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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
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
be determined on a petition for a writ of mandamus. Attorney
General vs. Boston, 123 Mass. 450; Warren vs. Charlestown, 2
Gray, 84; Larcom vs. Olin, 160 Mass. 102-110, 35 N. E. 113.
Petition dismissed.

6
Welch, Trustee, vs. Swasey, et al. 29 U. S. Supreme Court Reporter.
567, Oct., 1908

In error to the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of

Massachusetts to review a judgment denying a mandamus to
compel the board of appeal from the building commissioner of the
city of Boston to issue a building permit. Affirmed.
Statement by Mr. Justice Peckham:
The plaintiff in error duly applied to the justices of the supreme
judicial court of the state of Massachusetts for a mandamus against
the defendants, who constitute a board of appeal from the building
commissioner of the city of Boston, to compel the defendants to
issue a permit to him to build on his lot on the corner of Arlington and
Marlborough streets, in that city. The application was referred by the
justice presiding to the full court, and was by it denied (193 Mass.
364, 118 Am. St. Rep. 523, 79 N. E. 745), and the plaintiff has
brought the case here by writ of error.
The action of defendants in refusing the permit was based on the
statutes of Massachusetts, chap. 333 of the Acts of 1904, and chap.
383 of the Acts of 1905. The reason for the refusal to grant the
building permit was because the building site for the proposed
building was situated in one of the districts B, as created under the
provisions of the acts mentioned, in which districts the height of the
buildings is limited to 80, or, in some cases, to 100 feet, while the
height of buildings in districts A is limited to 125 feet. The height of
the building which plaintiff in error proposed to build and for which he
asked the building permit was stated by him in his application
therefor to be 124 feet, 6 inches.
 The designation of what parts in districts B and upon what
conditions a building could be therein erected more than 80 while not
more than 100 feet high was to be made by a commission, as
provided for in the act of 1905, and the commission duly carried out
the provisions of the act in that respect. The sole reason for refusing
the permit was on account of the proposed height of the building
being greater than the law allowed.
The plaintiff in error contended that the defendants were not
justified in their refusal to grant the permit, because the statutes
upon which their refusal was based were unconstitutional and void;
but he contended that, if they were valid, the defendants were
justified in their refusal.
The court, while deciding that mandamus was a proper remedy,
held that the statutes and the reports of the commissions thereunder
were constitutional.

Mr. Justice Peckham delivered the opinion of the court:

The ground of objection of plaintiff in error to this legislation is that
the statutes unduly and unreasonably infringe upon his constitutional
rights (a) as to taking of property without compensation; (b) as to
denial of equal protection of the laws.
Plaintiff in error refers to the existence of a general law in
Massachusetts, applicable to every city therein, limiting the height of
all buildings to 125 feet above the grade of the street (Acts of 1891,
Chap. 355), and states that he does not attack the validity of that act
in any respect, but concedes that it is constitutional and valid. See
also on same subject. Acts of 1892, Chap. 419, Par. 25, making
such limitation as to the city of Boston. His objection is directed to
the particular statutes because they provide for a much lower limit in
certain parts of the city of Boston, to be designated by a commission,
and because a general restriction of height as low as 80 or 100 feet
over any substantial portion of the city is, as he contends, an
unreasonable infringement upon his rights of property; also that the
application of those limits to districts B, which comprise the greater
part of the city of Boston, leaving the general 125-feet limit in force in
those portions of the city which the commission should designate
(being the commercial districts), is an unreasonable and arbitrary
denial of equal rights to the plaintiff in error and others in like
situation.
Stating his objections more in detail, the plaintiff in error contends
that the purposes of the acts are not such as justify the exercise of
what is termed the police power, because, in fact, their real purpose
was of an esthetic nature, designed purely to preserve architectural
symmetry and regular sky lines, and that such power cannot be
exercised for such a purpose. It is further objected that the
infringement upon property rights by these acts is unreasonable and
disproportioned to any public necessity, and also that the distinction
between 125 feet for the height of buildings in the commercial
districts described in the acts, and 80 to 100 feet in certain other or
so-called residential districts, is wholly unjustifiable and arbitrary,
having no well-founded reason for such distinction, and is without the
least reference to the public safety, as from fire, and inefficient as
means to any appropriate end to be attained by such laws.
In relation to these objections the counsel for the plaintiff in error,
in presenting his case at bar, made a very clear and able argument.
Under the concession of counsel, that the law limiting the height of
building to 125 feet is valid, we have to deal only with the question of
the validity of the provisions stated in these statutes and in the
conditions provided for by the commissions, limiting the height in
districts B between 80 and 100 feet.
We do not understand that the plaintiff in error makes the objection
of illegality arising from an alleged delegation of legislative power to
the commissions provided for by the statutes. At all events, it does
not raise a Federal question. The state court holds that kind of
legislation to be valid under the state Constitution, and this court will
follow its determination upon that question.
We come, then, to an examination of the question whether these
statutes with reference to limitations on height between 80 and 100
feet, and in no case greater than 100 feet, are valid. There is here a
discrimination of classification between sections of the city, one of
which, the business or commercial part, has a limitation of 125 feet,
and the other, used for residential purposes, has a permitted height
of buildings from 80 to 100 feet.
The statutes have been passed under the exercise of so-called
police power, and they must have some fair tendency to accomplish,
or aid in the accomplishment of, some purpose for which the
legislature may use the power. If the statutes are not of that kind,
then their passage cannot be justified under that power. These
principles have been so frequently decided as not to require the
citation of many authorities. If the means employed, pursuant to the
statute, have no real, substantial relation to a public object which
government can accomplish, if the statutes are arbitrary and
unreasonable, and beyond the necessities of the case, the courts will
declare their invalidity.
In passing upon questions of this character as to the validity and
reasonableness of a discrimination or classification in relation to
limitations as to height of buildings in a large city, the matter of
locality assumes an important aspect. The particular circumstances
prevailing at the place or in the state where the law is to become
operative,—whether the statute is really adapted, regard being had
to all the different and material facts, to bring about the results
desired from its passage; whether it is well calculated to promote the
general and public welfare,—are all matters which the state court is
familiar with; but a like familiarity cannot be ascribed to this court,
assuming judicial notice may be taken of what is or ought to be
generally known. For such reason this court, in cases of this kind,
feels the greatest reluctance in interfering with the well-considered
judgments of the courts of a state whose people are to be affected
by the operation of the law. The highest court of the state in which
statutes of the kind under consideration are passed is more familiar
with the particular causes which led to their passage (although they
may be of a public nature) and with the general situation surrounding
the subject-matter of the legislation than this court can possibly be.
We do not, of course, intend to say that, under such circumstances,
the judgment of the state court upon the question will be regarded as
conclusive, but simply that it is entitled to the very greatest respect,
and will only be interfered with, in cases of this kind, where the
decision is, in our judgment, plainly wrong. In this case the supreme
judicial court of the state holds the legislation valid, and that there is
a fair reason for the discrimination between the height of buildings in
the residential as compared with the commercial districts. That court
has also held that regulations in regard to the height of buildings,
and in regard to their mode of construction in cities, made by
legislative enactments for the safety, comfort, or convenience of the
people, and for the benefit of property owners generally, are valid.
Atty. Gen. vs. Williams (Knowlton vs. Williams) 174 Mass. 476, 47 L.
R. A. 314, 55, N. E. 77. We concur in that view, assuming, of course,
that the height and conditions provided for can be plainly seen to be
not unreasonable or inappropriate.
In relation to the discrimination or classification made between the
commercial and the residential portion of the city, the state court
holds in this case that there is reasonable ground therefor, in the
very great value of the land and the demand for space in those parts
of Boston where a greater number of buildings are used for the
purposes of business or commercially than where the buildings are
situated in the residential portion of the city, and where no such
reasons exist for high buildings. While so deciding, the court cited,
with approval. Com. vs. Boston Advertising Co. 188 Mass. 348, 69 L.
R. A. 517, 108 Am. St. Rep. 494, 74 N. E. 601; which holds that the
police power cannot be exercised for a merely esthetic purpose. The
court distinguishes between the two cases, and sustains the present
statutes. As to the condition adopted by the commission for
permitting the erection, in either of the districts B, that is, the
residential portion, of buildings of over 80 feet, but never more than
100, that the width on each and every public street on which the
building stands shall be at least one half its height, the court refuses
to hold that such condition was entirely for esthetic reasons. The
chief justice said: “We conceive that the safety of adjoining buildings,
in view of the risk of the falling of walls after a fire, may have entered
into the purpose of the commissioners. We are of opinion that the
statutes and the orders of the commissioners are constitutional.”
 We are not prepared to hold that this limitation of 80 to 100 feet,
while in fact a discrimination or classification, is so unreasonable that
it deprives the owner of the property of its profitable use without
justification, and that he is therefore entitled under the Constitution to
compensation for such invasion of his rights. The discrimination thus
made is, as we think, reasonable, and is justified by the police
power.
It might well be supposed that taller buildings in the commercial
section of the city might be less dangerous in case of fire than in the
residential portion. This court is not familiar with the actual facts, but
it may be that, in this limited commercial area, the high buildings are
generally of fireproof construction; that the fire engines are more
numerous and much closer together than in the residential portion,
and that an unlimited supply of salt water can be more readily
introduced from the harbor into the pipes, and that few women or
children are found there in the daytime, and very few people sleep
there at night. And there may, in the residential part, be more
wooden buildings, the fire apparatus may be more widely scattered,
and so situated that it would be more difficult to obtain the necessary
amount of water, as the residence quarters are more remote from
the water front, and that many women and children spend the day in
that section, and the opinion is not strained that an undiscovered fire
at night might cause great loss of life in a very high apartment house
in that district. These are matters which, it must be presumed, were
known by the legislature, and whether or not such were the facts
was a question, among others, for the legislature to determine. They
are asserted as facts in the brief of the counsel for the city of Boston.
If they are, it would seem that ample justification is therein found for
the passage of the statutes, and that the plaintiff in error is not
entitled to compensation for the reasonable interference with his
property rights by the statutes. That, in addition to these sufficient
facts, considerations of an esthetic nature also entered into the
reasons for their passage, would not invalidate them. Under these
circumstances there is no unreasonable interference with the rights
of property of the plaintiff in error, nor do the statutes deprive him of
the equal protection of the laws. The reasons contained in the
opinion of the state court are, in our view, sufficient to justify their
enactment. The judgment is therefore affirmed.

7
ABSOLUTE HEIGHT LIMITATIONS

Baltimore, Md. 175 feet.

125 ft. or 2½ times width of widest street on which building fronts
Boston
in section.
80 ft. in residence section.
Charleston, S.
125 ft. or 2½ times width of widest street, as in Boston.
C.
Chicago 200 ft.
Cleveland 200 ft. or 2½ times width of widest street, as in Boston.
Erie, Pa. 200 ft. or 2½ times width of widest street, as in Boston.
Los Angeles 150 ft.
Manchester, N.
125 ft.
H.
Newark, N. J. 200 ft.
Portland,
160 ft.
Oregon
Scranton, Pa. 125 ft.
Worcester,
125 ft.
Mass.
Denver, Colo. 12 stories.
Providence, R.
120 ft.
I.

C. “SURVEY LINES”

FURMAN ST. 17 Wendell (N. Y.) 649. 1836

By a law of April 12, 1816, section 18, a survey of the village of
Brooklyn was to be made and the resulting map was to constitute a
permanent plan for laying out the streets of Brooklyn. The act
provided that owners who violated the plan were not to receive
damages.
 The court, in upholding this provision, found that unless damages
were withheld from owners building in designated lines of streets,
section 18 of the act would be nugatory. The legislation clearly
intended that improvements within the street lines should not be paid
for. “By expensive erections an owner otherwise might bring an
enormous burden upon others for opening the street.”

This decision was cited with approval and followed in the case of
Re Dist. of City of Pittsburgh, decided in 1841, 2 W. & S. 320. This
language is found in the opinion: “The mere laying out of streets
cannot be said of itself to be a taking of the property of individuals,
upon which they are laid out, for public use at some future day, but
rather a designation of what may be required for that purpose
thereafter, so that the owners of the property may in due time be fully
apprised of what is anticipated and regulate the subsequent
improvements, which they shall make thereon accordingly.
... Until the actual opening “the owners thereof continue not only to
hold the same interest in them, but likewise to have the right to enjoy
and in the same manner as they did previously.”
In the case of Bush vs. McKeesport, City, 166 Pa. 57, the court
upheld the validity of the following clause: “No person shall hereafter
be entitled to recover any damages for any buildings or the
improvements of any kind which shall or may be placed or
constructed upon or within the lines of any located street or alley,
after the same shall have been located or ordered by counsel.”
But the New York court has since come to a different conclusion in
the case of Forster vs. Scott, 136 App. Div. 577, and the
Massachusetts court has also found against the constitutionality of
such a provision. In Forster vs. Scott, the plaintiff had given a deed
to the defendant warranting against incumbrances. A proposed
street was located on the plaintiff’s land. The court held that this was
not an incumbrance since the act of 1882, chapter 419 was
unconstitutional in providing that “No compensation shall be allowed
for any building, erection or construction which at any time,
subsequent to the filing of the maps, plans, etc., may be built in part
or in whole upon or through any street, avenue, road, public square,
or place.”
“Whenever a law deprives the owner of the beneficial use and free
enjoyment of his property, or imposes restraints upon such use and
enjoyment that materially affect its value without legal process or
compensation it deprives him of his property within the meaning of
the constitution.”

Edwards vs. Bruorton, 184 Mass. 529

Knowlton, C. J.
“This is an action for breach of a covenant in a deed. A public
street called Jersey Street was laid out by the street commissioners
of Boston over a part of the premises under authority of statute 1891,
c. 323, and the existence of this street constitutes a breach of the
covenant in the deed if the statute gave the board authority to lay it
out. It is contended that the statute is unconstitutional ... because in
section 9 it provides that no compensation shall be given for land
taken for a street, if the owner, after the filing of a plan in accordance
with the statute, shall erect any building within the boundaries of any
way and not remove it when required by the street commissioners.”

“This was intended to prevent any use of property inconsistent

with the plan after the filing of a plan and before the laying out of a
way. If it could have that effect, it might materially interfere with the
use which an owner might desire to make of his estate for many
years after the filing of the plan and before the laying out of a way.
The statute provides no compensation for this interference with
private property. The legislation can not constitutionally so interfere
with the use of property without giving compensation to the owner.”...
 “In the act before us, there is no express prohibition of the owner’s
use of his property, but it is declared that if he uses it otherwise than
in accordance with the plans of the street commissioners it may be
taken from him for a way without giving him compensation. This
attempt to except him from the general rule in regard to the taking of
property under the right of eminent domain is unconstitutional and
ineffectual.”
The court then finds that the unconstitutional parts of the statute
are not so connected with the rest of the statute as to invalidate it,
and that the street laid out under the provisions of the statute
became a legally located public way, and that its existence
constituted a breach of the covenant in the deed.

D. BILL-BOARDS

Bill-board decisions may be thus classified:

I. Where the ordinance has been held invalid on the ground that its
purpose was the removal of the bill-boards for aesthetic reasons and
where the character of the bill-boards as nuisances was not raised,
the decisions are uniformly against the reasonableness of the
ordinance.
People vs. Green, 85 N. Y. App. 400.—The ordinance prohibited
the posting of any advertisement whatever upon fences enclosing
private property fronting on or adjacent to any public park. There was
no claim that the posting of advertisements in any such places was
an injury to the morals, health or safety of the city. The ruling was
merely against the extension of the police power for aesthetic
purposes.
Commonwealth vs. Boston Advertising Co. 188 Mass. 348.—The
ordinance prohibited all signs so near a parkway as to be visible to
the naked eye and was clearly intended to accomplish aesthetic
purposes.
Varney vs. Williams, 100 Pac. Rep. 867.—The ordinance
absolutely prohibited maintenance and erection of all bill-boards for
advertising purposes. There was no attempt to restrict its operation
to bill-boards that were insecure or otherwise dangerous or to
advertising that might be indecent. “Bearing in mind that the
ordinance does not purport to have any relation to the protection of
passers by from injury by reason of unsafe structures, to the
diminution of hazard of fire, or to the prevention of immoral displays
we find that the one ground upon which the town council may be
thought to have acted is that the appearance of bill-boards is or may
be offensive to the sight of persons of refined tastes.” The promotion
of aesthetic or artistic consideration has never been held to justify an
exercise of the police power.
II. Where the court considers the ordinance as an attempt to
protect either the health, safety or morals of the community and finds
that it is an unreasonable regulation.
State vs. Whitlock, 149 N. C. 542.—The ordinance prohibited the
erection of bill-boards on the lot line. The court found that this was
an invasion of private rights, since such structures might be built with
absolute safety.
Crawford vs. City of Topeka, 51 Kas. 761.—The court, in holding
the ordinance unreasonable, said: “In what way can the erection of a
safe structure for advertising purposes near the front of a lot
endanger public safety any more than a like structure for some other
lawful purpose. Perhaps regulations might be made with reference to
the manner of construction so as to insure safety but the absolute
prohibition would be an unwarranted invasion of private rights.” The
unreasonableness of the ordinance is seen when it is considered
that the posting of a harmless paper upon a structure changes it
from a lawful to an unlawful one. To the same effect are the following
cases: Bryan vs. City of Chester, 212 Pa. St. 259; Bill Posting Sign
Co., vs. Atlantic City, 71 N. J. Law, 72; Chicago vs. Gunning System,
214 Ill. 628; Passaic vs. Patterson Bill Posting Co., 72 N. J. Law,
285.

II. PROCEDURE IN ACQUIRING LAND BY CONDEMNATION

AND IN ASSESSING BENEFITS
 1

Amendment To Constitution of New York, Art. 1, Sec. 7.

Adopted Nov. 4, 1913
When private property shall be taken for any public use, the
compensation to be made therefor, when such compensation is not
made by the State, shall be ascertained by a jury, by the supreme
court, with or without a jury but not with a referee, or by not less than
three commissioners, appointed by a court of record, as shall be
prescribed by law. Private roads may be opened in the manner to be
prescribed by law; but in every case the necessity of the road and
the amount of all damage to be sustained by the opening thereof
shall be first determined by a jury of free-holders, and such amount,
together with the expenses of the proceeding, shall be paid by the
person to be benefited. General laws may be passed permitting the
owners or occupants of agricultural lands to construct and maintain
for the drainage thereof, necessary drains, ditches and dykes upon
the lands of others, under proper restrictions and with just
compensation, but no special laws shall be enacted for such
purposes.
The legislature may authorize cities to take more land and
property than is needed for actual construction in the laying out,
widening, extending, or relocating parks, public places, highways or
streets, provided, however, that the additional land and property so
authorised to be taken shall be no more than sufficient to form
suitable building sites abutting on such park, public place, highway
or street. After so much of the land and property has been
appropriated for such park, public place, highway or street as is
needed therefor, the remainder may be sold or leased.
Words in italics are new.

Acts of New York, 1911. Chap. 679

AN ACT to amend the Greater New York charter, in relation to the
payment of the cost of certain public improvements.
The People of the State of New York, represented in Senate and
Assembly, do enact as follows:
Section 1. Chapter six of the Greater New York charter, as re-
enacted by chapter four hundred and sixty-six of the laws of nineteen
hundred and one, is hereby amended by adding thereto a new
section, to be known as section two hundred and forty-seven, to read
as follows:
§ 247. Before a public improvement of any kind (except an
improvement to be made pursuant to the rapid transit act) involving
the acquisition or the physical improvement of property for streets,
public places, parks, bridges, approaches to bridges, for the disposal
and treatment of sewage or the improvement of the waterfront, or
involving both such acquisition and physical improvement of
property, which acquisition or physical improvement, or both, is
estimated to cost the sum of fifty thousand dollars or more, shall be
authorized, the board of estimate and apportionment may determine
in what manner and in what shares and proportions the cost and
expense of the acquisition or physical improvement, or both, shall be
paid by the city of New York, by one or more boroughs thereof, by a
part or portion of one or more boroughs thereof, or by the respective
owners, lessees, parties and persons respectively entitled unto or
interested in the lands, tenements, hereditaments and premises not
required for the said improvement, which said board shall deem
peculiarly benefited thereby.
If said board shall determine that the cost of such acquisition or
physical improvement, or both, shall be apportioned between or
among the city of New York, one or more boroughs thereof, a part or
portion of one or more boroughs thereof, or the respective owners,
lessees, parties and persons respectively entitled unto or interested
in the lands, tenements, hereditaments and premises not required
for the said improvement, which said board shall deem peculiarly
benefited thereby, the said board may also determine in what
manner and in what proportion the cost and expense of such
acquisition or physical improvement, or both, shall be borne either by
the city of New York, by one or more boroughs thereof, by a part or
portion of one or more boroughs thereof, or by the respective
owners, lessees, parties and persons respectively entitled unto or
interested in the lands, tenements, hereditaments and premises not
required for the said improvement, which said board shall deem
peculiarly benefited thereby.

Kansas City vs. Bacon et al. 157 Mo. 450

VALLIANT, J. Appeal from a judgment of the circuit court of
Jackson county assessing benefits against property of the
defendants in the proceedings to establish Penn Valley park in
Kansas City.
For the establishing of the park 134 acres of land were
condemned and the total amount assessed as the value thereof to
be paid the owners was $870,759.60, and for the payment of that
amount assessments as of benefits were made on a large number of
lots included in what is known as West Park district, among which
were lots owned severally by defendants Bacon and Monroe. The
assessments on the lots of Mrs. Bacon aggregated $3,252.49; those
on the lots of Monroe, $991.17. The amount assessed against the
city as general benefits was $1.

The point against which the main force of appellants’ argument is

directed is instruction 11 given at the request of the city, and which
is:
“11. By your verdict you shall show a correct description of each
piece or parcel of property taken and the value thereof, and of each
piece or parcel of private property damaged and the amount of injury
thereto. You shall also show by your verdict the amount, if any,
assessed against the city, and shall show the amount of benefits
assessed against each piece or parcel of private property found
benefited within the benefit district.
In estimating the benefits that may accrue to the city and to the
public generally, or to any property in the benefit district by reason of
the proposed improvement, you shall consider only such benefits as
are direct, certain and proximate.”

The law contemplates that a public improvement may bring a

benefit to the property of individuals separate from that which it
brings to the city in general, and that it may bring a benefit to the city
in general separate from that which it brings to the property of the
individuals, and that when it comes to apportioning the cost, the
individuals and the city should each bear the burden in proportion to
the respective benefit, but the benefit in the one case must be as
“direct, certain and proximate” as in the other.

Conceding all that the learned counsel say concerning the

difference between general and special taxation, we do not see how
it affects the question relating to the character of the benefits the city
is required to pay for in a case like this. And if it is lawful for the jury
to estimate the benefit to the city at large with a view to charging a
proper share of the cost of the improvement to the city and thereby
to that extent relieve the burden of the property owners; that is to
say, if that feature of the law which contemplates laying a portion of
the burden on the city at large is not in violation of the fourteenth
amendment to the Constitution of the United States, then there must
be some rule to guide the jury in assessing those benefits, and if it is
not proper to instruct the jury that the only benefits to the city at large
which they are to consider are such “as are direct, certain and
proximate,” then the contrary is true, and they should be instructed to
consider benefits that are indirect, uncertain and remote. We
recognize that the task of assessing benefits either to private
property or to the city at large is a very difficult one, and that the
temptation to the jury to indulge in conjecture is great, but still they
ought to be admonished that the law requires them to use their
reason and judgment, and not their imagination. The provision of the
law requiring the benefits to the city at large to be estimated by the
jury should either be eliminated entirely or else the jury should be
instructed as to what the law means by such benefits, and if it does
not mean such “as are direct, certain and proximate,” it is
meaningless.

The specific charge of inequality before the law that these

appellants make is that the city has been relieved of its just
proportion of the cost of the park, and that portion has been laid,
together with their own burden, on these appellants. In their brief
they say that the jury should first have estimated the benefit to the
city at large and should have charged only the balance of the cost as
benefits against the private property, that the assessment of one
dollar against the city was no assessment at all.
If the case was given to the jury under proper instructions,
whatever opinion we may have as to the fact, we can not say as a
matter of law that an assessment of merely nominal benefit was
unlawful.

See also Kansas City vs. Bacon 147 Mo. 259, in which this
language is found:
“In the absence of misleading instructions or evidence of
misconduct a verdict of one dollar against the city at large is not as a
matter of law ground to disturb a verdict.”
 In this case there was an assessment on property holders of
$600,000, and of $1.00 against the city.
And:
Kansas City vs. Smart, 128 Mo. 272, where there was an
assessment of $140,000 against the benefit district and $1.00
against the city.

Park Law of Indianapolis. Chap. 231. Acts of Indiana, 1911

AN ACT concerning the “department of public parks” in cities of the
first and second classes, defining its powers and duties,
conferring certain powers upon the common council and mayor
of such cities in relation to said park department, legalizing
appointments of boards of park commissioners in such cities,
and acts done by such boards, repealing conflicting laws, and
declaring an emergency.
[S. 378. Approved March 6, 1911.]
Section 1. Cities—First and Second Class—Department of
Parks.
Section 2. Park Commissioners—Terms.
Section 3. Organization—Reports—Meetings—Funds.
Section 4. Control of Parks and Boulevards—Powers.
Section 5. Letting of Contracts.
Section 6. Breach of Agreement—Suit—Rules—Taxation.
Section 7. Sale of Park Lands—Park Line—Amusement
Places.
Section 8. Bequests of Property—Use and Control—
Gardens, Etc.
Section 9. Power over Waterways, Etc.
 Section 10. Condemnation—Eminent Domain. The said board
of park commissioners are authorized to exercise the power of
eminent domain within such city, for the purpose of carrying out any
of the provisions of this act, and outside of such city within five miles
of the limits of such city. And in case such board of park
commissioners cannot agree with the owners, lessees or occupants
of any real estate selected by them for the purposes herein set forth,
they may proceed to procure the condemnation of the same as
hereinafter provided, and in addition thereto, when not in conflict nor
inconsistent with the express provisions of this act, may proceed
under the general laws of the State of Indiana governing the
condemnation of the right of way for the purposes of internal
improvement which may be in force at the time, and the provisions of
such laws are hereby extended to parks, parkways, park boulevards
and pleasure driveways, or parts thereof, so far as the same are not
in conflict or inconsistent with the terms of this act.
Section 11. Common Council—Park Districts. The common
council of any such city shall have power, by ordinance upon and in
accordance with the recommendation of the board of park
commissioners, to lay off and divide the territory thereof into any
number of park districts that the conveniences of the citizens of such
city and of administration of the department of public parks may
require; and, after such districts are established, may from time to
time, in like manner, add new territory to any established district, or
create new districts from territory which may be annexed to any such
city. When such division is thus made of the territory of any such city
into districts, or when alterations are thus made in the districts, the
boundaries thereof shall be accurately defined, and the descriptions
of boundaries shall be entered by such board at full length in the
records of such board and shall be recorded in the office of the
recorder of the county in which such city is situated; and a duly
authenticated copy thereof shall be filed with the comptroller of such
city.
Section 12. Boulevard—Proceedings to Improve. The board
of park commissioners of any such city shall have the power to order
the improvement of any boulevard or any pleasure driveway or part
thereof, under the control of such board, by paving the same,
curbing and constructing sidewalks thereon, or either paving, curbing
and constructing sidewalks thereon in the same manner and subject
to the same limitation as to form and procedure, and to the same
extent as is or may be in the future conferred upon the board of
public works of any such city to improve any street, alley or sidewalk
within such city; the cost of such improvement of such boulevard or
pleasure driveway shall become a lien upon property to the same
extent, enforceable in the same manner, with the same rights as to
payments by installments and appeal as are or may be provided for
in the case of street and sidewalk improvements ordered by the
board of public works; and the provisions of said laws applicable to
street and sidewalk improvements ordered by the board of public
works of any such city are hereby extended to the improvement of
any such boulevard, or pleasure driveway: Provided, That said board
shall have exclusive authority to determine the kind of pavement to
be used. And said park board shall have the power to change and fix
the grade of any boulevard, park boulevard, or public driveway, or
public ground under its control, to the same extent as such power is
now or may be in the future conferred upon the board of public works
of any such city to change and fix the grade of any street, alley or
public place within any such city: Provided, That whenever the land
along one side of a boulevard or pleasure driveway is owned by the
city or used by the city for park purposes, one-half the cost of such
improvement may be assessed against the property benefited in
such park district, or districts, to the extent and in the proportion the
same shall be benefited as hereinafter provided; and in case it
should be determined by said board that no part of the cost of such
improvement is properly assessable against the property of a district,
or districts, in which the improvement is made, the same may be
paid by such city out of any funds available for such purposes.
Section 13. Appropriation of Property—Improvements. The
board of park commissioners of such cities of the first and second
classes, as supplemental to other powers conferred by this act, shall
have the power, whenever in their discretion such course is
advisable, to appropriate property in the manner hereinafter provided
for the purpose of: (a) establishing a park, parkway, pleasure
driveway or boulevard, or (b) widening or extending any park,
parkway, pleasure driveway or boulevard, or (c) opening, widening,
or extending any route or right of way for a sewer or channel of any
water course connected with or necessary for the protection of any
park, parkway, pleasure driveway or boulevard, or (d) constructing
any embankment or levee along such water course for the protection
of any such park, parkway, pleasure driveway or boulevard, or (e)
constructing any bridge or viaduct upon or connected with any such
park, parkway, pleasure driveway or boulevard, or (f) converting any
street or alley connecting any parks, parkways and boulevards in
any such city into a boulevard or pleasure driveway; and also said
board shall have power, in the same proceedings, to provide for the
construction of improvements of such property for a park, parkway,
pleasure driveway or boulevard, in case such property is
appropriated or to be appropriated for such purpose; or to provide for
the construction necessary for the widening or extending of the
same, in case such be the purpose for which the land is appropriated
or to be appropriated; or to provide for the construction necessary for
the opening, widening or extending of any such route or right of way
for a sewer or channel of any such water course, in case such
property is appropriated or to be appropriated for such purpose; or to
provide for the construction of any such embankment or levee along
any such water course as aforesaid, in case such property is
appropriated or to be appropriated for such purpose; or to provide for
the construction of any such bridge or viaduct, in case such be the
purpose for which such property is appropriated or to be
appropriated; or to provide for the converting of any such street or
alley into a pleasure driveway or boulevard, in case such be the
purpose of the appropriation; furthermore, such board may provide
for the construction of any of the foregoing work or improvements
when the property or part thereof necessary for the same has been
secured by contract or otherwise as hereinafter provided.
Section 14. Proceedings in Appropriating Property.
Whenever, as provided in the foregoing section, said board shall
deem it advisable to appropriate property and in conjunction proceed
with the work of construction, or to appropriate property, or to
proceed with such construction when the property necessary, or part