Fashion India Kuldova Osella Muslim Style .Pdf

Memories of Luxury, Aspirations Towards Glamour, and Cultivations of Morality: How south Indian Muslim women craft their style Caroline Osella Introduction Among Muslims in Calicut1 (a town in Kerala, South India), neither the strict observance of Islamic reformist dress codes, nor even their bind- ing to the South Indian region’s wider sense of modesty and simplicity as a valued marker of distinction (against allegedly ‘loose’ North Indian public moralities and displays), in any way work to cut women off from a keen interest in beauty, fashion and glamour. In fact, shopkeepers and popular discourse alike characterise Muslim women as distinguished by their exceptionally high spending on personal adornment and by their particularly strong interest in clothes and jewellery. As I settled into this community during long-term fieldwork and learned to adapt my own preferences concerning fabric, colour, degree and style of em- bellishment – in order to ‘fit in’ better at Muslim weddings and parties – I also began to discern specificities in aesthetics and to ask about about this2. Shopkeepers and non-Muslims alike claimed to recognise a par- ticular Muslim aesthetic: flashy, prone to excess and showy. All of these were thinly euphemised codes for ‘vulgar’. At the same time, non-Muslims also lamented the increased adoption of reformist dress styles. The lower middle-class women and girls I spent my time with were always in ‘proper Islamic modest dress’ (Osella C & F 2007). This usually means a floor-length loose house-dress indoors, which covers arms down to below the elbow; and an outdoor outfit, which masks body shape and covers all except the hands and face. Outerwear might be the old-style loose dark coat (referred to locally as pardah) with maftah [headscarf] or the newer Gulf-style abaya [fitted black coat] and shaila [long soft black scarf]3. Under this outerwear, older women wear saris and younger prefer salwar kameez4 , a long loose tunic worn over loose drawstring trousers. Women are very careful about 1 Calicut and Bombay are older names with colonial lineages, and have been replaced of- ficially by Kozhikode and Mumbai. I choose to follow the usage of research interlocutors, who are holding on to the older names. 2 Two years’ fieldwork was funded by ESRC; the period of writing-up was funded by AHRC. Thanks for comments on drafts go to: A Moores, E Tarlo, F Osella, T Kuldova. 3 The abaya is the Gulf Arab version of pardah dress, a Muslim women’s long dark outer garment worn over clothing. 119 maintaining a decent appearance, decent being a layered concept into which colonial Victorian ideals, post-colonial and, specifically, regional ideas about South Indian feminine modesty (Devika 2005), and post- 1930s successive waves of Islamic reformism have all set certain clear boundaries and expectations. One analytic predicament is that, as Tereza Kuldova has argued (ibid.), the Indian fashion business blurs several lines which both academic analysis and often consumers and producers would rather keep clearly separate. High-end fashion and vernacular style engage in mutual bor- rowings, a process which is intensified by the power of film to pick up and spread trends. In an economy where the ‘ready made’ mass clothing market still lags behind individually produced pieces, the figure of the tailor – as a humble paid servant – and that of the designer-producer – as a high-status creative – likewise blur into each other. Another paradox is that adornment has been understood in academia as a preoccupation especially associated with the feminine, a gender style stamped with abjection and marginality to the proper business of life, something then at once trivial and also associated with subaltern subjects, one of the compensatory activities of those who are excluded from real power and activity in the world (Lunning 2001), It has also – contrarily – been understood as world-making practice, as a form of cosmic ordering and an expression of timeless and universal principles (Papapetros 2011). It has recently also been read as part of ‘erotic capital’, an asset which can be cashed in on employment, marriage and other markets (Hakim 2010). I will sidestep these debates here, to follow here one simple theme: tracing some of the ways in which corporeal materiality and embodiment are expressive and self-making processes (Van Wolputte 2004), which I then understand as bearing the traces of entanglements in other realms, to different scales (following Strathern 2004). To clarify, global histories of trade, regional flows of money and faith-wide waves of revivalism have all left their material trace - even on the small scale of the individual body or a single piece of fabric. Cali- cut’s Muslim women locate themselves simultaneously within worlds of Indian luxury and worlds of Islam - where the latter can draw upon both Islamicate ornateness and opulence and also reformist moralities and simplicity. 4 This dress is now subcontinental-wide, although for formal occasions a sari is still re- quired by married women. The salwar is the trouser part and the kameez is the long loose tunic worn on top. Calicut Muslims observe what they name as decent dress by wearing a long, loose, black overcoat on top of either a sari or salwar-kameez. 5 Whether it is inhabited by women or by feminised, same-sex desiring or gender-queer males. 120 Contemporary desires for opulence, willing attachment to orientalising images of the self and of the historically close relationship with the fan- tasy Arab Other, together with cinematically driven identifications with stars and their dream-world of leisure and luxury all seep into a habi- tus already formed through a long history of Indian ocean trade, which brought Calicut’s Muslims both fortune and intimate encounters. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, Embodied Histories. Muslim women’s practice in Calicut acts as material outpouring of histories that have spilled out onto the bodies of those who now live there. Bourdieu’s work on consumption has helped us think about how yes- terday’s histories are lodged in our bodies in the form of today’s preferences and tastes (e.g Bourdieu 1984). Calicut Muslim history is one of business and smuggling, fortunes which have waxed and waned, a prof- itable entanglement with the Gulf region and with Indian ocean trade which dates back to at least the 10th century, and rescue from post-inde- pendence economic doldrums via Gulf migration. The community here is part of the Indian ocean’s coastal trading erstwhile elite and widespread culture of vernacular cosmopolitanism, something which we find in locations as widespread as Mombassa through to Zanizibar, Gu- jerat, Dubai and Malaysia, and all the other places which found themselves connected in a network through trans-oceanic travel and trade (Simpson & Kresse 2007; Vora 2013; see also Werbner 2008). If ‘Muslim style’ is recognised locally as leaning especially towards fantasies of opulence and extravagant display, this history – of a business community that has lived through some spectacularly prosperous moments – is influential. With a population of roughly 500 000, Calicut is the third largest town in India’s southern state, Kerala, and, even though Muslims do not comprise the majority, it is often called the ‘Muslim capital’ of Kerala. Calicut prospered due to maritime trade from the 10th to the 15th century, rapidly developing over the 12th and 13th centuries as a commercial hub between West Asia, Southeast Asia and the North-Western shores of South Asia. Upon Vasco da Gama’s arrival here in 1492, a long and bloody struggle began to wrench away control of the pepper trade from the ‘Moors’, merchants from Egypt and the Arabian peninsula. The 17th century saw the wane of Portuguese power; the rise of Dutch compa- nies and, at the turn of the 18th century, the Mysorean conquest of Mal- abar. During this period, Calicut lost its position as an international hub although remained an export centre for local products and an entry point for goods from West Asia and North India. The eventual defeat of Tippu Sultan and the establishment of British rule exacerbated this 121 shift: Bombay developed as the main international export centre and Calicut trade was reduced predominantly to the movement of goods to, and through, Bombay and Gujarat. Emerging as a major regional rice market, Calicut also saw a resurgence of Arab trade. From the 19th century until the mid 1980s, the colonial and post-colonial economy boost- ed Calicut’s position, the town became a world centre for timber export and, later, a centre for (legal) copra commerce and (illegal) gold-smuggling. By the late 1970s, the timber trade declined and, following the Gulf oil boom, Arab dhow ships stopped coming to the city, leading to the eventual closure of all port facilities. As in the rest of Malabar, and Ker- ala as whole, since the 1980s, Calicut’s economy has become dependent upon revenues and remittances from the Gulf. Some entrepreneurs run trans-oceanic or Gulf-based businesses and a large number of migrant workers send cash back home (Osella F & C 2007). Contemporary Calicut sprawls across several zones: the old commercial district of narrow lanes and beach-front godowns [warehouses] in the south-east, along and behind the sea front, gives way in importance to new and more spacious commercial zones further inland; new residen- tial areas grow to the city’s north and north-east. In the old district, right next to a densely populated Muslim ‘old town’, the small bazaar mean- ders, including the famous S.M. [sweet meats] street, where formerly famous halva was made and sold and where now a plethora of cheap and very fast-moving clothing businesses compete for mainstream trade.

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