National integration of a kind!

In the early sixties in the one ox town where I lived, barring the equivalent of the French nobility in the town, people moved about naked waist up. The first of saris in Kerala was known as chela. It was always of red colour and the length did not matter except when it had to be spread out to dry after a wash…many owned only one chela. While that one was drying on the shores of the pond the nubile wearers had to swim in the buff until the chela was dried. Unfortunately the dressing patterns have changed over the years forcing less exposure because of more exposure.

The exodus of Malayalees to the ‘gulf’ spread over a period from 1972 to 1983. If Haryana had at least one member from a ‘feuding’ family in the Army there was at least one ‘saviour’ in the gulf from each family in Kerala by the late 1980s. The off shore malayalees pumped in the much required cash to rejuvenate the perennially impoverished state economy if ever there was one.  The state then had no real industry to boast – not even the currently thriving “tourism” economy in the God’s own country. So it was in the late 1980s during one of my infrequent visits to my erstwhile ‘country’ where I had rubbed shoulders with the Gods and partook in the ‘toddy’ rituals which followed local acts of appeasement of deities known to the world as ‘Theyyam’, ‘Thira’ et al, I found that most women wore ‘maxis’. Maxi as is known popularly is a loose and colourful dress resembling the outer cassocks worn by the Christian clergy. This initial import from gulf into Kerala, the maxi, served as an all-purpose dress for all occasions. Women wore it to bed as well as to attend weddings!!! The general refrain those days was ‘uski maxi meri maxi se rangeen kaise?’ (hindi translation from Malayalam for better assimilation and picturisation in the vein of the popular ad echoing similar sentiments). The similarity of the dress with the traditional mundu (which is a white lungi, for better understanding by the uninitiated) that when donning either one had the option of wearing nothing underneath, for that forever liberated feeling. But the similarity ended there. The maxi can never be as elegant and appealing as a mundu.

These days salwar-kameez is the National dress of all Indian women! There was a time in the South when the unmarried wore half sari, the married wore sari and grandmothers wore the long sari(nine yards)…now everybody wears salwar-kameez in the South as the women  have been doing for ages in the Punjab…