The Story Of The Blouse: A Cover Up or Objectifying the Woman's Body?

Growing up in Bengal, I have always known true humidity and heat. And I guess that has been the case with most Indian children. The long summers were never pleasant. With sweat covered faces and dampened blouses, I witnessed the women in my house making meals, doing chores and living a life without raising a concern about being physically constricted in a claustrophobic blouse and a saree. It has been so natural to see Indian ladies sport blouses of different shapes and sizes along with their sarees, that it never occurred to me to question this piece of cloth that we, as a community, are so attached to.

This obsession doesn't just end at being attached emotionally to a beautiful garment. It extends to a level where we put women’s morality on their breasts and necessitate covering it up. We are often reprimanded if we are wearing a saree with a blouse that is sleeveless, or god forbid, backless. “Yeh hamari sanskriti nahi hain…”, is what falls on our ears.

The same, of course, is not applicable for men. Society is biased. That is a fact that has been established way back. What interested me was the evolution of this idea that women’s bodies, especially if she has to abide by our culture, should be covered from head to toe to be considered a decent human being. Interestingly, if we look at ancient Indian Architecture, like those at Khajuraho, we can come across motifs of bare bodied women throughout this structure of great importance. They were celebrated, worshipped and revered as sites of celestial energy. Then why is it that today, we are so spiteful of the same?

Blouses are probably one of the biggest cultural after-effects of colonisation. Our colonists could not fathom the fact that the women in our society could separate modesty and morality from their bodies. That they could be covered in only a saree, according to their own comfort, and still be respected. They viewed us as uncivilised perverts who were promiscuous in their ways. Victorian ethics and morals came into the narrative when the Whites deemed the introduction of petticoats and chemise necessary to maintain civility.

History of Blouse

Blouses of today came into being in colonial Bengal where they were popularised by Jnanadanandini Devi, who was discriminated against because she wore her saree without an additional layer of clothing; she wore her saree on her bare body. When I say repeatedly that women were bare bodied, I mean that they covered their bodies with comfortable, breathable and minimal fabric. It is not an implication that we never covered ourselves. And again, given the climate of our tropical country, I at times wonder whether the makers and propagators of the bra and the blouse ever considered the comfort of their customers.

If we look at the history of how women in India covered their breasts, we will find that it had more to do with caste, than one’s morality and civility. Lower caste women were not allowed to cover their breasts while their upper caste counterparts did so with a thin fabric which was also often an extension of the saree pallu. The story of Nangeli has gained a lot of impetus in the past five to six years, thanks to the growing popularity of social media and its algorithm. Even in her story, we witness men ‘allowing’ the savarna women to cover their chests while they denied the dalits the basic dignity of even doing that.

Picture credit: Instagram

It just simply becomes a big circus of our own double standards. We celebrate breastfeeding but somehow gag at the sight of even a slight portion of a woman’s chest otherwise. We scandalise the same breasts when they are not used for the purpose of feeding. We love the same things in private that we so vocally reject in public. This duality also reflects in the split image of the mother and the concubine, the sexualised whore and the admired Devi. In the land of Mother Goddess Kali, we still frown upon women who do not conform to our problematic ideas of decency.

Objectification and sexualisation of the woman's body

Women over the centuries have been oppressed in several creative ways, but the most celebrated of all has to be the objectification and sexualisation of the woman's body. The carefully woven cloth with strands of patriarchy, casteism, misogyny and colonialism has produced the perfect fabric for censoring something that does not even belong to the ones imposing it. Bodily agency is something that we women have been denied for a very long time.

Writing this article, I won't say that the thought of people slamming it with “Do you want us to go back to the stone age again?” or “Abb kya kapde nahi pehne?” has not occurred to me. No, I am not asking anyone to denounce clothes. I am just raising the question of whether we should really be tying our worth to tangible residues from our never ending colonial hangover, like the blouse, and let these very objects decide our worth in the public eye. We have internalised these Imperial gifts of objectification and sexualisation and labelled them as a part of our own culture. It is finally time that we start unlearning our past understandings based on the colonial perspective and regain the authority that was always ours to own, and never theirs to take away.

The views expressed are the author's own.