Book Review: The Song of the Shirt

Book: The Song of the Shirt

Author: Jeremy Seabrook

Publisher: Navayana Publishers-Delhi

Pages: 288

Price: Rs315

To realise that West Bengal is the smaller half of Bengal and that the bigger Bengal (East Bengal/ Bangladesh) is also real, I had to wait for my American sojourn. There, in moments of loneliness when I turned to Bengal, I typically encountered those who were not ashamed of their Bengaliness. These were people from East Bengal. It was in the US that I was exposed to the peculiar phenomenon of cheap apparel, especially T-shirts, so much so that many were given out for free at various events. Being a freebie-lover, I soon owned many, many T-shirts – more than I would ever wear in my life.

I repeatedly encountered 'Bangladesh' in the manufacturing tags. Like newspapers that receive no advertisements, something about the 'cheapness' of these shirts didn't add up. Someone, somewhere was paying the price. It was being paid now by labourers in Dhaka, but in the past had been paid in other locations. This was the continuing story of labour exploitation, evisceration of rural life, rural to urban migration and the control of every aspect of the lives of millions of labourers ultimately by people whose faces they will never see and forces which are hard to pin down to a specific nation or institution.

Jeremy Seabrook's The Song of the Shirt is a book that tells past, present and the future of the 'Made in Bangladesh' story, specifically the story of Bengal's garment industry and its now defunct colonial manufacturing counterpart of Lancashire. He provides a review of Bengal's famed pre-colonial handloom industry, its forcible decline engineered by the East India Company actions and policies, the lives of labour ghettos in Lancashire of yore and today's Dhaka.
The famous Bengali film Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray was translated as the 'Song of the Road'. The similarity of the book title is hard not to notice. But what follows is a dirge set among the expendable lives in a globalisation boomtown. While Britain had colonies, Bangladesh doesn't. Hence, Seabrook's musings about a future Dhaka that might share some of Lancashire's post-industrial prosperous fate lack reason.

Seabrook has situated his book largely in Dhaka of the present, the capital of the present-day People's Republic of Bangladesh, but also in various locations in the past which were key players in the story of cotton and the 'song of the shirt', including Lancashire, Kolkata, Manchester, Barisal, Mumbai and Murshidabad. He draws a multi-century story of Bengal's bleeding, oozing out riches into the White world and the worlds of their local compradors. This is a book that is more than the plight of garment industry workers. It is more than a critique of present consumer culture. It is indeed a book about how Bengal and Britain came to be the way they are, and much more – all accomplished in the sharp journalistic style of a master. This book will make you look at your wardrobe in a whole new way. Get the book before you buy your next T-shirt.

dnasunday@dnaindia.net, @dna