In March 2022, a Dalit man named Jitendra Pal Meghwal was killed by upper-caste men in Rajasthan for sporting a moustache. This was one atrocity among many, that are laying bare how caste hierarchy is policed through the body. News of similar lynchings and harassment of Dalit individuals —  for wearing jeans, for riding fashionable bikes, for owning expensive phones, for wearing collars in ways that denote non-subservience — have been making the news frequently. As upward mobility and assertion beckons for lowered-caste subjects, caste presents itself as a fantasy of absolute biopolitical control against them — of control over depictions, self-fashioning, and aesthetic choices one (community) gets to make.

Fashion exists coaxially to this structure of control in the caste society, and, as a consequence, is integral to it. Every signifier of everyday fashion: clothing, aesthetic dogmas, representation, self-fashioning, and choice, is caught in the web of caste-based superstructures. Those who transgress caste norms of dressing and style are punished, humiliated, or killed, while upper-caste aesthetics are presented as refined and deserving of reverence. Brahmanical legal and religious texts explicitly codify sartorial hierarchy as a means of social control. Moustaches, turbans, gold jewellery, footwear, certain fabrics, and even colours have historically been denied to oppressed castes. 

The Manusmriti lays out detailed prescriptions governing clothing, ornaments, and bodily presentation according to caste. The text restricts who may wear fine clothes, ornaments, or use perfumes, while repeatedly emphasising restraint and “humility” for Shudras — an injunction that functions to enforce visible inferiority. Shudras are forbidden from imitating the dress, speech, or bodily markers of upper castes; any aspiration to upward mobility is seen as a punishable offence.

Today, there exist deep dissonances within the Indian Fashion ecosystem: between what the priorities and conversations are, and who the active stakeholder within the industry is. These dissonances make themselves immediately apparent when we barely scratch the surface. 

Let us begin at the word itself. The word fashion derives itself from facere which means “to make.” This makes the word “Indian Fashion” something of an oxymoron, a paradox even. The ones whose labour makes the clothes, the articles, and embellishments which define Indian fashion are not the same as the people who spearhead the Indian fashion industry. The latter are the designers and label owners, generally belonging to dominant castes. The former, “the makers,” are lower caste artisans, “kareegars” following traditional occupations, highly skilled workers at the mercy of an extremely asymmetrical edifice of patronage, exploitation, and upper-caste cultural-economic consolidation. The distance between these two categories, i.e. the designer and the artisan, is one of the many stories of how caste and fashion intersect that we hope to address with this issue. 

The spirit of Manu lives on in how the dynamics of modernity shape the lifeworlds contiguous to the fashion industry. In recent modernity, especially since the interface with ‘Orientalism’ vis-a-vis the colonial apparatus, caste itself becomes pictorially entangled with how idioms of fashion are perceived. The very first image-based exchanges facilitated by the colonial encounter strengthened the imagination of how each caste-group was meant to look and perform itself. The Orientalist souvenirs of the late 18th and early 19th century, i.e. the colourful paintings made on Mica depict individual castes with their respectively unique attire and fashion. The same logic is followed by the numerous ethnographic drawings and photographs in the early to mid-19th century. The Paris and Crystal Palace exhibitions, which presented Indian artisan crafts and clothes-making traditions as inherent byproducts of caste perform further crystallization of signifiers, wherein codas of caste and fashion enmesh themselves inextricably in a way that continues to this day. Fashion designers and studios carry on this legacy, sometimes unthinkingly, often as a continuation of the networks of asymmetry established during the colonial era. 

This Issue, our third, was intended as a point of convergence for a number of different strands of inquiry that enumerate the relationship between caste and fashion. A question that we seek to ask through the issue is — how do these aesthetic registers of control continue to be reified within the modern Indian fashion industries? Through what new forms does the consolidation of cultural capital in the hands of dominant castes take shape? What are the various intersecting networks through which exploitations and subsequent assertions make themself visible? 

Besides beginning to address some of these questions, the Issue brings together archives of meticulously collected, comprehensively documented information about sartorial traditions of various communities, with the analytical thread of caste that runs at the core of these investigations. Through the various dimensions of the topic these pieces open up, we attempt to record some of the socio-political-cultural formations that are instrumental to our understanding of the caste-fashion-labour nexus, both in our history and in the present.

Shri Harsha Sai Matta’s article traces these webs of colonial and caste-based exploitation brilliantly, by focusing on the practice of lace-making in Nagercoil and the Travancore region in the 19th century. Starting as an evening activity for oppressed caste girls in Missionary schools, this practice gradually becomes a highly regarded artisan artifact of India. This process, Matta argues, also defines a deliberate, assertive negotiation toward an emergent sartorial modernity for the oppressed castes of the region. 

Amrutha Kosuru’s meditates on the knottiness of modernity by focusing on her identity as someone belonging to a weaver community, i.e. Padmasalis of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The textile artifact produced by her community is a thing of beauty but it is also a thing of embedded logics of caste. How does one negotiate with this? The burden of withdrawing from the allure of ancestral memory — in order to exit caste — is a weight specific to oppressed castes. Kosuru’s piece expounds upon this beautifully.

In his video essay, Elroy Pinto looks at his own family, with a weaved object, the godhadis, or hand woven quilts, as the starting point. His video essay follows the patchwork logic of the piece of clothing, and through a conversation with his mother: about his grandparents, their migration to the city, their work in the textile mills, a narrative about caste identity within the Catholic community in Mumbai comes to the fore.  

Nidhi Suman also focuses on similar enduring and uncomfortable familial legacies by writing about shoemakers and leather workers of Bengal. Tracing a family tree, Suman writes of her great-grandparents’ migration and absorption into the industry, of the working conditions of kareegars, and of the gradual but as-yet incomplete exit from the caste networks that enable such kareegari. Her photos provide an ethnographic supplement to the piece. 

Zeeshan Akhtar’s photos and essay are also set in the bylanes of Kolkata, particularly the muslim neighbourhoods of Zakaria Street, Metiabruz, Kidderpore, and Park Circus. His inquiry begins from the term topibechwa which, we learn, is actually a casteist slur. Through remarkable erudition and sincerity, Akhtar tries to recuperate the skull cap or topi as a complex object, with layers of caste and other historico-socio-cultural encodings. The topi is perhaps the most villainized artifact in our frenzied Hindutva zeitgeist. In this context, Akhtar’s richly layered analysis is both vitalizing and politically urgent. 

Kallol Datta’s piece builds on their longue duree artistic research into textile histories of the Korean Peninsula, to illuminate how an intersecting web of caste, class, and gender norms that fabricate any piece of clothing into reality. These overarching codifications the Korean caste system brings with itself hold critical overtures and resonances to the caste society of India and its relation to clothing protocols. 

Alyen Foning, Maltongmu Lepcha and Lungmying Lepcha offer us a visually rich deep dive into  Lepcha clothing and cultural memory in eastern Himalayas — as it gets shaped through memorialisation, evolving cultural relations to the landscape, as well as a rapidly accelerating ecological crisis in the region. 

Purushu Arie and Anubhuti Rabha both focus on complimenting struggles generated by the marginalized body moving within the city. Revolving around an encounter with assertive young skateboarders in a park in Chennai, Purushu’s piece puts us face to face with the numerous socio-cultural intensities that are hidden underneath the caste-coded slang “pullingo.” This word, used to mock the style and cultural aspirations of underclass youth in the city, shares an overlap with the (unfortunately) immensely popular Hindi slang “chhapri.” Purushu’s radical critique emerges organically through conversations with the young skateboarders, and is supplemented by Shaheen Peer’s crisp photos of the subjects of the piece. 

Rabha’s piece focuses on the racism and everyday discrimination that people from the northeast face within New Delhi. The pretext that “people from the northeast have better dressing sense and style” is hardly ever employed as an act of sincere admiration by mainlanders but rather functions as a racially charged dog whistle to project one’s insecurity and racism. Rabha’s article breaks this down, supplementing it with an academic reading. Images from Menty Jamir’s brilliant photoseries around Humayunpur, a locality in New Delhi punctuate the article visually.   

Another piece in this issue speaks to the grassroots-level reality of garment workers in Tiruppur and Dindigul in Tamilnadu, particularly in the context of the Tamilnadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), which was formed to fight against rampant gender and caste-based violence and discrimination within the industry. In the interview, TTCU leaders M. Jeeva and M. Poongodi, as well as human rights lawyer Thivya Rakini, generously share their journey — in laying out the stakes and enduring the tremendous force of the global fashion industries as well as state machinery, in order to assert themselves as a unified front of Dalit Women workers. Their assertive tactics are profound lessons in how to educate, agitate, and organize, no matter the size of the behemoth one faces.

Critical inquiries into what makes fashion, into why we wear what we wear, what goes into making the things we put on our bodies every day, are utterly necessary at this moment in history. The international hyper-capitalist machine produces clothes at blinding speed, and every day we are alienated further from the labour and people who make our things. This has also always been the nature of caste, which acts as a dual extraction and invisibilisation of labour, hand-in-hand with the dehumanisation of labouring communities. We hope to facilitate some of this discourse in this Issue, which we hope is an exercise in witnessing the inequality that has always been at the core of fashion.