Reform and Sartorial Styles in 19Th-Century Bengal (Photo Feature‪)‬

Reformers in 19th-century Bengal were greatly concerned with upper- and middle-class women's situation--what we now refer to as the "status of women": Rammohun Roy's stand on sati, debates on the age of consent, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar's campaign for widow remarriage, acrimonious discussions around upper-caste kulin polygamy, and, more positively, the need to educate girls and indeed women, occupied the bhadralok, the gentry of a rapidly urbanizing Bengal. For the subjects of such prolix debates to be visible in an ambience that now stressed decorum and respectability, it became essential to "dress" appropriately. Traditionally, Bengali women wore only a single piece of cloth wound dexterously around their bodies; there were no undergarments--but elaborate ornaments were not unusual. After the middle of the 19th century, female dress reform became an issue, a "movement" about which little was known until quite recently. While the more orthodox sections were not for any change in women's dress and wished to maintain parda (purdah), the reformist sections were considerably exercised over the issue of appropriate female attire. Apart from accepting the new wisdom on norms of decency, they were aware that girls' and women's education and their exposure to the world outside the home were severely impaired by what was deemed to be inappropriate and inadequate attire. (1) Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath's reformist father, worried about how women and girls from his family and others similarly placed were to be presented in public. In the 1870s, his apprehensions were considerably allayed by the return of daughter-in-law Jnanadanandini from Bombay "dressed in a civil and elegant attire in imitation of Gujarati women" (2) (figure 1). Wife of Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to join the Indian Civil Service (ICS), Jnanadanandini had been a child bride (she was married at seven) and had grown up in the rambling Tagore home in Calcutta's Jorasanko. (3) She did much to introduce the women of the large extended Tagore family to a new dress code and, with a few others, was soon at the forefront of the sartorial reform movement.