Blowing in the wind

The humble dhoti has managed to hit the headlines and do something unimaginable — get the DMK and AIADMK to speak in one voice. The recent incident of a High Court judge dressed in a veshti / vaetti being refused entry to the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association Club on grounds of being improperly dressed was enough for members on either side of the political divide to hitch up theirs.

On the one hand, the incident has brought to the fore the slavish mentality of such clubs still governed by decadent rules, reminiscent of British snobbery. In fact, it is worse. We can construe it as racism, of a sort that countless Indians have faced in other countries.

Who can forget the attacks on immigrant Indian families in Jersey city in the 1980s by a racist hate group which went by the ominous name of ‘dot busters’, with the dot signifying the Indian bindi .

Again, Sikhs in France were forced to protest and appeal to the United Nations Human Rights Commission against a 2004 French government order banning all religious headgear, including turbans and Muslim headscarves.

They won the long-drawn case in 2012. At home, MF Husain was denied entry into the Calcutta Club on account of his dress and footwear (or lack thereof).

Such denial of club memberships or entry, ostensibly to maintain their ‘classiness’, smacks of home-grown racism. ‘Class’, it would appear, is defined by Western paradigms of dress, etiquette and culture.

At the same time, however, the controversy over the dhoti also reflects the inability of South India to capture the larger imagination of the nation, as has been done by the Punjabis or even the Gujaratis.

While South India can count Bollywood heroines and select cuisine amongst its marketing successes, it has clearly failed on the sartorial front. The spotless white veshti has lost out to the sherwanis and churidar - kurta s. So has the melaku (half-sari) and pavadai-chattai to the Gujarati ghagra - choli or Punjabi salwar - kameez .

The vaetti ’s northern counterpart, the lungi , became the anthem of the nation’s youth in 2013 (read ‘Lungi dance’). The vaetti itself enjoyed no such luck. But it has emerged as the great unifier, the symbol of Tamil heritage and culture. It is time it is given its due.

While the ‘national’ dress — the sherwanis and churidar-kurtas — has been accepted as formal dress in most clubs across the country, the vaetti has to be added to this list. One option is to boycott such elitist clubs and exhibit reverse snobbery. Or bring such clubs under the law to prevent such ‘sartorial despotism’. A better option would be to market vaettis as the new fashion statement — what with all political parties casting their vote in favour of the vaetti .

The writer teaches at the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai. The views are personal

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