My north Indian great grandmother wore a handmade hand-stitched bustier, which was the prevailing version of a bra. I still have one of those, now just a fragile remnant of the past, with the silk fabric falling apart at every touch. It’s a marvellous garment that must have fitted her body like a minuscule sleeveless blouse with a low cut back and neckline; and handmade buttons and buttonholes to ensure a very form-hugging fit. Just like our bras, except that this garment needed no elastics since it was customised to the wearer’s body which perhaps changed much less than ours do today, for reasons we’ve discussed in an earlier column.
She wore this slinky little garment under her overshirt, which was loose and long-sleeved. This shirt was paired with a sari, with which she kept her head covered.
All of this is quite understandable given the very harsh and dry summers and winters in central and north India. A long-sleeved shirt and head cover would offer the much-needed protection from sunburn and sunstroke in summers and from exposure to the cold and frost in winters.
A painting by Jamini Roy Sourced by The Telegraph
My adopted land of Bengal, though, had the exact opposite both in terms of the weather and the clothes locals wore. Given the mellow but extremely humid weather that water-rich locales generally have, the traditional drape of a sari here was such that it did away with the need for a breast cover, which, given its natural tightness would have been very uncomfortable and perhaps forever drenched in the wearer’s sweat! Instead, the Bengali traditional sari drape — now called the “sadharan” drape — kept the wearers back either uncovered or covered with one layer of a thin muslin cotton sari to ensure adequate comfort in the unending sweaty seasons. Her front was draped by multiple layers of the sari, but all rather loosely, again, to ensure comfort.
Ancient Indian women and men covered their torsos barely, with an angvastram or uttariya. But since everything changes with the passage of time, so did these dress codes. Apart from the weather, various cultural changes that must have been imported by invaders, visitors and settlors must also have dictated these changes. So, in north India today, with the arrival of urbanisation everywhere, barring a few older women, most have given up the loose shirt for the ubiquitous “blouse”. The same is the case with Bengal, where hardly any woman now goes “blouse-less” even in villages.
But there is also a debate about whether this upper body freedom for women was the result of weather, emancipation or patriarchal diktat. One may refer to the “breast-tax” in Kerala, which is said to have made lower caste women pay a tax for covering their breasts.
The columnist is the founder-CEO of Necessity-SwatiGautam, a customised brand of brassieres. Contact: necessityswatigautam@gmail.com