Women of India

by Otto Rothfield

For by its very nature dress is a means selected to heighten the attraction of the sexes for each other. The use of clothes as a protection against the extremes of climate is merely secondary and is even something of a reproach to natural adaptation. It is as adornment, and in its purpose of attraction, that it has its real and ultimate meaning. That dress comes to be used incidentally to preserve modesty does not affect its primary purpose. Modesty itself is one of the secondary properties of love and one of its most powerful weapons. But it is when mankind becomes sophisticated that the value and function of modesty are properly understood; and it is then that dress and ornament are so designed as to combine their direct and, under the guise of modesty, their indirect attractions. It follows, therefore, that in any people the use of the means of attraction which are supplied by dress and jewelry must correspond to the attributes of the persons whom it is desired to attract. If the dress did not conform to some inbred desire in those who see it, it could have no power to please; even it might become repellent. But similarity of birth and training tends to mould the majority of each nation to something of an average, and it is after all as a response to the desires of the average person that dress is designed. It responds, therefore, to the psychology of the people in which it is found.

Looked at from this aspect, the fundamental difference between the costumes of European and of Indian women becomes at once more deeply significant. In Europe, during the long centuries that have succeeded the fall of Rome, one quality above all has clung to dress, that is, bizarrerie of form. The Teutonic barbarians who uprooted the Mediterranean civilizations and imposed in their place those tribal feudalisms and customary rules from which Europe is not yet fully freed, seem whether from their primitive particularism or their inborn brutality to have largely been lacking in the sense of form. Symmetry and simplicity were conceptions beyond their northern brains and outside their temperament. Even to this day the German (who with least admixture of blood or education represents the primeval Teutonic savage) is hardly able by any effort of reason to comprehend the meaning of these words. In essence, it would seem, his mind is formless, vague, amorphous. So in their buildings, the Goths could find no use for purity of form. What they sought always and with a great effectiveness achieved was a shape, or rather a conglomeration of shapes, complicated and exaggerated, with lengthy spires and cumbrous altitudes, that should be curious, awful, and bizarre. They never sought to soothe the mind. Their churches do not so much attract attention, but capture it, as it were, by an audacious ravishment. And as this purpose was congenial to their own psychology, so did they win their effect among their own and kindred peoples. Similarly their women, if they were to excite the desires of men habituated to bloodshed and the strong stress of war, had to take their attention by storm, with the aid of the fantastic and unexpected in their costume. Without the subtlety of imagination and finesse to excel by a fine harmony or a graceful nicety, they were forced upon the extravagant and exuberant. The lines of their dress were not designed to be congruous with the human body or to agree in beautiful drapery, but were meant rather to amaze the onlooker by a sudden onslaught upon his vision. At any cost they were to be effective—to produce, that is, an immediate effect by the strangeness and extravagance of their form. In regard to colour they had less invention and hardly any taste; and the grey skies of the north are not suited to the richer hues. So it was to contortions of line and form that they had recourse. However mitigated, these are characteristics that remain to this day. Even in modern dress, the lines tend to be abrupt and exaggerated, and an ever-changing fashion varies them in a discordant manner. Every ten years, it has been said, the shape of womankind, as it is visible, changes in Europe. Each new change means, of course, an attempt to capture attention by a novel attitude. This is the cause that, out of the whole nineteenth century, it was only for a few years under the Consulate and early Empire that woman’s dress appears tolerable to an artist’s eye or even, upon reflection, to the common man or woman.

A GURKHA’S WIFE

Indian dress, on the other hand, has this in common with the classic style, that it is simple in form and harmonious. It exacts no distortions or deformities. It veils the body but it does not misrepresent it. Still less does it attempt to substitute a fictitious for a natural line. But while the Indian mind, like that of the classic Mediterranean peoples, approves a natural simplicity of design, unlike the other, it delights in a profusion of extraneous ornament. Even the monstrous temples of the South are in essence simply planned, but they are overlaid and even overloaded with masses of strange carving and decoration. Indian psychology, in this not dissimilar from the Teuton, has a craving for the wonderful and bizarre. The people are of those that look for miracles. But, by a fortunate dispensation, they are content to leave the pure lines of form undisturbed—a quality that keeps them in regard to the broad facts of life true to nature. For their wayward fancies they find scope in bizarrerie of colour and external decoration. Thus the Indian woman wears dresses that in shape are easy and simple and beautiful, but she seeks further to attract by a marvellous variety of colour and a curious adornment.

A GLIMPSE AT A DOOR IN GUJARÁT

The limits of the bizarre as it appears in India are probably reached in the dress of the Banjara women. They belong to a tribe that, far from unmixed, has in it much of that gipsy race, which has also migrated across the Sind deserts and Asia Minor to the furthest corners of Europe. For centuries they were the carriers of India, transporting salt and opium and grain on their pack-cattle along the trade-routes across the continent. They have settled down now, some of them, in little settlements where, under their own chieftains, they till the soil and deal in cows and buffaloes. But many of them are wanderers to this day, daring smugglers, dangerous when they are cornered, often even thieves and robbers. The men are especially handsome, with a free and fiery look, and a manly air. But the women also are not by any means unattractive, and the striking dress they have chosen, with its bold colours and its swinging skirt, sets them up well and handsomely. The pity is that they will wear it till from age and dirt it drops off with its own corruption. The bright colours they affect reach their limit in the pleated skirt with its glaring reds and yellows, a motley that has in it something of the clown or mountebank. The bodice in no real sense fulfils its part but is rather a bright-decked screen dropping from the neck to just below the waist-line, stiffened with pieces of glass and thick stitching. The mantle which they adopt, unlike that of most Hindu women, is short, like that of the Mussulman, but coarser. Their jewelry is peculiar to themselves, and in shape strange and striking. It is worn about the head in great profusion, so that the twinkling cunning face seems almost set in silver. The hair has two pleats at each side into which tassel-like ornaments of silver are hung. But most bizarre of all is the horn or stick, twined into their hair, which rests upon the head and props up their mantle like a tent. Originally perhaps designed to give the head a better protection against the eastern sun, it has now acquired a religious significance and is never doffed, even at night in bed, except by a widow. That with this inconvenient attachment, they still can balance by its nice adjustment heavy pots of water on their heads is one of the minor wonders of the Indian country-side. The Banjara encampment with its boldly-clad and boldly-staring women, also it may be added with its strong fierce dogs of special breed, is a sight too picturesque ever to be forgotten, especially in a country where life tends in the villages to a brown monotone.