Column

A city college bans T-shirts; why does dress-code tyranny always target women?

A city college thinks T-shirts are vulgar. So exercised was the institution by the polluting impudence of the T-shirt that it cracked down on girls wearing them. The 400 girls rounded up by the college’s decency posse were then barred from taking mid-term examinations.

The news swiftly divided Mumbai into two main groups. The first believes that India’s antique traditions are indeed being threatened by the collar-less garment. The second is sure that the dress-code tyranny is an accessory to mean-minded hyper-conservatism. But the first group has been forcefully defending the right of a private institution to devise its own credo, beliefs, and customs.

I still don’t know which group I should submit my allegiance to. I agree that bodies that do not operate, wholly or primarily, on government funds - clubs, hotels, corporations - are not obliged to espouse inclusivist mores. In 1987, the Calcutta Swimming Club blocked Ananda Shankar and his kurta-churidar combination because it held that Western attire was more suitable to its burra sahib ethos. Willingdon Club of Mumbai was appalled enough by MF Husain’s bare feet, in 1996, that it made his attempt to enjoy its hospitality completely bootless.

Today, there are countless places whose custodians will willingly tear away their suits and slip into kurtas just to make Shankar feel comfortable. As for Husain, there are millions of organisers of small-talk soirees who will feel privileged to throw barefoot bashes to hear the artist talk about his horses, and Madhuri Dixit.

In fact, being barefoot in India is as commonplace as being partial to kurtas. The important point is that there are as many notions of formality as there are people. But it is the dogmatic view of decency that must be urgently and assiduously challenged.

How many of you have noticed that dress-code tyranny almost always targets women? The clowns on the train who delude themselves into believing that exposing their grimy chest hair is macho seem to be ignored by the decency posse. I will not accept the argument that most of these hirsute yahoos have never been to college. Even if that is the case, they probably have heard of colleges punishing women for vulgarity. They then arrogate upon themselves the responsibility of taking charge of women’s continuing education on authentic-Indian refinement.

I do not know the educational accomplishments of Sunil More, formerly a member of Mumbai’s constabulary, who carried the decency posse’s punishment impulse to the bestial extreme. Those who defended More, most of whom also defend authentic-Indian values, posited that women who wear anything other than tent canvas wantonly trigger a testosterone surge in a man.

In other words, the college is unconsciously, or perhaps not, reinforcing the orthodoxy that women are the sole carriers of Indian decency. The T-shirt ban is then the latest stage in the evolution of the man’s salutary prescriptions for women: first it was the skirt, then trousers, and later tank-tops…
One day, just being a woman will be vulgar.

—raghu@dnaindia.net