Back in a more repressive era when nuns carried out “panty checks” to see if you were wearing regulation white cotton underwear, and school prefects were armed with rulers to measure the length of your skirts, Mumbai University’s vice-chancellor Vijay Khole would have found himself in good company.
Sister Acquinas and he could have agreed on the basics of dress for women: item, one sack, large, loose, shapeless, and either a wimple or a headscarf covering offending strands of hair. In that age, perhaps Khole wouldn’t have been at the receiving end of derision for pronouncing that Mumbai’s women students needed to come to college more modestly dressed.
I’m fascinated by Khole and his innocence, his unstated but clear assumption that teenage sexuality is a one-way street: women are the objects of lust, men the passionate hunters. Does this man walk through the campus with his eyes shut?
The last time I dropped by Delhi University, the ones nudging their friends when a good-looking specimen strolled by, were the women. “Check HIM out!” one told me, nodding at a tall guy who, unlike his companions, wore a loose, flowing kurta instead of the standard body-hugging gym tee.
He was better-muscled than his companions: “The kurta brings that out,” said my guide to the niceties of female ogling, “better than the tee-shirt, because it reveals and conceals, you want to rip it off him.”
Teenagers might wear transparent blouses, tight t-shirts, show a lot of leg; but every generation rediscovers the allure of covering up along with the blatant appeal of on-display dressing for itself. Not that I’d want to provoke Khole into extending clothing fascism to men, but he might want to think about this: women have been getting an eyeful of men for as long as the opposite has been true.
What Khole unintentionally illuminates, though, is the general attitude to young adults. At 18, we trust them to vote, to marry, to buy property, to invest in the stock market, to drive cars, to go abroad for further studies, to choose their own area of specialisation. But we can’t trust them to get dressed on their own, and when they do, we reel back in shock. These shameless women, look at the clothes they wear these days!
Yes, do that. Look carefully and what you might see is not what Khole and other pursed-lips dragons of morality see. Those clothes aren’t an open invitation to lust-crazed rapists (rapists, incidentally, can dress any which way they want), they’re a statement of confidence.
This is who I am. This is my body, and I’ll dress it up, or down, as I please; this is how I choose to be. Once you ban the miniskirt, you have no alternative but to move into measuring-tape morality: are these trousers too tight, this neckline too low? It’s all in the eye of the beholder, and Khole has a particularly measuring eye. But there’s no measuring index for confidence, no way to measure the assertiveness and comfort with which the women he finds so offensive relate to their bodies. Much more than the young adults in his charge, it’s Khole who needs to grow up.
