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 FASHION, DRESS AND
IDENTITY IN SOUTH ASIAN
DIASPORA NARRATIVES
FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY TO MONICA ALI

Noemí Pereira-Ares
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian
Diaspora Narratives
 Noemí Pereira-Ares

Fashion, Dress and

Identity in South
Asian Diaspora
Narratives
From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali
Noemí Pereira-Ares
University of Santiago de Compostela
Santiago, Spain

ISBN 978-3-319-61396-3 ISBN 978-3-319-61397-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947752

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This book was advertised with a copyright holder in the name of the publisher in error,
whereas the author(s)/editor(s) are holding the copyright.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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 The Sari
Inside my mother
I peered through a glass porthole.
The world beyond was hot and brown.

They were all looking in on me –

Father, Grandmother,
the cook’s boy, the sweeper-girl,
the bullock with the sharp
shoulderblades,
the local politicians.

My English grandmother
took a telescope
and gazed across continents.

All the people unravelled a sari.

It stretched from Lahore to Hyderabad,
wavered across the Arabian Sea,
shot through with stars,
fluttering with sparrows and quails.
They threaded it with roads,
undulations of land.

Eventually
they wrapped and wrapped me in it
whispering Your body is your country.
(Alvi 2008: 39)
 Acknowledgements

This book, albeit extensively revised, began as a doctoral disserta-

tion at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and I will always be
deeply indebted to my Ph.D. supervisors, Margarita Estévez-Saá and
José Manuel Estévez-Saá, for their insightful academic guidance, per-
ceptive criticism and constant encouragement throughout. I am also
profoundly grateful and indebted to Claire Chambers for devoting her
precious time to reading and commenting on various draft chapters. I
greatly appreciate her generous enthusiasm, judicious feedback and inval-
uable comments. I would also like to thank Laura Lojo-Rodríguez and
Jorge Sacido-Romero for their reading suggestions and advice on par-
ticular sections. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers for their
constructive comments on the initial manuscript. I am also grateful to
the Spanish Ministry of Education for funding this study (FPU, AP2010-
4490), as well as to the Department of English and German Studies at
the University of Santiago de Compostela for providing support along
the way. I must particularly acknowledge the funding provided by the
‘Discourse and Identity’ Research Group (GRC2015/002 GI-1924),
and must thank its coordinator, Laura Lojo-Rodríguez, for being sup-
portive and generous throughout. Some of the research for this book
also comes from a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-38790), to which I am grate-

ful. I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of the
Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London,
and especially to Sanjay Seth, for the warm welcome and assistance dur-
ing my stay as a Visiting Researcher in 2013. I extend my acknowledge-
ments to my colleagues from the University of A Coruña. Special thanks
to Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos for his unfailing support and advice,
as well as to María Jesús Lorenzo Modia for her guidance and mentor-
ing during my years at the University of A Coruña. I also owe a debt
of gratitude to Joanne F. Forrester for our stimulating discussions and
for her editing advice. I am similarly grateful to the team at Palgrave
Macmillan and, in particular, to the editors Tom René, April James
and Camille Davies for urging on the project, and for their patience
and support. I also wish to acknowledge the generosity of The Journal
of Commonwealth Literature and Miscelánea: A Journal of English and
American Studies in granting permission to reprint sections of Chaps. 2
and 5, and must also thank Bloodaxe Books for giving copyright permis-
sion to reproduce Moniza Alvi’s poem ‘The Sari’. Additional thanks go
to all those colleagues, friends and relatives who have offered me support
and words of encouragement over the past years.
 Contents

Introduction
xi

1 ‘Our Eastern Costume Created a Sensation’: Sartorial

Encounters in Eighteenth-, Nineteenth- and Early-
Twentieth-Century Travelogues by South Asian Writers 1

2 The ‘Sartorially Undesirable “Other”’ in Post-War South

Asian Diaspora Narratives: Kamala Markandaya’s
The Nowhere Man 23

3 ‘It Was Stylish and “in” to Be Eastern’? Subversive Dress

in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia 59

4 ‘Chanel Designing Catwalk Indian Suits’: Sartorial

Negotiations in Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee 105

5 ‘She Had Her Hijab Pulled Off’: Dressed Bodies Do

Matter in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 149

A Sartorial Afterword 195

Bibliography 203

Index 233
ix
 Introduction

Writing in the eighteenth century, Mirza Itesa Modeen described the

fascination that his ‘costume’ aroused in Britain, adding that he, ‘who
went to see a spectacle, became [him]self a sight to others’ (1927:
8). Similarly, but in 1950s Britain, the narrator of Amit Chaudhuri’s
Afternoon Raag recalls how his mother’s dress and the ‘red dot on […]
[her] forehead’ prompted an Englishman to take a picture of her, a pic-
ture that ‘for many months […] hung among other photos at a studio
on Regent Street’ (1994: 57). In contrast, in Kamala Markandaya’s The
Nowhere Man , which is set in 1960s London, the wearer of South Asian
clothes is regarded with derision and, as Mrs Pickering tells Srinivas on
seeing him arrayed in a dhoti, going out ‘in those clothes […] is ask-
ing for trouble’ (1973: 244). For outside there might be teddy boys in
‘mock-Edwardian clothes’ (Naipaul 2001: 109) or skinheads dressed
in ‘jeans […] Union Jack braces […] [and] Doctor Marten’s boots’
(Kureishi 2002a: 26), waiting for the right moment to go ‘Paki bash-
ing’ (Syal 1997: 277). Srinivas’s dhoti in The Nowhere Man is probably
similar to that sported by Mahatma Gandhi when Winston Churchill
referred to him as a ‘half-naked fakir’, a statement recalled by Dev in
Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird (1999: 164) and by Mr. Kumar in Meera
Syal’s Anita and Me (1997: 180). A British Asian pre-teenager, the pro-
tagonist of Anita and Me refuses to put on ‘Indian suits’ (1997: 146),
as does Mishal Sufyan in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, opting
instead for a ‘shortie tank-top and 501s’ (1988: 271). Contrarily, in
Atima Srivastava’s Looking for Maya, Mira alternates between Eastern

xi
xii    Introduction

and Western clothes, and she even imagines her white boyfriend mak-
ing an ethnic contribution by dressing in ‘full khaadi, the hand-spun,
hand-woven cloth popularized by Gandhi’ (1999: 36). Srivastava’s novel
is set in the 1990s when, as Tania says in Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee
Hee, ‘brown was indeed the new black, in couture, in music, in design’
(2000a: 109). Alluding to the sporting of Asian dress by such personali-
ties as Princess Diana or Cherie Blair, the main character in Nirpal Singh
Dhaliwal’s Tourism astringently comments: ‘Cherie wore a blue and sil-
ver sari that hung awkwardly on her, and a matching bindhi […] The
Blairs, keen on rich Indians, were only too happy to dress up for them.
Money is the most cosmopolitan thing in the world’ (2006: 149–150).
The ‘Asian cool’ phenomenon depicted in the above-mentioned nov-
els also surfaces in a number of post-9/11 narratives, where it coexists
with the stigmas surrounding (South Asian) Muslim clothes. As a result,
post-9/11 British Asian fictions show characters that, out of fear, leave
‘their headscarves at home’ (Ali 2007: 376) and others that, in stark
contrast, defiantly ‘upgrade’ their hijabs ‘to burkhas’ (Ali 2007: 279).
Notwithstanding, in the twenty-first century the ‘desification’ of British
culture continues to increase, and we see how Jas, the white protagonist
of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, adopts desi aesthetics, roaming the
streets in his ‘designer desi garms’ (2007: 5).
Deftly woven into the fabric of the texts, dress in the above quota-
tions emerges as a conspicuous site of identity inscription, negotiation
and reinvention. Along this broad continuum of narratives, dress also
voices shared preoccupations that reveal both the currency that dress
has acquired in the Asian-British encounter and an underlying his-
tory of shifting attitudes towards the South Asian presence in Britain.
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From the
Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali stemmed from the need to address the
recurrence and specific character of dress in the literature of the South
Asian diaspora. While much of the discussion in this book could be per-
tinent to sartorial readings of differently located South Asian diasporic
texts, this study centres on South Asian literary productions in Britain.
Because, as Avtar Brah has noted in her seminal work Cartographies of
Diaspora, the South Asian diaspora is made up of ‘multiple journeys’
that intersect at various points, but each of these journeys has ‘its own
history, its own particularities’ (1996: 183) and, consequently, each of
them requires taking into account certain contextual specificities that
could be de-emphasised if the corpus of analysis were geographically too
 Introduction    xiii

comprehensive. Likewise, albeit applicable and easily transposed to other

genres—see Moniza Alvi’s ‘The Sari’ ([1993] 2008), a poem reproduced
at the beginning of this work1—the analyses carried out here focus on
narratives, from eighteenth-century travelogues to twenty-first-century
fiction. These narratives have been selected in accordance with two main
parameters. First, they deal with the diasporic experience in Britain; and,
second, they are written by authors of South Asian origin who migrated
to Britain (temporarily or permanently), or who were born in Britain.2
This has been done with the awareness that not all the writers discussed
here might consider themselves as being part of a diaspora in a strictly
literal sense. It is highly probable that none of them would be comfort-
able with the term ‘South Asian’ either. Some would define themselves
as Indians, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, whether Muslims, Hindus or
Sikhs. Others would embrace the duality projected by the hyphenated
identity ‘British-Asian’, and a third group would probably refer to them-
selves simply as British. All these different identity positionalities are here
subsumed, for the simple strategic purpose of drawing correspondences,
under the vexed category ‘South Asian’.3 I am myself guilty of falling
into similar ambivalences when it comes to deploying the taxonomy
‘South Asian diaspora narratives in Britain’—despite the fact that this
critical label has a number of precedents in various publications, to which
this book is greatly indebted.4 For, while vindicating the place that South
Asian diaspora writing should be allotted within mainstream British writ-
ing, this book simultaneously categorises the works under scrutiny as
belonging to a particular literary niche for the sake of highlighting their
singularity and the sui generis voice of their sartorial subtexts.
The discourse of diaspora, nowadays diverted from its original nexus
with the Jewish experience,5 is thus deployed to establish genealogical,
thematic and sartorial connections among various writers and works.
However, ethnic, cultural, socio-economic and religious differences are
to be highlighted whenever and wherever they are considered relevant to
this analysis. Because, ultimately, diasporas are not homogenous forma-
tions, even if they are constructed, imagined or represented as such (Hall
2003a). Diaspora studies are also used here to build a bridge between
the domain of postcolonialism and the epistemology of transculturalism,
two theoretical frameworks which illuminate much of the analysis in this
book, but which are often said to sit uncomfortably together for rea-
sons I shall not rehearse here.6 Of course, the transnational and transcul-
tural side of contemporary societies, which has fuelled theorisations on
xiv    Introduction

transculturalism, is not the sole result of diasporic movements. Yet dias-

poras, including those brought about by the synergies of colonialism and
postcolonialism, have largely contributed to shaping a world of ‘multi-
ple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000).7 The South Asian diaspora in Britain
constitutes a (post)colonial diaspora, and therefore engaging with its
literary tradition requires, almost unavoidably, taking into account the
vocabulary of postcolonialism. Yet it also demands the incorporation of
new approaches such as transculturalism, approaches able to articulate
the representation of diasporic subjectivities that show ‘plural affiliations
and multiple, multi-layered identities’ (Dagnino 2012b: 13). The study
of the South Asian diaspora in Britain emerges therefore as a terrain that
allows for the convergence of multiple theoretical paradigms, including
postcolonialism and transculturalism. However tangentially or indirectly,
this book thus adds to the voices of those critics who, like Diana Brydon
(2004), Lily Cho (2007) and John McLeod (2011), have suggested that
establishing a dialogue between the old and the new is more productive
than ‘pronouncing premature obituaries’ (Brydon 2004: 691). Despite
its multiple ‘discontents’ (Huggan 1993), postcolonialism continues
to be useful to critically interpret past and present forms of subordina-
tion, and it would be disingenuous to fail to recognise the important
role played by postcolonial studies in ‘dismantling the Centre/Margin
binarism of imperial discourse’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 117). It is now up
to novel approaches such as transculturalism to prove themselves useful
beyond the theoretical level and the world of academe. Transculturalism
is a priori all the more inviting, with its emphasis on differences and
commonalities, the local and the global, without this entailing a Western-
centric uniformisation or the denial of particularisms (Epstein 1995,
2009; Welsch 1999, 2009). In a post-9/11 Europe where multicultur-
alism is being questioned more than ever before, we may well wonder
whether transcultural thinking and transcultural representations offer
new insights that can help to circumvent the impasses of the multicul-
tural model.8
Diaspora and cultural studies—two fields that have often cross-ferti-
lised—have productively animated and contributed to further theorisa-
tions on the issue of identity, in particular cultural identity. Stuart Hall,
whose work is emblematic of such cross-fertilisation, contended that the
condition of diaspora provides a magnifying lens through which to look
at the unstable and ever-changing character of cultural identity (2003b),
mainly because diasporas create a ‘third space’ (Bhabha [1994] 2004:
 Introduction    xv

56) which favours the emergence of new and transgressive subjectivities.

Hall defined cultural identity as ‘the points of identification, the unstable
points of identification or suture, which are made within the discourse
of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning’ (2003b: 237).
Such postmodern conceptualisations seek to challenge integral, holis-
tic and unified notions of identity, advocating instead an idea of iden-
tity as de-centred, fragmentary, never complete, socially and culturally
constructed, and therefore linked to notions of ‘performativity’ (Butler
1990, 1993).9 This shift involves a ‘crisis of identity’ (Erikson 1968),
a move away from the idea of the self-sustained subject that has tradi-
tionally ruled post-Cartesian Western thought (Hall 1996b). This is the
conceptualisation of identity upheld in this book, one that many of the
narratives analysed here dramatise through the presentation of dressed
bodies that defy, subvert and even play with fixed boundaries of ethnic,
class and gender identity. They show, in this way, that identity is consti-
tuted by the ‘very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler
1990: 45). Yet, in the course of this sartorial journey we also come across
the representation of ideological dogmatisms, ethnic absolutisms and
exclusionist discourses which, regardless of their origin, all tend to rely
on essentialist visualisation of cultural and national identity. Diasporas,
as scholars such as Floya Anthias (1998) and Vijay Mishra (2008) have
argued, can become bastions of ideological dogmatism. Their ‘attach-
ment to the idea of ethnic and therefore particularist bonds’ might result
in ‘a new reconstructed form of ethnic absolutism’ (Anthias 1998: 567).
For their part, host societies have often constructed anti-immigration
discourses that hinge on essentialist visions of national identity, invoking
anxieties over the erosion of the nation’s cultural values and masquerad-
ing exclusion and racism under the guise of cultural incompatibility, con-
cerns about the welfare state or even national security issues. In line with
this, Paul Gilroy has cogently demonstrated how, in post-war Britain, the
so-called ‘new racism’10 relied on the conflation of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ to
deny diasporic settlers the possibility of ‘aligning themselves within the
“British race” on the grounds that their national allegiance inevitably
l[ay] elsewhere’ (2002: 46). In our current post-9/11 scenario, discrimi-
natory discourse has substantially moved the emphasis from race/ethnic-
ity to religious difference (Meer and Modood 2009), sharing none the
less a similar modus operandi, being equally exclusionist, essentialist and
recurrently underpinned by a fantasy of the ‘Nation qua Thing’ (Žižek
1993: 201).
xvi    Introduction

Highly critical of exclusionist notions of identity, Hanif Kureishi has

illustrated some of the above-mentioned preoccupations in two well-
known essays entitled ‘The Rainbow Sign’ and ‘Bradford’, respectively.
First published in 1986,11 these two essays also exemplify how dress con-
tributes to ‘the making and unmaking of strangers’ (Bauman 2000: 46).
In Part II of ‘The Rainbow Sign’, Kureishi describes his visit to Pakistan
as a young man, recounting how his jeans led a man to call him ‘Paki’,
thus denying Kureishi the possibility of being considered and regarded
as a ‘genuine’ Pakistani: ‘As someone said to me at a party, provoked by
the fact I was wearing jeans: we are Pakistanis, but you, you will always
be a Paki—emphasizing the slang derogatory name the English used
against Pakistanis, and therefore the fact that I couldn’t rightfully lay
claim to either place’ (2002a: 34). In ‘Bradford’, Kureishi records how,
in the eponymous town of the essay’s title, he was once denied access
to an Asian bar on the basis of his jeans: ‘At the entrance the bouncer
laid his hands on my shoulder and told me I could not go in. “Why
not?” I asked. “You’re not wearing any trousers.” […] Jeans, it seems,
were not acceptable’ (2002a: 61).12 Underlying these two extracts is,
inter alia, a critique of restrictive approaches to identity, approaches that
fail to accommodate hybrid forms of identification. In the first essay,
Kureishi criticises the reassertion of Islamic laws in 1970s Pakistan as well
as the separatism propounded by Black Muslims in 1960s America; in
‘Bradford’ he aims his critique at the state of multiculturalism in Britain.
The Bradford he visited back in the 1980s was a ‘microcosm’ within
Britain, where ‘extremely conservative and traditional views’ were repro-
duced by some factions of the Asian community (2002a: 58, 69). Yet,
as Kureishi notes perceptively, some of those views, when ‘isolated from
the specifics of their subcontinental context’ (2002a: 69), could be com-
pared to the ‘values championed by Ray Honeyford, amongst others’
(2002a: 69).13 Even more important for my objective here is Kureishi’s
attention to matters of dress in these essays. Despite being located in dif-
ferent geographies, the sartorial incidents described by Kureishi point
to the intimate connection between dress, body and identity. Especially
in the context of the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992), which all diaspo-
ras occupy, identity is often negotiated via the dressed body. A power-
ful signifier, dress might be capable of determining pronouncements of
belonging and not belonging, inclusion and exclusion. It might become
a ‘means of policing a minority identity’ (Donnell 1999: 495), a device
used to reinforce the imagined boundaries of a diasporic community,
 Introduction    xvii

or the site where the emergence of rhizomatic, hybrid and transcultural

identities might first become visible. Dress is ‘an extension of the body’
(Wilson 2010: 3), and as such it adds new layers of meaning to the body,
sometimes ‘marking’ the body in powerful ways. For, ultimately, whether
in Bradford or Pakistan, Kureishi’s jeans marked him out, neutralising his
‘Asianness’ and relegating him to the position of ‘outsider’.14
The close relationship between dress, body and identity is probably
nowhere better explored than within the interdisciplinary field of fashion
theory.15 As different fashion theory practitioners have said, dress ‘is an
intimate aspect of the experience and presentation of the self’ (Entwistle
2005: 10), a ‘kind of visual metaphor for identity and […] for register-
ing the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate within and among
identities (Davis 1992: 25). Through dress, we project our identity,
whether real or contrived, transmitting information pertaining to the
realm of gender, ethnicity, class, social position, religion, culture or col-
lective affiliation. It is largely through dress that we position ourselves
in society, that our identity positionalities are revealed to or concealed
from the eyes of others. The study of dress therefore also has important
implications for the study of identity. As one theorist noted when dis-
cussing the arbitrariness of gender, ‘if femininity can be put on at will by
men, and masculinity worn in the style of “butch”, or by “drag kings”,
then gender is stripped of its naturalness and shown to be a set of cul-
turally regulated styles’ (Entwistle 2005: 178). In other words, even
when dress might initially reinforce dualisms such as the gender binary,
it simultaneously highlights the socially constructed, rather than onto-
logically determined, character of identity. Dressing choices often under-
score, therefore, a tension between individual agency and normative
social discourses. Dress is a discourse and, as Michel Foucault taught us,
discourses ‘discipline’ the body (1977: 137). Yet dress also affords indi-
viduals a space for agency, a means through which to resist or subvert
‘discipline’. In her work The Fashioned Body (2005), sociologist Joanne
Entwistle has devised an approach that gives an account of this duality,
and her ‘sociology of the dressed body’ resonates, directly or indirectly,
throughout this book, mainly because, in most of the narratives under
scrutiny, dress offers the characters a space for identity creativity, but it
also constructs them discursively. Entwistle’s approach interprets sarto-
rial choices as being the result of complex negotiations between the indi-
vidual and the social, between individual agency and social conventions
and constraints. Conceiving of the body as a social entity that is none
xviii    Introduction

the less individually acted upon, dress is seen as a ‘situated bodily prac-
tice’ (2005: 34) through which individuals present their body/self to the
social world, but also through which received discourses might be repro-
duced or challenged.
Underlying Entwistle’s formulation is the idea that body and dress
are inextricable from one another. Human bodies, as she says, are gener-
ally ‘dressed bodies’ (2005: 32), nakedness being often repressed within
social interaction. Therefore, dress should not be discussed without ref-
erence to the body. Dress is so intimately connected to the body that,
as Anne Hollander suggests (1993), artistic representations of the naked
body have often been modelled following sartorial conventions. If the
body is evidently dressed even in the absence of any garment, dress is
produced and consumed in relation to the body. The ‘empty garment,
without head and limbs […] is death, not the neutral absence of the
body, but the body mutilated, decapitated’ (Barthes 1972: 26). Clothes
in costume museums, Elizabeth Wilson argues, ‘hint at something only
half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the
evanescence of life’ (2010: 1). Joanne Entwistle has been one of the
most salient advocates of the need to study body and dress conjointly—
and my recurrent use of the term ‘dressed body’ shows the indebtedness
of this book to her work (2001, 2007). As she claims, the dressed body
is so closely linked to ‘identity that these three—dress, the body and the
self—are not perceived separately but simultaneously as a totality’ (2005:
10). This triple linkage becomes extremely pertinent when analysing
the narratives under scrutiny in this book. In them, dress is not simply
a static cultural object, but also a ‘bodily practice’ lived and experienced
by the characters. It is ingrained in multiple discourses that affect the
characters’ sartorial choices, which they often voice and explain to the
reader. Dress adds new layers of meaning to the body, as does the body
in relation to dress. As we shall see, in many texts the body of the wearer
attaches a stigma to the garment, as does the garment to the body that
wears it. For, as Denise Noble has noted, not only is racialisation consti-
tuted through skin, but also ‘embodied a second time over through hair
styles, clothing […] hijabs and salwaar-kameez’ (2005: 133). Whether in
a symbiotic or paradoxical way, body and dress often converge in the nar-
ratives under scrutiny, to such an extent that, in many respects, this study
is as much concerned with the body as it is with dress—and this duality
only finds resolution through the notion of the ‘dressed body’.
 Introduction    xix

‘Dress’ and ‘fashion’ are terms that recur throughout the pages of
this book, and consequently they necessitate some brief discussion
at this point. Transposing the terminology of fashion theory, the term
‘dress’—and, by extension, ‘dressed body’—is used here to refer to all
forms of clothing, adornments and bodily modifications, from garments
to shoes, from headgear to jewellery, from scents to hairstyles, make-up,
piercings and tattoos (Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1997). In this sense,
the conceptual implications of ‘dress’ are much broader than those of the
term ‘clothes’, which is generally assumed to allude simply to garments.
Usually defined in relation to ‘dress’, ‘fashion’ has been conceived of as
the ‘different forms’ that dress has adopted over the course of history
(Hollander 1993: 11), or as a ‘specific system of dress’ (Entwistle 2005:
48). Fashion, as the process whereby different forms of dress come into
vogue at different points in time, has frequently been considered and
addressed as a Western phenomenon,16 leading to the wrong assump-
tion that fashion, in the sense outlined above, does not exist outside the
Western world. In recent years, a number of scholars have denounced
the Western-centrism present in much theorisation about fashion. Sandra
Niessen states that ‘[f]ashion’s definition has long been in need of review
and revision’, observing that fashion has been constructed as a Western
phenomenon and as the purview of Western ‘civilization’ (2007: 105);
and Jennifer Craik suggests that ‘[b]y displacing the European-dictator
(ethnocentric or cultural superiority) model of fashion’, it is possible to
see how ‘other fashion systems co-exist, compete and interact with it’
(1994: x–xi). Adding to these voices, this book endorses a definition
of ‘fashion’ as any of the multiple systems of dress that exist across the
globe; systems that are ruled by social, cultural, religious and sometimes
even political and ideological conventions; and systems that are all sub-
ject to constant change.
If the human body is mainly a dressed body, as fashion theory tells us,
those ‘fictional’ bodies that stand for human subjects are also likely to
become, through the process of mimesis, dressed bodies. Indeed, more
than in the real world, in the literary text the characters are almost always
imagined as being dressed. For even when they are verbally naked—in
other words, when there is a complete absence of sartorial ­description—
the reader is likely to perceive or imagine them as being dressed. In
other artistic manifestations—painting, sculpture, theatre or cinema,
among others—artists, creators or designers have to decide whether their
xx    Introduction

characters, figures or actors/actresses are to appear dressed or undressed.

Writers, however, are not under the same pressure. The reader of fiction
is supposed to imagine the literary character as being dressed unless it
is explicitly described as being naked—and this makes sartorial allusions
inherently significant. In literature, the nexus between body, dress and
self is sometimes extended to the point where, by means of a metonymic
process, the literary garment acts as pars pro toto; that is, it comes to
stand for the character. A clear example can be found in James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), where the identity of the man in the M’Intosh, despite
the critics’ efforts at fixing it, will always remain reduced to the afore-
mentioned garment (Estévez-Saá and Pereira-Ares 2011/2012). Dress
in literature shows a certain likeness to dress in the real world, and its
study can therefore benefit from the epistemology engendered within
fashion theory. Yet dress in literature shows multiple particularities that
need to be addressed separately. What we might term ‘literary clothing’
is close to the notion of ‘written clothing’ devised by Roland Barthes,
since both use verbal language as their ‘substance’ (2007: 88). However,
whereas descriptions of clothes in fashion magazines—what Barthes calls
‘written clothing’—give expression to a real object, sartorial descriptions
in literature are ‘brought to bear upon a hidden object (whether real or
imaginary)’ (Barthes 1985: 12). In literature, the referent of sartorial
allusions is more elusive, always already ‘fictional’. This referent, more
than being evoked through the reading, is actually constructed while
the reading is taking place, and consequently it is likely to be variously
imagined by different readers. Despite its elusiveness and even unreliabil-
ity, dress in literature offers much more than the examples of ‘written
clothing’ analysed by Barthes, or the sartorial exhibitions we come across
in costume museums. Because literature shows ‘dress in action’ (Buck
1983: 89); it captures the way in which dress is worn and adds meaning
to the bodies of the characters.
Fashion and dress have been frequently thematised in literature, and
plots have been constructed around them.17 If not the ‘engine of the
plot’, as Clair Hughes wrote (2006: 11), dress is a quintessential descrip-
tive device in literature. It contributes to the so-called ‘reality effect’,
lending ‘tangibility and visibility to character and context’ (Hughes
2006: 2). Sartorial descriptions in literature help to situate the action in
a particular place and time, and simultaneously reveal multiple character
traits. While ‘sartorial performativity is at issue’ in the literary text, ‘so
is the employment of apparel or accessory as symbol, image, motif, or
 Introduction    xxi

metaphor’ (Kuhn and Carlson 2007: 1). Literary dress might rely on the
meanings that particular clothes have in the real world and/or ‘operate
as the author’s personal sign-system’ (Hughes 2006: 3), thus acquiring
a significance that only makes sense within the diegesis. Dress might be
endowed with symbolism in literature, and it might also acquire a sort
of narrative function. Sartorial allusions might represent particular exer-
cises in description, but they might also build a narrative strand when
viewed in relation to one another. Dress in literature offers ‘one of the
different pleasures of reading a text—different, that is, from simply fol-
lowing the plot’ (Hughes 2006: 3). Dress contains multiple layers of
meaning that might pass unnoticed to a sartorially unobservant eye. But
dress is also ‘a visible aspect of history’ or, as Hughes adds, quoting John
Harvey (1996: 17), ‘values made visible’ (2006: 2). This book is about
what an analysis of dress can add to the interpretation of the literary text
and its context, where historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural
and fashion studies are used to support the reading. However, it is also
about what literature might add, or has been adding, to discussions on
the South Asian dressed body in Britain. For, as Yasmin Hussain has
said, South Asian diaspora texts offer a ‘compelling body of sociologi-
cal evidence about the South Asian diaspora’ (2005: 4) and, as this work
attempts to demonstrate, they also provide an important source of sarto-
rial evidence. They dramatise the different ways in which South Asians
in Britain have imagined themselves sartorially and have been imagined
by the dominant gaze, yielding insights into many of the controversies
surrounding the South Asian dressed body in Britain, most notably now-
adays debates on the practice of hijab within the South Asian Muslim
community.
Particularly in recent decades, the South Asian dressed body in gen-
eral, and the Muslim dressed body in particular, has come under the
critical gaze of many scholars, including those whose studies are geo-
graphically circumscribed to Britain.18 Framed within anthropologi-
cal, sociological and cultural approaches, these studies have contributed
towards bringing the South Asian dressed body into the centre of schol-
arly discussions. However, to the best of my knowledge, none of them
has engaged with, or drawn insights from, literature. Likewise, in recent
decades, the study of dress in literature has experienced an exponen-
tial growth. Yet this critical oeuvre has tended to focus on some of the
most, let us say, ‘canonical’ authors and texts.19 It is the aim of this book
to build a bridge between these two bodies of scholarship, or rather to
xxii    Introduction

explore the South Asian dressed body within and from within literary
criticism. ‘Costume historians,’ as Hughes notes, ‘have frequently drawn
on literature for evidence and information’, and yet ‘[l]iterary critics have
been puzzlingly slow to return the compliment’ (2006: 2). Literary crit-
ics engaging with South Asian diaspora writing in Britain have occasion-
ally made passing references to fashion and dress, but without turning
sartorial concerns into a main issue of analysis. Arguably, the contribu-
tions that come closest to the analytical purposes of this book are those
included in the 36th issue of the journal New Literatures Review, entitled
(Un)fabricating the Empire (2000) and, in particular, Susanne Reichl’s
‘Of Lappas and Levis: (Dress-)code-switching and the Construction of
Cultural Identities in the British Novel of Immigration’. In it, Reichl
approaches dress as yet another code of communication in three nov-
els—Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996), Hanif Kureishi’s The
Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Ravinder Randhawa’s Hari-jan (1992)—
drawing correspondences between the language and sartorial choices of
the characters in these texts. Reichl argues that linguistic and sartorial
strategies overlap in these novels, becoming crucial factors ‘in the posi-
tioning and constructing of the individual character’s identity’ (2000:
74). Her article outlines the dress–identity nexus with which this book
is concerned. However, her contribution is narrower in scope—being
reduced to three texts—and its emphasis on the parallelisms between lin-
guistic and sartorial choices, despite being extremely compelling, runs
athwart the specific focus on the dressed body that I propose here.
The present monograph constitutes, therefore, the first attempt at
providing a systematic and comprehensive analysis of sartorial identities
in the narratives of the South Asian diaspora in Britain, without losing
sight of how complex, problematic and even intrusive such an exercise
might be deemed considering my position as a white Western woman.
The book is divided into five main chapters, plus this introduction and
an afterward. All five chapters begin with an introductory section map-
ping the historical, sartorial and literary presence of South Asians in
Britain, simultaneously uncovering the points of intersection among
these dimensions. Each chapter then segues into the analysis of particu-
lar narratives. Chapter 1 engages with a series of travelogues written
by a number of South Asian authors who travelled—and in some cases
settled—in Britain during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. Having been subjected to much scrutiny as a result of
 Introduction    xxiii

their seemingly ‘exotic’ dressed bodies, these writers made dress into an
important issue in their narratives, timidly adumbrating and prefigur-
ing sartorial tropes and concerns that were to reappear in later fictions.
Chapter 2 focuses on texts produced in the post-Second World War
period, roughly from the 1950s to the 1970s, and depicting the experi-
ences of first-generation migrants. The chapter charts the points of sar-
torial continuity and discontinuity that exist between fiction written by
pioneering Indo-Caribbean writers and narratives dealing with the South
Asian diaspora from the Indian subcontinent. It then offers an in-depth
sartorial reading of Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), a
narrative in which dress connects past and present, colonialism and
diaspora, India and Britain. Moving from migrant narratives to fictions
revolving around second-generation characters, Chapter 3 examines sar-
torial representations in a series of works that, albeit published in the
1980s and early 1990s, look back to previous decades as they explore the
process of growing up in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. The fet-
ishisation of Eastern paraphernalia in the period is portrayed in a number
of these narratives, including Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
(1990), on which Chapter 3 concentrates. Drawing strength from the
irreverent world of British pop and youth subcultures, Kureishi’s novel
recreates a sartorial ‘carnival’ where dress affords the characters a site of
identity construction and reconstruction in subversive ways. Far removed
from carnivalesque endeavours, the narratives examined in Chapter 4,
all of them set and produced in the 1990s, introduce us to the ‘Asian
cool’ phenomenon, a phenomenon ambivalently treated in Meera Syal’s
Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), whose sartorial analysis centres
the remainder of this chapter. Besides tracing shifts in the protagonists’
development, dress in Syal’s novel is also endowed with a plethora of fig-
urative resonances which often coalesce around the novel’s exploration
of patriarchal structures, encumbering gender roles and the entwinement
between gender and ethnicity in the diaspora. Chapter 5 finally walks the
reader to the new millennium, initiating a sartorial journey across vari-
ous post-9/11 narratives. Focusing on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003),
the chapter examines, inter alia, how this novel openly problematises the
question of hijab, linking it to a broad spectrum of identity positionali-
ties and dissociating it from much Western rhetoric that merely sees it as
an oppressive element.
xxiv    Introduction

Notes
1. Moniza Alvi’s ‘The Sari’ first appeared in the collection The Country at
My Shoulder (1993), published by Oxford University Press. The version
reproduced here is from Moniza Alvi’s Split World: Poems 1990–2005
(2008), published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd, p. 39.
2. The implementation of these two parameters has excluded a number of
texts that, albeit fulfilling one criterion, do not comply with the other.
Thus, writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, G. V.
Desani or Attia Hosain, who have not centred their work on the diasporic
condition, are not considered in the present work. Likewise, the study
also excludes literary texts that touch on the South Asian experience in
Britain, but are not written by authors of South Asian origin—Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Colin MacInnes’ City of Spades (1957),
Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992), William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach
(1990), Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002) or Neil Gaiman’s Anansi
Boys (2005), among others.
3. Since the 1970s, within the British context, the term ‘South Asian’—
sometimes abbreviated to ‘Asian’—has been used to refer to people origi-
nally from South Asia. The potential artificiality underlying this category
is perfectly articulated by Robert C. Young: ‘This word Asian—which
means something else in the US […] [bands together] different groups
[that] share a geographical and cultural link only by contrast with the
English among whom they reside […] they are only “Asians” because
they are British Asians’ (1999: 22).
4. See Susheila Nasta (2002), Yasmin Hussain (2005) and Ruvani Ranasinha
(2007).
5. For more information, see Khachig Tölölyan (1991), William Safran
(1991), James Clifford (1994), Robin Cohen (1997), Steven Vertovec
(1999), Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003) or Virinder S.
Kalra, Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (2005), among others.
6. Especially within recent scholarship, transculturalism is said to oppose the
emphasis of postcolonialism on ‘nation and narration’ (Bhabha 1990),
insisting instead on addressing border-crossing and boundary-less cul-
tural identifications in a current era dominated by ‘global diaspora and
interconnection’ (Mirzoeff 1999, 154). Often traced back to the work
of Fernando Ortiz ([1940] 1995), transculturalism—and its multi-
ple cognates ‘transculturation’, ‘transculturality’, ‘transculture’—has
been developed subsequently in the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1992),
Wolfgang Welsch (1999, 2009), Mikhail Epstein (1995, 2009), and more
recently by Donald Cuccioletta (2001/2002), Sissy Helff (2009), Frank
 Introduction    xxv

Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (2009), Anne Holden Rønning (2011),

or Arianna Dagnino (2012a, 2012b).
7. Scholars such as Rey Chow (1993) and Stuart Hall (1996a) have con-
nected current forms of globalisation with the globalising effect ushered
in by colonisation and imperialism.
8. In recent years, multiculturalism has been criticised, inter alia, for rein-
forcing the exclusion of ethnic minorities, and for relying on the con-
ceptualisation of minority cultures as separate islands or spheres that
coexist—but do not intermingle—within the nation-state. See Heinz
Antor (2010a), Mikhail Epstein (2009) or Wolfgang Welsch (2009),
among others.
9. Judith Butler’s theories on performativity (Butler 1990, 1993) resonate
throughout the present work, often being transposed into discussions on
cultural and ethnic identity. However, it is worth clarifying that I intend
neither to provide a Butlerian reading of the narratives examined, nor
to develop an interpretative framework that systematically transposes
Butler’s theorisations on gender performativity to the exploration of eth-
nic identities.
10. The term ‘new racism’ was coined by Martin Barker (1981) to refer to a
particular form of racism that deploys cultural—rather than biological—
differences as the basis for exclusion. See also, Etienne Balibar’s notion of
‘differentialist racism’ (1991) and Tariq Modood’s concept of ‘cultural
racism’ (Modood 2000).
11. In 1986, ‘Bradford’ appeared in Granta, whereas ‘The Rainbow Sign’
was published as an appendix to the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette.
All references to these essays in the present work are taken from the ver-
sions included in Kureishi’s Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on
Writing and Politics (2002a).
12. The term ‘trousers’ in this quotation refers to the loose-fitting trousers
worn by Asian men and usually paired with a kurta—long shirt or tunic.
13. Kureishi is here alluding to the racially prejudiced views expressed by
Ray Honeyford in a 1984 article published in the conservative journal
Salisbury Review, and which led to what has been called the ‘Honeyford
affair’ (1984–1985).
14. It is worth noting that, though the two incidents narrated by Kureishi
and discussed here involve a form of dress-related exclusion in spaces
potentially scripted as ‘Asian’, the reverse process features prominently in
many of the texts analysed in this book.
15. For most scholars, the scope and concerns of fashion theory as an epis-
temological domain can be identified with those of the journal Fashion
Theory, a forum for the analysis of fashion ‘as the cultural construction
xxvi    Introduction

of the embodied identity’ and for the study of ‘the intersections of dress,
body, and culture’ (Steele 1997: 1–2).
16. Conceptualisations of fashion as an entirely Western occurrence can be
found in many fashion histories (Breward 2002; Laver 1995), texts read-
ing fashion under the lens of economy and class theory (Simmel 1971;
Veblen 1953), semiotic works (Barnard 2002; Barthes 1985) and even in
some of the most seminal works within the field (Hollander 1993; Wilson
2010).
17. Qaisra Shahraz’s ‘A Pair of Jeans’ ([1988] 2005), Pauline Melville’s ‘The
Truth Is in the Clothes’ (1990), Moniza Alvi’s ‘The Sari’ ([1993] 2008),
Carol Shields’ ‘Dressing up for the Carnival’ (2000), Lauren Weisberger’s
The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and Steven Millhauser’s ‘A Change of
Fashion’ (2006) are all texts that, albeit in different ways and to various
degrees, use dress as a central motif.
18. See Dulali Nag (1991), Naseem Khan (1992), Jennifer Craik (1994),
Emma Tarlo (1996, Nirmal Puwar (2002), Parminder Bhachu (2004,
2005a, 2005b), Parvati Raghuram (2003), and Sandra Niessen, Ann
Marie Leshkowich and Carla Jones (2005), among other scholars.
19. See, for example, Rosie Aindow (2010), Jennie Batchelor (2005), Clair
Hughes (2001, 2006), Cynthia Kuhn (2005), Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy
Carlson (2007), Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas and Catherine Cole
(2009), Aileen Ribeiro (2005), Catherine Spooner (2004), and Joseph
H. Hancock II, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas (2013).
 CHAPTER 1

‘Our Eastern Costume Created a Sensation’:

Sartorial Encounters in Eighteenth-,
Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century
Travelogues by South Asian Writers

The historical dynamics that have brought British and South Asian
­people into contact span more than 400 years and, contrary to what is
commonly assumed, Britain became a ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992) almost
at the same time as the Indian subcontinent itself.1 The history of this
cultural encounter is a history of multiple dimensions, or rather a his-
tory composed of multiple interrelated histories, whether they are social,
political, cultural, religious, linguistic or sartorial. While initially the sar-
torial history might seem to be the most trivial, the fact remains that, in
many ways and to different extents, it reflects all the others. For dress-
ing choices and attitudes to distinct forms of dress have been affected
by—and therefore can be said to bear testimony to—the social, politi-
cal and power synergies that historically have determined the interaction
between Britons and South Asians, either in the Indian subcontinent
or in Britain. As Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote with regard to the sartorial
reality of the Indian subcontinent—and it can certainly be extrapolated
to the South Asian sartorial reality in Britain—‘clothing and adorn-
ment were and continue to be as much an expression of the nature of
things Indian, rerum Indicarum natura as any other human activity,
say, politics, social and economic life, culture as embodied in literature
or art could be’ (2009: ix). Consequently, as Chaudhuri added, ‘an
excursion into the world of clothing’ allows the traveller to see ethnic,
social, political and even economic concerns ‘at work in a specific field of
culture’ (ibid.).

© The Author(s) 2018 1

N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora
Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0_1
2 N. Pereira-Ares

The arrival of the British in seventeenth-century South Asia had a pro-

found impact on the pre-existing sartorial scenario, a scenario which was
already rather complex given the multiple cultures, religions, and there-
fore dressing practices, that coexisted across the Indian subcontinent.
This impact resulted not only in the introduction of European clothes,
but also in a reassignment of the meanings ascribed to long-existing
forms of dress. As Emma Tarlo has demonstrated (1996), in colonial
India, dress, as well as its mystical and spiritual properties and long his-
tory as a marker of social, cultural and religious differences, became a vis-
ible medium through which the British acted out imperial ideology and
through which nationalist leaders later contested it. During the colonial
period, the British enforced certain sartorial codes aimed at regulating
the use of Indian dress. They attempted, for example, to ‘civilise’—obvi-
ously meaning Westernise—the dress of some sections of the Indian
population, at the same time as trying to ‘Orientalise’ the attire of oth-
ers, most notably the army uniform. By ‘Orientalising’ their uniform,
Bernard S. Cohn (1989) points out, the British sought to exploit the
Orientalist stereotype of wildness and ferocity with which Eastern war-
riors had long been associated. Cohn even argues that ‘British rulers in
nineteenth-century India played a major part in making the turban into a
salient feature of Sikh identity’ (ibid.: 304), Sikhs having been the most
numerous group within the East India Company’s army. While other
scholars have situated the origins of the Sikh turban in a pre-colonial
period (Puar 2007), they are congruent in noting that the significance of
the turban as a symbol of Sikh identity was reinforced conspicuously dur-
ing the colonial period, largely as a result of British efforts to police the
dress of the East India Company’s army. Moving on in time, during the
struggle for Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi encouraged Indian
people to cast aside British garments and to don khadi2 (see Chap. 2).
The dressed body became, in this way, a bone of contention in colonial
India, acquiring a set of specific social, political and ideological dimen-
sions that have endured far beyond the colonial period.
In their diasporic journeys to different parts of the globe, South
Asians have taken with them their clothes and a myriad of sartorial mem-
ories from the Indian subcontinent. In their writings, we find nostalgic
memories of the ‘clothes people […] wor[e] on certain days’ (Rushdie
1992: 11) and of ‘women washing clothes, their heads covered by saris’
(Chaudhuri 1994: 89),3 but also bitter memories, memories of ‘the
robes of authority which were colored khaki’ (Markandaya 1973: 138),4
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 3

and memories of the reluctance of the British to adopt Indian-style

clothes—their determination to differentiate themselves from the native
population leading Anglo-Indian women to keep ‘firmly to their corsets
well into the twentieth century, even after they had passed out of fashion
back in Britain’ (Aslam [2004] 2014: 48).5 There are diasporic charac-
ters that also allude to, and even miss, the organic relationship between
body and dress that existed in the Indian subcontinent they left behind.
Because, as Christopher Bayly has demonstrated, in pre-colonial India,
cloth was regarded ‘as a thing that c[ould] transmit spirit and substance’
(1999: 287); and Bernard Cohn has provided evidence of the mysti-
cal properties that dress was assumed to have, considered to be able to
retain the spirit of the wearer (1989). This intimate connection between
body and dress has been captured evocatively by Amit Chaudhuri in his
novel Afternoon Raag (1994). On seeing the way in which the stallhold-
ers of a London market ‘busily touch and test the cloth’, the main char-
acter in Chaudhuri’s novel recalls ‘the stalls of New Market in Calcutta,
where people still speak of cloth in terms of the human body’ (1994: 102;
emphasis added). For the protagonist of Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag,
cloth and clothes are multi-sensory phenomena, able to bring back mul-
tiple memories and feelings from the past. More importantly perhaps,
what these and other quotations show is that the politics and poetics of
dress in colonial India recur and haunt the sartorial present of diasporic
subjects, something that forces this and other studies to establish, almost
unavoidably, a dialectic between past and present, between ‘clothing
matters’ (Tarlo 1996) in India and dressing concerns in Britain.
If the British arrival in South Asia modified the repertoire of dress-
ing practices in the region, the South Asian presence in Britain has
also altered the clothing map of the country, leading to what could be
understood as a sartorial ‘colonization in reverse’.6 Of course, speaking
of a reverse sartorial colonisation only makes sense from a metaphorical
point of view. Because in Britain the use of South Asian dress has often
been questioned by the alleged colonised and the structures of power
and hegemony are not on the side of the supposed coloniser. As in the
Indian subcontinent, in Britain the sartorial relations between Britons
and South Asians have also evolved depending on the social, cultural,
political and ideological forces at work, forces that more often than not
have come from the white majority. Thus, whereas the ‘exotic’ apparel
of early-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Asian travellers in Britain
fascinated the white British population, the saris, turbans and veils worn
4 N. Pereira-Ares

by later generations of South Asians in post-war Britain aroused feelings

of suspicion among the white majority, often being perceived as visible
signs of the ‘threat’ that the new waves of immigrants were allegedly pos-
ing to the national myth of a homogeneous British culture (Cohn 1989).
The vicissitudes of history repeated, albeit in a reworked fashion, these
fluctuations in sartorial attitudes during the last decades of the twentieth
century and the early years of the twenty-first. While Eastern dress was
fetishised by the hippie counterculture in the 1960s and became fashion-
able commodities in the 1990s, since the events of 11 September 2001
in New York, South Asian clothes—and more particularly (South Asian)
Muslim clothes—have provoked feelings of mistrust among those who
see their wearers as suspicious-looking, threatening strangers (Ameli and
Merali 2006; Tarlo 2010). For many South Asians living in present-day
Britain, negotiating the question of what to wear transcends the cultural–
religious sphere, and the process of choosing a particular style often
underscores aesthetic, as well as significant identitary, political and/or
ideological messages. This is even more so in an age when, as Paul Gilroy
has argued, identity and ethnicity are often expressed through ‘the con-
tentious cultural terms of life-style and consumer performance’ (2002:
xiv).
The foregoing lines have sketched a brief, and therefore highly reduc-
tionist, sartorial biography of the encounter between Britons and South
Asians, a biography that has prioritised some sartorial dilemmas over
others. All these caveats notwithstanding, and at the risk of gross sim-
plification, it serves to illustrate the crucial role that the dressed body
has always played in the interaction between Britons and South Asians,
either as an element that has cast individuals into the categories of
‘superior’/‘inferior’, ‘outsider’/‘insider’, or as a palimpsest on which
different discourses have been written over the course of history. South
Asian dress has indeed been (re-)written not simply in colonial India, but
also in Britain, and not just by its ‘original’ wearers, but also by others
in paradoxical and often self-serving ways. It is a central contention of
this study that if dress has played such a crucial role in the interaction
between Britons and South Asians, those texts portraying this cultural
encounter are likely to pay attention to dress in a way other literary texts
do not, above all, if we take into account that many of them have a doc-
umentary or even autobiographical character. This hypothesis can already
find validation in the earliest samples of South Asian writing from and
about Britain, texts that map the presence of the colonial subject ‘at the
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 5

heart of the empire’ (Burton 1998). By this, I am referring to the various

travelogues, diaries, memories and even fiction written by a number of
Asian travellers and authors who spent time in Britain in the eighteenth,
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians such as Antoinette
Burton (1998) and Rozina Visram (2002) have already drawn attention
to the plethora of sartorial comments surfacing in these early accounts,
and my subsequent analysis thereof is indeed indebted to the work of
these two authors. Deploying a culturally- and sociologically-based liter-
ary approach, the remainder of this chapter is devoted to further explor-
ing the sartorial problematisations these early writers mapped out in their
texts, focusing in the main on a series of travelogues produced in the
Victorian period. As we shall see, in their accounts, these travel writers
recorded the scrutiny to which their seemingly ‘exotic’ dressed bodies
were subjected in Britain, as well as the sartorial strategies they adopted
to negotiate identity in the metropolis. Yet, in their writings, they also
returned the gaze to the coloniser, rendering British sartorial mores from
the perspective of the ‘Other’ and thus offering a defamiliarised and
defamiliarising portrayal of Britain.

* * *

The phenomenon of the South Asian diaspora in Britain, as well as the

literary tradition with which it is associated, is generally assumed to have
begun around the mid-twentieth century, when a large number of South
Asian immigrants arrived in Britain, encouraged by the great demand
for a workforce to reconstruct the country in the wake of the Second
World War. Nevertheless, as I have previously stressed, the presence of
South Asians in Britain is by no means just a twentieth-century occur-
rence. Nor are literary representations by South Asian writers in Britain
to be circumscribed to this period. Recent studies have demonstrated
that Asians were present in Britain almost at the same time as the British
set foot on the Indian subcontinent. As evidence of this, in her valu-
able study Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History, Rozina Visram quotes
a church record testifying to the public baptism of an Indian youth in
1616 (2002: 1), only sixteen years after the issuing of the charter which
granted the East India Company the exclusive right to trade in the East;
and in Staying Power, Peter Fryer provides copious data demonstrating
that ‘Asians were among the black pageant performers in seventeenth-
century London; that Asians were among the black servants […] in the
6 N. Pereira-Ares

eighteenth century; [and] that Indian seamen, known as Lascars, were

among London’s black poor in the 1780s’ (2010: 262). Whereas in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most South Asians were brought
to Britain by Indian-returned nabobs, or recruited to supply the needs of
the labour market, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a
number of South Asian travellers, businessmen, political activists and per-
sonalities, teachers and students visited and/or settled in Britain of their
own free will. These first sojourners or residents can be considered part
of an early wave of what was to become the great South Asian diaspora in
the post-war period. Indeed, Visram claims that the post-war mass migra-
tion of South Asians into Britain cannot be fully understood without refer-
ence to the long history of South Asian settlement in the country (2002);
Antoinette Burton speaks of the pre-twentieth-century South Asian pres-
ence in Britain as ‘a particular kind of diasporic corridor between South
Asia and the […] metropole’ (1998: 32); and Humayun Ansari consid-
ers that the first decades of the twentieth century ‘formed the immediate
background to arrivals on a much larger scale after the Second World War’
(2009: 40). While the extent to which the pre-twentieth-century South
Asian presence in Britain can be linked to the phenomenon of post-war
mass migration is debatable, most studies agree that, by the late nine-
teenth century, there was a noticeable South Asian community in Britain.
The Victorian period witnessed an upsurge in the number of per-
manent or transient South Asian settlers, some of whom, coming from
educated elites, left for posterity travel accounts of an invaluable inter-
est, though these have frequently been overlooked.7 The most well-
known are probably S. D. Mahomet’s The Travels of Dean Mahomet
(1794)—though not written in the Victorian era—T. N. Mukharji’s
A Visit to Europe (1889) and B. M. Malabari’s The Indian Eye on
English Life (1893). The list is none the less much longer, includ-
ing, among others, Ardaseer Cursetjee’s Diary of an Overland Journey
from Bombay to England (1840), Jehangeer Nowrojee’s and Hirjeebhoy
Merwanjee’s Journal of a Residence of Two Years and a Half in Great
Britain (1841), Laila Baijnath’s England and India (1893), Fath Nawaz
Jang’s An Indian Passage to Europe (1888), Jhinda Ram’s My Trip
to Europe (1893), T. B. Pandian’s England to an Indian Eye (1897),
G. Parameswaran Pillai’s London and Paris through Indian Spectacles
(1897), as well as the work of female writers such as, for example,
Cornelia Sorabji’s writings or Sunity Devee’s The Autobiography of an
Indian Princess (1921).8 Apart from Devee’s work, which is referred to
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 7

explicitly as an autobiography, the aforementioned accounts follow the

form and conventions of travelogues, though the boundary between
travel writing and autobiography is extremely porous in some of the
narratives (Chambers 2015). In them, the writers examine eighteenth-,
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain through Asian lenses—
as certain illuminating titles already anticipate, simultaneously com-
paring and contrasting Britain and the Indian subcontinent. As most
authors acknowledged in one way or another, by visiting Britain, they
sought ‘to see the broad principles […] wherein the Indian races differ
from the English, to see how afar we can meet on a common ground,
to study minutely the institutions and customs of England, and to form
some opinion as to the class of people that we get to rule us’ (Jang 2006:
3). Of course, these writers came from different cultural, religious and
socio-economic backgrounds and, consequently, banding them together
obscures such differences. Notwithstanding, their common project of
revising, revisiting and rewriting Britain through ‘brown eyes’ (Mohanti
1985) explains the existence of shared concerns in their production,
which gives the following analysis a certain raison d’être.
The sight of ‘the chalky cliffs of Dover’ (Baijnath 1893: 21) called
the attention of many of the abovementioned writers as they approached
Britain on steamboats whose names the authors frequently record. The
‘enigma of arrival’ (Naipaul 1987) soon gives way to vivid descriptions of
the main tourist sites in Britain, all of them motifs that would later reap-
pear in much early post-war migrant fiction. In a quasi-ethnographic man-
ner, the authors then go on to register British cultural, social and sartorial
mores, politics, institutions, education, religion and the arts. Almost invar-
iably, most of the travelogues examined record the writers’ amazement
at the hectic life of London—‘Activity, thy name is London!’ says Pillai
(1897: 2); the presence of women in the streets, ‘rush[ing] in and out’
(Malabari 1893: 32); ‘the brilliance of the electric light’ at night (Pandian
1897: 21); the multiplicity of means of transport in Britain; the great
offer of entertainment in the main British cities; the power of the press,
which, as a visionary Malabari described it, was to be ‘the greatest power
of our time […] greater than church, greater than state’ (1893: 171);
the widespread use of advertisements, the true ‘royal road to wealth’ in
Britain (Baijnath 1893: 31); as well as the affable character of the Britons,
especially of those returned Anglo-Indians whose character seemed to
have changed ‘after the official garb was laid aside’ (Baijnath 1893: 39).
Likewise, these accounts also diarise the writers’ encounter with European
8 N. Pereira-Ares

clothes in Britain: women in crinolines and men in ‘top hat[s]’ (Pillai

1897: 56); Oxonian students in the ‘best of […] uniforms, boating cos-
tumes, spring fashions of every hue and tint’ (Baijnath 1893: 143); and,
in stark contrast, East-Enders wearing the rags of poverty—‘bonnetless’
women ‘with dishevelled hair’, and ‘extremely dirty and shoeless’ children
(Pillai 1897: 33). For these travel writers, European clothes were not a
novel thing. Yet, in Britain, they saw them at play in a context other than
the colonial, a context where dress made visible a spectrum of socio-eco-
nomic divides that did not exist among those Britons in colonial India.
In her recent publication, Britain through Muslim Eyes (2015), Claire
Chambers illustrates this point by quoting from Sajjad Zaheer’s A Night
in London, a novel first published in 1938 in Urdu: ‘“In India, the sta-
tus of even the lowliest of the low Englishman is far superior to the most
distinguished Indians […] [H]ere, in England, Englishmen polish our
shoes, and Englishwomen fall in love with us” (11–12)’ (Chambers 2015:
129). In their efforts to map Britain for a potential audience back in the
Indian subcontinent, these travel writers jotted down the slightest sartorial
detail, to such an extent that certain travelogues even chronicle the sarto-
rial vindications that accompanied the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in
turn-of-the-century Britain. Speaking about the ‘Englishwoman’s dress’,
Malabari notes that there was a ‘tendency’ ‘towards freedom’ at the time
(1893: 41); and in London and Paris through Indian Spectacles, Pillai
records having come across women ‘in bloomers’ (1897: 66),9 a sartorial
symbol of female emancipation in fin-de-siècle Britain.
In general, the travelogues analysed offer a positive view of Britain,
yet not an uncritical one. For many of these early travellers also looked
at and recorded ‘the Victorian underworld’ (Chesney 1991), drunken-
ness, prostitution and the exacerbated gap between rich and poor being,
according to them, the main weaknesses affecting and challenging the
supposedly ‘civilised’ world of Victorian Britain. To quote some compel-
ling passages from the texts, Pandian observed that ‘Pandemonium itself
could hardly exhibit worse spectacles than are to be daily seen in many
of the viler types of taverns and public houses in the great Metropolis’
(1897: 92); Ram warned the potential reader of London’s metamor-
phose at night, when ‘[n]umbers of women in flaunting garbs and
painted faces are seen walking up and down in ones and twos and throw-
ing licentious glances at the passers-by’ (1893: 15); and Malabari wrote
that ‘side by side with […] heart-rending scenes of misery, one sees
gorgeously dressed luxury, flaunting it in the streets, dragged along by
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 9

horses, better fed and better looked after than many a family in the same
neighbourhood’ (1893: 81). The differences between the Eastern and
Western side of London also caught the attention of many writers. A sar-
torially observant Pillai detected that the ‘East-Ender c[ould not] strut in
the spotless garb of a West-End worthy’ (1897: 17); and in England and
India Baijnath noted that the appearance of the East End of London was
‘greatly inferior to that of its West End portion […] its insalubrity and
drunkenness are not seen even in the smallest town in India’ (1893: 30).
The East End thus emerges as a recurrent topos in these early narratives,
the tangible location that later post-war fiction would turn into a sym-
bolic venue of the postcolonial diaspora(s) (Procter 2003).
Similarly, while the majority of writers are in agreement on the hos-
pitality with which they were treated in Britain—Ram waxed lyrical on
being ‘received in England on equal footing and with brotherly feel-
ing’ (1893: 80); and Jang ‘felt glad that England did not give me a cold
reception’ (2006: 51)—some of them recorded certain incidents that
are suggestive of what critics have referred to as the fear of having the
empire within—a fear metaphorically articulated in many fin-de-siècle
English novels.10 For, as Burton has pointed out, ‘“the colonial encoun-
ter”—like the empire itself’ was sanctioned when seen ‘out of sight,
off-center, definitively “over there”’ (1998: 28). In A Visit to Europe,
for example, T. N. Mukharji remembers being addressed as a ‘for-
eigner’ in rather negative terms. The writer soft-pedals the incident by
claiming that this exclusionist remark was quickly countered by a group
of voices—‘“He is no foreigner […] He is a British subject as you and
I”’ (1889: 29). Yet, its mere existence reveals an insidious contraposi-
tion between ownness and foreignness that, while conveniently avoided
in colonial India, certain Britons were ready to invoke on seeing the
colonial within the metropolis. Additionally, the incident narrated by
Mukharji points at how problematic the question of British citizenship
has always been for those who once belonged to the British empire, and
later on for their descendants. Different passages from this and other
travelogues also reveal how colonial discourse and imperial ideology had
already been transposed to, and were being re-enacted in, the metropo-
lis. Mukharji recalls having been addressed as a ‘slave’ (1889: 29), which
reflects the reproduction of the ‘master–slave binary dialect’ of imperial-
ism (Said 2003: 353); and Mirza Itesa Modeen recounts how, on see-
ing him dressed in his jamah11 and turban, ‘[m]any [white Britons] […]
were […] pleased […] [but] a few thought it was the dress of the Harem
10 N. Pereira-Ares

and of delicate females. After two or three months had passed in this way
every one entered in friendship with me, and the fear which the com-
mon people had of me all vanished’ (1927: 8; emphasis added).12 Even
though Modeen tries to play this incident down, the passage can be said
to evince the reproduction of the ‘fetish/phobia’ ambivalence that Homi
Bhabha diagnoses as being characteristic of colonial discourse (Bhabha
2004: 104). What is more, the quotation illustrates how the effeminisa-
tion of the colonial male subject was already ingrained within a British
collective imaginary, this effeminisation being the result of Orientalist
discourses put at the service of Western (imperial) interests, as Said has
convincingly demonstrated in Orientalism.13
Like Modeen, most travel writers record being ‘Otherised’ as curiosi-
ties or oddities, either because of their skin colour—‘I have been pointed
at as a man, by fond mothers to their little children’ (Pillai 1897: 100)—
or more often because of their clothes. With irony, Modeen comments
that, when attending a theatre performance in London, he ‘who went to
see a spectacle, became [him]self a sight to others’ (1927: 8). Baijnath
speaks of the multiplicity of stares he received because of his ‘Indian dress’
(1893: 39), and Ram tells us that ‘everybody’s eye was turned on me, as
I looked a stranger, being dressed in my big turban […] and enveloped in
my big Multan overcoat’ (1893: 10). Similarly, Nowrojee and Merwanjee
note that their ‘Eastern costume created quite a sensation’ and they were
repeatedly ‘looked upon quite as curiosities’ (1841: 91). In the eyes of
a white British population that wore different clothes, the dress of these
early visitors turned them into objects of curiosity. This objectification is
clearly described by Nowrojee and Merwanjee when they recount their
visit to the Zoological Gardens, in Regent’s Park, London: ‘we attracted a
very great number around us for the peculiarity of our dress, and we were
objects of very great curiosity to the visitors—as much so perhaps as the
winged and four footed animals of the place’ (1841: 34). Both of them
became, in a serendipitous way, the objects of public attention and sarto-
rial scrutiny. Their distinctive garments were seen as being highly ‘exotic’,
which eventually turned the wearers into a source of amazement for those
gathered at the zoo. As Burton points out, ‘[t]he two men did not record
an explicit objection to this, but they understood that they were being
scrutinized and exoticized’ (1998: 43). The reaction of these early writ-
ers towards such an intrusive scrutiny, objectification and exoticisation
of their dressed bodies varies considerably. For Bhagavat Sinh Jee, ‘it was
pleasing to be told that the peculiarity of my dress made me for a time the
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 11

cynosure of all eyes’, even if he was not able to discern if those eyes trans-
mitted ‘approval or disapproval’ (1886: 29); and for Baijnath, his Indian
costume, ‘instead of being a source of disadvantage or discomfort, was
quite the reverse’ (1893: 164). Contrarily, other visitors such as Cursetjee
declared that at times they felt ‘vexed’ by people crowding around them,
attracted as they were by the ‘novelty’ of their ‘dress’ (1840: 93). In line
with this, Indian writer and political activist G. P. Pillai went so far as to
suggest that in nineteenth-century Britain the wearing of Asian clothes,
and in particular the male turban, became unbearable. He noted that, as
a result of ignorance, some mistook the turban for a hat—which brings
to mind the post-9/11 slogan ‘the turban is not a hat’ (quoted in Puar
2007). But, there were others that muttered more intransigent messages:
‘“Can’t you wear something more respectable?”’ (1897: 10). Anticipating
the futility dramatised in such post-war novels as Kamala Markandaya’s
The Nowhere Man (see Chap. 2), Pillai concluded that, in his view, South
Asians living in nineteenth-century Britain only had two choices, namely
undergoing a process of sartorial assimilation or suffering from sartorial
exclusion: ‘if you don’t walk home directly and say farewell, a long fare-
well to your bright little, nice little turban, you deserve to be congratu-
lated on your pluck’ (1897: 10).
These travel writers witnessed how their dress became ‘estranged in
London’ (Pillai 1897: 10), turned into an object of well-aimed curios-
ity on most occasions, but of certain derision on others. In his account,
Pillai claims that most people in Britain saw his turban as a ‘funny
thing’ (1897: 10), as much strange as laughable—which sets the tone
for the way in which South Asian clothes later came to be seen in post-
war Britain. Likewise, Indian writer Baijnath asserts that, at Oxford
University, his dress elicited ‘more than one cheer but also the remark:
“Why don’t you take off your hat, sir”’ (1893: 143). Paralleling the
incident experienced by Baijnath, in An Autobiography (1927–1929)
Mahatma Gandhi also records having been berated for refusing to take
off his turban in colonial South Africa, and throughout the text he dwells
extensively on his voluntary and enforced negotiations over this piece of
clothing either in India, South Africa or Britain. In line with this, At the
Heart of the Empire, Burton explains how in the late nineteenth century
Dadhabai Naoroji, an Indian who canvassed for a parliamentary seat at
Holborn, was advised to substitute ‘his Parsi headdress for an English
hat, as it was “better to appear altogether like an Englishman”’ (1998:
68). These early confrontations involving the headgear of these early
12 N. Pereira-Ares

travellers, writers and settlers would have sounded familiar to Gyani

Sundar Singh Sagar, a Sikh man who in 1950s Britain began a legal strug-
gle to vindicate the right of Sikh drivers to wear the turban in the work-
place.14 Of course, here I am linking various types of headgear, diverse
ethnic–religious communities and situations that have taken place in dif-
ferent periods, but establishing these connections serves to exemplify the
Western obsession with the headgear of the ‘Other’—an obsession that
can be traced back to colonial India (Cohn 1989) and is currently being
re-enacted through multiple hijab-centred debates (see Chap. 5). Linking
the colonial and the postcolonial scenarios also allows us to perceive how
protean, and even self-serving, attitudes towards dress might be. As noted
at the beginning of this chapter, in colonial India, the British encour-
aged the use of the turban amongst the Sikh contingent of the East
India Company’s army (Cohn 1989). Yet, when this and other pieces of
headgear began to appear in Britain on migrant bodies, they were soon
subjected to another process of ‘foreign’ rewriting, being endowed with
connotations that reproduced colonial attitudes in some cases and new
stigmas in others. In Britain, the male turban, like the Muslim veil, has
frequently been a bone of contention, viewed as a sign of ‘Otherness’
and, in a contemporary post-9/11 context, even as a marker of ‘suspi-
cion’ (Allen 2010)—see also Chap. 5. These pernicious associations do
not surface in the travelogues surveyed here. Yet the turban-related inci-
dents narrated by the above-mentioned authors can be said to prefigure
some of the debates and prejudices that were to surround much South
Asian headgear in Britain during the following centuries.
It is rather surprising and simultaneously telling that the headgear
worn by these early visitors and settlers was the reason for the few inci-
dents of direct, dress-related abuse they record in their narratives. For,
in the Britain they were visiting or settling in at that time, the wearing
of hats, bonnets and other forms of headdress was a common practice
among both men and women, even if ruled by distinct sartorial conven-
tions and demeanours. What seems to be at stake here is a question of
‘difference’—the headgear worn by these early travel writers was sim-
ply different—and ‘difference’ has often proved itself to be capable of
arousing conflicting passions. It can awaken fascination, desire and curi-
osity, but it can also engender mockery, suspicion, repulsion and a primi-
tive fear of the unknown. Difference might also be behind the current
fixation with the wearing of hijab15 in many Western societies, societies
where none the less the practice of veiling is not circumscribed to the
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 13

bodies of ethnic minorities. In her second novel, Alentejo Blue (2006),

set in Southern Portugal, Monica Ali describes an ‘old [local] woman
adjust[ing] her headscarf’ (2007: 137) and, in fact, in certain Catholic
and Orthodox countries in Europe we can still see old women with
their heads covered. To this we should add the habits worn by Christian
nuns, or the bridal veil, all of them sartorial elements with which most
Westerners can clearly identify, which they have lived with, and through
which Western societies relive the phenomenon of the veil transmitted
through the Judeo-Christian tradition in which they are enmeshed.16
None of these practices seems, however, to ignite the number of debates
and insidious comments that the hijab does in Western societies. They
are often taken for granted, viewed in a decontextualised way, their ori-
gins and the original discourses behind them having been consigned to
oblivion. Connecting past and present, we might then wonder whether
it is the headgear in itself or the ‘Otherness’ of the headgear that has
turned the turban and the hijab into such objects of the Western gaze.
Aware of the potential of the dressed body to act as an ‘arbitrat[or] in
the assignment of cultures and nationalities to peoples’ (Gilroy 2000: 24),
the aforementioned travellers began a series of sartorial negotiations in the
heart of the metropolis, negotiations that underlie processes of ‘strategic
exoticism’ (Huggan 2001: 32), assimilation, transculturalism or resistance
to the adoption of European clothes. In the engravings that accompany
The Travels, we can detect how Dean Mahomet, who is often consid-
ered the first Indian author writing in English (Fisher 1996), used dress
to inhabit different identity positions in Britain. As Michael Fisher notes,
each of the engravings ‘represent[s] an aspect of his identity: a European-
dressed Indian Gentleman, an Indian army officer, and an Indian courtier
in an Indian rule’s procession’ (1996: xx). In Britain, these different iden-
tity projections proved advantageous to Mahomet at different points. The
aura of ‘Indianness’ that surrounds the third engraving—with Mahomet
wearing Indian court robes—was actually and productively exploited by
Mahomet himself in the metropolis. The owner of shampooing houses,
where he claimed to offer Indian therapies,17 Mahomet became a success-
ful entrepreneur in Britain by selling ‘Indianness’—which has led certain
critics (Chambers 2015; Nasta 2002) to compare Mahomet to the char-
acter of Haroon Amir in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (see
Chap. 3). Similarly, in My Trip to Europe, Ram is revealed to have made
a rather fluid use of Eastern and Western dress in Britain, and at a given
point he describes his concessions to ‘European costume’ (1893: 86).
14 N. Pereira-Ares

With enthusiasm, Ram details his metamorphosis from ‘the bearded

Jhinda Ram’ into ‘the beardless Mr Raim (I was called so there)’ (1893:
86). Yet, for other South Asian visitors, students and settlers, adopt-
ing European clothing was a less playful enterprise. Instead, it was a
means of passing unnoticed or gaining the respect that European gar-
ments allegedly afforded. In his autobiography, Gandhi himself narrates
how, while a student in late-nineteenth-century London, he adopted the
‘tinsel[s] of “civilization”’ (2001: 177). Latent behind this is the idea that
South Asian clothes were coded as the trappings of the ‘inferior’, colo-
nial ‘Other’; clothes that aroused the curiosity and fascination of British
onlookers, but were garments to be eschewed if the wearer sought to
have any influence in Britain. Indeed, as Antoinette Burton has pointed
out (1998), the National Indian Association advised Indian students to
adopt Western clothes in Britain. Ironically, however, high-ranking South
Asian personalities were asked to appear in their ‘native’ clothes when
attending certain public and royal events. In effect, in The Autobiography
of an Indian Princess, Devee narrates how Queen Victoria herself insisted
on her appearing ‘at Court in my national dress’ (1921: 43).
But not all these early travellers and students were willing to ‘go
native’ or to succumb to the external monitoring of their dressed bod-
ies in Britain. Thus visitors such as Baijnath declared his preference for
‘a thousand starings than a change of one’s national habits’ (1893: 21).
Reformer and India’s first female lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji, went a step
further, as she detailed in her letters (2011). Having worn European
clothes in India as a result of her Christian upbringing, she took to
Indian garments while studying in nineteenth-century England, and
this sartorial change has been read as Sorabji’s visible vindication of her
Indian identity in Britain (Burton 1998). Discussing Sorabji’s adoption
of Indian clothes in Britain, Shompa Lahiri (2013) claims that Sorabji’s
decision might have been influenced by the fact that South Asian
clothes—and, in particular, the sari—afforded her freedom from the
constraining corset that ruled British female fashion at the time. If we
endorse Lahiri’s argument, then Sorabji’s sartorial manoeuvre in Britain
emerges, in retrospect, as a counter-discourse on current Western envi-
sions of South Asian female clothing as being oppressive. More clearly,
perhaps, it reminds contemporary readers that Western female fash-
ion has traditionally been highly oppressive and constraining, the corset
being emblematic in this respect. Cornelia Sorabji’s adoption of Indian
clothes in Britain was, none the less, a decision she made in consultation
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 15

with her family. In one of her letters she explicitly asked her relatives for
permission to keep her Indian clothes when returning home: ‘the more I
think of getting back to English garments, the more I dislike the idea—
so if no one at home objects, may I keep this attire please?’ (2011: 211).
This suggests that these early visitors and settlers had to negotiate their
dressing practices both vis-à-vis the British society they came to inhabit
and their own South Asian community. In fact, in many accounts, the
writers’ concern with retaining South Asian sartorial mores is linked
to anxieties over the extent to which their stay in Britain might affect
their position when back in the Indian subcontinent. As a case in point,
in his travelogue, Laila Baijnath encourages other visitors to maintain
their dressing habits in Britain, adding that, in doing so, their ‘caste will
meet [the]m more than half way; very probably it will not even think of
excommunicating [the]m at all’ after returning from Britain (1893: 164).
Set beside the different and variegated sartorial strategies of self-pres-
entation adopted by these travel writers in Britain are their conspicu-
ous attempts at resisting objectification by returning the gaze to white
Britons. Sartorially speaking, this process of ‘return[ing] the metropolitan
gaze’ (Burton 1998: 142) is rendered visible in multiple passages where
the writers describe and very often ridicule British fashions. Malabari
makes fun of British braces, braces that, according to him, are liable to
make a person ‘shorter by at least half an inch’ (1893: 43); and Pillai
shows how ridiculous and even risible British women’s hats might appear
when seen from a different perspective: ‘The lady’s hat is indeed a curios-
ity. It is monstrous to see how plants and shrubs of all kinds and colours
are made to appear to grow on a fair lady’s head in London’ (1897: 65).
Similarly, Pillai’s explanation of the widespread use of the male top hat in
nineteenth-century Britain is touched with sarcasm: ‘It would look as if
the basis of the British Empire rests on the top-hat. No man is a gentle-
man who cannot display a top-hat on his head’ (1897: 56). From the
perspective of these authors, British sartorial mores become subversively
defamiliarised and ‘Otherised’, and in this way the travelogues parallel
and simultaneously reverse the defamiliarisation and ‘Otherisation’ of the
Indian subcontinent that we find in much missionary and colonial writ-
ing. As Visram puts it, ‘in their accounts, with good humour, the mirror
was turned to reflect the English at home, in a manner somewhat remi-
niscent of European accounts of the unsophisticated “native”’ (2002:
110). Indeed, the writers’ deployment of words such as ‘atrocious’,
‘monstrous’ (Pillai 1897: 64–65) or ‘abominable’ (Malabari 1893: 43)
16 N. Pereira-Ares

when describing British clothing resembles the vocabulary employed by

Europeans to picture colonial territories and the customs of their inhabit-
ants. All this suggests that, while being turned into the object of many
gazes in Britain, these South Asian writers also became the subjects of
the gaze, scrutinising Britain in the same way as Britain was scrutinising
them; and while experiencing and testing the re-enactment of imperial
ideology and colonial discourse in the metropolis, they also found strate-
gies to contest these ideologies and discourses from within.
On closer inspection, the work of these travel writers therefore offers
much more than mere descriptions of Victorian Britain. From a histori-
cal, postcolonial perspective, their work gives tangible evidence of the
pre-twentieth-century South Asian presence in Britain, showing that the
diasporic movements triggered by colonialism were not unidirectional—
from the metropolis to the colonies—but rather bi- or multi-directional,
as Stuart Hall reminds us (1996a). In doing so, these early accounts
challenge one of many existing ‘white mythologies’ (Young 1992). They
undermine those foundational myths that portray Victorian Britain as
‘either purely white or unproblematically English’, calling into ques-
tion ‘a national history that views the non-white populations of the late
twentieth century as fallout from the disintegration of empire rather than
as the predictable outcome of centuries of imperial power and engage-
ment’ (Burton 1998: 9). These texts, and the reality behind them, dem-
onstrate the pertinence of the 1960s slogan ‘We are here because you
were there’ (quoted in Chambers 2015: 23), and the authors themselves
were ready to highlight this historical nexus by recurrently putting India
and Britain in dialogue with one another. What is more, through their
dual perspective as connoisseurs of Eastern and Western realities, these
writers were able to reflect on both Eastern and Western societies in an
edifying way. Thus, while praising many aspects of Victorian Britain, a
number of authors made direct or oblique critiques of British imperial-
ism. Mukharji (1889), Ram (1893), Baijnath (1893) and Nowrojee and
Merwanjee (1841), for example, explicitly denounced the devastating
impact of colonial policies on the Indian textile industry, an issue also
evoked in later fiction (see Chap. 2). At the same time, these writers were
also keen to expose what, in their view, were the most negative aspects of
their respective societies or communities back home. Malabari, a cham-
pion of women’s rights in India, denounced the invisibility of women
in Asia, where, according to him, the ‘woman is a vague entity, a nebu-
lous birth absorbed in the shadow of artificial sexuality’ (1893: 22)18;
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 17

and Mukharji was critical of the ‘intense religiousness’ practised in cer-

tain parts of India (1889: 12). In a post-9/11 context, where positions
have become increasingly polarised and tense, these early writings stand
out for the writers’ ability to denounce and criticise aspects of the self
and the other, but also for their attempts to forge a mutual understand-
ing whereby each of the parts involved in the colonial encounter could
be ‘treated exactly as equals’ (Malabari 1893: 61). As Nowrojee and
Merwanjee put it, in a sentence that could well be read as a transcultural
statement, ‘by the frequent interchange of ideas and feelings much ben-
efit would result to both’ (1841: 1).
From a literary perspective, these narratives can be considered the first
manifestations of a tradition of South Asian diaspora writing in Britain.
Of course, there are considerable differences between these early trav-
elogues and the narratives that are to be examined in subsequent chap-
ters. These texts are travelling accounts, not works of fiction; they are
mainly addressed to a South Asian audience back in the Indian sub-
continent, and not so much to those already inhabiting the metropolis
(Burton 1998); and the homogeneity they show in terms of form and
content varies from the strikingly different agendas pursued by writers
in later diasporic fiction. Yet, as Susheila Nasta has rightfully pointed
out, ‘these early representations clearly predicted trends that have now
become identifiable as the basis for some of the fashionable orthodoxies
normally attributed to the radical insights of contemporary postcolonial
theory’ (2002: 22) and, I would certainly add, of post-war diaspora fic-
tion. The ‘writing-back’ paradigm proposed in The Empire Writes Back
is often exemplified, and was used as such by Ashcroft et al. (1989),
through the analysis of post-war migrant narratives, and yet the travel-
ling accounts analysed here can be said to represent early acts of writing
back to the metropolis. In addition, not only did most of the aforemen-
tioned authors write their accounts in English—something that has often
been interpreted as a subversive act of appropriating the language of the
coloniser—but writers such as Malabari also reflected on the relationship
between language and imperialism, claiming that ‘[i]n no other respect,
perhaps, does the imperial instinct of the Anglo-Saxon seem to be more
imperiously asserted’ (1893: 13). In a similar vein, post-war fiction
has often been credited with offering pioneering portrayals of Britain
through Asian lenses, and yet the travelogues examined in this chap-
ter did so much earlier. These travelling accounts do not simply render
Britain through Asian eyes, making the ‘European’ see ‘himself as others
18 N. Pereira-Ares

see him’ (Mukharji 1889: 2). They also destabilise what Anne Kaplan
has called the ‘imperial gaze’ (1997) or what M. L. Pratt has referred
to as the figure of the white Western ‘seeing-man’, ‘whose imperial eyes
[…] look[ed] and possess[ed]” the newly annexed territories’ (1992:
7). In them, we find South Asian ‘seeing-men and women’ whose eyes
progressively unveil, possess and defamiliarise Britain. Through these
narratives, Western readers come to experience how alien, and even ris-
ible, their own culture might appear when rendered from a different
perspective, just as Eastern readers might have felt detached from the
reality portrayed in reports on the colonies. It might not be a coinci-
dence that these early sojourners opted for writing their experiences in
the form of travelogues, memoirs and diaries, the literary genres that had
most often been employed by European travellers describing the Indian
subcontinent and other colonial territories (Innes 2008). These authors
defamiliarised the aforementioned genres in the eyes of Western readers.
They appropriated ‘the forms, styles, and symbols—in short, the cultural
vocabulary—of the dominant texts and myths of colonial Europe’, and
‘[b]y subversively adapting, refracting, and manipulating these […] they
ridicule[d] and refute[d] how they themselves ha[d] been represented’
(Boehmer 2006: 352).
As I have signposted throughout this chapter, these narratives also
adumbrate some of the motifs and themes that were to recur in many
post-war diaspora narratives, and they also focus on the dressed body.
In them, however, dress is not plotted with the literariness and sym-
bolism we can find in later fictions. Dress allusions in these travelogues
describe sartorial ‘truths’ that are, none the less, subjected to the laws
of representation, their verisimilitude or playful distortion of reality.
Implicit in some texts and explicit in others is the presumption that dress
might draw attention to, or deflect attention from, the body; that dress
marks the body sometimes more prominently than any other physiog-
nomic feature; that dress might guide pronouncements of inclusion and
exclusion; that dress is intimately connected to notions of cultural and
national identity; and that dress acts as a mechanism through which iden-
tity is performatively staged and negotiated. In the main, the relevance
conferred on the dressed body in these accounts is triggered by the
writers’ bona fide attempts at recording the attention that their clothes
and headgear received in Britain. Their bodies, dressed in non-West-
ern garments, aroused the curiosity of many Britons at the time, who
found the writers’ dress a source of amazement on many occasions. As
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 19

we have seen, their reactions towards such objectification were diverse,

but in general they interpreted it as being the product of unfamiliarity
and opted for ‘striking back’ by submitting British sartorial mores to the
same objectification and scrutiny in their texts. Despite existing, exam-
ples of dress-related abuse are scarce in these accounts. In the main,
their ‘differently’ dressed bodies were met with curiosity, many British
onlookers projecting an Orientalist gaze upon their bodies and dress.
While certain parallelisms can be drawn, and have been drawn through-
out this chapter, the sartorial realities described by these travel writers
contrast with the sartorial stigmatisation and racism faced by the charac-
ters in later post-war as well as post-9/11 fiction. Of course, the extent
to which these travel writers might have refrained from recording certain
issues is debatable, and the genre of their writings does not always afford
the liberties that fiction does. But it is also true that the Britain they trav-
elled to was not the country of the 1960s and 1970s, riven by cultural
and sartorial racism. Nor was it plagued by the generalised suspicion
ushered in by 9/11. Additionally, we should also bear in mind that the
impact of these early visitors on the sartorial map of Britain was minimal,
or at least incomparable to the visibility acquired by South Asian clothes
when large numbers of South Asian migrants began to arrive in the post-
war period. In the years that separate these early travelogues from the
body of post-war fiction analysed in the following chapters, British atti-
tudes towards South Asian dress changed dramatically. To be more pre-
cise, the change affected not so much the perception of Asian clothes per
se, but rather the perception of those clothes when worn on the bodies
of post-war migrants (Tarlo 2013). As Emma Tarlo has explained, when
studying the history of South Asian clothes in Britain, it is important to
draw a distinction ‘between the migration experiences of South Asian
textiles and those of South Asian peoples’ (2013: 76–77). For whereas
Asian textiles and designs have been ‘welcomed’ in Britain since the six-
teenth century, once they began to arrive on the bodies of large num-
bers of South Asian migrants, they acquired ‘very different associations’,
being ‘read as permanent frames which fixed and defined the identity of
their wearers as different, foreign, ill adapted to the British environment,
“out of place”’ (Tarlo 2013: 77). This double bind is exposed in many
of the texts analysed in this book and, as we shall see in the next chapter,
Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man perfectly dramatises the gradual
construction of the South Asian migrant as an ‘undesirable “Other”’ in
the post-war period.
20 N. Pereira-Ares

Notes
1. See Roger Ballard (1994), Antoinette Burton (1998), Michael H. Fisher,
Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi (2007), Peter Fryer (1989, 2010),
Susheila Nasta (2013), Ron Ramdin (1999) or Rozina Visram (2002).
2. Khadi, also known as khaddar, refers to hand-spun, hand-woven cloth
made from indigenous Indian yarn. For further information on dress in
colonial and postcolonial South Asia, see Susan S. Bean (1989), Bernard
S. Cohn (1989), Emma Tarlo (1996), Christopher A. Bayly (1999),
Dipesh Chakrabarty (1999), Nira Wickramasinghe (2003) and Nirad C.
Chaudhuri (2009).
3. The term ‘sari’ refers to a garment worn by women in the Indian subcon-
tinent and its diasporas, being particularly widespread in countries such
as India and Bangladesh. It consists of a long, unstitched cloth which can
be wrapped in different styles, the most common one being that in which
the cloth is wrapped around the waist leaving one end draped over the
shoulder (Banerjee and Miller 2008).
4. This is an allusion to the uniform of British soldiers and/or officers. In
1848 Sir Harry Burnett Lumsden introduced khaki as the new colour for
military uniforms (Farwell 1989).
5. Once imperial ideology began to be established in colonial India, the
British enforced rigid codes of dress to differentiate themselves from,
and establish authority over, the native population: ‘They were trying to
escape “imitation”’ (Tarlo 1996: 39).
6. I borrow the phrase ‘colonisation in reverse’ from Louise Bennett’s epon-
ymous poem (2000).
7. In comparison to the amount of criticism devoted to post-war South
Asian diaspora fictions, these early accounts have received less criti-
cal attention. In recent decades, a number of studies have none the less
contributed to redressing this imbalance. See, for example, Antoinette
Burton (1998), Claire Chambers (2015), Michael Fisher (1996),
Catherine Lynette Innes (2008), Amrita Satapathy (2012) and Simonti
Sen (2005).
8. In the introduction to An Indian Passage to Europe: The Travels of Fath
Nawaz Jang (2006), Omar Khalidi quotes a lecture delivered by Michael
Fisher, who acknowledges having found at least twenty travelogues writ-
ten by South Asian travellers to Britain during the pre-twentieth-century
period.
9. The term ‘bloomers’ refers to a type of female baggy trousers, popularised
by the women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer, from whom the garment
takes its name. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early
twentieth century, the bloomers were associated with the liberation of
 1 ‘OUR EASTERN COSTUME CREATED A SENSATION’ … 21

women (Callahan 2010). The so-called bloomers were designed follow-

ing the trousers worn by Asian and Middle Eastern women, and whether
or not a matter of coincidence, in her letters Cornelia Sorabji details
how Lady Hunter asked her for ‘a PUNJAB pair of trousers. Those the
women wear […] she wants it only for the shape of it’ (2011: 84; empha-
sis in the original).
10. Stephen D. Arata (1990) has already called attention to the number of
Late-Victorian British novels featuring the trope of reverse colonisation,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) being a prominent example in Arata’s
discussion.
11. The jamah is a long-sleeved, knee-length coat, usually worn with a sash.
12. Mirza Itesa Modeen’s Shigarf-nama-‘‘I Vilayat was originally written in
Persian ‘some time between 1780 and 1784’ (Chambers 2015: 25). Here
I am using the English translation by James Edward Alexander, first pub-
lished in 1827.
13. In this respect, see Ashis Nandy (1983), Mrinalini Sinha (1995),
Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak (1987), Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta (1995),
Revathi Krishnaswamy (1998), Edward Said (2003) and Frantz Fanon
(2008), among others.
14. In 1959 Gyani Sundar Singh was denied, on the basis of his Sikh turban, a
job as a bus conductor in Manchester.
15. As I shall further clarify in Chap. 5, the term ‘hijab’ originally alludes to
the dress code—either masculine or feminine—ostensibly prescribed by
Islam as part of the principle of modesty. Yet, it is more commonly used
in relation to women’s modest clothing and, in particular, to the practice
of head covering. The term ‘hijab’ has also come to refer to one of the
commonest styles of veil used by Muslim women, a style characterised by
covering the head and leaving the face uncovered.
16. As scholars such as Leila Ahmed (1992), John Esposito (1998) and Fadwa
El Guindi (1999) have amply demonstrated, the origins of veiling can be
traced back to pre-Babylonian times, being subsequently incorporated
into Hellenic, Judaic, Christian and Muslim cultures.
17. He recorded his methods in his work Shampooing or Benefits Resulting
from the Use of the Indian Medicated Bath, first published in 1822.
18. In addition to being a poet, writer and journalist, Malabari was also a
social reformer best known for his campaigns in favour of Indian wom-
en’s rights. Evidence of Malabari’s active role in promoting women’s
rights can be found in Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India
(1887) and An Appeal from the Daughters of India (1890).
Another random document with
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very little more effort than is required to paddle it. The use of the pole
necessitates a standing position, but this is neither risky nor difficult
for any canoeist who understands the knack of balancing a canoe,
and none but an experienced canoeist has any business in swift,
white water. The setting pole is gripped with the left hand near the
top, with the right hand held stationary about 2 ft. lower, and as the
canoe travels past the pole, firmly planted on the river bottom, the
poler leans forward and makes use of his weight and strength to give
a quick push. The pole is again shoved forward as quickly as
possible, that the craft may lose as little headway as possible, and a
new grip secured for the next push. After a little experience with the
pole, the canoeist will find it an easy matter to swing his craft across
the current and avoid rocks and other obstructions as easily as when
paddling. When contemplating a long trip up a stream where the
water is heavy and the current swift, the use of two poles will make
the work easier. Both persons should pole from the same side, the
man in the bow doing the steering while the stern man adds his
straight-ahead push to force the canoe upstream.
 Shifting the Paddle from One Side of the Canoe to The Other

The Track Line

The average wilderness stream of the North has enough “tight”

places which judgment tells the traveler to avoid by making a detour
by land rather than risk a capsize and a possible loss of the outfit. To
“tote” the outfit overland means more or less hard work, and as
every canoeist will avoid portaging if there is a fair chance of getting
the canoe through a bad stretch of water, the tracking line will come
in handy very often. The usual ring in the bow of the canoe is far too
flimsy for hauling the loaded craft, and sufficient length of stout rope
should be carried along to pass through the painter eye, and then
carried aft and half-hitched to the first and second thwarts. One man
can pull the canoe up a swift stream by walking along the bank while
his partner takes up the opposite side and steers the craft away from
rocks by using a stern line. With a heavily loaded canoe in very swift
and shallow water, both men must often wade, and a tump line
rigged up as a breast or shoulder strap will make it easier work for
the man at the bow line.

Paddling a Canoe Single-Handed

The open, or Canadian-model, canoe is, of course, handled more

easily and with better speed with two paddlers but there are
occasions when the canoe is used single-handed. When out for a
few hours’ paddle, the canoeist usually balances the craft by sitting
on the bow seat—or kneels on the bottom with his back against the
bow-seat brace—and using the stern for the bow. This brings the
paddler’s weight nearer the center and keeps the canoe better
balanced than when paddling from the stern with the bow high in the
air. However, when the canoe is loaded, many canoeists stow their
camp duffle forward and paddle from the stern, the weight of the
outfit keeping the craft on an even keel. This answers well enough
for smooth-water going, but when the water is rough, or a stretch of
rapids is run single-handed, the stern position is by no means a good
one since the craft is more difficult to control, and much more
strength is required to drive it forward. The Indian manner of
paddling a canoe alone is the only correct one, for he always sits
amidships—kneeling in the center—and if a load is carried, it is
placed in front and back of him so that the craft is balanced on an
even keel. Consequently the canoe draws less water and can be
paddled faster with the same effort, while the paddler has the craft
under perfect control. But the experienced line paddler does not
kneel in the center, he moves out until his body is close to the
gunwale. This makes the craft heel at a decided angle, it is true, but
this position makes for better speed because it enables the paddle to
be held almost vertical, and the more nearly perpendicular the
paddle is swung the more efficient will be the stroke.
 In using the double blade, the paddler dips first on one side, then
on the other, and to make the blades travel through the air with the
least resistance, it is customary to set them at right angles to each
other. The motion is really a push and pull, the shaft of the paddle
being rotated in the hands so that the blade will enter the water with
the full breadth facing the canoeist. Rubber cups, to catch the drip as
the paddle rises in the air when making the stroke, are sometimes
used by novices, but these are unnecessary if the paddles are set at
right angles, and the paddler will bend his wrist a trifle to throw the
drip ahead and to one side. At the beginning, the novice will very
likely throw a little water in the canoe, but a little practice will soon
master the knack.

Care and Repair of the Canoe

The canvas-covered cedar canoe will stand a vast amount of hard

service, but it should not be dragged over the ground or over the
boarding of the landing float, neither should it be so placed that any
strain will come amidships while the ends are well supported. When
storing for the winter, keep it under cover, resting bottom side down
on a floor, or turn it bottom side up and support it with boxes, or other
standards, at the center as well as at the ends. While unused at the
camp, turn it bottom side up on the bank. Birch bark must be kept
out of the sun, and the paint of canvas-covered canoes will last
longer if kept in the shade. When the paint becomes rough,
sandpaper it down smooth, and give it a couple of coats of canoe
paint. When the paint is worn off and exposes the canvas, give the
bare cloth a couple of coats of shellac before painting.
 Paddling should be Done on the Knees When Traveling Where High Winds
and Seas are Encountered

A repair kit should be taken along on all long trips, consisting of a

small can of white lead, a can of orange shellac, and a sheet of oiled
silk. For small cuts in the canvas, a coat or two of shellac will suffice,
but for bad gashes, cut off the loose threads of canvas and rub on a
little white lead under the raised portion near the hole and on the
surface, cut a patch of the oiled silk to cover it, and paste it in
position. When the lead is dry, give it a couple of coats of shellac.
For making quick repairs, a roll of electrician’s tape will come in
handy. The birch canoe is quickly repaired in the same manner as
suggested for the canvas-covered craft, and as the shellac is
waterproof and dries quickly, all ordinary repairs may be made by the
stream side with but little loss of time.
 Oiling Tool for Clocks
Jewelers use a little tool for oiling clocks and watches that could
be used profitably by others for the same and similar work. It
consists of a steel wire, bluntly pointed on the end and set into a
wood handle. Very often the only thing that is the matter with a clock
which does not keep good time, is that it is dirty and dry. If this is the
case, any person handy with tools can fix it at practically no cost.
Remove the works, which are usually held with four screws, from the
case, immerse them in kerosene and allow them to stand for a few
minutes, then remove and drain. This will clean out the dirt.

The Tool will Pick Up a Drop of Oil and Deposit It Where Wanted

The oiling tool is dipped in light oil and a drop applied to each
bearing. Replace the works in the case and the job is finished. A
reliable jeweler will charge very little for this work, but the more crafty
ones may ask a good price for this “mysterious” process. If the works
are not dirty, apply the oil with the tool. Anyone who has tried to oil a
clock with an ordinary spout oilcan knows the futility of the attempt.
The object of the tool is to pick up and carry a drop of oil and deposit
it where wanted. A can, a feather, or a match will do, but any one of
them is apt to carry dirt, flood the dry part, or smear up nonmoving
parts.
Easily Constructed Wall Shelves
 Shelves for Books Supported with Picture-Frame Wire to the Wall

All that is necessary to make and support the simple set of wall
shelves, shown in the illustration, is lumber for the shelves, four
screw eyes, four screw hooks, sufficient picture-frame wire to form
the braces and supports, and wood screws for attaching the wire. On
the top side of the upper shelf are fastened the four screw eyes, two
near the wall edge and the others near the outer edge. To support
the upper shelf four screw hooks are used; two placed in the wall
and spaced to match the set of screw eyes nearest the wall, the
others being placed above the first and connected to the outer set of
screw eyes with the wire, thereby forming strong inclined supports.
The remaining shelves can be hung to suit by the supporting wires,
which are fastened with screws to the end of each shelf.
 Showing the Strength of a Giant
This trick is not so well known as it might be, although for a while it
was quite a popular drawing attraction for circus side shows and
other amusement places. It is one of the favorite Hindu tricks. The
performer passes for examination two pieces of rope 10 ft. long. In
one end of each rope a large ring is fastened. Taking a ring in each
hand the performer commands three or four men at each end of the
rope to take hold of it and at a signal they pull as hard as possible.
They pull until they are exhausted as in a tug of war, but the
performer only appears a trifle exerted and finds no difficulty in
holding the men.

The Performer Seems to Hold the Ones Pulling on the Ropes without Any
Effort, Producing an Effect That cannot be Readily Understood, and Making
an Excellent Trick for the Lawn Party

The secret is in the use of a piece of flexible wire, which passes up

the right sleeve of the performer, across the back and down the left
sleeve, lying just inside of the coat sleeve. At the ends of the wire
are small hooks. When about to perform this trick the performer puts
on a pair of gloves. The gloves are slit in the palms to allow the
hooks to pass through. The hooks are covered with cloth, colored to
match the gloves. An essential point to remember in performing the
trick is to keep the fingers well around the rings to prevent the ropes
from dropping in case of a slack-up on the tension.
 The Tricks of Camping Out
By STILLMAN TAYLOR

PART I—The Camping Outfit

Toouter
enjoy a vacation in the woods thoroughly, it is essential that the
be provided with the right kind of an outfit. The
inexperienced are likely to carry too much rather than too little to the
woods; to include many unnecessary luxuries and overlook the more
practical necessities. However, camp life does not mean that one
must be uncomfortable, but rather implies plain and simple living
close to nature. An adequate shelter from the sun and rain, a
comfortable bed, a good cooking kit, and plenty of wholesome food,
are the important things to consider. No man or woman requires
more, and if unwilling to share the plain fare of the woodsman, the
pampered ones should be left at home, for the grouchy, complaining
individual makes, of all persons, the very worst of camping
companions.
The Old Hand at the Camping Game Prefers
to Cut Poles on the Camping Site and Set
Them Up on the Outside for the Camp-Fire
Tent

The Wall Tent may be erected with the

Regular Poles, or, When Ordered with Tapes
along the Ridge, It can be Set Up with Outside
Tripod or Shear Poles
 The Choice of a Tent

There are tents and tents, but for average outings in what may be
considered a permanent camp, the regulation wall, or army, tent is
generally used to make a comfortable shelter. It is a splendid utility
tent, with generous floor space and plenty of headroom. For the
permanent camp, the wall tent is often provided with a fly, which may
be set up as an extra covering for the roof, or extended over the front
to make a kind of porch. An extension may also be purchased to
serve the same purpose. The 7 by 9-ft. wall tent will shelter two
persons comfortably, but when the camp is seldom moved, the 9 by
12-ft. size, with a 3¹⁄₂-ft. wall, will afford more room. The regulation 8-
oz. duck is heavy enough, or the same tent may be obtained in tan
or dark green khaki, if preferred. In any case the tent should have a
sod cloth, from 6 to 12 in. wide, extending around the bottom and
sewed to the tent. An extra piece of canvas or floor cloth is desirable,
but this as well as the fly are extras, and while convenient, are by no
means necessary. The wall tent may be erected with the regular
poles, or it may be ordered with tapes along the ridge and erected by
suspending between two trees. The old hand at the camping game
rarely uses the shop poles supplied with most tents, but prefers to
cut them at the camping site and rig them up on the outside, one
slender pole fastened with tapes along the ridge and supported at
either end in the crotch formed by setting up two poles, tripod or
shear-fashion.
The “Baker” style is a popular tent, giving a large sleeping
capacity, yet folding compactly. The 7 by 7-ft. size, with a 2-ft. wall,
makes a good comfortable home for two, and will shelter three, or
even four, if required. The entire front may be opened to the fire by
extending it to form an awning, or it may be thrown back over the
ridge to form an open-front lean-to shelter.
The “Dan Beard,” or camp-fire, tent is a modification of the Baker
style, having a slightly steeper pitch, with a smaller front opening.
The dimensions are practically the same as the Baker, and it may be
pitched by suspending between two trees, by outside poles, or the
regular poles may be used.
 For traveling light by canoe or pack, a somewhat lighter and less
bulky form of tent than the above styles may be chosen, and the
woodsman is likely to select the forester’s or ranger types. The
ranger is a half tent with a 2-ft. wall and the entire front is open; in
fact, this is the same as the Baker tent without the flap. If desired,
two half ranger tents with tapes may be purchased and fastened
together to form an A, or wedge, tent. This makes a good tent for two
on a hike, as each man carries his own half, and is assured a good
shelter in case one becomes separated from his companion, and a
tight shelter when the two make camp together.
The forester’s tent is another good one, giving good floor space
and folding up very compactly, a 9 by 9-ft. tent weighing about 5¹⁄₂ lb.
when made of standard-weight fabric. It may be had either with or
without hood, and is quickly erected by using three small saplings,
one along the ridge, running from peak to ground, and one on each
side of the opening, to form a crotch to support the ridge pole, shear-
fashion. These tents are not provided with sod or floor cloths,
although these may be ordered as extras if wanted.
The canoe or “protean” tents are good styles for the camper who
travels light and is often on the move. The canoe tent has a circular
front, while the protean style is made with a square front, and the
wall is attached to the back and along the two sides. Both tents are
quickly set up, either with a single inside pole or with two poles set
shear-fashion on the outside. A 9 by 9-ft. canoe or protean tent with
a 3-ft. wall makes a comfortable home in the open.
Whatever style of tent is chosen, it is well to pay a fair price and
obtain a good quality of material and workmanship. The cheaper
tents are made of heavier material to render them waterproof, while
the better grades are fashioned from light-weight fabric of close
weave and treated with a waterproofing process. Many of the
cheaper tents will give fair service, but the workmanship is often
poor, the grommets are apt to pull out, and the seams rip after a little
hard use. All tents should be waterproofed, and each provided with a
bag in which to pack it. An ordinary tent may be waterproofed in the
following manner: Dissolve ¹⁄₂ lb. of ordinary powdered alum in 4 gal.
of hot rain water, and in a separate bucket dissolve ¹⁄₂ lb. of acetate
of lead—sugar of lead—in 4 gal. of hot rain water. The acetate of
lead is poisonous if taken internally. When thoroughly dissolved, let
the solution stand until clear, then pour the alum solution into a tub
and add the lead solution. Let the solution stand for an hour or two,
then pour off the clear water and thoroughly soak the fabric in the
waterproofing mixture by rubbing and working the material with the
hands. Hang the cloth up without wringing it out.
The Forester’s Tent is Quickly Erected by
Using Three Small Saplings, One along the
Ridge, and One on Each Side of the Opening
to Form a Crotch for the Ridge Pole
The Ranger’s or Hiker’s Tent Comes in The Canoe or Protean Tents
Halves. Each Half may be Used Are Good Styles for the
Independently as a Lean-To Shelter for One Camper Who Travels Light
Man, or Both Joined Together to Make Room and Is Often on the Move,
for Two Persons and They can be Quickly Set
Up with a Single Inside Pole

How to Pitch a Tent

It is, of course, possible to pitch a tent almost anywhere, but for

the sake of comfort, it is well to select a site with natural drainage.
Many campers dig a shallow trench around the tent to prevent water
from running in during a heavy rain. This is a good idea for the
permanent camp, but is not often necessary if the soil is sandy or
porous, or where a sod cloth is used.
It is rarely necessary to carry the regular poles to the camping
ground, and they may be omitted excepting when en route to a
treeless region. The wall and other large tents may be pitched in
several ways. In some places the woodsman cuts a straight ridge
pole, about 3 ft. longer than the tent, and two crotched uprights, 1 ft.
or more longer than the height of the tent. The ridge pole is passed
through the opening in the peak of the tent, or fastened to the
outside of the ridge with tapes sewed to the cloth. The two upright
stakes are then firmly planted in the ground, one at the back and the
other in front, and the ridge pole is lifted and dropped into these
crotched supports. Set up the four corner guys first to get the tent in
shape, then peg down the side guys and slide them taut so that all of
them will exert an even pull on the tent. Another good method for
setting up the side guys is to drive four crotched stakes, each about
4 ft. long, somewhere near 3 ft. from each corner of the tent, and
drop a fairly heavy pole in the rest so formed, then fasten the guy
ropes to this pole. When a sod cloth is provided it is turned under on
the inside, the floor cloth is spread over it and the camp duffel
distributed along the walls of the tent, to hold it down and prevent
insects and rain from entering.
To overcome the disadvantage of placing the poles in the center of
the entrance, the uprights may be formed by lashing two poles
together near the top to make a crotch and spreading the bottoms to
form a pair of shears. Poles may be dispensed with entirely,
providing the tent is ordered with tapes for attaching a rope to
suspend the ridge of the tent between two trees. In a wooded
country this manner of setting a tent is generally preferred.
Where a wall tent is used in a more permanent camp, it is a good
plan to order a fly, a couple of sizes larger than the tent. This should
be set up by using separate poles and rigged some 6 or 8 in. higher
than the ridge of the tent, thus affording an air space to temper the
heat of the sun and also serving to keep things dry during long,
heavy rains.

The Camping Kit

The camping kit, including the few handy articles needed in the
woods, as well as the bedding and cooking outfit, may be either
elaborate or simple, according to the personal experience and ideas
of the camper. In making up a list, it is a good plan to remember that
only comparatively few articles are really essential for a comfortable
vacation in the wilderness. A comfortable bed must be reckoned one
of the chief essentials, and one may choose the de-luxe couch—the
air mattress or sleeping pocket—use the ordinary sleeping bag, or
court slumber on one of the several other styles of camp beds. The
fold-over combination bed, the stretcher bed, or a common bag
made of ticking, 6¹⁄₂ ft. long by 2 ft. wide, which is stuffed with
browse or leaves, will suffice for the average person. Folding camp
cots, chairs, tables, and other so-called camp furniture, have their
places in the large, fixed camps, but the woodsman can manage to
live comfortably without them. A good pair of warm blankets should
be included for each person, providing the sleeping bag is not taken
along. The regulation army blankets are a good choice and
reasonable in price, or the blankets used at home may be pressed
into service.
A good ax is the woodsman’s everyday companion, and a good-
weight tool, weighing 3 or 4 lb., and a smaller one of 1¹⁄₂ lb. should
be carried. When going light, the belt ax will suffice.
The oil lantern is only suited for the fixed camp, since the fuel is
difficult to transport unless it is placed in screw-top cans. The
“Stonbridge” and other folding candle lanterns are the most
convenient for the woods and give sufficient light for camp life.
The aluminum cooking outfits are light in weight, nest compactly,
and will stand many years of hard usage, but like other good things,
they are somewhat expensive. A good substitute, at half the price,
may be obtained in tin and steel, having the good feature of nesting
within each other, but, of course, not being quite so light nor so
attractive in appearance as the higher-priced outfits. Both the
aluminum and steel outfits are put up in canvas carrying bags, and
an outfit for two includes a large and a small cooking pot coffee pot;
frying pan with folding or detachable handle; two plates; cups knives;
forks, and spoons. Outfits may be bought for any number of persons
and almost all sporting-goods stores carry them. The two-man outfit
in heavy aluminum will cost $9 or $10, while the same outfit
duplicated in steel is priced at $3.35.