Francesca Orsini: 'Clothing words'

Cloth and weaving threads through warp and weft, have long been metaphors for existence in Indian devotional literature, as this very famous song attributed to Kabir shows. But cloth has also been a metaphor for rewriting in another language (putting a text into “a new jāma ”)—whether in the case of translation or adaptation. Cloth as a commodity typically carried into a language specific, often very distant, place-names (Kashmir/cachemere, others?), turning those toponyms into metonyms for luxury items from faraway lands and for exotic alternatives to a humdrum provincial life (muslin from X in Cranford ). Within the globalizing world of the 19c, foreign cloth names that had become all too common (e.g. langkilath in Hindi for “longcloth”) also became metonyms in India, e.g. for the Hindi writer Bharatendu Harishchandra, for global trade and the inevitable “race to development” among peoples and nations (speech ‘How can India progress’, 1877, also Bayly). Clothing became of course most significant as a symbol in the swadeshi rejection of foreign cloth and Gandhi’s mission to have everyone spinning their own khadi cloth (Tarlo, Clothing matters ).

But for our purposes, when thinking about creative multilingualism, clothing is an apt choice in two main respects.

First, as colonial satire: mixing items of clothing or wearing items deemed inappropriate/too westernized was systematically satirized on both sides of the “contact zone”, in India as well as in other colonial as well as non-colonial contexts (Egypt, Turkey, the cover of Imagined Communities ). Though in fact even “local” clothing was often made of foreign material, foreign/inappropriate/anglicized/western/ babu fashion was ruthlessly made fun of, both in men and in women, though of course satire was also gendered. While often expressed in terms of binaries of good/bad, homespun or traditional/westernized, difference was more a matter of relative terms. (We are familiar with the long-lasting strategy in Hindi films not just of making the heroine transition from western to Indian clothes when she becomes the appropriate soulmate but also, when wanting to show her in “modern/western clothes”, to show another woman in even more western/modern/skimpier clothes.) So one of the set of examples we can look at are satirical verses or skits about clothing, where foreign words and fashion become a source of creativity, fun, and critique.

Second, names of specific types of cloth and clothing can act as islands of multilingualism within single-language texts that point to the value, and often nostalgia, for a richer, more mixed world in an era of stricter cultural and ethnic nationalisms that translate into ideologies of monolingualism. I can think here of the Hindi writings of Krishna Sobti (e.g. Dilo dāniś ), which uses specific Persian and Urdu names of items of clothing to convey the richness of the world of Old Delhi. This choice of evocative names of clothing is particularly strong in Urdu, too, as part of the nostalgic evocation of the material, social, and cultural world of Indo-Persian elites that modern India turned resolutely its back on (Qazi Abdul Sattar, Shab ghazīda (1962), S.R. Faruqi, Chand tare sāre āsmān ).