Jun 14th, 2008
Taboos Are Funny Things-II
My wife loves wearing sleeveless dresses. In fact, it would be accurate to say that she has a fetish for them. If she ever gets salwar kameez with a long sleeve, she won’t wear it till it has been altered so that the sleeve is short enough for her comfort. I once gifted her a nice full-sleeved shirt and to my horror she wanted to mutilate it to sleevelessness. it took all my powers at emotional blackmail to dissuade her.
There is one exception, however. Once while discussing how she wanted a saree’s blouse to be stitched, I suggested a sleeveless blouse. She looked at me with disgust and said: “That is what whores wear!”.
My guess is that this is what happened. A generation back, the saree was the only dress for most people. In North India, fashionable women took to wearing sleeveless blouses. In South India, they did not, and wearing a sleeveless blouse was considered daring and mildly disreputable. Over a generation, young women over most of India have made the transition from sarees to other forms of dress. So, a woman in South India who wants to look fashionable will wear a sleeveless kameez. This means that if you have grown up in a town in Karnataka, it is entirely possible that you have never seen a woman wearing a sleeveless blouse with a saree. The only exception would be whores. Of course, all this will change with the introduction of the Tata Nano.
1. i’m not sure. i think even in the south (especially Bangalore) it was fairly common for “high society” women to regularly wear sleeveless blouses with sarees. but still that was considered too revealing.
2. I think the sleeveless salwar became popular much much later (sometime in the 90s only, with dil to pagal hai contributing to the tipping point) than the sleeveless blouse with saree (which has been fairly popular for some 50 years now). point being that when the former became popular, there were a lot more people willing to “expose” so it caught on much more easily.
3. Ok let me propose this theory. I think it has to do with the total surface area of exposed skin. and most women tend to put a limit on that. sleeve length being equal, the surface area of skin displayed by a saree is significantly more than that revealed by a salwar. and reducing the sleeve length to zero will mean that the threshold gets crossed in case the woman is wearing a saree, and not if she’s wearing other stuff like salwar or jeans. in fact, area exposed by saree is more than that exposed by a knee-length skirt since the former exposes areas that are likely to be bigger than that exposed by the latter. hence …
I have seen many South Indian women wear sleeveless blouses when I grew up in the 80s. These were generally the so-called high society women who were considered to be persons with loose morals. I wonder if there is/was a direct association with whores.
Without getting into a discussion on the morals of high society women, I want to point out that:
1) The issue is perception, not reality
2) The question is what is the probability that you grow up with such perceptions. I went to a middle-class school in Bombay and I had teachers, both young and old who wore sleeveless sarees. A sleeveless blouse was never considered to be revealing, though we did our share of leching at teachers.
3) I completely disagree with Karthik. I believe that what is considered revealing and what is not, what is considered vulgar and what is not, has nothing to do with how much surface area is exposed.
1. I think sk has a point with his surface area theory. Most popular bollywood actresses have several photos with skimpy top and not-so-skimpy bottom as well as with skimpy bottom and not-so-skimpy top but the combination isn’t anywhere near that common.
The idea is probably also to fire imagination by forcing male brains to “put stuff together”. All power to skimpy
2. There is also a lot of truth in the perception-rather-than-reality theory. In 19th century Kerala Namboothiris had done enough social engineering to ensure that Namboothiri women wouldn’t go out topless but women from many so-called-lower-castes *had to* be topless when they went out. The whores did cover their breasts, on the other hand, to invite imagination. If a young girl from one such so-called-lower-caste were to cover her breasts her mother would chide her for being a whore.
Your second point contradicts the first and is more valid.
Ravikiran, I was talking about perceptions only. What kind of morals such women possessed is beyond me.
The second point doesn’t preclude that fact that in some cultural circumstances perception could be “proportional” to the surface area.
This brings me to the question: why do women in Peninsular India, especially along the coasts even consider sleeveless shirts? The region is hot and humid and people tend to sweat a lot. Unless I am running, I don’t wear sleeveless. I can’t figure why women are any different. It still sticks and stinks.
Which makes me wonder — if the so called high society women of the 80s could afford air-conditioning just like middle class women of today can. And thus.
Maybe morals here is code for jealousy and hatred for the rich.