The historical dynamics that have brought British and South Asian people into contact span more than 400 years and, contrary to what is commonly assumed, Britain became a ‘contact zone ’ (Pratt 1992) almost at the same time as the Indian subcontinent itself. 1 The history of this cultural encounter is a history of multiple dimensions, or rather a history composed of multiple interrelated histories, whether they are social, political, cultural, religious, linguistic or sartorial. While initially the sartorial history might seem to be the most trivial, the fact remains that, in many ways and to different extents, it reflects all the others. For dressing choices and attitudes to distinct forms of dress have been affected by—and therefore can be said to bear testimony to—the social, political and power synergies that historically have determined the interaction between Britons and South Asians, either in the Indian subcontinent or in Britain . As Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote with regard to the sartorial reality of the Indian subcontinent—and it can certainly be extrapolated to the South Asian sartorial reality in Britain—‘clothing and adornment were and continue to be as much an expression of the nature of things Indian, rerum Indicarum natura as any other human activity, say, politics, social and economic life, culture as embodied in literature or art could be’ (2009: ix). Consequently, as Chaudhuri added, ‘an excursion into the world of clothing’ allows the traveller to see ethnic , social, political and even economic concerns ‘at work in a specific field of culture’ (ibid.).
The arrival of the British in seventeenth-century South Asia had a profound impact on the pre-existing sartorial scenario, a scenario which was already rather complex given the multiple cultures, religions, and therefore dressing practices, that coexisted across the Indian subcontinent. This impact resulted not only in the introduction of European clothes, but also in a reassignment of the meanings ascribed to long-existing forms of dress . As Emma Tarlo has demonstrated (1996) , in colonial India , dress , as well as its mystical and spiritual properties and long history as a marker of social, cultural and religious differences, became a visible medium through which the British acted out imperial ideology and through which nationalist leaders later contested it. During the colonial period, the British enforced certain sartorial codes aimed at regulating the use of Indian dress. They attempted, for example, to ‘civilise’—obviously meaning Westernise—the dress of some sections of the Indian population, at the same time as trying to ‘Orientalise’ the attire of others, most notably the army uniform . By ‘Orientalising’ their uniform, Bernard S. Cohn (1989) points out, the British sought to exploit the Orientalist stereotype of wildness and ferocity with which Eastern warriors had long been associated. Cohn even argues that ‘British rulers in nineteenth-century India played a major part in making the turban into a salient feature of Sikh identity’ (ibid.: 304), Sikhs having been the most numerous group within the East India Company’s army. While other scholars have situated the origins of the Sikh turban in a pre-colonial period (Puar 2007), they are congruent in noting that the significance of the turban as a symbol of Sikh identity was reinforced conspicuously during the colonial period, largely as a result of British efforts to police the dress of the East India Company’s army. Moving on in time, during the struggle for Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi encouraged Indian people to cast aside British garments and to don khadi 2 (see Chap. 2). The dressed body became, in this way, a bone of contention in colonial India , acquiring a set of specific social, political and ideological dimensions that have endured far beyond the colonial period.
In their diasporic journeys to different parts of the globe, South Asians have taken with them their clothes and a myriad of sartorial memories from the Indian subcontinent. In their writings, we find nostalgic memories of the ‘clothes people […] wor[e] on certain days’ (Rushdie 1992: 11) and of ‘women washing clothes, their heads covered by saris’ (Chaudhuri 1994: 89), 3 but also bitter memories, memories of ‘the robes of authority which were colored khaki ’ (Markandaya 1973: 138), 4 and memories of the reluctance of the British to adopt Indian-style clothes—their determination to differentiate themselves from the native population leading Anglo-Indian women to keep ‘firmly to their corsets well into the twentieth century, even after they had passed out of fashion back in Britain ’ (Aslam [2004] 2014: 48). 5 There are diasporic characters that also allude to, and even miss, the organic relationship between body and dress that existed in the Indian subcontinent they left behind. Because, as Christopher Bayly has demonstrated, in pre-colonial India, cloth was regarded ‘as a thing that c[ould] transmit spirit and substance’ (1999: 287); and Bernard Cohn has provided evidence of the mystical properties that dress was assumed to have, considered to be able to retain the spirit of the wearer (1989). This intimate connection between body and dress has been captured evocatively by Amit Chaudhuri in his novel Afternoon Raag (1994) . On seeing the way in which the stallholders of a London market ‘busily touch and test the cloth’, the main character in Chaudhuri’s novel recalls ‘the stalls of New Market in Calcutta, where people still speak of cloth in terms of the human body’ (1994: 102; emphasis added). For the protagonist of Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag, cloth and clothes are multi-sensory phenomena, able to bring back multiple memories and feelings from the past. More importantly perhaps, what these and other quotations show is that the politics and poetics of dress in colonial India recur and haunt the sartorial present of diasporic subjects, something that forces this and other studies to establish, almost unavoidably, a dialectic between past and present, between ‘clothing matters’ (Tarlo 1996) in India and dressing concerns in Britain .
If the British arrival in South Asia modified the repertoire of dressing practices in the region, the South Asian presence in Britain has also altered the clothing map of the country, leading to what could be understood as a sartorial ‘colonization in reverse’. 6 Of course, speaking of a reverse sartorial colonisation only makes sense from a metaphorical point of view. Because in Britain the use of South Asian dress has often been questioned by the alleged colonised and the structures of power and hegemony are not on the side of the supposed coloniser. As in the Indian subcontinent, in Britain the sartorial relations between Britons and South Asians have also evolved depending on the social, cultural, political and ideological forces at work, forces that more often than not have come from the white majority. Thus, whereas the ‘exotic’ apparel of early-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Asian travellers in Britain fascinated the white British population, the saris, turbans and veils worn by later generations of South Asians in post-war Britain aroused feelings of suspicion among the white majority, often being perceived as visible signs of the ‘threat’ that the new waves of immigrants were allegedly posing to the national myth of a homogeneous British culture (Cohn 1989) . The vicissitudes of history repeated, albeit in a reworked fashion , these fluctuations in sartorial attitudes during the last decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first. While Eastern dress was fetishised by the hippie counterculture in the 1960s and became fashionable commodities in the 1990s, since the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, South Asian clothes —and more particularly (South Asian) Muslim clothes —have provoked feelings of mistrust among those who see their wearers as suspicious-looking, threatening strangers (Ameli and Merali 2006; Tarlo 2010) . For many South Asians living in present-day Britain , negotiating the question of what to wear transcends the cultural–religious sphere, and the process of choosing a particular style often underscores aesthetic, as well as significant identitary, political and/or ideological messages. This is even more so in an age when, as Paul Gilroy has argued, identity and ethnicity are often expressed through ‘the contentious cultural terms of life-style and consumer performance ’ (2002: xiv).
The foregoing lines have sketched a brief, and therefore highly reductionist, sartorial biography of the encounter between Britons and South Asians, a biography that has prioritised some sartorial dilemmas over others. All these caveats notwithstanding, and at the risk of gross simplification, it serves to illustrate the crucial role that the dressed body has always played in the interaction between Britons and South Asians, either as an element that has cast individuals into the categories of ‘superior’/‘inferior’, ‘outsider’/‘insider’, or as a palimpsest on which different discourses have been written over the course of history . South Asian dress has indeed been (re-)written not simply in colonial India, but also in Britain , and not just by its ‘original’ wearers, but also by others in paradoxical and often self-serving ways. It is a central contention of this study that if dress has played such a crucial role in the interaction between Britons and South Asians , those texts portraying this cultural encounter are likely to pay attention to dress in a way other literary texts do not, above all, if we take into account that many of them have a documentary or even autobiographical character. This hypothesis can already find validation in the earliest samples of South Asian writing from and about Britain , texts that map the presence of the colonial subject ‘at the heart of the empire ’ (Burton 1998). By this, I am referring to the various travelogues, diaries, memories and even fiction written by a number of Asian travellers and authors who spent time i...