Saree a very versatile dress

by S. Pathiravitana

With Tony Blair kissing goodbye to the Labour Party, one of the minor disappointments is that Cheri Blair may have to shelve her plans to sport a saree. She was planning to wear one when canvassing the Indian vote among British citizens for her husband's fourth shy at being Prime Minister.

Though still a glamorous dress in the eyes of foreigners, back home in India, it hasn't that attraction to the younger set. So says an Indian journalist who was writing to the Herald Tribune some time back; the trend now, he says, among the younger set is for slacks and skirts. The reason given for this even by Colombo working girls is that the pace of modern living is such that the saree is a bit cumbersome and a little impractical.

'What nonsense!' I can hear this Indian journalist muttering under his breath. He says he has an aunt 'who bathed herself and her children in the waters of East Bengal, scrubbed the family pots and pans and swam, all in a voluminous saree." My own discovery after a dip into several sources is that the saree is a very versatile dress.

Some say that it is as old as the Vedic books written about 5000 years ago where the name appears as chira. However, there is no clear indication how exactly it evolved. At first sight nearly every one of those human figures one sees in the ruins of Sanchi, Barhout, Auradhapura and Amaravati, both men and women, look as if all of them are bare above the waist.

The dress below, which covers the lower half, looks more like a dhoti. For whatever reason at some stage in history, a fold of the dhoti got drawn up and covered the upper body affecting both men and women and giving one the impression that both parties are wearing sarees.

This is clearly visible in a bas relief found among Gandhara art, an art produced by the Greeks under Buddhist influence in a land which is now known as Afghanistan. In one of those Graeco-Buddhist bas reliefs the figures look as if the men, by covering one shoulder, are trying to wear the dhoti as a saree, and the single woman in the relief looks as if she is wearing a saree which may have once been a dhoti.

This is possible because a dhoti after all is about the same length as a saree. The difference between the two today is the way how the folds are tucked around the waist.

For instance, you can wear the saree as a bifurcated garment as if it were a divided skirt. Women in some parts of rural India find the bifurcated saree a convenience when working on their agricultural plots. The most famous instance of a bifurcated saree enabling a woman to perform a heroic deed is that of the Maharanee of Jhansi or more popularly known as Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai.

The story

That story needs to be briefly told. She was born in 1828 and her childhood name was Manikarnika. Her mother died when Manu (her pet name) was four and the burden of looking after her fell on her father who was a Brahamin. But he brought her up as if she were a Kshatriya boy.

Under him her education was completed with martial training, horse riding, fencing and shooting when she was still a teenager. When India's War of Independence broke out in 1857 the state of Jhansi was ruled by her husband who was the Maharaja of Jhansi.

By the time the 1857 Revolt broke out her husband was dead and she had fallen out with the British over a misunderstanding. In the absence of her husband she took over the command to face the threatened British invasion which was imminent. She had a voluntary force at her command and even the women of Jhansi joined in. She fought very bravely and at a very crucial moment the horse she was riding let her down by stumbling. Her face was slashed by the enemy as she fell down but she fought on killing two more before her life ended.

The introduction of Jhansi ki Rani at this stage was only to show that a horse could be ridden by even a saree-clad woman. For the saree could be worn in a way to free the legs by drawing a fold from between the legs and tucking it behind the waist, just as the ordinary rural women working in the fields do.

The other aspect of the saree that intrigue modern viewers is how from being a dhoti it transformed itself into a saree. For a long time the saree never rose beyond the waist and remained looking like a dhoti.

There is an interesting bas relief from our Jetavana in Anuradhapura which depicts Mayadevi being guided to the sal grove for the birth of the Buddha. The dhoti-clad three feminine figures wear the very minimum of clothes. I have seen this same scene portrayed by a modern artist like M Sarlis. And how the two portraits differ! One of Mayadevi wearing only the dhoti and the other adorning her with the Osariya.

There appears to be a similar gap in the reactions of those who visited Sigiriya on seeing the semi clad beauties. The poets who left their impressions of the Sigiriya beauties on the Mirror Wall were never abashed on seeing these topless beauties.

I went through the first fifty verses of Paranavitana's Sigiri Graffiti and found that none of the poets were disturbed by the topless-ness; indeed, the sight seemed the most natural thing in the world to them. And nearly all of them swooned writing love-lorn verses to them.

They were in praise of the 'golden coloured' bodies of the fair damsels whose 'eyes were like water lilies' and of her 'abundant splendour' but nothing else. Those of us who were brought up on the Sandesa poems were trained to look for things like 'thisara thana' (the breast shaped like a swan) pullulukulu (broad hips) and 'ingi sunga miti gatha hakina' ( a waist that can be held in a fist.)

When it comes to dress and other accoutrements the Portuguese were the first to cause some drastic changes to our style of dress and living. There are nearly sixty words for adornment alone that have crept into our vocabulary and nobody suspects they are from the Portuguese.

So well are they assimilated like bottama, camisay, kalisama, cheeththa, saluva, saban, piyara, saakuva and even the alpenettiya the word for a little pin, they all came from Portugal.

Trend setters

As usual it is the upper classes that set the fashion. At that time we had two good 'kalu suddas' to set the pace for dress change in Vimala Dharm Suriya and his queen Dona Catherina, both of whom in their childhood came under the cultural tutelage of Portugal. The four and six cornered hats and boleros for the Nilames and other aristocrats, the kalisans our later kings displayed, all were Portuguese imports.

In contrast we have the earlier kings like Parakrama Bahu the Great who displayed his bared, manly torso and simple dhoti and stands in majestic isolation at the southern end of the Minneriya tank.

If you take a look at family photographs taken in the first two decades of the 20th century and if they are still hanging from walls, you may find it difficult to identify the clothes worn, particularly by the ladies. They may be found wearing a two piece dress one a long sleeved puffy blouse or jacket and a skirt or saya.

Their origin is Portugal from where the word kaba kuruttu also comes The Anagarika Dharmapala surveying the cultural decay of the country found the dress that the women were wearing particularly distasteful.

Casting his eye around it fell on the Osoriya, a modest and graceful adornment which the women in the Kandyan hill country still favoured. He recommended this as a suitable dress for women to wear. He didn't stop at that, he also persuaded his mother to adopt it and presented her at public meetings as an example to follow.

From his day, many fashionsble women have tried to improve on the Osoriya by introducing novelties like the Coorg and the hipster without much success except perhaps on the cat walks on the fashion floors.

The Osoriya, on the other hand, added lustre to the personality of the late Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranike's in-born grace and modesty while remaining a standing memorial to the man who revived it.