What a dhoti-clad farmer being turned away from a city mall tells us about Indian masculinity

A dhoti-clad farmer being turned away from a city mall over his attire is no isolated incident. This symptom of our cultural-psycho-pathology around dressing the Indian male body presents us with an opportunity to go beyond mere sartorial choices.

A dhoti-clad farmer being turned away from a city mall over his attire is no isolated incident. This symptom of our cultural-psycho-pathology around dressing the Indian male body presents us with an opportunity to go beyond mere sartorial choices.

The Indian man finds himself at the intersection of racialised violence of colonialism and gendered violence of patriarchy, at once victim and perpetrator. His brand of masculinity remains a belated reenactment of the colonial master, whether consciously in admiration or unwittingly. In his imitation of harder and more exclusionary masculinity, he has foregone a softer, syncretic way of being favouring, even savouring fluidity.

Many Indian men persist in dotting their foreheads, piercing their ears, adorning their necks and wrists, draping their waists, and baring their feet, as do women. Can the dhoti incident then prompt us to return to the drape, not as an external marker of identity (“traditional Indian man”), but rather from an internal fluidity of being? 

While I myself have, over the years, transitioned my wardrobe to mostly mundu/dhoti/jarek/kamen drapes, I cannot advocate solely for altering the sartorial form to the dhoti or something else. This is because, in the particular case of India (and South East Asia), the gesture of decolonising bears an added historical responsibility of not only reclaiming dwindling markers of identity (such as attire and food) but also a foundation of the self, which sees men/women/other humanly fathomable binaries as fundamentally non-dual beings.

While championing a native attire may be a start in the direction of change, it also risks staying a superficial and fragmentary fix if we do not also grasp a shift in the very granularities of being human that are enfolded within the drape. Bodies, clothes, communities and nations are temporary architectures for the self, scaffolded by economies and ecologies of knowledge, subject to gains and losses. 

Anything that trends in the Indian population stands to make significant economic gains by sheer statistical scale; clothing is no different. Yet if clothing creators (traditional or otherwise) remain indifferent to the environmental impacts of industrialised textile production, India’s ecological wounds will only deepen at the behest of ongoing economic growth. Reconfiguring the deadlock between ecological and economic well-being entails imagining and activating ways of knowing the world different from the nature-culture/masculine-feminine/self-other binary formulations of Euro-centric modernity.

This is an opportune time for administrators, consumers, and, more critically, for the man on the street to reconsider the profound losses we have been conditioned into in our everyday mundane practices. The reflection attempts to provoke a response rooted in understanding and conviction for necessary changes that are not merely cosmetic and nothing less than an act of reclaiming the self.