Denim for damsels is a political ripoff. Jeans are kosher for guys, perhaps, unless you are a minister. The story, most probably apocryphal, about a Union mantri on the way to the airport being ordered back home and change from jeans to ‘desi’ attire exemplifies the deep-rooted political dislike of jeans.
Jeans symbolise the West, which, to genus Bharateeya, symbolises drugs and wild sex. It is cool to get a dollar job in Silicon Valley, but wearing denim in India is a cultural travesty especially when sported by women. Perhaps, it would be patriotic of our IT whizkids to wear kurta-pajamas to brave the cold winds of Seattle.
Why do Indian politicians, more specifically from the cow belt, hate Western culture? Why do they parade this animosity as cultural protection of Indian female purity and tradition? A large proportion of Indian politicians are boomers, who grew up in the deprivation of the post-Independence era or were conceived on the threshold of Socialism.
Most of them were born poor or close, and saw virtue in poverty. Many of them therefore had faulty or no education this partly explains why they treat Hindi as an instrument of defiance and defence instead of the easy-going lingua franca it can be. Unless they belonged to the global elite, the type had few lifestyle choices.
They rode around on buses and bicycles Air India represented glamour, imagine that! They did not have much money to spend on clothes - Levi’s lay in the distant future and even if they had a few rupees in their pocket, there were no malls. Both the Left and the Right are agreed on one thing poverty is a principle. An enduring political and creative cliché of the 1960s to the 1990s is that torn clothes represent Indian culture and rebellion.
It is a ghastly philosophy to pass on, but there you are. Only the elite speak correct angrezi, which ironically, the boomer’s children wish to master. Boomers see cities as hotbeds of sin where loose women wear boots and ripped jeans and eat beefsteak in Calcutta though many village markets sell jeans and tops.
Rapes of rural women who do not wear jeans have numbed our conscience. Lost in translation is the fact that the majority of Indian women wear saris at weddings and religious occasions, observe fasts on auspicious days and know most prayers and psalms.
Then came GenX, nicknamed the 'latchkey generation' because of comparatively less parental supervision resulting in men becoming defenders of Indian feminine virtues; made-in-India jeans arrived in stores in the mid-'90s. In Bollywood movies, the vamps wore denim. GenX aspired to live in cities, but brought patriarchal values of dress and behaviour from rural and suburban India.
Millennial politicians do not get the blues over denim. They grew up enjoying the fruits of liberalisation, are educated, wear jeans and tees while the ladies, like the woman on the plane, sometimes wear ripped jeans.
They are the pathfinders for the next generation. However, much the neo-patriotic brigade rants against 'Western' culture, India is undergoing a political fashion change. It can’t be stopped. Along with jeans, the band-aid of hypocrisy is being ripped off too. OK, boomer?
(The writer be contacted at ravi@newindianexpress.com)