Whenever I hear the words ‘ethnic wear,’ I reach for the nearest clothes hangar. Being in a garments store recently, a hangar was, indeed, close at hand. But I refrained from hooking someone with it simply because, the shop being in Khan Market, it was impossible for me to distinguish between customers and the store’s employees.
It may have been a close call for at least one member of India’s thriving retail industry. But the term ‘ethnic wear’ pisses me off no end. What ‘ethnic wear’? I know that you know that I know what it means — sari, salwar kameez, choli, sherwani, bandhgala, Khan suit…. Like light, I know ‘ethnic wear’ when I see it. But for a voluble section of the country — which, in its continued quest to be a nation of virtue-signallers, recently took to the ludicrous binary of ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ in English, thereby quietly emphasising the perceived dowdiness of the latter against the perceived spunkiness of the former — their perfunctory use of the term ‘ethnic wear’ sounds not just preposterous, but downright embarrassing.
‘Ethnic,’ as an adjective, merely denotes belonging to an ethnicity, a population group or subgroup sharing a common genetic descent and/or cultural background. So ‘Germanic’ is as good a description of ‘ethnic’ as ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ or ‘Nordic’. And yet, somehow, you enter a store — here in India — and there’s a section devoted to ‘ethnic wear’. In India.
I’m not one of those ‘hyper-cultural purity’ patriots who want to change the script in this column to Devnagari, or has long discussions with people about why ‘It will always be Bombay, never Mumbai, for me!’ — as if the city cares if you called it Constantinople or some other bul. But the shirt, trouser, dress, skirt, shorts, tracksuit that we — especially men in our cities — overwhelmingly have been wearing since the late 20th century either becomes the default ‘wear’ in our stores, or, quite correctly, ‘Western wear’ — while the aforementioned rest get the ‘ethnic wear’ treatment. What are we? The National Geographic magazine catering to an Idaho subscriber?
I understand the value of classifications. While there can be much methane-based emissions till the chattering classes come home about the vacuity and pointlessness of ‘artificial’ genres, it’s certainly easier for me to search for The Offspring’s number, ‘Self-Esteem’, on Spotify in the ‘punk rock’ section instead of under ‘reggae’, ‘classic rock’, ‘jazz’ or ‘Hindi’, than trawling through a category-less reservoir of songs.
Choice of cuisines, too, has common sense stirred well in it. You think about whether you’ll go for ‘Mughlai’, ‘Bengali’, ‘Japanese’, ‘Continental’, ‘Italian’, ‘Pizza’, or ‘Burgers’… tonight. Now imagine throwing ‘Ethnic’ into this buffet — code for ‘Indian’…
The problem is that because of mass media and past history — itself a subset of mass media — we tend to see ourselves through the eyes of outsiders. In our context, that’s pretty much the Anglophonic West. Britons (and, say, Spaniards) are perfectly right calling the region that encompasses the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Iraq, ‘Middle East’. The US, straddling both the Pacific and Atlantic, are also perfectly fine calling it that.
But why on Earth should Indians in India call West Asia ‘Middle East’ — when it doesn’t lie to our east but our west? That’s like calling your mother-in-law ‘darling’ just because your easily-influencing father-in-law calls her so. My beef with ‘ethnic wear’ is the same. It would be improbable to find a store in multicultural New York, for instance, to have an ‘ethnic’ section displaying Zara, Mango, H&M, Armani, Calvin Klein apparel. Why should they? The ‘ethnic wear’ tag in Indian stores has whiffs of the same Orientalist tag that ‘Natives’ did to ‘Europeans Only’ clubs. Except, we don’t even have the comfort of racism to fall back on. Not self-racism anyway.
So, peeps in the retail industry, drop that ridiculously ‘sola topee-Prince Philip khush hua’ label of ‘ethnic wear’ from your shops and online stores. If you have to set it apart from ‘wear’ (read: shirt-trousers, etc), just call it ‘Indian wear’. Or, even better, nothing at all. It’s doubtful that any customer wanting to buy a sweatshirt will be rummaging through churidars.