Insights From "Clothing Matters: Dress, Identity, and Power in India" By Emma Tarlo

In Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, Emma Tarlo explores the active role that clothing has played in “the identity construction of individuals, families, castes, regions and nations.” Her work is an example of the importance of researching history, opinions, personal stories, and more, to understand a topic. Tarlo emphasizes that it is not enough to locate a person within a historical trend without understanding the context of before and after, and how they feel about their position. 

One of Tarlo’s key interventions is challenging the assumption that non-Western clothing is “costume.” This mindset, however, can be seen in how the Victoria and Albert Museum in Bombay classified styles of headwear to aid in classification. As Arjun Appadurai explains, this imperial practice takes garments “out of their social, political, and economic context.” By isolating items for display, clothing becomes detached from its real world context. This issue can be seen when Tarlo explains that there is often more information about embroidery designs preserved in museums and books than in the villages, where those designs originated. This knowledge only being present in museums and in imperial contexts becomes inaccessible and unrelatable to local communities. 

Tarlo also situates clothing within broader shifts in anthropology after postcolonialism. There was a change in how anthropologists studied India; they began studying tribes and villages to understand the functions of Indian social institutions. Yet clothing was often overlooked because original ethnographers viewed it as a “feminine” issue, even though clothing is an issue of huge concern for most South Asian women. Additionally, the issue of caste also makes this situation more complicated. The amount of embroidery, expectations of modesty, and fabric choices all signal one’s caste. Due to the caste, and ongoing debates on modernization, controversies tend to center on what women are wearing. 

While all of this is true, Tarlo presents the irony existent in Indian traditional clothing. In the example of Gujarati embroidery, there was initially an attempt to dress Tarlo in more mainstream fashion rather than local fashion. Yet by the end of her stay, they adapted to her tastes and gave her a local salwar kameez “they were trying to escape.” 

India has faced a turbulent history in balancing Western and traditional clothing. During British colonization, British clothing became popular among the upper class. Resistance emerged through the Khadi movement, where hand-spun cloth symbolized anti-colonial struggle. After this came a period of negotiating between Western and Indian styles, followed by the phase of ethnic chic. Today, there is what can be described as artwear exclusivity, where traditional handloom sarees are marketed as rare and one-of-a-kind. A new image of the sari is developing where it is “elegant, exclusive, Indian, unconventional, sexy and expensive all at the same time.” This shows the change in the concept of what is traditional, popular, modern, and of high-status. 

Now the issue of clothing is changing again. For men especially, dress is becoming problematic. Having adapted so much to Western clothing, many are not able to wear traditional clothing in workplaces because it is seen as “too Indian’.” This raises the broader question of what it means to be “Indian” in India and outside of it, especially with the development of the NRI. Clothing continues to affect identity in cultural, religious, political, and societal spaces.

A prevalent theme in her work is “dress and undress,” the idea of changing identities through clothes, often with the element of rediscovery. This idea can be seen with the changes in Indian clothing that come out of the struggles of power, colonialism, caste, religion, gender, and modernity. Tarlo shows the impact these aspects have on Indian clothing and the importance of studying them.