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)

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 The Sari
Inside my mother
I peered through a glass porthole.
The world beyond was hot and brown.

They were all looking in on me –

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

My English grandmother
took a telescope
and gazed across continents.

All the people unravelled a sari.

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

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

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

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

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

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

Introduction xi

1 ‘Our Eastern Costume Created a Sensation’: Sartorial

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

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

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

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

in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia 59

4 ‘Chanel Designing Catwalk Indian Suits’: Sartorial

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

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

Matter in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 149

A Sartorial Afterword 195

Bibliography 203

Index 233
ix
 INTRODUCTION

Writing in the eighteenth century, Mirza Itesa Modeen described the

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

xi
xii INTRODUCTION

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

comprehensive. Likewise, albeit applicable and easily transposed to other

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

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

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

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

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

Highly critical of exclusionist notions of identity, Hanif Kureishi has

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Our Eastern Costume Created a Sensation’:

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

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

© The Author(s) 2018 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

explicitly as an autobiography, the aforementioned accounts follow the

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

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

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

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

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

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

travellers, writers and settlers would have sounded familiar to Gyani

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

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

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

With enthusiasm, Ram details his metamorphosis from ‘the bearded

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

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

when describing British clothing resembles the vocabulary employed by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ing the trousers worn by Asian and Middle Eastern women, and whether
or not a matter of coincidence, in her letters Cornelia Sorabji details
how Lady Hunter asked her for ‘a PUNJAB pair of trousers. Those the
women wear […] she wants it only for the shape of it’ (2011: 84; empha-
sis in the original).
10. Stephen D. Arata (1990) has already called attention to the number of
Late-Victorian British novels featuring the trope of reverse colonisation,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) being a prominent example in Arata’s
discussion.
11. The jamah is a long-sleeved, knee-length coat, usually worn with a sash.
12. Mirza Itesa Modeen’s Shigarf-nama-‘‘I Vilayat was originally written in
Persian ‘some time between 1780 and 1784’ (Chambers 2015: 25). Here
I am using the English translation by James Edward Alexander, first pub-
lished in 1827.
13. In this respect, see Ashis Nandy (1983), Mrinalini Sinha (1995),
Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak (1987), Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta (1995),
Revathi Krishnaswamy (1998), Edward Said (2003) and Frantz Fanon
(2008), among others.
14. In 1959 Gyani Sundar Singh was denied, on the basis of his Sikh turban, a
job as a bus conductor in Manchester.
15. As I shall further clarify in Chap. 5, the term ‘hijab’ originally alludes to
the dress code—either masculine or feminine—ostensibly prescribed by
Islam as part of the principle of modesty. Yet, it is more commonly used
in relation to women’s modest clothing and, in particular, to the practice
of head covering. The term ‘hijab’ has also come to refer to one of the
commonest styles of veil used by Muslim women, a style characterised by
covering the head and leaving the face uncovered.
16. As scholars such as Leila Ahmed (1992), John Esposito (1998) and Fadwa
El Guindi (1999) have amply demonstrated, the origins of veiling can be
traced back to pre-Babylonian times, being subsequently incorporated
into Hellenic, Judaic, Christian and Muslim cultures.
17. He recorded his methods in his work Shampooing or Benefits Resulting
from the Use of the Indian Medicated Bath, first published in 1822.
18. In addition to being a poet, writer and journalist, Malabari was also a
social reformer best known for his campaigns in favour of Indian wom-
en’s rights. Evidence of Malabari’s active role in promoting women’s
rights can be found in Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India
(1887) and An Appeal from the Daughters of India (1890).
 CHAPTER 2

The ‘Sartorially Undesirable “Other”’

in Post-War South Asian Diaspora
Narratives: Kamala Markandaya’s The
Nowhere Man

As the travelogues analysed in Chap. 1 demonstrate, the South Asian

presence in Britain is not to be circumscribed to the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries alone. However, most South Asians in present-
day Britain are connected to the history of South Asian mass displace-
ment that took place in the period following the Second World War. This
means that the South Asian diaspora in Britain is mainly an archive of
what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996) and Vijay Mishra (1996) have
called the ‘new’ South Asian diaspora, though it is linked to previous
as well as to other contemporary South Asian diasporic (hi)stories. It is
linked to the (hi)stories of South Asian sojourners, visitors and labour-
ers in pre-twentieth-century Britain; to (hi)stories of the ‘old’ South
Asian diaspora via individuals who, like Samuel Selvon, V. S. Naipaul
and David Dabydeen, moved to Britain from their Indian enclaves in
the Caribbean at some point during the twentieth century; and, finally,
to (hi)stories of South Asian displacement in other geographical loca-
tions such as the USA or Canada via individuals who, such as Salman
Rushdie or Anita Desai, have inhabited different diasporic spaces and
have thus become ‘transmigrants’ (Schiller et al. 1995). As noted in the
‘Introduction’, following Avtar Brah’s magisterial work Cartographies of
Diaspora, the South Asian diaspora in Britain represents just one of the
‘multiple journeys’ that configure the South Asian diaspora as a whole
(1996: 183), and, at the same time, this particular ‘journey’ comprises
different (hi)stories and even ‘modalities’—‘modalities, for example, of
gender, “race”, class, religion, language and generation’ (ibid.). While

© The Author(s) 2018 23

N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora
Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0_2
24 N. PEREIRA-ARES

historicising briefly the South Asian presence in Britain in the years fol-
lowing the Second World War, the remainder of this chapter provides
an analysis of sartorial representations in a series of early post-war narra-
tives, focusing in particular on Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man
(1972), a novel in which the politics and poetics of dress connect past
and present, colonial India and postcolonial Britain.
The arrival of the Empire Windrush1 at Tilbury in 1948 has met-
onymically come to be regarded as the ‘start of [post-war] mass
[im]migration’ into Britain (Anwar 1995: 274). This coincided with the
enactment of the National Act of 1948, which opened Britain’s doors to
Commonwealth citizens. In the wake of the Second World War, Britain
experienced a huge manpower deficit and, in order to deal with this
labour crisis, workers from the former colonies were officially recruited
to help to rebuild the country. A number of West Indians migrated to
Britain during the early post-war years. Some of them had South Asian
roots, descending from those South Asians who, in the nineteenth cen-
tury, had moved from the Indian subcontinent to the West Indies to
work as indentured labourers (Fryer 1989).2 After the partition of
India, settlers from newly created nations such as India, Pakistan and
East Pakistan (Bangladesh since 1971) also began to move to Britain.
‘Starting small at the beginning of the 1950s’, they ‘gr[ew] fast, siza-
ble and visible’ in the following decades (Thandi 2007a: 159). The next
major phase of South Asian settlement in Britain began with the arrival
of Asian people from East Africa in the 1970s (Fryer 1989; Rangaswamy
2005). During the heyday of the British Empire, the British administra-
tors of East Africa had recruited people from the Indian subcontinent
as indentured labourers. When the British finally left in the early 1960s,
certain African leaders incorporated an anti-Indian discourse. In 1972,
for example, Idi Amin, then President of Uganda, expelled all South
Asians from the country. Some of these people had British citizenship
and opted to migrate to Britain, where they were considered ‘refugees’.3
From a literary perspective, the post-war years witnessed the emer-
gence of a group of authors who began to write about Britain, and
more particularly, about the process of finding one’s bearings in a new
country and culture (Dennis and Khan 2000). The first to do so were
writers with a Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean background. It was only
later that authors coming from the Indian subcontinent began to pro-
duce fiction about the post-war South Asian diasporic experience in the
heart of the metropolis, Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972)
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 25

being a prominent example in this respect. Among the works written

by pioneering Indo-Caribbean authors, it is worth mentioning novels
such as Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956)—and its sequels
Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983), V. S. Naipaul’s
The Middle Passage (1962) and The Mimic Men (1967), and later on,
David Dabydeen’s The Intended (1991). In these narratives, the authors
sought to recreate, and speak to, an increasing diasporic community liv-
ing within Britain, thereby initiating ‘the shifting reconstruction of the
[category of] “expatriate” or “migrant” writer into “minority” writer’
(Ranasinha 2007: 40). Many of these early post-war works of fiction
revolve around the protagonists’ ‘passage to England’4 and their first
years in the metropolis, looking for jobs and a place to live, navigating
their way through ‘attic and basement, pleasure and its penalty’ (Naipaul
[1967] 2011: 3). The moment of arrival is often evoked in these nar-
ratives, and the newly arrived are recurrently portrayed in the act of
stepping off the boat or reaching such symbolic venues as London’s
Victoria Station (Procter 2003). Similarly recurrent is the image of the
newcomers arriving in London in clothes that reveal their tropical prov-
enance and which soon prove to be rather unsuitable for Britain’s cli-
mate. In Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Moses is all the more
surprised when he sees Henry Oliver, alias Sir Galahad, arriving at
Waterloo Station in a ‘grey tropical suit’ ([1956] 2006: 13).5 Reading
Oliver’s dressed body, Moses infers that, contrary to what he has been
told, Henry Oliver knows nothing about Britain’s weather, let alone
Britain itself. Like Sir Galahad, Lewis also arrives in London wearing ‘a
widebrim hat and a jacket falling below the knees’ (2006: 8), and in V.
S. Naipaul’s Half a Life the main character, Willie Somerset Chandran,
describes the clothes of a newly arrived West Indian man in analogous
terms: ‘wide-brimmed Jamaican hat and […] going-away tropical zoot-
suit trousers’ (2001: 82). On the one hand, the clothes worn by these
characters define them as individuals coming from a ‘tropical’, transat-
lantic locus, while on the other, they voice their future expectations in
the new country, both socially and economically. For, probably, these
male characters are sporting different versions or pieces of the so-called
‘zoot suit’, a style endowed with symbolic socio-economic meanings.
Consisting of high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed trousers and long
jackets with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders, the zoot suit was
popular within the African-American and Chicano communities of the
USA during the 1940s. By that time, the zoot suit had also edged its way
26 N. PEREIRA-ARES

into the Caribbean, both as a result of the influence exerted by American

culture and the existence of American military bases on the islands (Peiss
2011). Connected to the jazz scene, in America the zoot suit became
a symbol of ethnic pride in this period as well as a gesture of anti-sub-
servience (McRobbie 1989). In the Caribbean, as Kathy Peiss has noted
(2011), these connotations were partially lost. Certain groups reworked
the zoot suit to symbolise their disconformity with the legacy of British
colonialism, but others simply used it as a fashion statement. However,
almost ubiquitously, by dressing their bodies in zoot suits, which were
often made out of expensive fabrics, the wearers were proclaiming a
symbolic socio-economic message—we refuse to be the underprivi-
leged (Polhemus 2010)—a message that is arguably also attached to the
dressed bodies of the aforementioned characters.
Discussing the images of post-war black settlement in Britain, Stuart
Hall claims that during the 1950s and 1960s many West Indians travelled
to Britain in their ‘Sunday best’ (2000: 84). Their clothes, Hall argues,
were ‘those of someone determined to make a mark, make an impres-
sion on where they [we]re going. Their formality [wa]s a sign of their
self-respect. These [we]re not the victims of migration … These folks
mean[t] to survive’ (2000: 84). Like the real men and women to whom
Hall alludes, the above-mentioned characters also set foot in Britain in
smart clothes. Their garments speak both of their place of origin—a
‘tropical’ locus—and their future aspirations to achieve economic pros-
perity in the new country, aspirations evoked symbolically by the for-
mal suits they were wearing upon arrival. It can even be argued that
their dressed bodies render visible a dual, yet highly ambivalent, iden-
tity attachment, both to the Caribbean—the homeland that none the
less fails to provide them with opportunities for self-advancement—and
Britain—the new home, the mythical ‘motherland’ that, despite arousing
ambiguous feelings in its former colonial subjects, supposedly offers the
promise of economic self-betterment. Despite the resonances of the ‘zoot
suit’ as a symbol of ethnic pride, the formal suits worn by these charac-
ters act in the main as a passport to acceptance within Britain. Their suits
reflect the dominant ideology of ‘whiteness and civility’ that, as James
Procter goes on to submit, ‘Wole Soyinka associated with early postwar
dress in “Two in London” (1961): “My dignity is sewn / Into the lin-
ing of a three-piece suit. / Stiff, and with the whiteness which / Out-
Europes Europe”’ (Procter 2003: 70). Only later, in the 1970s, did the
idea of Black pride start to emerge in Britain, and it was precisely at that
moment that the ‘pristine, “starched” styles of the 1950s and 1960s were
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 27

exchanged for an “uncultivated”, “wild”, untended, dishevelled look’

(Procter 2003: 71) perfectly represented by the figure of the Rastafarian
that appears in later novels such as Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock (1999),
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) or even Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of
Suburbia, where Karim spots various Rastafarians in ‘dreadlocks half-way
down their back’ ([1990] 2009: 239).
In Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, as in other Windrush narratives, the
characters migrate to Britain in search of a Promised Land, dressing their
bodies in clothes packed with aspirations. Yet, once there, they find that
‘the streets of London [are not] paved with gold’ (Selvon 2006: 2). In
the post-war Britain they inhabit, the property market gradually gives in
to the so-called ‘colour bar’, and the newcomers begin to face ‘aggres-
sive landlords and foremen and Please No Coloured signs’ (Naipaul
[1962] 2002: 50). Some characters, such as Sir Galahad in The Lonely
Londoners, manage to get along, naïvely flaunting his advancement by
‘stocking up with clothes’ (Selvon 2006: 73); others such as Cap descend
into the underworld, a descent sartorially symbolised by the worn-out
trousers that expose his ‘backside’ (ibid.: 39). The characters in Selvon’s
The Lonely Londoners might not experience the blatant racism that was
to dominate the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet they are subject to a series
of prejudices and stereotypes based on their skin colour and differ-
ent culture. Despite racist provocations and the squalor they live in, the
‘boys’ in Selvon’s novel define themselves as ‘black Londoners’ (Nasta
2002: 107). They feel attached to Britain, the imagined ‘motherland’,
and yet the idea of a return ‘home’, so characteristic of diasporic fictions,
is always lingering in the background. The characters find themselves
located at an identity crossroads whose ambivalence is already foreshad-
owed by the ‘tropical suits’ that some of them wore on arrival. This
identity ambiguity does not lead to a clear solution or resolution in the
so-called ‘Moses trilogy’, not even in Moses Migrating, in which the main
character, Moses Aloetta, decides to go back to Trinidad, eventually real-
ising that he ‘belongs’ neither here (Trinidad) nor there (Britain). In a
certain way, and differences aside, he too becomes ‘the nowhere man’ of
Markandaya’s eponymous novel.
Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man occupies a more than promi-
nent place in any genealogy of South Asian diaspora writing in Britain.
Unlike the narratives dealt with so far, all of them focusing on the
(Indo-)Caribbean diaspora, The Nowhere Man explores the diasporic
experience of South Asians migrating from the Indian subcontinent
to Britain in the twentieth century, thereby featuring as a precursor to
28 N. PEREIRA-ARES

later fiction exploring the India–Britain diasporic route, such as Leena

Dhingra’s Amritvela (1988), Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
(1988) and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1994), to name but a few.
Together with Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird (1971), Markandaya’s
novel offers one of the earliest portrayals of ‘the harsh realities’ (Nasta
2002: 182) endured by first-generation migrants from the Indian sub-
continent in 1960s Britain. In fact, the context from which and about
which authors such as Markandaya wrote is different from that por-
trayed in novels such as Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. Whereas the early
post-war period has been described as ‘a laissez-faire phase within black
British cultural history’ (Procter 2000: 96), the 1960s and 1970s wit-
nessed the growth of racial intolerance. As Britain recovered from the
war and labour shortages ceased to be a problem, immigrants began to
be perceived as a threat (Brah 1996). Coming in large numbers, they
started to be blamed for the problems afflicting Britain: housing short-
ages and high levels of unemployment, among others. Anti-immigration
lobbying soon paved the way to a series of Immigration Acts (1962,
1968, 1971) aimed at restricting the entrance of immigrants to Britain.6
In the process, the political discourse of the period also became overtly
racist, emphasising the image of the immigrant as an alien threat.
Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech (1968)7 and later on Margaret
Thatcher’s comment about Britain being ‘swamped by people with a dif-
ferent culture’ (1978)8 epitomise the racist rhetoric that dominated these
decades.
In the streets, the institutionalised racism sanctioned by the state was
translated into insults and physical attacks towards immigrants. Avtar
Brah tells us that the ‘practice of Paki-bashing (an epithet naming the
violence perpetrated against South Asians in the period) reached its peak
during the late 1960s’ (1996: 27), and Dick Hebdige has even noted
that, vis-à-vis other minorities such as the West Indians, South Asians
were particularly singled out for ‘the brutal attention’ of certain rac-
ist groups because, ‘less easily assimilated than the West Indians into
the host community’ (2003: 58), they used to keep strikingly differ-
ent religious, eating and sartorial rituals. This idea is similarly voiced by
the main character and narrator of Dabydeen’s The Intended. Being an
‘Indian West-Indian Guyanese’ ([1991] 2005: 8), the young protago-
nist of Dabydeen’s novel reflects, at one point, on the cultural differences
existing between South Asians coming from the Indian subcontinent
and those arriving from the Caribbean. He feels that coming from an
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 29

Indian enclave in the West Indies, rather than from the Indian subconti-
nent, makes him less different from the native Britons he encounters in
London—a thought he relishes, considering the currency of the assim-
ilationist model at the time. Important for the purpose of the present
study, he comes to this conclusion after comparing his sartorial mores
to the apparel worn by Nasim’s relatives—a South Asian boy seriously
injured by a group of skinheads at the beginning of the novel: ‘I too
would have been wearing a turban if the British had not taken us away to
the Caribbean’ (ibid.: 17). South Asian clothes—and, in particular, the
turban—are here signalled as being more ‘Otherising’ than the garments
of Caribbean migrants. Not even the potential ‘tropicality’ of their suits
and outfits is as ‘Otherising’ as the turbans or saris worn by migrants
from the Indian subcontinent. In effect, the (Indo-)Caribbean charac-
ters analysed here are not regarded as being as ‘sartorially different’ as
their South Asian counterparts. They can more easily ‘mingle’ in sarto-
rial, albeit not always in epidermal, terms. Precisely because of the opera-
tion of the ‘epidermal racial schema’ (Fanon 2008: 4), acculturating the
dressed body is still a pressing concern for many of them and, in effect,
in Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, we see how Harris grounds his suc-
cess on the adoption of a clearly identifiable British appearance: ‘When
he dress, you think is some Englishman going to work in the city, bowler
and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm’ (2006: 103).
In an uncanny manner, the narrator of Dabydeen’s The Intended feels
both captivated and repelled by Nasim’s relatives, ‘the several Asians
wrapped in alien, colourful clothes’ (2005: 15). He feels transfixed by
the familiarity of the image. For these colourful clothes, like the bodies
of the wearers, bear upon themselves multiple (hi)stories of removal and
settlement, (hi)stories that are simultaneously his and not his, (hi)stories
that make the young boy ‘re-live […] the passages from India to Britain,
or India to the Caribbean to Britain’ (ibid.: 16). However, their distinct,
‘colourful’ clothes further ‘alienate’ their bodies and by extension his own
that is placed amid them. The protagonist of Dabydeen’s The Intended
and his peers come to perceive South Asian dress as an outward indica-
tor that accentuates ‘difference’, increasing the visibility of their skin
colour, a signifier that marks them out indelibly. They even feel embar-
rassed by association, to the point that ‘[w]henever an Asian sat next to
us on the Tube, dressed in a turban or sari, we would squirm with embar-
rassment, frozen in silence until the doors opened to release us at our
destination’ (ibid.: 15). Inadvertently, they have interiorised—and even
30 N. PEREIRA-ARES

become complicit with—the normative discourse of ‘whiteness’ and all

that this label entails. They have internalised the hegemonic gaze, ipso
facto perceiving South Asian dress as the epitome of ‘Otherness’. Their
rejection of South Asian diacritics underlies their desire to assimilate to
a hegemonic norm, a desire that is concomitant with the need to deflect
attention and even racist abuse. This foregrounds the importance of dress
in the process of racialisation, a fact recurrently explored in many of the
texts discussed throughout this book, and with which many writers are
also well acquainted. In an interview with Rebecca Hardy, for exam-
ple, Meera Syal concedes that, as a girl growing up in 1960s Britain, she
wished her Aunties did not appear ‘wear[ing] saris [while] walking down
Wolverhampton’ (Hardy 2009: 3), saris that attracted multiple stares and
somehow marked her as being ‘different’ or at the very least made her
‘visible’. Even more revealingly, as Harriet Lane explains, paraphrasing
Monica Ali’s words, when Ali’s family arrived in 1970s Britain, some of
her British relatives suggested that if she was ‘dressed carefully, no one
“need know”’ (Lane 2003: 4). Underlying this suggestion is the fact that
body and dress operate in close proximity when it comes to racialisation;
that dress can add further layers of racialisation to the body; that dress
can attract attention to or deflect attention from the body; and that dress
can make the wearer more visibly conspicuous, and therefore more likely
to suffer abuse. The strategic use of dress as a mechanism for ‘passing’ is
also inherent in this comment, and the alleged need to prevent people
from ‘know[ing]’ attests to the stigmatisation of the South Asian migrant
subject in the period. In effect, as Brah notes, in the 1960s and 1970s,
‘the Asian was an undesirable who “smelled of curry”, was “dirty”, wore
“funny clothes”, lived “packed like sardines in a room”, practiced “strange
religions” and so forth’ (1996: 22; emphasis added). As we shall see in
what follows, Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man explores the grad-
ual construction of the South Asian migrant as an ‘undesirable’ presence
in the post-war period. In the process, the novel registers the cultural
racism surrounding South Asian clothes in 1960s Britain, and it also
records the political currency that dress acquired during India’s struggle
for independence. Perceptively described by Susheila Nasta as being both
‘historic and haunting’ (2002: 182), The Nowhere Man provides a rich
sartorial archive, where the motif of dress connects the characters’ present
in Britain with their past in colonial India, showing how their diasporic
experience comes to be haunted by the spectres of colonialism. 9

* * *
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 31

Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man retells the story of Srinivas, an

Indian man who is indirectly forced to leave colonial India and whose
harrowing experiences as a diasporic subject in Britain culminate in his
death at the hands of Fred Fletcher, a young man who embodies and
enacts the racist attitudes and fabrications that circulated in Britain in the
late 1960s. Markandaya’s oeuvre has frequently been pigeonholed into
what K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar called ‘Indo-Anglian writing’ (1962)10 and,
partly as a result, critics have often overlooked the relevance that her
novel The Nowhere Man has within a tradition of South Asian diaspora
writing in Britain. Furthermore, as the Indo-Canadian writer and critic
Uma Parameswaran claims, on its publication in 1972, Markandaya’s
The Nowhere Man fell victim to ‘a conspiracy of silence. No one
wanted to draw attention to its disturbing theme of racial violence in
Britain’ (Parameswaran 2000: 25). By the time the question of racism
in post-war Britain began to be extensively problematised in fiction and
addressed directly in critical forums, Markandaya’s novel had been for-
gotten, relegated to a literary past to which few critics looked back, and
which new voices such as Salman Rushdie’s or Hanif Kureishi’s were
somehow eclipsing. Engaging with The Nowhere Man implies, therefore,
an archaeological endeavour. It implies digging up Markandaya’s novel
from where it has recurrently been buried, thus retrieving a fundamen-
tal link to any cartography of the literature of the South Asian diaspora
in Britain. Like other novels by Markandaya, such as, for example, Some
Inner Fury (1955) or Possession (1963), The Nowhere Man explores
the ‘East–West encounter’ (Banerji 1990: 37) or, more accurately, the
‘India–Britain relationship’ (Parameswaran 2000: 196). However, unlike
the rest of Markandaya’s narratives, The Nowhere Man is the only one
that focuses on the South Asian diasporic experience in Britain, even
though the novel flits between India and Britain, past and present.
Indeed, whereas the discourse-time (Genette 1980) in The Nowhere Man
unfolds within approximately one year—beginning in 1968—the story-
time of the novel spans more than sixty years, harking as far back as the
1900s.11 The fluctuation between past and present echoes, and is pro-
pelled by, Srinivas’s haunted temporality, which in itself poses a challenge
to the linearity of history. This non-linear temporality creates a condi-
tion of ‘time-lag’ (Bhabha 2004: 364), whereby the repressed colonial
memory returns and through which Markandaya ‘keeps alive the making
of the past’ (Bhabha 2004: 364).12 Through a series of analepses trig-
gered by Srinivas’s recollections, not only does the third-person narrator
32 N. PEREIRA-ARES

recount the trials of Srinivas in Britain, but also his previous life in India
and his timid actions against Britain’s colonial rule in the prelude to
independence, including his refusal to accept a gold medal that bears the
mark of ‘the imperial presence which haunted them all’—‘Georgius V Dei
Gra: Britt: Omn: Rex Fid: Def: Ind: Imp’ ([1972] 1973: 116). In this
way, Markandaya’s novel connects the post-imperial scenario of 1960s
Britain and India’s colonial past, effectively ‘show[ing] how the latter
affects immigrants in Britain’ (Ranasinha 2007: 155). For all these rea-
sons, Parameswaran proposes reading The Nowhere Man both ‘as socio-
literature that articulately and authentically record[s] life as lived during
a significant and fascinating period of India’s modern history, and as the
beginning of what is now known as Diaspora literature’ (2000: 15).
When the novel opens, Srinivas is already an old man ‘nearing seventy’
(Markandaya 1973: 1). Almost fifty years have passed since he first set
foot in Britain, and during this time his son Seshu has perished in the
Second World War; his wife Vasantha has died from tuberculosis; his son
Laxman has grown more and more apart from him; and Srinivas him-
self has begun a relationship with a white English woman named Mrs.
Pickering. In an act of superb focalisation (Genette 1980), the third-
person narrator first introduces the protagonist of Markandaya’s novel
through the eyes of Dr. Radcliffe, Srinivas’s doctor, and from his per-
spective, Srinivas emerges as

A spare figure […] A thin body, wearing tight white trousers and a black
coat—the tunic-and-tights uniform, copied by young women in brilliant
fabrics, that one saw flash past by the thousand in the streets of London.
To which this old man, with his serene eyes and composed bones, clearly
did not belong. Repudiated, in fact, with his quiet airs, at ease in a situa-
tion which could demoralize, as Dr. Radcliffe knew. (Markandaya 1973: 4)

Srinivas is thus described in bodily and sartorial terms, and his dressed
body locates him both ethnically and geographically. His ‘tight white
trousers’13 reveal his connection to the Indian subcontinent, whereas his
‘black coat’ links the character to Britain, his diasporic locus. In addition,
the portrayal of Srinivas conveys further information, being as much
haunting and spectral as premonitory and prophetic. He is depicted
as a quasi-ghostly figure, a ‘spare’ and almost disembodied soul. He is
said not to ‘belong’, but to what exactly he does not belong is highly
ambivalent. At first sight, the referent of the pronoun ‘which’ seems to
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 33

be the city of London: Srinivas, with his ‘serene eyes’ and ‘quiet airs’,
does not fit into the hustle and bustle of London. Yet, ‘which’ might
well refer to Srinivas’s body. Srinivas, with his ‘composed bones’, does
not seem to belong to his ‘thin’ body, a body that is severely afflicted
by disease. For the truth is that, at this point in the novel, Srinivas has
already developed leprosy, a disease that metaphorically stands for the
racial exclusion he has been suffering in recent years. Srinivas’s leprosy
is not explicitly mentioned until the last chapters of the novel where,
after multiple flashbacks, the narrative goes back to the point where it
began: the year 1968. However, the marks on Srinivas’s body and Dr.
Radcliffe’s arrangements for Srinivas to be examined at the ‘Hospital for
Tropical Diseases’ (ibid.: 6) ominously foreshadow the inevitable at the
inception of The Nowhere Man. The ambivalence encapsulated in the
‘which’ of the above-quoted passage serves to reinforce the correlation
that Markandaya establishes between Srinivas’s leprosy and his position
as an undesirable ‘Other’ in the bigoted context of 1960s Britain. His
body, and more importantly, all that it stands for—those ‘alien’ cultures
‘flooding’ and ‘threatening’ Britain—is repudiated, his disease being just
‘the excuse’ (ibid.: 241). Tragically enough, as we shall see, not only
is Srinivas repudiated by society, but also by his own son Laxman, for
whom Srinivas represents a ‘burden’ (ibid.: 310), both as the aged father
he should look after and, above all, as the only living connection to an
Indian past of which he is ashamed.
Away from Dr. Radcliffe’s house, for Srinivas, there is only one
place left to go, probably the sole place that, at his point, he can still
call home: his three-storey house in South London, always referred to as
No. 5 Ashcroft Avenue. The novel creates a symbolic symbiosis between
the old man and the house from the beginning to the very end. In fact,
at the inception of the novel, the house, which is already a ramshackle
building, remains erect only thanks to its firm girders, just like Srinivas,
whose ‘thin’ and ‘spare’ body is only supported by its ‘composed bones’
(ibid.: 4). The house has been witness to most of Srinivas’s fortunes and
misfortunes in Britain, and what is more, its ‘timber’ floor even bears a
resemblance to the ‘old wooden dwelling […] in a country left behind’
(ibid.: 16). Wood becomes here the first in a series of motifs that act as
‘link[s] with the past’ (ibid.: 16), immersing Srinivas in a swirl of rec-
ollections and allowing the reader to reconstruct the character’s life-
story. As we are told in retrospect, Srinivas and his wife Vasantha moved
to Britain in the 1920s and their two sons—Laxman and Seshu—were
34 N. PEREIRA-ARES

born in the same decade. Their settlement in Britain therefore pre-

dates the movements of post-war mass migration from the Indian sub-
continent and this periodisation is of paramount importance as it allows
Markandaya to highlight the changes surrounding British discourses on
immigration over several decades. Thus the bigotry that Srinivas con-
fronts in the late 1960s contrasts diametrically with the family’s experi-
ences before, during and in the years immediately following the Second
World War, a period frequently referred to in the novel as ‘the era of live
and let live’ (ibid.: 63, 168, 211). The Second World War is envisioned
in the text as a moment of historical trauma that none the less froze
and suspended many systems of belief: it ‘ripped away veils […] mak-
ing it difficult for conventions to rule with their previous inflexible rod’
(ibid.: 22). The bombings did not discriminate between sartorially differ-
ent bodies, and their consequences brought the neighbours at Ashcroft
Avenue closer to one another. As the narrative voice in Attia Hosain’s
‘Deep Roots’ puts it, ‘[t]here was, then, a bond that grew out of shared
hardships’ (2013: 21).
In this seemingly welcoming context, Srinivas begins to consider
himself ‘a naturalized Briton’ (Markandaya 1973: 97–98), ‘natural-
izing’ his own appearance by dressing his body ‘in the same [presum-
ably Western-style] blue suit’ (ibid.: 91). The image of Srinivas wearing
Western clothes contrasts with the figure of the old man dressed in
Indian-style trousers that features at the beginning of the novel—but
which, chronologically, occurs much later—and this sartorial contrast is
indicative of the changes affecting Srinivas in the interim that separates
both descriptions. Srinivas’s self-conscious process of ‘naturalisation’
has led certain critics, such as Sunita Rani (2010), to state that Srinivas’s
diasporic experience is dominated by the character’s attempt to assimi-
late into British culture, and his adoption of Western clothes is signifi-
cant in this respect. However, in her portrayal of Srinivas, Markandaya
goes beyond the rhetoric of assimilation, adumbrating the now voguish
discourse of cosmopolitanism. At one point in the text, Srinivas himself
declares he had ‘los[t] the fetters which tied him to any one country.
He was a human being, and as such felt he belonged to a wider citizen-
ship’ (Markandaya 1973: 40). In his self-definition, Srinivas exceeds the
‘either/or’ discourse—either Indian or British—in favour not just of a
‘both’, but of the notion of ‘a wider citizenship’, a concept that under-
pins most formulations of cosmopolitanism.14 However, in The Nowhere
Man, Srinivas’s cosmopolitan vision becomes a frugal utopia, and his
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 35

diasporic experience a trauma. Nostalgically, at the end of the narrative,

Srinivas remembers his wife Vasantha, the woman who had remained
‘wholly Indian’ all her life (ibid.: 40), ‘go[ing] about, in fact, uncom-
promised to the day of her death in nine yards of sari and sandals irre-
deemably Indian in style and cut’ (ibid.: 243). Vasantha’s dressed body
thus emerges here as a silent rebuke of Srinivas’s cosmopolitan fantasies.
Her sartorial manners are occasionally deemed atavistic, seen by Srinivas
as impenetrable forces that have even prevented him from enjoying the
beauty of Britain’s winters—‘infected by Vasantha, shivering in unsuit-
able clothes […] he had been conscious only of a cold that pierced to
the marrow’ (ibid.: 71). However, in the bigoted diasporic space of
Markandaya’s novel, it is Britain that turns out to be impenetrable for
Srinivas, and in the end he realises tragically that, despite all his efforts
and the (sartorial) concessions made, Britain still relegates him to the
position of ‘intruder’ (ibid.: 181).
Like Srinivas, Vasantha has not hesitated to ‘adopt[…] the foreign and
forsak[e] her own’ when necessary (ibid.: 20). However, unlike her hus-
band, she shies away from any potential identification with Britain, which
the novel allows us to interpret as her refusal to identify with the former
coloniser. In fact, like Debendranath Roy’s mother in Sunetra Gupta’s A
Sin of Colour (1999), Vasantha comes from an Indian ‘family of strong
ideals’, and during India’s struggle for independence she too used to
dress her body in ‘unbleached homespun’ (Gupta 1999: 8), the cloth
popularised by Gandhi as a form of protest. Characteristic of many first-
generation subjects, Vasantha nurtures a diasporic consciousness, recre-
ating a lost India ‘in alien surroundings’ (Markandaya 1973: 21), one
that, being ‘not available in any “real” sense’, becomes ‘an absence that
acquires surplus meaning by the fact of diaspora’ (Mishra 2008: 2). In
effect, the India Vasantha imagines and attempts to recreate is an India
‘of the mind’ (Rushdie 1992: 10), whose tangibility is reduced to cul-
tural objects such as the sari she wears, to iterated actions that make pre-
sent what is absent. Vasantha’s sari acts as a metaphor for the abandoned
homeland, re-enacting and reproducing it in the diaspora. Indian dress
provides Vasantha with a link to the past, while concurrently affording a
mechanism of identity performativity. The adoption of Western clothes
would destroy that link and, more importantly, it would compromise her
identity: ‘She would, she felt, merely look ridiculous if she painted her
face and put on a shirt and stockings, and only a widow, which thankfully
she wasn’t, would lop off her hair’ (Markandaya 1973: 35). Vasantha’s
36 N. PEREIRA-ARES

dressed body visibly defines her as a married Indian woman, a preroga-

tive she is not willing to forswear, neither for the sake of ‘integrating’,
as her son Laxman puts it (ibid.: 273), nor in the face of Britain’s cold
weather. Vasantha’s dress is therefore tightly bound to issues of ethnic
and gender identity, two categories that often become imbricated in the
context of diaspora (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1982; Yuval-Davis et al.
1989). In effect, it is not insignificant that Vasantha, as the woman, is
the one that retains and perpetuates the sartorial mores inherited from
a previous past in the Indian subcontinent—nor is she the only female
character in South Asian diaspora literature to be constructed in sarto-
rial opposition to her male counterpart.15 Women, as Floya Anthias
(1992) points out, have traditionally been construed as the bearers of
culture and, consequently, as the guarantors of collective continuity in
the diaspora. Figuring as ‘representatives’ of a given ethnic group, they
are therefore expected to stage a particular model of femininity through
body and dress, with sartorial transgression along ethnic lines impacting
on gender expectations (and even sexual reputations), and with sartorial
subversions along gender lines affecting issues of ethnic identification
and allegiance.
Vasantha’s attempt to recreate an ‘imaginary homeland’ (Rushdie
1992: 10) clashes with her son’s vehement denial of his Indian back-
ground. Unlike Srinivas and Vasantha, Laxman is a second-generation
diasporic character, born in Britain and educated in ‘Christian schools’
(Markandaya 1973: 19). Britain is his homeland and yet, from a ten-
der age, he has learnt that his body, his skin colour, which is ‘not even
brown but the finest […] elephant ivory’ (ibid.: 269), marks him out as
an ‘Other’. Ashamed of his origins, Laxman avoids any outward indica-
tor that might further call attention to his ‘Indianness’, and the novel
also emphasises his self-distancing from his parents. He is excruciat-
ingly embarrassed by them, particularly his mother, whose dressed body
becomes an unwanted visible reminder of the Indian ‘presence/absence’
(Hall 2003b: 241)16 he seeks to erase from his identity record:

Laxman could not help looking askance at his […] provincial parents […]
and his mother with her bun. And her clothes, like the robes Jesus Christ
wore, only worse with the cardigan […] he could not say exactly what he
wanted of his mother. But something: anything that she could do that
would sink her indistinguishably into England, instead of sticking out like
a sore thumb. (Markandaya 1973: 35)
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 37

Laxman adopts here a patronising and corrective attitude whereby he

blames his mother for being ‘different’ and refusing to assimilate into
British culture. However, what Laxman is actually doing is to project
the dominant gaze onto his mother’s dressed body. Reworking Frantz
Fanon’s words, it could be said that Laxman has let the racial ‘[sarto-
rial] schema’ penetrate his consciousness. He has come to see Asian dress
as being the clothes of the inferior ‘Other’, thus giving in to ‘the inter-
nalization—or better, the [sartorialisation] of this inferiority’ (Fanon
2008: 4). For Laxman, dress is a powerful signifier of integration and,
accordingly, he strives to make his ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1990)17 unques-
tionably British: ‘His voice, syllables, accent, syntax, the clothes he
wore, his manners, his style—all would proclaim him to be the same’
(Markandaya 1973: 269–270; emphasis added). His clothes and acces-
sories are, in effect, clearly and genuinely British: ‘Savile Row suit, and
[a] hat from Lock’s’ (ibid.: 278).18 Laxman sports the latest London
fashions, British brand-name clothing with which he simultaneously
seeks to buy status. His clothes reveal his attachment to a British, rather
than a diasporic, imaginary, concurrently bespeaking his identification
with the country of his birth. Yet, in the context of the novel, they can
also be read as part of that ‘hide’ Laxman has developed in order to
‘cover’ what he sees as ‘the deficiencies of his inheritance’ (ibid.: 310).
Building on this argument, Laxman’s clothes can even be compared
to the masks donned by Saladin in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Beset
by the racial exclusion he experiences at school, Saladin—like Rushdie
himself (Hamilton 1995)—adopts ‘masks that these fellows [his white
British classmates] would recognise, paleface masks, clown-masks, until
he fooled them into thinking he was okay’ (Rushdie 1988: 43). In their
attempts to ‘pass’ for whites, these two characters turn themselves into
paradigms of mimicry.19 However, in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses¸ the
phrasing of the above quotation holds Saladin’s white classmates, and not
Saladin himself, up to ideological scrutiny. Saladin eventually manages to
‘fool’ them, which situates him in some way in a position of intellectual
superiority, a position denied to Laxman in The Nowhere Man. What is
more, unlike Saladin in The Satanic Verses, in The Nowhere Man Laxman
is never ‘born again’ (Rushdie 1988: 3), never freed from slavish assimi-
lation, and the novel questions his investment in a form of self-identifi-
cation that casts off a part of himself. Despite his dress and mannerisms,
towards the end of the narrative, Laxman is confronted explicitly and
directly with ‘the fact of blackness’ (Fanon 2008: 82), when a white child
38 N. PEREIRA-ARES

named Joe disdainfully refers to him as ‘a black man’ (Markandaya 1973:

268). The incident, purposely placed in the 1960s section of the novel,
further highlights the overt racism of the period. Laxman might not
be ‘the nowhere man’ that features in the title of Markandaya’s novel,
but his plight is, in many respects, as tragic as Srinivas’s. His homeland,
Britain, turns out to be an unhomely place riddled with prejudice and
unwilling to grant him the condition of belonging.
When Vasantha dies, Srinivas is left alone in the old house when
Laxman moves to Plymouth with Pat, the white woman he has mar-
ried. Vasantha’s plan to have both her sons—and their future families—
living under the same roof is destroyed, and the novel thus explores
the challenge that diaspora poses to the notion of the extended fam-
ily so central to South Asian culture. In utter loneliness, Srinivas finds
comfort in Mrs. Pickering, the Englishwoman who takes care of him
until he dies. Four months after the death of Vasantha, Mrs. Pickering
moves in with Srinivas and, evincing the cultural racism already circu-
lating around Indian clothes, Srinivas’s neighbours welcome the pres-
ence of Mrs. Pickering, the woman who, after all, has ‘redeemed […]
[Vasantha’s] oddities of dress’ (ibid.: 73). Like Srinivas, Mrs. Pickering
occupies a marginal position in society, which in this case is of an eco-
nomic, rather than an ethnic, order. Mrs. Pickering has ‘no particular
home to go to’ (ibid.: 58) and her dress provides us with multiple clues
regarding her financial situation. Dress allusions ‘are often discrete exer-
cises in description’ (Hughes 2006: 3) and Mrs. Pickering’s ‘tattered’
stockings (Markandaya 1973: 52) are irrefutable proof of her pecuni-
ary difficulties. Moreover, Mrs. Pickering is said to wear a lemon-yellow
straw hat that, once an expensive accessory, is now disintegrating, as
Srinivas notices on seeing the ‘stalks of straw which had become unrav-
elled from the main weave’ (ibid.: 52). Despite its worn appearance, Mrs.
Pickering clings to her hat desperately. Like Vasantha, for whom clothes
are a perpetual reminder of the homeland left behind, Mrs. Pickering re-
enacts the past through the wearing of her shabby accessory. Her straw
hat conjures up memories of those years when she too could indulge in
‘[e]xpensive hats and gloves and shoes’ (ibid.: 57). But in The Nowhere
Man no character is even afforded the mere pleasure of living on illu-
sions. Reality is always lurking, waiting for the right moment to inflict a
mortal blow. Accordingly, Mrs. Pickering loses her self-construed link to
a previous affluent past when her cherished hat is crushed by a group of
idle youngsters.
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 39

Allowing some space for digression, it is worth noting that these

youngsters are dressed in what seems to be a rocker style: ‘leather
jacket[s] and winkle-picker shoes’ (ibid.: 56).20 That Markandaya
includes these sartorial details is by no means accidental or coinciden-
tal. To start with, the ‘leather jacket[s]’ worn by these idle youngsters
connect them with some of Fred Fletcher’s friends, who are also said
to be dressed ‘in leather’ (ibid.: 223), and in this way the scene involv-
ing Mrs. Pickering’s hat becomes premonitory of what is going to hap-
pen to Srinivas later in the narrative. Secondly, and however tangentially,
such sartorial references serve to bring to the fore the world of post-
war British subcultures, some of which fostered antagonistic relation-
ships with immigrant communities. In line with this, Dick Hebdige even
claims that we ‘can watch, played out on the loaded surfaces of British
working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since
the War’ (2003: 44–45) and, in effect, many South Asian diaspora fic-
tions echo this ‘phantom history’ by simply describing the character-
istic regalia of certain British post-war subcultures. In V. S. Naipaul’s
Half a Life, for example, the narrator speaks about a group of ‘young
men in mock-Edwardian clothes who roamed the streets looking for
blacks’ (2001: 109; emphasis added). The description alludes to a group
of teddy boys, and here clothes are used synecdochally to refer to the
members of this subculture. Emerging in 1950s London, the teddy boys
appropriated the Edwardian-style line of menswear popularised by the
tailors of Savile Row in the period, reworked its meanings and combined
it with eclectic features of American origin (Jefferson 1973).21 Their
styles of dress were, according to Tony Jefferson, an ‘attempt to buy sta-
tus’ (1973: 9), since the teds tended to occupy the position of ‘“lumpen”
youths’, facing periodic unemployment and unskilled jobs (ibid.). Being
one of the most vilified subcultures of the post-war period—for some
rather unjustly (Cross 1998)—the teds were frequently reported to be
behind racial attacks, most notably in the Notting Hill race riots of 1958.
According to Jefferson, the teds’ racism stemmed from a perception of
‘immigrants as actually making it—the corollary of this, of course, was
that they were making it “at the Teds’ expense”’ (1973: 9).
Like Naipaul’s Half a Life, Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird also high-
lights the teds’ aversion to immigrants, simultaneously making reference
to other post-war subcultures. At one point in the novel, one of the main
characters, Adit Sen, insists on accompanying his guests down the street,
adducing that ‘they might be assaulted by teddy boys’ ([1971] 1999: 27).
40 N. PEREIRA-ARES

To this, Bella responds: ‘It’s not teddy boys any longer […] It’s rock-
ers now, and mods’ (ibid.). Like the teddy boys, the mods were also a
genuinely British subculture. Emerging in the 1960s, the genesis of the
mods as a subculture is often traced back to a group of style-conscious,
lower-middle-class young Londoners connected to the jazz and R&B
scenes (Hebdige 1974).22 The mods, as we are told in Atima Srivastava’s
Transmission (1992), were obsessed with the smallest sartorial detail:
‘It was pure fashion’ and mod styles were ‘different every week’ (1992:
123). Indulging in the latest fashions, the mods became the symbol of
consumption in ‘Swinging London’ (Wilson 2010), an idea echoed in
Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, where Karim connects the members
of this subculture with ‘the painstaking accumulation of comfort and,
with it, status—the concrete display of earned cash. Display was the game’
(2009: 75). The mods’ style contrasted with that of the rockers, a subcul-
ture organised around the world of rock and roll. Indeed, according to
Ted Polhemus, ‘the Rocker’s visual iconography of studs, painted insig-
nia, chains and razor-sharp winklepickers was intended to leave no one
in doubt that the spirit of hard-hitting rock’n’roll was alive and kicking’
(2010: 80). Though there were different groups within the broader sub-
culture of the rockers, Mike Brake suggests that they all shared a ‘studied
scruffiness and aggressively working class masculinity’ (2013: 77). This
was even more so in the case of greasers, a mid-1960s group of rockers
that attempted to imitate the American Hell’s Angels. Whereas the rock-
ers used their distinctive attire to proclaim their ‘rock’n’roll authentic-
ity’, the greasers ‘used theirs to proclaim their badness’ (Polhemus 2010:
94–96). Whether their more aggressive and chauvinist character might
have made them more likely to indulge in racial violence is something that
neither Polhemus (2010) nor Brake (2013) tackle. Yet Hebdige (2003)
defines the greasers’ relationship with immigrant communities along the
parameter of antagonism, and whether or not a matter of coincidence, in
The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim is verbally abused by a greaser: ‘Once a
greaser rode past us on an old bicycle and said, as if asking the time, “Eat
shit, Pakis”’ (Kureishi 2009: 53).
By 1966, Hebdige states, the mod movement had begun to fade,
breaking down into a number of different scenes: ‘there was a polariza-
tion between the “hard mods” and those overtly interested in fashion
and the 60s look’ (2003: 55). Out of the so-called ‘hard mods’, Hebdige
explains, grew the skinheads, who constituted ‘an identifiable subcul-
ture’ by the late 1960s (2003: 55). Dressed in working-class clothes,
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 41

the skinheads explored a ‘downward’ dressing option, thus opposing

the mods and teds, who explored the ‘upward’ possibility through dress
(Hebdige 2003: 55). Like the teds, however, the skinheads were also
committed to recuperating a territoriality that they perceived as being
threatened by immigrants (Clarke 2006). The case of this subculture
leads us, in a sort of circular way, to Hebdige’s above-mentioned argu-
ment (2003), namely that the dressed bodies of post-war British subcul-
tures might enable us to reconstruct a tentative history of race relations
in the period. Because, paradoxically, while upholding an anti-immigra-
tion discourse, the skinheads drew on the music and style of West Indian
migrants (Hebdige 2003).23 This alliance, as Hebdige states, was only
possible because the members of this subculture addressed their hatred
towards other ‘alien groups’, most notably ‘“queers”, hippies, and
Asians’ (ibid.: 58). No wonder, therefore, that, on spotting a group of
skinheads dressed in ‘Levi’s, Crombies24 and braces’ (Kureishi 2009:
75), the protagonist of Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia avoids look-
ing at them: ‘I made sure we didn’t eyeball them and give them reasons
to get upset’ (ibid.: 75). Karim’s assertion that he recognises them ‘from
school’ (ibid.) is even reminiscent of Kureishi’s own encounter with this
subculture back in the 1970s. As Kureishi narrates in ‘The Rainbow
Sign’, as a teenager, he witnessed how some of his schoolmates became
skinheads and spent their free time beating up Asians. For Kureishi, it
‘was a shock’ to see one of his best friends dressed in ‘jeans […] Union
Jack braces […] [and] Doctor Marten’s boots’ (2002a: 26), a character-
istic skinhead ensemble that, according to Kureishi, was capable of trans-
forming the personality of the wearer. Dressed in this apparel, Kureishi’s
friend ‘seemed to have sprung up several inches’, gaining ‘a brand-new
truculent demeanour’ that opposed his previously ‘angel-boy’ image
(ibid.). Kureishi’s description shows the importance of dress in the con-
struction of the skinhead cult, and in contributing to accentuating the
skinheads’ hard image. The concatenation of dress and hardness (even
violence in this case) is further emphasised when Kureishi states that his
friend used to touch up his hair with a ‘a sharpened steel comb that also
served as a dagger’ (ibid.).
Kureishi’s portrayal of the skinhead subculture in ‘The Rainbow Sign’
agrees with most representations of it in the literature under considera-
tion here. In effect, the figure of the skinhead appears in many works
of fiction set in the late 1960s and 1970s, being associated almost ubiq-
uitously with racism. On some occasions, this subculture is mentioned
42 N. PEREIRA-ARES

explicitly in the texts—‘At his [Nasim’s] new school no one need know
that skinheads had beaten him up’ (Dabydeen 2005: 22); on others,
the narratives simply allude to the skinheads’ characteristic dress code,
thus relying on the reader’s ability to decode sartorial descriptions.
A clear example can be found in Farrukh Dhondy’s ‘Salt on a Snake’s
Tail’, where Jolil’s father encounters a group of white youths in ‘close-
fitting clothes and […] close-cropped hair’ (1986: 93)—a conspicu-
ous reference to the distinctive apparel and hairstyle sported by British
skinheads.25 Similarly, in Syal’s Anita and Me, Sam’s new clothes speak
silently of his newly adopted skinhead affiliation: ‘His hair […] a spiky
crew cut […] short denim jackets, tight jeans held up with braces, and
huge clumsy boots’ ([1996] 1997: 174). The boots Meena refers to are
the so-called Doc Marten boots which were popularised in 1960s Britain
by the skinheads (Brydon 1998). Relying on the association of this
type of footwear with the skinhead collective, in a later passage, Meena
appears haunted by the image of a pair of ‘boots smashing into the skull
of the Bank Manager’ murdered in the fictional village of Tollington
(Syal 1997: 282). This use of the pars pro toto reappears in Syal’s second
novel, where the character of Tania contends that ‘epistemic violence’
(Spivak 1987) can be as alarming and harmful as ‘a well-aimed Doc
Marten’ ([1999] 2000a: 145). In using such sartorial metonyms, these
narratives convey the fear and anguish that the mere sight of the skin-
head’s outfit—epitomised by their Doc Martens—might have instilled
in many South Asians living in 1960s and 1970s Britain. Furthermore,
this emphasis on dress serves to stress how the individuality of the wearer
dissolved, and was even locked into, the very ideology inscribed on the
dress of the whole collective.
No skinheads are referred to explicitly in Markandaya’s novel,
although Fred Fletcher could be said to prefigure them. Despite los-
ing her treasured hat at the hands of the above-mentioned youngsters,
Mrs. Pickering enjoys her present existence in Srinivas’s company. She
even instils a new vitality into his old house, cleaning and redecorating
it, which acts as a metaphor for the restorative effect her presence has
on Srinivas after the death of Vasantha. The two women even bear a
certain resemblance to one another, to the point where Srinivas sees his
dead wife materialising in the body of Mrs. Pickering—‘[Mrs. Pickering]
smoothing her dress as he remembered Vasantha doing with her sari, and
her thighs, his wife’s slender thighs, showing up in outline under the silk’
(Markandaya 1973: 162). However, their clothes are different, clothes
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 43

that locate them in different places: Britain and India. Arguably, Mrs.
Pickering and Vasantha represent Srinivas’s dual attachment to these
two countries. However, despite their resemblance, the two women are
different and their sartorial mores never intermingle. Vasantha never
puts on Western clothes, and Mrs. Pickering does not ‘wear silks, only
heavy, hairy woollen materials’ (ibid.: 162). Unlike the characters in
later fiction, whose bodies are dressed in ethnically diverse clothes (see
Chaps. 3 and 4), in The Nowhere Man the sartorial choices of the liter-
ary personae symbolically emphasise the existence of a dominant ‘either/
or’ opposition, either Indian or British. Srinivas attempts, as mentioned
earlier, to exceed this binary, yet in the end his attempts prove futile. In
febrile delirium, Srinivas refers to Mrs. Pickering as Vasantha, but these
women—like their sartorial paradigms—stand for two identity configura-
tions that, in the context of Markandaya’s novel, seem irreconcilable.
In Mrs. Pickering’s company, Srinivas grows more and more attached
to Britain, which serves to make his racial ostracism appear even more
tragic and dramatic at the end of the novel. In his confessions to the old
woman, Srinivas even refers to Britain as ‘my country’ (ibid.: 60), nostal-
gically adding that he ‘feel[s] at home in it, more so than [he] would in
[his] own’ (ibid.: 61). Soon, however, his peaceful existence is disturbed
by the haunting memories of colonialism, memories that hang ‘on
the robes of the soul’ (Gunesekera [1994] 1998: 39). The novel thus
builds on the trope of ‘colonial haunting’ (O’Riley 2007: 8), one that
is triggered by Srinivas’s traumatic memories of his life in colonial India,
and one that allows for a dramatised account of ‘the unspoken, unrep-
resented pasts that haunt the historical present’ (Bhabha 2004: 18).
Through the ‘invasion of the projective past’ (ibid.: 365), The Nowhere
Man gives credence to Markandaya’s self-acknowledged ‘awareness
of history’ (Markandaya 1976: 29), as the novel records such histori-
cal events as the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, the Independence of India
in 1947 and Britain’s last effort to regain its imperial power during the
Suez War of 1956. It is precisely when Srinivas hears ‘the reverberations
of the Suez crisis’ (Markandaya 1973: 97) in Britain that the spectres of
his colonial past return to haunt his diasporic present, with dress becom-
ing the medium through which the haunting occurs. In a clear example
of how Markandaya uses dress to connect colonial India and postcolonial
Britain, Srinivas imagines Egypt being occupied by the Union Jack and
‘men in khaki’ (ibid.), the same clothes that dressed the bodies of those
British officers who once raided his house back in 1920s India:
44 N. PEREIRA-ARES

They filled the room, towered over the occupants with their presence, the
bulk of hobnailed boots, their buckled belts. Overwhelmed, in their uni-
forms. One forgot there were men under the khaki, as one was meant to
do […] Contained within an aura, a glittering envelope of subtle intimi-
dation, and invested in the robes of authority which were colored khaki.
(ibid.: 138)

In this passage, which is ‘time-lagged’ (Bhabha 2004: 364), the offic-

ers are conspicuously depersonalised. Their portrayal, reduced to a
series of sartorial details, depicts them as quasi-machines. Their human
side seems to have melted away under the khaki trappings of authority,
as it is ‘meant’ to. Their uniform, and especially their bulky boots and
belts—items frequently charged with connotative meanings of aggres-
sion—intimidate those gathered in the house, whose bodies are meta-
phorically said to shrink out of fear, to such an extent that their garments
no longer fit them, hanging instead ‘loosely on their abject frames’
(ibid.). While revealing the power of dress to symbolise or even enact
authority, the above-quoted extract also evinces, in a Fanonian way
(2008), the negative effects that the colonial project had upon both col-
oniser and colonised.26 For, when stripped of ‘the robes of authority’,
the aforementioned officers are not faceless automatons, but rather ‘pink
young m[e]n’ who ‘play […] polo on the maidan, in dusty breeches and
shirt’ (ibid.).27 As for Srinivas, his ordeals as a colonial subject have left
traumatic memories in him, and the image of men attired in khaki has
become a haunting ghost which, like Jacques Derrida’s notion of the
spectre (1994), exhibits a liminal status as it exists in a space between
absence and presence, past and present, India and Britain.
Srinivas’s self-fabricated vision of hordes of men marching over Egypt
in khaki uniforms rekindles the memories of his life as a colonial sub-
ject in India, memories which had up until then remained dormant, but
never altogether disappeared. Traumatic episodes such as the raid on his
house in 1920s India have left a scar on his psyche, something similar to
what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘affection-impression’ trace—‘the passive per-
sistence of first impressions: an event has struck us, touched us, and the
affective mark remains in our mind’ (2006: 427). The fear and anguish
that khaki-coloured clothes continue to arouse in Srinivas result from the
passive persistence of the traces left by the yoke of colonialism, just as
Srinivas’s traumatic memories stand for the wounds that afflict India’s
collective memory: ‘Blood which came down from generation to genera-
tion, holding in solution memories and truths as indestructibly as genes,
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 45

as demonstrably as slowworms’ (Markandaya 1973: 99). From Sigmund

Freud ([1914] 1958a) to contemporary trauma studies (Caruth 2010;
Herman 1992), the process of going through a traumatic experience
is often said to recall the compulsion to repeat it. This compulsion to
repeat might not always manifest itself through a verbal rendition of the
traumatic event, but rather through attempts to ‘act […] it out’ (Freud
1958a: 150). In The Nowhere Man, Mrs. Pickering detects this compul-
sive need in Srinivas’s behaviour: ‘“You keep harping on the past,” she
said. “It crops up time and again, I can always tell when it does because
you become a different man. Your past […]”’ (Markandaya 1973: 103).
Srinivas becomes a different man when haunted by the past. He behaves
differently, as when he ventures out of the house in his ‘bare feet’
(ibid.: 101), remembering and repeating what he used to do in India.
Srinivas’s act of going out barefoot represents another motif that allows
Markandaya to connect the character’s past and present. What is more,
and inasmuch as it goes against British sartorial conventions, Srinivas’s
decision to walk along British streets without shoes can even be inter-
preted as a symbolic act of defiance and disapproval vis-à-vis Britain’s
return ‘to peremptory imperial ways’ during the Suez crisis (ibid.: 98),
an act that repeats his former revolutionary modes in colonial India, and
anticipates the message of protest with which Srinivas imbues his dhoti28
towards the end of the novel.
Drawing on Freud’s analysis of mourning (1958a), Paul Ricoeur
ponders the extent to which private and public expressions of trauma
might help to substitute ‘acting out for the true recollection’ (2006:
79), eventually leading to the reconciliation between past and present.
In Markandaya’s novel, Mrs. Pickering also encourages Srinivas to exor-
cise his past by sharing it with her, saying that ‘life can go rancid if one is
haunted too long’ (Markandaya 1973: 103). Through another flashback
triggered by Srinivas’s recollections, we learn about his life in the Indian
subcontinent, as well as about the politics and poetics of dress in colonial
India. Srinivas’s life-story in India plunges the reader into the prelude
to independence, a period in which clothes became politically signifi-
cant, a silent weapon used wisely by nationalist leaders. The Nationalist
Movement is brought to the fore through Vasantha’s family. Her broth-
ers, all of them lawyers, are embroiled in anti-colonial politics and at a
given point they resign from their posts as a means of inveighing against
the colonial government. For their part, the women of the family, includ-
ing Vasantha, initiate a protest through their dressed bodies:
46 N. PEREIRA-ARES

They kindled a bonfire and burned on it every article of what they thought
to be British-manufactured […] Silks and cottons, doilies of Brussels lace
[…] were hurled on to the flames […] their pretty clothes […] [were sub-
stituted for] the lumpish, coarse, off-white homespun they thenceforth
wore. (ibid.: 114)

As in Markandaya’s (1955) Some Inner Fury, here the burning of for-

eign cloth and Vasantha’s embrace of homespun khadi are plotted as
unequivocal allusions to the Swadeshi Movement of the first decade of
the twentieth century, and to Mahatma Gandhi’s subsequent defence
of khadi as part of his non-cooperation politics during India’s struggle
for independence.29 Originally, the Swadeshi Movement purported to
give impetus to an Indian textile industry that had been devastated by
the impact of British self-serving trade policies—‘It was the British, of
course, who destroyed our textile industry’, explains Chanu in Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane ([2003] 2007: 262). But, the movement soon became
a political symbol of India’s struggle for independence. Where British
cloth had been the most conspicuously visible sign of Britain’s politi-
cal and economic domination, khadi became the most potent symbol of
the idea of a politically and economically free India. ‘[T]he economics of
cloth and the semiotics of cloth’ became indissolubly intertwined in the
figure of Gandhi, who turned khadi into the ‘fabric of Indian independ-
ence’ (Bean 1989: 359), and his dressed body into a palimpsest which
transcended ‘the limitations of language in multilingual and illiterate
India’ (ibid.: 368). During the struggle for independence, Gandhi did
not simply dress his body in khadi—first in the form of a dhoti and later
a short khadi loincloth (Tarlo 1996). He also encouraged Indian peo-
ple to boycott foreign clothes and adopt the ‘vow of swadeshi’ (quoted
in Tarlo 1996: 87), a vow that Vasantha’s family took and accepted as
a ‘discipline’ and with ‘accumulating grace’ (Markandaya 1973: 114).
In contrast to mill-cloth, khadi was hand-spun from indigenous Indian
yarn. Consequently, in order to clothe India in khadi, the tradition of
hand-spinning had to be revived. Gandhi promoted the creation of train-
ing centres for spinning and weaving (Tarlo 1996), some of which might
have been attended by Vasantha in The Nowhere Man. Indeed, Vasantha
is said to have ‘learned to spin, as all patriotic little Indian girls obedi-
ently did’ (Markandaya 1973: 114).
Khadi and its associated symbolism is a recurring motif in many
(post-)colonial as well as diaspora narratives. In Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 47

(1938), a burning dhoti literally and symbolically becomes ‘the ammuni-

tion used by the villagers to unleash anarchy’ (Chatterjee 2000: 112);
and in Ravinder Randhawa’s Hari-jan (1992), Laxmi, an Indian woman
living in Britain, wears khadi as an assertion of her Indian identity, as a
symbolic text(ile) through which she makes a stand against those who
cast aspersions on her ‘Indianness’ simply because she has married a
white man.30 In The Nowhere Man, Vasantha’s sartorial manoeuvre high-
lights the political currency of clothes during India’s struggle for inde-
pendence, and the novel proves to be an important source of historical
evidence in this respect.31 Khadi acquires, none the less, further symbolic
resonances when Srinivas’s father, Narayan, adopts it for a short time. A
‘lecturer at the Government College’ (Markandaya 1973: 105), Narayan
is said to have always and unquestionably followed British prerogatives in
colonial India, because ultimately the family’s livelihood depended ‘upon
the government, which was British’ (ibid.: 110). Accordingly, he has
dutifully complied with the decreed college uniform, dressing his body
in ‘white duck trousers and black alpaca coat’ (ibid.: 126). However,
following the Amritsar Massacre, Narayan begins to feel like a ‘leper’
(ibid.: 131)—and note here the parallel established between Narayan and
Srinivas, who develops leprosy in Britain. Narayan then decides timidly
to side with the revolutionary cause, showing his allegiance through his
dressed body. For a day, Narayan lays aside the prescribed college uni-
form and dresses his body in Gandhian clothes: ‘Khaddar shirt, khaddar
dhoti, khaddar cap’ (ibid.: 126). Narayan’s ‘revolutionary regalia’ (ibid.:
127) turns out to be a brief sartorial gesture in favour of the national-
ist enterprise. Yet it represents an act of bravery on the part of a man
who has had to put up with manifold affronts from his British colleagues:
invitations to the principal’s home are never extended to him, nor are his
professional merits duly recognised. Consequently, Narayan’s turning to
khadi, however fleeting it might be, does not simply represent a politi-
cal declaration articulated through the dressed body. It also allows the
character to redeem his previous pusillanimous attitudes. By dressing his
body in khadi, Srinivas’s father is, for the first time, making a multi-lay-
ered statement, a statement as much intended to vindicate India’s free-
dom from colonialism as to advocate social equality. In almost analogous
terms, Narayan’s sartorial gesture in India is later mirrored by Srinivas in
London, and in this way, the resonance of dress as a form of resistance
and even protest ricochets between geographies.
48 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Almost an outlaw in colonial India as a result of his father’s revo-

lutionary deeds, Srinivas is advised to leave the country: ‘there was no
place left for him [Srinivas] in the country of his birth’ (ibid.: 178). With
the image of Srinivas’s departure from India, the narrative returns to the
present: Britain in the late 1960s. The country to which we return has
none the less changed over the years: ‘the era of live and let live was end-
ing’ (ibid.: 168). Racial attitudes have shifted dramatically since the early
post-war period. The growing presence of migrants is not welcomed by
Srinivas’s neighbours, and ‘step by step […] racism [has been] institu-
tionalized, legitimatized, and nationalized’ (Fryer 2010: 381). Indeed,
Fred’s racist crusade is sparked off when a friend of his blames Britain’s
immigrant population for the country’s economic decline and the rise of
unemployment in a passage that recalls the bigoted discourses of such
contemporary figures as Duncan Sandys or Enoch Powell:

One day he [Fred] found out, from a mate of his who had had it straight
from the mouth of his councilor. The blacks were responsible. They came
in hordes, occupied all the houses, filled up the hospital beds and their off-
spring took all the places in schools […] his mate had also spoken of differ-
ent habits and alien characteristics. ((Markandaya 1973: 171)

Using the rhetoric of the so-called ‘new racism’ (Barker 1981), Fred’s
friend articulates racism along cultural, social and economic lines.
Immigrants are held to be responsible for swamping the country with
‘alien’ customs, as well as causing innumerable problems for Britain’s
social, economic and health systems. Markandaya’s novel thus emphasises
the way in which the economic difficulties faced by Britain at the time
contributed towards exacerbating the racial conflict. Unable to secure
decent jobs, young men such as Fred blame immigrants for all their mis-
fortunes, harbouring strong feelings of blind hatred and becoming all
the more resentful when they observe that many migrants have managed
to make it in Britain: ‘It’s these people… These immigrants […] One
day they’re poor, living off the rates, the next they could buy us all up’
(Markandaya 1973: 207). That Fred’s friend is presumably reproducing
the words of ‘his councilor’ is significant, for it serves to present Fred’s
subsequent racist acts as popular materialisations of the institutionalised
racism of the period. In effect, Fred soon sets himself up as a crusader
whose destiny is to ‘lead his countrymen in the fight to overthrow the
evil, hidden forces that were threatening them in their homeland’ (ibid.:
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 49

292). Srinivas, a defenceless old man, becomes the main target of Fred’s
racist violence, the person on whom Fred ‘pin[s] the blame’ for all his
ills (ibid.: 171). As Fred begins to torment Srinivas in every possible
manner—he leaves faeces on Srinivas’s doorstep and abuses the old man
repeatedly—we bear witness to how Srinivas, who was once forced to
abandon his home-land, also becomes a repudiated figure in Britain, the
host-country.
Confronted with the fact that, ‘at the end of [all] these assimilating
years’, he is considered ‘an alien’ (ibid.: 241), Srinivas makes a power-
ful sartorial statement before dying. He searches for ‘the thin white mull
dhoti’ that his mother once slipped into his suitcase, and ties it about
him, deftly ‘arrang[ing] its fluffy white folds’ (ibid.: 241–242). Dressing
his body in the most Gandhian garb he still owns, Srinivas reverts to
his Indian identity as never before in Britain. He feels that his previ-
ous sartorial attempts to mingle visually with the white British major-
ity have been a mistake. They have only served to distance him from
his Indian past, without allowing him the benefit of being unreservedly
considered part of Britain either: ‘It was my mistake to imagine. They
will not, except physically […] have me enter. I am to be driven outside
[…] An outsider in England. In actual fact I am, of course, an Indian’
(ibid.: 242–243). In a certain way, it is as if by donning his old dhoti,
Srinivas was striving not to become ‘the nowhere man’ of the novel’s
title. Srinivas’s dhoti constitutes an identity statement, but it simultane-
ously emerges as a sartorial act of defiance—which bears comparison to
the meanings of resistance inscribed on the hijabs worn by some female
characters in certain post-9/11 narratives (see Chap. 5). Precisely at the
time when racism becomes more rampant, Srinivas decides to make his
‘Indianness’ all the more visible, without fearing or even caring about
the potential consequences. In fact, Srinivas disregards Mrs. Pickering’s
warning not to go outside wearing a dhoti—‘[i]t is asking for trouble’,
she adds (ibid.: 244). In turn, this suggests that the wearing of this gar-
ment makes Srinivas more likely to be racially abused in the heated con-
text of the novel, and ostensibly in the actual period in which the text
is set. Srinivas’s dhoti becomes in this way a form of protest, a means of
making a stand against racism. It acts as an outward signifier of resist-
ance that calls to mind the strategic use Gandhi made of this piece of
clothing during India’s struggle for independence. What is more, it is
almost impossible to overlook the parallelism that Markandaya draws
between Srinivas’s act of wearing a dhoti in the postcolonial context of
50 N. PEREIRA-ARES

1960s Britain and Narayan’s revolutionary manoeuvre of donning khadi

in colonial India, a parallel that clearly illustrates how the sartorial sub-
text in the novel sutures together past and present, colonial India and
postcolonial Britain. Albeit in different chronotopoi, these two men once
believed in the possibility of a dual identity, partaking of British culture
and even assimilating their Indian selves into it. However, the discrimi-
nation they have faced, either in India or Britain, forces them to stick
to one part of the either/or binary. Their return to traditional Indian
clothes reveals their final choice, simultaneously acting as a symbol of
rebellion against those discourses that have construed them as inferior
subjects or intruders.
In The Nowhere Man, Britain emerges as an unfriendly, diasporic
locus, where economic stagnation and racist attitudes are rampant, and
where the attempts of migrant characters to be accepted in the host soci-
ety are constantly boycotted. This scenario is shared by other early post-
war diasporic fictions, including Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird, where
Adit Sen’s diasporic experience mirrors Srinivas’s in certain respects.
Like Srinivas, Adit initially puts aside the old colonial grudges in order
to savour the cosmopolitan side of London. A first-generation South
Asian migrant, Adit is portrayed as an Anglophile and, at the start of the
novel, his nightwear can even be said to symbolise his palpable adora-
tion for Britain, with his ‘dressing gown of cornflower blue […] and […]
pillar-box red nylon sleeping suit’ ([1971] 1999: 9; emphasis added)
loosely recalling the colours of the Union Jack. However, as the novel
moves forward, Adit also begins to feel disappointed with Britain, real-
ising that the utopian cosmopolitan metropolis is just a self-fabrication.
In the streets, the insults hurled at South Asians—‘wog’ (ibid.: 14) and
the ‘Nigger go home graffiti on the walls’ (ibid.: 181)—make him aware
of this poignant reality. Instantly, as we are told, ‘his “feel” for British
history and poetry […] fell away from him like a coat’, leaving him ‘[u]
nclothed’, ‘shiver[ing] in the cold and fear[ing] the approaching winter’
(ibid.: 182). Adit’s realisation is thus expressed through a sartorial meta-
phor. The ‘coat’ represents Adit’s Anglophilia and, like Adit’s enthusiasm
for England, this coat has ‘been secretly undermined by moths’ (ibid.:
182), moths that stand for the agents that have racially abused Adit in
1960s Britain. Paradoxically, during his years in Britain, the coat (Adit’s
Anglophilia) has acted as both a blindfold and a shield, making him
immune to racist discourses. However, when the coat falls away from
his shoulders, Adit faces the cruelty of reality, ‘shivering’ and ‘fearing’
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 51

the cold which, in this extended metaphor, represents Britain’s hostility

towards immigrants. Like Srinivas in The Nowhere Man, Adit realises that
he represents an unwelcome presence in Britain, and paralleling Srinivas’s
condition as a leper, Adit also somatises his anxiety, developing a sense of
‘nostalgia’ that soon ‘become[s] an illness, an ache’ (ibid.: 183; emphasis
added).
In both novels, and particularly in The Nowhere Man, the diseased or
afflicted body is thus deployed metaphorically to allude to the damage
inflicted by racism. This involves a reworking of the trope of the disa-
bled body that features in many colonial works of fiction, where it often
stands for the psychological wounds of colonialism (Barker 2016). It is
no coincidence that the ‘blotchy beginnings of disease’ become visible
on Srinivas’s hands after he is physically assaulted by Fred (Markandaya
1973: 196). Srinivas’s leprosy, mentioned earlier, indeed acts as a met-
aphor for his position as an ‘undesirable “Other”’ in 1960s Britain.
Like the leper, Srinivas becomes an outcast in Britain, the only differ-
ence here being that ostracism pre-dates the emergence of the disease.
Racial discrimination is in fact the metaphorical cause of Srinivas’s lep-
rosy. Additionally, the anxiety that his illness provokes among his neigh-
bours is used figuratively in the text to represent those post-war British
discourses that envisioned mass migration from the former colonies as
being an endemic threat. Leprosy is commonly associated with tropi-
cal places which, in the context of the novel, evoke the former colonies
and, in particular, India. Leprosy is also a contagious disease, commonly,
albeit erroneously, seen as being easily-spread and difficult to contain—
attributes that were used at the time to describe the alleged menace
that the new waves of immigrants were posing to Britain. As seen by
his neighbours, Srinivas’s leprosy constitutes a ‘threat’ or, as one of his
lodgers puts it, a ‘monstrous intrusion from a far country’ (ibid.: 239).32
Significantly, in this last quotation, Srinivas’s leprosy is described in terms
that conjure up the notion of colonisation, as his neighbours present his
disease as a territorial incursion. At stake here, one could argue, is a fig-
uratively expressed ‘anxiety of reverse colonisation’ (Arata 1990), with
Srinivas’s body being seen as a source of pollution and as an intrusive
force that ‘endangers’ both individual bodies and the national body. This
argument is reinforced by Fred’s own fear of himself becoming ‘a leper’
after assaulting Srinivas: ‘You will never make me a leper’ (Markandaya
1973: 276; emphasis in the original), which could be translated into
‘you will never make me an “Other”’. For Fred, only fire can purify the
52 N. PEREIRA-ARES

community, ridding it of the disease—and metaphorically of immigrants

like Srinivas—and this is just what he plans to do.
Before his final attack on Srinivas’s house, Fred decides to buy a
coat that can add visually to his metamorphosis into ‘Britain’s saviour’.
His friends advise him to go to Carnaby Street, where ‘a coat such as
bewitched his mind’s eye might be procured’ (ibid.: 288). However,
Fred soon realises that Carnaby Street—one of the epicentres of fash-
ion in 1960s London—has little to offer in exchange for his mother’s
money. While Laxman, Srinivas’s son, dresses in Savile Row suits, Fred
cannot afford to buy a coat on Carnaby Street. Their respective abil-
ity or inability to obtain fashionable commodities reveals their different
economic status, and the novel thus draws attention to the correlation
between Fred’s racism and his economic precariousness, for which Fred
blames migrants. Meandering through an open-air market in Soho, Fred
finally spots a coat that suits his pocket: ‘Scarlet, and gold, with loops,
and lanyards, and braid, and a broad white buckskin crossbelt’ (ibid.).
This brightly coloured coat attracts Fred, mainly because it radiates
power and authority. Fred imagines the coat as having been ‘the vest-
ments [once] laid, somewhere, sometime, on proud viceregal shoulders’
(ibid.). He fabricates a history for this coat, connecting it with the rega-
lia worn by colonial viceroys, and the novel thus utilises clothes to link
colonial India and postcolonial Britain repeatedly. What is more, that
Fred’s newly acquired coat exudes authority is reminiscent of ‘the robes
of authority’ worn by the British officers who burst into Srinivas’s house
back in 1920s India. And, as the latter did, Fred also assaults Srinivas’s
house (now in Britain), setting the whole building on fire. Ironically,
Fred’s coat, initially aimed at protecting and even hardening his per-
sona, becomes the cause of his death, as it catches on an old gadget in
the basement and thwarts his escape. In an act of poetic justice, Fred
Fletcher dies engulfed by the raging flames. His body ends up ‘charred’
(ibid.: 311), whereas Srinivas emerges ‘untouched’ (ibid.). Not even his
clothes—or ‘his fine white thatch’ (ibid.)—show any trace of the fire.
Laxman rescues his father before the flames reach him, literally carrying
his ‘burden’ until the last moment, when Srinivas, like the burning house
he has inhabited, crumbles. Presumably, Srinivas dies as a result of the
deep shock he has suffered and, in this way, the novel does not afford
Fred the pleasure of murdering Srinivas. The old man resists and survives
Fred’s attack. However, the racism that Fred demonstrates has damaged
Srinivas severely, metaphorically leading him to develop leprosy.
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 53

Deploying a lexicon of haunting and spectrality, Markandaya’s The

Nowhere Man offers a bleak portrayal of the migrant experience, where
the postcolonial repeats the colonial, and where the diasporic present
of the characters is haunted by the spectres of colonialism. The cloth-
ing subtext of the novel, as we have seen, plays a central role in artic-
ulating this haunting and spectral aspect of the novel. In The Nowhere
Man, Markandaya threads a network of sartorial associations into an
almost symbolic system connecting the past and the present, the colo-
nial and the postcolonial, India and Britain. Srinivas’s bitter memories
of khaki garments in colonial India return when he envisions hordes of
men in khaki marching over Egypt; the military-styled coat Fred sports
when he attacks Srinivas’s house in Britain is reminiscent of the clothes
of authority worn by the British officers who burst into Srinivas’s home
in India; and Narayan’s act of dressing his body in khadi in colonial
India is similarly re-enacted by his son Srinivas in postcolonial Britain.
In The Nowhere Man, sartorial references are plotted with a specific sym-
bolic function, with most items of dress having a symbolic germaneness
to past, present and future happenings. While exploiting the potential of
literary dress, and recreating various sartorial identities, Markandaya’s
novel also provides a historically well-informed account of sartorial
matters in both colonial India and postcolonial Britain. History, Paul
Ricoeur (2006) argues, is often constructed out of archived memories,
and in The Nowhere Man Srinivas’s memories allow us to visit and revisit
the historical archive of sartorial relations between Indians and Britons
over various decades and across two different loci, India and Britain. The
novel thus invites us to reflect on both the colonial and the postcolo-
nial legacy carried by South Asian dress. It invites us to consider how
pressing and political the issue of clothing might be for many South
Asian diasporic subjects, subjects who have faced the burden of negotiat-
ing their Indian dress in two contexts—colonial India and postcolonial
Britain—where the structures of power have always stayed with those
bodies dressed in European clothes, and characters that, in the con-
text of Markandaya’s text, end up using Indian clothes to rebel against
a discrimination that has followed them in their journey from India to
Britain. As in other early post-war South Asian novels, in The Nowhere
Man the diasporic space becomes inhospitable and the prospects for
diasporic characters are reduced either to a return to their original home-
land; to an existence doomed to alienation; or, as happens in the case of
Srinivas, to death. In The Nowhere Man, both the diasporic subjects and
54 N. PEREIRA-ARES

those who, a priori, see themselves as the native inhabitants of Britain,

are ultimately and irremediably trapped in an either/or discourse—what
Laxman refers to as the ‘Them and Us’ dichotomy (ibid.: 269)—and
the non-existence of hybrid sartorial identities reinforces this idea. As we
shall see in Chap. 3, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia upends
this binary, creating and re-creating a sartorial ‘carnival’ that, as Salman
Rushdie would put it, ‘rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolut-
ism of the Pure’ (1992: 392).

NOTES
1. Empire Windrush is the name of the ship that docked at Tilbury in 1948.
For more information, see James Procter (2000) or Matthew Mead
(2009), among others.
2. In Slave Song (1984) and The Counting House (1996), as well as in criti-
cal works such as Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in
the Caribbean (1996), David Dabydeen has researched the relationship
between slavery and Indian indentured labour in the Caribbean.
3. This migratory route is echoed, with varying degrees of emphasis, in
novels such as Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), Hanif
Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef
(1994) and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s memoir Love in a Headscarf
(2009), among others.
4. This is a reference to Nirad A. Chaudhuri’s A Passage to England, a col-
lection of essays first published in 1959. The title of Chaudhuri’s book
evokes and plays with the title of Edward Morgan Foster’s novel A
Passage to India (1924).
5. At some point in George Lamming’s The Emigrants, the first person nar-
rator notes that the newly arrived are desperately trying ‘to crouch further
into their garments’, having no ‘rain clothes’, no suitable ‘wear for this
[British] climate’ ([1954] 1982: 107, 113, 224); and Kamau Brathwaite’s
poem ‘The Emigrants’ evokes a similar image when it alludes to the ‘hats
[and] rain-cloaks’ worn by the newcomers ([1967] 2000: 52).
6. For more information, see Avtar Brah (1996), Dilip Hiro (1971), Peter
Fryer (1989), Colin Holmes (1991), Shinder S. Thandi (2007a) or
Robert Winder (2005), among others.
7. Enoch Powell delivered this speech at the Annual General Meeting of the
West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre on 20 April 1968.
8. This is an allusion to Margaret Thatcher’s words in a television interview
in 1978. Quoted in Barker (1981: 15).
9. A much-condensed version of the discussion that follows has been pub-
lished in Pereira-Ares, Noemí (2015a) ‘Sartorial Memories of a Colonial
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 55

Past and a Diasporic Present in Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man’,

Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50(2): 179–196.
10. See, for example, Madhusudan Prasad (1984), Niroj Banerji (1990), Prem
Kumar (1987), John Peter Joseph (2009), Sunita Rani (2010) and G. N.
Parthasarthi (2013).
11. In Writers of the Indian Diaspora: Kamala Markandaya, Uma
Parameswaran provides a detailed account of the time setting in Kamala’s
The Nowhere Man: ‘The novel starts in 1968 and ends a year or so later.
Srinivas born 1900; Vasantha born 1907; Police search house for Vasudev
[in colonial India] […] circa 1920; Srinivas and Vasantha marry: 1920 or
1921; Srinivas leaves for England, Vasantha follows; Laxman born 1922
or 1923; Seshu born 1923 or 1924; Vasantha dies 1948 or 1949; Srinivas
meets Mrs. Pickering four months later; Mrs. Pickering moves in circa
1950; they sublet first and second floors in 1965’ (2000: 189).
12. While in Homi Bhabha’s work (2004), the concept of ‘time-lag’ is con-
nected to the process of hybridisation, I am here using it in the light of
Michael F. O’Riley’s interpretation of Bhabha’s ‘time-lag’ as ‘a form of
cultural memory that unconsciously haunts the present’ (2007: 6).
13. This is a reference to the so-called Indian pyjamas, often worn with a
kurta, a kurta being a loose, knee-length tunic (Tarlo 1996).
14. See, for example, Heinz Antor (2008, 2010b), Anthony Appiah (2006),
Ulrich Beck (2006), Pheng Cheah (2006), Berthold Schoene (2009) and
Prina Werbner (2008).
15. To give a few examples, in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Jeeta
wears a shalwaar-kameez, whereas her husband Anwar is, for the most
part, dressed in ‘a rancid [Western-style] suit’ (2009: 51); in Meera Syal’s
Anita and Me, when Meena’s parents dress up to go to a nearby cinema,
each of them opts for strikingly different clothes: Mrs. Kumar puts on a
‘dusty pink sari’, while Mr. Kumar dons a ‘blue serge suit’ (1997: 25);
and in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Nazneen’s Bengali saris contrast with the
Western suits worn by her husband Chanu.
16. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘différance’—and the related
concept of ‘trace’—(1976, 1982), Stuart Hall (2003b) theorises cultural
identities (and, in particular, cultural identities in the Caribbean) as a
conglomerate of various identity presences/absences.
17. Pierre Bourdieu defined the concept of the ‘habitus’ as ‘a system of dura-
ble, transportable dispositions’ which might include gestures, postures
and certainly ways of dressing (1990: 53). I am here using the term in its
most basic sense, though the implications behind Bourdieu’s notion of
the ‘habitus’ are wider. In Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the concept of
the ‘habitus’ seeks to give an account of how social discourse is inscribed
on the body, while simultaneously recognising ‘the agent’s practice, his or
her capacity for invention and improvisation’ (1990: 13).
56 N. PEREIRA-ARES

18. Both Laxman’s Savile Row suit and Lock’s hat are examples of traditional
British upmarket men’s clothing. The history of Lock’s hats goes as far
back as the seventeenth century. As for the tailors of Savile Row, they
have long been ‘the traditional, typically conservative arbiters of British
upper-class, male dress style’ (Polhemus 2010: 48), and during the 1950s
and 1960s their line of menswear became extremely popular among cer-
tain sections of Britain’s young population.
19. Despite, according to Homi Bhabha, mimicry being intrinsically subver-
sive—it represents at once ‘resemblance and menace’ (2004: 86)—the
term is deployed here not so much in Bhabha’s sense, but rather in rela-
tion to utter imitation, particularly as far as Laxman is concerned.
20. Leather jackets and winkle-picker shoes were part of the apparel of some
mid-1960s rockers (Polhemus 2010), but other subcultures such as the
mods also favoured the use of winkle-picker shoes in the period.
21. The teds’ attire usually consisted of drape jackets, high-waisted drainpipe
trousers, bootlace ties and suede crepe-soled shoes. For more informa-
tion, see Mike Brake (2013), Tony Jefferson (1973) and Dick Hebdige
(2003).
22. Unlike the teddy boys, Dick Hebdige suggests, the mods were not hostile
to immigrant communities, at least not to the West Indians, whom they
emulated in style. Most notably, the mods appropriated the ‘stingy-brim’
hat that, associated with the zoot suit in 1940s Afro-American culture,
was popular among the rude boys in Britain (Hebdige 2003).
23. ‘[T]he clean-cut, neatly pressed delinquent look owed […] to the rude
boys [and in addition] the skinheads borrowed individual items of dress
(the crombie, the crop) […] from […] West Indian groups’ (Hebdige
2003: 56). Hebdige also surmises that the sporting of crops by the so-
called ‘hard mods’ or skinheads was aimed at reproducing, however artifi-
cially, ‘the texture and appearance of the short negro hair styles, favoured
at the time by the West Indian blacks’ (2003: 37).
24. This is a reference to the Crombie coat, which was appropriated by British
skinheads in the 1960s.
25. The previous quotation is taken from ‘Salt on a Snake’s Tail’, collected in
Dhondy’s Come to Mecca and Other Stories. London: Collins & Co. Ltd.
26. As Fanon suggested in Black Skin, White Masks, in one way or another,
both the coloniser and the colonised became slaves to the colonial pro-
ject: ‘The Negro enslaved by his [complex of] inferiority, the white man
enslaved by his [complex of] superiority’ (2008: 43).
27. This idea was similarly echoed by Baijnath’s in his travelogue England and
India, where the author observed how the character of many returned
Anglo-Indians had changed ‘after the official garb was laid aside’ (1893: 39).
28. The dhoti is a ‘men’s waist-cloth, worn by draping, folding and tucking’
(Tarlo 1996: xii).
 2 THE ‘SARTORIALLY UNDESIRABLE “OTHER”’ IN POST-WAR … 57

29. For a detailed discussion of the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhi’s defence
of khadi, see Susan S. Bean (1989), C. A. Bayly (1999), Bernard S. Cohn
(1989), Peter Gonsalves (2010, 2012), Emma Tarlo (1996) and Lisa
Trivedi (2003), among others.
30. Among other examples, in Atima Srivastava’s Looking for Maya, Mira
fantasises about the idea of her white boyfriend dressing in ‘khaadi, the
hand-spun, hand-woven cloth popularized by Gandhi’ (1999: 36); and
in Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird, Dev recalls with abhorrence Winston
Churchill’s reference to Gandhi as a ‘naked fakir’ ([1971] 1999: 164).
31. The political dimension of clothing during India’s struggle for inde-
pendence is chronicled in many other texts. As cases in point, in Hari
Kunzru’s The Impressionist ([2002] 2003), the narrator notes that Pran
Nath’s English clothes run counter to the nationalists’ ‘proud-Indian
attire of Congress caps, white kurta-pyjamas and high-necked achkans’
(ibid.: 256); and in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1994), Lucy-amma is
said to have witnessed ‘politicians with handlebar moustaches and tor-
toiseshell topknots, morning coats and gold-thread sarongs, barefoot
and church-shod. She had seen monkey-suits give way to Nehru shirts’
([1994] 1998: 15).
32. A clear parallel can be established with Farrukh Dhondy’s ‘KBW’, in
which Jenny’s typhus is seen as resulting insidiously from the presence
of ‘blacks’: ‘it’s the foreigners have brought it in, that’s for sure, from
Istanbul and Pakistan and now from that Uganda Asians’ place. We’ve
never had these things here’ (Dhondy [1976] 1986: 81).
 CHAPTER 3

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

Subversive Dress in Hanif Kureishi’s The
Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)1 is set in London

during the 1970s. Those were years marked by the cultural frenzy inher-
ited from the late 1960s, but also years in which Duncan Sandys’ and
Enoch Powell’s 1960s racist discourses continued to resonate, and years
that witnessed the activity of the National Front. Indeed, racism does
surface in The Buddha: Helen’s father throws Karim out of his house,
proclaiming his support of Powellism—‘“We’re with Enoch”’ ([1990]
2009: 40); and Changez, Jamila’s husband, is racially abused in the
street, with various thugs attempting to ‘carve the initials of the National
Front into his stomach’ (ibid.: 224). The Buddha thus recaptures the
overt racism so powerfully dramatised in novels such as Markandaya’s
The Nowhere Man (see Chap. 2), but tinges this bleak reality with laugh-
ter and comedy throughout.2 The Buddha is not a text constructed
around images of victimhood (Kureishi 1996a) and, as we shall see, the
characters in Kureishi’s novel prefer to exploit the Sixties’ ‘cultural revo-
lution’ and its liberating promise, rather than passively succumbing to its
racism. What is more, unlike their literary predecessors, second-genera-
tion characters such as Jamila exhibit a more belligerent attitude towards
racism, racial discrimination and those discourses that construct them as
outsiders. Significantly enough, after the attack on Changez, Jamila goes
on a protest march which, historically speaking, recalls and records the
‘shift from basement […] to pavement between the 1950s and 1970s’
(Procter 2000: 95). In other words, the novel dramatises the incipient
political activism of South Asian youths in the 1970s. Militant struggles

© The Author(s) 2018 59

N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora
Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0_3
60 N. PEREIRA-ARES

against racism and racial discrimination did exist in the 1950s and
1960s, but the greatest public protests took place in the late 1970s and
1980s.3 It is no coincidence that these decades witnessed the coming-
of-age of a new generation of diasporic individuals born and/or raised
in Britain. Largely influenced by the American Civil Rights Movement,
this new generation of British Asians began to stand up for their rights
and to condemn, openly and publicly, the racism to which they had long
been subjected (Brah 1996). ‘Black’ emerged in this context as a ‘politi-
cal, rather than racial, category’ (Mercer 1994: 28), forging alliances
among South Asian, African and Caribbean diasporic communities on a
common ground: the struggle against racism in Britain. Meera Syal has
referred to these public protests as crucial moments in the emergence of
a collective consciousness, adding that the 1979 Southall, West London,
uprising had an almost epiphanic effect on her, making her realise that
she ‘was not alone’ and that she ‘did belong [in Britain]’ (1994: 120).
In the mid-1960s and 1970s, the British government passed a series
of Race Relations Acts (1965, 1968, 1976) aimed at penalising racial
discrimination, while simultaneously continuing with strict policies on
immigration control (Thandi 2007a). ‘Slowly’, as Shinder S. Thandi has
argued, ‘the most blatant and direct forms of racial discrimination were
outlawed through legislation. However, indirect—often more insidious
and challenging—forms of discrimination remained’ (Thandi 2007a:
180), including various forms of dress-related discrimination. In fact,
for many South Asians in Britain, their struggles for equality have also
implied a struggle to achieve certain sartorial rights. As Thandi explains
(2007a: 178–181), from the late 1950s to the early 1990, the Sikh com-
munity, for example, campaigned for the right to wear the turban, one
of the most prominent cases being that of Gyani Sundar Singh, already
mentioned in Chap. 1. During these decades, South Asian clothes con-
tinued to be largely stigmatised. Whereas being ‘Black’ became ‘cool’,
partly as a result of the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement and the legacy of
black music, being and, by extension, dressing ‘Asian’ continued to pro-
voke ridicule and derision. In Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box (1991)—a
novel that, albeit set in the 1980s, looks back to the late 1960s and
1970s—we are told that Rezwana’s ‘chooridar shalwaar’ used to be the
butt of ‘ridicule’ at school (1991: 194). This might seem paradoxical
considering that, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the hippie countercul-
ture had created a generation thirsty for Eastern paraphernalia, includ-
ing Eastern textiles and clothing. Kaftans, Afghan coats and sandals
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 61

became sartorial musts for those seeking to be identified with the ‘with-
it’ generation (Lurie 1981)4; Carnaby Street became ‘a bazaar of cheap
Indian garments’ (Ashmore 2010: 113); and contemporary pop musi-
cians and groups such as the Beatles also took to wearing Indian cloth-
ing. In Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), the main
character, Kulwant, regrets having been born in ‘the pre-time to Beatle-
time’, when it was ‘not yet chic to be ethnic’ (1987: 16); and in Farhana
Sheikh’s aforementioned novel, Rasia looks back to the late 1960s,
remembering the importance that Indian attire acquired within the
musical and cultural scenario of the period: ‘the Beatles, John and Yoko
and transcendental meditation. Things Indian—Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,
incense, flowing Kashmiri dresses, hashish, sitar music—acquired mystery
and glamour’ (Sheikh 1991: 192). She even goes on to affirm that at
that time ‘it was stylish and “in” to be eastern’ (ibid.: 193), a statement
reproduced in this chapter’s titular quotation, but after which a question
mark has been added. For Rasia’s statement is fraught with paradox, and
the novel itself tacitly exposes the ambiguities surrounding the fetishisa-
tion of the East in the period. Thus, whereas British musical and cul-
tural icons such as the Beatles consumed Indian paraphernalia, Rezwana,
the average South Asian woman, is said to have experienced sartorial
abuse at school. It seems, therefore, that for ‘alterity’ to be perceived in
positive terms it needs to be diverted from its ‘original [cultural] nexus’
(Appadurai 1999: 28).
From a literary perspective, the late 1970s and 1980s witnessed the
publication of a series of narratives that, with the benefit of hindsight,
can be considered in-between fiction, or fiction that builds a bridge
between ‘the concerns of both first- and second-generation writers’
(Ranasinha 2007: 13). While Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)
and Farrukh Dhondy’s short stories in Come to Mecca (1978) and East
End at Your Feet (1976) have been hailed as emblematic examples in
this respect (Nasta 2002; Ranasinha 2007), I make a case here for Leena
Dhingra’s Amritvela (1988), a lesser-known novel, to be considered a
representative of ‘transition fiction’, a text whose ‘transitional’ nature is
inscribed in and induced by a textile. Amritvela features a main female
character, Meera, who, albeit born in India, has grown up entirely in
Britain, and the whole text pivots on her need to ‘reconnect’ with India
(1988: 13), as she feels uprooted in Britain. Hers is not a story of return
migration, but rather of a probationary attempt to go back, which even-
tually demystifies the ‘teleology of return’ (Clifford 1994: 302) and the
62 N. PEREIRA-ARES

idea of diasporic uprootedness. When in India, Meera feels like a per-

fect stranger whose ‘Western shoes’ prove unsuitable for walking along
the streets of Delhi (Dhingra 1988: 44). The unsuitability of her shoes
speaks of Meera’s alienation from India—just as she feels estranged in
Britain—and, more importantly, it forces her to confront her own
romanticised view of the homeland. The novel ends with Meera return-
ing to Britain, proudly wrapped none the less in an inherited Indian
shahtús.5 The shahtús acts both as a textile, with which Meera covers
herself on the plane, and as a text that carries the family’s history. The
shahtús has been passed down from one generation to another, crossing
the arbitrary frontiers erected by humans. It once survived ‘Partition’
(ibid.: 173), having been carried from Lahore to Delhi; and is now
crossing oceans as Meera takes it to Britain. This shahtús does not sim-
ply provide Meera with an everlasting connection to India. Its history
also allows her to replace ‘the grounded certainties of roots […] with
the transnational contingencies of routes’ (McLeod 2000: 215). The
shahtús is a textile that, via the multiple ‘routes’ it has followed, favours
Meera’s transition from a traumatic dependency on ‘roots’ to a relativisa-
tion of rootedness and even a celebration of uprootedness. It is in the
clouds—‘the halfway point between East and West’ (Dhingra 1988: 1)—
that Meera feels safer and more comfortable. The experience of living at
a constant halfway point is now deemed exhilarating by Meera, because
‘whichever way I am going, it always carries me home’ (ibid.: 177). In
this way, Amritvela moves away from the idea of trauma so often associ-
ated with diaspora, and the condition of diaspora is reconstructed as an
interstitial space that affords a broad spectrum of cultural attachments.
Far from seeing herself as a ‘nowhere’ woman, Meera finally envisions
the possibility of laying claim to two ‘homes’.
Unlike Dhingra’s Amritvela, and unlike the narratives explored in
Chap. 2, Kureishi’s The Buddha does not constitute a migrant narrative
in a strictly literal sense, as its main character, Karim, has never changed
countries. As a result, The Buddha, along with Ravinder Randhawa’s A
Wicked Old Woman (1987), is credited with having inaugurated a new
phase within South Asian diaspora writing in Britain (Nasta 2002), being
followed closely by novels such as Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box (1991),
Atima Srivastava’s Transmission (1992) or later Meera Syal’s Anita and
Me (1996). As Hari Kunzru said with regard to Zadie Smith’s White
Teeth (2000), these texts are not therefore the ‘story of immigrants,
of outsiders’, but rather of individuals ‘who have always already found
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 63

[them]elves “here” [in Britain]’ (quoted in Upstone 2010: 5). Despite

being produced in the 1990s, the above-mentioned narratives all revert
to the 1960s and 1970s, or are set in those decades, as they explore
what it was like to be a British Asian growing up in post-war Britain. In
effect, novels such as The Buddha adopt, and at the same time rework,
the conventions of the Bildungsroman.6 For the characters in these nar-
ratives, the connections with the homeland left behind by their ancestors
are vague, largely reduced to their parents’ memories or to the clothes
and objects kept in ‘shiny suitcase[s] on top of [the] wardrobe’ (Syal
1997: 132). Consequently, in these works of fiction, ‘return—whether
literal or metaphorical—is no longer an imaginative possibility or aes-
thetic solution’ (Nasta 2002: 182). Return as a strategy of retreat from
non-acceptance cannot be endorsed by characters who, strictly speaking,
do not have a homeland other than Britain. For the literary personae in
the above-mentioned fictions, the main concern is not so much ‘where
you’re from’, but ‘where you’re at’ (Gilroy 1991). Yet the ‘subtext of
home’ (Brah 1996: 187) is still knottily problematic for them, because of
the exclusion they experience and the existence of hegemonic discourses
that construe them as outsiders or ‘misfit[s]’ (Kureishi 2002a: 27). As a
result, processes of self-denial and discrimination against oneself can be
found in much second-generation writing, whether fictional or essayistic.
In ‘The Rainbow Sign’, for example, Kureishi claims that the institution-
alised racism of the 1960s led him to ‘deny his Pakistani self’ (ibid.: 25)
and, for exactly the same reasons, in ‘PC: GLC’, Syal concedes that, as a
young girl, she wished to be ‘invisible’ (1994: 119). In an almost analo-
gous fashion, in The Buddha, Karim also admits to ‘denying’ his Indian
self (Kureishi 2009: 212) and, in Syal’s Anita and Me, Meena’s self-
rejection acquires a bodily and sartorial dimension: she refuses ‘to put
on […] Indian suits’ and develops a strong dislike of her ‘brown’ body,
wanting to ‘emerge reborn, pink and unrecognisable’ (1997: 146). The
plight of Laxman in The Nowhere Man (see Chap. 2) resonates in these
novels, and yet both Karim and Meena are redeemed, through various
discursive strategies, from an eternal quest for self-authentication in rela-
tion to a hegemonic norm. Reflecting shifts in ethnic minority politics, in
these later novels the characters develop a new ‘way of living in England’
(Sheikh 1991: 148), simultaneously advocating the need to redefine
exclusionist and ossified notions of ‘Britishness’.7
Western pop and fashion are often important elements of cultural
attachment for many British-born diasporic characters. In The Buddha,
64 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Karim expresses his sexual ambiguity by claiming that opting for homo-
sexuality versus heterosexuality is as restrictive as having to choose
‘between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones’ (Kureishi 2009: 55); and
in Syal’s Anita and Me, when asked to sing a song in the context of an
‘evening’s mehfil’ (1997: 107), Meena comes up with the Royal Teens’
‘We Wear Short Shorts’ (ibid.: 115).8 Very often these characters also
dress themselves following Western fashion and, in fact, clothes are used
to mark generational divides in many South Asian diaspora narratives
featuring or revolving around second-generation characters. In Salman
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Mishal, who claims that ‘Bangladesh in’t
nothing to me’ (1988: 259), uses her dressed body to project an iden-
tity conspicuously rooted in Western cultural and sartorial mores. She
‘cut[s] off her hair […] put[s] rainbows in it’ (ibid.: 250) and goes
out ‘with yards of midriff showing between shortie tank-top and 501s’
(ibid.: 271).9 Mishal’s attitude is mirrored by Shahana in Monica Ali’s
Brick Lane, for whom Bangladesh is a foreign country and whose favour-
ite items of dress include ‘jeans and a t-shirt’ ([2003] 2007: 216), items
that put her in visual opposition to her mother Nazneen, who wears
Bengali saris and dupattas.10 The sartorial choices of these British-born
characters link them to an urban British culture more than to a diasporic
imaginary. They voice the characters’ estrangement from the culture of
their parents, as well as their right to identify with the culture in which
they have grown up. Regardless of this, the pressure of assimilation as
well as the stigmas circulating around South Asian dress frequently
impact on their sartorial choices. For the adolescent protagonists of
Sheikh’s The Red Box, Tahira and Mumtaz, wearing Western clothes does
not simply represent a potential means of rendering visible their cul-
tural affinities, but also a strategy to avoid mockery and even sartorial
abuse: ‘A lot of English boys […] say you’ve got your pyjamas on; they
start teasing you when you come back to school’ (1991: 14). Whether
in Eastern or Western clothes, Tahira and Mumtaz still risk stigmatisa-
tion. Eastern garments turn them into the object of ridicule among
their white peers, while Western garments jeopardise their status within
the South Asian community: ‘when I [Tahira] go out with my mum,
I have to put my shalwaar kameez11 on […] ‘cos someone like my uncle
or somebody might see me’ (ibid.: 13; emphasis added). The concerns of
Tahira’s mother over her daughter’s clothes are conspicuously linked to
the fear of ‘bringing shame on the family’ and potentially even to issues
of future marriageability. This calls to mind Qaisra Shahraz’s ‘A Pair of
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 65

Jeans’ (1988), in which Miriam’s marriage is jeopardised when her in-

laws see her in a pair of tight jeans ‘with an inch of midriff showing’
([1988] 2005: 169). For them, she is no longer the perfect daughter-
in-law, but rather a Muslim woman who is ‘very much under the sway
of western fashion and by extension its moral values’ (ibid.: 169). Dress
and, in particular, women’s dress is thus revealed to be a potent signifier
when it comes to negotiating between cultures. It is made to stand for
the cultural values of a given group and to take on itself the mytholo-
gies whereby each culture constructs the other. Thus, in the eyes of
Miriam’s future in-laws, her jeans construct her as a Westernised Muslim
woman and, implicitly, as a ‘bad’ girl who would not comply with what is
expected of a Muslim wife. The Asian girl in Western clothes is associated
with modernity, non-compliance and even sexual licentiousness, associa-
tions that rely on the mythology of the West as a dangerously ‘corrup-
tive’ space. Policing the female dressed body represents, therefore, an
attempt to control women’s femininity and sexuality, while at the same
time contributing to marking out the boundaries of the South Asian
diasporic community.
In Srivastava’s Transmission, Angie does not dress in a ‘sari’ (1992:
206), as her mother does, opting instead for ‘Levis’ (ibid.: 56). A
‘mobile young woman’ (ibid.: 24), Angie is none the less haunted by
a past of racial abuse, a past she tries to face up to by beginning a rela-
tionship with Lol, a former skinhead whose Doc Martens are now cov-
ered with ‘moss’ (ibid.: 202).12 Back in the 1970s, as we learn, Angie
struggled to fit in by donning ‘white masks’ (Fanon 2008). Her ‘v-neck
royal blue jumper[s]’, ‘pleated skirt[s]’ and ‘knee length white socks’
were aimed at disguising the mere fact that she ‘wasn’t […] white’
(Srivastava 1992: 204). Like Laxman in The Nowhere Man or Saladin
in The Satanic Verses (see Chap. 2), the young Angie reproduced in the
diaspora the same forms of make-believe staged by many characters in
colonial India: in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist ([2002] 2003), for
example, the chameleonic Pran Nath uses clothes to ‘shape-shift’, to slip
into ‘a gora identity’ (ibid.: 250, 249). Clothes might therefore act as
masks that invoke notions of mimicry and ethnic passing and, as Sita says
in Randhawa’s The Coral Strand (2001), they might equally function
as a form of ‘camouflage’, that ‘common enough device employed by
Asian women living in the West who had to hip-hop between cultures’
(2001: 30). Camouflage proves a useful strategy for Tahira and Mumtaz
in The Red Box. When attending a party, they both leave their houses
66 N. PEREIRA-ARES

dressed in Asian clothes, but changing into mini-skirts before reach-

ing the venue: ‘“Walk quicker. I want to get to Ilford and change these
stupid trousers,” said Tahira, a little out of breath. “Bet my skirt’s get-
ting all creased up in the stupid bag…”’ (Sheikh 1991: 52). In Sheikh’s
novel, this sartorial swapping represents much more than characteris-
tic teenage behaviour. Dress provides these characters with a means of
manipulating ethnicity and gender—as well as their complex intercon-
nectedness—within two different spaces, spaces that are governed by dis-
similar sets of ethnic normativity and contradictory codes of femininity.
Their manoeuvre is emblematic of what Meera Syal has referred to as
her early ‘schizophrenic ability to role swap’ (2000b: 252) between her
pose as a good Indian girl at home and her role as a somewhat irrever-
ent adolescent outside. Inheriting this ability, in Anita and Me, Meena
readily strips off her ‘salwar kameez suit’ (1997: 107) and dons ‘some
trousers and a jumper’ (ibid.: 116) before heading for the local park.
Dress is here revealed to demarcate the sphere of home from the exter-
nal world, and the above-mentioned youngsters contribute to reinforcing
this sartorial diglossia through their clothed bodies. Sartorial switching
as envisioned in the above novels functions as a survival strategy, allow-
ing these young characters to navigate different worlds, while simultane-
ously emphasising a vision of them as caught up in a clash of cultures.
For these British Asian characters do not shuttle fluently between Eastern
and Western clothes. They just switch and swap strategically from one
sartorial paradigm to another, according to two well-defined contexts—
home and outside—and in turn these spaces become ipso facto scripted
as ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’. Qaisra Shahraz’s ‘A Pair of Jeans’ articulates
this idea lucidly, as Miriam arrives home, changes into Muslim clothes
and reflects on the fact that she is a woman with ‘two sides […] A per-
son who spontaneously switched from one setting to another, from one
mode of dress into another—in short swapping one identity for another.
Now, dressed as she was, she was part and parcel of another identity, of
another world, that of a Muslim-Asian environment’ (2005: 170–171).
Superseding this sartorial diglossia in literature will be a matter of time.
Kureishi’s The Buddha lays the foundations for this process to take place
within a carnivalesque scenario, and later novels will introduce us to
characters who sport mix-and-match fashions within fictional worlds that
are not the ‘carnival of ethnicities’ (Ross 2006) presented in Kureishi’s
text (see Chap. 4).
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 67

Especially in the earliest samples of writing about second-generation

subjects, the characters’ self-identification is often problematic and they
prove to be extremely unconfident when they attempt to define them-
selves. Thus, in Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), the narrator
tells us that, as a young woman, Kulwant ‘messed it all up because she
wanted everything, wanted to be Indian and English’ (ibid.: 29);13 and
in Kureishi’s The Buddha, Karim defines himself as a ‘Englishman born
and bred’, though he feels the need to add the word ‘almost’ to his self-
definition (Kureishi 2009: 3). Karim’s subsequent elaboration on this
sentence reveals, however, that his final ‘almost’, more than answering to
a sense of ambivalent attachment on the part of the character, responds
to the tension that exists between how Karim regards himself and how
other people perceive him. Because, as Karim says, ‘I am often consid-
ered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having
emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care—Englishman I am
(though not proud of it)’ (ibid.: 3; emphasis added). Facing monolithic
ideas of ‘Britishness’ in some cases, and the pressure of living up to an
Asian background in others, these characters strive to subvert received
identity categories, categories that have actually failed to accommo-
date their hybrid selves. In Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman, Kulwant
was once ‘forced to choose’, to forsake one identity for another (1987:
29). But now, masquerading as an old woman dressed in a ‘dilapidated
[Oxfam] coat’ (ibid.: 3), she chooses what she wants out of both her
Indian and British cultural heritages. Unlike the poetic voice in Jenny
Joseph’s ‘Warning’ (1961), Kulwant does not wear ‘purple’. Yet, her dis-
guise as an old woman carries a similar message. It represents a chant
about the freedom from conventions that being old might afford.
Through her disguise, Kulwant creates a new persona for herself, playing
with different identity configurations and exploiting the positive side of
assuming the identity of an old, and therefore highly ‘invisible’, woman.
Clothes, as she says, are like ‘borrowed skins’ (Randhawa 1987: 40),
revealing and concealing identity in ways that might even be misleading,
as when a group of South Asian female characters clad in ‘silken saris’
(ibid.: 51) mistake Kulwant for an old British woman. Kulwant regrets
their failure to understand how she stays ‘on the divide’, and yet she is
delighted because these women have not ‘seen through her’ (ibid.: 51).
Her cunning disguise has produced the desired effect, successfully expos-
ing the arbitrariness of identity categorisations.
68 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Clearly revolving around performance, stagecraft and acting, Hanif

Kureishi’s The Buddha, on which the remainder of this chapter is
focused, foregrounds the postmodern idea of identity as a contingent
self-construction, and the text is full of expressions that validate this
argument: Eva Kay is said to have ‘construct[ed] an artistic persona for
herself’ (Kureishi 2009: 150); Charlie Hero is reported to have donned
a ‘new personality’ (ibid.: 151), a ‘wonderful trick and disguise’ (ibid.:
154) or a ‘borrowed persona’ (ibid.: 246); and, at a given point, Karim
Amir assumes that if he wants ‘the additional personality bonus of an
Indian past,’ he will ‘have to create it’ (ibid.: 213). In a way reminis-
cent of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, The Buddha creates and recreates
an actual ‘carnival’ in Bakhtinian terms and, in so doing, the novel opens
up a space of transgression, freed from ‘the prevailing point of view of
the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from
all that is humdrum and universally accepted’ (Bakhtin 1968: 34).14 The
dressed body becomes, as we shall see, as central to Kureishi’s narra-
tive as it is to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, as it repre-
sents the site where power is tested and contested, where Foucauldian
discipline is substitute for liberation, and where subversions are staged.
Right from the beginning of the text—when Karim dresses up for Eva
Kay’s soirée, to the end of the narrative—when they all get dressed to
attend Karim’s dinner invitation, The Buddha enacts a ‘carnival’ in which
not only the main characters, but also some segments of British society
become involved. The characters experiment with various clothes, which
often underlies an experimentation with different ethnic, class and gen-
der identities, whether real or contrived, permanent or transient. For its
part, the British society depicted (especially the younger sectors) experi-
ments with new cultural forms of expression such as music or fashion,
as well as with new identity positions in a period affected by a national
identity crisis resulting from the ‘psychological loosening of the idea of
Empire’ (Kureishi 1992: xvi) and the crumbling of the grand narratives
of modernity (Lyotard 1984). Throughout the course of this ‘carnival’,
not only are received ideas of ethnic, class and gender identity subverted,
but ultimately the novel also interrogates the meaning of ‘Britishness’,
a question that has persistently surfaced in Kureishi’s fiction and non-
fiction writing.15
* * *
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha is a highly autobiographical text16
and, as I shall signpost throughout this chapter, it is also sartorially
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 69

autobiographical. Narrated in the first person, The Buddha follows Karim

Amir in his search for his ‘inner room’ (2009: 3), simultaneously trac-
ing the breakdown of Karim’s family unit as his father Haroon begins
a relationship with Eva Kay and abandons Margaret, Karim’s mother.
Through Haroon, the novel also incorporates the (hi)story of first-gen-
eration migrants, which shows the persistent need of British Asian writ-
ers to revisit and revise the passage from India to Britain, a need that
can even be detected in new millennium narratives such as Monica Ali’s
Brick Lane (2003) (see Chap. 5). Kureishi’s debut novel enjoyed imme-
diate success on its publication in 1990, and since then The Buddha
has generated an enormous amount of literary criticism, with multi-
ple works attempting to establish its generic affiliation and the literary
tradition/s to which it might belong. The Buddha has been defined as a
Bildungsroman (Schoene 1998; Stein 2004), as ‘a social novel eased by
a comic outlook’ (Hashmi 1992: 92), or even as a text revolving around
a ‘picaresque anti-hero’ (Nasta 2002: 197). Likewise, critics have vari-
ously traced the indebtedness of Kureishi’s novel to previous South Asian
diaspora fiction (Moore-Gilbert 2001; Nasta 2002), to British texts with
a social focus (Hashmi 1992) or to the work of American writers such
as Phillip Roth (Weber 1997). What the complexity of elucidating the
genre and literary affiliations of The Buddha highlights is the hybridity
inherent in the text itself. Its indebtedness cuts across cultures and coun-
tries and, consequently, the text establishes multiple transcultural and
transnational linkages. The transculturality and transnationality embod-
ied by the text as a cultural product also permeates the fictional world of
the novel, a world that has been praised for breaking down fixed notions
of ethnicity, class and gender (Thomas 2005), and for offering a ‘wry
appreciation […] of fashion, literature, music, politics and spiritual-
ity’ (quoted in Yousaf 2002: 64; emphasis added)—two critical assess-
ments that, as this chapter argues, actually converge. Fashion is used
in The Buddha to give credence to the novel’s setting, to capture the
sartorial uproar of the epoch and, ultimately, to destabilise the distinc-
tion between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art in the text. For its part, dress is
deployed to articulate transgressive subjectivities that deconstruct fixed
identity categories and undermine binary oppositions.
In The Buddha, Karim embarks on a journey from the London sub-
urb of Bromley to ‘London proper’ (2009: 40), negotiating, refashion-
ing and playing with his ethnic, class and gender identity in the process.
Over the course of this journey we, as readers, travel back to the 1970s,
70 N. PEREIRA-ARES

a decade that in Kureishi’s novel is presented as a continuation of the

cultural and sartorial uproar that defined the 1960s—‘We lived in rebel-
lious and unconventional times’ (ibid.: 82), says Karim. From the very
moment of its conception, The Buddha was destined to constitute an
evocation of this rebellious era: ‘I [Kureishi] knew—my excitement
told me—that I had material for a whole book: south London in the
1970s, growing up as a “semi-Asian” kid, pop, fashion, drugs, sexual-
ity’ (Kureishi 2002a: 18; emphasis added). As Kureishi’s words reveal,
The Buddha was designed to be a novel revolving around popular culture
and its insubordinate ethos, where fashion and dress were to play a more
than prominent part. The centrality of clothes stems not only from the
fact that fashion is ‘an incontestable element of mass culture, like pulp
fiction, comics, and movies’ (Barthes 1985: 9), but also because fashion
and dress are crucial to the pop music scene as well as to the world of
the various youth subcultures that accompanied the emergence of pop
in post-war Britain, all of which is part of the ‘material’ that makes up
The Buddha. ‘[P]op,’ as Kureishi has stated, is ‘a form crying out not to
be written about. It is physical, sensual, of the body rather than the mind’
(1996b: xix; emphasis added), and so are its subcultures. Youth subcul-
tures tend to express themselves through physicality: ‘Because of its high
emotional content, teenage culture is essentially non-verbal. It is more
naturally expressed in music, dancing, in dress, in certain habits of walk-
ing and standing, in certain facial expressions and “looks”’ (Storey 2001:
73). Portraying the physicality and corporality of these movements pro-
vides, therefore, one of the most plausible paths for representation; a
way of capturing the ‘essence’ of these movements; and an attempt to
overcome the fact that, as Kureishi suggests, they are forms ‘crying out
not to be written about’, but rather to be lived and experienced. The
centrality of physicality and the dressed body within the world of pop
music and youth subcultures has been deemed carnivalesque by various
scholars (Stallybrass and White 1986; Railton 2001), and the depiction
of these cultural movements is one of the first aspects that contributes to
turning Kureishi’s The Buddha into a highly carnivalesque narrative. Pop
music and youth subcultures are not only carnivalesque because of the
significance that they attach to the body or because they surrender ‘the
rational mind to the body and the emotions’ (Railton 2001: 328), but
also because, like the carnivalesque forms theorised by Bakhtin, they have
often challenged and undermined the status quo, ‘buil[ding] a second
world and a second life outside officialdom’ (Bakhtin 1968: 6).
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 71

In The Buddha, Kureishi brings to life many post-war pop youth sub-
cultures, thereby capturing the rebellious and carnivalesque character of
the epoch, while giving verisimilitude to the novel’s setting. As differ-
ent critics have already noted (Kaleta 1998; Yousaf 2002), The Buddha
provides a well-informed portrayal of the 1970s that none the less recalls
the 1960s and harks even further back. In the novel, Kureishi ‘creates
a decade that both looks its part and looks apart’ (Kaleta 1998: 83). In
the fictional world of Kureishi’s novel, the styles of 1970s glam rock-
ers and punks mix with the Edwardian ‘drape coats’ of ‘ageing’ teddy
boys (Kureishi 2009: 75; emphasis added), as well as with the charac-
teristic apparel of many 1960s subcultures: mods showing off; rockers
in ‘studded leather and chains’ (ibid.: 75); skinheads wearing ‘Levi’s,
Crombies and braces’ (ibid.);17 and hippies in ‘velvet trousers’ (ibid.:
129). Of all these subcultures, the hippies, glam rockers and punks are
the ones that feature most prominently in the novel, thus retrieving a
part of Kureishi’s cultural biography, as the writer lived through these
movements and even dabbled with hippie aesthetics (Kureishi 2005a).
In The Buddha, Kureishi’s alter ego, Karim, also flirts with hippie styles.
Changez compares Karim’s clothes to those of a ‘gypsy vagabond’
(Kureishi 2009: 97), which associates Karim with the generally unkempt
and untidy image of the hippies; and throughout the novel Karim sports
‘crushed velvet flares’ (ibid.: 8), ‘tie-dyed vests’ (ibid.: 57), ‘unbuttoned
Hawaiian shirt[s]’ (ibid.:168) and, occasionally, a ‘headband’ to con-
trol his ‘shoulder-length frizzy hair’ (ibid.: 6). Karim’s hippie-like looks
are even redolent of the clothes with which Kureishi’s father, Rafiushan
Kureishi, dressed his son’s fictional version (Yusef) in ‘The Redundant
Man’, an unpublished work that Kureishi discusses in his memoir My Ear
at His Heart ([2004] 2005a). In ‘The Redundant Man’, Kureishi/Yusef
appears as a young man with ‘long black hair’ often tied ‘at the back
with a pink ribbon’ and wearing ‘greasy jeans’, ‘crushed white shirt[s]’
and ‘CND badges’ (ibid.: 136). The parallel between the two fictional
versions of Kureishi—Karim and Yusef—is conspicuous, especially if we
pay attention to the way the two characters tie back their respective long
black hair in each text. Despite being crafted at different times and by
different hands, Karim and Yusef are, in many respects, a sartorial mirror
of each other and, ostensibly, both of them are a projection of the young
Kureishi.
In the 1970s scenario portrayed in The Buddha, the remnants of the
hippie and psychedelic 1960s are very much alive, and at The Three
72 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Tuns18 we come across a scene that leaves no room for doubt. There,
Karim observes a number of boys in ‘cataracts of velvet and satin, and
bright colours’, and close to them are others dressed in ‘bedspreads
and curtains’ (Kureishi 2009: 8). The first group is very likely sporting
a disco style that follows the psychedelic fashions epitomised by rock
stars such as Syd Barrett, of whom they are said to be talking ‘esoteri-
cally’ (ibid.). Probably, those other boys ‘in bedspreads and curtains’ rep-
resent a group of hippies dressed in clothes made from reused fabrics,
which dovetails with the hippies’ own return-to-nature and anti-capitalist
ethos—and they were also likely to listen to Syd Barrett, for they often
consumed psychedelic music and culture.19 Emerging in the USA in the
1960s, the hippie counterculture proposed an anti-Establishment ideol-
ogy based on pacifism, freedom, mysticism and a return to nature, all of
which was rendered visible through dressed bodies that defied neatness
and artificiality (Hall 1968). The hippies’ usage of bright, psychedelic
colours in clothing paralleled the hallucinatory states induced by the
consumption of drugs such as LSD, and their frequent incorporation of
non-Western ethnic motifs (from Native Americans to Eastern cultures)
was suggestive of their interest in the mysticism and alleged proximity to
nature of those peoples vis-à-vis the capitalism, consumption and mate-
rialism of the Western world they rejected (Hall 1968). Intriguingly, in
The Buddha most references to Eastern clothing enter the text via the
hippie counterculture and its ramifications in the 1960s and 1970s. The
novel thus recalls the ‘cross-ethnic synthesis’ (Hebdige 2003: 107) that
many hippies enacted through their multi-ethnically-dressed bodies, and
uses this effectively to blur ethnic demarcations and even the East–West
divide. The hippies were responsible for bringing liberation from ethnic,
class and gender normativity,20 and their spirit of transgression pervades
The Buddha. The whole novel pivots on the consumption of Eastern
philosophy in 1960s and 1970s Britain, an interest initially cultivated
within the counterculture and later absorbed into mainstream culture.
The fetishisation of the East in the period, albeit bitterly satirised at some
points, creates a productive space of cross-ethnic dialogue in the novel,
at least as far as fashion and dress are concerned.
As Ted Polhemus notes (2010), by the end of the 1960s, some sub-
cultures had evolved from the return to simplicity proposed by the hip-
pies and favoured instead sartorial artifice in a way that anticipated glam
rock. This movement is also chronicled in The Buddha through the char-
acter of Charlie Hero, whose sartorial metamorphosis from a psychedelic
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 73

icon into a Bowie-ite is rendered visible in the following excerpt: ‘A

couple stood there—a tall young man [Charlie] with short, spiky hair
dyed white. He wore silver shoes and a shiny silver jacket. He looked
like a spaceman. The girl with him was dowdy in comparison. She was
about seventeen, wearing a long hippie smock, a skirt that trailed to the
ground, and hair to her waist’ (Kureishi 2009: 35). Charlie’s transfor-
mation, which rests entirely on dress, is so complete that Karim fails to
recognise him—hence he initially refers to him as a ‘young man’. Charlie
has left his hippie, psychedelic past behind and moved towards glam
rock. The hippie girl beside him represents only a trace of that past, a
past that is now deemed ‘dowdy in comparison’. The simplicity of her
smock and her unkempt hair clashes with Charlie’s glittery clothes and
elaborate hairstyle, both of which express the artfulness of glam rock-
ers, who elbowed their way into the music scene of the early 1970s.
Charlie’s look is described as resembling that of ‘a spaceman’, a conspic-
uous reference to David Bowie and his Ziggy Stardust attire. The figure
of David Bowie, one of the most well-known exponents of glam rock,
is indeed mentioned in The Buddha, as Karim categorically affirms that
Charlie’s change boils down to ‘Bowie’s influence’ (ibid.: 68). Bowie’s
androgynous looks dislodged gender binaries more straightforwardly
than any other previous subculture in the post-war period and, as we
shall see, Charlie’s persona also interrogates gender conventionalisms in
The Buddha. Thinking that a turn to glam rock might boost his career
as a singer, Charlie does away with his previous hippie, psychedelic para-
phernalia. He throws away ‘a Barclay James Harvest album’ as well as
his former wardrobe: ‘cowboy boots’, ‘an old pair of frayed jeans’ and ‘a
wide-collared shirt with pink flowers on it’ (ibid.: 88). Interestingly, at
this point, Charlie gets rid of the very same clothes he previously advised
Karim to wear—‘“You’ve got to wear less.” […] “Levi’s, I suggest, with
an open-necked shirt […] and a thick brown belt. Forget the head-
band”’ (ibid.: 16). Karim, who lionises Charlie in every possible manner,
‘tattoo[s]’ this piece of advice on his brain and, convinced that Charlie is
the one with a ‘real sartorial understanding’ (ibid.: 17), he starts think-
ing about where to buy the prescribed clothes. However, Charlie gives
Karim no room for manoeuvre, and this is the first sartorial episode that
anticipates the chasm between the two characters, the symbolic separa-
tion of the hero of the Bildungsroman from his initial idol or role model.
In the second part of The Buddha, Karim, Haroon, Eva and Charlie
move to West Kensington, and at the Nashville21 Charlie experiences
74 N. PEREIRA-ARES

a musical and sartorial revelation. There, Karim and Charlie see ‘the
usual long-hairs […] in velvet trousers or dirty jeans, patchwork boots
and sheepskin coats’ (ibid.: 129), a portrayal that very likely describes a
group of hippies or hippie look-alikes. The wearing of long hair styles,
unkempt clothes, patchwork boots and sheepskin coats (probably some
version of the Afghan coat) are all items characteristic of a hippie sar-
torial vocabulary. However, Karim and Charlie also find something they
have never come across in the suburbs: ‘kids in ripped black clothes
[…] Their hair was uniformly black, and cut short […] or if long it was
spiky and rigid’ (ibid.). Without any previous information, the clothes
of these anonymous characters become the only vehicle of communica-
tion through which the reader can elucidate that Karim and Charlie are
actually at a punk concert. Of course, the allusion to bodies dressed in
ripped black clothes and sporting spiky hair evokes characteristic features
of punk aesthetics. Yet Kureishi’s description proves to be sartorially very
demanding, relying heavily on the reader’s knowledge of fashion. As
Kenneth C. Kaleta has argued in this respect, The Buddha is so iconic
that the meaning of the novel becomes an ‘“emotional gestal”—that is,
the meaning of the novel is in process, not merely a product’ (1998:
70). This process of constructing meaning might go to different lengths
depending on the reader’s ability to ‘undercode’ (Eco 1976: 136) the
sartorial subtext of the novel, for it is largely through fashion and dress
that The Buddha narrates the transition from the hippies’ ‘crushed-velvet
idealism’ (Kureishi 2009: 75) to the pessimism emblazoned on the black,
slashed clothes of the punks.
The portrayal of the New Wave is the aspect that most clearly contrib-
utes to situating The Buddha in the 1970s. Appearing in the summer of
1976, British punks sentenced, or wished to sentence, the hippie move-
ment to death: ‘I [Karim] knew London was killing us as I heard, “Fuck
off, all you smelly old hippies! […]”’ (Kureishi 2009: 131). Prophetically
claiming that the punk band at the Nashville represents the future,
Charlie follows them on their way out and blends into the group, ‘rip-
ping his shirt off—it was my [Karim’s] shirt, too’ (ibid.: 132). Literally,
Charlie’s act of taking his shirt off articulates his immediate desire to
join in the punk movement; symbolically, it signals a break with his past
and eventually with Karim as well. Because, ultimately, it is Karim’s shirt
that Charlie removes. Charlie then vanishes from the novel and, when
he reappears, he has already adopted a ‘new personality’ (ibid.: 152).
Interestingly, Charlie’s new persona is again entirely dependent on the
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 75

clothing he wears, as his middle-class origins are at variance with the

working-class ethos of the punk movement:

His hair was dyed black now, and it was spiky. He wore, inside out, a
slashed T-shirt with a red swastika hand-painted on it. His black trousers
were held together by safety-pins, paperclips and needles […] there were
five belts strapped around his waist and a sort of grey linen nappy attached
to the back of his trousers. (ibid.: 152–153)

This fragment is a fine précis of punk aesthetics, with Charlie’s dressed

body emerging as an epitome of sartorial violence. His multiple belts
and slashed black clothes festooned with strange items such as safety-
pins or linen nappies convey the punks’ sense of otherness, ugliness
and self-destruction (Hebdige 2003). Set beside all these ornaments is
Charlie’s swastika, which has been read as a symbol of Charlie’s identi-
fication with Nazism (Buchanan 2007). However, this might not neces-
sarily be so. Like many 1970s punks, Charlie might wear the swastika
for its mere shock value (Hebdige 2003).22 Defamiliarising the swas-
tika from its original fascist meanings and endowing it with new mes-
sages is, after all, part of the process of ‘bricolage’ (Hebdige 2003:
103) in which most subcultures participate, and punks in particular. In
their attempt to convey their feelings of alienation, pessimism, anarchy
and dread in a British context dominated by high unemployment rates
and economic stagnation, the punks dressed in a very shocking man-
ner (Hebdige 2003). Punks’ clothes were, as Karim puts it, ‘the acme
of fashion. [For] [a]s soon as you got your clothes home you had to
slash them with razor-blades’ (Kureishi 2009: 173). Like the skinheads
(see Chap. 2), the punks explored a ‘downward’ option, emphasis-
ing a working-class identity, whether real or contrived (as in Charlie’s
case). Unlike the skinheads, however, the punks did not defend a myth
of ‘working-classness’ defined along the parameters of heterosexuality.
Instead, they played freely with such dichotomies as masculinity versus
femininity, heterosexuality versus homosexuality—the use of make-up
by male punks being rather telling. Moreover, as Dick Hebdige (2003,
2011) and Paul Gilroy (2002) have noted, punks were crucial in prob-
lematising ‘whiteness’, rearticulating this category as an ethnic subject
position devoid of dominant resonances—their iconoclastic ‘attacks’
on the symbols of white Britain are emblematic in this respect. The
‘white ethnicity’ (Hebdige, 2003) asserted by the punks did not a priori
76 N. PEREIRA-ARES

antagonise non-whiteness. Instead, in their real, yet also mythically con-

strued, marginality within Britain, many punks felt close to immigrant
communities—songs such as The Stranglers’ ‘I Feel Like a Wog’ tes-
tify to this (Gilroy 2002).23 Alluding to the punk movement, Kureishi
himself has stated that rock’n’roll afforded a space of confluence for
all those who felt ‘displaced’ at the time, for all those whose class and
ethnic background was not ‘easily located in the English […] system’
(2005a: 173).
Towards the end of the novel, Kureishi portrays certain evolutions
within the punk subculture. The ‘spiky, sculptural, ornamental’ hair
of early punks has been substituted for ‘the Mohican’ (Kureishi 2009:
239), a hairstyle that became fashionable among early 1980s punks.24
What is more, as the novel comes to an end, Kureishi records the pro-
gressive fading out of the punk movement and the beginning of the
1980s. In the last chapter of the novel, when Karim returns from New
York, he is shocked by the way in which ‘London ha[s] moved on in
ten months. No hippies or punks: instead, everyone was smartly dressed’
(ibid.: 270). The ‘smartly dressed’ people that Karim comes across tes-
tify to the more sober fashions of the 1980s and, in a more figurative
manner, to the substitution of the social, cultural and sartorial revolts of
the 1960s and 1970s for the ‘collective money-harvesting’ that defined
the 1980s (Kaleta 1998: 81). In effect, the 1980s has come to be seen
as a decade of ‘retreat’ after the (sartorial) experiments and revolutions
of the ‘protest era’ (Geczy 2013), though to state this is to disregard
1980s subcultures such as the New Romantics.25 That Karim compares
the new London he encounters to a ‘room full of George Orwell look-
alikes’ (Kureishi 2009: 270) can even be understood as a reference to
the more conservative scenario that was approaching after the election
of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In that room, his younger brother, Allie,
would not strike a discordant note, with his abhorrence of ‘whinge-
ing lefties’ (ibid.: 267) and his expensive and flamboyant clothes: ‘His
clothes were Italian and immaculate, daring and colourful without
being vulgar, and all expensive and just right’ (ibid.; emphasis added).
By then a fashion designer, Allie projects his success through his own
body, wearing clothes that are flashy and colourful, but not ‘vulgar’.
His image contrasts with the styles of the hippies and punks depicted
in previous sections, and the novel thus highlights the transition to the
yuppified 1980s. Allie himself openly declares his abhorrence of the hip-
pies, their idealism and, of course, their clothes, which ‘look like rags’
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 77

(ibid.: 267). In the same passage, Allie also asserts his dislike of ‘white
skin’ (ibid.: 268), which could arguably be interpreted as an allusion to
punk ‘whiteness’.
The Buddha thus walks the reader to the 1980s, constantly using fash-
ion and dress to furnish the setting—hence the descriptive approach
adopted in much of this chapter. As Kenneth C. Kaleta (1998) noted
in this respect, historical facts are not Kureishi’s main interest, but
the writer does use material culture to give spatio-temporal credence
to his novels and, in The Buddha, he does it with gusto. This is so
much so that clothes are even used to add to the portrayal of certain
London geographies: Karim imagines central London as being inhab-
ited by kids ‘dressed […] like little gods’ (Kureishi 2009: 128); South
London emerges as a derelict area, whose passers-by are ‘men in dirty
coats and […] women in old shoes without stockings’ (ibid.: 223); and
Brixton houses punks as well as Rastafarians wearing ‘dreadlocks half-
way down their back […] and running shoes’ (ibid.: 239). The col-
lection of sartorial minutiae is also irrefutable proof of the realism that
pervades The Buddha. The mode of the novel is a form of postmod-
ern realism focused on the young, the popular and, partly as a result,
on the deconstruction of grand narratives. The novel gives credence to
Kureishi’s claim in The Faber Book of Pop that ‘pop provided writers with
new areas to explore’ [introducing] ‘us to the fringes of the respectable
world, to marijuana, generational conflict, clubs, parties, and to a certain
kind of guiltless, casual sex that had never been written about before’
(1996b: xix). ‘Literature,’ Kureishi states, ‘had been too often used as
a boot stamped on the face of the young to show them how little they
knew and, by extension, how much the elite knew’ (ibid.: xviii). Pop
has reacted against this idea ab initio, and so does The Buddha, captur-
ing the transformations that post-war youths were bringing about ‘in
all areas, from clothes to language, from clubs to technology’ (ibid.:
xx). In The Buddha, Kureishi does not ‘cut adrift from the contempo-
rary scene’ (ibid.: xvii), as he feels certain twentieth-century writers have
done.26 In the light of this, one could even argue that the novel is posi-
tioned against the literary output of those ‘high-brown novelists’ who
had once ‘moved away from ordinary people, leaving them to “trash”
[…] and thus opening the gap between “high” and “low” culture’
(ibid.: xviii). With its emphasis on the popular, The Buddha constitutes
an attempt to dismantle this division, and the profusion of allusions to
fashion and dress—like the inclusion of pop music—is therefore also to
78 N. PEREIRA-ARES

be understood as Kureishi’s own strategy to weave the popular into the

literary text and thus bridge the gap between high and popular culture.
The Buddha constitutes a vindication of the right of popular cul-
ture to be considered as equally laudable as those forms traditionally
regarded as ‘high’ culture. Such an advocacy has been expressed lucidly
by Kureishi in an interview with Claire Chambers, where he praises cul-
tural studies as being just as valid a field as literature: ‘It would be silly to
say people should be reading Shakespeare and not studying Coca-Cola:
it just depends on how good the teaching is’ (Chambers 2011: 238).
Additionally, in Kureishi’s writings (1996b, 2005a), popular culture is
often described as being transformation-ushering, which brings to mind
Stuart Hall’s definition of popular culture as ‘the ground on which the
transformations are worked’ (2006: 478). This idea also finds an echo
in The Buddha. In the last chapter of the novel, the ‘carnival’ ends and
‘order’ is somehow restored. However, the disruptions ushered in by
the carnivalesque world of pop and youth subcultures seem to have left
their imprint on society. Allie’s acquaintances are described as ‘George
Orwell look-alikes’, but Karim adds a significant detail: ‘Orwell would
have eschewed earrings’ (Kureishi 2009: 270). Likewise, while Allie
readily scorns the ‘weirdos’ that populated the 1960s and 1970s, the
reader gets the impression that, were it not for the gender transforma-
tions they brought about, Allie would not be so confident in his ‘girlish’
deportment (ibid.: 103). In effect, within Kureishi’s oeuvre, The Buddha
represents the writer’s most sustained attempt at vindicating the potency
of the popular to understand, if not to change, the contemporary scene.
After all, as Kureishi has noted, pop involved ‘not just fashion, but poli-
tics’ (Yousaf 2002: 18). ‘For a lot of kids, Pop was the only hope for
a creative, unpredictable life […] Otherwise we were locked into the
post-war vision of a controlled—married, of course—and secure life’
(Kureishi 2005a: 158). An advocate of popular culture, Kureishi has reit-
eratively valued British pop for posing a challenge to the status quo and
for helping to subvert ethnic, class and gender conventions in the post-
war period (Kureishi 1996b, 2002a). No wonder, therefore, that in The
Buddha, a novel that subverts ethnic, class and gender boundaries, those
subversions are located in the realm of the popular, of subcultures and,
of course, in the realms of fashion and dress. The narrative captures the
sartorial uproar that defined the period, effectively showing how British
pop groups and subcultures deployed the dressed body to visibly enact
their transgressions. Similarly, as we shall see in what follows, when we
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 79

move from the contextual to the textual, we can also detect how the
dressed bodies of individual characters are used to articulate subversive
ethnic, class and gender positions. Kureishi’s The Buddha thus creates its
own ‘carnival of culture’ (Kureishi 2005b), drawing on, and at the same
time adding to, the carnivalesque aspect of the world of pop music and
youth subcultures.
The Buddha begins with Karim virtually ‘dressing up for the carni-
val’—borrowing the title of Carol Shields’ eponymous collection of short
stories (2000). The main character in Kureishi’s novel decks his body in
some garish clothes intended to match up to Eva Kay’s esoteric soirée:
‘turquoise flared trousers, a blue and white flower-patterned see-through
shirt, blue suede boots with Cuban heels […] a scarlet Indian waistcoat
[and] a headband’ (Kureishi 2009: 6). The portrayal of Karim dress-
ing himself up adumbrates, at a very early stage in the novel, the carni-
valesque aspect that dominates The Buddha, as it emphasises the novel’s
attention to the ‘material bodily principle’ (Bahktin, 1968: 19). What is
more, from the very beginning, Karim’s dressed body enacts a transcul-
tural space, visibly conflating Western and Eastern sartorial elements.
This transculturally dressed body, more than resulting from Karim’s wish
to establish a rapport between his two cultural backgrounds, is the prod-
uct of his borrowing from contemporary hippie-influenced styles which,
as previously noted, also established cross-cultural pollinations. Karim’s
attire agglutinates, in fact, many sartorial diacritics pertaining to hippie
aesthetics: he wears a characteristic headband, colourful and flower-pat-
terned clothes, a pair of boots probably similar to the so-called Beatle
boots,27 as well as non-Western garments such as his Indian waistcoat.
The result is a dressed body that defies any attempt at categorisation in
monolithic terms, challenging the sartorial ‘either/or’ discourse that
governed previous fictions (see Chap. 2). Karim might define himself as
an ‘Englishman’, often casting off his Indian side. However, the transcul-
tural clothes he dons here figuratively prevent him from slavishly assim-
ilating to hegemonic ‘Englishness’. Even if via youth culture, Karim is
not allowed to eschew his Indian self and, in effect, the novel forces him
repeatedly to confront his Indian side, until he tentatively acknowledges
it at Anwar’s funeral: ‘I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now—
the Indians—that in some way these were my people, and that I’d spent
my life denying or avoiding the fact’ (Kureishi 2009: 212). Karim timidly
‘claims his “origins”’ here (Bald, 2003: 86), with this claim articulating
Karim’s recognition of his multilayered identity. Karim, as John Clement
80 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Ball says with regard to Kureishi, occupies a hybrid position that is ‘semi-
detached’ from, and simultaneously ‘semi-attached’ to, both Britain and
the Indian subcontinent (Ball 1996: 16). Intriguingly, in the first part
of the novel, Karim is made to negotiate this semi-detachment/attach-
ment via youth culture. The outfit he dons at the inception of the novel
attests to this, as does his subsequent self-identification as a ‘hippie […]’
(Kureishi 2009: 75). Karim’s hippie affiliation, it can be argued, affords
him an alternative subject position, a space for identity negotiation away
from mainstream ‘Britishness’—where he is ‘Otherised’—but at the
same time connected to Britain—because, while not ‘proud of it’, Karim
defines himself as an ‘Englishman’ (ibid.: 3). However inadvertently,
Karim thus establishes a rapport between his two cultural backgrounds:
the counterculture reacts against, but has its origins in, Western culture;
it is not an Eastern invention, and yet it is informed by the East. Delving
into the implications of Karim’s hippie ascription, one could even ponder
the extent to which Karim is destabilising the category of ‘hippie’ as the
purview of a group of middle-class youths who were mainly white.
The sartorial ‘double entendre’ inherent in Karim’s garish clothes—
Eastern versus Eastern via Western counterculture—is a dialogism that
pervades most of the novel. It assists in the collapse of the East–West
divide in the text and gestures towards the unsustainability of such
dichotomising divisions in a world dominated increasingly by the cir-
culation of culture. The permeability of culture(s) is further explored
through the set of clothes Karim wears at the end of the novel: ‘black
cashmere sweater, grey cords […] black American loafers’ (ibid.: 259).
His is a cosmopolitan style, congruent with the staid fashions of the
1980s sketched in the novel, but similarly transnational: his ‘American
loafers’ establish transatlantic links, and his ‘cashmere sweater’ is sugges-
tive of the long-established import of Eastern textiles to the West, even
if this nexus has somehow been ‘lost in translation’ (Rushdie 1983: 29).
Being more subdued, this ensemble contrasts with the cacophony of
clothes Karim wears at the beginning of the text, which has been read
as evidence of Karim’s progress from adolescence to maturity (Reichl
2000). No grand finale is, however, afforded to Karim in the last chap-
ter of The Buddha. He has grown more mature, confronting ‘truths’ to
which his hedonistic persona had previously turned a blind eye, most
notably with regard to racial politics. Yet, at the end of the text, Karim
appears almost as bewildered and disorientated as he was at the begin-
ning. No doubt his sartorial hesitation in front of the mirror—‘I thought
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 81

for an hour about what to wear’ (Kureishi 2009: 259)—can symbolise

Karim’s still ongoing search for an identity he has been unable to find
in the course of the novel. However, it might be equally symptomatic of
the fact that identities are never secure or complete, but rather in pro-
cess, demanding continuous (sartorial) negotiations and renegotiations.
As Stuart Hall points out in this respect, identities are metamorphic and
discrepant, ‘[h]ence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of
position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcen-
dental “law of origin”’ (2003b: 237).
Karim’s ensemble at the start of the novel elicits different commentar-
ies from Margaret and Eva, which in turn provide an early introduction
to these opposed characters. Disapproving of Karim’s clothes, Margaret
warns her son against ‘show[ing] us up’ (Kureishi 2009: 7) and goes on
to compare Karim to Danny La Rue, an Irish-born entertainer famous
for his drag performances. On the one hand, Margaret’s comment is sug-
gestive of her failure to understand 1970s fashions and their free play
with the boundaries between femininity and masculinity—hence she
compares Karim to a female impersonator. Margaret is stuck in a past
where colourful and exuberant clothes were not de rigueur for men, a
convention the novel upends, dramatising as it were the so-called ‘pea-
cock revolution’ in dress.28 Karim immediately exposes the ridiculous-
ness and arbitrariness of Margaret’s rationale by bringing to the fore
Auntie Jean’s ‘blue hair’ (ibid.). Margaret is ready to criticise Karim, yet
she sanctions other similarly bizarre dressing practices, just because they
are conventionally accepted: ‘“It’s dignified for older women to have
blue hair,” Mum said’ (ibid.). On the other hand, by comparing Karim
with Danny La Rue, Margaret signals the potential artificiality and the-
atricality that pervade the persona Karim has just donned to attend Eva’s
soirée. In fact, Karim’s outfit is overdone, so much so that it becomes
almost a parody. Eva Kay turns out to be more than pleased with Karim’s
sartorial choices, praising him for bringing ‘authenticity’ to her eso-
teric Buddhist gathering: ‘“Karim Amir, you are so exotic, so original!
It’s such a contribution! It’s so you!”’ (ibid.: 9). Karim might not have
liked his mother’s disapproving remarks about his clothes, but he is not
comfortable with Eva’s comments either, as shown by his wry observa-
tion: ‘“Thank you, Mrs. Kay. If I’d had more notice, I’d have dressed
up”’ (ibid.). Karim’s choice of words is not serendipitous, let alone free
of irony, considering the double meaning of ‘dress up’—dressing smartly
versus wearing a disguise. In alluding to the act of ‘dressing up’, Karim
82 N. PEREIRA-ARES

surreptitiously tells Eva that the ‘authenticity’ he is willing to offer her

is just a matter of clothes and performance. Consequently, Eva’s idea of
‘authenticity’ is immediately interrogated and, filtered through Karim’s
perspective, her soirées appear to be purely carnivalesque inventions,
where different identities are put on at will and where, therefore, the
idea of identities as naturally determined constructs is dismantled.
In effect, Eva’s ‘demonstration[s] of the mystic arts’ (ibid.: 12) are
highly theatrical and even parodic, with Haroon pretending to be a mas-
ter of yoga postures and the rest of the audience venerating him with sar-
donically exaggerated respect. This audience brings together a group of
multifarious, seemingly eccentric, characters whose interest in the latest
social and cultural trends often translates into ‘a terrific amount of show-
ing off’ (ibid.: 12), and the fetishisation of the East in the period is here
satirised with glee. In these esoteric reunions, Haroon assumes a similarly
self-serving role, and the ‘authenticity’ for which he is worshipped is only
a self-invention. For, ultimately, his knowledge of Buddhism is just part
of a personal interest he has cultivated in recent years and now sells back
to the British public—even his books on Eastern philosophy come from
the ‘Oriental bookshop […] off Charing Cross Road’ (ibid.: 5). Despite
Haroon’s impersonations of a Buddhist guru ending up having some
impact on the real man off stage, his transformation initially takes place
‘not at the level of identity but of artifice’ (Ball 1996: 23). Haroon is, as
Karim puts it, ‘a renegade Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist’ (Kureishi
2009: 16). Karim’s wording, and in particular his use of the term ‘mas-
querading’, takes the reader to the world of theatre, the carnival and, by
extension, to the very idea of performance in its most literal sense. Both
the theatre and the carnival require the wearing of costumes, disguises
or masks, and this is something that Haroon does not fail to provide.
Like Karim, Haroon also dresses up for Eva’s soirée, stripping off his
‘black polo-neck sweater […] and grey Marks and Spencer cords’ (ibid.:
6) in order to assume the appearance of an Eastern guru. As Haroon
tells Karim, he transforms himself from ‘an Indian in the Civil Service’
into a Buddhist guru ‘by the bootlaces’ (ibid.: 31). Pushing this idea fur-
ther, it could even be argued that Haroon becomes a sort of impersona-
tor. Not only because he assumes different personae, but also because he
wears multiple layers of clothing, one on top of another, which he then
progressively removes. Thus, when leaving his home to head to Eva’s,
Karim notices that Haroon is wearing ‘a long silk shirt embroidered
around the neck with dragons’ as well as ‘baggy trousers and sandals’
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 83

(ibid.: 29). On top of the shirt, Haroon has donned a ‘crimson waist-
coat with gold and silver patterns’ and, in turn, his whole outfit is hid-
den under his ‘car coat’ (ibid.). Haroon’s coat literally conceals his ‘fake’
Eastern persona from any eyes that might catch sight of him on his way
to Eva’s. Figuratively, Haroon’s coat represents but one of the multiple
forms of sartorial camouflage he has often used to hide his ‘true’ Eastern
self. Indeed, as Karim tells us in recalling his father’s past, one of the
first things Haroon did on arriving in London was to go to Bond Street
and buy ‘bow-ties, bottle-green waistcoats, and tartan socks’ aimed at
replacing the ‘itchy woollen vests’ his mother had once knitted for him
(ibid.: 24). Haroon is thus revealed to have deployed clothes as ‘masks’
through which to disguise his ‘Indianness’, a sartorial strategy compara-
ble to his linguistic efforts at camouflaging his Indian accent. Like many
other migrant characters, Haroon has opted for assimilation during most
of his life, using clothes to ‘assimilate’ his body. However, in Eva’s gath-
erings, he ‘de-assimilates’ or ‘de-colonises’ his dressed body. Intriguingly,
he accomplishes this process by assuming a persona that is not entirely
himself, by becoming a Muslim in the guise of a Buddhist; in other
words, by donning yet another ‘mask’. However, this new ‘mask’ is dif-
ferent from his previous Rushdiean ‘paleface masks’ (Rushdie 1988: 43):
it is a ‘mask’ endowed with a seemingly transformative power.
Masks, as Bakhtin has suggested, are related to ‘transition’, ‘meta-
morphoses’ and even the rejection of ‘conformity to oneself’ (1968:
39) and, in many respects, this is what Haroon’s role as a Buddhist
guru means for the character. No matter their artificiality, Haroon’s
moments of guru impersonation provide a fertile space for subversion
and inversion. If only for as long as the show lasts, Haroon frees him-
self from his tight-fitting assimilationist coat and, more importantly per-
haps, from the identity thrust upon him by other characters, especially
Jean and Ted who, embarrassed by Haroon’s Indian background, always
call him Harry (Yousaf 2002). Eventually, the line between acting and
being is blurred, and the character somehow penetrates the personality
of the actor. Haroon leaves his previous job to become, officially, a spir-
itual adviser. He is no longer regarded as a ‘charlatan’ (Kureishi 2009:
280) or a ‘wonder-maker’ (ibid.: 22), but as a man whose acquired wis-
dom is actively helping others; and he is no longer a man trying to hide
his ‘Indianness’ in Britain, but rather an Indian who is making the most
of what Eastern philosophy can offer to the West. At stake here, Susie
Thomas suggests, is the idea of ‘posing’ as ‘a rehearsal for the real thing’
84 N. PEREIRA-ARES

(2005: 66). While the notion of such a ‘real thing’ is at odds with the
novel’s investment in destabilising core identities, ‘posing’ does afford
Haroon a space for identity experimentation, enabling him to manipulate
his identity via parameters other than postcolonial assimilation. No longer
hiding (him-)self under a coat, Haroon dons ‘his Nehru jacket’ (Kureishi
2009: 282)29 to attend the dinner that closes the novel. Whether Haroon
retrieves the Nehru jacket from India directly or from the Beatles’ own
appropriation of this garment is difficult to ascertain. His Nehru jacket
contains the ‘double entendre’ mentioned above, acting as another sar-
torial element that, as a result of its history of appropriations, thwarts
any critical attempt at aligning Haroon along an East–West divide. In
fact, this is not ‘a’ Nehru jacket, but ‘his’—Haroon’s—Nehru jacket,
a jacket that is ‘collarless and buttoned up to the throat like a Beatle
jacket, only longer’ (ibid.: 282). Haroon’s Nehru jacket is therefore
both and simultaneously neither. It emerges as a sartorial ‘third space’
(Bhabha 2004: 37), positioning Haroon in an interstice that blurs
clear-cut demarcations of national and cultural identity. What is more,
Haroon’s Nehru jacket can even be said to challenge essentialist notions
of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Indianness’—as well as the polarisation between
these categories—as it can lay claim to both of them and establishes a
rapport between the two.
As Roger Bromley suggests, what we experience in The Buddha ‘is the
putting on and off of masks, the casting and recasting of roles’ (2000:
152). Such manoeuvres blur the distinction between what is and what
appears to be, between authenticity and artificiality, and between iden-
tity performativity and theatrical-like performances. This becomes even
more noticeable when Karim starts working as an actor. The different
roles he plays become theatrical representations within the wider ‘the-
atrical’ space provided by the novel, and what is more, Karim’s job
‘involves the repeated donning and casting aside of costumes and per-
sona’ (Sandhu 2003a: 252). Karim begins his career as an actor by play-
ing the role of Mowgli in Shadwell’s production of Rudyard Kipling’s
The Jungle Book (1894). Albeit initially reluctant, Karim finally accedes
to Shadwell’s demands concerning the costume he is required to wear—
‘a loin-cloth and brown make-up’ (Kureishi 2009: 146)—as well as the
Indian accent he is pressured to use. No doubt Karim’s role as Mowgli
is based on highly stereotypical and Orientalist images. However, and
despite their diverging views on the Mowgli passage,30 most critics
claim that Karim’s act of ‘relapsing into [a] cockney’ accent is disruptive
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 85

(ibid.: 158). Karim stages a linguistically hybrid Mowgli that indel-

ibly ‘deconstruct[s] Shadwell’s sham “authenticity”’ (Ross 2006: 242).
Similarly, as Berthold Schoene has already noted (1998), Karim’s cos-
tume, mainly brown make-up, can be deemed subversive, a ‘parod[y] of
white expectations’ (Huggan 2001: 95). It turns Karim’s performance
into ‘some kind of farcical ethnic drag act’ (Schoene 1998: 121) and,
just as drag parodies the belief in ‘naturalized or essentialist gender iden-
tities’ (Butler 1990: 100), so too does Karim’s costume become a parody
of ethnic/racial essentialisms. The mere fact that Shadwell prescribes the
use of ‘brown muck’ (Kureishi 2009: 146) highlights his reliance on a
‘black vs. white rhetoric’ that Karim simply prises apart (Schoene 1998:
121): Karim is ‘black enough’ to be cast by Shadwell, but ‘white enough’
to be forced into wearing brown make-up. Karim is, like Pran Nath in
Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist, an ethnic ‘trespasser’, his skin being
‘not a boundary between things but the thing itself’ (Kunzru 2003: 188,
250), a challenge to any belief in racial/ethnic purity. His persona inverts
Shadwell’s binary logic, which is thus boldly exposed in the novel and,
in the end, Shadwell’s notion of authenticity is reduced to a matter of
dress and parodic performance, rather than being bolstered by having an
Indian actor play the part. Ultimately, and extrapolating Butler’s theories
of ‘parodic proliferation’ in the context of gender identity (1990: 100),
Schoene affirms that ‘Karim’s ethnic drag opens up the possibility of
imagining the proliferation of individual identities beyond the bounds of
racial originality and ethnic authenticity, that is, the gradual coming-into-
being of black Englishmen or white Indians’ (1998: 121–122). This
subversive Butler-inspired reading, like Karim’s Mowgli performance per
se, none the less has its own limitations. Because, while the drag perfor-
mance parodies ‘the very notion of an original’ (Butler 1990: 175), it is
not exempt from producing the reverse effect, making the alleged ‘origi-
nal’ recoverable; in other words, reinforcing the (racial) matrix it suppos-
edly subverts.
Dress encapsulates a tension between artifice and authenticity,
‘between the self as constructed and self-styled and the self as natural and
authentic’ (Entwistle 2005: 113). In The Buddha, this tension is actu-
ally used to question the limits of that oft-cited notion of ‘authenticity’,
one that is ‘clearly related to that of otherness. That which is authentic
is as constructed as that which is other, in both the sense of it being a
similar process and the fact that it is usually other people and their sto-
ries that are valued for their authenticity’ (Sánchez-Arce 2007: 141).
86 N. PEREIRA-ARES

If authenticity can be achieved just by dressing up—as frequently occurs

in The Buddha—then the very idea of ‘authenticity’ is stripped of its
alleged naturalness and shown to be based on arbitrary associations. Eva
eulogises Karim for the ‘authenticity’ he brings to her esoteric gather-
ings, but the authenticity he offers her is just a matter of dress; Shadwell
casts Karim for his supposed ‘authenticity’, and yet he feels he has to
dress up the character; and Haroon dons a costume lest his disciples cast
aspersions on his ‘authenticity’. Despite being called upon repeatedly
because of their supposed ‘authenticity’, Karim and Haroon are strategi-
cally performing a ‘staged ethnicity’ (Huggan 2001: 95) or a ‘posed eth-
nicity’ (Stein 2004: 102), from which they benefit and which seems to
impact on their subjectivities. ‘Comic performance,’ Michael Ross sug-
gests, ‘for all its Chaplinesque pitfalls and pratfalls, can be in Kureishi a
mode of discovery, indeed of self-discovery’ (2006: 246). These dynam-
ics, which also inform Susie Thomas’s idea of developing ‘through act-
ing’ (2005: 67), are at play in Karim’s impersonation of Changez
through his embodiment of the character Tariq. Under the leadership of
the avant-garde director Matthew Pyke, Karim is forced to contend with
the ‘burden of representation’ (Mercer 1994), whose polyhedral sur-
face he discovers after the ‘“me-as-Anwar” fiasco’ (Kureishi 2009: 186).
Karim then decides to base Tariq on Changez, but he ends up ‘project-
ing himself imaginatively into Changez’s shoes’ (Ross 2006: 245). The
process of artistic creation forges a common ground between Changez
and Karim, which eventually catapults the latter into acknowledging his
Indian self at Anwar’s funeral. As Ross observes, Karim’s ‘embracement
of the concept “my people” is clearly guarded and conditional […] but it
still represents a substantial adjustment of attitude’ (2006: 246). On the
stage, the ensuing result is a character—Tariq—who markets a version
of an Indian man arriving in Britain that is not Changez’s, but rather a
potentially ‘hybrid’ creation in-between Changez and Karim. In effect,
Changez does not recognise himself in Tariq and, as Sangeeta Ray warns,
this is not the product of ‘Changez’s willful blindness’ (1998: 236).
Karim has merged (him/his)self with Changez in the process of creating
Tariq and, albeit rarely commented on, Tariq’s dress is the first and most
visible indicator of this. Karim dresses Tariq in clothes that are close to
those in his own wardrobe, but which are diametrically opposed to the
‘dark-red stringy knitted jumper’ (Kureishi 2009: 78) worn by Changez
when he arrives in London. ‘Insist[ing] on assembling the costume
[him]self’, Karim chooses ‘white platform boots, wide cherry flares’
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 87

and a shirt with ‘a wide “Concorde” collar’ (ibid.: 220). Karim dresses
the character of a man newly arrived from India in the latest London
fashions, thereby adding a sartorial twist to Tariq’s more stereotypical
dimension. Tariq is neither a transgressive character, nor a ‘ridiculous ste-
reotype’ tout court (Jena 1993: 6). The audience accepts the character,
yet Tariq plays with their expectations of ‘sartorial authenticity’. Hence,
their ‘laughter’ is ‘uncertain at first’ (Kureishi 2009: 220), with that
uncertainty arguably stemming from the conflicting messages put across
by Tariq’s outward signifiers—in the end, one could argue, those in the
audience are laughing at a character that is potentially their own sartorial
mirror. Crucially, in shaping Tariq, Karim refuses to focus on differences
and highlights instead transcultural linkages and commonalities. Tariq,
the Indian man in fashionable Western clothes, visibly interrogates the
East–West distinction, disavowing the possibility of intrinsic, essentialist
notions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Indianness’ in the ‘global postmodern’ (Hall
1997: 182).
While it is open to debate whether Karim is intentionally playing with
the audience’s presuppositions by dressing Tariq in the latest London
vogues, Kureishi certainly shatters the reader’s expectations concerning
the dress of his characters. In the topsy-turvy world of the novel, ste-
reotypical associations between ethnic identities and sartorial mores are
overturned, and the text wantonly plays with dress in an often irrever-
ent fashion. The idea of Haroon, a Muslim man, posing and dressing
as a Buddhist is inherently disruptive and, in a novel where there are
no Muslim women in hijab, it is subversive to find men behind the
veil: Haroon ‘had a scarf over most of his face’ (Kureishi 2009: 64);
Changez ‘[was] with one of her [Jamila’s] scarves wrapped around his
head and covering his ears, Indian fashion’ (ibid.: 182). Changez, who
a priori was expected to play the role of the chauvinist husband, thus
joins the novel’s ‘carnival’, repeatedly dressing in Jamila’s clothes. Jamila
wears, among other garments, a ‘black T-shirt and white shorts’ (ibid.:
71), and yet she does not shy away from her Indian identity, being the
most politically active and outspoken character with regard to the rights
of the Asian community in Britain. Her mother, Jeeta, wears tradi-
tional Muslim clothes, but she escapes the stereotype of the submissive
Muslim woman, as she eventually annihilates her husband’s patriarchal
authority by depriving him of any form of bodily pleasure, from food to
‘laughter’ (Ross 2006: 238). It is Margaret, however, the white British
woman, who embodies a model of female subservience and, as Wendy
88 N. PEREIRA-ARES

O’Shea-Meddour hints, she even comes close to a figurative form of

‘Islamic’ dress, clothed in a ‘“dressing-gown, which was so long it almost
touched the floor, making her look square”’ (2008: 39). Muslim cloth-
ing in the novel is largely restricted to the Anwars’ storyline, with Jeeta
wearing a ‘salwar kamiz’ (Kureishi 2009: 78) and Anwar drifting from
his ‘rancid [Western-style] suit’ (ibid.: 57) to ‘a pair of pyjamas’ (ibid.:
171)—a sartorial transition that evokes his nostalgic return to ‘an imag-
ined India’ (ibid.: 74). Eastern garments, albeit not Muslim clothes
per se, nevertheless abound in the text. They are worn by ‘brown’ and
‘white’ bodies alike—mainly in the context of Eva’s esoteric soirées—
and while establishing a nexus with the East, they are however often
procured in Britain. As a result, the reader of Kureishi’s novel becomes
puzzlingly lost in a maze of sartorial permutations, appropriations and
exchanges. The novel thus points at the idea that nowadays ‘there is
no longer anything absolutely foreign’ or ‘anything exclusively own’
(Welsch 1999: 198). This is concomitant with Kureishi’s emphasis on
challenging ossified notions of ‘Britishness’ and, in the context of the
novel, it effectively thwarts the possibility of aligning characters to par-
ticular ethnic, cultural and national demarcations on the basis of outward
signifiers.
In The Buddha, identity is often shown to be performatively consti-
tuted by the ‘very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler
1990: 45). This also applies to ‘whiteness’, which is not presented as an
immutable ethnic category. In The Buddha, ‘whiteness’ is also strategi-
cally performed and modelled by various characters, at times in ways that
undermine hegemonic norms. The most conspicuous example emerges
when Charlie moves to New York and starts ‘selling Englishness’
(Kureishi 2009: 247), adopting a Cockney accent among other ritu-
alised acts. In this way, not only is the category of ‘white Englishness’
turned into the exotic ‘Other’ in America, but it is also reduced to a
matter of performativity (even performance). Moreover, however faux
Charlie’s punk persona might be, it can be said to destabilise normative
and even hegemonic ideas of ‘whiteness’ and, in effect, like many 1970s
punks, Charlie also directs some of his ‘assaults’ at the most emblem-
atic symbols of white Britain, particularly ‘the Queen’ (ibid.: 153)—
which calls to mind the disruptive image featuring on the sleeve of the
Sex Pistols’ single ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977). Meanwhile, his mother
Eva deviates from mainstream ‘whiteness’ through her strategic flirtation
with the counterculture, dressing in the clothes of the alleged ‘Other’.
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 89

At her esoteric soirées, Eva walks barefoot, darkens her eyes ‘with kohl’
and dons such items of dress as ‘a full-length, multi-coloured kaftan’,
a ‘blue silk pyjama’ or a ‘red turban’ combined with a ‘long red dress
which fell to the floor’ (ibid.: 8–9, 113, 30). Like her bare feet, Eva’s
ensembles exude touches of hippiedom, chiming in with the hippies’
tendency to incorporate sartorial influences from Eastern cultures. This
should not be taken to imply that Eva embodies hippiedom unequivo-
cally, let alone the anti-capitalist ideology associated with the hippies, as
she is the character that comes closest to the Thatcherite ethos the novel
foreshadows. Eva is better defined as a woman with a ‘with-it’ under-
standing, a woman who also sees much potential in capitalising on a
‘with-it’ ethos, since she certainity is a social climber. No doubt Eva’s act
of cashing in on ‘Asianness’ can be regarded as ‘an unhealthy [and cer-
tainly self-serving] veneration of cultures of non-western origin’, which
boils down to a ‘patronising exoticism’ (Moore-Gilbert 2001: 138). Yet,
opportunistic as it is, Eva’s appropriation of ‘Asianness’ opens a space
for subversion in the text. Eva’s dressed body combines in itself the East
and the West, and she proves to be free from the prejudices that bedevil
other characters—Margaret, for example, highly dependent on main-
stream sanctions, rejects putting on a sari, as Haroon teasingly suggests
to her on one occasion. More importantly, Eva’s dressed body reverses
the colonial project of sartorial ‘civilisation’ as well as the postcolonial
paradigm of mimicry. Whereas in colonial India the allegedly ‘civilis-
ing project’ meant, at some points, clothing the bodies of the natives in
European clothes (Tarlo 1996), in the postcolonial world of Kureishi’s
novel, Haroon’s disciples, including Eva, are readily eager to deck their
bodies in Eastern garments, to let their bodies be sartorially ‘colonised’
and their minds spiritually ‘civilised’.31 Likewise, instead of having the
postcolonial migrant dressing in Western clothes, The Buddha features a
white British woman who emulates the cultural mores of those formerly
colonised. Eventually, Eva’s appropriation of ‘Asianness’ leads her to
‘scour that suburban stigma right off her body’ (Kureishi 2009: 134).32
To put it differently, she achieves upward social mobility, and this creates
a subversive nexus between ethnicity and class in the novel. Whereas, in
many migrant narratives, mimicking stereotypical ‘Britishness’ offers the
characters more opportunities to prosper—that was the ‘right thing’ to
‘secur[e] bright futures’ (Markandaya 1973: 106)—in The Buddha the
commodification of ‘Asianness’ allows the characters—not simply Eva,
but also Haroon and Karim—to move up the social ladder.
90 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Karim’s assertion that suburban stigmas are in the ‘blood’ (Kureishi

2009: 134) is therefore demystified in the text: there is ‘nothing sub-
urban about her [Eva]’ at the end of the novel (ibid.: 261). Karim
repeatedly articulates a rigid understanding of class, but class is denied
an ontological status in the novel. Like ethnicity or gender, class is por-
trayed as a matter of performativity—sometimes even performance—
with the dressed body playing an important role in the process. In The
Buddha, by self-consciously dressing in one way or another, the charac-
ters inhabit different class positions, blur the lines between social classes
and explore the ‘new possibilities of social mobility in post-war Britain’
(Felski 2000: 40). Some characters who aspire upwards dress in rich
clothes—Karim’s Auntie Jean insists on wearing those ‘dresses from
the perfume days’ (Kureishi 2009: 104). Others, being relatively afflu-
ent, decide to dress down. The director Matthew Pyke and those around
him, pretending to be radical outsiders at odds with the Establishment
and sympathisers with the have-nots, inscribe this message on their
dressed bodies. Among many other different styles of clothing, Pyke
himself occasionally wears a pair of ‘dungarees’ (ibid.: 159), a garment
that, while a part of 1970s fashions in general, has a working-class gen-
esis. Most notably, Pyke’s son sports ‘a shaved head, earrings and filthy
clothes’ (ibid.: 199), an ensemble that Karim himself interprets for the
reader: ‘[clothes] far too rough and slovenly to be anything other than
a member of the liberal middle class’ (ibid.: 199). As a result, reading
the social class of other characters through their dressed bodies becomes
extremely difficult and misleading, as Karim experiences when attempt-
ing to read Eleanor’s. Eleanor is a well-off, left-wing woman who is part
of Pyke’s crew and a devotee of his. When Karim first meets Eleanor,
the fact that she ‘dresse[s] roughly, wearing a lot of scarves’ leads him
to believe that she is ‘less middle class than she [eventually] turn[s] out
to be’ (ibid.: 173). Dressing down is also the path followed by Charlie
to escape from his middle-classness, a social class that, as Rita Felski has
argued convincingly, constitutes ‘a singularly “uncool” identity […] pre-
ferring camouflage over confession’ (2000: 41). By becoming a punk,
Charlie steps up the ladder to fame and, in terms of class, this involves a
complex and even ironic manoeuvre: Charlie appropriates a faux work-
ing-class ethos in order to better himself socially and economically. His is
a strategic adoption of class and one that, as noted earlier on, is entirely
contingent on clothes. Charlie self-fashions himself as a punk by dress-
ing accordingly, and dress thus becomes a catalyst for social mobility,
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 91

eventually helping to dismantle the rigidity of social structures. Charlie’s

figure, despite his final decadent image, is made to stand for the new syn-
ergies of social permeability brought about by British pop, which helped
to make class barriers spongier or, as Kureishi put it in an interview with
Bradley Buchanan, to free individuals ‘from the straightjacket [sic] of
class’ (Buchanan 2007: 111).
The Buddha is not, however, a naïve account that loses sight of reality
in its celebration of an ‘aesthetics of impurity’ (Oubechou 1997: 106),
and the Anwars’ storyline acts, in some respects, as a counterpoint to the
‘carnival’ that frames most of the novel. Whereas the Amirs manage to
move to ‘London proper’ (Kureishi 2009: 4), the Anwars are pinioned
to their small business, their lives being ‘pervaded by fear of [racist] vio-
lence’ (ibid.: 56). Rising up the social ladder is not so easy for them, and
whereas Haroon finds an alternative and even transgressive way to revert
‘internally to India’ (ibid.: 64), Anwar adopts a form of ethnic essential-
ism the novel does not abide by—hence he dies ‘in a scene of macabre
surrealist farce’ (Ross 2006: 238), beaten with a dildo by Changez, the
very man he once coerced his daughter Jamila into marrying. What is
more, in the Anwars’ narrative, ‘Asianness’, far from being venerated,
often emerges as a sign of ‘Otherness’. When agreeing to walk Changez
to Millwall football ground, Karim first dragoons Jamila’s husband into
wearing ‘a bobble-hat over his face’ (ibid.: 98); put differently, into
wearing a form of sartorial camouflage aimed at hiding his dark skin and
thus warding off potential racist acts. This implies that, outside certain
artistic and leftist circles, the Asian body continues to be an ‘undesirable
presence’ and a potential target of racial abuse. Also tellingly, whereas
Helen reveres Haroon in the context of Eva’s orderly gatherings, she
refuses to touch Changez’s suitcase in case she gets ‘malaria’ (ibid.: 78).
The liberal Helen is in the end plagued by deep-seated prejudices, and
her admiration for the ‘proliferation of difference’ involves ‘a kind of dif-
ference that doesn’t make a difference of any kind’ (Hall 1996b: 467).
For Helen to consume Eastern paraphernalia, as she does, the East needs
first to be ‘sanitised’ and warmed-up so that it sounds, smells and tastes
familiar. Otherwise, she simply pathologises it. This brings to the fore
the double movement frequently involved in the consumption of alter-
ity. Exoticism, which is contingent on ‘authenticism’ (Sánchez-Arce
2007),33 renders ‘people, objects, and places strange even as it domesti-
cates them’ (Huggan 2001: 13; emphasis added). Domestication in this
sense ties in with what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘the aesthetics of diversion’
92 N. PEREIRA-ARES

(1999: 28); that is, the process whereby the exoticised and fetishised
element is diverted from its ‘original’ context. In The Buddha, Helen
eagerly consumes the ‘domesticated’ and ‘diverted’ versions of the East
that Haroon represents, but when confronted with Changez the East as
‘fetish’ turns into ‘phobia’ (Bhabha 2004: 104). The Buddha thus pro-
vides a nuanced exploration of the fetishisation of alterity in the period,
unveiling its multiple paradoxes and, above all, the snobbery surround-
ing it. The novel even invites us to reflect on how different the East
looks, and is perceived, when ‘worn’ on different bodies. It is despised
on the body of the migrant ‘fresh from a small Indian town’ (Kureishi
2009: 220), seen as fashionably ‘chic’ on white bodies such as Eva’s, and
worshipped on Eastern bodies that accede to marketing what the British
public wants to consume, as occurs in the case of Haroon and Karim.
This in turn interrogates the position of father and son in the novel:
Are they submitting their bodies to an Orientalising process or are they
‘“changing the script of what it means to be English”’ (Thomas 2005:
69)? Both interpretations are equally plausible— without being mutu-
ally exclusive either—which ultimately points at how complex and con-
tradictory the fetishisation of alterity might be for those whose culture is
appropriated (see also Chap. 4). It offers at once new possibilities of self-
advancement for characters such as Haroon and Karim. However, it is
largely based on modelling the East so as to make it palatable to Western
consumers, or on submitting the East to a Western Orientalist/exoticist
gaze from which Haroon and Karim might not escape, even if they sell
back ‘unauthentic’ ethnicities.
Fashion and dress in The Buddha, as noted earlier, are used to con-
fuse ethnic and class boundaries, and they are also deployed to cre-
ate ‘gender trouble’ (Butler 1990). In Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth
Wilson has stated that fashion ‘plays endlessly with the distinction
between masculinity and femininity’, expressing our ‘shifting ideas about
what masculinity and femininity are’ (2010: 122). Dress encodes gen-
der difference, gendering the body as male or female. Yet, inasmuch as
it repeatedly plays with this distinction, dress also exposes the culturally
construed character of gender (Entwistle 2005). The gendered body,
as Butler argues, ‘has no ontological status apart from the various acts
that constitute its reality’ (1990: 136). The ‘effect of gender is produced
through the stylization of the body […] bodily gestures, movements and
styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self
(ibid.: 140). Given the types of subcultures that Kureishi depicts most
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 93

prolifically in The Buddha (hippies, glam rockers, punks), it is no won-

der that the novel subverts gender (and sexual) binaries, and that it does
so through the dressed body. Put another way, the disruption of these
binaries in the text clearly draws strength from the transgressive sarto-
rial practices of post-war subcultures. Indeed, according to Entwistle, the
clothes of many pop groups in the 1970s destabilised gender conven-
tions in such a powerful way that the term ‘gender-bending’ was used
at the time to describe the way in which the self-presentation of these
groups subverted standard notions of masculinity and femininity (2005:
175). In an interview with Colin MacCabe, Kureishi himself has declared
that ‘dressing up and being girlish was part of English pop’ (1999: 48),
and in Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift the narrator describes the protagonist
Lester’s gender-ambiguous image as just something to be expected of
a pop star: ‘Like most pop heroes, Lester […] was neither completely
boy nor girl’ (2001: 38). Similarly, in The Buddha, when Charlie appears
at school dressed like a proto-Bowie, he is also referred to as being ‘[g]
irlie’ (Kureishi 2009: 69), which highlights the way in which Charlie’s
appearance (like Bowie’s) challenges received notions of masculinity and
femininity. Later, when Karim visits Charlie in New York, he discovers
that, outside Britain and its class antagonism, Charlie’s music has lost its
power. A resourceful Charlie has none the less adopted new strategies to
keep up. In addition to ‘selling Englishness’ (ibid.: 247), Charlie starts
exploiting his image and body, finishing his performances ‘bare-chested,
thin and white like Jagger’ (ibid.). Charlie thus emphasises the compo-
nent of sexual fetish inherent in punk aesthetics (Entwistle 2005), and
by extension he also relies on the fetishisation and commodification of
his own body, a body he has self-fashioned to be gender ambiguous—the
comparison to Mick Jagger being significant in this respect.
Kureishi’s The Buddha certainly poses a challenge to the ‘heterosex-
ual matrix’, revealing the existence of multiple ‘gender discontinuities’
in which ‘gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or
sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender’ (Butler 1990:
135–136). Charlie is said to attract ‘gays’ and ‘girls’ alike (Kureishi
2009: 247), and his dressed body—from his Bowie to his punk phase—
expresses a form of androgyny that prises apart gender binaries. A serial
womaniser, Charlie none the less has a homosexual encounter with
Karim at the start of the novel, even if for the mere sake of free gratifi-
cation (Thomas 2005). Jamila, who is married to Changez, indulges in
casual sex with Karim throughout, has a baby with Simon and enters a
94 N. PEREIRA-ARES

lesbian relationship with Joanna. Likewise, Karim also puts to the test
gender and sexual binaries, equally desiring men and women. Karim
likes ‘being handled by men […] objects—the ends of brushes, pens, fin-
gers—up my arse’, but also ‘cunts and breasts, all of women’s softness’
(Kureishi 2009: 55). Karim thus articulates an undifferentiated sexuality
that goes beyond challenging the homosexual versus heterosexual binary,
envisioning, in a Freudian way (Freud 1905), the idea that the homosex-
ual is always already present in the heterosexual, and vice versa.34 More
pertinently for my purpose here, in the same passage, Karim also asserts
to like ‘the way women dressed’ (Kureishi 2009: 55). Clothes conceal
and reveal the body and, in doing so, they eroticise the human body.
As Entwistle points out, ‘nakedness is uninteresting, not “sexy”, while
clothing adds a mystery to the body that makes it all the more provoca-
tive’ (2005: 181). Karim himself is not sexually aroused when he sees
Eleanor stark naked. In contrast, he is excited when he observes how
‘in his jeans he [Charlie] [i]s growing’ (Kureishi 2009: 17), or when
he looks at Eleanor ‘sitting in a chair […] pressing the swathes of cloth
down her legs’ (ibid.: 187) and fantasises about what is hidden beneath
her long skirt. The skirt becomes a fetish or, as the narrator of Kureishi’s
Intimacy puts it, ‘a transitional object; both a thing in itself and a means
of getting somewhere else’ ([1998] 1999a: 19). The attraction that
female clothing exerts on Karim can therefore be interpreted in terms
of fetishism: women’s clothes as fetishes of the male gaze, with fetish-
ism being conceptualised here as the ‘individual displacement of private
erotic feelings onto […] a particular article of clothing in conjunction
with its effect on the body’ (Kunzle 2006: 1). But in The Buddha, Karim
also flirts with dressing practices conventionally associated with women,
mostly by putting on ‘eye-liner and nail varnish’ (Kureishi 2009: 206).
No doubt this might lead to much Freudian pandering and it is tempt-
ing to suggest that the passage shows Karim exploring his feminine side.
Yet Karim’s use of make-up is to be understood in the context of 1970s
subculture fashions, many of which extended the use of make-up to men.
His flirtation with these practices entails, in the main, an involvement in
popular culture, which none the less adds to the overall gender ambiva-
lence present in the text.
Whereas Karim only applies eye-liner and nail varnish, Changez
cross-dresses using Jamila’s clothes, her ‘pink silk dressing gown’ (ibid.:
192) as well as ‘her jumpers or shirts’ (ibid.: 182). Any form of cross-
dressing precipitates a crisis in the binary logic of gender, ‘putting into
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 95

question the categories of “female” and “male”’ (Garber 1997: 10).

Cross-dressing is thus used in The Buddha to undermine gender binaries,
a project further accomplished by endowing different characters with
attitudes and attributes conventionally typified as feminine or masculine.
As well as his cross-gender behaviour, Changez is comically suspected of
having developed ‘full female breasts’ (Kureishi 2009: 271), and Karim
asserts that Jamila has ‘a dark moustache […] more impressive than my
own’ (ibid.: 51), a feature culturally gendered as masculine. What is
more, Jamila’s clothing gradually evolves towards a gender-neutral style,
and this is made to coincide with her overt lesbianism. Thus, once inside
the anarchist and vegetarian commune she joins, Jamila adopts a uni-
sex style: ‘an inside-out sweatshirt and jeans’ (ibid.: 214). For her part,
Jamila’s lover, Joanna, sports an even more androgynous, ‘boyish’ look:
‘short hair […] a red and black workman’s shirt and jeans’ (ibid.: 274).
Their outfits further destabilise the line between femininity and mascu-
linity in the text, revealing the construed nature of gender and paving
the way for critical approaches to the ‘third’ (Garber 1997). As Marjorie
B. Garber observes, this ‘third’ category negates, rather than asserting.
It opens up ‘a space of possibility […] it is the disruptive element that
intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of
category itself’ (1997: 17). Particularly in the case of Jamila, and consid-
ering her active involvement in feminism, her unisex clothing can also be
interpreted along feminist lines, inhabiting as she does a period in which
unisex styles became a symbol of female equality: gender equality was
then visibly negotiated through ‘equality in dress’ (Rouse 1989: 221).
Indeed, throughout the novel, Jamila’s dressed body is often pre-
sented as a carrier of powerful social messages, which is commensurate
with her political commitment. Not so long ago, we are told, Jamila used
to sport an ‘Afro natural’ (Kureishi 2009: 51), an unequivocal symbol
of a black British consciousness and the 1960s motto ‘Black is Beautiful’
(Mercer 1987; hooks 1992).35 Feminist and political activist Angela
Davis projected this new paradigm of beauty at the time, and it is not a
coincidence that her writings are among the books that Jamila devours.
Jamila is thus revealed to have constructed her identity around the cat-
egory of ‘black’, even around a ‘black’ role model that, being considered
‘cooler’ in the period, none the less obscured the Asian component of
her identity. Jamila’s identification with ‘blackness’ might result from the
currency of ‘black’ as a political and even aesthetic category at the time.
But it might also underscore the absence of validating Asian role models
96 N. PEREIRA-ARES

in the period. Indeed, at one point, Karim asserts that, in the past, he
and Jamila used to pretend to be ‘black Americans’ (Kureishi 2009: 53).
For them, this concocted identification was a means of rebelling against
a notion of ‘Britishness’ from which they were excluded: ‘The thing was,
we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wogs
and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it’ (ibid.). In the novel’s ‘present’,
Jamila has already disposed of her Afro, but she continues to occupy
‘alternative’ subject positions that allow her to manipulate her identity
outside the boundaries of conventional ‘Indianness’ as well as hegem-
onic and normative ‘whiteness’. In effect, in the following excerpt, her
dressed body projects a rebellious female subjectivity endowed with a
feminist intertextuality:

Jamila was wearing what looked like several sacks: long skirts, perhaps
three, one over the other, and a long smock in faded green beneath which
the flat arcs of her braless breasts were visible to the slightly interested.
She had […] on her feet a rather unrelenting pair of Dr Martens in brown
(ibid.: 80–81)

This ensemble has been read as evidence of Jamila’s adopting ‘Islamic

clothes’ (O’Shea-Meddour 2008: 39), which seems incongruous when
read alongside the image of her ‘braless breasts’ showing through
her smock. The wearing of faded smocks and long skirts was common
among many hippies in the late 1960s and, partly as a result, by the early
1970s, knee-length and long skirts were edging their way back into fash-
ion, having been displaced by the enthusiasm aroused by the mini-skirt
in the 1960s (Rouse 1989). Karim himself voices this transition when he
avers that the ‘days of tight tops and mini-skirts for women were gone’
(Kureishi 2009: 81), an assertion placed immediately before the above-
quoted excerpt. Going braless was also a political statement among hip-
pie women and feminists alike. Many hippie women eschewed the use
of the bra at the time, braless breasts being envisioned not only as an
indicator of women’s sexual liberation, but also as a form of reunion
with nature and the body—and in the commune Jamila joins, Changez
is, in fact, struck by the women’s degree of nudity: they ‘go completely
without clothes, their breasts without brassieres!’ (ibid.: 223). The
1960s was also the period of bra-burning, the unbound breast emerg-
ing as a feminist symbol of women’s struggles against sartorial con-
straints and, not coincidentally, Jamila envisions the above-mentioned
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 97

outfit as a liberation from the capriciousness of fashion: she was ‘crazy

about these clothes’, never having ‘to think about what to put on’ (ibid.:
55). Further layers of feminism are potentially revealed when examining
Jamila’s footwear: a pair of Doc Martens. First popularised in Britain by
the skinheads (see Chap. 2), in the 1970s, the so-called Doc Martens
began to be used by different collectives purporting to express a message
of transgression. Anne Brydon points out that many feminist as well as
lesbians adopted this type of footwear in the period, attempting to ‘sub-
vert malestream expectations of female propriety and to relish the feel of
power that big boots can give’ (1998: 11). Described as ‘unrelenting’,
Jamila’s Doc Martens do convey resolution, determination and assertive-
ness. Furthermore, in the context of the novel, we might even wonder
whether these boots act as a harbinger of her later lesbian relationship
with Joanna.
Jamila’s refusal to comply with fashion dictats indicates that she
espouses a vision of fashion as enslaving and putatively objectifying,
a vision that has also been upheld by certain Western feminists (Wolf
1991). Fashion has indeed been a contested topic within feminist dis-
course, partly—albeit not exclusively—because of the strongly rooted
and problematic association between fashion and the feminine (Tseëlon
1997). Fashion and dress have commonly been regarded as female con-
cerns, even as the epitome of female superficiality, vanity and frivolity
(Entwistle 2005). This idea of fashion as being a female prerogative is
clearly dismantled in The Buddha, as in Kureishi’s novel male charac-
ters tend to show more interest in clothes and appearance than do their
female counterparts. Allie, Karim’s younger brother, can be defined as a
fashionista. Even before turning into a fashion designer, Allie reads fash-
ion magazines such as Vogue or Harpers & Queen; he travels to Italy in
order to scrutinise ‘clothes in Milan’ (Kureishi 2009: 144); and he goes
to bed with ‘a tiny pair of red silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket […] and
his hairnet’ (ibid.: 19). Similarly, whereas Jamila inhabits the sphere of
the mind and shows ‘little physical vanity’ (ibid.: 81), Karim lives in the
world of the physical and his most bizarre thoughts always contain a sar-
torial dimension: ‘I was thrown out of a class at school for asking what
people would be wearing in heaven’ (ibid.: 80). Being the narrator of
the novel, most sartorial references are filtered through his perspective,
which indicates that Karim is very observant of style and fashion. Always
preoccupied with what to wear, Karim reproduces Kureishi’s own sar-
torial obsession as a young man: ‘I [Kureishi] was a teenager, obsessed
98 N. PEREIRA-ARES

with my clothes and hair’ (2005a: 14). In The Buddha, Karim inherits
his clothing obsession from Haroon, who manifest a zealous care for
his image, thus contrasting with Margaret and her scant concern for the
body—‘she considered her body to be an inconvenient object’ (Kureishi
2009: 4). Haroon is said to ‘put olive oil’ on his hair in order to avoid
baldness (ibid.: 84), and to shave his chest so as to allow its hair to
‘sprout more luxuriantly’ (ibid.: 4). Haroon pays as much attention to
his body as to his clothes. His wardrobe is extensive and his painstak-
ing fussiness regarding clothes is unlimited. He has about ‘ten pairs’ of
shoes, ‘at least a hundred’ ties (ibid.: 47) and every Sunday he ‘polish[es]
his shoes’, ‘brush[es] his suits’ and chooses ‘his shirts for the week—one
day pink, the next blue, the next lilac and so on’ (ibid.: 47). Haroon
distances himself from men’s alleged lack of interest in fashion,36 with-
out this ever compromising his virility in the text, symbolised by his
exuberant chest. The Buddha thus wards off the vestigial stereotype of
the effeminate colonial male subject, while simultaneously undermining
the prerogative that fashion and dress are exclusively female concerns.
Interestingly, Haroon’s and Margaret’s different approaches to body
and dress are not entirely ‘fictional’. In My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi
speaks of his mother as someone who used to ‘hid[e] her body—it was
private’ (2005a: 75). This calls to mind Margaret’s puritanical attitudes
in The Buddha, from which she is none the less redeemed at the end of
the novel: ‘Mum spent ages preparing herself, and Allie told her what
jewellery to wear, and the right shoes and everything’ (Kureishi 2009:
269). An even more obvious parallel emerges when comparing Haroon
to Kureishi’s father. In the aforementioned memoir, Kureishi defines
his father as having been ‘female in his narcissism’ (2005a: 75) and, like
Haroon in The Buddha, Rafiushan Kureishi is also said to have been
‘forever fussing with his clothes’, ‘spend[ing] ages powdering, dressing,
moisturizing and worrying about his hair, which he always oiled’ (ibid.).
Recurrently underpinned by the writer’s memoir, Hanif Kureishi’s The
Buddha offers a sartorially well-informed portrayal of an epoch and an
actual ‘carnival’ in Bakhtian terms. Despite being set in the 1970s, the
novel walks readers back to the 1960s, eventually leaving them on the
verge of the 1980s and the prelude to Thatcherism. Fashion and dress
play a crucial role in Kureishi’s presentation and representation of these
decades. They add tangibility and credibility to the setting of the novel,
help to move the plot and time frame forward, and act as yet another
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 99

mechanism through which Kureishi weaves the popular into the fabric
of the text. Drawing strength from the sartorial irreverence and carni-
valesque aspect of contemporary pop and youth subcultures, Kureishi
also utilises fashion and dress to undermine fixed identity categories
and go beyond traditional binarisms. In The Buddha, the characters are
not chained to a predetermined inventory of clothes by their ethnic-
ity, original social class or biological sex. On the contrary, dress affords
them a medium through which to manipulate their identities along all
these parameters, with the novel featuring subversive sartorial identities
and allowing for the proliferation of acts of dressing-up. White British
characters such as Eva dress their bodies in the clothes of the ‘Other’,
however self-serving this appropriation might be; middle-class characters
such as Charlie Hero take on working-class personae through a strate-
gic use of clothing; and the line between femininity and masculinity is
repeatedly crossed and re-crossed through the characters’ frisky use of
dress. By fashioning and refashioning their clothed bodies, the charac-
ters in Kureishi’s novel perform and inhabit a myriad of different identity
positions, whether permanent or transient, real or contrived. The novel
thus gestures towards the idea that ‘[t]oday, every principle of identity
is affected by fashion’ (Baudrillard 2007: 463). More importantly, the
characters’ play with dress serves to expose the arbitrary and contingent
nature of identity, which is often reduced to acts of sartorial performativ-
ity and sometimes even performance. Kureishi’s The Buddha reveals that
‘the body politic, the class body, the racial body and the body of gen-
der’ are constructs traditionally ‘disguise[d] […] as human nature’ (Fiske
1994: 70). What is more, the sartorially diverse London that Kureishi
depicts in The Buddha heeds the call to redefine defunct notions of
‘Britishness’ or, as one character puts it in Kureishi’s The Black Album,
‘the whole Orwellian idea of England’ (Kureishi 1995: 106).
Like Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) or Hari
Kunzru’s My Revolutions (2007), Kureishi’s The Buddha is organised
around the strains of pop and youth subcultures. The Buddha does not
rely on an Indian diasporic lore, but rather on a relay of images that
invoke a British cultural and sartorial imaginary—the culture with which
Kureishi, and Karim as well, identify most clearly (Pally 1986). This
is so much so that, from a sartorial point of view, The Buddha strikes
a discordant note in comparison to most of the narratives dealt with in
this book, narratives whose sartorial vocabulary often coalesces around
100 N. PEREIRA-ARES

South Asian diasporic fashions. The Buddha shatters the potential expec-
tations of any reader who, on approaching a novel about characters with
a Muslim background, might assume the text contains multiple refer-
ences to modest fashion. Kureishi eschews creating a novel about hijabs
and skullcaps and, whereas London is indeed sartorially ‘tropicalized’
in the text (Rushdie 1988: 354), the agents of this tropicalisation are
not so much migrant bodies, but rather those who turn to the East in
a period in which being ‘only English’ is not enough (Kureishi 2009:
3). In effect, Eastern paraphernalia, including clothes and textiles, per-
vade the whole novel. The origins of these stretch from China to India,
but the characters procure them in Britain. They are worn by ‘brown’
and ‘white’ bodies alike, but they often appear in the text via the coun-
terculture and its ramifications in the 1960s and 1970s. These sartorial
permutations attest to the impossibility of conceiving of cultures as being
fixed territorially or contained in an increasingly globalised world, which
further illuminates Kureishi’s project of dismantling ossified notions of
cultural/national identity. Consequently, attempting to disentangle the
actual ‘origins’ of the textiles in question runs counter to the novel’s
purpose, namely to blur national, cultural and ethnic demarcations and
ultimately to blur the East–West divide. In The Buddha, as in a process
of continual deferral, the East informs, and is simultaneously informed
by, the West, and vice versa. This rapport—particularly as far as dress is
concerned—is channelled through the cross-ethnic pollination initially
ushered in by the counterculture, and as a result the sphere of popular
culture, to which all subcultures are connected, emerges in the novel
as a space that propelled cross-ethnic dialogues in the post-war period.
However, as we have seen, The Buddha also exposes the ambivalences
and limitations of the assertion in this chapter’s titular quotation, pro-
viding a nuanced approach to the fetishisation of the East in the period.
However, as we shall see in the following chapter, the possibilities as well
as hazards surrounding the consumption of alterity are also explored in
Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, a novel that exhibits a sar-
torial repertoire strikingly different from that present in The Buddha.
Creating a world that brims with Punjabi suits and dupattas, Syal’s novel
moves the focus from the 1960s and 1970s to the 1990s; from a male
protagonist to three female personae; from rebellious teenage bodies to
adult bodies; and from carnivalesque endeavours to lives often grounded
in bleak reality.
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 101

NOTES
1. Hereafter referred to as The Buddha.
2. In this respect, see Luke Ferretter (2003), Michael L. Ross (2006) and
Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein (2005). These critics have analysed the
nexus between the political agendas of several postcolonial writers and
the humorous or even parodic perspectives in their writings.
3. Chapeltown (1975), Brick Lane (1978), Southall (1979, 1981), Bristol
(1981), Brixton (1981), Moss Side (1981), Handsworth (1985) and
Dewsbury (1989) are some examples.
4. Being ‘with-it’ during the late 1960s and first half of the 1970s often
involved an interest in non-Western cultures, ‘a wish to appear original
or exotic and at least a flirtatious interest in Zen, yoga, [and] vegetarian-
ism’ (Lurie 1981: 96), interests that were common to many of those who
defined themselves as being hippies.
5. A shawl made out of very fine wool.
6. For a discussion of the particularities of the ‘multicultural’ Bildungsroman
in Britain, see, for example, José Santiago Fernández Vázquez (1997),
Mark Stein (2004) and Sarah Ilott (2015).
7. In this respect, Mark Stein argues that, as well as depicting the transfor-
mations undergone by the characters, the multicultural Bildunsgroman
also seeks to promote change at the level of society: ‘The black British
novel of transformation, as I understand it, has a dual function: it is about
the formation of its protagonists as well as the transformation of British
society and cultural institutions’ (2004: 22).
8. This song was a celebration of the hot pants, also known as short shorts.
Emerging in the late 1950s, the so-called hot pants were popularised in
the 1960s. For more information on this article of clothing, see Anne
Rooney (2009).
9. ‘501s’ refers to Levi’s jeans.
10. The term dupatta alludes to a long scarf that is part of many South Asian
women’s outfits, most notably the shalwaar-kameez.
11. The shalwaar-kameez (also spelled salwaar-kameez, salwar-kameez, shal-
var-kameez or shalwar-qameez, among other variants) describes a suit that
combines a long shirt or tunic (kameez) with loose trousers (shalwaar).
It is a popular garment in north and north-west India, and the whole of
Pakistan as well as their diasporas. It is alternatively known as the ‘Punjabi
suit’.
12. As noted in Chap. 2, the so-called Doc Martens were popularised in
Britain by the skinhead collective, becoming an emblematic item of their
style.
102 N. PEREIRA-ARES

13. Note also the parallel with Meena’s self-definition in Syal’s Anita and Me:
‘I was a freak of some kind, too mouthy, clumsy and scabby to be a real
Indian girl, too Indian to be a real Tollington wench’ (1997: 150).
14. Kureishi’s novel has already been read under Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘car-
nivalesque’ by various scholars (Carey 1997; Ferretter 2003; Holmes
2002; Ross 2006). My reading of the dressed body in Kureishi’s narra-
tive is informed by similar arguments, or rather it reinforces, substantiates
and adds new layers of meaning to the carnivalesque dimension of The
Buddha.
15. In this respect, see Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Rainbow Sign’ ([1986] 2002a),
in which the author explicitly denounces the dangerousness and obsoles-
cence of perpetuating anachronistic notions of ‘Britishness’ as defined by
previous writers such as, for example, George Orwell or T. S. Eliot.
16. See Kenneth C. Kaleta (1998) for an autobiographical reading of the
novel.
17. See Chap. 2 for a more detailed discussion of these subcultures and their
characteristic styles.
18. The Three Tuns, an actual pub in Beckenham, was frequented by leading
would-be artists in the 1970s, most notably David Bowie.
19. See Ted Polhemus (2010) for a discussion of the connections between the
psychedelic and the hippie movements.
20. Hippie culture cut across ethnic boundaries in their deployment of differ-
ent ethnic styles; across gender boundaries through the promotion of a
unisex sartorial revolution; and across class strata because the hippies rep-
resented the ‘return of an otherwise affluent, middle class and potentially
“arrived” group to the disguise of poverty’ (Hall 1968: 7).
21. The Nashville Rooms, a pub located in West Kensington, hosted many
rock and punk concerts in the 1970s and 1980s. Among others, Joy
Division, the Sex Pistols and the Police played there.
22. Speaking about the swastikas worn by British punks, Hebdige notes: ‘in
punk usage, the symbol lost its “natural” meaning—fascism […] the
swastika was worn because it was guaranteed to shock […] The signifier
(swastika) had been wilfully detached from the concept (Nazism) it con-
ventionally signified […] its primary value and appeal derived precisely
from its lack of meaning: from its potential for deceit’ (2003: 116–117).
23. See, however, Roger Sabin (2011) and Timothy S. Brown (2011) for a
different view on the relationship between punks and racial politics.
24. The Mohican is a hair style in which both sides of the head are shaven,
leaving a spike of long hair in the centre.
25. In the last chapter of The Buddha, there is a reference to a new pub in
‘Covent Garden’ frequented by ‘fashion designers, photographers,
graphic artists, shop designers and so on’ (Kureishi 2009: 270), and
 3 ‘IT WAS STYLISH AND “IN” TO BE EASTERN’? … 103

this brings to mind the Blitz and the scene of the so-called ‘posers’, later
known as ‘New Romantics’, whose elaborate styles of dress, ‘extravagant
fabrics, elegance and finery’ revealed their ‘addiction to the glamorous’
and clearly ‘separated them from the Punks’ (Polhemus 2010: 146–147).
26. See, in this respect, Kureishi’s introduction to The Faber Book of Pop
(1996b: xvii–xx) where he speaks about the elitist and introspective char-
acter of modernism, as well as My Ear at His Heart (2005a: 181–182),
in which Kureishi is critical of the emphasis on language ushered in by
formalism, experimentalism and the French Nouveau Roman.
27. A style of tight-fitting, ankle-height, sharply-pointed and Cuban-heeled
boots popularised, as its name indicates, by the Beatles.
28. Presumably coined by George Frazier, the term ‘peacock revolution’
describes the changes in menswear that took place in the 1960s and early
1970s. While previously men’s fashions were designed along the param-
eters of sobriety, during these decades, colourful clothes and elaborate
styles were reintroduced.
29. Originally a hip-length tailored coat with mandarin collar, the Nehru
jacket was popularised by the first Prime Minister of India, Sri Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru. As Tarlo suggests, this jacket was essential to Nehru’s
attempt to project ‘a highly tailored but noticeably non-Western image’
(1996: 123) in post-independence India. During the 1960s and 1970s,
this jacket became popular in Britain, largely as a result of the Beatles’
appropriation of it.
30. For opposing readings of Karim’s theatre performances, including his role
as Mowgli, see Seema Jena (1993), Sangeeta Ray (1998) and Berthold
Schoene (1998).
31. As Bart Moore-Gilbert has already noted in this respect, in The Buddha
Kureishi ‘parodies the narrative of empire as an evangelising project and
reverses the power relations embodied in colonial proselytism. Instead of
Indian natives compliantly absorbing the religious wisdom of the West,
the native British seek deliverance from their ersatz immigrant guru’
(2001: 123).
32. For an analysis of suburbia in Kureishi’s novel, see James Procter (2003),
Rita Felski (2000) and Sukhdev Sandhu (2003a), among others.
33. Arguing that ‘authenticism’ shares the same modus operandi as
Orientalism, Ana María Sánchez-Arce defines it as ‘the discourse or
grand narrative that legitimizes knowledge on the grounds of it originat-
ing from essential identity characteristics or subjectivities. It permits and
precedes the “celebration” of difference whilst enforcing a repressive dis-
course that restricts the articulation of those differences’ (2007: 143).
34. See interview with Colin MacCabe (1999), in which Kureishi speaks of
Karim’s bisexuality in rather Freudian terms.
104 N. PEREIRA-ARES

35. The movement ‘Black is Beautiful’ and the sporting of Afro hairstyles dur-
ing that period sought to subvert the stigma commonly cast on black
bodies. In this respect, scholars such as bell hooks (1998) and Kobena
Mercer (1987) have yielded insights into the ways in which ‘black hair’
has historically been devalued and regarded as one of the most visible
stigmata of ‘blackness’.
36. As Jennifer Craik submits, the relationship between men and fashion has
conventionally been guided by a ‘set of denials’, which includes the fol-
lowing propositions: ‘that there is no men’s fashion; that men dress for fit
and comfort, rather than for style; that women dress men and buy clothes
for men; that men who dress up are peculiar (one way or another); that
men do not notice clothes; and that most men have not been duped into
the endless pursuit of seasonal fads’ (1994: 170).
 CHAPTER 4

‘Chanel Designing Catwalk Indian Suits’:

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

The 1990s that frame Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee
(1999)1 can be regarded as a period of multicultural celebration, far
from the colour bar and institutionalised racism of previous decades and
unaware of the tensions that September 11 was to bring about in the
years to come. The Thatcher era, adumbrated in Hanif Kureishi’s The
Buddha (see Chap. 3), had been a difficult and ambiguous time for
South Asians in Britain. While facing Thatcher’s policies of economic
reconstruction, many South Asians managed, as Kureishi would put it,
to ‘squeeze the tits of the system’ (1996a: 17), thereby paving the way
for the consolidation of Asian entrepreneurship in the 1990s. Similarly,
despite—or even fuelled by—the enduring anti-immigration rhetoric,2
the period had also witnessed the intensification of South Asian political
and militant activism, with South Asians becoming more and more aware
of their particular position within British society, both with regard to a
‘majority/minority axes’ (Brah 1996: 189) and to other minorities with
which they had been interacting and establishing complex relations of
power and privilege. Indeed, by the late 1980s, South Asians had already
begun to contest the category of ‘Black’, denouncing the invisibility
of their own plight under the banner of a shared struggle against racist
oppression in Britain (Hall 2003a; Modood 1994). As Stuart Hall has
said in this respect, ‘the question of Black in Britain […] has its silences.
It had a certain way of silencing the very specific experiences of Asian
people’ (1991: 56). The rejection of ‘Black’ as a unified notion did not
simply give rise to the emergence of new, albeit similarly problematic,

© The Author(s) 2018 105

N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora
Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0_4
106 N. PEREIRA-ARES

labels such as ‘South Asian’ and ‘British Asian’.3 More importantly, it

served to foreground what Stuart Hall called ‘the end of the essential
black subject’, showing that, ‘crossed and recrossed by the categories
of class, gender and ethnicity’ (Hall 2003a: 92), different experiences
had been obscured by the politics of solidarity in previous decades.4 As
a result of all these synergies, by the end of the Thatcher era in 1990,
South Asians had developed a stronger sense of community, which
favoured the emergence of ‘increasingly confident celebrations of Asian
identities and increasingly vibrant Asian contributions to British popular
culture and lifestyle’ in the following years (Thandi 2007b: 183).
In the 1990s, the South Asian community in Britain experienced an
exponential growth, both demographically and in terms of its influence
within the political, economic, media and literary sphere. During this
decade, as Shinder S. Thandi explains (2007b), South Asians achieved
significant—albeit still unbalanced—political representation in the
British Parliament; Asian entrepreneurship developed considerably, wit-
nessing the incorporation of a substantial number of Asian women into
the labour market; and from writers to musicians to sports figures, all
of them contributed to giving more visibility to the South Asian com-
munity in Britain. As Syal points out in ‘PC: GLC’ (1994), the seismic
explosion of British Asian artists and writers within the cultural and lit-
erary panorama of 1990s Britain was also related to the promotion of
ethnic minorities and minority cultures encouraged by institutions such
as the Greater London Council (GLC) in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
For many South Asians, this was ‘an ironic turnaround’, ‘the very cul-
tural differences they had learned to hide for the sake of “integration”
into their workplaces […] were now being promoted and sometimes
even celebrated by their employers’ (Syal 1994: 121). In the name of an
incipient political correctness, Syal notes, her mother was then asked to
make an ethnic contribution to the school where she worked by taking ‘a
sari for the dressing-up box’ (ibid.). A decade later, in the 1990s, South
Asian clothes in Britain were no longer exclusively the dress of South
Asian migrants, the ‘highly charged clothing of […] newcomers who
refused to assimilate the sartorial styles of the local white Europeans’
(Bhachu 2004: 11). South Asian fashion was now an ‘important aspect
of [a] thriving Asian cultural economy’ (Thandi 2007b: 198), with
multiple retailers selling novel reinterpretations of the sari or shalwaar
kameez which catered for a wide range of consumers, not simply Asians
(Nag 1991; Khan 1992; Bhachu 2004). South Asian clothes were thus
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 107

moving from ‘suitcase[s] to showroom[s]’ (Dwyer 2010: 148), edging

their way into international catwalks. Collections of such haute couture
brands as Christian Dior featured a variety of reinterpretations of Asian
clothes—labelling them as ‘Asian chic’—and celebrities and person-
alities such as Princess Diana or Cherie Blair sported Asian designs on
certain occasions (Jones and Leshkowich 2005). This was a time when
the ‘Asian Cool’ phenomenon replaced its ‘close cousin “Black Cool”’
(Puwar 2002: 67); a time when Asian dress was transformed from an
‘undesirable “Other”’ into a celebrated cultural commodity.
The globalisation, celebration and creative reinvention of Asian dress
finds echo in many narratives published from the 1990s onwards. The
‘Asian cool’ phenomenon is, as we shall see, a major topic in Syal’s
Life, and it also features prominently in Ali’s Brick Lane (see Chap. 5).
Another interesting example can be found in Ravinder Randhawa’s
Hari-jan (1992), whose protagonist, Harjinder, becomes involved in the
organisation of a fashion contest. The event includes an ‘Indian Fashion
Show’, where both ‘English’ and ‘Asian’ women try on various pieces of
Asian dress provided by ‘local Indian boutiques’, from dupattas to ban-
gles or ‘sequin-embroidered sandles [sic]’ (ibid.: 131). Varsha reads
the event as an example of how ‘power relationship[s] ha[ve] been com-
pletely reversed’ (ibid.: 132), as white women here are the ones who
dress their bodies in Asian clothes and seek sartorial advice from their
Asian counterparts: ‘“It’s the English women who’ve had to learn how
to wear something […] They’ve had to ask for help from women that,
two weeks ago they would row with on sight”’ (ibid.). Aimed at pro-
moting cross-ethnic interaction, the fashion show in Hari-jan establishes
a compelling parallelism with what such organisations as Rock Against
Racism (RAR) attempted to do in the late 1970s and 1980s through
music—and, albeit in highly sardonic terms, Suresh evokes this com-
parison when he wonders whether ‘fashion shows are the key to getting
rid of racism in this country’ (ibid.). The event uses fashion as a cata-
lyst for forging alliances between different ethnic groups, substituting
sartorial prejudice for interchange. Fashion thus features in the novel as
a site that affords the emergence of transcultural rapports, concurrently
offering South Asian characters new opportunities for self-fashioning. In
effect, in Hari-jan, young characters such as Harjinder and Binny often
discuss Asian clothes in relation to what is in and out of fashion at the
time: ‘Jindi, I can’t decide whether to wear a sari, or shalwar kameez.
Are churidaars out or in? I saw some in a boutique, but then someone
108 N. PEREIRA-ARES

said they’re out. And what do you think of lungi-style shalwar, is that
too high fashion?’ (ibid.: 89). For the second-generation characters in
this narrative, Asian clothes are no longer the mere robes of tradition,
pieces of clothing that, unchangeable in their form, remain aloof from
fashion diktat. Instead, they are cultural products that afford them a
space for cultural and identity negotiation in Britain, but also for crea-
tive engagements with a South Asian culture and fashion industry that
transcend British borders and frontiers. These characters buy clothes
from ‘Desi tailor[s]’ who know ‘all latest designs’ (ibid.: 140) and who,
by simply defining themselves as desi, establish transnational and trans-
sartorial connections with South Asians inhabiting different parts of the
globe.5 The sari and the shalwaar kameez, as the characters inform us,
have been reinvented by these retailers, adopting new patterns, styles and
colours. They are thus diverted from their association with tradition and
transformed into fashionable items that both compete with and simulta-
neously enrich other fashion trends.
Just as South Asian dress gained a new momentum in the 1990s, dias-
pora literature also conquered a larger sector of the literary market dur-
ing that decade (Ranasinha 2007), helped by the success of Booker Prize
winners such as Salman Rushdie, and the fact that migrancy had come to
be seen as the postmodern and postcolonial condition—‘the immigrant
is a kind of modern Everyman’ (Kureishi 1981: 4). Whereas authors
such as Hanif Kureishi had begun to publish at a time when ‘writing
about Asians’ was not considered an ‘interest[ing] topic’ (Yousaf 2002:
9), 1990s writers benefited from the allure of the ‘postcolonial exotic’
(Huggan 2001). Fiction such as Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s
Breath (1993), Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag (1993) or Romesh
Gunesekera’s Reef (1994) continue to seesaw between the Indian sub-
continent and Britain, featuring characters that bring along ‘suitcases
full of [Indian] clothes’ and recall the ‘style[s] of clothing’ the British
‘had once brought to [their] land’ (Gupta 1993: 47). In contrast, nov-
els such as, for example, Ravinder Randhawa’s Hari-jan (1992), Atima
Srivastava’s Looking for Maya (1999) or Meera Syal’s Life (1999) con-
fine their setting to a 1990s British context and, following the path of
Kureishi’s The Buddha, they focus on characters born and/or bred in
Britain. In these samples of writing about second-generation characters,
the question of ‘in-betweenness’ and the retracing of previous diasporic
(hi)stories still appear—through the character of Chila, Life brings to
the fore the diasporic route from Uganda to Britain, and, in Looking for
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 109

Maya, the passage from India to Britain is incorporated via the story of
Mira’s parents. However, in these novels, the trauma so often associated
with the diasporic experience (Mishra 2008) is frequently substituted by
a transcultural dialectic that recognises differences and commonalities,
the success as well as failure involved in cultural transactions (McLeod
2011). What is more, these works introduce a series of literary personae
that seem more confident with regard to their identities as British Asians,
with novels such as Life advocating the need to redefine not so much the
notion of ‘Britishness’—as is the case in Kureishi’s work—but the idea
of what being Asian means in contemporary Britain. Often, the charac-
ters’ alignment with a dual British-Asian identity, which is not, however,
exempt from challenges, is also conveyed discursively through the rep-
resentation of clothed bodies that make a more flexible and eclectic use
of Eastern and Western dress. This attests to the emergence of hybrid
sartorial identities, whose performativity is not conditional on, or framed
within, carnivalesque endeavours or masquerades, as occurs in Kureishi’s
The Buddha (see Chap. 3).
Almost at the beginning of Srivastava’ Looking for Maya, Mira looks at
her ‘dark skin[ned]’ arm, which is wrapped around the ‘pale skin[ned]’
arm of her white boyfriend Luke, and she states that the two of them
form a new ‘creature which [i]s IndianEnglish’ (1999: 3). The lack of
a hyphen in ‘IndianEnglish’ speaks about an identity formation that is
not just this and that, but rather something entirely new. Unlike Angie
in Srivastava’s Transmission, who used sartorial masks to conceal her
‘brownness’ as a young girl (see Chap. 3), Mira situates her ‘dark skin’
in a position equal to Luke’s ‘whiteness’, and South Asian dress on a par
with Western clothes. Mira, who often wears black clothes and attends
the launching of Amrit’s new book in a ‘black jacket over black trousers’
(ibid.: 24), however dons a ‘shalwar khameez’ of ‘bright orange raw silk’
when visiting Luke’s parents (ibid.: 43). She claims to feel ‘pretty in it’
and, above all, ‘Indian’ (ibid.: 44), her shalwar kameez radiating Indian
pride and self-confidence. Vis-á-vis what we find in much previous fic-
tion, where the characters follow the conventional model of ‘British on
the streets, Asian at home’ (Khan 1992), Mira’s sartorial manoeuvre
offers a refreshing change. Through her clothing, she emphasises and
extols her ‘Indianness’ at a family reunion where all the other bodies
are ‘white’. Mira tinges with newness and new colours a family gather-
ing overwhelmingly dominated by ‘beige’ hues and ‘Laura Ashley type
gear’ (Srivastava 1999: 44). Simultaneously, at this point in the novel,
110 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Mira’s act of dressing in a shalwar kameez also symbolises her yearning to

establish a stronger connection with her Indian background, a yearning
she will attempt to satisfy by beginning a relationship with Amrit.
The ‘IndianEnglish’ being envisioned by Mira in Looking for Maya
adopts a more tangible form in Randhawa’s Hari-jan (1992), where
Harjinder becomes the epitome of mix-and-match fashions: shalwar
kameez, dupatta and ‘space-age footgear’ (ibid.: 10), ‘Reeboks! […]
Wicked and white’ (ibid.: 9). She styles her outfits in unusual, even freak-
ish, ways that blur clear-cut demarcations along ethnic lines—‘It’d take
a Sherlock Holmes to work out what it’s [her shalwar kameez is] really
supposed to be’ (ibid.: 29). Her dressed body renders visible a hybrid
identity that Harjinder enjoys, celebrates and constantly reinvents. She
chooses from a multifarious range of clothing, and ‘experiment[s]’ end-
lessly with her dupattas (ibid.: 10), which suggests that, for her, the use
of South Asian clothes is not simply related to issues of cultural identi-
fication, but also to matters of ‘consumer culture, aesthetic preference,
fashion and style’ (Moors and Tarlo 2013: 7). Even Ghazala’s ‘Hijab’
(Randhawa 1992: 58; capitals in the original)—which Harjinder inter-
prets in atavistic terms—puts to the test the association between this
sartorial practice and the notion of tradition in a simplistic way. For
Ghazala, the wearing of hijab represents neither an old tradition nor
a patriarchal imposition, and the novel stresses this by having Ghazala
adopt the hijab just as the most direct patriarchal authority in her
home—her father—relinquishes his role as the paterfamilias. With the
family unit on the verge of disintegration, Ghazala finds in religion a
means of seeking strength, moral guidance and of securing a sense of
self. Her renewed religious commitment is thus intertwined with issues
of identity, and her dressed body emerges as a place where faith and
identity converge. Ghazala becomes ‘visibly Muslim’ (Tarlo 2010),6 a
valiant and defiant attempt on her part, considering the abuse to which
she is subjected at school due to her clothes: ‘You think it was easy for
me to come to school in this kind of dress? […] One look at me and
the whole world knows what I am. Or they think they do—stupid, for-
eign, one of those fanatical Muslims, a dirty Arab’ (Randhawa 1992:
29). Ghazala reels off a list of stereotypes putatively thrust upon her as
a result of her clothes, thereby evincing the increasing stigmatisation of
the Muslim dressed body at the time. This, coupled with Ghazala’s allu-
sion to ‘those fanatical Muslims’, indicates that Hari-jan is obliquely
informed by the post-Rushdie affair context in which it is set.
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 111

As Ruvani Ranasinha notes, ‘[i]n the aftermath of the Rushdie

Affair (1989) and the Gulf War (1991), the 1990s ushered in an era
of religious revivalism, and the emergence and racialisation of “British
Muslim” identities’ (2007: 64). British Muslims then moved from being
an ‘invisible’ minority in previous decades to becoming the centre of
much debate and discussion (Thandi 2007b). Images of book burn-
ing across Britain—despite being the action of a small segment of the
Muslim population—contributed to racialising the whole Muslim com-
munity and to forging a vision of Muslims as individuals at odds with
Western secular and liberal values, a vision exacerbated in the wake of
September 11 (see Chap. 5). The Rushdie affair, as different schol-
ars have pointed out (McRoy 2006; Thandi 2007b), also exposed and
instigated the radicalisation of certain British Muslims, an issue that
Hanif Kureishi explores in The Black Album (1995) and the short story
‘My Son the Fanatic’ (1994). The Black Album charts, in effect, the
response of various British Muslim characters to the publication of a
‘sacrileg[ious] and blasphem[ous]’ book (1995: 169), a clear allusion to
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Dress gains central stage in the novel as it
is used by some characters to project a highly politicised Muslim identity.
Riaz, for example, lectures his disciples in a ‘grey salwar’ (Kureishi 1995:
80), thereby dressing against the ‘white capitalist civilization’ (ibid.: 141)
he seeks to resist. Yet Kureishi’s novel holds Riaz’s credo up to ideo-
logical scrutiny, exposing its contradictions when Riaz appears wearing
a Paul Smith shirt, a symbol of Western consumerism and capitalism
(Kaleta 1998). On a similar note, Riaz’s most fervent follower, Chad,
although sporting a ‘white cap’ (Kureishi 1995: 126), refuses to give up
his erstwhile ‘tight trousers’ (ibid.: 105), which leads Tahira to confront
him on the issue of modesty: ‘“You brothers urge us to cover ourselves
but become strangely evasive when it comes to your own clothes. Can’t
you wear something looser?”’ (ibid.). Tahira reminds Chad that the
Muslim principle of modesty ostensibly applies to men and women alike,
ergo their sartorial standards should be similar. Tahira’s comment thus
foregrounds the difficulty in separating religion from patriarchy, or rather
the complex way in which both of them often converge. In the novel,
Tahira is self-confident about her decision to wear the hijab, a sartorial
practice that renders visible her religious commitment and politicised
Muslim identity. However, as the above quotation reveals, the novel
interrogates the position of Tahira’s dressed body within Riaz’s group,
a group where the presence of women is not welcomed unanimously
112 N. PEREIRA-ARES

and where sartorial yardsticks are applied differently to men and women.
Kureishi’s work thus questions the extent to which Tahira’s dressed body
is being used as an ideological banner by her male counterparts, as a sar-
torial presence largely valued by Riaz’s followers for giving visibility to
their cause.
In The Black Album, Chad never jettisons his ‘casual clothes’ (ibid.:
126), but he does persuade Shahid, the main character of the novel, to
perform a sartorial rite of passage: Chad ‘watched as Shahid changed, for
the first time, into “national dress” […] Chad looked him over before
taking, from behind his back, a white cap. He fitted it on Shahid’s head,
stood off a moment, and embraced him’ (ibid.: 131). In the context of
the novel, this fragment captures Shahid’s flirtation with radical Islam,
but this flirtation becomes a frugal sartorial gesture, a transitory phase of
identity experimentation in Shahid’s process of Bildung and, in fact, on
leaving Chad, Shahid readily changes out of ‘the salwar in the bathroom’
(ibid.: 144). In The Black Album, Shahid is exposed to the religious dog-
matism defended by his friends Chad and Riaz, but he is also attracted by
the world of British pop embodied by Deedee Osgood. In a passage that
recalls the sartorial transgressions enacted in The Buddha (see Chap. 3),
Shahid also gives in to Deedee’s desire to put make-up on his face, and
the novel thus offers a scene of playful cross-dressing: ‘She hummed and
fussed over him, reddening his lips, darkening his eyelashes, applying
blusher, pushing a pencil under his eye […] He even wondered what it
might be like to go out as a woman, and be looked at differently’ (ibid.:
117–118). For Shahid in The Black Album, ‘[d]ressing up’, as Kureishi
noted, ‘has a new fluidity’ (quoted in Kaleta 1998: 140). It represents a
means of playing with different identities in a way that undermines essen-
tialisms and orthodoxies. As Kureishi stated when alluding to Shahid’s
act of cross-dressing, ‘[i]f you’re a [essentialist] Muslim, you can’t play
with your identity in that way’ (quoted in Kaleta 1998: 140). Towards
the end of the novel, Hat tells Shahid ‘our religion isn’t […] like try-
ing on a suit to see if it fit! You gotta buy the whole outfit!’ (Kureishi
1995: 235). But Shahid refuses to buy an outfit that confines him ‘to
one system or creed’, to a ‘fixed self’ (ibid.: 274). Shahid assumes that
individuals have multilayered identities that ‘melted and mutated daily’
(ibid.), and the novel closes with Shahid and Deedee buying tickets to
the ‘Monday Prince concert’ (ibid.: 275), waiting expectantly to see a
pop icon who put gender and ethnic binaries to the test. In The Black
Album, the Western liberalism embodied by Deedee Osgood wins over
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 113

the ‘fundamentalism’ espoused by Riaz and, in rather problematic terms,

Islam emerges as being irreconcilable with Western liberalism and secu-
larism, partly because Kureishi ‘never explores any forms of Islam that
are not “fundamentalist”’ (Ranasinha 2007: 244).
Cursory as it might be, this literary overview cannot fail to regis-
ter the sharp ascent of British Asian female authors to the 1990s liter-
ary panorama, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the 1980s.
The figure of Ravinder Randhawa played a crucial role in this respect
(Nasta 2002; Ranasinha 2007). As well as authoring one of the first nov-
els revolving around an Asian female character—A Wicked Old Woman
(1987)—she also co-founded the Asian Women Writers’ Workshop
(AWWW) in 1984.7 The AWWW provided a springboard for later British
Asian female writers, including Meera Syal, whose short story ‘The
Traveller’ appears in the collection Right of Way (1988), published and
edited by the workshop. The dynamics of this collective were intricately
connected to the development of Black British feminism in the 1980s,8
and indeed Syal’s ‘The Traveller’—and, in general, most of her oeuvre—
is emblematic of the feminist concerns of this workshop. ‘The Traveller’
is a ten-page allegorical narrative revolving around a winged girl (the
embodiment of feminism) who travels across different lands, spreading
the seeds of freedom among women whose wings have been ‘clipped’
by different forms of patriarchy (Syal 1988: 100). The text avoids using
specific locations, and the ethnicity of the women in question is never
revealed explicitly. However, judging by certain cultural and dress details,
one can infer that ‘The Traveller’ is addressing and comparing the plight
of South Asian women in two different geographies, geographies that
could well be the Indian subcontinent and Britain. Key to the devel-
opment of ‘The Traveller’ is the idea of female solidarity, which brings
to mind Robin Morgan’s (1984) concept of ‘global sisterhood’, a con-
cept that gained large currency in the 1980s and with which Syal might
have been acquainted at the time of writing ‘The Traveller’. However,
while advocating the need to build solidarity among women, Syal’s ‘The
Traveller’ provides a critique of the universalising tendencies at the heart
of much feminism ‘under western eyes’ (Mohanty 1988). A similar femi-
nist agenda also underlies Syal’s Life and, in effect, Life repeatedly enters
into dialogue with ‘The Traveller’, redeploying its phraseology almost
verbatim and building on the metaphorical nexus between flying and
female freedom. The rapport between these two texts also stretches to
the sartorial sphere, as they both criticise the ways in which the female
114 N. PEREIRA-ARES

dressed body is commonly used as a synecdoche for the nation and its
cultural values. The sartorial subtext present in Life is none the less
broader in concerns, references and symbolic resonances—significantly,
the German edition of Life is entitled Sari, Jeans und Chilischoten [chilli
peppers]: Roman (2003), a title that unequivocally anticipates the prom-
inent role that dress plays in the novel. As the remainder of this chap-
ter will show, fashion and dress in Syal’s Life register the boom of the
‘Asian cool’ phenomenon in 1990s Britain, and record the emergence of
subjectivities that defy binaries and stereotypes. Meanwhile, the dressed
bodies of the protagonists speak volumes about their attitudes towards
the South Asian community in Britain and about the different models of
British Asian femininity they embody. In Life, there are dressed bodies
that remain unchanged from the beginning to the end. Others undergo
certain metamorphoses over the course of the narrative. But most of
them embark on a journey of self-discovery, donning purple-tinted
glasses in the process.
* * *
Meera Syal is one of the most multitalented Asian personalities in con-
temporary Britain and, according to Yasmin Hussain, ‘possibly the
most influential South Asian woman in the British media’ (2005: 15).
Nowadays, Syal is best known for her work as an actress (Ranasinha
2007),9 even though her acting career began almost in parallel with
her development as a writer. In fact, in her essay ‘PC: GLC’ (1994),
Syal acknowledged that her initial impulse to become a writer was in
response to her discomfort about the stereotypical roles created by
the ‘white fringe’ (1994: 123). Writing offered her emancipation from
such clichéd roles, as well as an opportunity to shape ‘round charac-
ters’ and ‘explod[e] stereotypes’ (1994: 123, 133). From her play One
of Us (1983) to her novel, The House of Hidden Mothers (2015), Syal
has devoted her oeuvre to exploring the South Asian female experi-
ence in Britain, giving voice to the multiplicity of ‘untold stories’ that
‘lay silent on the lips of Asian women’ (Syal 2000b: 254). As a novel-
ist, Syal debuted with the publication of Anita and Me (1996), a semi-
autobiographical narrative set in 1960s Tollington—a fictional village
near Wolverhampton, where Meera Syal grew up (Best 2003). The
novel traces Meena’s growing awareness as a British Asian character and
portrays her efforts to negotiate her identity vis-à-vis the values of her
Indian family and the local community, which is overwhelmingly white:
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 115

‘I [Meena] was a freak of some kind, too mouthy, clumsy and scabby to
be a real Indian girl, too Indian to be a real Tollington wench’ ([1996]
1997: 150). The whole narrative is told, in retrospect, by the mature
Meena who speaks in the preface to Anita and Me, and this older Meena
could well be the same Meena who appears briefly in Syal’s second novel,
Life, first published in 1999 and dramatised for television in 2005.
Indeed, as Dave Gunning has pointed out, ‘[t]he heroines of Life belong
to the same generation as Meena—the protagonist of Anita and Me—
but, as the later novel is set in the late 1990s, they are in their midthir-
ties’ (2008: 120), as Meena would also have been by that time.
Viewed from this perspective, Life could be considered a ‘sequel’ to
Anita and Me, or even an elaboration on the future awaiting the pre-
adolescent Meena who, at the end of Anita and Me, becomes reconciled
with her duality as a British Asian subject and, by extension, with her
‘different’ dressed body. She is not reborn ‘pink’ (Syal 1997: 146)—as
she initially wishes to be—but develops instead a transcultural subjectiv-
ity, picturing herself as a ‘traveller’ whose persona traverses cultural and
geographical frontiers: ‘I now knew I was not a bad girl, a mixed-up
girl, a girl with no name or no place. The place in which I belonged was
wherever I stood’ (ibid.: 303). Meena finally comes to see through the
dominant discourse of ‘whiteness’, one that had damaged her subjectivity
severely, leading her into a process of body- and self-rejection. Asserting
the potential to live in the interstices between cultures, Meena eventu-
ally ‘float[s] back down into my body which, for the first time ever, fit-
ted me to perfection and was all mine’ (ibid.: 326), and the novel ends
with her on the verge of leaving Wolverhampton, poised to reclaim ‘each
resting place as home’ (ibid.: 303). London emerges as her final destina-
tion, if we assume that Life features a cameo role for the young protago-
nist of Anita and Me. However, the adult Meena who appears in Life
is not such a free wanderer, being caught up in conflicting sets of gen-
der relations. In the public sphere, she is a tough businesswoman, but
in her private and marital life she lives by patriarchal beliefs, embodying
the stereotype of the compliant and submissive wife: ‘If any of her col-
leagues had dismissed her, patronized her, ordered her, spoken to her
the way the man she loves spoke to her then, she’d have wiped the floor
with their battered carcasses. Instead, Meena smiled and said sorry’ (Syal
[1999] 2000a: 147; emphasis added). This might or might not be the
same Meena we know from Anita and Me, but Life certainly offers the
possibility of making this connection. More importantly, Life invites the
116 N. PEREIRA-ARES

thought of whether Meena, the protagonist of Anita and Me, might

have been successful in sustaining her bodily freedom—and figuratively
her individual freedom—as an adult woman in a long-term love relation-
ship, and this voices, in turn, one of the main concerns explored in Life.
Unlike Meena at the beginning of Anita and Me, the three protago-
nists of Life—Chila, Sunita and Tania—are pretty confident about their
identity position in society. They are both ‘Asian and British’ (2000a:
63) and, in effect, Tania and Sunita see themselves as belonging to the
generation that endowed this hyphenated identity with pride. Pioneering
consumers of the incipient Bhangra music of the 1970s, they have built
bridges and have ‘ha[d] choices’ (ibid.: 12). However, as adults living
in 1990s Britain, they have fallen into rather stereotyped roles: the sub-
missive wife (Chila), the subservient mother (Sunita), and the individ-
ualistic daughter enraged at her Asian matrilineal inheritance (Tania).
Whereas Anita and Me features a process of Bildung whereby Meena
forges her gender and ethnic identity as a pre-adolescent, Life pivots on
various experiences of ‘Re-Bildung’ in adulthood, as the three protago-
nists reassess their position as adult women, wives and mothers in the
course of the novel. Albeit less autobiographical than Anita and Me,
Life also draws on Syal’s own experience: ‘All the women in the book
are in me—I have been the idealistic sweet bride [Chila], I have been the
media babe in pockets [Tania], I probably still am the harassed mother
with sick down her leggings [Sunita]’ (Rubin 1999: 3). Combining
third- and first-person narration, and displaying a panoply of points of
view, Syal’s Life has been lauded for its ‘multiple foci’, which wards off
a ‘unitary vision of Asian women in Britain’ (Gunning 2008: 122). Its
multivocality and storytelling resonances are also praised by Gill Gregory
(1999), who none the less finds fault with the amalgam of subject mat-
ter cobbled together in the novel. For all its ‘“chick-lit”’ style (Ranasinha
2007: 252), Life constitutes a stimulating contribution to South Asian
diaspora writing in Britain, and one that has reached a wide reader-
ship (Reichl 2002). With a realism tinged with irony and comedy,10 the
novel marks a departure from ‘its migrant forebears’ in that it places the
focus on ‘internal prejudice [rather] than white racism’ (Upstone 2010:
129–130). Revolving around mature personae, Life also counteracts the
plethora of second-generation narratives dealing with young and adoles-
cent characters, providing kaleidoscopic insights into the complexities
faced by British Asian women when it comes to negotiating individual-
ity, wifehood and motherhood/mothering.11 In an interview with Fiona
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 117

Morrow, Syal herself explained that her intention in crafting Life was to
‘write a book about women of my age and my generation, the flip side
of Bridget Jones—not young, free and single, but in long-term relation-
ships, with kids’ (Morrow 1999: 59). Life indeed touches on pressing
questions affecting adult characters in love/sexual relationships, most
notably uneven gender roles, domestic violence, female self-harming, or
what Akash calls the fear of ‘domestic emasculation’ (Syal 2000a: 203).
Where Syal’s Anita and Me is mainly concerned with identity politics
articulated along a majority/minority axis, Life focuses on gender rela-
tions within the South Asian diasporic community; and where Anita
and Me deals with the developing consciousness of a pre-adolescent,
Life engages with ‘wrinkly teenagers […] pre-menopausal minxes’ (ibid.:
242), exploding taboos along the way.
Meera Syal’s Life begins with a one-paragraph description of Leyton,
an area in East London, thus adding to the plethora of diasporic fictions
that have used the East End of London as a topos—understanding this
term in view of both its etymological and figurative attributes. Leyton
is depicted as a lieux de memoire and as a site of the living present. It is
a place where the traces of its former ‘white’ past are almost reduced to
the ‘long-unread inscriptions’ in the churchyard (ibid.: 10), and a place
where the roof of what was once a Methodist church now exhibits ‘a
gleaming minaret’ (ibid.). This inaugural description of Leyton dove-
tails with later portrayals of the East End as the ‘dwelling place’ of vari-
ous diasporas (Procter 2003), where the robes of its inhabitants speak
of multiple diasporic ‘roots/routes’ (Gilroy 1993): South Asian women
in bright ‘saris’ and Somalians in ‘vibrant zig-zag wrap[s] and matching
headscar[ves]’ (Syal 2000a: 271–272). Migrant communities have trans-
formed the landscape of the East End, not simply at a visual and sartorial
level, but also in economic terms, contributing to a vibrant entrepreneur-
ship that includes ‘sweet emporiums, café-dhabas, opulent jewellers and
surprisingly expensive Asian fashion boutiques’ (ibid.: 40). These ‘expen-
sive Asian fashion boutiques’ bear witness to the increasing consumption
of Asian-designed clothing in the period, and yet their clientele prob-
ably comes from outside the East End. Because, in the novel, the East
End is depicted as a derelict area, from which better-off migrants have
escaped or wish to escape—the despair in Sunita’s sentence ‘the East
End suburb where, God, I still am’ (ibid.: 73) makes this apparent. As in
Kureishi’s The Buddha—‘That’s where the niggers live’ (Kureishi 2009:
43)—the multicultural model is also interrogated in Life. It is revealed
118 N. PEREIRA-ARES

to have hinged historically on the logic of ‘living apart together’ (Mirza

et al. 2007). At one point, Tania signals the existence of a corner that
separates the ‘Eastenders from the Eastern-Enders’ (Syal 2000a: 40).
On one side, there is a McDonald’s, on the other ‘Kamla’s Chiffons’
(ibid.: 40), two brands that are made to stand for the West and East,
respectively. These two worlds co-exist in the city, but they are some-
how kept apart from each other, as if a dividing line had been traced
between them. In the 1990s London of Life—and ostensibly also now-
adays—there are, therefore, invisible lines that separate and segregate.
These imperceptible lines are none the less crossed and re-crossed by
the dressed bodies of the youngsters Tania comes across as she meanders
through the East End:

girls in customized Punjabi suits,12 cut tight, set off by big boots and
leather jackets, others in sari blouse twinned with khakis and platform
trainers […] The boys favoured tracksuit tops or kurtha13 shirts, love beads
and pierced eyebrows; one of them had a turban, another wore his long
hair in a thick plait (ibid.: 44–45)

Dressed in a melange of ethnically diverse clothes, the bodies of these

youngsters stage a fluid sense of identity that destabilises ethnic and cul-
tural boundaries. The girls combine Punjabi suits or sari blouses with
their otherwise Western-style garments; and the boys favour a variety
of Eastern and Western clothes, accessories, hairstyles and headdresses.
Their dressed bodies render visible a process of ‘cultural translation’
(Bhabha 2004)—a notion that, as I have argued elsewhere (Pereira-Ares
2015b), is closely linked to transcultural formulations. In ‘How Newness
Enters the World’—an essay included in The Location of Culture—
Bhabha uproots the notion of ‘cultural translation’ from its linguistic
bearings and, while no precise definition is provided, cultural translation
is envisioned as the condition of living—hence the performative charac-
ter with which Bhabha imbues cultural translation—in a heterocultural
and heteroglossic ‘third space’, negotiating and translating across cultures.
For the migrant, who lives across cultures, cultural translation consti-
tutes a strategy for ‘survival’, a space of resistance that prevents him/her
from falling prey either to ‘a “nativist”, even nationalist, atavism’ or to ‘a
postcolonial metropolitan assimilation’ (Bhabha 2004: 321–324)—and
note here the similarities with Mikhail Epstein’s description of ‘transcul-
ture’ as a state that affords migrant subjects the possibility of integrating
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 119

several cultures, while keeping ‘their freedom from any of them’ (2009:
330). In light of Bhabha’s theories on cultural translation, it could be
argued that the youths described above inhabit a heterosartorial ‘third
space’, where they bargain and translate across diverse sartorial para-
digms. Their dressed bodies open a new way, one that avoids the rheto-
ric of assimilation and the discourse of ethnic absolutism. Through their
mix-and-match outfits, they project an identity rooted equally in British
and Asian sartorial mores, in mainstream as well as street and subcultural
styles. Crucially, both male and female figures participate in this process
of pick-and-mix, superseding in this way the sartorial, gender-based divi-
sions found in much diasporic fiction, where male characters appear in
Western-style clothes and their female counterparts in Asian garb (see
Chap. 2). The girls described above reject acting as ‘the privileged signi-
fiers of national [cultural] difference’ (Kandiyoti 1994: 377), a position
covertly anchored in patriarchal discourses that construct women, and
their bodies, as emblems of cultural continuity, as the carriers of some
‘authentic’ culture that needs to be preserved. These young women have
‘customised’ their identity through mix-and-match outfits, just as they
have ‘customised’ their Punjabi suits which are, significantly, said to be
‘cut tight’. This indicates that their suits are designed so as to reveal,
rather than conceal, the shape of the body, a transgressive departure from
the rules of modesty that have traditionally governed most South Asian
culture.
Life introduces here a new generation of British Asian subjects who
enjoy the liminal space of the cultural border, and who simultaneously
make cultural boundaries increasingly porous. For them, belonging to
different cultures seems to be ‘a good and creative place to be’ (2000a:
228), and dress provides them with a space for sartorial and identity
creativity. Dress is for these characters what writing from within various
cultures is for authors such as Salman Rushdie: an ‘ambiguous and shift-
ing ground’, but one that is ‘not an infertile territory’ (Rushdie 1992:
15).14 This entails a rebuttal of the ‘collective trauma’ (Cohen 1997:
ix) so often associated with the experience of diaspora, stressing instead
the potential of the diasporic condition to stimulate inventiveness and to
allow for the proliferation of hybrid subjectivities. The newness encasing
their dressed bodies can be better understood if compared to the sarto-
rial/identity polarisation initially displayed by Meena in Anita and Me.
The protagonist of Syal’s debut novel embodies the archetypal British
Asian character that straddles two worlds, worlds that Meena initially
120 N. PEREIRA-ARES

regards as being incompatible. In a figurative fashion, Meena conveys the

differences between them when she compares her mother’s clothes to
the garments Mrs. Christmas gives her. The ‘dancing elephants, strutting
peacocks and long-necked birds’ printed on her mother’s clothes (1997:
43) represent the little India that Meena inhabits at home, whereas ‘the
delicate flowers, roses and bluebells’ (ibid.:) on Mrs. Christmas’s dresses
stand for the world outside, which is almost entirely white. The clothes
of the youngsters described in Life contain neither ‘elephants’ nor ‘del-
icate flowers’. Their garments are largely diverted from these ‘original’
nexuses, having been submitted to a process of resignification (Butler
1990). Unlike the Asian clothes worn by Meena’s mother in Anita and
Me, theirs do not speak of ‘bare feet on dust […] honking taxi horns
and heavy sudden rain beating […] on deep green leaves’ (Syal 1997:
43). Nor do they invoke the homogenous ‘whiteness’ inscribed on Mrs.
Christmas’s garments. These young characters have inherited two sarto-
rial paradigms, and they have actually transformed them into a third that
is neither one nor the other. What is more, behind their dressed bodies,
there is also a sartorial narrative of spatial conquest and re-inscription.
They have turned South Asian clothes into an outdoor sartorial practice,
and ostensibly British garments into an indoor language, thereby oppos-
ing the diglossic usage of clothing that Meena puts into practice in Anita
and Me, wearing Western clothes when outside, and Indian garments at
home: ‘I [Meena] changed into some trousers and a jumper […] I flung
open the back gate to our yard’ (ibid.: 116–118).
In Life Tania is surprised by, and even envious of, the confidence with
which the aforementioned teenagers roam the streets, proudly wearing
hybrid outfits: ‘When did it become easier?’ (Syal 2000a: 44). Back in
the 1970s, as Tania recalls, there was no pride in dressing Asian—at least
within mainstream culture. Unlike the above-mentioned girls, who wear
‘customized Punjabi suits’, Tania had to make do with the clothes her
mother used to buy her at the ‘Delhi Silk House’ (ibid.: 41). Displaying
an acute awareness of history, Tania links the sartorial freedom of these
youngsters with the ‘mini-wars’ her generation once fought (ibid.: 44)
and, more broadly, with the struggles of Britain’s ethnic minorities in
previous decades—the allusion to the Southall (West London) upris-
ing in the text being significant. Characters such as Tania feature as the
ones responsible for building the ‘bridge’ between Asian and British cul-
tures (ibid.: 319), allowing younger generations to enjoy ‘a cornucopia
of choices, a smorgasbord of alternatives’ (ibid.: 245). That the context
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 121

of Life is 1990s London also helps to explain the sartorial confidence

of the youths that Tania describes. As noted earlier in this book, in the
post-war period, South Asian clothes were negatively coded, ‘considered
the garb of low-status, working-class immigrants who were not welcome
in Britain’ (Bhachu 2005b: 43). However, in the 1990s, they became
a ‘noticeable global trend’ (Jones and Leshkowich 2005: 1) and Syal’s
Life does not fail to register this sartorial twist. Throughout the narra-
tive, different characters allude to or sport Asian clothes with prestigious
Western brands. Tania speaks about ‘Chanel designing catwalk Indian
suits’ (2000a: 21), a comment reproduced in the title of this chapter;
and a white receptionist asks Chila if her outfit is a ‘DKNY’ [acronym
for Donna Karan New York], adding that Asian clothes are ‘really in at
the mo’ (ibid.: 55). Furthermore, while heading for Soho, Tania backs
up Chila’s decision to put on a ‘tailored Punjabi suit’ by claiming that
‘nothing like a bit of the genuine ethnic’ could better please the habit-
ués of the area (ibid.: 52; emphasis added), and here the italicised words
show how dependent exoticism and the consumption of alterity are on
the discourse of ‘authenticism’ (Sánchez-Arce 2007)—see also Chap. 3.
The globalisation of Asian dress is, in effect, treated with ambivalence
in the novel, coming as it were within the purview of what Stanley Fish
calls ‘boutique multiculturalism’ (1999: 56),15 and triggering conflicting
responses among South Asians themselves. Tania’s unfriendly allusion to
‘white girls prancing around wearing bindis on their heads and henna
on their hands’ (Syal 2000a: 109) is significant in this respect (Gunning
2008). Similarly, when asked if her Punjabi suit is by DKNY, Chila pro-
vides a naïve answer that the novel none the less turns into a deprecat-
ing remark: ‘No, Bimla’s Bargains, Forest Gate, I think’ (ibid.: 55).
Chila’s seemingly down-to-earth response makes the white receptionist’s
comment sound almost asinine. Chila connects her Punjabi suit with a
multi-ethnic London area, and with a local retailer rather than an inter-
national emporium. The novel thus locates the source of sartorial crea-
tivity within, rather than outside, the South Asian community, indirectly
exposing the ‘blindness’ of the white receptionist. This white woman has
come to ‘see’ Asian dress through DKNY, despite multiple South Asian
bodies wearing Asian clothes in Britain. But these bodies have often been
‘invisible’ in terms of fashion. The whole repartee brings to the fore the
divorce between the ‘original’ wearer of Asian dress and the ‘external’
consumer of Asian gear. This consumer, as is hinted at above, has come
to value South Asian clothing mainly or simply because it is now part
122 N. PEREIRA-ARES

of the catwalk repertoire of leading Western brands, because it has been

‘domesticated’ under Western sartorial parameters.
The commodification of ‘Asianness’ in the West therefore emerges as
an ambivalent terrain in the novel, being littered with both possibilities
and pitfalls. For ultimately, as Graham Huggan suggests, the ‘alterity
industry’ is often driven by exoticist dynamics whereby ‘the commodi-
fied signs of cultural otherness become a currency to be negotiated and
traded by metropolitan interest groups’ (Huggan 2001: 259). These
ambiguities are further explored through the character of Tania, whose
relationship with the Asian community is also extremely ambivalent.
While referring contemptuously to her Indian friends as ‘pindoos […]
village idiots’ (Syal 2000a: 18), Tania capitalises strategically on the mar-
ketability of ‘Asianness’. She attends the premieres of her films clad in
‘ruby-red sari[s]’ (ibid.: 169), in contrast to her normally Western-style
clothes; and allows photographers to take pictures of her against ‘a back-
drop of saris and spices’ (ibid.: 250). Whereas in Anita and Me, Anita
Rutter—and, more importantly, her ‘whiteness’—becomes Meena’s
‘passport to acceptance’ (Syal 1997: 148), in Life, Tania’s ‘Asianness’ has
been her ‘passport out of the East of London and into cosmopolitan cir-
cles where she was now termed merely exotic’ (Syal 2000a: 18). Much
seems to have changed from the 1960s to the 1990s, as the compari-
son between these two novels reveals. However, Tania is problematically
being considered ‘merely exotic’, which is to say ‘merely “authentic”’ as
well (Sánchez-Arce 2007: 151). She is made to occupy the sort of ‘(fash-
ionably) marginal’ position that Ania Loomba speaks of in her discus-
sion of postcolonialism (1998: xii). Even her white boyfriend, Martin,
is, to a large extent, attracted to Tania’s ‘exoticism’, his moments of
passion for her repeatedly crystallising at those points where Tania is
dressed in Asian clothes: ‘He always fancied her when she was unreach-
able and in ethnic dress’ (Syal 2000a: 169). The Western consumption
of alterity acts therefore as a double-edged sword in the novel: it pro-
vides Tania with a means of self-advancement, but also turns her into
the object of a Western exoticist—even Orientalising—gaze. The novel
emphasises Tania’s submission to the Western taste for alterity by reveal-
ing that she has often relied on a fake past, concocting stories about
skinheads, ‘the kind of racism they want to hear about’ (ibid.: 144).
Similarly, the Asian clothes she dons at her premieres are conspicuously
presented in the text—and even more so in the filmic adaptation—as
being different from those worn by Sunita or Chila. Hers are often more
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 123

fashionable, well attuned to what is frequently termed ‘Asian-chic’ gear.

Her Asian-chic clothes can be deemed emblematic of a creative endeav-
our at sartorial reinterpretation, and yet they can also be read as items
of dress strategically modelled to be appealing to the Western gaze.
The ambiguity inherent in Tania’s Asian-chic clothes brings to a bifur-
cated conclusion the novel’s exploration of the globalisation of Asian
dress: the internationalisation of Asian dress might represent a form of
‘re-orienting’—that is, re-directing—Asian dress or it might equally and
even simultaneously involve a process of ‘re-Orientalizing’ Asian fashion
(Jones and Leshkowich 2005).
While Tania uses Asian-chic clothes as a form of ‘strategic exoticism’
(Huggan 2001: 72),16 Sunita considers her ‘shalwaar kameez’ (Syal
2000a: 230) to be the reason why Chila is denied the right to know the
sex of her baby. This episode, as we learn later, is intended to criticise
discourses of son preference within the South Asian community, and
what Sunita initially ‘assume[s] to be racist behaviour turns out to be
a reaction to less emancipated Asian women’ who demand a termina-
tion when they learn they are carrying a daughter (Reichl 2002: 140).
Regardless of this, Sunita’s initial reaction is significant. She shows here
a sartorial awareness that results from a long history of dress-related dis-
crimination, one that the novel tentatively reconstructs in its first chapter.
In it, an old white man makes reference to Margaret Thatcher’s bigoted
rhetoric and, through his perspective, Deepak’s attire is described as
resembling a ‘Christmas tree’ (Syal 2000a: 10), which recalls the risible
comparisons circulating around South Asian dress. The passage depicts
Deepak’s wedding procession on its way to Chila’s house, where the
ceremony is to be officiated. In contrast to his usual Westernised looks,
consisting of multiple ‘designer shirt[s] (ibid.: 183), Deepak has arrayed
his body in South Asian finery on this occasion, including a turban that
the aforementioned old man risibly pictures as being ‘cartoon-size’
(ibid.: 10). While evincing the subsistence of unreconstructed attitudes
towards South Asian cultural and sartorial practises, the novel none the
less asserts the possibility of a society that invests in transcultural dia-
logue. This becomes conspicuous in the last chapter of Life, where the
funeral of Tania’s father is, at one point, filtered through the perspec-
tive of another old white man who, significantly, is given a name on
this occasion. Mr. Keegan reflects on the cultural differences that exist
between his mores and those of the community he observes: he contra-
poses burial versus cremation, and the use of black versus white as the
124 N. PEREIRA-ARES

colour of mourning clothes. However, unlike the nameless old man at

the inception of Life, Mr. Keegan finds cultural diversity enriching, and
he even ponders the benefits that learning from others might accrue:
‘he wondered if it wasn’t better that way, to let it all out and not be
ashamed, rather than the choking, muted snuffles that his wife occasion-
ally allowed herself’ (ibid.: 331). At stake here is the idea of transcul-
tural reciprocity, ‘a situation where each party recognizes the other as
an architect of cognitive and intellectual tradition’ (Parry 2002: 77).
There is also a sense of societal transformation in the attitude displayed
by Mr. Keegan, considering that he represents a generation nurtured on
Powellism (Gunning 2008). The contraposition of these elderly figures
reflects changes in the majority society, just as the novel insists on the
need to bring about transformations within the Asian community.
Chila’s wedding, which occupies the first chapter of the novel, acts
as an introductory section, outlining the personality of the three main
characters, characters introduced ‘via their dress’ (Reichl 2002: 139).
Their dress and their attitudes towards dress provide important details
concerning the model of British Asian femininity they embody as well as
‘their stances towards the Indian community in London’ (Reichl 2002:
139). Of the three protagonists of Life, Chila is the most naïve, though
her naïvety is presented, at some points, as resulting from a reductive
interpretation of her persona. Largely through Chila’s perspective, we are
introduced to the main rituals of the Punjabi wedding and, of course,
to her wedding clothes, which are pregnant with ominous symbolism.
Chila’s bridal dress consists of a red wedding lengha,17 a garment that
has established itself as ‘“traditional” wedding wear’, being the most
popular for ‘South Asian brides […] in much of the sub-continent, and
for the majority of South Asian communities in the UK’ (Wilson 2006:
96). Chila’s body is clad in red, a colour that symbolises, inter alia, auspi-
cious fecundity in Hindu culture, being the colour of blood and there-
fore of life. Significantly, her dupatta is said to be ‘encrusted with fake
pearls’ (Syal 2000a: 13), a sartorial detail that denies the magnificence of
Chila’s bridal dress and, more importantly, it establishes a contrast with
Deepak’s rich clothes, whose pearls are not deemed fake. Their differ-
ent socio-economic statuses are thus expressed in sartorial terms, and the
underlying implications subsequently explored through another sarto-
rial motif. Prior to the expected ‘tragic performance’ of Vidaai (ibid.:
26),18 Chila strips off her bridal lengha and dons the ‘loudest pin-
doo suit’ (ibid.: 21) which her in-laws had given her for the departure.
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 125

Immediately, Tania casts aspersions on this gift. She claims that it looks
cheap and démodé, adding that Chila’s in-laws have brought her a suit
from ‘Mrs. Patel’s bargain basement bin’ (ibid.), when they could actu-
ally have afforded to buy her Indian designer clothes. The wedding is a
special occasion, a ceremony ruled by tradition (Raghuram 2003), which
explains why Deepak has donned Asian dress rather than his otherwise
Western clothes. Accordingly, one might also assume that the wedding
does not lend itself to fashion experiments, fashionably ‘chic’ clothes
or Asian designer gear. However, this token encapsulates more subtle
meanings in the text. Both as the groom’s family and in socio-economic
terms, Chila’s in-laws have a higher status, and their gift might be aimed
at highlighting Chila’s inferior position. What is more, in the context
of the novel, this gift also acts as evidence of the coldness Chila faces
from many of Deepak’s relatives—‘they had higher hopes for their only
son’ (ibid.: 28)—and even as a harbinger of the tenuousness of Deepak’s
commitment, for he soon begins to be unfaithful to her.
Chila’s bridal clothes in the novel do not seem to augur a promising
future. Despite her joy, Chila feels uncomfortably trapped in her bridal
attire. She silently complains about her lengha, which only allows her to
take ‘baby steps’ (ibid.: 13); she finds it difficult to follow Deepak while
negotiating ‘fabric and high heels’ (ibid.: 17); and, at a given point, she
thinks of her body as being ‘mummified in red and gold silk’ (ibid.: 14).
The term ‘mummify’ is extremely telling as it alludes to the notion of
preservation and, in many respects, Chila’s unmanageable and tradition-
ally tailored clothes—like the various rituals of the ceremony—symbol-
ise the perpetuation of ossified conventions in the diaspora. In itself, the
wedding acts as a ‘definitional-ceremony’, a ‘performance of the group’s
shared and unquestionable truths, made unquestionable by being per-
formed’ (Myerhoff 1980: 32). Despite her evident happiness, Chila, as
the bride, is expected to present a sorrowful demeanour at the wedding,
and her clothes are precisely designed to increase that sorrow, restrict-
ing her mobility and therefore her freedom to enjoy. For the wedding
implies the departure of the bride from her paternal home, her adop-
tion by the husband’s family and, more importantly, the ceremony fore-
shadows that ‘the dirty thing’ is to take place on the wedding night
(Syal 2000a: 13). The entrapment that Chila experiences in her bridal
clothes is both literal and metaphorical, as it stands for the burden of
tradition with which she is saddled. Chila’s bridal clothes make ‘her
body […] walk the walk of everyone’s mothers on all their weddings,
126 N. PEREIRA-ARES

meekly, shyly, reluctantly towards matrimony’ (ibid.: 14). Looking like

her female ancestors on their wedding day, the novel anticipates, Chila is
about to become a mirror image of them, adopting a model of wifehood
that will eventually restrict her individuality as a woman. Unsurprisingly,
early in the next chapter, we learn that, despite being in line for a promo-
tion, the married Chila gives up her job. Deepak tells her that ‘no wife of
his’ is going ‘to work if she d[oesn’t] want to’, but he ‘forg[ets] to ask
me [Chila] that bit’ (ibid.: 35). Chila’s voice is later silenced, just as her
body is ominously trapped in her bridal clothes at the beginning of the
narrative. The verbal and the sartorial thus converge around the novel’s
main theme: the subsistence of patriarchal behaviours that naturalise gen-
der roles and curtail women’s opportunities for self-advancement. The
male characters in Life are not archetypes of hyper-masculinity, but most
of them—albeit to different degrees—embody a patriarchal masculinity.
While circling the sacrificial fire, Chila and Deepak remain tied to each
other, ‘literally, her scarf to his turban’ (ibid.: 13). A symbol of their
union, this sartorial knot is none the less extremely precarious. Chila is
tied to Deepak through her dupatta, a garment she comes to see as a
‘yoke’ later in the novel (ibid.: 200); Deepak is tied to Chila through
his turban, a turban with which he never reappears in the text. Chila
and Deepak establish a bond of union not so much based on individual
choices, but on a shared compliance with traditions and expectations, of
which the two items of dress are emblematic in this context. For each of
them, the other represents an ideal. As Chila tells Tania towards the end
of the novel: ‘“I don’t think I ever loved him,” she said calmly. “It was
the idea of him. I … wanted to do what was right […]”’ (ibid.: 325).
Likewise, for Deepak, Chila simply embodies ‘the perfect wife’ (ibid.:
132). He even sees her as a person through whom to redeem his ‘sorry
past’ (ibid.: 67)—an almost Oedipal mother/wife figure. While eclipsed
by the voices of the three female protagonists, male characters do speak
their minds in the narrative and, through his musings, we learn that the
young Deepak was once overcome by a ‘schizophrenia’ of role swap,19
constantly switching between his pose as the perfect Indian son and
his role as an ‘undutiful’ man ‘in his private life’ (ibid.: 168–169). Syal
thus burdens Deepak with the same kinds of conflicts that trouble her
female characters. He too is caught between, and becomes a ‘victim’ of,
different models of gender relations, even though as a man he occupies
a ‘more empowered position in relation to these models’ (Ranasinha
2007: 257). Deepak had managed to keep his two worlds apart for a
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 127

long time, but when, years before he fell in love with Tania, he realised
that his two lives were no longer compatible. The novel emphasises
the conflicting cultural demands both of them faced by framing their
first meeting within the context of an ‘[a]ssisted marriage’ (Syal 2000a:
142), which they saw as a mere game. Tania was immediately impressed
by the appearance of her new suitor. Deepak’s ‘Paul Smith suit’ was, as
Tania puts it, a ‘relief after the polyester blazers and sensible jumpers I’d
seen before’ (ibid.: 151). Deepak’s Paul Smith outfit connected him to
a world outside and beyond the marriage game that Tania also shared:
‘It was recognition, that we were both here out of obligation and some
curiosity, that we could play the game and take the piss at the same time’
(ibid.: 151). However, the pressure of living up to family expectations
and the fear of becoming trapped within those expectations doomed the
affair to failure. For Tania, a long-term relationship with Deepak would
have meant complying with his ‘double standards’ (ibid.: 132) and the
chauvinist ideas hidden behind his cosmopolitan gear. Afraid of becom-
ing a replica of ‘[thei]r parents’, Tania then decided to ‘move on. And let
Chila move in’ (ibid.: 152).
In contrast to what one might initially believe, Tania is not divorced
from South Asian culture in toto, but rather from a part of it. For her,
South Asian culture is a ‘movable feast’, comprising multiple (sartorial)
elements she can ‘pick up or discard’ at will (ibid.: 146). However, she
claims categorically to be unable and unwilling to cope with ‘this rogue
gene which I would cauterize away if I could’ (ibid.: 148). This ‘rogue
gene’ stands for what Tania perceives as the compliance of South Asian
women with a marriage institution that abides by phallocentric author-
ity and reasserts traditional gender roles, ipso facto restricting female
individuality and promoting female submissiveness. Tania has seen this
happening to many of her British Asian friends. ‘In the outside world’
these women ‘fly on home-grown wings’, but their ‘Armani suit shrinks
and crumples away’ as soon as they reach the domestic sphere (ibid.:
146). Syal thus intertwines a sartorial metaphor with the metaphorical
nexus flying–freedom that drives the development of ‘The Traveller’.
The ‘home-grown wings’ represent the alleged freedom these female
characters enjoy as British Asian women nurtured in an ostensibly liberal
society: Britain. But the fact that their Armani suit—their public side—
dwindles at home suggests that in their private, marital lives their individ-
uality is curtailed. Tania envisions the Armani suits worn by these women
as mere façades, uniforms that project an empowered femininity in the
128 N. PEREIRA-ARES

public sphere, but whose rebellious character becomes innocuous when

the wearers eventually submit their bodies to the patriarchal structures
governing the South Asian household. Partly as a result, Tania trivialises
sartorial diacritics, warning against making bold statements on appear-
ances, and highlighting the line that separates presentation from inter-
pretation: ‘Only anyone not Asian would assume that wearing mini-skirts
[…] meant I was in ethnic denial’ (ibid.: 146). For Tania, the ‘roots go
deeper’ (ibid.), roots that become conspicuously exposed when long-
term love relationships are entered upon: ‘We three girls managed the
oft-quoted juggling act until it was time to find a man. See how I com-
bine this bindi with that leather jacket and make a bold statement about
my duality? […] And then it was time to cut the crap and own up who
we really were’ (ibid.: 148). At work here is the idea that there is no
escaping one’s heritage, a heritage that Tania pictures as being a strait-
jacket. Sartorial juggling is envisioned as a subversive process of iden-
tity creativity, but Tania associates it with adolescent rebelliousness and
denies its sustainability in adulthood. To put it differently using Dave
Gunning’s words, Tania ‘locates the disintegration of the hybrid position
at the time when long-term sexual relationships are to be established’
(Gunning 2008: 128).
Tania’s ambivalent stance towards South Asian culture is therefore
precipitated by the conflict she experiences when it comes to negotiat-
ing her individuality and intellectual ambition vis-á-vis traditional expec-
tations of womanhood within the South Asian community. The novel
traces this conflict back to Tania’s adolescent years, when the whole fam-
ily silently put up with her father’s eccentricities. It was, however, her
mother whom Tania ‘blamed’ (Syal 2000a: 145), irritated by the vision
of her body ‘shrivell[ing] to the size of a winkled pea around her hus-
band’ (ibid.: 145)—an assertion that heightens the metaphorical nexus
between the shrunken body and the idea of female subjugation in the
narrative. As a result, Tania has come to identify wifehood with submis-
sion, motherhood with paralysis, her own womb with ‘a source of pow-
erlessness’ (Rich 1976: 68) and, accordingly, she has always preferred her
‘eggs unfertilized’ (Syal 2000a: 142). The novel links Tania’s troubles
in establishing long-term relationships, as well as her divorce from the
Asian community, to the patriarchal scenario that governed her child-
hood. Tania’s early rebellion against patriarchal structures was none the
less channelled through the rage she directed at her mother, whom she
also held responsible for making them ‘visibly comic’ (ibid.: 272). Syal
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 129

thus presents here a hostile mother–daughter story, with Tania dodg-

ing her mother’s attempts to make her complicit with her own subjuga-
tion as a woman: ‘she [Tania’s mother] taught me […] how to take up
as little room as possible. How to read the moods of everyone in the
room’ (ibid.: 145–146). The daughter’s rage is understandable, and yet
it is largely misdirected, turning the mother figure into a culprit, rather
than a victim of patriarchy, obviating the fact that, as Sunita claims, it
is (also) the ‘fathers you need to be re-educating’ (ibid.: 230). Having
always disparaged her mother, who is now dead, Tania also belittles the
‘cuttings from magazines’ (ibid.: 129) she finds in her mother’s last sari,
one of them featuring a Hindi film star and her mother’s hand-written
annotation ‘Eyebrows like this please’ (ibid.: 129). Tania sees these
cuttings from a hegemonic standpoint and, consequently, she consid-
ers them vapid and inconsequential. Unable to read against the grain,
Tania fails to recognise that these cuttings constitute a space of female
self-expression and, one could even argue, of creative activity. These cut-
tings represent a patchwork of impressions—even a creative outlet as it
were—remotely recalling the quilting motifs in Bharati Mukherjee’s
Jasmine (1989) and Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), or even the garden
metaphors in Alice Walker’s oeuvre (1983)—to which Syal claims indebt-
edness (Syal 1996). Interestingly, Tania’s mother used to tie these cut-
tings into ‘the end of her sari pullau’ (Syal 2000a: 129),20 a part of the
sari that connects, and simultaneously separates, ‘the individual self and
the external world’ (Banerjee and Miller 2008: 34). Like the pullau, the
above-mentioned cuttings also draw a line between, and at the same time
suture together, aspects of the inner and outer selves. Taken from mag-
azines, these cuttings are inherently associated with the external world,
and yet Tania’s mother used to keep them ‘secret’ (Syal 2000a: 129).
This indicates that she conceives of them as a space of her own, where
she can safely and privately transcend the limitations externally imposed
on her. The novel thus recovers previous female voices from hybrid texts,
and the sartorial sphere shyly emerges as a potential site of female self-
expression. Not only because these cuttings are literally and symbolically
tied to the saris worn by Tania’s mother, but also because they articulate
her fashion preoccupations—her gloss ‘Eyebrows like this’ being mean-
ingful in this respect.
Earlier in the novel, Tania’s conflicting position vis-à-vis South Asian
culture is also narrated through sartorial clues. In the first chapter of
the novel, occupied by Chila’s wedding, Tania’s physical and sartorial
130 N. PEREIRA-ARES

portrayal is limited to an allusion to her ‘leonine mane’ (ibid.: 18) which

indicates her nonconformist character. More significantly, she is intro-
duced via her feelings towards the dressed bodies that surround her: ‘She
was squeezed between two large sari-draped ladies, fleshy book-ends
who exchanged stage whispers’ (ibid.: 14). Tania’s sensation of impend-
ing suffocation stands here for the asphyxiation she experiences when
confronted with traditional models of Asian womanhood—it can even
be read as a permutation of her ‘matrophobia’ (Rich 1976: 235).21 The
‘sari-draped ladies’ figure as bastions of tradition, whose individuality
does not show through their dressed bodies, bodies clothed in identical
garments that highlight their adoption of a common model of woman-
hood. Their saris act, in turn, as symbolic figurations of the homeland
left behind, as emblems of the cultural heritage these women strive to
preserve and safe-guard. These matriarchs even bring to mind the
Aunties in Anita and Me, Aunties that Meena also describes as women
indistinguishably dressed in ‘unfurling shimmering saris’ (Syal 1997: 29)
or, more categorically, as ‘sari-shaped packages’ (ibid.: 33). In both nov-
els, Syal avoids particularising the dress of the matriarchs, and she uses
this sartorial device to emphasise their choral voice. The Aunties are
physically caricaturised as ‘fleshy book-ends’, and ideologically patholo-
gised as ‘a formidable mafia, whose collective approval was a blessing and
whose communal contempt was a curse’ (ibid.: 33). The matriarchs in
Syal’s novels are not the ruthless figures that appear in Aslam’s Maps for
Lost Lovers—‘her mother […] took the bridegroom aside and told him
in a whisper, “Rape her tonight”’ (2014: 88). Yet, they are recurrently
depicted in a negative light. They are portrayed as figures that strive
to monitor the behaviour (and dressed bodies) of younger generations
according to ossified notions of Asian femininity, becoming in the pro-
cess real agents in the reproduction and perpetuation of patriarchal val-
ues. Assuming and performing the role of cultural transmitters (Anthias
1992), they attempt to preserve a past that is not attuned to the living
present of younger generations, a past that is no longer such but in their
diasporic imagination. In line with this, in a letter to Ruvani Ranasinha,
Syal commented that first-generation migrants are often ‘over-anxious to
preserve what they remember as the homeland’, becoming ‘more tradi-
tional than their counterparts at “home”’ (quoted in Ranasinha 2007:
224). This temporal and spatial disruption is sagely dramatised in Syal’s
Bhaji on the Beach (1993). In this screenplay, whereas Pushpa and Bina
are clad in saris that cover their bodies completely, Rekha, an Indian
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 131

woman on a visit to Britain, sports a Western-style suit that reveals and

emphasises her figure. The presence of Rekha in the text shatters the
diasporic imaginary, revealing that the diasporic matriarchs are anchored
in a version of Indian culture that has substantially changed since they
left the Indian subcontinent. Rekha even confronts them for clinging to
what she perceives as an outdated version of India and she does so by
emphasising their stuck-in-time sartorial mores: ‘“Home? What home?
When was the last time you went home? Look at you, your clothes,
the way you think […] You’re all twenty years out of date”’ (quoted in
Ranasinha 2007: 225).
The only ‘Auntie’ fully described and individualised in Life is Sunita’s
‘Modern Auntie’, who used to wear ‘sleek, subtle saris […] the sim-
plest gold jewellery’, her hair ‘cut short in a fashionable bob’ (Syal
2000a: 79–80). Her dressed body projects an image conspicuously dif-
ferent from those of the above-mentioned matriarchs. Her ‘fashionable
bob’ reflects her fashion consciousness, while simultaneously symbol-
ising her rebellion against tradition—significantly, later in the novel,
when Sunita experiences a feminist re-awakening, she too adopts a
‘gleaming bob’ (ibid.: 321). But, not coincidentally, Sunita’s ‘Modern
Auntie’ was ostracised by the Asian community, being widely known
as ‘Divorced Auntie’ behind her back (ibid.: 80). She was blamed for
having abandoned her husband—which is ‘often regarded as a blow to
izzat’ (Wilson 2006: 21)22—everyone forgetting her ‘visits to hospi-
tal: ‘Five broken ribs, nose broken twice, broken arms, burns to chest
[…]’ (Syal 2000a: 81). The novel thus retrieves the voice of Sunita’s
Modern Auntie, and her story also serves to introduce a painful sub-
text of domestic violence that gains more prominence through the case
of Jasbinder Singh. Largely as a result of Modern Auntie’s confessions,
Sunita became a feminist at university, a highly politicised young woman
who bears comparison to Jamila in The Buddha (see Chap. 3), both with
regard to intellectual references—the two of them are devotees of Angela
Davis—and dressing choices. Because Sunita also used to wear clothes
that sent rebellious feminist messages: ‘Doc Martens and black leggings
(the FemiNazi Max Wall look, he [her husband Akash] had called it)’
(ibid.: 84). The sartorial component that most clearly links Sunita and
Jamila is their respective use of Doc Martens, a type of footwear that, as
mentioned in Chap. 3, was adopted by many feminist collectives in the
1970s and 1980s (Brydon 1998). Akash’s reference to Sunita’s outfit
as a ‘FemiNazi Max Wall look’23 might be taken as a tongue-in-cheek
132 N. PEREIRA-ARES

remark, and yet it betrays a mocking attitude towards Sunita’s dressed

body at the time and, more broadly, towards her feminist agenda. What
is more, as a result of her Western-boyish outfit, Sunita was constructed
as a sexually licentious woman by her Asian male peers, a reputation that
jeopardised her marriageability. For them, a woman who ‘wore men’s
shoes and smoked’ was simply ‘the ideal person to lose their virgin-
ity with’ (Syal 2000a: 85). Dress is thus revealed to operate as a potent
mechanism of sexual stereotyping, suturing together gender and ethnic
issues: the Asian girl in Western clothes is regarded as ‘the bad Indian
woman’ within the Asian community (ibid.: 21); and the opposite also
finds a matching cliché: the Asian girl in Asian clothes is regarded as the
‘Other’ within the majority community, and similarly associated with a
myriad of sexual stereotypes. In fact, as Avtar Brah notes, in white-dom-
inated contexts, there is the stereotype that constructs Asian women as
‘exotic’ and sensual; and the opposing stereotype that construes them
as ‘ugly’ and undesirable (1996: 78). In Syal’s Anita and Me, Meena
experiences these conflicting stereotypes during the course of her life.
For, whereas in the main narrative she is rejected by local male teenag-
ers because of her skin colour—described as ‘offputting’ (1997: 105),
in the prologue to the novel the mature Meena admits to having been
treated, at some point in her life, as an exotic ‘trinket’ by ‘middle-class
white boys’ (ibid.: 10). It thus follows that, for the female characters
in these novels, dressing the body often entails a two-fold negotiation,
which stems from their position of double subalternity (Spivak 1988),
both as individuals that are part of a minority and as women subjected
to ‘two sets of gender relations, that of the host country and that of the
ethnic community’ (Kalra et al. 2005: 51).
The polyphony that dominates Life allows the reader to view the same
facts from different perspectives, including the relationship between
Sunita and Akash. As a young woman, Sunita saw Akash as a man who
embodied ‘[t]he best of East and West’ (Syal 2000a: 89). However, as
viewed by Tania, Akash was just playing his part, being ‘canny enough
to clip her [Sunita’s] wings before she realized her potential’ (ibid.: 147;
emphasis added). The loss of female independence is again linked here
with the institution of marriage, and the phraseology present in ‘The
Traveller’ evoked in the Sunita narrative. In effect, through the char-
acter of Sunita, Syal builds on the plight of the ‘wingless’ women that
inhabit the second land visited by the protagonist of ‘The Traveller’.
In that land, the winged girl finds (South Asian) women who are part
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 133

of the public sphere, but at home they face ‘wingless’ men who often
‘point accusing fingers at neglected children’ (Syal 1988: 101). There is
a conspicuous parallelism between the allusion to ‘neglected children’ in
‘The Traveller’ and Sunita’s later fear of becoming the ‘absent mother
in the scarlet dress’ (Syal 2000a: 72), a scarlet dress that conjures up
the notion of the ‘fallen’ or ‘loose’ woman—an association that Clair
Hughes traces back to ‘the Whore of Babylon’ (2006: 142). Both Sunita
and the unnamed women in ‘The Traveller’ are subjected to a patriar-
chal schema whereby the female body is mainly associated with nourish-
ment and domesticity. Any challenge to the prescribed roles of wifehood
and motherhood triggers a patriarchal response whereby notions of devi-
ant female behaviour are adduced. While in Life Akash is apparently far
removed from a macho stereotype, the novel questions his pose, digging
out some hidden truths. To keep their marriage afloat, Sunita has risked
‘a few burns on the soles of her feet’ (Syal 2000a: 49)—an allusion to
her Sita-like subservience—and she once agreed to have an abortion at a
clinic significantly decorated with ‘yellow wallpaper’ (ibid.: 90). A clear
reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1892) eponymous short story,
this yellow wallpaper does not invoke a post-natal depression in Life, but
rather Sunita’s post-abortion trauma. Paradoxically, despite being a rela-
tionship counsellor, Akash has never discussed this issue with Sunita, and
the ensuing trauma has never been exorcised as a result. Akash’s silence
with regard to the abortion issue arguably underlies a silenced guilt.
The unspoken guilt of having succeeded in his career at the expense of
Sunita, and more pertinently here, of Sunita’s body. Not only because
she was the one physically subjected to the abortion—which eventually
prevented her from passing her exams—but also because, as we discover
at Chila’s wedding, Sunita’s dressed body has ceased to belong to her,
now being usurped by her children, who leave multiple marks of their
existence on her body and clothes.
When we are first introduced to Sunita, her dressed body is presented
as ‘a map of motherhood, marked out by handprints, chocolate streaks
and a recent vomit stain’ (Syal 2000a: 16). This bodily and sartorial
description reveals that Sunita’s individuality as a woman has been super-
seded by her role as a mother. The imagery of Sunita’s dressed body as
being reclaimed by her children is recurrent throughout the first part of
the novel—the irreconcilability between motherhood and women’s sub-
jectivities is portrayed at this point in an almost Beauvoirian sense (de
Beauvoir 1979). Even in the absence of her children—as when she meets
134 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Chila and Tania for a dinner in Soho—Sunita is denied the possibility of

enjoying her individuality as a woman, as her clothes invariably empha-
sise her domesticity and position as a mother: ‘Sunita was squeezed into
a velvet dress which was already crumpled where Nikita had been hold-
ing onto it. Her hair was unbrushed and she had obviously had no time
to apply make-up’ (Syal 2000a: 45). Sunita’s dress has been creased by
her daughter Nikita, who becomes in this way an absent presence dur-
ing the course of the dinner, a permanent reminder of Sunita’s paren-
tal responsibilities. Saddled with domestic and care work, and therefore
with little time for herself, Sunita has neglected her dressed body in
almost every possible manner—her ‘unbrushed’ hair, not being a politi-
cal stance of any sort, makes this evident. Additionally, the fact that she
is ‘squeezed’ into her dress—an image that recurs in the text (ibid.: 16,
45, 188)—reveals that Sunita’s body has changed over the years. She has
adopted ‘the fleshy mantle worn by married Indian ladies […] It was
like a uniform […] the rippling belly rolls escaping from painted on sari
blouses’ (ibid.: 19). This ‘uniform’ connects Sunita with the Aunties pre-
viously described as ‘fleshy book-ends’. Sunita has become a replica of
them in bodily terms, just as she has come to embody their traditional
model of Asian womanhood. Traumatically for her, Sunita also real-
ises that her body has begun to show the sequelae left by the passing of
time, her ‘white pubic hair’ being irrefutable proof of this (ibid.: 121).
The character of Sunita thus allows Syal to make a timid foray into the
complexities involved in coming to terms with the ‘ageing body’ (Barry
2016) and its physical metamorphoses—a theme that Syal also explores
in her novel, The House of Hidden Mothers (2015). In front of the mir-
ror, Sunita is faced with the ‘objective certainty of [he]r transformations’
(Woodward 1991: 71), and she is left to undergo a process of re-cog-
nition which she initially rejects, preferring simply to ‘avoid looking at
her reflection’ (Syal 2000a: 188). Sunita thus parallels the behaviour of
Meena in Anita and Me, as Meena also ‘avoid[s] mirrors’ (Syal 1997:
146). In both cases, the fear of confronting the mirror evinces the char-
acters’ reluctance to identify with what they see. Their reasons are none
the less different: Meena attempts to escape from the ‘brownness’—and
even sartorial difference—of the projected image; while Sunita recoils
from the image of the mature woman the mirror reflects back. The next
question is: whose gaze is it that Meena and Sunita have internalised to
see themselves as not ‘likeable’ (Žižek 1999: 105)? Meena looks at her-
self through the dominant gaze, one that is putatively male and certainly
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 135

white; Sunita, while potentially assuming a male gaze, is also seeing her-
self through the prism of her younger and freer self—which is partly
comparable to the so-called ‘gaze of youth’ (Furman 1997: 109; Twigg
2013: 41).
Sunita feels estranged from, yet simultaneously entrapped in, her own
body, and her dress becomes an additional source of discomfort. Her
clothes bear nostalgic and traumatic witness to the transformations of
her body—‘the blouses and jackets she […] wor[e] this time last year
no longer fit [her]’ (Syal 2000a: 188). They accentuate the fact that her
body has grown in size and, consequently, her unease. The tightness of
her dresses leads Sunita to experience an ‘epidermic self-awareness’ (Eco
2007b: 316) which in this case is of a negative, rather than positive,
order. Her clothes at this point in the novel become just another element
that imprisons her body and restricts her mobility. Sunita’s cumulative
sense of bodily entrapment is linked with the ensnarement ensuing from
repressive gender roles. This becomes apparent when Sunita refers to her
underarms as ‘fleshy wings, useless for flying’ (Syal 2000a: 125; empha-
sis added). Sunita’s initial inability to escape her bodily and domestic
entrapment—the former being the somatic result of the latter—prompts
her to resort to food and self-harm as ways of channelling her frustra-
tion and despair. Sunita begins to eat compulsively—‘she could sit in the
kitchen, eating leftovers. It made her feel better’ (ibid.: 172)—and, using
a razor, she inflicts a series of cuts on her upper arm until she bleeds:
‘Snip snap; so easy, so fascinating to see how frail her armour was […]
There, she said afterwards, I am alive’ (ibid.: 171).24 Food and self-
harming provide Sunita with escape from her fettered existence, even
with a sort of bodily jouissance that is none the less highly self-destruc-
tive. Paradoxically, and at the same time tellingly, whereas Akash’s clinic
is visited by ‘anorexics’ and ‘over-eaters’ alike (ibid.: 96), Sunita’s hus-
band is blind to what is happing in his own home. Sunita’s voice is not
heard within the domestic realm, just as her body is not ‘seen’ by Akash.
Life thus brings to the fore what Tania refers to as ‘our [South Asian
women’s] propensity to cracking up and self-harm’ (ibid.: 313), that is
to say, the high rate of eating disorders, self-harming and body image
dissatisfaction that is prevalent among South Asian women in Britain
(Anand and Cochrane 2005; Wilson 2006). Syal herself commented
on this issue in an interview with Rebecca Hardy, linking self-harming
‘with the subjugation of women, of feeling isolated and powerless. Self-
harming is often the only way of coping with emotional pain—it’s a form
136 N. PEREIRA-ARES

of release’ (Hardy 2009: 3). In a reversal of roles, in the second part of

the novel, it is Akash who shows a crestfallen appearance—‘sitting the
way Sunita often sat in the evenings, slouched, legs apart’ (Syal 2000a:
207)—, and who approaches food as a mere form of self-release: ‘[he]
began eating it, tasting nothing’ (ibid.: 279). This takes place in Part II
of the novel, when Sunita impels her husband to reassess his masculinity
and face up to the forms of micro-machismo he has been reproducing in
the household.
At the end of Part I, Sunita experiences a epiphanic moment when
she is forced to confront the mirror that Tania’s documentary provides
(Gunning 2008, 2012), and she then initiates a process of re-empow-
erment by reclaiming her body for herself. Inured to remaining silent
and ‘disguis[ing] pain (Syal 2000a: 74), Sunita does not confront Akash
directly until the end of the novel. Initially, she opts for alternative
modes of communication, speaking to him ‘via graffiti’ (ibid.: 209) and,
more pertinently to my objective here, via her own dressed body, a visual
text that makes up for her verbal silence. Her formerly ‘unbrushed’ hair
(ibid.: 45) now gives way to a ‘boyish’ hairstyle (ibid.: 204), and her pre-
viously loose dresses to ‘slightly flared Lycra trousers’ and ‘leather cow-
boy boots’ (ibid.). Sunita’s new outfit is reminiscent of her adolescent
look, which suggests that she has fashioned her mature persona in rela-
tion to her younger self, one she considers more attractive, but also more
rebellious and definitely opposed to the image of the Aunties. While not
wearing Doc Martens, Sunita’s boots express empowerment and author-
ity, just as her boyish hair speaks of her efforts to destabilise gender roles.
In buying new clothes and devoting more time to her appearance, Sunita
regains an individuality previously obscured by her roles as wife and
mother—and, despite frequently being beset by guilt-inspired feelings,
she gradually develops a maternal subjectivity that does not obliterate
her individuality as a woman. Gaining autonomy over her dressed body
therefore emerges as a primal step on Sunita’s path towards regaining
autonomy over herself. Interestingly, Sunita’s new persona is encased in
a Western wrapping, which might underlie a potential pairing of Western
culture and freedom from patriarchy—an idea with which the novel toys,
but one it certainly does not adhere to in the end. Sunita’s Western-
styled ensembles are soon questioned by her great-grandmother, who
acts as the embodiment of moral regulation. Mata-ji discusses Sunita’s
dress with Akash, awakening in him fears of emasculation and marital
betrayal: “‘Why has she forgotten her trousers?’25 Mata-ji demanded […]
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 137

‘She doesn’t dress for you. What’s the matter?’” (ibid.: 276). Akash’s
answer—‘it’s a dress. It’s the fashion nowadays’ (ibid.)—seems edifying
inasmuch as he buttresses Sunita’s sartorial choice, rather than censuring
it. Yet Akash also seems to use this response as a subterfuge to prevent
his own fears from materialising. In effect, intimidated by her regained
empowerment and individuality, Akash initially deems Sunita’s new per-
sona a ‘[c]liché’ (ibid.: 226), though he later supports her in her journey
of transformation. This journey does not simply involve Sunita. It ges-
tures towards a broader concern: the necessity of ‘redefining what being
middle aged means’ (ibid.: 244). Just as Sunita is envisioned as belong-
ing to the generation that has built bridges between different cultures,
the novel also urges this generation to refashion defunct ideas of what
being Asian and middle-aged means. Being an ‘Auntie’ in contemporary
Britain, the novel posits, does not imply dressing in ‘winter coat over
sari, men’s socks and sandals’ (ibid.: 83), the very stereotypical figure
Sunita expects to find when, on being called ‘Auntie’ in the street for the
first time, she starts looking around in bewilderment.
While Sunita experiences a feminist re-awakening, her beloved friend
Chila develops a feminist awareness. Finding out that her marriage to
Deepak is a farce inflicts a hard blow on Chila at the end of Part I, and
she then begins to interrogate the indoctrination that has guided most of
her life, including the institution of marriage. Because, ultimately, despite
the fact that ‘her life had improved and expanded in so many ways’,
Chila feels that ‘a part of her was […] getting smaller’ (ibid.: 198). The
novel thus redeploys the image of the dwindling body to evoke Chila’s
oppression under an idea of marriage that is essentially patriarchal,
and divorce seems even less desirable in view of the communal ostra-
cism suffered by Sunita’s ‘Modern Auntie’. Chila’s painful discovery is
juxtaposed with her pregnancy and, indeed, it is largely through being
a mother that Chila becomes a more determined and mature character.
Understood as a patriarchal institution and the allegedly natural destiny
for women (O’Reilly 2004), motherhood is censured in Life, with Tania
epitomising its rejection and asserting her right to choose. Nevertheless,
the experience of mothering is revalorised in the text as a condition that
can forge strong links among women. Sunita herself states that not even
her feminist involvement has brought her as close to ‘the kinship I felt
with my sex when I gave birth’ (Syal 2000a: 88). Life does not, however,
provide a simplistic and idealised portrayal of mothering and childbear-
ing. The maternal body is presented, in Kristevan terms (Kristeva 1984),
138 N. PEREIRA-ARES

as being both ‘wonderful and frightening’ (Syal 2000a: 197), and the
act of giving birth is treated as a physical ordeal that entails pain and
has a profound impact on women’s bodies, leaving ‘ravines that would
never close up’, muscles so ‘slack that wearing tampons would now be
a pointless exercise’ (ibid.: 75). In a blatant manner, the novel repeat-
edly dissects and anatomises the South Asian pregnant body, unveiling
in the process some of the taboos that surround it. Chila herself discloses
the truth behind the loose ‘Punjabi suit’ that Deepak has ordered ‘to
accommodate her growing stomach’ (ibid.: 197): its loose cut has been
designed strategically to hide ‘any hint of a bulge’ (ibid.). Sexuality has
traditionally been considered a taboo subject in South Asian culture
(Ratti 1993; Kawale 2003), and so has the pregnant body as a result of
its sexual implications—‘Pregnancy was irrefutable proof that someone
had Done It’ (Syal 2000a: 197). Pregnancy attaches a sense of shame
to the female body, this shame being the product of patriarchal beliefs
aimed at monitoring women’s sexuality. Covering the pregnant body
with loose clothes is therefore a means of diverting attention from the
‘swelling of shame’ (ibid.). With comic undertones, Chila itemises the
multiple sartorial strategies her Aunties have deployed to hide their preg-
nant bellies: ‘Dupattas would be draped and folded and pinned over the
offending region […] aunties […] would leave their coats on all evening.
On one occasion, a very large and shy acquaintance had insisted on using
her very small husband as a shield’ (ibid.). Chila finds fault in these sar-
torial practices, practices that repress and conceal, rather than extol and
reveal, the power of the maternal body as a source of life. The novel itself
flouts the aforementioned taboos by openly uncovering the Asian preg-
nant body, so much so that Life features an entire chapter devoted to
Chila’s labour. Written in dialogue form, the chapter moves from Chila’s
first contractions to the moment in which Chila gives birth to her son.
In this way, Life does not simply rectify the visual and verbal silences
surrounding the pregnant body and its representations, it also counter-
acts the scarcity of literary samples describing and representing the very
moment of childbirth.26
That Chila, initially the most conformist of the three protagonists,
is the one that reflects on the taboos surrounding the pregnant body
points at her transformation in Part II. Chila’s growingly critical aware-
ness is also evinced in a passage where she rebels against her mother’s
discourse of son preference and the idea of marriage as the ultimate
aim of women—though her rebellion is always a silent one. Looking
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 139

at the young girls in her mother’s living-room, Chila wishes she could
become almost a ‘winged girl’ and let them know they have multiple
options beyond the marriages their parents will try to secure for them:
‘She would tell […] all these young girls to go away and pack a bag and
travel and read and climb mountains and see the view from somewhere
very high and bright and maybe send her a postcard so she could remind
herself of a different view’ (ibid.: 201). Travelling is here equated with
female freedom—as it is in ‘The Traveller’—and the notion of a ‘differ-
ent view’ is tied in with the process of interrogating received cultural
values. Tellingly, at this point in the text, Chila feels her ‘dupatta heavy
on her shoulders, yoke of ages, transparent as air, heavier than iron, a
woman’s modesty symbolised by a scrap of silk, izzat […] a family’s
honour is carried by its daughter’ (ibid.: 202). This sartorially evocative
passage unravels the conflation between patriarchy and tradition, and
the heaviness of Chila’s dupatta betokens the burden that this confla-
tion has always imposed on her. Bound to this is the idea that women
are constructed as the carriers of culture (Anthias 1992), and the female
dressed body turned into a palimpsest of male-imposed meanings, one
on which issues of cultural identity, tradition and family honour have
been inscribed and re-inscribed over the course of history.
The ‘metaphoric use of “women” as “nation”’ (Grewal and Kaplan
1994: 22) is denounced even more explicitly in Syal’s ‘The Traveller’.
Because, in the first land visited by the winged girl—arguably some-
where in the Indian subcontinent—the protagonist is publicly accused
of dressing immodestly. Her walking boots are deemed ‘too masculine’,
her dress and hairstyle ‘too provocative’ (Syal 1988: 99) and a challenge
to someone’s ‘izzat’ (ibid.: 100). To the detriment of her mobility, the
winged girl is forced to change her ‘travelling clothes’ (ibid.: 98). She
ties up her hair, substitutes her ‘boots for ordinary open-toed sandals’
and rearranges her robe ‘so that my legs were entirely covered’ (ibid.:
99–100). Both in ‘The Traveller’ and in Life, concepts such as ‘izzat’
are presented as regulatory mechanisms that patriarchal discourse
deploys effectively to exert control over women and their bodies, ulti-
mately being aimed at discouraging women ‘from crossing patriarchal
boundaries and breaking out of prescribed moulds of femininity’ (Wilson
2006: 12). The texts also voice what Amitava Chowdhury—drawing on
Amy-Jill Levine (1992)—explains as women’s ‘permanent otherness’
(Chowdhury 2016: 99), in other words, the fact that a woman’s posi-
tion has traditionally been contingent on a male figure, generally a father
140 N. PEREIRA-ARES

or husband. What is more, dramatising what studies on the imbrications

between gender and ethnicity postulate (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1982;
Yuval-Davis et al. 1989), in both texts, sartorial ethnic-based conventions
are revealed to operate as a means of monitoring female behaviour (even
sexuality) and, in turn, sartorial gender-based regulations are used to
carve out notions of belonging, cultural identity and family respectability.
Like her ‘fellow travellers’ (Syal 2000a: 319), Tania also under-
goes a transformation in the second part of the novel—tellingly enti-
tled ‘Spring’—a transformation already foreshadowed at the end of Part
I: Tania ‘do[es] not know yet that […] a rain-spattered sari will always
win over a spangly scrap of Lycra’ (ibid.: 182). The sari stands here for
Tania’s Asian heritage, from which she has often felt she should sepa-
rate in order to pursue her aspirations. But, in this sartorial metaphor,
the sari is conceded victory, foretelling Tania’s final reconciliation with
her Asian roots. Because in Life the past can be transformed, but never
wiped out altogether. As Reichl (2002) points out, Tania’s affair with
Deepak in Part II represents an important step on her path towards
becoming reconciled with her South Asian side. However, the restora-
tion of the mother–daughter bond plays an even more prominent role
in this respect, especially after the emotional cost of Deepak’s betrayal.
Walking along the corridors of the hospital where her father is, Tania
senses ‘her mother’s steps behind her’ (Syal 2000a: 297), that ghostly
presence that has always haunted her. But Tania now longs to reconcile
herself with that ghost, to ‘bury herself in the billowing waves of one of
her mother’s voluminous housecoats, her favourite pre-school game […]
to lounge in the shade of Mama’s gargantuan thighs […] create sanctu-
ary. There had to be somewhere she could call home’ (ibid.: 272). This
dress- and bodily-related memory represents a regression to childhood,
to an almost pre-symbolic order, to the figure of the mother as the place
of origin. In recalling her own experience of being mothered, Tania nur-
tures ‘the fantasy of a lost territory’ (Kristeva 1997: 302), reaffirming the
pervading bond with her mother and, in the context of the novel, also
with her South Asian roots. Tania’s recollection creates a point of blissful
communion between mother and daughter, while signalling Tania’s wish
to reunite with a mother figure who is now absent, lost as a result of the
irretrievable separation that death accomplishes. Tania’s figurative reun-
ion with her mother is further attained through a process of exoneration
which entails a revision of the circumstances shaping her mother’s life
experience. Tania realises that for most of her life she has blamed her
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 141

mother rather unjustly. She has readily judged her for being compliant
with a model of female submissiveness, without taking into account that
‘[n]ot everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life’ (Aslam
2014: 115). Where she previously envisioned her mother simply as a
submissive woman and an unadjusted diasporic subject, she now thinks
of her as having been ‘courageous’ (Syal 2000a: 272). Tania’s initial rage
at her mother is thus substituted for a reparation of the mother–daughter
nexus in the novel. The matrilineal link is tentatively restored and so are
Tania’s filial bonds to the Asian community. Wishing to reconnect with
her past, Tania goes shopping around the area of her childhood. She
stops outside ‘Riaz’s music shack’ (ibid.: 315)—where she first became
acquainted with Bhangra music—and she wistfully fabricates a vision
of her, ‘mum, Sunita, Chila, holding imaginary hands, fighting over
[…] bindis […] running fingertips over fabrics’ (ibid.: 316–317). As a
young girl, we are told at the start of the novel, Tania despised accom-
panying her mother to the Delhi Silk House, where her ‘mummy ran her
work-worn hands over waterfalls of silks’ (ibid.: 41). However, she now
returns to her ‘old stomping ground’ (ibid.: 315), reliving memories and
recreating fantasies in which fabrics and textiles reconcile her with the
past. Thinking that familiar sounds, smells and textures might even be
capable of bringing her father back from his vegetative state, Tania takes
to hospital her newly acquired ‘silver bangles’ and ‘jingl[es] them near
his ear’, ‘making them choon-choon softly, Mum’s theme tune as she
waddled around the house’ (ibid.: 316). Where Tania previously trivial-
ised sartorial diacritics, she now deploys sartorial objects to bring the past
into the present. These objects have been procured within the limits of
the Asian community, which also implies a move from Tania’s self-ori-
entalising ‘Asianness’ to a more ‘genuine’ attachment to Asian culture.
The scene at the hospital eventually gathers the family together: Tania is
beside her father, and the figure of her dead mother is evoked through
the ‘sound effects’ (Sacido and Mieszkowski 2015) produced by the sil-
ver bangles. It is even tempting to compare these sounds to the mother’s
voice which, as Mladen Dolar submits, is ‘endowed with an array of ret-
roactive fantasies of a primary fusion’ (2006: 41).
The mother–daughter dyad is a recurrent theme in Syal’s oeuvre,
though a comprehensive exploration here is beyond the scope of this
work. The dedication of Life—‘For all our mothers and daughters’—
already anticipates the importance of the mother–daughter nexus in the
novel. In Life, the mother–daughter relationship is initially presented in
142 N. PEREIRA-ARES

terms of conflict, as the three protagonists wrestle between consenting to

and dissenting from the conceptions of womanhood inherited from their
mothers, with the dynamics of ‘identification and distanciation’ (Hirsch
1989: 16) exacerbated by the twinning of gender and ethnicity in the
diasporic space. The novel none the less promotes the reconciliation
between mothers and daughters, at times opting for a form of silence
that is in recognition of the limits of intergenerational understanding.
Towards the end of the text, Tania reconnects with her dead mother
via a revision of the past, reassembling memories or fabricating fantasies
where material culture propels recovery; Chila rebels against her moth-
er’s indoctrination, but she does not upbraid her so as not to ‘shatter the
fragile throne upon which she sat’ (Syal 2000a: 202); and Sunita feels
reassured by the silence of her mother concerning her new Western-style
look, even if that silence is ‘conditional’ (ibid.: 278). The maintenance
and/or restoration of the mother–daughter bond highlights the novel’s
emphasis on establishing an intergenerational dialogue that might serve
to refashion the ways in which the Asian community imagines itself in a
contemporary context.
Life stresses time and again the need to redefine ‘what being Asian
and male or Asian and female means’ (ibid.: 103), and it encour-
ages male and female characters from different generations to become
involved in this process of redefinition. It urges older generations to
come to understand that the new ones are not willing to live in a static
version of the past; and it exhorts younger generations to negotiate,
change and redefine, rather than simply endorse or deny, the cultural
lore inherited from their forbearers. Otherwise, as the novel hints, the
intergenerational conflict might result in cultural rejection or in situa-
tions that confine individuals—especially women—to fettered existences,
from which escape might only lead to communal ostracism, best exem-
plified by what happens to Sunita’s ‘Modern Auntie’ in Life or to the
winged girl’s only disciple in ‘The Traveller’. This unnamed woman, who
willingly absorbs the songs of female freedom, ends up being an outcast,
blamed for bringing ‘shame’ on her family (Syal 1988: 104). Eventually,
she accuses her mentor of having filled her head ‘with dreams of soaring
freedom’ while leaving her ‘amongst the wingless ones’ (ibid.: 104)—
where the ‘wingless ones’ stand for the members of a community that
continues to live by patriarchal values. The ending of ‘The Traveller’ is
highly ambiguous. The winged girl’s only disciple becomes a feminist
activist, but she has to carry out her activism clandestinely, in the forest
and under a sky always presided over by the ‘moon’ (ibid.: 105). Despite
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 143

sowing the seeds of change, the winged girl’s project is not entirely suc-
cessful, partly because she fails to engage all sectors of society, but mainly
because she addresses the plight of women in universalising terms. In
light of this, Syal’s ‘The Traveller’ can be read as a text aimed at fore-
grounding the shortcomings of much Western feminism when it comes
to providing answers to the situation of non-white women, and this out-
look also resonates in Life, given the novel’s emphasis on pinpointing the
particularities affecting the British Asian female experience.
Set beside the importance of the mother–daughter nexus is the idea of
female solidarity that Syal first explored in ‘The Traveller’ and is superbly
articulated in the last chapter of Life.27 Despite the ups and downs in
their friendship, the three protagonists are brought together at the
funeral of Tania’s father and, filtered through Mr. Keegan’s perspective,
are described not as friends, but as ‘sisters’ (Syal 2000a: 331). In this last
chapter, the protagonists appear dressed in customary ‘white’ (ibid.),28
with Sunita gathering ‘her dupatta around her body’ (ibid.: 333)—a
departure from her previously Westernised image. The scene further
attests to the reconciliation of the three women with an Asian heritage
they had questioned and/or cut loose from in the course of the novel.
As a result, Life has been said to present an ‘undecidedness between
strategic positionalities and essentialist inner selves’ (Reichl 2002: 145).
No doubt Syal’s Life might be regarded as a ‘conservative’ novel in the
sense that it concedes victory to tradition, but not in an uncritical way.
Its ‘conservatism’ does not perforce equate with essentialism (Gunning
2008). To establish this equation is to ignore the wide-ranging critique
the novel provides of the structures governing the Asian community and
their impact on the perpetuation of atavistic and sexist gender roles—at
some points Life is so specifically denunciatory that it passes over the
multiple ways in which South Asian patriarchy intersects with British
patriarchal ideologies. Furthermore, to assume that the protagonists’ rec-
onciliation with their Asian heritage entails a ‘return’ to identity essen-
tialisms is to deny the renewed critical stances they develop in the course
of the novel. The denouement of Life certainly allows for a different
reading, one that interprets the novel as a call to dismantle South Asian
patriarchy from within, and without resorting to an inexorable divorce
from the South Asian community. The protagonists of the novel, as
Ranasinha points out, manage to contest ‘prescribed gender roles in ways
that do not necessitate a self-distancing from [Asian] culture’ (2007:
252). The novel thus gestures towards a form of transnational feminism,
144 N. PEREIRA-ARES

sensitive to global rhythms—and their engendered epistemology—but

also to cultural and ‘local particularities’ (Rajan and Desai 2013: 2). As
potential proxies of this approach, the protagonists of Life are allowed to
enjoy a more hopeful ending than the one portended to the winged girl’s
disciple in Syal’s ‘The Traveller’. In Life, the protagonists’ challenges
to patriarchal structures effect changes in various characters—including
male figures such as Akash—without driving them into communal ostra-
cism. Eventually, the novel closes with the three heroines shielded by
those gathered at the funeral and conjuring up images of travelling and
flying that may well stand for the idea of female freedom: Sunita speaks
of her future trip to Spain; Chila maps out a trip to India; and Tania
urges the sparrows to spread their chants of freedom: ‘“Go on … go”
Tania said […] scattering the sparrows […] who fluttered […] singing
their journey as they flew’ (Syal 2000a: 334).
Meera Syal’s Life offers a gendered rendition of the British Asian
experience, recurrently using fashion and dress as motifs that add to the
exploration of gender issues. Overflowing with references to fashion and
clothes, Life can be said to refract Syal’s interest in the semiotic poten-
tial of dress, one she has exploited productively in most of her works.
In effect, the introduction of the three protagonists of Life via sartorial
details is a device already used by Syal in My Sister-Wife (1993).29 In
this, the opposing models of Asian femininity embodied by Farah and
Maryam are also conveyed through descriptions of their dressed bodies,
with the former wearing ‘Western ivory designer suits’ and the latter ‘tra-
ditional Pakistani clothes’ (1993: 115, 121). What is more, when these
two female characters eventually swap roles, they also exchange clothes,
as Farah adopts a ‘salwar kameez’ and Maryam ‘an elegant lounge suit’
(ibid.: 138). The descriptive and the narrative thus coalesce, as changes
in dress trace shifts in the evolution of the characters. As we have seen,
the heroines in Life are also introduced via details of dress, details that
map out different models of British Asian femininity, and position the
protagonists in relation to both the majority and minority cultures.
Furthermore, albeit subtler, their transformations also take on a sartorial
dimension throughout: Sunita refashions her appearance in the course
of the novel, which marks the first step on her path towards reassess-
ing her position as an adult woman, wife and mother in contemporary
Britain; Chila develops a feminist awareness, and this eventually leads her
to interrogate received ideas, including the sartorial conventions aimed
at disguising the pregnant body; and Tania becomes reconciled with her
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 145

mother and Asian heritage, using sartorial objects to propel recovery and
reunion.
Dress acts in the novel as a means of self-presentation—one that is as
reliable as equivocal—and it shyly emerges as a space for female expres-
sion. Sunita deploys her restyled appearance to speak in the absence of
words, and the narrative tentatively retrieves lost female voices through
textiles, through allusions to their sartorial demeanours or through the
fashion concerns they once jotted down. Additionally, in Life, dress is
endowed with a broad range of metaphorical and symbolic resonances
that repeatedly conjure up the imagery in ‘The Traveller’ and which
often coalesce around the novel’s exploration of patriarchal structures
and encumbering gender roles. In Life, there are suits that crumple on
reaching the domestic sphere, dresses that stress the domestic entrap-
ment of the characters, sartorial knots that turn out to be extremely pre-
carious, and clothes that ominously imprison the bodies of the wearers.
In the process, Life yields insights into the imbrications between gender
and ethnicity in the diasporic space, calling attention to the importance
of dress when it comes to arbitrating these imbrications. For the protag-
onists of Life, dressing the body often implies a negotiation vis-à-vis both
the majority culture—where Asian dress might potentially ‘Otherise’ or
exoticise them—and the Asian community, where sartorial regulations
on a gender basis are commonly used to stage belonging and where sar-
torial imperatives on an ethnic basis serve to preclude deviations along
gender lines. At the crux of this entwinement is the construction of the
female dressed body as the cultural signifier par excellence, one on which
notions of tradition, culture and even family honour have been written
and re-written over the course of history. All these concerns are explored
against a background of ostensibly multi-sartorial celebration, a context
marked by the boom of the ‘Asian cool’ industry. The globalisation of
Asian dress is none the less treated in ambivalent terms in the novel. It
is presented as a viable option that offers Asian characters new possibil-
ities for self-fashioning, and favours sartorial creativity as well as cross-
ethnic pollination. However, it is also revealed to often be premised on
exoticist impulses, which might eventually widen, rather than bridge,
the gap between the ‘external’ consumer and the ‘original’ wearer. Life
even invites us to ponder how intrusive the Western appropriation of
Asian dress might seem for many Asian subjects who, like the protago-
nists of the novel, are by no means exempt from sartorial stereotyping
and scurrilous dress-related clichés. As we shall see in the next chapter,
146 N. PEREIRA-ARES

the paradoxes surrounding the ‘Asian cool’ phenomenon are further

explored in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, a novel that walks us to a post-
9/11 context, immerses us in a fictional world populated by Muslim
characters, and introduces us to the polyvalent meanings underlying the
practice of hijab.

NOTES
1. Hereafter referred to as Life.
2. In this respect, Paul Gilroy (2002) notes that the 1981 British Nationality
Act reinforced the equation between ‘Britishness’ and Anglo-Saxon
‘whiteness’, as it denied British citizenship to the UK-born children of
immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
3. The term ‘(South) Asian’ began to be widely used in Britain in the 1970s,
following the arrival of South Asian refugees from Africa (mainly from
Kenya and Uganda) where the label ‘Asian’ had been employed since
the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1988, the Commission for
Racial Equality discouraged the use of the term ‘Black’ to refer to people
of South Asian origin, advising instead the deployment of the category
‘British Asian’.
4. See also discussions in Tariq Modood (1994), Avtar Brah (1996), Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown (2000) and Claire Alexander (2002).
5. The term ‘desi’, which means ‘from the homeland’, has been used to
refer to young generations of South Asians living in various locations
around the world—mainly the USA and the UK. Shalini Shankar (2008)
has pointed out that the emergence of this term marks a shift from the
idea of South Asians as immigrants longing to return to the Indian sub-
continent to the idea of South Asians having roots in various diasporic
locations.
6. Emma Tarlo uses the term ‘visibly Muslim’ to refer to ‘the growing num-
bers of people whose affiliation to Islamic values, identity and faith are
marked out through everyday dress practices and who become a vis-
ible presence in the sartorial landscape of cosmopolitan cities in Britain,
Europe and elsewhere’ (Tarlo 2013: 79).
7. Currently known as the Asian Women Writers Collective (AWWC).
8. From the 1980s, postcolonial feminists such as Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (1981, 1985a, b), bell hooks (1982, 1989), Chandra Talpade
Mohanty (1988), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) and Sara Suleri (1992) began
to denounce the ways in which Western feminism had ignored the plight
of non-Western women. To this we should add those voices that favoured
the development of Black and Asian feminist scholarship in Britain. See,
 4 ‘CHANEL DESIGNING CATWALK INDIAN SUITS’ … 147

in this respect, Amrit Wilson (1978), Pratibha Parmar (1982), Parita

Trivedi (1984), Hazel V. Carby ([1982] 1997) and Heidi Safia Mirza
(1997), among others.
9. Meera Syal’s output as an actress is extensive, though she is probably
best known for her performances in such popular television comedies as
Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42. For a detailed account
of Syal’s career, see, for example, Ruvani Ranasinha (2007) and Sarah
Upstone (2010).
10. In this respect, see Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein (2005) as well as Sarah
Upstone (2010).
11. This aims at signalling the distinction that feminist discourse has intro-
duced between ‘motherhood’ and ‘mothering’—mainly as a result
of Adrienne Rich’s postulates in Of Woman Born (1976). As Andrea
O’Reilly explains, vis-à-vis the patriarchal institution of motherhood—
which is ‘male-defined and controlled and […] deeply oppressive to
women’, mothering can be viewed as referring to ‘women’s experiences
of mothering that are female-defined and centred and potentially empow-
ering to women’ (2004: 2). This terminological shift is also evoked in a
relatively recent publication germane to the study of South Asian culture,
namely South Asian Mothering: Negotiating Culture, Family and Selfhood
(2013), edited by Jasjit K. Sangha and Tahira Gonsalves.
12. Also called shalwaar kameez.
13. A knee-length, loose shirt or tunic worn by men.
14. Similarly, in an interview with Sarfraz Manzoor, Syal states that her gen-
eration has been ‘so creative’ because ‘to inhabit two different worlds and
never belong to any’ gives ‘so much material’ (2009: 3).
15. Fish defines ‘boutique multiculturalism’ as the multiculturalism ‘of ethnic
restaurants, weekend festivals, and high profile flirtations with the other
in a manner satirized by Tom Wolfe under the rubric of “radical chic”’
(1999: 56).
16. I owe this point to Mita Banerjee (2007).
17. A long, pleated skirt, usually worn with a choli (blouse) and dupatta. See
Amrit Wilson (2006) for more information about the use of lenghas as
wedding outfits.
18. The formal departure of the bride from her parents’ home.
19. Syal herself has acknowledged that, as a young girl, she developed a
‘schizophrenic ability to role swap’ (2000b: 252).
20. Also known as pullu or pallu, it refers to the free end of the sari (Banerjee
and Miller 2008).
21. Adrienne Rich defines ‘matrophobia’ as ‘the fear not of one’s mother or
of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother’ (1976: 235).
148 N. PEREIRA-ARES

22. Amrit Wilson has noted that, in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the con-
cept of izzat—which translates as ‘honour’—is ‘closely linked to prestige,
reputation and male ego’ (2006: 13).
23. This represents a conflation between the term ‘Feminazi’, commonly asso-
ciated with pejorative and mocking connotations, and a reference to Max
Wall, a famous British comedian of the past.
24. The issue of eating disorders is also thematised in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
(2003).
25. A reference to the trousers of the shalwaar kameez.
26. Speaking about Bhaji on the Beach in a conversation with Alison Oddey,
Meera Syal refers to the criticism she has received for ‘tackling taboo sub-
jects like violence, sex, women and pregnancy’ (Oddey 1999: 61).
27. Despite that much psychoanalytic, feminist scholarship is largely Western-
centric (hooks 2015), and therefore its application to texts such as Life
might be deemed problematic, the twinning of the mother–daughter
bond and the idea of female solidarity in Life calls to mind Luce Irigaray’s
thoughts (1993) on the vertical dimension (mother/daughter relation-
ships) and the horizontal dimension (a sorority of women).
28. In Hindu funerals, white is the customary colour of mourning.
29. My Sister-Wife is a screenplay Syal wrote for BBC2 in 1992. Later on, it
was published as a play in the volume Six Plays by Black and Asian Women
Writers (1993), edited by Rukhsana Ahmad and Kadija George. All allu-
sions to My Sister-Wife in this book refer to the play.
 CHAPTER 5

‘She Had Her Hijab Pulled Off ’: Dressed

Bodies Do Matter in Monica Ali’s
Brick Lane

The new millennium has been a ‘post-period’ almost since its dawn.
Often referred to as the post-9/11 era, it is now marked by other related
‘posts’—from the 3/11 Madrid (2004) and 7/7 London (2005) bomb-
ings to more recent events in England, Germany, France and elsewhere
across the globe. As well as their impact on geopolitical issues, political
discourses and ethnic relations, these events have reawakened the histori-
cally rooted and deleterious vision of Islam as a ‘lasting trauma’ for the
West (Said 2003: 59), with the ensuing consequence of Muslims being
increasingly vilified and demonised. The Muslim subject has come to be
indiscriminately and perniciously associated with the threat of terrorism,
which has added new layers of stigma to Muslim identities, identities
already coded in negative terms as ‘backward’, ‘reactionary’, ‘oppres-
sive’ and ‘violent’—especially so in Britain since the Rushdie affair (Malik
2009). In the case of South Asian Muslims, on whom this chapter is
largely focused, they are ‘doubly stigmatized’, firstly by ‘Islamophobia’,
and secondly, by ‘xenophobia towards nations such as Pakistan as abet-
ters of terrorism’ (Chambers and Herbert 2015: 2). The post-9/11
backlash and the spread of Islamophobia in the West have resulted in
hostility and violence towards Muslim communities.1 In Britain, for
example, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 were followed by vari-
ous revenge crimes, not only against Muslims, but also against indi-
viduals who simply looked like Muslims (Álvarez 2005; Dodd 2005;
Modood 2005a). Non-Muslim South Asians and, in particular, Sikhs
have also been the target of such assaults, partly because their dressing

© The Author(s) 2018 149

N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora
Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0_5
150 N. PEREIRA-ARES

practices are often identified erroneously as being Muslim (Ahluwalia and

Pellettiere 2010)—and this informs the appearance, rather controver-
sial none the less, of t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Don’t freak,
I’m a Sikh’. In our post-9/11 context, projecting a Muslim identity is
therefore a valiant undertaking, as Muslim diacritics—including cloth-
ing—make the wearer more likely to be verbally or physically abused
(Ameli and Merali 2006; Moors and Tarlo 2007; Tarlo 2010). Emma
Tarlo even notes that ‘the frequency of incidents of verbal and physi-
cal abuse directed at Muslim women in Britain is directly linked to the
degree to which they cover, with those wearing face veils reporting high
levels of regular abuse’ (2010: 10). Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, a British
Muslim writer of South Asian descent, gives an exemplary account of
this in her memoir Love in a Headscarf ([2009] 2014), in which she
describes the violent attack suffered by one of her ‘headscarf-wearing
friends’ in post-7/7 Britain (ibid.: 150). The writer also declares here
that, in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7, her headscarf—which she has refused
to remove despite the adverse circumstances—marked her out and
‘tagged [her] with the label “terrorist”’ (ibid.: 146). As Janmohamed’s
comment reveals, new stigmas have been added to Muslim dress in the
post-9/11 era, which results from what Aroosa Kanwal calls the emer-
gence of a ‘terrorist ontology’; in other words, the association between
‘Muslimness’ and ‘terror’ (2015: 186). Muslim clothing has now come
to be insidiously connected with suspicion, and its wearer immediately
envisioned as a potential ‘threat within’. In this context, Janmohamed’s
resolution not to remove her headscarf can be read as a powerful act of
resistance and even defiance vis-à-vis Islamophobia. But, interestingly,
she explains her decision as part of her ‘duty as a citizen’ (2014: 149),
the duty of standing up for what she believes in without ‘letting fear stop
[her]’ (ibid.). Janmohamed thus connects the issue of hijab with the
duties and rights involved in citizenship, inviting the reader to ponder
whose fear really does pose a challenge to British citizenship as well as to
the seemingly liberal and democratic values of the nation-state.
Especially since 9/11, the Muslim dressed body has come under a
global spotlight, with most debates concentrating on the dressed bod-
ies of Muslim women, and in particular on the practice of hijab.2
However, despite its recurrent presence in the mass media and in cer-
tain academic forums, the question of hijab continues to offer a volatile
and varied rhetoric, being simultaneously ‘attacked, ignored, dismissed,
transcended, trivialized or defended’ (El Guindi 1999: xi). Literature on
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 151

the subject agrees that many of the complexities surrounding the Muslim
veil stem from the multiple denotations and connotations that the prac-
tice of veiling acquires across time and space: ‘[the veil] means different
things to different people within [Muslim] society, and it means different
things to Westerners than it does to Middle Easterners’ (Fernea 1993:
122). In the West, Helen Watson contends, the Muslim veil tends to be
perceived either as ‘part and parcel of the exotic, sensual Otherness of
Oriental traditions’ or ‘as an overt symbol of the oppression of women
under Islam’ (2002: 153). Nevertheless, the vision of the Muslim
veil as a symbol of female oppression does not surface exclusively in a
Western collective imaginary. For the influential Moroccan sociologist
Fatima Mernissi (1991), for example, the practice of hijab has been—
and continues to be—an instrument of female subjugation imposed
and perpetuated by patriarchy—not by Islam—through a slanted inter-
pretation of the Qur’an. In contradistinction, for other Muslims, the
veil represents a powerful element of cultural identification which even
transcends the mere religious sphere. In countries such as Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Morocco or Iran, the style of veil—or the type of fabric out of
which it is made—constitutes a visible marker of rank, social status and
ideological affiliation (El Guindi 1999). Moreover, the veil might also
be imbued with aesthetic and erotic connotations (Schick 1990), which
bears comparison to what occurs with high heels or the corset in Western
culture—items that have equally been regarded as constraining. In con-
trast to those visions of the veil as an element that eroticises the female
body, for other factions of the Muslim population, the practice of hijab
entails an implicit argument against the objectification of women’s bod-
ies. Thus Iranian writer Zahrā Rahnavard claims that the use of hijab pre-
vents women from becoming ‘an object whose value lies solely in her
looks’ (1990: 9). It is along similar feminist lines that we should situate
the return to veiling among young Muslim women who actively partici-
pate in the public sphere and for whom the veil is ‘more a sign of their
assertion of their own identity than of the power of the male’ (Hourani
1991: 442). In Britain, this return to veiling among certain segments
of the Muslim population can be traced back to the early 1990s and, as
Tarlo (2010, 2013) notes, it encapsulates multiple concerns, from mat-
ters of faith to the rejection of Western (consumerist) values, feminist
postulates against objectification as well as aesthetic interests. For some
British Muslim women, Tarlo argues, adopting Muslim dress—includ-
ing hijab—is also a way of engaging with ‘an aspirational post-ethnic
152 N. PEREIRA-ARES

global Islamic community’ (2013: 81) and thus transcending local and
ethnic demarcations. In addition to all these connotations, in post-9/11
Britain—and elsewhere in the West—the wearing of (or return to) hijab
might additionally underscore an act of resistance and defiance vis-à-vis
anti-Muslim discourses, with some Muslim women donning the veil as
a symbol of solidarity with those who have been verbally or physically
abused as a result of projecting a ‘visibly Muslim’ identity (Tarlo 2010).3
The Muslim veil also acquired a prominent political dimension
throughout the twentieth century and has thus far into the twenty-first,
both in Muslim and non-Muslim countries.4 Within a European context,
and particularly since 9/11, the question of hijab has reached the polit-
ical sphere of many countries, including the UK, where it has sparked
multiple debates and controversies.5 Although taking in a variety of con-
cerns such as, for example, female freedom and fears of terrorism, the
controversies over the Muslim veil in the UK and elsewhere in Europe
have frequently converged around debates on the state of multicultur-
alism. While some defend the Muslim veil as living proof of multicul-
tural societies, others consider it a threat to multicultural conviviality,
to secularism and even to the core values of European countries, values
that are often spoken of as if they were immutable. This discourse, as
Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo (2013) point out, is out of tune with
current developments in Muslim dress, ignoring, inter alia, ‘the develop-
ment and proliferation of what has become known […] as Islamic fash-
ion and how the emergence of such a phenomenon does not so much
signal Muslim alienation from European and American cultural norms
as complex forms of critical and creative engagement with them’ (ibid.:
1). Furthermore, to speak about homogenous national identities—if ever
tenable—is all the more elusive in an era where ‘all culture is transcul-
ture’ (Mirzoeff 1999: 154), and where individuals often establish mul-
tiple points of identification, partly—albeit not exclusively—through
fashion and dress. As Kureishi explains in My Ear at His Heart ([2004]
2005a), for his ‘sons—one of whom wears a baseball cap the wrong way
round, does hip-hop poses in the mirror and makes up “raps” as he walks
home from school’—their self-declared ‘Indianness’ as well as their cul-
tural/sartorial eclecticism constitute ‘a way of being “in” with the kids of
colour, as well as with the whites’ (ibid.: 26–27). Cultural identities are
increasingly rhizomatic and, as Gautam Malkani hints at in Londonstani
(2006), in the postmodern era they are less about origin and more about
performative acts, including those pertaining to the sartorial sphere. In
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 153

fact, in Londonstani, Malkani manages to fool the reader into believ-

ing that the main character is of South Asian origin until the end of the
text, where Jas is revealed to be a young white man who has assumed
desi aesthetics throughout. In our post-9/11 context, one could argue,
there is therefore a tension between the postmodern erosion of master
narratives—including traditional conceptualisations of identity—and a
renewed fantasy of restoring essential(ist) notions of national identity at
a time of crisis, which arguably informs much rhetoric on the Muslim
veil as a threat to the core values of European countries. Endorsing
this fantasy is to deny a long history of ethnic diversity that pre-dates
postcolonial immigration; the impact of the ‘rhythms of globalization’
(During 1992: 343); and the fact that, in the diaspora space, ‘the native
is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native’ (Brah 1996: 209).
In effect, as Kureishi had already noted in the 1980s and with regard
to Britain, the notion of ‘Britishness’ has become more and ‘more com-
plex […] involving new elements’ (2002a: 38). South Asian cuisine,
for example, has been completely absorbed into British culture and, as
Tarlo points out, ‘[w]hether in the form of pashmina shawl, silk scarf or
printed summer top, textiles of South Asian resonance or provenance
have a well-established place in British wardrobes’ (2013: 73). To this we
should add the impact of the ‘Asian cool’ phenomenon in the cultural,
musical and sartorial spheres. Nirmal Puwar (2002) signals that 2000
was the year when fashion markets became saturated with Asian clothing,
including items such as the shalwaar kameez which, albeit not exclusively
a Muslim garment, is none the less worn by many Muslim women in the
Indian subcontinent and its diasporas. This means that, in our post-9/11
contemporaneity, the commodification and even fetishisation of South
Asian dress coexists with the stigmatisation of the (South Asian) Muslim
dressed body, a paradox that, as we shall see in this chapter, is superbly
articulated in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).
From a literary perspective, ‘“South Asian” continues to be a pow-
erful marketing category’ (Ranasinha 2016: 26), and recent decades
have witnessed the emergence or consolidation of many British Asian
voices: Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Suhayl Saadi, Gautam
Malkani, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal and Sunjeev Sahota, among others.
Meanwhile, well-established writers such as Hanif Kureishi have diversi-
fied their literary production, refusing to confine themselves to the role
of ‘native informants’ (Spivak 1988: 284)—and this has also been the
trajectory followed by Monica Ali after the publication of Brick Lane.
154 N. PEREIRA-ARES

In works such as Love in a Blue Time (1997) Intimacy ([1998] 1999a),

Midnight All Day (1999b), Gabriel’s Gift (2001), The Body and Seven
Stories (2002b) or The Nothing (2017), Kureishi has moved away from
the subject matter that first made him famous, exploring instead issues
as varied as white masculinities, the disintegration of the family institu-
tion, father–son relationships, and the ageing body. Intermittently, he
has returned to the British Asian experience in novels such as Something
to Tell You ([2008] 2009) and, more recently, in The Last Word (2014)
which offers a portrait of a British Indian novelist as an old man. In con-
trast, writer Meera Syal has devoted her entire oeuvre to the South Asian
female experience in Britain. This also holds true for her recent novel,
The House of Hidden Mothers ([2015] 2016), where surrogacy connects
India and Britain in neo-colonial terms, and where Syal provides a lucid
example of how dress can add ethnic meaning to the body. For Toby’s
ethnic-free perspective is startled when he sees Shyama in a sari: ‘She was
wearing a sari […] He was used to seeing her in work clothes: casual
suits, mannish jackets. It sounded stupid, but he hadn’t thought of her as
Indian until now’ (ibid.: 20).
The shadows of 9/11 also pervade various British Asian novels pub-
lished in the twenty-first century, though with varying degrees of empha-
sis. Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), a quasi-historical novel
of migration wrapped in the suspense of a thriller, does not broach the
subject directly, focusing instead on ‘the small-scale September 11s that
go on every day’.6 Also published in 2004, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission
(2004) deals with 9/11 in a figurative way (Liao 2013), and locates the
action not in Britain, but in the USA, where the cybernetic virus that
drives the development of the plot is unleashed. For its part, Salman
Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), often and rightfully inter-
preted under a post-9/11 lens, does not address September 11 explic-
itly. The novel represents an exploration of 9/11 from the perspective
of the past, one that aptly invites the reader to question the unprece-
dented nature and unexpectedness of the events of that day. First pub-
lished in 2006, both Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and Nirpal Singh
Dhaliwal’s Tourism are informed by the post-9/11 scenario, though they
do not centre on September 11. In Dhaliwal’s Tourism, for example,
September 11 is only mentioned in passing, as when a white character
strives to understand that the headwear worn by Osama bin Laden was
not a symbol of Sikhism. Sartorial misunderstanding and dress-related
prejudice also surface in Kureishi’s Something to Tell You ([2008] 2009),
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 155

which provides a more direct engagement with Britain’s ‘9/11’ (ibid.:

473). In its last chapters, the narrative maps post-7/7 London, with
Ajita putting on a burkha to test how Londoners look at her: ‘There has
been some curiosity and many hostile looks, as though people wonder
whether I’m carrying a bomb’ (ibid.: 481). The novel thus captures the
stigmatisation of the Muslim subject in the wake of the London bomb-
ings, effectively showing how discriminatory rhetoric has moved the
emphasis from race/ethnicity to religion: ‘“Muslim”—or “Mussie”—
was a new insult, along with “ham-head” and “allahAllah-bomb”. In
our youth it had been Paki, wog, curry-face, but religion had not been
part of it’ (ibid.: 482). Underlying these quotations—both of which fea-
ture the word ‘bomb’—is the conflation between Muslims and terrorism
mentioned earlier in this chapter, one that is also brought to the fore in
Ayisha Malik’s chick-lit style novel, Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged (2015). In
it, the British Muslim protagonist negotiates dating and the wearing of
hijab in post-9/11 London where, as a result of her visible ‘Muslimness’,
she is once called a ‘terrorist’ on the tube (ibid.: 13). Both published
in 2016, Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Tariq Mehmood’s
Song of Gulzarina explore two sides of terror that are present—and have
gained prominence—in the post-9/11 era (Chambers 2016). As Claire
Chambers contends in a recent review of both novels, these texts con-
front and dramatise terror both as ‘state-sponsored and the work of vio-
lent extremists’ (ibid.).7
As the new millennium moves forward, it seems that British Asian
writers have become less and less oblique and figurative in their engage-
ment with 9/11 and 7/7. However, many of the concerns tackled in
the above-listed narratives are already either prefigured or extensively
problematised in Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane, which came out
substantially earlier. First published in 2003, Brick Lane does not simply
represent one of the first fictions by a British Asian author to map out
post-9/11 London from within a Muslim community. It also constitutes
one of the earliest and most sustained fictional efforts to explore the
impact of 9/11 on British Muslim subjectivities. While portraying the
victimisation of Muslims in post-9/11 Britain, Ali’s novel also looks into
how the post-9/11 climate of Islamophobia and the subsequent ‘War
on Terror’ has impinged on British Muslims. The narrative depicts the
polarisation of British society in the wake of 9/11, but also the polari-
sation that emerges within the Bangladeshi community of Brick Lane,
where the growing radicalism of certain Muslim youths—most notably
156 N. PEREIRA-ARES

some members of the Bengal Tigers—collides with the attitudes about

and interpretation of Islam upheld by most older characters. Even within
the Bengal Tigers, an Islamic group that emerges in the 2001 narrative,
positions are disparate and consensus is hardly ever reached, which wards
off an unrestrained association between militarism and radicalism, politi-
cal Islam and ‘irrational fanaticism’ (Hiddleston 2005: 66). Ali’s Brick
Lane offers a kaleidoscopic approach to Muslim identity politics in post-
9/11 Britain, and daringly glimpses at some of the potential factors that
might galvanise young British Muslims into embracing radical Islam.
This is mainly achieved through the character of Karim, a British-born
Muslim who becomes the leader of the Bengal Tigers. The novel thus
takes in a concern previously explored in works such as Kureishi’s The
Black Album (1995), but transposes it to a post-9/11 scenario, adding
nuances which might be deemed topical and which timidly anticipate
issues explored in later works of fiction. Importantly in this respect, at
the end of the novel, Karim goes to Bangladesh, though rumours circu-
late that he has gone ‘for jihad in some faraway place’ (2007: 486). In a
contemporaneity where the travelling of radicalised British Muslims to
the East is at the forefront of debate, Karim’s story, written as it was in
the early years of the new millennium, could be considered prophetic.
Karim is not, however, the suicide bomber that features in Sunjeev
Sahota’s Ours Is the Street (2011). Nor is his future ever revealed in the
novel. What Karim finally decides to do is left entirely dependent on a
cacophony of rumours whose veracity is never confirmed. The ambiva-
lences that surround Karim’s future do not simply echo the uncertainties
that beset Karim in the course of the novel. Arguably, they also reflect
the caution with which Ali treats such a delicate topic, one that, if blown
up out of proportion—as media coverage frequently does, might easily
contribute towards reinforcing stereotypes and generalisations.
Especially in the post-9/11 section of Brick Lane, clothes and cloth-
ing become particularly significant. There are characters who suffer
abuse as a result of their dress; and there are others who undergo pro-
found sartorial transformations. In one way or another most of them
come to acknowledge that, as Ali herself has stated, ‘clothes do matter’.8
Ali’s assertion, pertinent as it is for the aim of this work, is also voiced
in Brick Lane, indirectly by the protagonist (Nazneen), and explicitly
by Arzoo, a minor character whose story is purposefully inserted after
Karim’s post-9/11 sartorial change. A poor labourer in East Pakistan—
now Bangladesh—Arzoo shocks the entire village by appearing with a
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 157

new jacket made of ‘red wool’ and with ‘four brass buttons’ (Ali 2007:
376), a garment reminiscent of a ringmaster’s jacket or perhaps even of
an old, patched officer’s uniform. Teased by his neighbours thereafter,
Arzoo eventually relinquishes his jacket, articulating one of the grand
themes in Brick Lane: ‘“You think that a clothing is just a clothing.
But as a matter of fact it is not. In a place like this it is a serious thing”’
(ibid.: 377). Arzoo’s story loosely connects the politics of clothing in the
Indian subcontinent and Britain, as Nazneen extrapolates his claim to
the post-9/11 British milieu she inhabits. The dialogue between these
two contexts reappears when Nazneen becomes a home-based seamstress
and her husband recalls the devastating impact of British colonial policies
on the Bengali textile industry. More importantly, Ali’s novel repeatedly
contrasts hijab negotiations in contemporary Bangladesh and Britain, as
well as the relationship between the fashion industry and migrant women
in these two geographies. In fact, Brick Lane is largely informed by Naila
Kabeer’s The Power to Choose (2000), a study of Bangladeshi women and
the labour market in London and Dhaka.9 While briefly exploring the
role of the fashion industry in Brick Lane, the remainder of this chapter
is focused specifically on analysing dress as a visual discourse on identity
in Ali’s text. In the process, the chapter also examines how Monica Ali
problematises the practice of hijab in the novel, in both pre- and post-
9/11 contexts. As we shall see, in Brick Lane, Ali does not simply open
the discussion within the fictional world of the narrative. She also creates
a series of characters whose dressed bodies silently project a broad spec-
trum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes that range from rejection to a
celebration of this practice.10
* * *
Brick Lane ([2003] 2007) is Ali’s best-received novel and, so far, the
only one that the British Bangladeshi writer has devoted entirely to
the South Asian migrant experience.11 Partly autobiographical,12 Brick
Lane revolves around the life of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman
brought to Britain as the result of an arranged marriage with Chanu, a
man ‘at least forty years old’ (ibid.: 17). The novel traces Nazneen’s pro-
cess of self-empowerment and identity reconfiguration as a British Asian
subject, and this has led critics to read it as a Bildungsroman (Perfect
2008; Stein 2004). Ali’s debut novel is none the less much more than
Nazneen’s story: it retrieves silenced female experiences—most nota-
bly those of Nazneen’s mother, gives voice to a wide range of male and
158 N. PEREIRA-ARES

female characters living in the diaspora, and, via an epistolary narrative,

it intertwines Nazneen’s international migration with the intranational
migration experience of her sister Hasina, who moves from their natal
village to the city of Dhaka. These parallel narratives are told in a realist
mode, with some extraordinary incursions that are textually explained,
thereby ensuring ‘a realist reading’ (Cormack 2006: 717). While receiv-
ing wide critical acclaim,13 Brick Lane has also had some detractors.
On its publication in 2003, community leaders from Tower Hamlets
expressed their discomfort with Ali’s portrayal of the Bangladeshi com-
munity, which they deemed to be highly stereotypical.14 Similarly, while
Francis Gilbert (2003) and Geraldine Bedell (2003) praised Brick Lane
for uncovering a ‘hidden world’ (Gilbert 2003: 1), other reviewers and
scholars have found fault in the ‘broken English’ used to render Hasina’s
letters, and/or in the novel’s allegedly hackneyed themes and literary
conventions (Ahmad 2004; Greer 2006; Mullan 2004; Sandhu 2003b).
Certainly, Brick Lane does not offer an entirely unprecedented depiction
of the South Asian diasporic experience in Britain, being largely contin-
gent with previous fictions in its evocation of the passage to Britain, the
sense of alienation experienced by the protagonist, the East–West divide
or the generational gap, among other aspects. Nor is it the first narra-
tive to explore British Bangladeshi culture in the East End. As Sukhdev
Sandhu has pointed out (2003b), Farrukh Dhondy’s short stories in East
End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca (1978) or Syed Manzurul
Islam’s The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1997) feature as earlier examples.
Those early assessments of the novel as a window on a ‘hidden world’
reveal, therefore, a critical myopia. They overlook previous novels, prob-
ably eclipsed by the phenomenal success of Brick Lane, which has often
been explained in terms of marketing strategies (Maxey 2008; Upstone
2010). Despite all this, Brick Lane does constitute, in other respects,
a new intervention in the tradition of South Asian diaspora writing in
Britain. To begin with, and as noted earlier on, Ali’s novel represents
one of the first fictional attempts to explore Muslim identity politics
in post-9/11 Britain. The novel has been accused of lacking political
engagement (Sandhu 2003b), and while this argument does apply to the
1980s section of the text, it does not hold true for the chapters set in
2001, which are informed by the 2001 Oldham riots, the growing post-
9/11 Islamophobia, the ‘War on Terror’ and radical Islam. Another of
the main thrusts of Brick Lane lies in placing the female migrant expe-
rience in the foreground, delving into the complex and ambiguous
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 159

relationship between migrant women and the labour market in contem-

porary society—mainly through their involvement in the fashion industry
(Germanà 2011; Hiddleston 2005; Pereira-Ares 2012a). This is of para-
mount importance, since, as Nikos Papastergiadis claims in his study on
migration, the experience of migrant women, ‘a key force in the interna-
tional labour market’, has frequently been ignored and/or explained ‘in
masculinist terms’ (2000: 48). Ali’s concern with the female experience
also leaves stylistic traces in the narrative. For, despite featuring a third-
person narrator, most of the novel is viewed from Nazneen’s perspective.
The novel thus places a Spivakian subaltern woman as the main focal-
iser, consistently subverting the prevailing centrality of both the white
Western gaze and the male gaze (Pereira-Ares 2012b).15
Brick Lane begins on the day Nazneen is born in 1967 in East
Pakistan. Her tribulations in the Indian subcontinent are narrated in
just six pages, but we are here introduced to the story of ‘How You
Were Left to Your Fate’ (Ali 2007: 15), a story that is to mark most of
Nazneen’s life. Indeed, Brick Lane is largely about the process whereby
Nazneen manages to overcome the doctrine of fatalism and (female) pas-
sivity inherent in this story. The action then moves to Tower Hamlets
in the year 1985, with Nazneen bathing nostalgically in memories of
Bangladesh, and facing the reality of a diasporic milieu whose culture is
initially a barrier and whose language she barely speaks. Her husband,
Chanu, soon articulates the patriarchal order that is to govern Nazneen’s
early years in London, as he explicitly deters her from taking English
lessons—‘Where’s the need anyway?’ (ibid.: 45), and going out—‘Why
should you go out?’ (ibid.: 37). Nazneen’s cultural and geographical
dislocation is thus exacerbated by her cloistered existence in London,
and the novel even adds a bodily dimension to her limited situation:
‘She looked and she saw that she was trapped inside this body, inside this
room, inside this flat, inside this concrete slab of entombed humanity’
(ibid.: 76; emphasis added). Trapped in spatio-bodily terms, Nazneen’s
first contacts with the external world take place either through the tel-
evision set or the small window of the family’s flat. The sight offered by
this window gives us an early image of Brick Lane as a sealed-off eth-
nic enclave, inhabited by women in saris and men in ‘panjabi-pyjama
and skullcaps’ (ibid.: 18), with the ‘tattoo lady’ as the only white char-
acter. Underscoring a potential critique of the multicultural model,
Brick Lane is depicted as an insular community, a segregated space for
the ‘underprivileged’, where the white presence is minimal or reduced
160 N. PEREIRA-ARES

to dispossessed subjects who, like the ‘tattoo lady’, occupy a marginal

position in society. Repeatedly in the early pages of the novel, Nazneen
allows her gaze to prowl over the body of the ‘tattoo lady’, a body
dressed less in clothes than in ink (ibid.: 17, 18, 40, 53, 87). The cul-
tural clash is shown through Nazneen’s bewilderment at the semi-naked
body of this woman, and her attempts at deciphering its ink inscrip-
tions foreshadow, early in the text, the attention Nazneen is to pay to
the dressed bodies that populate the narrative. With a poor command
of English, Nazneen finds in the so-called ‘language of clothes’ (Lurie
1981) an alternative mode of making contact with, and making sense
of, the unfamiliar world that surrounds her. This world is so alien to
Nazneen that her first descriptions of the clothes of the Other—here
meaning Western garments—are all the more defamiliarising: ‘A man in
a very tight suit (so tight that it made his private parts stand out on dis-
play) and a woman in a skirt that did not even cover her bottom gripped
each other as an invisible force hurtled them across an oval arena’ (Ali
2007: 63). This passage, which describes the clothing worn by a pair of
ice-skaters Nazneen watches on TV, conveys her sense of uncertainty
and unfamiliarity with the new culture in which she lives. Nazneen feels
estranged from, and is unable to translate, what she sees on the screen,
and the novel thus forces the reader to experience the cultural dislocation
that Nazneen herself experiences in Britain. Despite the unfamiliarity of
the image, Nazneen is enthralled by the ice-skaters’ performance, per-
ceiving it as a sort of ‘declaration’ of freedom (ibid.: 36). Reiteratively
thereafter, Nazneen virtually restages this performance, as she transposes
herself onto the ice-rink in her musings and daydreams (ibid.: 93, 141,
228). This imaginary re-enacting of the ice-skaters’ performance pro-
vides Nazneen with an oneiric space which allows her to escape from the
reality principle (Freud 1958b) and to enjoy the freedom the ice-skaters
display. From a Lacan-inspired perspective, Nazneen’s daydreams can
even be read as ‘fantasies’ through which she ‘stages’ her desires (Žižek
2006)—the imaginary freedom she savours in her daydreams realises her
desire for freedom in the real world.
As Nazneen begins to venture out of her apartment, London is also
unveiled before the reader in highly defamiliarising terms, which brings
to mind the descriptions of the metropolis offered in the travelogues
examined in Chap. 1. Filtered through Nazneen’s eyes, Western women
are seen as having ‘strange hair […] pumped up like a snake’s hood’ (Ali
2007: 57), walking in a bizarre manner with their shoulders ‘padd[ing]
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 161

up and out. They could balance a bucket on each side and not spill a
drop of water’ (ibid.: 43). While adding comic undertones and empha-
sising Nazneen’s unfamiliar and naïve perspective, passages such as this
subvert the ‘imperial gaze’ (Kaplan 1997), forcing white Western readers
to feel what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘the sensation of being seen. For the
white man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing
without being seen’ (1976: 7). Subversively, in Brick Lane it is Nazneen
who enjoys this privilege, assuming the position of a voyeuristic spectator
who looks at Western bodies, without herself being seen: ‘they were not
aware of her […] They could not see her any more than she could see
God […] She enjoyed this thought. She began to scrutinize. She stared at
the long, thin faces, the pointy chins’ (Ali 2007: 56; emphasis added). As
the words in italics show, Nazneen does not simply see—an inevitable and
even unconscious act—but rather she looks, gazes and scrutinises, verbs
that allude to a more conscious and intentional movement than the mere
act of seeing. Ali makes Nazneen’s continuous acts of looking go beyond
mere gestures of observation and turns them rather into consciously and
deliberately construed processes aimed at placing Nazneen as the subject
of the gaze. The fact that Nazneen compares herself to a God that sees
without being seen even recalls Foucault’s ‘Panopticism’ (1977), but in
Brick Lane the ‘all-seeing’ figure is significantly and subversively an Asian
female character. The novel thus challenges the looking paradigm that
has traditionally repressed the subjectivity of the subaltern (hooks 1992),
at the same time as it subverts the prevailing centrality of the male gaze,
in both Western and Muslim cultures.16 Crucially, while exerting con-
trol through her gaze, Nazneen avoids any act that might turn her into
an object of visual scrutiny. Thus, on passing a girl with a big camera
in Brick Lane, Nazneen ‘adjusted her headscarf. She was conscious of
being watched’ (Ali 2007: 254). While a discussion of Nazneen’s dressed
body is provided in subsequent pages, it is worth noting at this point
that Nazneen’s veil emerges here as a sartorial strategy that allows her to
retain her position as the bearer of the gaze in the novel. What is more,
in a narrative where the male prerogative of the gaze is neutralised and
even inverted (Pereira-Ares 2012b), Nazneen’s veil also provides her
with a mechanism of withstanding the male gaze on several occasions.
As a case in point, when Nazneen passes a group of young Bengali men,
she covers her face in order to resist being reduced to a visual object:
‘they parted and bowed with mock formality. One remained straight and
still and she caught his look […] Nazneen pulled her headscarf over her
162 N. PEREIRA-ARES

face’ (Ali 2007: 143). Nazneen’s veil is thus endowed with a liberating
potential in these passages, which counteracts much Western rhetoric on
the Muslim veil as a symbol of oppression. Her veil acts as a ‘gaze inhibi-
tor’ (Bullock 2000), offering Nazneen protection vis-à-vis objectification
and allowing her to retain her position as the subject of the gaze during
her forays out of her home.
In Brick Lane, the Muslim veil is first and openly problematised in
Chapter Five when Nazneen and Chanu arrive, uninvited, at Dr. Azad’s
house. Dr. Azad, the family’s doctor, represents an Asian man who,
despite having achieved considerable professional success in London, is
at odds with Western life and the Westernised manners of his wife and
daughter. Unlike Nazneen at the start of the novel, Mrs. Azad is pre-
sented as being antithetical to the submissive Muslim woman stereotype.
She is highly opinionated, drinks alcohol and, more pertinently for my
purpose here, wears Western clothes:

The door swung out. A woman [Mrs Azad] in a short purple skirt leaned
against the doorpost. Her thighs tested the fabric, and beneath the hem-
line was a pair of dimpled knees. Her arms folded beneath her breasts. A
cigarette burned between purple lacquered nails. She had a flat nose and
eyes that were looking for a fight. Her hair was cropped close like a man’s,
and it was streaked with some kind of rust-coloured paint. (Ali 2007:
106–107)

As tends to occur in Ali’s novel, most characters are introduced through

Nazneen’s scrutinising gaze and, as the above quotation demonstrates,
Nazneen’s gaze reveals a conspicuous fixation with clothes. Through an
example of indirect thought, we see how Nazneen looks Mrs. Azad up
and down, noting her tight miniskirt, varnished purple nails and rust-col-
oured hair which, incidentally, Nazneen pictures as being manly in style.
Filtered through Nazneen’s perspective, the narrator then describes Mrs.
Azad’s ‘opulent backside’ with disdain (ibid.: 33) and finds fault with her
unsophisticated and indecorous way of adjusting ‘her underwear with a
thumb’ (ibid.: 88). The description of Mrs. Azad’s body and sartorial
demeanour is not therefore a sympathetic one, which betrays Nazneen’s
disapproval, arguably because she finds Mrs. Azad’s manners ‘inap-
propriate’ for a Bengali woman. Nazneen and Mrs. Azad embody, in
effect, different models of Asian femininity and the text emphasises this
by placing them in visual opposition, with Nazneen wearing a sari and
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 163

Mrs. Azad sporting a miniskirt. An epitome of Western fashion, Mrs.

Azad’s miniskirt immediately discloses her Westernisation. However, per-
ceiving Nazneen’s incredulous gaze, Mrs. Azad decides to articulate the
reasons why she wears Western clothes and avoids the practice of hijab in
London:

“Listen, when I’m in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all
that. But here I go out to work. I work with white girls and I’m just one
of them. If I want to come home and eat curry, that’s my business. Some
women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding
spices all day and learn only two words of English […] They go around
covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons, and when someone
calls to them in the street they are upset. The society is racist. The society is
all wrong. Everything should change for them. They don’t have to change
one thing. That,” she said, stabbing the air, “is the tragedy.” (ibid. 114;
emphasis added)

As the italicised words show, the question of hijab becomes explicit in

Mrs. Azad’s explanatory speech. Dr. Azad’s wife admits to complying
with hijab when she is in Bangladesh, but she displays a marked reluc-
tance to cover her head in Britain. Indeed, in the above quotation, Mrs.
Azad seems to imply that the British Asian subject should only eat curry
behind closed doors and should only wear Asian clothes when back in
the Indian subcontinent, suggesting that, in Britain, racism often circu-
lates around Asian cooking and dress. For Mrs. Azad, the use of the veil
in London constitutes a potential marker of ‘Otherness’ which, rather
than eluding the objectification of the female body, as certain pro-veil-
ing apologias argue, turns the body of the Muslim woman into the tar-
get of curious gazes as well as into a potential locus for racist attacks.
According to Mrs. Azad, doing away with hijab and adopting Western
clothes means circumventing stereotyping and stigmatisation. She thus
envisions Western clothes as a mechanism of being, visually, an insider in
Britain. In addition, as her comments intimate, Mrs. Azad also conceives
of Western dress as a sartorial liberation, as she refers to those women
in Muslim dress as ‘little walking prisons’—a comment that seems to
conjure up the image of the Muslim woman wearing such outfits as the
burkha or abaya.17 Mrs. Azad’s attitude towards hijab can therefore be
said to coincide with those views that perceive hijab both as an oppres-
sive practice and as a potential sign of ‘Otherness’ within non-Muslim
164 N. PEREIRA-ARES

countries. By identifying these views with an Asian character, Ali’s novel

destabilises the paradigm that tends to associate pro-veiling attitudes
with Muslims and anti-veiling stances with non-Muslim people, showing
that no unitary opinion can be found within any collective. Mrs. Azad’s
position with regard to hijab can trigger as many different interpretations
as the veil itself. Her discourse can be said to champion and even rein-
force the Western-centric view of the veil as an element of ‘Otherness’,
and the corrective and patronising attitude she shows towards women in
hijab betrays a certain intolerance—she even seems to hold them respon-
sible for the insults potentially hurled at them in the streets. However,
her personal decision not to comply with hijab is equally valid, in that
it implies her right to choose what she wants to wear and with whom
she wants to identify. Moreover, in a novel where many female characters
wear the veil, Mrs. Azad’s position acts as a counterpoint, giving voice
to another important segment of the Muslim female population, women
who do not cover their heads and who do not feel represented by the
ubiquitous image of the Muslim woman ‘behind the veil’.
‘Fashion’, as Jennifer Craik notes, might act as ‘a technique of accul-
turation’ (1994: 10), and this is partly what Western clothes mean for
Mrs. Azad. In line with this, Mrs. Islam, the old money-lender in Brick
Lane, also acknowledges that, in order to survive in London, she has tac-
tically assimilated certain aspects of Western culture, clothing being one
of them: “‘I am not old-fashioned,’ said Mrs. Islam. ‘I don’t wear bur-
kha. I keep purdah18 in my mind […] Plus I have cardigans and anoraks
and a scarf for my head. But if you mix with all these people, even if
they are good people, you have to give up your culture to accept theirs.
That’s how it is’” (Ali 2007: 29). Mrs. Islam’s comment appears in the
1980s section of the novel, and ostensibly lays bare the subsistence of the
assimilationist model that had dominated previous decades. Interestingly,
Mrs. Islam refers to the burkha as an old-fashioned practice, an equa-
tion later challenged by the burkhas adopted by the female members of
the Bengal Tigers. Their burkhas do not respond to traditional or out-
dated demands. Nor are they the result of direct patriarchal impositions,
as occurs in the case of Aleya, whose husband forces her into wearing a
burkha. Instead, they emerge as symbols of a politicised Muslim female
identity in post-9/11 Britain. The novel thus foregrounds the ‘historic
dynamism of the veil’ (Fanon 1965: 63), and hints at how hijab practices
and perceptions can reflect generational divides. Brick Lane presents, in
effect, two groups of British-born Muslim characters that, through their
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 165

dressed bodies or attitudes towards dress, express different responses to

the cultural-religious background inherited from their parents. On the
one hand, we find Shahana, Nazneen’s oldest daughter, who reproduces
one of the most conventional responses associated with second-genera-
tion characters. Born and bred in Britain, Shahana eschews identifying
with Bengali culture and, accordingly, she has as her favourite items of
dress ‘a pair of shoes, jeans and a t-shirt’ (Ali 2007: 216). Repeatedly in
the novel, the intergenerational conflict between Shahana and her par-
ents is articulated through sartorial altercation.19 Shahana ‘hate[s]’ her
kameez’ (ibid.: 180), refuses to put on Asian clothes and, on one occa-
sion, even ruins ‘her entire wardrobe by pouring paint on’ her Asian
clothes (ibid.). On the other hand, and in contrast with the more cli-
chéd character of Shahana, in the 2001 section of the novel, we come
across the female militants of the Bengal Tigers, young British Muslim
women who, far from shying away from their Muslim roots, make their
‘Muslimness’ conspicuously visible, so much so that, at a given point,
they ‘upgrade’ their hijabs ‘to burkhas’ (ibid.: 279). The choice of words
in this quotation is extremely important, especially with regard to the
term ‘upgrade’. As a synonym for ‘elevate’, the word ‘upgrade’ indicates
that the Bengal Tigers have taken on a more committed attitude towards
Islam. However, ‘upgrade’ might also mean updating or modernis-
ing, which suggests that the burkha worn by these women is also about
reconceptualising the meanings traditionally associated with this piece of
clothing.
In her valuable discussion on hijab negotiations in London, Emma
Tarlo contends that, for certain young British Muslim women, adopting
‘Islamic fashion’ involves ‘differentiating themselves from their moth-
ers whose clothing they increasingly consider insufficiently Islamic’
(2013: 80). Although the burkha is not among the samples of ‘Islamic
fashion’ mentioned by Tarlo, some of her points can be extrapolated
to the case of the Bengal Tigers in Brick Lane. These female char-
acters are never given the chance to explain their sartorial decisions in
Ali’s text, and yet it is clear that their burkhas distance them from the
middle-aged women that appear in the novel, women who wear saris,
shalwaar kameezes and dupattas. Their burkhas can be said to express a
symbolic intergenerational rebellion and they certainly mark the exist-
ence of generational divides in the novel. For, whereas Mrs. Islam refers
to the burkha as an old-fashioned practice, the Bengal Tigers return to
it in a contemporary context and update its connotations. While they
166 N. PEREIRA-ARES

do encapsulate matters of faith, their burkhas are not grounded on old

notions of piety, acquiescence and submissiveness. Instead, they project a
militant stance, blending religious concerns with identity issues, ideologi-
cal postulates and even feminist messages. Unlike the sari or the shalwaar
kameez, which link the wearer to the Indian subcontinent, the burkha
connects these young women with a global Muslim community—and,
in effect, as a group, the Bengal Tigers includes individuals who are dif-
ferently located in ethnic terms, but who all share Islam as their religion.
Consequently, it could be argued that these women use the burkha to
transcend ‘ethnicity and locality’ (Tarlo 2013: 81), to go beyond the
ethnic demarcations inscribed on the saris and shalwaar kameezes worn
by their forbearers and thus establish connections with other Muslim
communities across the globe. These young women project a clearly
identifiable Muslim appearance which, in the 2001 context of the novel,
can even be read as an act of resistance vis-à-vis Western dominance
and ethnic-religious discrimination. Their dressed bodies articulate a
highly politicised Muslim identity from which older characters often feel
detached in Ali’s fiction. Indeed, the Bengal Tigers position themselves
to redeem the passivity shown by previous generations towards racism
and discrimination, exemplified in the text by Karim’s father’s dictum
‘Don’t make trouble’ (Ali 2007: 233). Considering the gradual radical-
isation undergone by some members of the Bengal Tigers, Brick Lane
allows for a perilous association between burkhas and radicalism, one that
would reinforce common visions of the burkha as ‘the uniform of agents
of Islamic fascism’ (Anderson and Greifenhagen 2013: 56). The novel
both enables this reading and thwarts it, as, in Brick Lane, these female
characters are often more concerned with counteracting local prejudice
against Muslims and defending women’s rights than with fuelling the
more radical agenda assumed by some of their male counterparts.
It seems that, for these young women, the burkha is not only about
giving visibility to the Muslim community in general, but also about giv-
ing it to Muslim women in particular, thereby destabilising the paradigm
that commonly associates Muslim women’s clothing with the notion of
invisibility (Tarlo 2010). In fact, in the group’s various meetings, they
set themselves up as representatives of Muslim women, vindicating their
individual as well as collective rights: ‘“Women’s rights,” called one.
“Sex education for girls,” called the other. “Got to put that in”’ (Ali
2007: 240). These women therefore display a feminist (yet largely anti-
Western feminism) agenda that brings to mind Helen Watson’s notion
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 167

of ‘feminism in reverse’ (2002: 152). In her study on hijab responses,

Watson asserts that the return to veiling among young women ‘can be
seen as a reaction against the secular feminism of the West, and as part of
the search for an indigenous Islamic form of protest against male power
and dominance in public society’ (ibid.). The feminist agenda of these
young women, it could be argued, is not therefore so dissimilar to that
of Mrs. Azad in terms of content, but extremely different in terms of
approach, something their choice of attire makes apparent. Unlike Mrs.
Azad, these women seek to vindicate the rights of Muslim women within
and from within Muslim culture, arguably dissociating themselves from
secularised versions of Western feminism. However, the fact that their
voices are repeatedly silenced in the text raises questions about their suc-
cess: ‘The Questioner glared at them. “The Qur’an bids us to keep sepa-
rate. Sisters. What are you doing here anyway?”’ (Ali 2007: 285). These
women resist the Questioner’s tirade—‘[i]n defiance, they remained
standing’ (ibid.). They speak in verbal and bodily terms, but the novel
questions the extent to which their voices are actually heard within the
collective. What is more, when the Bengal Tigers dissolve—after Karim’s
departure—these female characters also fade and, judging by the words
of the Questioner, they do not seem to have a place in the new Islamic
groups whose future the novel leaves unresolved: ‘“I’m starting a new
group. You know, I never approved of allowing women in the Bengal
Tigers. It was supposed to be an Islamic group! It was a mixed-up idea.
Not my idea”’ (ibid.: 486). Ali’s novel thus highlights the difficulty in
separating religion from patriarchy, as well as the intricate ways in which
both often coalesce and intersect. Disentangling them is an urgent need,
but one with which characters such as the Questioner do not seem will-
ing to grapple. Finally, it is also worth noting that, despite their emphasis
on giving visibility to the plight of Muslim women, these female char-
acters are largely reduced to a state of invisibility in Ali’s novel. Filtered
through Nazneen’s perspective, they are described as ‘black tents’ (ibid.:
279); they are never given a name; and their demands dissolve amid
the masculinist rhetoric of the group. Their (sartorial) position is there-
fore not sanctioned by the novel, just as Mrs. Azad’s attitude is not an
approach unreservedly favoured by the protagonist of the novel, and not
even by Razia, Nazneen’s best friend in London.
When we are first introduced to Razia in the novel, she is wearing a
sari, a garment widely worn by Muslim women in Bangladesh and its
diasporas, which explains why many female characters in the novel wear
168 N. PEREIRA-ARES

saris rather than the shalwaar kameez, an item of clothing often favoured
by Muslim women. However, Nazneen sees, sticking out from under-
neath Razia’s sari, a pair of ‘black lace-up shoes, wide and thick-soled’
(ibid.: 27). Razia’s shoes contrast with the sandals Nazneen wears, and
this contrast evokes, in turn, the West–East contraposition. Significantly,
Nazneen considers that it is ‘the sari’, not the shoes, that ‘looked strange
on her [Razia]’ (ibid.: 27). For Nazneen, Razia’s rebellious character is
at odds with the idea of female acquiescence and endurance that she,
Nazneen, associates with the sari at this early stage in the novel. It is
Razia’s pair of shoes—the Western element—that Nazneen perceives as
being more in tune with Razia and her constant railings against patri-
archal structures and community politics. This forges an early nexus
between Western culture and freedom from patriarchal strictures, an
idea the novel often looks on with favour, but one that is not inher-
ently premised on rejecting identification with South Asian culture. This
detail also heralds Razia’s process of Westernisation later in the narra-
tive and, in effect, two chapters further on, Razia jettisons her sari and
dons instead ‘a garment she called a tracksuit. She would never, so she
said, wear a sari again. She was tired of taking little bird steps’ (ibid.: 95).
As the wording of this sentence suggests, for Razia, her new tracksuit
implies liberation both in figurative and strictly literal terms. Figuratively,
because she envisions it as a symbol of rebellion—even as a symbolic first
step on her path towards liberation from patriarchal authority. And liter-
ally because, for Razia, abandoning the sari has meant gaining the free-
dom of mobility, her allusion to ‘little bird steps’ being telling in this
respect. Later, when she is granted British citizenship, Razia changes the
neutral identity projected by the tracksuit and takes on a more commit-
ted one: ‘She had acquired a sweatshirt with a large Union Jack printed
on the front’ (ibid.: 188). Razia’s sweatshirt is doubly significant: it
reflects her increasing process of Westernisation and, through the sym-
bol of the Union Jack, connects Razia with a specific country, the UK.
Razia’s incorporation of the symbol of the Union Jack can even be
read as a visual vindication of her right to belong, forcing the viewer to
acknowledge that there are indeed Muslims ‘in the Union Jack’ (Gilroy
2002). This notwithstanding, what could be one of Ali’s most powerful
reasons for having Razia wear this sweatshirt is to be found in the post-
9/11 section of Brick Lane, where Razia’s sweatshirt is spat on, denoting
that Razia is symbolically excluded from the nation represented by the
Union Jack.
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 169

Despite Razia’s adoption of Western clothes, her attitude towards

the practice of veiling remains equivocal. Throughout the course of the
novel, there are certain passages where, albeit wearing Western clothes,
Razia is casually revealed to cover her head: ‘Razia pulled down her head-
scarf. She rubbed at her strong jaw. Now that she wore trousers she sat
like a man, right ankle resting across left knee’ (Ali 2007: 123; empha-
sis added). It seems therefore that, for Razia, sporting Western clothes
does not clash with the wearing of the veil. Like Mrs. Azad, Razia rejects
seeing herself as a dislocated subject, and she also finds Western clothes
liberating. However, unlike Dr. Azad’s wife, Razia apparently does not
desire the complete invisibility of her Asian self. Hence she perpetuates
the practice of the veil and, at one point, her dressed body emerges as
the epitome of transculturality in the novel: Razia ‘wore the Union Jack
top over salwaar pants’ (ibid.: 228). Razia thus fashions a hybrid identity
for herself. In mixing different sartorial practices, she renders visible her
duality as a British Asian subject and positions herself in relation to both
‘the majority society’ and her ‘culture […] of origin’ (Tarlo 2007: 138).
What is more, it could be argued that Razia’s headscarf challenges the
negative nexus between veiling and oppression—Razia discards the sari,
which she finds constraining, but continues using her headscarf as a veil.
Razia is a rebellious woman, and she reiteratively resists submitting her-
self to patriarchal order. In the light of this, one could also assume that,
had Razia envisioned her headscarf as a patriarchal imposition, she would
probably have done away with it altogether. Of course, this might be a
fallacious argument, because patriarchal discourse impregnates culture,
tradition and religion in surreptitious and often imperceptible ways. The
boundaries between these spheres, Janmohamed ascertains in Love in a
Headscarf, are often ‘fuzzy’ (2014: 74). However, as Janmohamed goes
on to contend, considering that a woman in hijab is, consciously or sub-
consciously, ‘participating in [her] own oppression’ (ibid.: 151) is equally
spurious. To endorse this view—whether within or outside the fictional
world of Brick Lane—is to deny the multiple connotations and deno-
tations that underlie the Muslim veil, including feminist and pseudo-
feminist stances. Separating the practice of veiling from patriarchy is a
pressing necessity, and an exercise Janmohamed conducts in two ways in
Love in a Headscarf. First, she urges readers—and, in particular, Western
readers—to unlearn the multiple stereotypes that associate the Muslim
veil negatively with women’s oppression. Second, she stresses the need to
identify those points where patriarchy has often intersected with culture,
170 N. PEREIRA-ARES

tradition and, consequently, with women’s dressing practices. While

making it clear that her veil relates to a personal choice, Janmohamed
explicitly condemns the situation of those Muslim women who are
‘forced to dress and act in a certain way’ (2014: 157). Throughout her
memoir, she exposes the double standards sometimes perpetuated in the
name of Islam, including the existence of sartorial yardsticks that are
applied differently to men and women, or the idea that it is women who
should cover up to prevent ‘men’s rampant and uncontrollable lust […]
It wasn’t up to women to control men’ (ibid.: 160).20 Janmohamed’s
memoir thus enters in dialogue with Western and Islamic feminism21 in a
productive and transcultural way, with Janmohamed taking in a pro-veil-
ing stance that is none the less sensitive to the patriarchal ideology often
underlying religious, cultural and sartorial practices in most societies.
In Love in a Headscarf, Janmohamed also details the process whereby
she once began to separate Islam from the ‘instruments of social com-
pliance that culture employed to keep individuals—and particularly
women—in line: reputation, gossip, social inclusion and, of course,
access to marriage’ (ibid.: 136). These instruments of control also
acquire a prominent role in Ali’s Brick Lane, as most female charac-
ters have to contend with them both inside and outside the household.
Razia’s sartorial changes in the novel, for example, do not come with-
out a risk: ‘This top is too hot. Too hot […] But I must wear it, from
time to time […] If I stop wearing this now, they are going to think
I listen to them’ (Ali 2007: 229). Razia is referring here to the ‘gos-
sip’ going on behind her back within the Bangladeshi community of
Brick Lane. Her process of self-empowerment, coupled with her vis-
ual transformations, have attracted disrespectful comments from local
Muslims, most notably Mrs. Islam, whose name and actions appear
to be marshalled in order to articulate how religion might be used to
exert social control. Community structures are thus presented as power-
ful instruments of regulation, having a great impact on the perpetuation
of patriarchal values and on impeding the access of Muslim women to
the labour market. Jorina, for example, is accused of bringing ‘shame’
on the family after she starts working in a garment factory, and Razia’s
husband refuses to allow her to work for fear of ‘gossip’ (ibid.: 123).
When her husband dies, Razia manages none the less to find a job in a
British sweatshop, and her experience is immediately compared to that
of Hasina, Nazneen’s sister, who also starts working in a garment fac-
tory in Dhaka. While both of them put their reputations in jeopardy
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 171

by taking up employment, Hasina’s situation is more dramatic than

Razia’s. Because, unlike London, which is depicted in Brick Lane as a
city of opportunities, Dhaka is portrayed as a place governed by a strict
understanding of gendered spheres—and this has fuelled criticism.22 The
women at the factory where Hasina works are frequently insulted and
attacked by certain Muslim factions that blamed them for violating pur-
dah, and Hasina herself ends up being accused of prostitution, dismissed
and finally raped by her landlord. Through Hasina’s letters, we also learn
about Aleya, whose husband has only allowed her to work on the condi-
tion that she puts on a ‘burkha’ (ibid.: 150). Aleya’s burkha is therefore a
patriarchal imposition and a sartorial instrument of control, one that has
disturbingly allowed her to sidestep another patriarchal injunction: the
prohibition of outside employment. On a similar note, in the main nar-
rative, Nazneen also counters Chanu’s initial refusal to allow her to take
a job by complying with a mechanism of patriarchal regulation, namely
confinement to the domestic sphere—‘“Some of the women are doing
sewing at home,” said Nazneen’ (ibid.: 184; emphasis added). Nazneen
circumvents objections to outside employment by becoming involved in
a system of subcontracted piecework at home, which eventually brings
Karim, her middleman and future lover, into her life, carrying ‘a bale of
jeans over his shoulder’ (ibid.: 209). Ironically, where Chanu expected
that Nazneen’s confinement to the domestic sphere would keep her
away from the ‘temptations’ present in the outside world, the household
becomes the place of Nazneen’s sexual encounters with Karim.
Interweaving various female experiences in London and Dhaka,
Brick Lane allows a glimpse at the potential factors that might compli-
cate the access of Muslim women to the labour market. Their stories
are all bound up with the garment industry, with Ali’s novel establish-
ing a relationship with Kabeer’s work (2000) that is ‘often as straightfor-
wardly mimetic as it is inspirational’ (Hiddleston 2005: 116). Brick Lane
thus builds on the historical connection between women and dressmak-
ing (Barber 1994), but transposes it to an age of voracious capitalism,
exploring and exposing the ambivalent face of fashion as an industry that
both empowers and exploits migrant women. For, whereas the textile
industry offers female migrant characters a feasible source of employment
in the text, it simultaneously turns their bodies into what Gayatri Spivak
calls the ‘new focus of superexploitation’ (1987: 167). In her letters
from Dhaka, Hasina complains about her low wages and the overtime
she is required to do at the garment factory when ‘big order[s] come
172 N. PEREIRA-ARES

from Japan’ (Ali 2007: 153). Similarly, in London, Razia inveighs against
the poor conditions under which she is working at the British sweat-
shop (ibid.: 189, 228), a sweatshop that is eventually closed down by
health inspectors. Likewise, home-based sewing provides Nazneen with
economic self-empowerment, so much so that she eventually becomes
the family’s breadwinner, thereby inverting intra-household relation-
ships. Yet, she is pinioned to the sewing machine all day long and, what
is more, as Kabeer (2000) claims in her study on the subject, this prac-
tice contributes strongly to rendering the work of ethnic migrant women
invisible, and to deeming it unskilled. For most of the novel, the female
characters in Brick Lane are made to contend with the capitalist dynam-
ics of exploitation and the promises of economic prosperity. While in the
main plot the potential of the clothing industry to empower female char-
acters prevails, in the Hasina narrative the situation becomes increasingly
problematic, as physical and economic servitude combine with sexual
exploitation. A more positive scenario emerges at the end of the novel,
as Razia sets up a sewing business that opens the way to new practices in
which female empowerment is possible without entailing female exploita-
tion—but, once again, it is in London, and not in Dhaka, where a differ-
ent future materialises. Interestingly, the idea for this business comes to
Razia when she visits a new shop in London called ‘Fusion Fashions’:

‘Fusion Fashions’ said Razia, reading out the name. Inside, a white girl
stood in front of the mirror turning this way and that in a black kameez
top with white embroidered flowers and a sprinkling of pearls stitched near
the throat. The trousers were not the usual baggy salwaar style but narrow-
hipped and slightly flared at the bottom. (Ali 2007: 394)

The designs at ‘Fusion Fashions’ are emblematic of the ‘Asian cool’

phenomenon and the emergence of retailers selling ‘Asian-chic’ clothes
that cater to Asian and non-Asian women alike—the woman trying on
the kameez in the above-quoted excerpt is white. Taking this shop as an
example, in the last chapter of the novel—set in 2003—Razia becomes
a ‘businesswoman’ (ibid.: 482), employing Nazneen, Jorina, Hanufa
and other women from Brick Lane: ‘Razia parcelled out the work. She
had a brief conference with Jorina about the stretch in a woollen jersey
fabric destined for a salwaar kameez. She made some calculations and
gave Hanufa the money’ (ibid.: 482). For critics such as James Procter,
Razia’s business ‘has little to offer in the way of political alternatives’,
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 173

as she continues to work in partnership with ‘white-run clothes stores’

(2006: 118). However, Razia’s enterprise represents a powerful state-
ment in terms of female agency and visibility. Razia has rid herself of the
figure of the middleman, and she is now the one in charge of control-
ling the tempo and mode of her own work and that of her employees.
As the leader, Razia runs the business under democratic principles, lis-
tening to the voices of all her female employees and trying to reach dif-
ferent agreements with them: ‘“Hanufa, I’m going to pay you today.
Nazneen and Jorina, you wait until tomorrow because I get another
payment in then. Ok with everybody?”’ (Ali 2007: 484). Moreover, the
agency of these women is extended to the point where, for the first time
in the text, they are the ones that design the clothes they sew: “Hanufa
passed the drawing to Nazneen […] The detail indicated gold and dia-
manté dhakba work and the ends of the dupatta were beaded in a cob-
web design […] ‘What about white organza for the scarf?’ said Nazneen.
‘Nice contrast’” (ibid.: 480). These women therefore assume a creative
and visible role, becoming the designers of the ‘Asian-chic’ clothes they
produce, and not merely automatons sewing batches of clothes handed
to them. Moreover, whereas for most of the novel these women can-
not afford to buy the clothes they produce, at the end of Brick Lane,
Jorina’s question ‘Do you think I should keep it?’ (ibid.: 482) gestures
towards the possibility of destabilising previous relations of production
and consumption.
In Brick Lane, Razia’s first encounter with ‘Fusion Fashions’ is placed
in the post-9/11 section of the novel, and the narrative thus contrasts
the allure of ‘Asian-chic’ clothes in the West with the stigmatisation and
prejudice faced by (South Asian) Muslims in the wake of 9/11. Razia
herself voices this paradox when she says: ‘“Look how much these
English are paying for their kameez. And at the same time they are
looking down on me. They are even happy to spit on their own flag,
as long as I am inside it. What is wrong with them? What is wrong”’
(ibid.: 394). Razia is here alluding to the episode where she was spat
on when wearing her Union Jack sweatshirt, an episode that is not an
isolated incident in the post-9/11 narrative. Immediately after the
attacks on the World Trade Centre, Sorupa’s daughter ‘ha[s] her hijab
pulled off’ in the street, and the narrator adds that she ‘was the first,
but not the only one’ (ibid.: 368). While dramatising the victimisation
of Muslims in post-9/11 Britain, these passages have important impli-
cations for the relationship between body and dress when it comes to
174 N. PEREIRA-ARES

racialisation. In the post-9/11 British scenario of the novel, the veiled

body of Sorupa’s daughter is religiously marked, and she is immediately
turned into a ‘culprit’ by association, becoming a target for those seek-
ing to retaliate. She is unveiled in the street and this, while it is a direct
personal affront, underscores an attack on the Muslim community, with
the female body being synecdochally taken to represent the whole. If the
hijab worn by Sorupa’s daughter imposes further layers of stigmatisation
on her body, Razia’s racialised body (skin colour and features) is seen
by those who assault her as ‘polluting’ the Union Jack sweatshirt she is
wearing—hence they have no qualms about spitting on ‘their own flag’.
In so doing, the assaulters figuratively assert that Razia’s presence is not
welcome in the nation—represented by the Union Jack—making their
assault a symbol of what the nation must expel to be itself and secure.
At work in these two passages, one could argue, are both what Fanon
called ‘the epidermal racial schema’ (2008: 4) and what we might call the
‘the sartorial racial schema’. The former imposes a racist discourse on the
original sartorial schema, and the latter adds further layers of racialisa-
tion to the epidermal schema proper. Paradoxically, while these Muslim
women suffer abuse in the streets, the novel portrays white British con-
sumers that are willing to pay elevated prices for Asian-style clothes—the
scene at ‘Fusion Fashions’ being a case in point. Their white bodies col-
lapse the ‘sartorial racial schema’ or, in other words, they ‘magically sani-
tize’ the garment, transforming the visibly undesirable into ‘oriental chic’
(Geczy 2013: 158). While inviting us to ponder how differently simi-
lar garments might be perceived when ‘worn’ on different bodies, Brick
Lane also unmasks, in this way, the contradictions that exist in a con-
temporary society where the ostensibly transcultural drives of consumer
culture—albeit none the less frequently Orientalising—coexist with unre-
constructed as well as newly-formulated forms of dress-related prejudice
and stereotyping.
The ‘pinch of New York dust’ that ‘settle[s] on the Dogwood
Estate’ (Ali 2007: 368) brings about a new wave of hostility towards
Muslims, to which the assaults suffered by Razia and Sorupa’s daugh-
ter attest. Ali’s Brick Lane thus portrays the impact of September 11 on
the other side of the Atlantic, demonstrating how 9/11 ‘has become
a European event’ (Versluys 2007: 65), at both a social and a literary
level. Against a backdrop of escalating Islamophobia and the ‘War on
Terror’, the Lion Hearts, an anti-Muslim group, intensify their leafleting
campaigns, while the Bengal Tigers become entrenched in dogmatisms,
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 175

with some militants adopting radical stances. The idea of global jihad
gains a certain currency during the discussions of the group: its mem-
bers issue a ‘poster for Islamic Jihad with the words emblazoned across
an AK-47’ (Ali 2007: 301); the Questioner raises the possibility of trav-
elling to Afghanistan to fight against the Americans—‘We are fit young
men. There are no chains tying us to these walls. With a little plan-
ning, a little effort, we can cross continents’ (ibid.: 415); and when
Nazneen challenges Karim’s idea of martyrdom by claiming that Islam
does not allow suicide, he replies in defiance: ‘It’s not suicide, yeah. It’s
war’ (ibid.: 243). At some points inspired by certain members of the
group, at others fearing to lose his leadership, Karim also ‘get[s] radi-
cal’ (ibid.: 283). He becomes increasingly attracted by the idea of con-
tributing to a global jihad aimed at fighting against the oppression of
Muslims worldwide—‘It’s a world-wide struggle, man. Everywhere they
are trying to do us down. We have to fight back’ (ibid.: 243)—and the
word ‘radical’ begins to surface prominently in his discourse, to the
point where Nazneen equates ‘radical’ with ‘right’ (ibid.: 261). The
aftermath of September 11 expedites Karim’s radicalisation, and yet the
novel also provides a broader background to his cause. In his conversa-
tions with Nazneen, Karim tells her about his experience as a Muslim
growing up in 1980s Britain, about his father being ‘called all th[ose]
names’ on the bus (ibid.: 233) and about his years at school when he
‘used to be chased home every day’ (ibid.: 260). Brick Lane thus draws
a correlation between discrimination and the attractions of radical Islam,
ultimately presenting Karim’s radicalism ‘not as a mythical, incompre-
hensible hatred of the West but as a desperate reaction to [Karim’s]
unequal status in that society’ (Hiddleston 2005: 66). In effect, as a
group, the Bengal Tigers act in direct response to the Lion Hearts, so
much so that, ‘without the spark of the Lion Hearts’, the Bengal Tigers
risk ‘becom[ing] an endangered species’ (Ali 2007: 301). There is also
an underlying desire for generational differentiation in Karim’s course
of action. Karim sees himself as belonging to a generation that needs
to take up the struggle. He deplores his father’s pusillanimous attitude
towards racism, and equally bemoans the lack of political interest shown
by younger generations, those Bengali ‘kids’ who ‘earn good money’ and
‘don’t remember how it used to be’ (ibid.: 260).
Walking in the opposite direction to Nazneen, Karim becomes a
more essentialist character as the novel moves forward. Constructing
his ideological discourse around the polarisation ‘Muslims’ versus ‘the
176 N. PEREIRA-ARES

West’—the same polarity that informs, none the less, much public rhet-
oric on the ‘War on Terror’ (Akhtar 2005)—Karim gradually distances
himself from his previously hybridised identity. For Karim is first intro-
duced in the novel as a confident British Muslim man, or so we see him
through Nazneen’s eyes:

She considered him […] His hair. Cut so close to the skull […] He wore
his jeans tight and his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow […] He wore
the phone at his hip, in a little black leather holster. He felt the length and
breadth of it and tested the surface with his thumb as if he had discovered
a growth […] Then he refolded his arms. They looked strong, those arms.
(Ali 2007: 210)

Albeit mediated by the voice of the narrator, the presence of Nazneen’s

gaze can be felt in this excerpt, which is charged with voyeuristic over-
tones. From Nazneen’s perspective, Karim’s body is exposed and even
objectified, and the novel thus subverts the gender politics of the gaze.
In a reversal of the male gaze which commonly scrutinises a female body
(Berger 1972; Mulvey 1997), in Brick Lane it is a woman who looks at
and scrutinises other male bodies. Whereas Nazneen recurrently looks
at Chanu’s body with an almost Swiftian disgust,23 Karim is described
as a well-built, attractive man, and the visual impression he leaves with
Nazneen brims with sensuality and eroticism, an idea emphasised by the
phallic dimension Karim’s phone seems to acquire (Pereira-Ares 2012b).
Here, Karim appears in Western clothes, refers to Britain as his ‘country’
(Ali 2007: 212), and juggles his self-acknowledged ‘Britishness’ harmo-
niously with his Muslim religiosity, evoked in the text through his ‘salaat
alert[s]’ (ibid.: 213). However, in the wake of 9/11, Karim changes his
clothing, and this sartorial change is used to indicate a metamorpho-
sis along identity and ideological lines, without necessarily and explic-
itly naming it. Karim adopts a Muslim appearance that the text initially
encourages us to interpret as an outward sign of defiance and resistance
vis-à-vis post-9/11 Islamophobia: ‘Some of the parents were telling their
daughters to leave their headscarves at home. Karim put on panjabi-
pyjama and a skullcap. He wore a sleeveless fleece and big boots’ (ibid.:
376). In the context of the novel, Karim’s new outfit denotes, more than
a renewed or increased religiosity per se, a militant stance, his adoption
of boots in lieu of his erstwhile trainers adding to this idea. Interestingly,
these boots, as well as Karim’s new fleece, are said to be ‘expensive’
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 177

(ibid.: 376), brand-name clothes that underlie an engagement with

consumer culture and, as Alla Ivanchikova surmises, perhaps even with
‘subcultural styles’ (2012: 62). As a result, Karim’s new outfit could well
be taken to represent a multi-inspired, urban Islamic style; or, as Claire
Chambers suggests in her discussion of Chris Morris’s film Four Lions
(2010), a combination of Muslim ‘clothing with elements of military
wear and street style’ aimed at ‘fashion[ing] a specifically young British
Muslim code of dress conveying a political statement’ (Chambers 2012:
189). This would be ‘the equivalent of the layering of modest wom-
en’s clothing (both subcontinental clothes such as the shalwar kameez
and kurta, and British clothes from high street chains such as Primark
and Topshop) to create a “visibly Muslim” ensemble’ (ibid.). There are
none the less a number of ironies surrounding Karim’s new clothes in
Brick Lane. Karim has increasingly come to reject the West, and yet he
cannot resist the shine of its consumer culture—hence he proudly runs
‘his fingers over the labels’ on his fleece and boots (Ali 2007: 376).
Furthermore, his Muslim dress is described in the text as a ‘new style’
(ibid.). It is thus presented almost as a ‘trend’, which invokes ideas of
evanescence, transience, mutability and ‘cultural performativity’ (Perfect
2008: 113). Yet, Karim is more than ever in search of certainties and his
views on identity have mutated towards essentialist postulates. At a given
point, he even seems to suggest that the combination of diverse cultural
influences leads to the loss of an individual’s cultural identity: ‘When I
was a little kid […] If you wanted to be cool you had to be something
else—a bit white, a bit black, a bit something […] It weren’t us, was it?
[…] Bangladeshi’ (Ali 2007: 263).
Initially, Nazneen is not able to fully discern the ideological change
in Karim. However, she does register his sartorial transformation, not-
ing that this metamorphosis is ‘either too trivial or else too important
to be discussed’ (ibid.: 376). An answer to this conundrum is provided
by the story of Arzoo that I mentioned earlier in this chapter, a story
that is placed immediately after Karim’s sartorial change. Dress thus
emerges in the novel as an alternative signifier when verbal language is
inadequate or when silence reigns over words. Nazneen never articulates
verbally Karim’s transformation, but she repeatedly draws a distinction
between Karim, the man in jeans, and Karim, the man in panjabi-pyja-
mas, preferring to remember him ‘in his jeans and trainers, telling her all
the things that lay hidden just outside her window. He knew about the
world and his place in the world. That was how she liked to remember
178 N. PEREIRA-ARES

him’ (ibid.: 448). The certainty and confidence that Karim displays when
he first meets Nazneen—and which attracts her so powerfully—turn out
to be an illusion that eventually shatters in the post-9/11 narrative. The
post-9/11 climate of Islamophobia and the ‘Crusade’ of the ‘American
President’ (ibid.: 374) exacerbate the identity crisis that Karim has grad-
ually come to experience in the course of the novel. Increasingly unsure
about ‘his place in the world’ (ibid.: 448), Karim finds in radical Islam a
sense of belonging and a means of securing a form of identity certainty
in a context where Britain, his home, becomes less and less welcoming,
and where Bangladesh emerges from the distance not as his homeland,
but that of his parents. The novel emphasises the nexus between Karim’s
growing radicalism and his sense of uncertainty in terms of belonging
through a series of motifs, motifs that even pose the question of whether
Karim is actually attracted to the idea of global jihad or rather to a desire
to feel at home somewhere and unreservedly accepted there. On the
internet, Karim visits ‘Islamic web site[s]’ (ibid.: 347), but also webpages
that show images of ‘typical Bangladeshi village[s]’ (ibid.); he assumes an
interpretation of Islam different from Nazneen’s, and yet he is seduced
by her because, for Karim, Nazneen represents ‘the real thing […] a girl
from the village’ (ibid.: 386), neither a ‘westernized girl’ in ‘short skirts’,
nor a ‘religious girl, wear[ing] the scarf or even the burkha’ (ibid.: 384–
385). Just as Nazneen is initially dazzled by the outside world Karim
personifies, so Karim is enthralled by the ‘idea’ of home that Nazneen
embodies. Nazneen’s sari makes Karim think of his own mother, who
also ‘had one. Same material’ (ibid.: 212) and, in this way, Nazneen
emerges as ‘a maternal preoedipal space in which Karim [does not feel]
threatened’ (Cormack 2006: 706). Moreover, at the end of Brick Lane,
we do not know for sure whether Karim has ‘go[ne] for jihad in some
faraway place’ (Ali 2007: 486) or just moved to Bangladesh—the ‘[o]
r’ in the Questioner’s answer to Nazneen’s query reinforces this ambi-
guity. Nazneen envisions Karim ‘in a mountain cave, surrounded by
men in turbans wielding machine-guns’ (ibid.: 486), but the Questioner
insists in his belief that Karim has gone to Bangladesh, presumably with-
out involvement in jihad. The novel thus begs the question of whether
Karim’s dalliance with radical Islam might ultimately underscore an old
question in a new wrapping: a ‘homing desire’ (Brah 2004: 36).24 The
fact of having been born in Britain, but feeling excluded from it, leads
Karim to search for an alternative point of attachment and belonging,
whether it is radical Islam or Bangladesh. In effect, if we assume that
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 179

Karim eventually goes to Bangladesh, he then ends up undertaking

a similar journey to Chanu, with the caveat that Chanu returns to the
country he once left, whereas Karim goes in search of an utterly mythi-
cal ‘homeland’—and, in a strictly literal sense, Bangladesh is not Karim’s
homeland.
Karim’s search for his ‘place in the world’ in Brick Lane establishes, in
some—but not all—respects, a parallelism with Ed Husain’s narration in
The Islamist (2007), a memoir in which Husain recounts his involvement
in, and later disengagement from, radical Islam in 1990s Britain. In it,
Husain claims that, back in the 1990s, radical Islamism gave him ‘a place
in the world’ and a ‘cause to which I belong’ (ibid.: 32–33). Husain thus
links his embrace of radical Islam with a search for belonging, but add-
ing other factors: he speaks of a ‘teenage rebellion’ (ibid.: 13)—which
also involves intergenerational differentiation, the lure exerted by the
idealism encasing radical Islamism, and, albeit rather tangentially, he also
gauges the impact that social exclusion might have had on his decision
to join radical Islam—‘“Pakis! Pakis! F—-off back home!” […] I can still
see a gang of shave-headed tattooed thugs standing tall above us, hurl-
ing abuse as we walked to the local library’ (ibid.: 2). More pertinently
for my objective here, while telling of his years inside Hizb ut-Tahrir,25
Husain refers to a series of seminars on the issue of hijab he attended,
seminars that displayed a highly belligerent tone. One of them, entitled
‘Hijab: Put up or Shut up’, contraposed the image of one woman in a
‘miniskirt and another completely covered in hijab, jilbab and niqab’
(ibid.: 68). Husain presents these seminars as having a formative and
indoctrinating purpose, being aimed at highlighting the corruptive side
of the West—symbolised by the woman in a miniskirt—and the appro-
priateness of hijab as a means of avoiding moral deviation. In this way,
the alleged ‘clash of civilisations’ (Huntington 1996) was also articulated
in sartorial terms, with women (and their dressed bodies) being ‘made
to carry the burden of representation, symbolizing far more than […]
their male coreligionists’ (Morey and Yaqin 2011: 40). Offering a par-
allel apropos this question, in Brick Lane we also come across a series
of leaflets that, charged with a tone of confrontation, deploy women’s
bodies as a battleground on which political and ideological issues, as well
as matters of national and cultural identity, are fought out. However,
in Brick Lane, these leaflets do not have a ‘formative’ purpose (Rashid
2015: 119). They are used mainly to map out the political polarisation
of Brick Lane. What is more, it is worth noting that, in Ali’s novel, the
180 N. PEREIRA-ARES

first leaflet to be issued, and arguably the most confrontational, does not
come from the Muslim side, but rather from the Lion Hearts, the anti-
Muslim group in the novel:

HANDS OFF OUR BREASTS!

The Islamification of our neighbourhood has gone too far.
A Page 3 calendar and poster have been removed from the
walls of our community hall.
How long before the extremists are putting veils on our
women and insulting our daughters for wearing short skirts?

Do not tolerate it! Write to the council! This is England!KEEP

YOUR BREAST TO YOURSELF
And we say this. It is not us who like to degrade women by showing
their body parts in public spaces.(Ali 2007: 258)

In the first leaflet, the Lion Hearts accuse the ‘extremists’—as they call
the Bengal Tigers—of removing a poster from the community hall. This
poster presumably showed the image of a naked or semi-naked woman.
On the basis of this event, the Lion Hearts launch a message whereby
they warn British men against the bigotry of the ‘extremists’, alleging
that they might eventually want to impose the wearing of the veil on
their women—meaning Western women. The Lion Hearts poise them-
selves to ‘save’ British women from a potential ‘veiling’, which is redo-
lent of, and enters in dialogue with, the rhetoric surrounding the image
of the Afghan woman behind the burkha during the ‘War on Terror’.26
The Lion Hearts’ leaflet reveals an attitude towards women’s bodies as
male property, and uses the issue of hijab as subterfuge for an attack on
multiculturalism and the defence of a mythical sense of ‘Britishness’. In
a direct response, the Bengal Tigers issued a leaflet accusing the Lion
Hearts of degrading the image of women by exposing their naked bodies
in public. They assert their sense of moral superiority through the female
body, which is thus turned into a symbolic signifier of cultural-religious
values. No doubt these two messages transmit polarised visions on the
question of hijab. Yet both are concurrent in using the female dressed
body as a discursive tool in a dialectic struggle that is largely articulated
in masculinist terms. It is not women who speak here, their voices being
muted and their dressed or undressed bodies appropriated by their male
counterparts—in both leaflets women’s breasts are turned into objects.
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 181

Through these leaflets, Brick Lane brings into the open the silence to
which (Muslim) women are often confined, even when the issue at
stake is their own dressed bodies, which calls to mind ‘the non-being of
woman: the paradox of being at once captive and absent in discourse,
constantly spoken of but of itself inaudible or inexpressible’ (de Laurentis
1990: 115).
At work in the above-quoted leaflets is the idea of the female
(dressed) body being taken as the pars pro toto and often used as a pas-
sive receptacle of male-inscribed meanings, an idea that Ali portrays as
cutting across cultures and societies—hence she juxtaposes discourses
coming from different angles. The novel builds on this issue when
Chanu deploys the dress of his daughters to express his discordant ide-
ological positions: ‘today Chanu had ordered skirts and no trousers.
Yesterday, both the girls had to put trousers beneath their uniforms. It
depended where Chanu directed his outrage’ (Ali 2007: 264). A ‘quix-
otic’ figure (Cormack 2006: 703), torn between tradition and his sense
of ‘modern man’ (Ali 2007: 220), Chanu is capable of arousing the most
conflicting passions in the reader. One finds it difficult to sympathise
with his pretentiousness and chauvinism, and yet the novel adds an ele-
ment of pathos to his story. In Britain, Chanu’s university education is
not recognised; in the workplace, he suffers discrimination in terms of
promotion; his daughter Shahana grows apart from him; and he becomes
haunted by the myth of return—especially so after 9/11, as he fears
the ‘backlash’ (ibid.: 306) and becomes increasingly unable to discern
‘what’s what’ (ibid.: 464). Overwhelmed by the discontinuities of dias-
pora, at a given point, Chanu simply ‘lays on the sofa in lungi’ (ibid.:
184)27—a garment that, less contiguous with diasporic South Asian
fashions, foreshadows his imminent desire to go back to Bangladesh.
Moreover, while we might celebrate Chanu’s decline in patriarchal
power, the novel encourages us to develop empathy with his loss of cer-
tainties: ‘The thing about getting older […] is that you don’t need eve-
rything to be possible anymore, you just need some things to be certain’
(ibid.: 312), as he says in a passage where he seems to intuit Nazneen’s
extramarital affair with Karim. Chanu’s throne is gradually being shat-
tered, and his downfall acquires a somatic dimension in the text. At the
start of Brick Lane, Chanu exhibits a prominent stomach which, seen
through Nazneen’s eyes, is described abjectly as looking ‘like a nine-
month pregnancy’ (ibid.: 459). Chanu’s protruding stomach matches his
great expectations for the future in Britain, but it shrinks progressively
182 N. PEREIRA-ARES

as his failure becomes more and more palpable: his stomach becomes
‘alarmingly small’ when Nazneen usurps his previous position as the fam-
ily’s breadwinner (ibid.: 204); his whole body dwindles when he real-
ises his failure as a husband: ‘He had shrunk. Not just his cheeks and
his belly, but all of him’ (ibid.: 459); and, eventually, his stomach fails
to adapt to his excessive eating and he develops an ulcer. While Chanu’s
disease-afflicted body stands for his inability to cope with life in the dias-
pora, his dwindling body is engrained in metaphor for his diminishing
phallocentric power. Not fortuitously, as Chanu’s body gets smaller,
Nazneen increases her agency, regaining autonomy over herself and her
body which she ‘come[s] to inhabit […] for the first time’ (ibid.: 343).
Nazneen’s attitude towards her dressed body is an unavoidable topic
when exploring a novel that deals so much with fashion, dress, clothes
and hijab practices. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed Nazneen’s veil in
relation to the challenges the novel poses to ‘conventional’-looking para-
digms, arguing that Nazneen’s veil acts as a mechanism that prevents her
from losing her position as the bearer of the gaze in the text. However,
Nazneen’s veil also responds to an inherited actuality, sanctioned by gen-
der, cultural and religious conventions. In fact, judging by Nazneen’s
own behaviour in the first part of the novel, her use of the veil seems
to be determined by the religious principles allegedly prescribed by the
Qur’an.28 For on several occasions the narrator portrays Nazneen in the
act of veiling before plunging into the public sphere: ‘She put on her
cardigan, took her keys and left the flat […] Nazneen pulled the end of
her sari over her hair. At the main road she looked both ways, and then
went left’ (ibid.: 53–54; emphasis added). Likewise, Nazneen’s veil is
also mentioned when she forgets to cover her head in front of Karim, as
she should ostensibly have done in front of an unknown man: ‘Nazneen
sat. She folded her hands in her lap. She smoothed the soft blue fab-
ric of her sari and folded her hands again. She had once more forgotten to
cover her hair’ (ibid.: 232; emphasis added). That Nazneen ‘forgets’ to
cover her hair proves, albeit indirectly, that her use of the veil answers
to religious compliance, simultaneously anticipating her future love rela-
tionship with Karim. More importantly, the passage shows Nazneen
‘review[ing] her understanding of purdah’ (Germanà 2011: 77) and,
in effect, throughout the narrative, Nazneen revisits and revises her
understanding of the clothes she wears. This occurs alongside, or rather
is triggered by, various transformations Nazneen undergoes in the
course of the novel: she substitutes economic dependence for financial
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 183

self-empowerment, fatalism for individual agency, and submissiveness for

self-assertiveness.
Nazneen’s saris dress her body and act as veils, as she often uses the
end of her sari to cover her head (Ali 2007: 54, 143, 277). This is a
sartorial convention she has inherited from her mother, and one she has
come to associate with continuance, acquiescence, resignation and suf-
ferance. For most of the novel, she complies with it unquestionably and
even measures other South Asian women against it. Filtered through her
perspective, the novel offers an admonitory description of Mrs. Azad’s
dressed body; and Nazneen also censures Razia’s Westernised man-
ners, comparing Razia’s short haircut with the hair of a ‘tramp’ (ibid.:
63) and deeming her demeanour ‘unbecoming to a Bengali wife’ (ibid.:
127). However, as the novel moves forward, Nazneen herself fantasises
about Western clothes (ibid.: 141, 220, 277), eventually posing a com-
pelling rhetorical question: ‘where’s the harm?’ (ibid.: 141). Nazneen is
here revisiting her own idea about how a British Asian Muslim woman
should dress, and, more broadly, a matrilineal inheritance she has until
now regarded as unassailable. It is no coincidence that this takes place
after a long digression where Nazneen raises objections to her moth-
er’s indoctrination into fatalism and female subservience, which finds
its best expression in Amma saying ‘[i]f God wanted us [women] to
ask questions, he would have made us men’ (ibid.: 80)—and, as the
above-quoted excerpt shows, Nazneen does postulate a question here.
Nazneen’s ruminations in this passage are also indicative of a sartorial,
ethnically-related awareness previously undetected in her, one that results
from her increasing interaction with the outside world, which is gov-
erned by different sartorial standards. In effect, Nazneen plays at imitat-
ing the ‘white girls’ in front of the mirror: ‘Walking over the bedspread,
she imagined herself swinging a handbag like the white girls. She pulled
the skirt higher’ (ibid.: 141). This act of toying with dress in front of the
mirror underscores a self-conscious play with identity, and adumbrates
Nazneen’s diminishing dependence on fatalism and her incipient invest-
ment in the performative character of identity. Nazneen rehearses her
identity by experimenting with clothes, just as she rediscovers her body
and even sexual appeal in a series of mirror scenes that act as mirror-
stage experiences in adulthood.29 That Nazneen imagines herself wear-
ing ‘handbags like the white girls’ indicates that she wishes to perform
a normative—even idealised—ethnicity, and yet the novel wards off an
epidermal identification (Fanon 2008), as Nazneen is said to be ‘thrilled’
184 N. PEREIRA-ARES

by the reflection of her ‘brown legs’ in the mirror (ibid.: 141). Arguably,
what Nazneen delineates most clearly here is a longing to enjoy the
freedom which Western culture allegedly promises and which, at this
point, she finds it difficult to negotiate within the limits of her Muslim
upbringing.
Repeatedly in the novel, Nazneen uses fantasy to escape from ‘reality’:
her fettered existence, her domestic routines, and the unpleasant task of
cutting Chanu’s corns (ibid.: 39, 45, 91, 182, 183). The mirror shat-
ters her fantasies on some occasions, as when she beholds the image of
a woman with ‘a serious face’ (ibid.: 93), so different from the woman
she embodies in her dreams, gleefully ‘travelling across the ice’ (ibid.).
However, the mirror also acts as a sort of ‘fantasy-window’ (Žižek 1999:
119), not only because she plays at acting and dressing like the ‘white
girls’ in front of it, but also because her encounters with the mirror gen-
erally give way to daydreams where she fantasises about becoming an ice-
skater—‘eyes to the mirror, she […] skated off’ (Ali 2007: 141); ‘She
looked in the mirror […] the ice smelled of limes’ (ibid.: 220). In this
way, Ali makes Nazneen virtually identify with the image of the ice-skat-
ers that appeared at the start of the novel, reproducing an almost ‘imagi-
nary identification’ in Slavoj Žižek’s terms (1999: 105)—which is utterly
‘imaginary’ in this case, as the protagonist is merely daydreaming. These
figments of the imagination provide Nazneen with a form of escapism,
but they can also be said to act as fantasies through which Nazneen
‘stages’ her desires (Žižek 2006). What ‘the fantasy stages’, Žižek writes,
‘is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied’ (ibid.: 370).
Instead, the role of fantasy is ‘to give the coordinates of the subject’s
desire, to specify its object’ (ibid.). In view of this, one could argue that,
through her fantasies, Nazneen ‘learns’ how to desire, with the object
of desire being the attainment of a spatio-bodily freedom that is tightly
bound in the text to notions of female empowerment, an aspiration
repressed by the symbolic network in which she, as a subject, is embed-
ded. Importantly, the above-mentioned daydreams are always triggered
by a Western element—an ‘English magazine’ (Ali 2007: 93); Chanu’s
Western-style trousers (ibid.: 141); or the ‘sequined vests’ (ibid: 220)—
and they always prompt Nazneen to imagine herself in Western terms.
Brick Lane thus establishes a connection between Nazneen’s desires—
which she realises through fantasy—and the Western world. In other
words, Nazneen seems to identify Western culture with escape from
her own heritage, which she comes to perceive as a straitjacket. This
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 185

correlation is articulated conspicuously in the following excerpt, where

we have access to Nazneen’s thoughts through an instance of indirect
discourse:

The sari, which seconds ago had felt light as air, became heavy chains […]
Suddenly, she [Nazneen] was gripped by the idea that if she changed her
clothes her entire life would change as well […] If she wore trousers and
underwear, like the girl with the big camera on Brick Lane, then she would
roam the streets fearless and proud. And if she had a tiny tiny skirt with
knickers to match and a tight bright top, then she would—how could she
not?—skate through life with a sparkling smile and a handsome man who
took her hand and made her spin, spin, spin. For a glorious moment it was
clear that clothes and not fate, made her life. And if the moment had lasted
she would have ripped the sari off and torn it to shreds. (ibid.: 277–278)

Nazneen envisions her sari as ‘heavy chains’ that bond her to a matri-
lineal inheritance of fatalism and female endurance. In rather problem-
atic terms, it is only through the adoption of Western clothes—in other
words, identification with Western culture—that she discerns a way out
from the literal and metaphorical oppression exerted by her sari. The
troubling picture Nazneen draws here makes it difficult to celebrate this
passage, even when it adumbrates an important change in her approach
to identity. The assertion ‘it was clear that clothes and not fate made her
life’ foresees Nazneen’s final evolution towards a conception of identity
not as fixed and predetermined, but rather as malleable, shifting and per-
formative. For identity is here reduced to sartorial construction, even to
‘the stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler 1990: 141). Fate is thus substi-
tuted for clothes and the ‘tension between the pedagogic and the per-
formative’ (Cormack 2006: 706)30 is felt by Nazneen, who gradually
comes down on the side of the latter. Nazneen realises the constituted,
rather than essential, status of identity and, despite what the above-
quoted excerpt seems to augur, this realisation does not lead Nazneen to
forsake her Asian-Muslim affiliation. On the contrary, it ultimately allows
her to embrace her cultural-religious identity in more positive terms and
to reconfigure it so as to make it palatable to her increasing agency.
In effect, the novel has Nazneen ‘defy’ her fate in a sari—that is,
within, and not outside, the limits of South Asian culture—and, in
particular, the very same sari that appears in the above-quoted passage
— the one she envisions as ‘heavy chains’. For this is the sari Nazneen
186 N. PEREIRA-ARES

is wearing when, a few pages further on, she first has sexual intercourse
with Karim, when she contravenes all that is expected of her. This is a
‘red and gold silk sari’ (Ali 2007: 277), endowed with symbolic reso-
nances of youth and sexuality. It is Nazneen’s most special sari, and a
sari that brings together Nazneen and Amma, who also dons her best
sari on the day she commits suicide—hers is a ‘Dhaka sari’, her ‘finer-
ies’, as Hasina puts it in her letters (ibid.: 436). The sari thus connects
mother and daughter again, but this time in a very different situation,
at the very point where they both challenge fatalism. And, in effect,
Nazneen’s acknowledgement that Amma has committed suicide consti-
tutes an important step on her way to transcendence and intentional-
ity.31 Convinced that she ‘will decide what to do’ (ibid.: 405), Nazneen
rejects returning to Bangladesh with Chanu, declines Karim’s marriage
proposal, and chooses to shape her future away from any direct form
of patriarchal interpellation. Various factors lie behind Nazneen’s deci-
sion, but identity features prominently among them. Nazneen refuses
to submit her(self) to the identity Chanu and Karim thrust upon her—
‘the girl from the village’ and ‘the real thing’ (ibid.: 385), respectively—
and, whereas Chanu and Karim end up reverting to a Lacanian fantasy
of a unified self, Nazneen turns her fantasies into concrete possibilities,
embracing the potential of inhabiting multiple identity thresholds:

In front of her was a huge white circle, bounded by four-foot-high boards

[…] Nazneen turned round. To get on the ice physically — it hardly
seemed to matter. In her mind she was already there. She said, “But
you can’t skate in a sari.” Razia was already lacing her boots. “This is
England,” she said. “You can do whatever you like.” (ibid: 492)

Evocative of Nazneen’s regained autonomy, the passage shows Nazneen

staging, in a literal sense, her desire to spin around on an ice-rink, a
desire previously confined to ‘fantasy-windows’ (Žižek 1999)—the tel-
evision screen, the mirror or her recurrent daydreams. Nazneen achieves
an independent personality by enacting, in the real world, her ‘imaginary
identification’ (Žižek 1999) with the ice-skaters. But, precisely at the
point where she is able to occupy their position, the novel dissolves this
identification, or rather it eludes utter resemblance. Because Nazneen is
about to become an ice-skater dressed in a sari, which projects an iden-
tity formation both similar and different from that of the ice-skaters
that so powerfully enthralled her at the beginning of the novel. To put
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 187

it differently, the novel asserts Nazneen’s transcultural identity in its last

paragraph, an identity constructed around the interplay of differences as
well as commonalities. What is more, Nazneen’s sari, while retaining its
cultural and even religious significance—considering that it can also act
as a veil—is imbued with agency in this final passage. It is no longer a
garment speaking of fatalism and female endurance. Nor is it a hindrance
to Nazneen in her ‘conquest’ of new spaces. Dressed in a sari, Nazneen
is about to jump on to an ice-rink located in the centre of London. The
novel thus envisages the possibility of a British society where geographi-
cal compartmentalisations on an ethnic basis might be dismantled, simul-
taneously opening the doors to a reconfiguration of the ‘sartorial maps
of London’ (Tarlo 2007: 146).
Brick Lane thus ends on an overtly optimistic note, which has not
been exempt from criticism (Ahmad 2004). The ending of the novel,
for all its utopianism and potential pitfalls, further validates Mark Stein’s
postulate on the dual function of the multicultural Bildungsroman
(2004), as it is as much about the culmination of Nazneen’s process of
Bildung as it is about the transformation of British society. Razia’s state-
ment ‘This is England […] You can do whatever you like’ might encap-
sulate more than one ‘terrible irony’ (Cormack 2006: 712), especially
if viewed from a post-9/11 context and even subsequent ‘posts’. But,
at the same time, Razia’s assertion also brings to mind the end of the
Lion Hearts’ leaflet quoted above—‘This is England’ (Ali 2007: 258)
–, and it clearly reverses its underlying exclusionist rhetoric. For most of
the novel, London is portrayed as a balkanised locus, and the multicul-
tural model repeatedly called into question. However, in its last passage,
Brick Lane invests in the possibility of a different multicultural—or shall
we say transcultural?—British society, asserting a relationship between
cultures that is not ‘one of isolation and conflict, but one of entangle-
ment, intermixing and commonness’ (Welsch 1999: 201).32 This pos-
sibility, the novel posits, is to be premised neither on the effacement of
cultural-religious differences—as Mrs. Azad suggests—nor on the exac-
erbation of the East–West divide, as encouraged by the Lion Hearts
and the Bengal Tigers in the text. Instead, future promise is based on
a fruitful and creative interplay between differences and commonalities,
most clearly represented by Nazneen and Razia—the two figures with
which the novel closes. Razia asserts a transcultural British Asian iden-
tity when she appears in Union Jack top and salwaar trousers. As for
Nazneen, her Bildung leads her to reject the story of her origins, which
188 N. PEREIRA-ARES

conflates fatalism and female subservience, but not to a process of iden-

tity formation that denies her cultural-religious background. Hence the
novel ends with her ice-skating in a sari. It is true that Nazneen’s indi-
vidual progression involves a rejection of communal politics (Gunning
2012) and lends itself to being read under a Western liberal perspective.
However, whereas the practice of hijab frequently hurts Western liberal
sensibilities, in Ali’s novel, Nazneen’s sari-veil accompanies her on her
way to self-empowerment. What is more, though political and militant
Islam are dismissed in the text, Islam is not presented as being incom-
mensurable with Western liberal values. In Ali’s Brick Lane, Nazneen
uses her religion ‘against the circumstances of her oppression’ (Gunning
2012: 103). As Gunning has noted perceptively, in the course of the
novel, Nazneen ‘comes to an understanding of Islam as supporting,
not obstructing, agency: “God provided a way, and I found it” (373)’
(2012: 103).
The final scene in Brick Lane, other considerations aside, displays the
novel’s captivating aesthetics at its best. It leaves us at the point where
Nazneen is about to tint the whiteness of the ice with the colourful hues
of her sari, thereby providing an actively created and artistically formu-
lated image of a harmonious coexistence between Western and Eastern
elements. No doubt, an undeniable appeal of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is
its highly evocative and sensory character, with its multiple allusions to
bodily sensations, sounds, flavours, smells and textiles. When read along-
side the novel’s exploration of the fashion industry, some of these tex-
tiles become at once enslaving and empowering fabrics. As we have seen,
Brick Lane unpacks the backroom of the fashion industry, exposing the
harsh conditions that govern the mass production of clothes in Eastern
and Western sweatshops, as well as the invisible and similarly exploita-
tive side of much subcontracted sewing homework. However, the textile
industry also provides many female characters—Nazneen included—
with a viable means of entering the labour market and achieving finan-
cial independence. Ali’s novel thus retrieves the historical nexus between
women and dressmaking, but updates it by having her female charac-
ters enter a contemporary fashion industry that is shaped by the syner-
gies of capitalist accumulation and exploitation. In accordance with its
hopeful ending, Brick Lane also resolves, in optimistic terms, the tension
between exploitation and empowerment delineated above, as Razia sets
up her own textile business and employs women from the Bangladeshi
community of Brick Lane. Hers is a partnership aimed at producing
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 189

‘Asian-chic’ clothes that might appeal to Eastern and Western consum-

ers alike, which provides further evidence of the novel’s final invest-
ment in transcultural assertiveness. What is more, for the first time in the
novel, these women assume a creative—and, therefore, visible—role in
dressmaking, and they can even allow themselves to wear the very same
clothes they produce. They can thus invert the production–consumption
relationship governing their previous involvement in the fashion industry
while exploiting, for their own benefit, the allure of ‘Asian-chic’ cloth-
ing in the West. Under Razia’s leadership, these women become ‘savvy
design agents in the capitalist markets of the new millennium’ (Bhachu
2004: 140), simultaneously contributing to situating Asian dress on the
fashion map.
In Brick Lane, many textiles also become texts in their own right.
Nazneen repeatedly approaches other characters by first reading their
clothes, and Ali frequently deploys dress as a means of suggesting with-
out naming. Dress is a favoured signifier in Brick Lane, so much so that,
without its sartorial references, the novel would have demanded far more
pages to render, verbally, all the information that is silently conveyed
through dress. In Brick Lane, Ali uses dress as a stylistic device, offering
concise exercises in sartorial description whose implications exceed the
mere purpose of introducing characters. Dress in the novel acts as yet
another ‘system of signification’ (Eco 1976: 8) which the reader is left
to decode, and the characters use to supplement verbal communication.
Dress in Brick Lane is revealed to have a supra-utilitarian function, and
Ali effectively exploits it as a discourse on identity. In the novel, dress
voices the different—at times changing and even conflicting—identity
positions occupied by the characters, mainly along ethnic, cultural and
religious lines. It becomes a potent signifier of individual and cultural-
religious identity, as well as an element of debate within the fictional
world of the novel. Importantly in this respect, as we have seen through-
out this chapter, Ali’s Brick Lane overtly addresses the practice of hijab,
which is explicitly discussed in the novel, and implicitly problematised
through the dressed bodies of various characters. The novel gives voice
to a wide spectrum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes that range from
rejection to celebration, from compliance to defiance, from enforced
acceptance to voluntary adherence. At one end of the scale we might
place Mrs. Azad, who rejects hijab—at least when in London, conceiving
of it as a marker of ‘Otherness’ and finding Western clothes liberating.
In stark contrast, at the other end, we find the militants of the Bengal
190 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Tigers, young women who celebrate the practice of hijab in one of its
most extreme forms: the burkha. Responding neither to old traditions,
nor to patriarchal impositions, their burkhas emerge as outward indica-
tors of political Islamism and female public activism. Along the middle
positions of this continuum we can place Razia and Nazneen. Razia,
though wearing Western clothes, is casually revealed to cover her head;
and Nazneen never relinquishes her sari which continues to act as a veil.
Ali’s exploration of the question of hijab goes beyond the dramatisation
of prevailing discourses on the veil as an oppressive or liberating element.
The cornucopia of factors that inform the sartorial choices of the char-
acters ultimately encourages the reader to question the extent to which
those religious discourses that base the use of hijab on a strict interpreta-
tion of the Qur’an or those Western liberal feminist postulates that see
the veil as an oppressive element are valid for understanding the wide
range of aspects that intervene in the practice of hijab. The novel clearly
reveals their lacunae and asserts the polyvalent significance of the Muslim
veil. Indeed, if Brick Lane endorses a final message regarding the ques-
tion of hijab, that message is one in which simplistic and simplified views
of the veil have no place and one that is probably located somewhere in
the middle of the spectrum established above. In the process, the novel
exposes how the dressed body of the Muslim woman might be turned
into a political, ideological and discursive battleground as well as into
a receptacle for various male-inscribed meanings. However, Brick Lane
gives priority to the voices of its female characters, characters that express
their position towards the practice of hijab visually or verbally. For, in the
end, the voices of Muslim women are crucial, as crucial as their freedom
and ‘power to choose’ (Kabeer 2000).

NOTES
1. See discussions and data in Tahir Abbas (2005), Chris Allen and Jorgen
Nielsen (2002), Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood (2009), Tariq Modood
(2005a, b) and Lorraine P. Sheridan (2006), among others.
2. Broadly speaking, and as noted earlier in this work, within Muslim cul-
tures, the term ‘hijab’ (literally ‘curtain’) alludes to the dress code—both
masculine and feminine—ostensibly prescribed by Islam and related
to the cultural-religious principles of modesty, privacy and morality.
Consequently, as Fadwa El Guindi (1999) has pointed out, hijab is nei-
ther an exact equivalent for the term ‘veil’, nor a hypernym encompassing
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 191

the multiplicity of garments used by men, and mainly by women, to

cover their heads and bodies: burkha, chador, abaya, haik, niqab, qina
or lithma, among others. Nevertheless, as a result of a metonymic pro-
cess, the term hijab has also come to designate one of the common-
est styles of veil used by Muslim women, a style that is characterised by
covering the head, but leaving the face uncovered. That being said, it is
worth noting that, throughout the present chapter, the term hijab will
be used to allude either to the principle of covering or to a particular
style of veil. Moreover, the term hijab will be used interchangeably with
that of ‘veil’—and, in particular, Muslim veil. This decision is not simply
made for stylistic reasons. It also intends to emphasise the importance of
addressing the practice of hijab as part of the broader phenomenon of
the veil, a phenomenon that, as mentioned in Chap. 1, is not exclusive
to Muslim cultures. Scholars such as Leila Ahmed (1992), John Esposito
(1998) or Fadwa El Guindi (1999) have amply demonstrated that the
origins of veiling can be traced back to pre-Babylonian times, being
subsequently incorporated into Hellenic, Judaic, Christian and Muslim
cultures.
3. This is a simplified outline of the multiple and often conflicting dis-
courses that have surrounded the question of hijab in recent decades.
It is far from offering a comprehensive exploration of the topic, being
aimed mainly at pinpointing certain aspects that are particularly useful
to the analysis of hijab in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane ([2003] 2007). For
more information about the practice of hijab, see Leila Ahmed (1992),
Katherine H. Bullock (2000, 2002), John Esposito (1998), Fadwa El
Guindi (1999), Elizabeth Fernea (1993), Daphne Grace (2004), Fatima
Mernissi (1991, 2003), Lama Abu Odeh (1993), Zahrā Rahnavard
(1990), Emma Tarlo (2007, 2010, 2013); Helen Watson (2002) and
Jasmin Zine (2002), among others.
4. To give some examples: in Algeria, the attempts by European colonisers
to unveil native women, far from decreasing the practice of veiling, bol-
stered the use of the veil, which came to symbolise national resistance;
in the 1930s, Reza Pahlavi banned the veil as part of his project to mod-
ernise Iran and, as a sartorial counter-discourse, the new government
established after the Islamic Revolution of 1978/1979 required women
to return to the veil—see discussion in Robert C. Young (2001); and,
in the mid-1990s, the Taliban regime ruling Afghanistan forced women
to wear the burkha as a sign of the new status quo. Within a contem-
porary European context, national legislations on the practice of hijab
have placed European countries along a continuum that ranges from the
more restrictive positions of countries such as Belgium and France, to
the less coercive postures of Austria and the UK. See Eva Brems (2014),
192 N. PEREIRA-ARES

Alessandro Ferrari and Sabrina Pastorelli Ashgate (2013), Joan Wallach

Scott (2010), and Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors (2013), among
others.
5. See Emma Tarlo’s Visibly Muslim (2010) for an in-depth discussion of the
so-called ‘jilbab controversy’ in Britain (2010: 104), and of the vexed
article published by Jack Straw in 2006. See also Nahid Afrose Kabir
(2012), Victoria Camarero Suárez and F. Javier Zamora Cabot (2012),
and Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors (2013), among others.
6. Taken from an interview with Marianne Brace, ‘Nadeem Aslam: A
Question of Honour’, The Independent, 11 June 2004. http://www.
independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/nadeem-aslam-a-
question-of-honour-731732.html.
7. Taken from: Claire Chambers’ ‘Book Review: Tabish Khair, Just Another
Jihadi Jane and Tariq Mehmood, Song of Gulzarina’, The Huffington
Post, 20 December 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-claire-
chambers/book-review-tabish-khair-_b_13674626.html.
8. This is taken from an interview that is part of a Marks and Spencer (M&S)
advertisement—in 2013, Monica Ali was one of the faces of M&S.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcqf4_R6dMg.
9. Monica Ali mentions Kabeer’s research in the ‘Acknowledgements’ that
accompany the novel.
10. Part of the discussion on the politics of hijab in Brick Lane has been pub-
lished in Pereira-Ares, Noemí (2013) ‘The Politics of Hijab in Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48(2): 201–220.
11. To date, Monica Ali has published three other novels: Alentejo Blue
(2006), In the Kitchen (2009) and Untold Story (2011).
12. See Monica Ali’s ‘Where I’m coming from’ (2003). See also interviews
with David Cohen (2003) and Diran Adebayo (2004).
13. Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003, has been trans-
lated into multiple languages, and was made into a film in 2007 under
the direction of Sarah Gavron.
14. See Matthew Taylor’s ‘Brickbats fly as community brands novel “despic-
able”’, The Guardian, 3 December 2003. https://www.theguardian.
com/uk/2003/dec/03/books.arts.
15. Part of the following discussion on the politics of the gaze in Brick Lane
has been published in Pereira-Ares, Noemí (2012b) ‘The East Looks at
the West, the Woman Looks at the Man: A Study of the Gaze in Brick
Lane by Monica Ali’, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American
Studies 46: 71–82.
16. If within a Western imaginary the female gaze has been regarded as dan-
gerous and threatening—something evoked by the Greco-Roman myth
of Medusa—in the Muslim world, the social order is considered to be
 5 ‘SHE HAD HER HIJAB PULLED OFF’: DRESSED BODIES … 193

challenged if a woman dares to look at a man (Ahmed 1992; Mernissi

2003).
17. The abaya is an ankle-length outer garment.
18. Literally, the term ‘purdah’ refers to the ‘curtain’ which separates the male
and female sphere.
19. As Monica Ali explained in a conversation with David Cohen (2003),
‘there’s some of me in Shahana’. Ali then goes on to speak about the
cultural conflict she experienced as a young girl born to an English
mother and a Bengali father, a conflict that, albeit tangentially, also took
on a sartorial dimension: ‘Her maternal grandparents mocked her father’s
culture, sniping at “the gaudiness” of saris […] Her father thundered
in reply that “white women went around like tarts” and that “a sari at
least did the basic job of covering the flesh”. Caught in this crossfire, Ali
resented her father and came to the conclusion “that it was all his fault”.
“It took time and maturity,” she says, “to appreciate the richness of my
heritage”’ (Cohen 2003).
20. Janmohamed is here referring to those patriarchally-grounded discourses
that have traditionally conceived of the veil as a mechanism that affords
men protection from sexual temptation—the mere ‘look is fornication of
the eye’, noted Iman Ghazali in the twelfth century (quoted in Mernissi
2003: 141).
21. My use of the term ‘Islamic feminism’ is taken from Margot Bradan
(2009).
22. See Jane Hiddleston (2005) and Michael Perfect (2008) for an in-depth
exploration of this question.
23. See ibid.: 39–40, 144, 178, 181, 184, 202, 204, 295, 521, 366, 370.
24. I am here using the concept of ‘homing desire’ as referring simply to a
‘desire to belong’ (Brah 2004: 36) which can be differently ritualised
and performed, and which is tightly bound to experiences of inclusion
and exclusion. Avtar Brah first developed this concept in Cartographies of
Diaspora (1996).
25. For a discussion of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, see, for example,
Parveen Akhtar (2005). See also Emma Tarlo (2010) for an analysis of
the sartorial agenda of Hizb ut-Tahrir.
26. In a reformulation of Spivak’s formula, ‘white men are saving brown
women from brown men’ (1988: 297), during the ‘War on Terror’,
Western governments used the image of the Afghan woman in a bur-
kha as a visual discourse to help to legitimise the invasion of Afghanistan
(Lindisfarne 2002).
27. The lungi is a waist-cloth which, unlike the dhoti, is ‘stitched to form a
large tube of cloth’ (Tarlo 1996: xii).
194 N. PEREIRA-ARES

28. It is worth mentioning, however, that within intellectual Muslim circles,

there is a great controversy over whether the Qur’an pre-scribes the veil-
ing of women as a religious obligation. While pro-veiling proponents
have deployed Suras 24: 30–31, 33: 53, 33: 54, and 33: 59 to defend the
practice of hijab as a religious duty, anti-veiling apologias have tended to
offer strikingly different interpretations of these Qur’anic passages. Thus,
for Mernissi (1991), as well as for other Islamic feminists, the Qur’an
does not explicitly prescribe the veiling of women. They argue that, ulti-
mately, the Qur’an would restrict the practice of hijab to the wives of the
Prophet under specific social circum-stances, circumstances which have
no raison d’être nowadays.
29. The term ‘mirror-stage’, which takes us back to Jacques Lacan’s theo-
ries on the ‘mirror stage’ (1977), is deployed figuratively here. Because
Nazneen is not a toddler, and her encounter with the mirror does not
therefore represent a stage previous to her entrance into the symbolic.
30. Alistair Cormack’s contraposition of the pedagogic and the performative
(2006) leads us to the work of Homi Bhabha, where he asserts that the
notion of ‘nation’ as well as ‘national/cultural identity’ is built through
a ‘double narrative movement’ (1990: 297)—the pedagogic and the
performative.
31. The inclusion of Amma in the text places Brick Lane in the tradition of
many twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives that have attempted
to recover the figure of the mother (Hirsch 1989; Lojo-Rodríguez 2009;
Usandizaga 1993).
32. It might be worth recalling here Monica Ali’s words in an interview with
Rowenna Davis, in which Ali claims that the multicultural model has
put too much emphasis on ‘differences. It’s great to have differences,
but there also needs to be some emphasis on the things that bring us
together’ (Davis 2011: 2).
 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD

In May 2016, Britain witnessed Sadiq Khan, born to Pakistani migrants,

becoming London’s first Muslim mayor. Following the investiture cer-
emony at Southwark Cathedral, certain right-wing voices used social
media to turn the spotlight on Khan’s Muslim faith in a mean-spirited
manner, criticising his wife, Saadiya Ahmed, for only putting on the hijab
after the election victory. However, as it immediately became apparent
in the international media, the woman to whom they were referring—
and whose picture was used as evidence—was not Saadiya, but rather the
Muslim writer and broadcaster Sarah Joseph, who was also at Southwark
Cathedral and who reacted swiftly to this erroneously grounded social
media vociferation. In addition to the string of prejudiced implications
underlying it, this hijab-centred incident attests to the current obsession
with the hijab in Western societies. It is also symptomatic of the scru-
tiny to which the Muslim dressed body—and, in particular, the Muslim
female dressed body—is currently subjected both in and beyond Britain,
with the practice of hijab wearing often being used as a versatile political
tool. This ongoing attention, which has intensified since 9/11 and which
our era of mass communication undoubtedly amplifies, bestows a cer-
tain historical unprecedentedness on the question of the hijab. However,
as the socio-literary analyses in this work have shown, much present-
day discussion on the hijab in Britain, for all its singularity, brings to
mind other dress-related precedents. These precedents have not simply
involved Muslims, but also other South Asian minorities in Britain. Thus
debates over the wearing or not wearing of the hijab in contemporary

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 195

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

Britain can be linked to those surrounding the Sikh turban in the 1950s
and 1960s and, more tangentially, even to the headgear-related inci-
dents recorded in the pre-twentieth-century travelogues examined in this
book. What is more, one could even argue that, if viewed in the context
of the Asian–British encounter, these controversies over the South Asian
dressed body in Britain represent a re-enactment of the multiple sartorial
confrontations that historically have affected this encounter, first in colo-
nial India and later in postcolonial Britain. Of course, these connections
are entirely conditional on deploying the broadly inclusive, but none the
less largely opaque, category ‘South Asian’; and, of course, the practice
of wearing the hijab in Britain also involves individuals other than South
Asian Muslims, with the above-mentioned historical links being inappli-
cable to them. All these caveats notwithstanding, and recalling Edward
Said’s words, drawing connections ‘between the past and the present’
might serve to convey ‘a more urgent sense of the interdependence
between things’ (1994: 72).
Grounded in a particular interest in literature as a cultural phenom-
enon which is embedded, and simultaneously intervenes in, historical,
social, cultural, political and sartorial realities, this book has attempted to
demonstrate that the dressed body has always mattered to those involved
in, and writing about, the South Asian presence in Britain. It has mat-
tered to authors writing in almost all periods, and to male and female
writers alike. Each text, as we have seen, plots dress in different ways.
Some recreate the writers’ own sartorial memories; while others exploit
the literariness of dress within the diegesis. In all of them, references to
fashion and dress do not fail to act as quintessential descriptive devices,
at times building on a narrative strand or acquiring metaphorical and
symbolic resonances. Yet, in most of them, dress allusions transcend
the mere descriptive, capturing the process involved in the sartorial per-
formativity of identity. More often than not, sartorial allusions in South
Asian diaspora narratives are used to express silently a myriad of identity
aspects along aesthetic, social, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, political
and ideological lines. Dress in these narratives emerges as a cultural site
where identity is visibly inscribed, constructed, monitored, negotiated
or creatively reinvented. It renders visible the points of identity attach-
ment forged by the characters in the liminal space of the diaspora, invok-
ing notions of ethnic identification, maintenance, assimilation, hybridity,
transculturality or resistance. Dress is a cultural element that allows
diasporic characters to relive an imagined South Asia; to revert to a
 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD 197

mythical past; to construct a British Asian identity in new and sometimes

transgressive ways; to forge an identity rooted in British popular culture,
in South Asian local and global mores, in urban and cosmopolitan sensi-
bilities, in transnational desi aesthetics or in many of them indistinguish-
ably. Dress articulates class as well as gender distinctions and, especially
in the work of women writers, it shines a light on traditional discourses
that construct the female dressed body as a repository of cultural values.
Dress voices the existence of generational divides along the diasporic
continuum and reflects the various ways in which different generations
of characters negotiate their identity in the ‘diaspora space’ (Brah 1996:
209). These identity negotiations often involve a sartorial bargaining vis-
à-vis the diasporic community and the majority society, a society that is
also inhabited by other minority groups as well as by specific subcultures
that, defining themselves against mainstream culture, establish complex
and sometimes antagonistic relations with diasporic communities, sar-
torially or otherwise. Dress in these narratives guides pronouncements
of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belonging. It is capa-
ble of casting individuals into the categories of ‘superior’/‘inferior’,
‘outsider’/‘insider’, and is powerful enough to alter the body and its
perception.
Indeed, body and dress operate in close proximity in the featured
texts, whether in a symbiotic or a paradoxical manner. The same clothes,
as many narratives expose, are construed and viewed differently when
worn by ‘white’ or ‘brown’ bodies. The ‘epidermal racial schema’, as
theorised by Frantz Fanon (2008: 92), impinges therefore on dress and
sartorial perceptions. It imposes a racial schema on what we might call
the original sartorial schema. What is more, in a large number of texts,
a reverse process also holds true. Dress marks the body of the charac-
ters more prominently than any other physiognomic feature, to the point
where the ‘body schema’ (Ibid.: 4) is eclipsed by the workings of the
sartorial racial schema. Dress is thus revealed to contribute to the raciali-
sation of individuals and/or to adding new layers of racialisation and
stigmas to their bodies. In the broad continuum of narratives scrutinised,
South Asian dress is portrayed as a palimpsest that has been written and
rewritten over the course of the history that frames the Asian–British
encounter. It has been (re-)written not simply in Britain, but also in
colonial India, and not just by its wearers, but also by others, in paradox-
ical and often self-serving ways. As a result of this long history of ‘for-
eign’ writing, South Asian dress has been coded with meanings beyond
198 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD

the control of its wearers, meanings such as ‘backwardness’, ‘inferior-

ity’, ‘Otherness’, ‘funniness’ and, as certain post-9/11 narratives reveal,
‘suspicion’. It is not, therefore, farfetched to postulate that there exists
here a process of ‘sartorialisation’ that works in a similar way to, and/
or operates over, what Fanon defined as ‘epidermalization’ (Ibid.: 4). If,
as Fanon wrote, the ‘body schema’ is collapsed by the ‘epidermal racial
schema’ (Ibid.: 92), so is the original sartorial schema veiled by the sar-
torial racial schema. In some texts, we even come across characters that
have interiorised and become complicit with the prejudices surrounding
South Asian clothes, which parallels what Fanon called the ‘internaliza-
tion—or rather the epidermalization [in this case sartorialisation]—of
[…] inferiority’ (Ibid.: 4).
Notwithstanding this, in our journey across sartorial representations
in the narratives under consideration, we have also witnessed the over-
coming of the above-mentioned ‘sartorial traumas’. Particularly in fiction
published since the 1990s, we come across hybrid sartorial identities that
stress the potential of the diasporic condition to stimulate inventiveness
and show ‘how newness enters the world’ (Bhabha 2004: 323). In these
narratives, South Asian dress is conspicuously revalorised and creatively
reinterpreted by the characters, characters that often partake in the glo-
balisation of Asian dress, with all its possibilities as well as pitfalls. For, as
certain novels reveal, the consumption of sartorial alterity in the West is
often driven by exoticist dynamics and is frequently fraught with multi-
ple paradoxes. There are characters that nevertheless manage to exploit
ambiguities for their own benefit, using dress both as a mechanism of
self-expression and as a means through which to explore consumer cul-
ture and engage with fashion. They reinvent their identity sartorially
and, in the process, they also redesign South Asian fashions. They endow
South Asian dress with meanings that would be unfamiliar to the char-
acters featuring in much early post-war fiction. These early characters
would probably not identify the layers of feminism and resistance behind
the veils worn by certain post-9/11 female personae. Neither would they
have imagined that decades later their literary offspring would be trans-
forming ‘tradition’ into ‘fashion’, sartorial mores into fashion statements,
simultaneously challenging the Western-centric assumption that fashion
is a Western prerogative. South Asian dress is thus revealed to be part of
a fashion system in its own right, a system that enters into dialogue with
other sartorial paradigms, drawing from and at the same time competing
with them. Through their dressed bodies, and sometimes even through
 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD 199

their direct involvement in the fashion industry, this new generation of

characters manages to place South Asian dress at the pinnacle of global
fashion in the fictional worlds that frame their existence. Dress in South
Asian diaspora narratives, like the experience of diaspora itself, might
entail ‘trauma’, but it also emerges as a site of ‘new beginnings’ (Brah
1996: 190).
Each diaspora narrative is often ‘both an individual story and, explic-
itly, a cultural narrative’ (Bromley 2000: 21). Judging by what we have
found in the texts analysed, I would certainly add and conclude that
most South Asian diaspora narratives in Britain are also sartorial nar-
ratives. Throughout this book, I have traced the historical, political,
sartorial and literary presence of South Asians in Britain from the eight-
eenth century to the new millennium. This critical exercise has shown
that most South Asian diaspora narratives—the literary sphere—pro-
vide a space where the historical, the political and the sartorial converge
and intersect. In each of the five chapters that make up this book, I
have examined works produced and/or set roughly in the same period.
Despite the particularities of dress in each text, and in addition to the
connection dress–body–identity that surfaces in most of them, the works
analysed in each of these chapters offer sartorial subtexts that speak of
shared concerns, concerns that can easily be put into dialogue with the
sartorial ‘truths’ of the periods in which they are set. This suggests that
the clothing subtexts in these narratives are to a large extent informed
by, and at the same time indicative of, a collective sartorial history
that different writers have revised, revisited and problematised in their
works. Dress in these narratives registers the different ways in which
South Asians in Britain have imagined themselves sartorially, and have
been imagined and constructed through the dominant gaze in differ-
ent periods. It thus records the different attitudes with which the South
Asian presence in Britain has been met over the centuries, as well as
the responses of various generations of diasporic subjects towards such
attitudes.
No doubt writers have always been aware of the communicative
potential of clothes. Authors ‘do not, after all, send their characters
naked into the world’ (Hughes 2006: 2). Notwithstanding, the narra-
tives of the South Asian diaspora in Britain offer a paradigmatic case in
terms of the plethora of sartorial references they contain and their inter-
connectedness. More than representing an idiosyncratic feature of a par-
ticular work or author, the recurrence of sartorial allusions constitutes a
200 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD

general characteristic of a sheer number and variety of texts, texts where

sartorial details often voice similar preoccupations. All this boils down
to the existence of certain particularities that have undoubtedly con-
tributed to turning these narratives into such rich sartorial archives. To
begin with, and as anticipated earlier in this book, these narratives are
concerned with exploring life in the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992), a space
where identity is often a bone of contention and an aspect to be negoti-
ated along different lines, including the ‘visible’ and, therefore, also the
sartorial one. This is especially so in the case that occupies us here, con-
sidering that the sartorial paradigms of the cultures in contact are strik-
ingly different in visual terms. Another important reason that should not
be underestimated is that the Asian–British encounter, as I have sign-
posted throughout this book, has a long history of sartorial debates, and
in many of the texts examined here the boundaries between fiction and
autobiographically-inspired writing are extremely porous. Some are eye-
witness accounts, and most of them reveal autobiographical underpin-
nings. As a result, dress in these narratives has recurrently been used to
dramatise the complexities as well as creative engagements derived from
the aforementioned cultural encounter. In other words, the importance
given to dress in these narratives is, to a large extent, triggered by the
crucial role that ‘clothing matters’ (Tarlo 1996) have historically played
in the interaction between Britons and South Asians from the colonial
period to the present, from the time when sartorial ‘battle[s] […] cen-
tered on heads and feet’ were fought in colonial India (Cohn 1989:
345), to contemporary debates over the use or non-use of the hijab in
present-day Britain.
Located at the crossroads of various epistemological domains, but
placing the literary text at the centre of analysis, this book has added tan-
gentially to the growing scholarship on South Asian dressing practices
in Britain, and mostly to the bourgeoning cohort of studies on dress in
literature, vindicating that much benefit can be accrued from establish-
ing such interdisciplinary links. Dress in literature contains multiple lay-
ers of meaning, and decoding sartorial allusions contributes to a better
understanding of the literary text and its context. But dress in literature
also refracts sartorial concerns, attitudes, values and discourses that tran-
scend the literary sphere. Dress in literature offers less and more than
the dressed bodies we come across in our real, but none the less sym-
bolically and discursively constructed, world. Literature draws on reality,
and yet it remains fiction, and the link reality–fiction is a perilous one, as
 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD 201

some of the writers examined here know first-hand. But it is precisely in

its fictionality or in the liminality of the fiction–reality tension where the
sartorial power of literature lies. The literary character has proved itself
capable of voicing sartorial fears and traumas, as well as pleasures and
diversions that its human counterpart has frequently found it more dif-
ficult to vent. Fiction affords writers a liberating medium through which
to air uncomfortable sartorial ‘truths’ as well as a fruitful space for sarto-
rial creativity, all of which, while potentially relying on ‘reality’, can also
impact on the real world. Literature is capable of arousing strong pas-
sions, and so are the dressed bodies of the characters. Literature is capa-
ble of putting readers in someone else’s shoes, bringing them nearer to
other sartorial realities and making them sympathise with or understand
the sartorially unknown. Literature is capable of conveying emotions that
enrapture, persuade and can therefore help to dismantle sartorial miscon-
ceptions. Literature acts as a memento of sartorial pasts, and adumbrates
sartorial futures. It is a sartorial archive in retrospect; a sartorial reposi-
tory of the present; and a voice that has proved itself capable of uncov-
ering and unpacking sartorial concerns that only later, sometimes much
later, have come under the critical gaze.
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 INDEX

A Ali, Monica, xii, xxiii, 13, 30, 46, 55,

Abaya, 163 64, 69, 146, 148, 149–194
Abbas, Tahir, 190 Alentejo Blue, 13
Acculturation, 33, 164. See also Brick Lane, xxiii, 46, 55, 64, 69,
Assimilation 101, 107, 146, 149–194
Adebayo, Diran, 192 interviews with, 30, 192, 194
Adornment(s), xix, 1 In the Kitchen, 135, 163
Aesthetics, 71, 74, 75, 79, 91, 153, Untold Story, 192
188 ‘Where I’m coming from’, 192
Afghan coat. See Coat(s) Allegory/allegorical, 113
Afghanistan, 175 Allen, Chris, 12
Afghan women, 180 Alterity, 61, 91, 92, 100, 121, 122,
‘Afro’, 96, 104. See also Black, hairstyle 198
Agency, 173, 182, 183, 185, 187, 188 ‘alterity industry’, 122
Ahluwalia, Muninder K., 150 sartorial alterity, 198
Ahmad, Ali, 158, 187 Alvi, Moniza
Ahmad, Rukhsana, 148 ‘The Sari’, viii, xiii, 168
Ahmed, Leila, 21, 191 Ameli, Saied, 4, 150
Ahmed, Saadiya, 195 Amin, Idi, 24
Aindow, Rosie, xxvi Amritsar Massacre, 43, 47
Akhtar, Parveen, 176 Anand, Aradhana, 135
Alexander, Claire, 146 Anderson, Brenda A., 166
Algeria, 191 Androgyny, 93
Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 146 androgynous, 73, 95
Alien(ation), 18, 28, 29, 35, 41, 48, Ansari, Humayun, 6
49, 53, 62, 75, 152, 158, 160 Anthias, Floya, 36, 130, 140

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 233

N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora
Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0
234 INDEX
Antor, Heinz, xxv
Appadurai, Arjun, 61, 91
Appearance, 9, 29, 34, 38, 82, 93, 97,
127, 128, 136, 144, 150, 166,
176
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 55
Arata, Stephen D., 51
Art, 1, 69
Ashcroft, Bill, 17, 34
Ashmore, Sonia, 61
Asia, 16
Asian(s), 5, 30, 66, 91, 105, 107, 117,
121, 125, 163. See also South
Asian(s)
Asian chic, 123
Asian clothes, 11, 19, 66, 107, 108,
121, 122, 132, 163, 165
Asian clothing, 117
Asian community, xvi, 124, 128,
131, 132, 141, 142, 145
Asian cool, 107, 114, 145, 146, 172
Asian culture, 141
Asian dress, 37, 107, 121, 123, 125,
145, 189
Asian fashion, 117, 123
Asian garment(s), 14, 181
Asian identity, 187
Asian style, 174
Asian women, 65, 106, 113, 114,
116, 123, 132
‘Asianness’, 89, 91, 122, 141
Asian Women Writers’ Workshop
(AWWW), 113
Aslam, Nadeem
Maps for Lost Lovers, 130, 154
Assimilation, 11, 13, 34, 37, 64,
83, 84, 118, 119, 196. See also
Acculturation
Attire, 2, 15, 40, 73, 79, 123, 125,
167
Authenticism, 91, 121
Authenticity/inauthenticity, 40, 81,
82, 84–87
authentic/inauthentic, 85, 92, 119,
122
Autobiography, 6, 7, 11, 14
autobiographical, 4, 69, 114, 116,
157
B
Baijnath, Laila, 6–11, 14–16, 56
England and India, 6, 9
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 68, 70, 83
Bald, Suresht Renjen, 79
Balibar, Etienne, xxv
Ballard, Roger, 20
Ball, John Clement, 79, 82
Banerjee, Mita, 147
Banerjee, Mukulika, 20, 129
Banerji, Niroj, 31
Bangladesh, 24, 64, 156, 159, 163,
167, 178, 181, 186
Bangladeshi(s), 155–158, 163, 170.
See also Asian(s); South Asian(s)
Bangladeshi community, 155, 158,
170, 188
Bangladeshi culture, 158
Bangladeshi identity, 156–158, 189
Bangladeshi women, 157
Barber, Elizabeth W., 171
Barker, Clare, 51
Barker, Martin, xxv, 48, 54, 122
Barnard, Malcolm, xxvi
Barry, Elizabeth, 134
Barthes, Roland, 70
Batchelor, Jennie, xxvi
Baudrillard, Jean, 99
Bauman, Zygmunt, xvi
Bayly, Christopher, 3
Bean, Susan, 46
Beatle boots. See Footwear
Beck, Ulrich, 55

Bedell, Geraldine, 158
Belonging, 38, 116, 119, 137, 140,
145, 175, 178, 179
Bengali, 64, 157, 161, 162, 165, 175,
183
Bennett, Louise, 20
Berger, John, 176
Best, Jason, 114
Bhabha, Homi, xiv, xxiv, 10, 31, 43,
44, 55, 56, 84, 92, 118, 119,
194, 198
Bhachu, Parminder, 106, 121, 189
Bildung, 112, 116, 187
Bildungsroman, 63, 69, 73, 157, 187
Binaries/binarisms, 73, 93, 95, 99,
112, 114
Bindis, 121, 141
Black, 5, 6, 26, 28, 32, 47, 56, 60, 71,
74, 75, 80, 85, 87, 95, 104–107,
109, 111–113, 123, 131, 146,
148, 172, 176, 177
as a category, 60, 95, 105
Black cool, 107
Black is Beautiful, 60, 95, 104
‘black hair’, 71, 104
‘blackness’, 37, 95, 104
Bloomers, 8, 20
Body, 2–4, 13, 18, 25, 29, 30, 32–34,
36, 42, 46, 47, 49, 51–53, 55,
63–65, 68, 70, 74, 76, 78, 79,
83, 89–96, 98, 99, 102, 110–
112, 114, 115, 119, 123–126,
128, 131–139, 143–145, 150,
151, 153, 154, 159–163, 169,
173, 174, 176, 180–182, 190,
195–199
body and dress, 3, 30, 36, 98, 197
body, dress and identity. See Identity
dressed body, 18. See also Dress
pregnant body, 138, 144
Boehmer, Elleke, 18
Boots. See Footwear
INDEX 235
Border(s), 108, 119
border crossing, xxiv
Boundaries, xv, xvi, 65, 81, 92, 96,
119, 139, 169, 200
ethnicity, 78, 92, 102, 118
gender, 78, 102
Bourdieu, Pierre, 37, 55
Bowie, David, 73, 93, 102
‘Boyish’, 95. See also Hairstyle
Bra, 96
braless, 96
Braces, 15, 41, 42, 71
Bradan, Margot, 193
Brah, Avtar, 23, 28, 30, 54, 60, 63,
105, 132, 146, 153, 178, 193,
197, 199
Brake, Mike, 40, 56
Brathwaite, Kamau
‘The Emigrants’, 54
Braziel, Jana, xxiv
Brems, Eva, 191
Breward, Christopher, xxvi
Bricolage, 75
Britain, 1, 3–9, 11–20, 23–33, 35,
36, 38, 42–54, 56, 60–63, 69,
70, 72, 75, 80, 83, 86–88, 90,
93, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106,
108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116,
120, 121, 127, 131, 135, 137,
144, 146, 149–155, 157, 158,
160, 163, 164, 173, 175, 176,
178, 181, 192, 195–197, 199,
200
British, 1–5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14–16,
19, 21, 24, 26, 28–30, 34, 37,
39–43, 45–47, 49–54, 56, 60,
61, 63, 64, 66–69, 74, 75, 78,
80, 82, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 99,
101–103, 105, 106, 108, 109,
111–116, 119, 120, 124, 127,
143, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151,
153–158, 163–165, 168–170,
236 INDEX
172, 174, 176, 177, 180, 183,
187, 196, 197, 200
British clothes, 177
British clothing, 16
British in colonial India, 2, 3, 9, 20,
45, 47, 196, 197
British culture, 4, 34, 37, 50, 64,
120, 153
British dress, 2, 20, 43, 78, 99, 183
British fashion, 15, 64
British garment(s), 2, 120
British identity, 50, 68, 75, 109,
112, 114, 119, 153, 157, 166,
178, 187, 197
British style, 4, 37, 56, 108, 119,
177
British women, 15, 180
British Asian(s), 63, 66, 69, 106, 109,
113–116, 119, 124, 127, 143,
144, 153–155, 157, 163, 169,
183, 187, 197. See also Asian(s);
South Asian(s)
British Asian clothes, 66, 163
British Asian clothing, 1, 3, 200
British Asian community, 60, 106,
114, 124, 197
British Asian culture, 1, 66, 106,
169, 197
British Asian dress, 114, 144
British Asian fashion, 144
British Asian garment(s), 120
British Asian identity, 187, 197
British Asian style, 106
British Asian women, 116, 127
literature/authors, 1, 113, 155
British Muslim(s), 111. See also
Muslim(s); Asian(s); South
Asian(s)
British Muslim clothes, 177
British Muslim clothing, 177
British Muslim community, 152
British Muslim culture, 177
British Muslim dress, 151, 177
British Muslim fashion, 177
British Muslim garment(s), 153
British Muslim identity, 111
British Muslim style, 177
British Muslim women, 151, 165
‘Britishness’, 63, 67, 68, 80, 84,
87–89, 96, 99, 109, 153, 176,
180
Bromley, Roger, 69, 84, 199
Brown, Timothy, 102
Brydon, Anne, 97
Brydon, Diana, xiv
Buchanan, Bradley, 75, 91
Buck, Anne, xx
Buddhism, 82
Bullock, Katherine, 162, 191
Burden of representation, 86, 179
Burkhas, 164–166, 190
Burton, Antoinette, 5, 6, 9–11,
14–17, 20
Butler, Judith, 85, 88, 92, 93, 120,
185
C
Callahan, Colleen R., 21
Camarero Suárez, Victoria, 192
Camouflage, 65, 83, 90, 91. See also
Masks
Capitalism, 72, 111, 171
Carby, Hazel, 147
Carey, Cynthia, 102
Caribbean(s), 23–25, 27, 29. See also
Indo-Caribbean(s)
Carnaby Street, 52, 61
Carnival (carnivalesque), 54, 66,
68, 70, 71, 78, 79, 82, 87, 91,
98–100, 102, 109
Caruth, Cathy, 45
Chador, 191
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 20

Chambers, Claire, 7, 8, 13, 16, 20, 21,
78, 149, 155, 177, 192
Chanel, 121
Chatterjee, Meeta, 47
Chaudhuri, Amit
Afternoon Raag, 3, 108
Chaudhuri, Nirad C.
Culture in the Vanity Bag, 1
A Passage to England, 54
Cheah, Pheng, 55
Chesney, Kellow, 8
Choli, 147
Cho, Lily, xiv
Chooridar, 60
Chowdhury, Amitva, 139
Chowdhury-Sengupta, Indira, 21
Chow, Rey, xxv
Churchill, Winston, 57
Citizenship, 9, 24, 34, 146, 150, 168
Civilisation, xix, 89
and dress/clothes, 14, 89, 111
Civil Rights Movement, 60
Clarke, John, 41
Clash of cultures/cultural clash, 66,
160
Class, social, 90, 99
Clifford, James, xxiv, 61
Cloth, 3, 20, 35, 46, 56, 57, 84, 94,
193
hand-spun, xii, 20, 46, 57. See also
Khadi
Clothes, 2–4, 8, 10–12, 14, 15, 18,
19, 25–27, 29, 30, 34–40, 42–47,
50, 52–56, 60, 63–68, 70–77,
79–83, 86–90, 93, 94, 96–100,
103, 104, 106–112, 118–126,
131–136, 138, 139, 144, 145,
154, 156, 160, 162–165, 169,
172–174, 176, 177, 182, 183,
185, 188–190, 197–199. See
also clothing; dress; fashion;
garment(s); style
Asian. See Asian(s)
INDEX 237
brand-name, 37, 177
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
clothes and dress, 2, 182
clothes and literature, 66, 77
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
literary clothing, 53
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Western. See Western
Clothing, 1, 3, 11, 14, 16, 21, 37,
49, 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 72, 75,
82, 88–90, 94, 95, 98, 101, 106,
108–110, 117, 120, 121, 150,
153, 156, 157, 160, 164–166,
168, 172, 176, 177, 189, 199,
200. See also clothes; dress; fash-
ion; garment(s); style
Asian. See Asian(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
clothing industry, 172. See also
Textile(s); Fashion
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Western. See Western
Coat(s), 10, 21, 32, 47, 50–53, 57,
71, 77, 83, 84, 103, 137, 138
Afghan coat, 60, 74
Crombie (Abercrombie), 41, 56, 71
Oxfam, 67
Cochrane, Raymond, 135
238 INDEX
Cohen, David, 192, 193
Cohen, Robin, xxiv, 119
Cohn, Bernard S., 2–4, 12, 20, 57,
200
Colonial discourse, 9, 10, 16
Colonialism, xxiii, 16, 26, 30, 43, 44,
47, 51, 53
colonial, 16, 30, 43, 44, 51, 53
colonial haunting, 43
colonisation, xxv, 3, 20, 21
decolonisation, 51
Colour(s), 10, 15, 20, 27, 29, 35, 36,
50, 72, 105, 108, 109, 124, 132,
148, 152, 174
Commodity (commodification), 89,
93, 107, 122, 153
Commonality/commonalities, 4, 52,
87, 109, 187
Communal, 130, 137, 142, 144, 188
Communication, 74, 136, 189, 195
communication and fashion/dress,
189
Community, xvi, 25, 28, 52, 65, 106,
114, 123, 159, 168, 180, 197
Asian. See Asian(s)
Bangladeshi. See Bangladeshi(s)
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
ethnic communit(ies), 132
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
Pakistani. See Pakistani(s)
Sikh. See Sikh(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Consumer culture, 110, 174, 177, 198
Contact zone, 1, 200
Cormack, Alistair, 158, 178, 181, 185,
187, 194
Corset, 3, 14, 151
Cosmopolitan, 34, 35, 50, 80, 122,
127, 146, 197
cosmopolitanism, 34
Costume, 8, 10, 11, 13, 82, 84–86
Craik, Jennifer, 104, 164
Crombie. See coat(s)
Cross-dressing, 95, 112
Cross, Robert J., 39
Cuban heels. See footwear
Cuccioletta, Donald, xxiv
Cultural studies, 78
Cultural translation, 118
Culture, xv, xvii, xxvi, 1, 2, 13, 18,
24, 26, 27, 28, 33, 35, 36, 66,
69, 70, 72, 77, 78–80, 89, 92,
94, 99, 100, 106, 110, 115, 118,
119, 120, 124, 127, 137, 139,
142, 144, 145, 152, 159, 160,
169, 170, 174, 177, 181, 187,
197, 198, 200
Asian. See Asian(s)
Bangladeshi. See Bangladeshi(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
Indian. See Indian(s)
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
Pakistani. See Pakistani(s)
Sikh. See Sikh(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Western. See Western
Cursetjee, Ardaseer
Diary of an Overland Journey from
Bombay to England, 6
D
Dabydeen, David, 23, 42, 54
The Counting House, 54
The Intended, 25, 28, 29
Slave Song, 54
Dagnino, Arianna, xiv, xxv

Davis, Angela, 95, 131
Davis, Fred, xvii
Davis, Rowenna, 194
De Beauvoir, Simone, 133
De Laurentis, Teresa, 181
Dennis, Ferdinand, 24
Derrida, Jacques, 44, 55
Desai, Anita, 23, 144
Bye-Bye Blackbird, 28, 39, 50, 57
Desai, Jigna, 144
Desi, 108, 146, 153, 197
Design, clothes/clothing/garment(s),
76, 107, 117, 125, 172, 173
Devee, Sunity
The Autobiography of an Indian
Princess, 6, 14
Dhaliwal, Nirpal Singh, 153
Tourism, xii, 154
Dhingra, Leena, 62
Amritvela, 28, 61, 62
Dhondy, Farrukh, 57
Come to Mecca, 56, 61, 158
East End at Your Feet, 61, 158
‘KBW’, 57
‘Salt on a Snake’s Tail’, 42, 56
Dhoti, 45–47, 49, 56, 193
Diana, Princess, xii, 107
Diaspora, xii, xiii, xiv, xxi, xxii, xxiii,
xxiv, 5, 6, 9, 17, 18, 20, 23, 27,
31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 46, 55,
62, 64, 65, 69, 105, 108, 116,
119, 125, 153, 158, 181, 182,
193, 196, 197, 199
‘diaspora space’, 197
diaspora and trauma, 35, 109. See
also Trauma
diasporic, 2, 3, 6, 16, 17, 23, 24,
27, 30–32, 34–37, 43, 50, 53,
60, 62, 63, 65, 99, 108, 117,
119, 130, 141, 142, 145, 146,
158, 159, 181, 196–199
identity, 197
INDEX 239
‘old’ and ‘new’, 23
South Asian diaspora, 5, 6, 17, 20,
23, 27, 31, 36, 39, 62, 64, 69,
116, 158, 196, 199
theoretical model, xiii, xiv
See also return
Difference, xv, 12, 29, 51, 91, 92,
103, 119, 134
différance (Derrida), 55
Discourse, 4, 9, 13, 16, 24, 28, 30,
34, 41, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59,
63, 79, 97, 103, 115, 119, 121,
123, 138, 139, 147, 149, 152,
157, 164, 169, 174, 175, 181,
185, 189–191, 193, 197, 200
Disguise, 67, 68, 81–83, 99, 102
Diversity, 124, 153
DKNY, 121
Doc Martens. See footwear
Dodd, Lizette Vikram, 149
Dolar, Mladen, 141
Domesticity, 133, 134
Domestic sphere, 127, 145, 171
Domestic violence, 117, 131
Donnell, Alison, xvi
Drag, 81, 85
Dress, 1–4, 10–13, 18, 19, 26, 29, 30,
35, 37, 38, 41–43, 45–47, 53,
64–66, 69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 78,
81, 85–87, 89, 90, 92, 97–100,
106–109, 111, 114, 119, 121,
123, 124, 126, 130, 132–136,
139, 144, 145, 150, 152–154,
156, 157, 163, 170, 173, 177,
181–183, 189, 190, 195–200.
See also clothes; clothing; fashion;
garment(s); style
Asian. See Asian(s)
British, 2, 3, 13, 19, 24, 28, 42,
43, 56, 64, 66, 106, 164, 174,
177, 183
240 INDEX
British Asian, 124. See also British
Asian(s)
British Muslim, 111. See also British
Muslim(s)
dress and body, 18, 29, 30. See also
Body
dress and fashion, 63
dress and identity. See identity
dress and literature, 108, 200
dress, body and identity. See identity
dressed body, 79, 89, 110, 112,
133, 136, 195, 196
dress-related discrimination/abuse,
12, 19, 60, 123
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
undressed, 180
Western. See Western
Dungarees, 90
Dupatta(s), 64, 100, 107, 110, 124,
126, 138, 139, 143, 165, 173
During, Simon, 153
Dwyer, Claire, 107
E Esposito, John L., 21, 191
East, the, 2, 5, 9, 12, 31, 61, 72, 80,
82, 87–89, 91, 92, 100, 117,
122, 156, 158, 187
East Africa, 24
East End of London, 9, 117
Eastern, xi, xxiii, 2, 4, 9, 10, 13, 16,
18, 60, 61, 64, 66, 72, 79, 80,
82, 83, 88, 89, 91, 92, 100, 109,
118, 188, 189
Eastern clothes, 64, 66, 72, 88, 118
Eastern clothing, 14, 60, 72
Eastern culture, 72, 89
Eastern dress, 4, 13, 109
Eastern fashion, 4
Eastern garment(s), 61, 64, 88, 89,
118
Eastern identity, 109
Eastern style, 18
Eastern women, 21
East India Company, army uniform,
2, 5
Eating disorders, 135, 148
Eco, Umberto, 74, 135
Edwardian-style, 39
Effeminisation, 10
effeminate, 98
Eicher, Joanne B., xix
Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, xiv
El Guindi, Fadwa, 21, 150, 190, 191
Empire, 5, 9, 15, 16, 24, 68, 103
Empire Windrush (ship), 54
Windrush narrative, 27
Ensemble, 41, 80, 81, 89, 90, 96,
136, 177
Entwistle, Joanne, 85, 92–94, 97
Epidermalization, 198. See also Fanon,
Frantz
epidermal racial schema, 29, 174,
197
Epstein, Mikhail, 118
Erikson, Erik H., xv
Estévez-Saá, Margarita, vii, xx
Ethnicity, xv, xvii, xxiii, 4, 54, 66, 69,
75, 86, 89, 90, 99, 106, 113,
140, 142, 145, 155, 166, 183.
See also Community
ethnic, 1, 12, 26, 36, 38, 61, 65,
66, 68, 69, 72, 75, 78, 79, 85,
87, 88, 91, 100, 102, 106,
107, 110, 112, 116, 119, 120,
122, 128, 132, 145, 147, 149,
152–154, 159, 166, 172, 187,
189, 196

ethnic group, 36, 107
ethnicity and gender, xxiii, 36, 66,
106, 140, 142, 145
ethnic minority/minorities. See
minority/minorities
ethnic relations, 149
Europe, 6, 13, 18, 146, 152
European(s), 7. See also Western
European clothes, 8, 13, 14, 53, 89
European clothing, 14, 53
European culture, xix
European dress, 13
European garment(s), 14
European style, 18
Exoticism, 13, 89, 91, 121–123
exotic, xxiii, 3, 5, 10, 81, 88, 101,
108, 122, 132, 151
exoticist, 92, 122, 145, 198
‘strategic exoticism’, 13, 123
F 144, 162
Fabric(s), 26, 32, 46, 72, 99, 125,
141, 151, 162, 172, 188
Fanon, Frantz, 29, 37, 65, 174, 197
Farwell, Byron, 20
Fashion, 3, 8, 14, 26, 37, 40, 52, 63,
65, 66, 68–70, 72, 74–78, 80,
81, 87, 90, 92, 94, 96–100, 107,
108, 110, 114, 120, 121, 125,
129, 131, 137, 144, 145, 152,
153, 157, 159, 164, 165, 169,
171–174, 182, 188, 189, 196,
198, 199. See also clothes; cloth-
ing; dress; garment(s); style
Asian. See Asian(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
INDEX 241
fashionable dress/clothes, 87, 108,
123
fashion and dress. See dress
fashion and feminist discourse. See
feminism
fashion industry, 108. See also cloth-
ing; textile(s)
fashion and literature, 69
fashion magazines, 97
fashion theory, xvii, xix, xx, xxv
fashion and Western-centrism, xix,
198
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
self-fashion(ing), 107, 145
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Western. See Western
Felski, Rita, 90, 103
Femininity, 36, 65, 66, 75, 81, 92, 93,
95, 99, 114, 124, 127, 130, 139,
Feminism, 95, 97, 113, 143, 146,
166, 167, 193, 198
feminism in reverse, 167
feminist, 95–97, 113, 131, 132,
137, 142, 144, 151, 166, 169,
190
feminist discourse and fashion, 97
Islamic feminism, 170
Western feminism, 143, 167
Fernández Vázquez, José Santiago,
101
Fernea, Elizabeth W., 151, 191
Ferrari, Alessandro, 192
Ferretter, Luke, 101, 102
Fetish, 10, 92–94
fetish/phobia, 10, 92–94
fetishisation, 61, 72, 82, 92, 93,
100, 153
fetishism, 94
Fisher, Michael H., 13
242 INDEX
Fish, Stanley Eugene, 121, 147
Footwear, 42, 97, 131
Beatle boots, 79
boots, 41, 42, 44, 73, 74, 79, 86,
97, 118, 136, 139, 176, 177,
186
Cuban heels, 79
Doc Martens, 97
high-heels, 125, 151
sandal(s), 35, 60, 82, 137, 139, 168
shoes, 8, 38, 45, 62, 73, 77, 86, 98,
132, 165, 168, 201
trainers, 118, 176
winkle-pickers, 39
Foster, Edward Morgan
A Passage to India, 54
Foucault, Michel, 161
Freedom, 8, 14, 47, 67, 72, 113, 116,
119, 120, 125, 127, 136, 139,
141, 142, 144, 152, 160, 168,
184, 190
female freedom, 113, 139, 142,
144, 152
Freud, Sigmund, 45, 160
Fryer, Peter, 5, 20, 24, 48, 54
Furman, Frida, 135
G Globalisation, 107, 121, 123, 145,
Gaiman, Neil, xxiv
Gandhi, Mahatma, xi, xii, 2, 11, 14,
35, 46, 49, 57
An Autobiography, 11
Garber, Marjorie, 95
Garment(s), 10, 15, 44, 49, 53, 84,
120, 124, 126, 130, 167, 174,
187. See also clothes; Clothing;
Dress; Fashion; Style
Asian. See Asian(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
South Asian. See South Asian
Western. See Western
Gaze, 5, 13, 15, 16, 19, 30, 37, 92,
94, 122, 134, 159–163, 176,
182, 199, 201
Geczy, Adam, 76, 174
Gender, 23, 36, 66, 68, 69, 78, 79,
85, 90, 92, 94, 95, 99, 112, 116,
132, 136, 144. See also Ethnicity
relations, 115, 126, 132
role(s), 117, 126, 127, 135, 136,
143, 145
Generational conflict, 77, 142
Genette, Gérard, 31, 32
Germanà, Monica, 159, 182
Gilbert, Francis, 158
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, 133
Gilroy, Paul, 4, 13, 63, 75, 117, 168
Glam rock, 72, 73
glam rocker(s), 71, 73
198
Gonsalves, Peter, 57
Gonsalves, Tahira, 147
Grace, Daphne, 191
Greaser(s), 40
Gregory, Gill, 116
Greifenhagen, Voker F., 166
Grewal, Inderpal, 139
Gunesekera, Romesh, Reef, 28, 43,
108
Gunning, Dave, 115, 116, 121, 124,
128, 136, 143, 188
Gupta, Sunetra
 INDEX 243

A Sin of Colour, 35 post-9/11, xii, 12, 49, 150, 152,

The Glassblower’s Breath, 108 155, 164, 174
Hindu, xiii, 124, 148
Hippie(s), 4, 41, 60, 71–74, 76, 80,
H 89, 96
Habit, 13, 15, 48, 70 Hiro, Dilip, 54
Hairstyle, 42, 73, 76, 136, 139 Hirsch, Marianne, 142
Afro, 96 History, 1, 4, 6, 16, 19, 23, 28, 31,
bob, 131 32, 39, 41, 43, 50, 52, 53, 62,
‘boyish’, 136 84, 120, 123, 139, 145, 153,
cropped, 162 197, 199, 200
long hair, 118 Hollander, Anne, xviii, xix, xxvi
Mohican, 76 Holmes, Colin, 54
short, 73 Holmes, Frederick M., 102
spiky, 74 Home, xii, 11, 15, 16, 26, 27, 33, 38,
Hall, Stuart, 16, 26, 36, 78, 81, 105 43, 47, 49, 50, 53, 62, 63, 66,
Hamilton, Ian, 37 75, 82, 109, 110, 115, 120, 125,
Hancock, Joseph H., xxvi 127, 130, 131, 133, 135, 140,
Hand-spun cloth. See Khadi 147, 152, 157, 162, 163, 171,
Hardy, Rebecca, 30, 135 172, 175, 176, 178, 179
Harvey, John, xxi homeland, 35, 36, 38, 53, 62, 63,
Hashmi, Alamgir, 69 130, 178, 179
Hat(s), 8, 11, 15, 25, 37–39, 42, 56, homework, 188
91, 112 homing desire, 178, 193
Lock’s, 37 Honeyford, Ray, xvi, xxv
straw, 38 Hooks, bell, 95, 161
top hat(s), 8 Hosain, Attia
wide-brim, 25 ‘Deep Roots’, 34
Headdress, 11, 12 Hourani, Albert, 151
Headgear, 11–13, 18 Huggan, Graham, 13, 85, 86, 91,
Headscarf/scarves, xii, 13, 150, 161, 108, 122, 123
169, 176. See also Veil Hughes, Clair, 38, 133, 199
Hebdige, Dick, 28, 39, 40, 72, 75 Huntington, Samuel P., 179
Helff, Sissy, xxiv, xxv Husain, Ed
Herbert, Caroline, 149 The Islamist, 179
Herman, Judith, 45 Hussain, Yasmin, 114
Hiddleston, Jane, 156, 159, 171, 175 Hutnyk, John, xxiv
Hijab, xviii, xxi, xxiii, 12, 49, 87, 100, Hybrid(ity), 54, 67, 69, 80, 85, 86,
110, 111, 146, 150, 151, 157, 109, 110, 119, 120, 128, 129,
163, 164, 173, 179, 189, 195, 169, 196, 198
200. See also Veil
244 INDEX
I colonial India, 2, 12, 48, 50, 52, 53
Identity, xii–xviii, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxv,
xxvi, 2, 4, 5, 13, 14, 18, 19,
26, 27, 35, 36, 43, 47, 49, 50,
54, 55, 64–69, 75, 79–85, 87,
88, 90, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103,
108–112, 114, 116–119, 128,
139, 140, 143, 146, 150–153,
156–158, 164, 166, 168, 169,
176–179, 183, 185–189, 194,
196–200
Asian. See Asian(s)
Bangladeshi. See Bangladeshi(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
cultural identity, 84, 139, 140, 177,
179
dress and identity, xvii, 18, 36, 49,
69, 119, 199
dress, body and identity, xvii, xviii,
199
Eastern. See Eastern
Indian. See Indian(s)
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
national identity, 18, 68, 100, 153
sartorial identities, 53, 54, 99, 198
Sikh. See Sikh(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Western. See Western
Ideology, 2, 9, 16, 26, 42, 72, 89, 170
Ilott, Sarah, 101
Immigration Acts, 28
Immigration. See Migration
Imperialism, 9, 16, 17
India, xxiii, 2–9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17,
20, 21, 24, 28–32, 35, 43–48,
50–56, 61, 62, 65, 69, 84,
87–89, 91, 100, 101, 103, 109,
120, 131, 144, 148, 154, 196,
197, 200
independence, 43, 132
Indian textile industry, 16, 46
Indian(s), 1, 2, 6–8, 13, 14, 18, 27,
29, 46, 49, 53, 79, 84. See also
South Asian
Indian clothes, 15, 50, 53
Indian clothing, 11, 49, 61
Indian community, 124
Indian culture, 131
Indian dress, 10, 35, 53
Indian fashion, 87, 107
Indian garment(s), 14, 61, 120
Indian identity, 14, 47, 49, 87
Indian style, 3, 34
Indian women, 131, 132
‘Indianness’, 13, 36, 47, 49, 83, 84,
87, 96, 109, 152
Indian subcontinent, 1, 3, 15, 24, 28,
34, 36, 108, 153, 159
Indo-Caribbean(s), xxiii, 24, 25, 27,
29
Industry, 46, 108, 122, 145, 157,
171, 188. See also clothing; fash-
ion; textile(s)
Innes, Catherine Lynette, 18
Irigaray, Luce, 148
Islam, 21, 112, 113, 149, 151, 156,
158, 164–166, 170, 175, 178,
179, 188, 190
radical Islam, 112, 178, 179
Islamic, xvi, 88, 96, 152, 156,
165–167, 170, 175, 177, 178,
191, 193. See also Muslim(s)
Islamic clothes, 96
Islamic community, 152
Islamic dress, 88
Islamic fashion, 152, 165
Islamic feminism. See Feminism
Islamic garment(s), 88, 96
Islamic style, 177

Islamophobia, 149, 150, 155, 158,
174, 176, 178
Islam, Syed Manzurul
The Mapmakers of Spitalfields, 158
Ivanchikova, Alla, 177
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, 31
Izzat, 131, 139
J Khadi, 2, 46, 50, 53
Jacket, 25, 42, 56, 73, 84, 97, 109,
135, 154, 157
leather, 39, 118, 128
Nehru, 84, 103
Jagger, Mick, 93
Jamah, 9
Jang, Fath Nawaz
An Indian Passage to Europe, 6
Janmohamed, Shelina Zahra
Love in a Headscarf, 150, 169, 170
Jeans, 41, 64, 65, 73, 94, 95, 165,
171, 176, 177
Jee, Bhagavat Simaji
Journal of a Visit to England in
1883, 10
Jefferson, Tony, 39
Jena, Seema, 87
Jewellery, 98
Jihad, 156, 175, 178
Jones, Carla, 107, 121, 123
Joseph, John Peter, 55
Joseph, Sarah, 195
Jouissance, 135
Joyce, James
Ulysses, xx
Jumper, 65, 66, 80, 86, 94, 120, 127.
See also Sweater(s)
K The Buddha of Suburbia, xxii, xxiii,
Kabeer, Naila, 157, 171, 172, 190
Kabir, Nahid Afrose, 192
INDEX 245
Kaftan(s), 60, 89
Kaleta, Kenneth C., 71, 74, 76, 77,
111, 112
Kalra, Virinder, 132
Kandiyoti, Deniz, 119
Kanwal, Aroosa, 150
Kaplan, Ann, 161
Kaplan, Caren, 139
Kaur, Raminder, xxiv
Khair, Tabish
Just Another Jihadi Jane, 155
Khaki, 2, 43, 44, 53, 118
Khalidi, Omar, 20
Khan, Naseem, 24
Khan, Sadiq, 195
Kipling, Rudyard, 84
Krishnaswamy, Revathi, 21
Kristeva, Julia, 138, 140
Kuhn, Cynthia, xxi, xxvi
Kumar, Prem, 55
Kunzle, David, 94
Kunzru, Hari, 62, 85, 153
My Revolutions, 99
The Impressionisist, 65, 85
Transmission, 154
Kureishi, Hanif, xi, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxiii,
xxv, xxvii, 13, 27, 31, 40, 41, 54,
55, 59–105, 108, 109, 111–113,
117, 152–154, 156
Gabriel’s Gift, 93, 154
interviews with, 78, 86, 91, 93, 99
Intimacy, 94
Love in a Blue Time, 154
My Beautiful Laundrette, xxv
My Ear at His Heart, 71, 98, 152
Something to Tell You, 154
The Black Album, 99, 111, 112, 156
The Body and Seven Stories, 154
13, 27, 40, 41, 54, 55, 59–104,
105, 108, 109, 112, 117, 131
246 INDEX

The Faber Book of Pop, 77 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 68

The Last Word, 154
‘Bradford’, xvi, xvii, xxv
‘My Son the Fanatic’, 111 M
‘The Nothing’, 154 MacCabe, Colin, 93
‘The Rainbow Sign’, 41, 63 MacInnes, Colin
Kureishi, Rafiushan City of Spades, xxiv
‘The Redundant Man’, 71 Mahomet, S. D.
Kurta, 177 The Travels, 6
Make-up, 75, 84, 85, 94, 112, 134
Malabari, B. M., 7, 8, 15–17, 21
L The Indian Eye on English Life, 6
Lacan, Jacques, 194 Malik, Ayisha
Lahiri, Shompa, 14 Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged, 155
Lamming, George Malik, Kenan, 149
The Emigrants, 54 Malkani, Gautam
Lane, Harriet, 30 Londonstani, 152, 154
La Rue, Danny, 81 Mannur, Anita, xxiv
Laver, James, xxvi Manzoor, Sarfraz, 147
Lengha, 124, 125 Marginalisation, 38, 76, 122, 160
Lesbian(s), 94, 97 Markandaya, Kamala, xi, xviii, 2, 11,
Leshkowich, Ann Marie, 107, 121, 19, 23–59, 89
123 Possession, 31
Levine, Amy-Jill, 139 Some Inner Fury, 31, 46
Lewis, Gail, 25 The Nowhere Man, xi, xxiii, 11, 19,
Liao, Pei-Chen, 154 23–59, 63, 65
Liberalism, 112 Marks and Spencer (M&S), 192
Lindisfarne, Nancy, 193 Marriage, 65, 127, 132, 133, 137,
Literature, 1, 31, 32, 41, 66, 69, 77, 138, 157, 170, 186
78, 108, 150, 196, 200, 201. See Masculinity, 40, 75, 81, 92, 93, 95,
also dress; fashion 99, 126, 136
British, 113 Masks, 37, 65, 82–84, 109. See also
British Asian, 113 Camouflage
South Asian diaspora, 31 masquerade/masquerading, 67, 82,
Lojo-Rodríguez, Laura, 194 109
London, 3, 5–9, 25, 27, 32, 39, 40, Mass culture, 70
69, 76, 77, 83, 100, 118, 122, Maxey, Ruth, 158
155, 159, 163, 167, 171, 172 McLeod, John, 62, 109
London bombings, 149, 155. See also McNeil, Peter, xxvi
7/7 McRobbie, Angela, 26
Loomba, Ania, 122 McRoy, Anthony, 111
Lungi, 108, 181 Mead, Matthew, 54
Lurie, Alison, 61, 160 Meer, Nasar, xv, 190

Mehmood, Tariq
Song of Gulzarina, 155
Melville, Pauline ‘The Truth is in the
Clothes’, xxvi
Merali, Arzu, 4, 150
Mercer, Kobena, 60, 86, 95
Mernissi, Fatima, 151
Merwanjee, Hirjeebhoy, 6, 10, 16, 17
Journal of a Residence of Two Years
and a Half in Great Britain
(with Jehangeer Nowrojee), 6
Metaphor(s), 35, 50, 127, 129, 140,
182
Mieszkowski, Sylwia, 141
Migration, 6, 19, 24, 26, 34, 51, 61,
154, 158, 159
anti-immigration, 28, 41, 105
immigration, 34, 153
migrant, xxiii, 7, 12, 17, 19, 25, 28–
30, 41, 48, 50, 52, 53, 62, 69,
83, 89, 92, 100, 106, 116–118,
130, 157–159, 171, 172, 195
return migration, 61. See also Return
transmigrant, 23
Miller, Daniel, 129
Mimicry, 37, 65, 89
Minh-ha, Trinh Thi, 146
Minority/minorities, xvi, xxv, 13, 25,
28, 63, 105, 106, 111, 117, 120,
132, 144, 195, 197
ethnic minority/minorities, 120
minority culture, 106
Mirza, Heidi Safia, 147
Mirza, Munira, 118
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 152
Mishra, Vijay, 23, 35, 109
Modeen, Mirza Itesa, xi, 9, 10, 21
Modesty, 111, 119, 139
Modood, Tariq, 105, 149
Mod(s), 40, 41, 56, 71
Mohanti, Prafulla, 7
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 113
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 69, 89
INDEX 247
Moors, Annelies, 110, 150, 152
Morey, Peter, 179
Morgan, Robin, 113
Morrow, Fiona, 117
Motherhood, 116, 128, 133, 137, 147
mother—daughter nexus, 141, 143
Mourning dress, 124
Mukharji, T. N., 6, 9, 16–18
A Visit to Europe, 6, 9
Mukherjee, Bharati
Jasmine, 129
Mullan, John, 158
Multiculturalism, xiv, xvi, xxv, 121,
147, 152, 180
boutique multiculturalism, 121
critique of, xiv, xxv, 117–118, 159
Mulvey, Laura, 176
Museums, xviii, xx
Muslim(s), 12, 65, 82, 83, 87, 110,
152, 153
Muslim body, 195
Muslim clothes, 4, 66, 87
Muslim clothing, 150, 177
Muslim community, 111, 149, 166,
174
Muslim culture, 167
Muslim dress, 150–152, 163, 177
Muslim fashion, 177
Muslim garment(s), 153
Muslim identity, 111, 149, 150,
158, 166
Muslims, South Asian, 149
Muslim style, 177
Muslim women, 65, 87, 150, 153,
167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 183,
190
Muslim women and the labour mar-
ket, 157, 170, 171, 188
post-9/11, 12, 149, 150, 152, 153,
155, 156, 158, 164, 168, 173,
174, 176
‘visibly Muslim’, 177
See also Veil
248 INDEX
‘Muslimness’, 150, 155, 165
Myerhoff, Barbara, 125
N O’Riley, Michael F., 43
Nag, Dulali, 106
Naipaul, V.S., xi, 7, 23, 25, 27, 39
The Enigma of Arrival, 7
Half a Life, 25, 39
The Middle Passage, 25
The Mimic Men, 25
Naked(ness), 94, 180, 199
Nandy, Ashis, 21
Naoroji, Dadhabai, 11
Nashville Rooms, The (pub), 102
Nasta, Susheila, 17, 30
Nation, 24, 114, 168, 174
National Front, 59
National Indian Association, 14
Nehru jacket. See Jacket(s)
New Romantics, 76
New Wave, 4, 51, 74, 174
New Woman, 8
Nielsen, Jorgen, 190
Niessen, Sandra, xix, xxvi
9/11, 19, 146, 149, 150, 152,
154–157, 173, 174, 176, 181,
195. See also September 11
Niqab, 179
Noble, Denise, xviii
Nostalgia, 51
Nowrojee, Jehangeer, 6, 10, 16, 17
Journal of a Residence of Two Years
and a Half in Great Britain
(with Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee),
6 Pastorelli Ashgate, Sabrina, 192
O 133, 136–139, 142–145, 147,
Oddey, Alison, 148
Odeh, Lama Abu, 191
Oldham riots, 158
O’Reilly, 137
Orientalism, 10, 103
Orientalising, 2, 92, 122, 141, 174
Orientalist, 2, 10, 19, 84, 92
Ortiz, Fernando, xxiv
O’Shea-Meddour, Wendy, 88, 96
Other, 5, 12, 14, 19, 33, 36, 37, 51,
56, 58, 99, 107, 132, 160
‘Otherising’, 29
‘Otherness’, 12
Oubechou, Jamel, 91
P
Pahlavi, Reza, 191
‘Paki bashing’, 28
Pakistan, 24
East Pakistan, 24, 156. See also
Bangladesh
Pakistani(s), 63, 144, 195
Pakistani clothes, 144
Pakistani clothing, 144, 157
Pakistani community, 159
Pakistani culture, 144, 159
Pakistani garment(s), 157
Pakistani women, 63, 144
Pally, Marcia, 99
Pandian, T.B., 7, 8
England to an Indian Eye, 6
Papastergiadis, Nikos, 159
Parameswaran, Uma, 31, 55
Parmar, Pratibha, 147
Parry, Benita, 124
Parthasarthi, G. N., 55
Patriarchy (patriarchal), 87, 110, 111,
113, 115, 119, 126, 128, 130,
151, 159, 164, 167–171, 181,
186, 190
Paul Smith (brand), 111, 127

Peiss, Kathy, 26
Pellettiere, Laura, 150
Pereira-Ares, Noemí, 54, 118, 159,
161, 176, 192
Perfect, Michael, 157, 177, 193
Performance, 4, 10, 68, 81, 82,
84–86, 88, 90, 93, 99, 103, 124,
125, 147, 160
Performative, 118, 152, 183, 185,
194
performative and pedagogic, 185
performativity, 35, 84, 88, 90, 99,
109, 177, 196
Pillai, G. Parameswaran, 7–11, 15
London and Paris through Indian
Spectacles, 6, 8
Polhemus, Ted, 26, 40, 56, 72, 102,
103
Pop, 61, 63, 70, 77–79, 91, 93, 99,
103, 112
Popular culture, 70, 78, 94, 100, 106,
197
Post-9/11, 11, 12, 17, 19, 49, 146,
149, 150, 152–158, 164, 168,
173, 174, 176, 178, 187, 198.
See also September 11
Postcolonial, xiv, 9, 12, 16, 17, 20, 24,
43, 49, 50, 52, 53, 84, 89, 101,
108, 118, 146, 153, 196
postcolonialism, 122
Postmodern, 68, 77, 87, 108, 152
Post-war period, 6, 19, 28, 30, 39, 48,
73, 78, 100, 121
Powell, Enoch, 48, 54
Powellism, 59, 124
Prasad, Madhusudan, 55
Pratt, M. L., 1, 18, 200
Procter, James, 9, 25, 26, 28, 54, 59,
103, 117, 172
Psychedelic, 71–73, 102
Puar, Jasbir K., 2, 11
Punjabi pyjama(s)
INDEX 249
panjabi-pyjamas, 177
Punjabi suit, 100, 101, 118–121, 138
Punk(s), 71, 74–77, 88, 90, 93, 102,
103
Purdah, 164, 171, 182, 193
Puwar, Nirmal, 107, 153
Pyjama(s), 64, 88, 89, 97. See also
Punjabi pyjamas
Q
Qur’an, 151, 167, 182, 190, 194
R
Racialisation, xviii, 30, 111, 174, 197
and dress/clothes, 30, 173, 197
Racism, xv, xxv, 19, 27, 28, 30, 31,
38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 51, 52, 59,
60, 63, 105, 107, 116, 122, 163,
166, 175
anti-racism, 49, 60, 107
cultural racism, 30, 38
‘differentialist’ racism (Balibar), xxv
‘new racism’, xv, xxv, 48
racial abuse/discrimination, 50, 51,
59, 60, 65, 91
racial attacks, 39
racial schema (epidermal/sartorial),
29, 37, 174, 197, 198
and religion, xv, 149, 155
sartorial racism, 19
Raghuram, Parvati, 125
Rahnavard, Zahrā, 151, 191
Railton, Diane, 70
Rajan, Gita, 144
Ram, Jhinda, 8–10, 13, 14, 16
My Trip to Europe, 6, 13
Ramdin, Ron, 20
Ranasinha, Ruvani, 25, 32, 61, 108,
111, 113, 114, 116, 126, 130,
131, 143, 147, 153
250 INDEX
Randhawa, Ravinder, 67, 110, 113
The Coral Strand, 65
Hari-jan, 47, 107, 108, 110
A Wicked Old Woman, 61, 62, 67,
113
Rangaswamy, Padma, 24
Rani, Sunita, 34, 55
Rao, Raja, xxiv
Kanthapura, 46
Rashid, E., 179
Rastafarian, 27, 77
Ratti, Rakesh, 138
Ray, Sangeeta, 86
Reichl, Susanne, 80, 101, 116, 123,
124, 140, 143, 147
Resistance, 13, 47, 49, 118, 150, 152,
166, 176, 191, 196, 198
dress, as, 47, 49, 150, 152, 166,
176, 191, 196, 198
Retailers, 106, 108, 121, 172
Return, xxii, 15, 27, 43, 45, 48, 50,
53, 61, 63, 72, 88, 102, 143,
146, 151, 152, 165, 167, 181,
191
return and diaspora, 5, 31, 53, 181
return migration, 61, 179
Ribeiro, Aileen, xxvi
Rich, Adrienne, 128, 130, 147
Ricoeur, Paul, 44, 45, 53
Right of Way (AWWW collection),
113
Roach-Higgins, Mary, xix
Rocker(s), 39, 40, 71, 73, 93
Rock’n’roll, 40, 76
Rønning, Anne Holden, xxv
Rooney, Anne, 101
Ross, Michael L., 66, 85–87, 91, 101,
102
Rouse, Elizabeth, 95, 96
Rude boys, 56
Rushdie, Salman, 2, 23, 35–37, 54,
80, 83, 100, 108, 110, 111, 119,
149
Fury, 31, 46
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 99
Imaginary Homelands, 36
Rushdie affair, 111, 149
The Satanic Verses, 28, 37, 61, 64,
65, 68, 111
Shalimar the Clown, 154
Shame, 129
S
Sabin, Roger, 102
Sacido, Romero, 141
Safran, William, xxiv
Sagar, Gyani Sundar Singh, 12
Sahota, Sunjeev
Ours Is the Street, 156
Said, Edward, 9, 10, 21, 196
Samaroo, Brinsley, 54
Sánchez-Arce, Ana María, 85, 91, 103,
121, 122
Sandhu, Sukhdev, 84, 103, 158
Sandy, Duncan, 48, 59
Sangha, Jasjit K., 147
Sari, xiii, xxiv, xxvi, 14, 20, 29, 35, 42,
55, 65, 89, 106–108, 114, 118,
122, 129, 130, 134, 137, 140,
147, 154, 162, 163, 166–169,
178, 182, 183, 185–188, 190,
193
pullau, 129
Sartorialisation, 37, 198
sartorial racial schema, 174, 197,
198
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 161
Satapathy, Amrita, 20
Savage, Jon, 77
Savile Row, 37, 39, 52, 56

Scarves, 87, 90. See also Headscarves
Schick, Irvin, 151
Schiller, Ninna, 23
Schoene, Berthold, 55, 69, 85, 103
Schulze-Engler, Frank, xxv
Second World War, 5, 6, 23, 24, 32,
34. See also Post-war period
Self, the, 17, 85
Self-harm, 117, 135
Selvon, Samuel, 23, 27
The Lonely Londoners, 25, 27–29
Moses Ascending, 25
Moses Migrating, 25, 27
Semiotic, 46, 144
Sen, Simonti, 20
September 11, 105, 111, 154, 174,
175. See also Post-9/11
7/7, 149, 150, 155
Sewing homework, 188
Shahraz, Qaisra
‘A Pair of Jeans’, 64, 66
Shahtús, 62
Shalwaar-kameez, 55, 101
Shankar, Shalini, 146
Shawl(s), 101, 153
Sheikh, Farhana, 61, 63, 66
The Red Box, 60, 62, 64, 65
Sheridan, Lorraine P., 190
Shields, Carol, 79
Shirt(s), xxv, 35, 44, 47, 64, 71,
73–75, 79, 82, 83, 87, 95, 101,
111, 123, 147
t-shirt(s), 64, 75, 87, 150, 165
Shoes. See Footwear
Shorts, 64, 87, 101
Sikh(s), xiii, 2, 12, 149, 150
community, 2, 12, 60
identity, 2
post-9/11, 12, 150
turban, 2, 12, 21, 60, 196
Sinha, Mrinalini, 21
INDEX 251
Skin, 10, 27, 29, 36, 56, 67, 77, 85,
109, 132, 174
Skinhead(s), 29, 40–42, 56, 65, 71,
75, 97, 101, 122
Skirts, 96, 178, 180, 181
mini, 66, 96, 128, 162, 163, 179
Skullcap, 100, 159, 176
Slavery, 54
Smith, Zadie, xxiv, 27, 62
White Teeth, 27, 62
Smock, 73, 96
Sorabji, Cornelia, 6, 14, 21
South Africa, 11
South Asian(s), 1–6, 11, 12, 14–17,
19, 23, 24, 27–31, 36, 42,
50, 53, 59–62, 64, 69, 100,
105–109, 113, 114, 116, 117,
123, 128, 135, 138, 140, 143,
149, 195–200. See also Diaspora;
Asian(s); Bangladeshi(s); Eastern;
Indian(s); Muslim(s); Pakistani(s);
Sikh(s)
South Asian clothes, 4, 11, 14, 19,
29, 30, 60, 106, 110, 121, 198
South Asian clothing, 1, 3, 14, 53,
106, 110, 121
South Asian community, 6, 15, 64,
106, 114, 121, 123, 128, 143
South Asian culture, 38, 108,
127–129, 138, 168, 185
South Asian dress, 3, 4, 19, 29,
53, 64, 108, 109, 123, 153,
197–199
South Asian fashion, 100, 106, 181,
198
South Asian garment(s), 29, 124,
181
South Asian identity, 4
South Asian style, 4
South Asian women, 18, 61, 113,
114, 117, 127, 132, 135, 183
252 INDEX
Soyinka, Wole, 26
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 21, 23,
42, 132, 146, 153, 171, 193
Spooner, Catherine, xxvi
Srivastava, Atima, 65, 109
Looking for Maya, 108, 109
Transmission, 40, 62, 65, 109
Stallybrass, Peter, 70
Steele, Valerie, xxvi
Stein, Mark, 69, 86, 101, 147, 157,
187
Stereotype(s), 2, 27, 87, 98, 110, 114,
115, 132, 133, 156, 162, 169
Storey, John, 70
Street style. See Style
Style, xvii, xviii, 4, 25, 26, 35, 37, 39,
40, 41, 53, 56, 71, 72, 74, 76,
79, 80, 90, 92, 95, 97, 101, 108,
110, 119, 151, 162, 172, 177,
191
Asian. See Asian(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
Eastern. See Eastern
European. See European(s)
Indian. See Indian(s)
Islamic. See Islamic
literary style, 18, 116, 155
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
street style, 177
style as fashion, 3, 72, 90, 97, 110
Western. See Western
Subculture, 39–41, 56, 70–73, 75, 76,
78, 79, 92, 94, 99, 100, 102, 197
Subversion, 83, 89
subversive, 17, 56, 79, 85, 87, 89,
99, 128
Suit(s), 25, 26, 34, 37, 50, 55, 56,
66, 88, 101, 112, 121, 124, 125,
127, 131, 138, 144, 160
Armani suit, 127
Savile Row, 37, 39, 52
tropical suit(s), 25, 27
zoot suit(s), 25, 26, 56
Suleri, Sara, 146
Swadeshi movement, 46, 57
Swastikas, 102
Sweaters, 80. See also Jumpers
sweatshirt, 95, 168
Syal, Meera, xi, xii, xiii, 30, 42, 54, 55,
60, 62–64, 66, 100, 105–148,
154
Anita and Me, xi, 42, 55, 62–64,
66, 102, 114–117, 119, 120,
122, 130, 132, 134
Bhaji on the Beach (screenplay), 130
‘Finding My Voice’, 114
The House of Hidden Mothers, 114,
134, 154
‘Influences’, 89, 177
interviews with, 30, 116, 135, 147
Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, xii,
xxiii, 54, 100, 105–148
My Sister-Wife, 144
‘PC–GLC’, 63, 106, 114
‘The Traveller’, 113, 127, 143–145
Symbol, xx, 2, 8, 18, 26, 40, 46, 50,
75, 88, 95, 96, 102, 111, 126,
151, 152, 154, 162, 164, 168,
174
symbolic, 9, 25, 45
symbolism, 18, 46, 124
T
Tarlo, Emma, 2–4, 19, 20, 46, 55–57,
89, 103, 110, 146, 150–153,
165, 166, 169, 187, 191–193,
200
 INDEX 253

Taylor, Matthew, 192 111, 120, 136, 148, 169, 172,

Teddy Boys, xi, 39, 40, 56, 71 181, 184, 187. See also Jeans
Teds, 39, 41, 56 baggy, 20, 82, 172
Terror, 150, 155, 158, 174, 176, 180, cords, 80, 82
193 drainpipe, 56
terrorism, 149, 152, 155 flares, 71, 86
‘War on Terror’, 155, 158, 174, high-waisted, 25, 56
176, 180, 193 Lycra, 136, 140
Textile(s), 16, 19, 46, 60, 61, 62, 80, tight, 25, 32, 111
100, 141, 145, 153, 157, 171, velvet, 71, 74
188, 189 Turban, 2, 3, 9–13, 21, 29, 89, 118,
textile industry, 46, 171. See also 123, 126, 178. See also Sikh(s)
clothing; Fashion Twigg, Julia, 135
textile industry, India, 16, 46
Thandi, Shinder S., 20, 24, 54, 60,
106, 111 U
Thatcher, Margaret, 28, 54, 76, 123 Uganda, 24, 57, 108, 146
Thomas, Susie, 69, 83, 86, 92, 93 Underwear, 162, 185
Three Tuns, The (pub), 71 Uniform, 2, 8, 20, 32, 44, 47, 127,
Tölölyan, Khachig, xxiv 134, 157, 166, 181
Tradition, 5, 13, 17, 31, 46, 69, 108, British army, 2
110, 124–126, 130, 131, 139, Union Jack, 41, 43, 50, 168, 169,
143, 145, 151, 158, 169, 181, 173, 174, 187
190, 194, 198 Unisex clothing, 95
Trainers. See Footwear Universalism/universalist, 113, 143
Transculturalism, xiii, xiv, xxiv, 13 Upstone, Sara, 63, 116, 147, 158
transcultural, 17, 69, 79, 87, 107, Usandizaga, Arancha, 194
109, 115, 118, 123, 170, 174,
187, 189
transculturality, 69, 169, 196 V
transculture, 118, 152 Veblen, Thorstein, xxvi
Transnational, 62, 69, 80, 143, 197 Veil, 3, 12, 13, 21, 34, 87, 150–153,
Trauma, 34, 45, 62, 109, 119, 133, 161–164, 169, 170, 180, 182,
149, 198, 199, 201. See also 183, 187, 190, 191, 193, 194,
Diaspora 198. See also Hijab
Travel writing, 7 Judeo-Christian tradition, 13
Trivedi, Lisa, 57 post-9/11, 12, 150
Trivedi, Parita, 147 unveil, 18, 160, 174
Trousers, 21, 25, 27, 32, 34, 47, 56, Vertovec, Steven, xxiv
66, 71, 74, 75, 79, 82, 101, 109, Vest, 71, 83, 184
Victorian period, travel writing, 6
254 INDEX
Victorian underworld, 8
Victoria, Queen, 14
Visram, Rozina, 5, 6, 15, 20
W 96, 109, 115, 120, 122, 146
Waistcoat, 79, 83
Walker, Alice, 129
Warner, Marina, xxiv
‘War on Terror’. See Terror, 155, 158,
174, 176, 180, 193
Watson, Helen, 151, 166, 191
Weber, Donald, 69
Welsch, Wolfgang, 88, 187
Werbner, Pnina, 55
West, the, 24, 29, 65, 118, 122, 149,
152, 173, 175, 179, 198
Western, xv
Western-centric, 164, 198
Western-centrism, xix
Western clothes, 14, 34, 35, 43,
64–66, 87, 89, 118, 120, 125,
162–164, 169, 176, 183, 190
Western clothing, 164
Western culture, 18, 80, 136, 151,
164, 168, 184
Western dress, 13, 109, 163
Western fashion, 14, 65, 163
Western feminism. See Feminism
Western garment(s), 64, 118, 160
Western style, 34, 88, 118, 131,
142, 184
Western women, 160, 180
West Indians, 24, 26, 28, 56
Wheatle, Alex
Brixton Rock, 27
White, xii, xxii, xxiv, 3, 4, 9, 10, 15,
16, 18, 27, 32, 37, 38, 42, 46,
47, 49, 52, 56, 57, 62, 64, 65,
70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 85–
89, 92, 93, 99, 100, 106, 107,
109–112, 114, 116, 120–123,
132, 134, 143, 148, 152, 154,
159, 161, 163, 172–174, 177,
183, 184, 186, 193, 197
‘Whiteness’, 26, 30, 75, 76, 77, 88,
white, in relation to ‘whiteness’, 75,
77, 96, 146
Wickramasinghe, Nira, 20
Wilson, Amrit, 147, 148
Wilson, Elizabeth, 40, 92
Winder, Robert, 54
Windrush narratives, 27
‘With-it’, being, 61, 89
Wolf, Naomi, 97
Women, 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18,
20, 21, 26, 32, 36, 42, 43, 45,
65, 67, 77, 81, 87, 94, 96, 101,
104, 106, 107, 111–114, 116–
118, 123, 126, 127, 130, 132,
133, 135, 137–139, 142, 143,
146–148, 150–153, 157, 159,
160, 163–174, 177, 179–181,
183, 188–191, 193, 194, 197
Asian. See Asian(s)
British. See British
British Asian. See British Asian(s)
British Muslim. See British
Muslim(s)
Eastern. See Eastern
Indian. See Indian(s)
Muslim. See Muslim(s)
South Asian. See South Asian(s)
Western. See Western
Woodward, Kathleen, 134
X
Xenophobia, 149
 INDEX 255

Y Zine, Jasmin, 191

Yaqin, Amina, 179 Žižek, Slavoj, 134, 160, 184, 186
Young, Robert C. J., 16, 191 Zoot suit. See Suit
Yousaf, Nahem, 69, 71, 78, 83, 108
Yuval-Davis, Nira, 36, 140

Z
Zaheer, Sajjad
A Night in London, 8
Zamora Cabot, F. Javier, 192
Ziggy Stardust, 73