| Devangshu Datta: Charge of chaddi brigade | |
| Devangshu Datta / New Delhi February 14, 2009, 0:55 IST | |
Buddy Holly was the first deity of the chaddi pantheon. Elvis Presley followed close on Holly’s heels. Their successor, Jim Morrison is reckoned to be the high god with other luminaries like Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain well up there in terms of chaddi-quotient.
Pramod Muthalik as a chaddi-recipient looks distinctly odd in this company. He doesn’t look or talk like a rock-star. Nevertheless, as of today, he is the possessor of many, many pairs of possibly-used, definitely-pink unmentionables. Enough, in fact, for him to turn his party office in Hubli into a lingerie discount store.
Unlike Morrison, or Jagger, Muthalik is not receiving these spontaneous donations from his adoring fans as he struts on stage. In fact, Muthalik doesn’t have many fans if one goes by the fact that his party’s candidates all lost their deposits in the last Karnataka Assembly elections.
What he does have is chaddis, donated by women across India, who have been disgusted by his methods of registering disapproval of what women choose to do with their free time and money. Perhaps he can make enough selling those frilly nothings to fund his next election campaign.
In sending chaddis to the Ram Sene, the Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women has found an interesting way to stay within the Gandhian chalk-circle of non-violent protest. It may appear pointless to send women’s chaddis to an obscure obscurantist but then Muthalik is himself leading a pointless campaign.
Not incidentally, the CPLFW, which was founded on February 5, already claims a much larger following than Muthalik, who’s been around for years. The CPLFW’s been quite clever at attracting attention with its cyber campaign. Unlike Muthalik’s misnamed Ram Sene, it is staying well within the bounds of law. The chaddi donation has been effective in that it has exposed Muthalik to sufficient ridicule for him to call off his V-Day protest in Bangalore.
It’s interesting to note how often apparel features in socio-political movements. There were Garibaldi’s Redshirts who unified Italy and Evita’s Shirtless ones who brutalised Argentina. There was the “half-naked fakir” exhorting everyone to spin their own and burn foreign factory-made ones.
More specifically, women’s clothes form important footnotes in history. Mid-Victorian Britain had its blue-stockings, who believed in the education and emancipation of women. Actually, they covered their stockings with bloomers that allowed enough freedom of movement to ride bicycles. Their daughters and grand-daughters were the suffragettes who agitated for the vote.
Around the time the suffragettes won the vote in Western Europe, Kemal Ataturk sparked off a social revolution when he decreed that all prostitutes in Turkey must positively wear the chador at all times in public. This gave respectable Turkish women plenty of incentive to refuse to wear the chador anytime.
Then, there were the bra-burners of the feminist movement. There are the Red Stockings of modern Denmark who have effectively ensured at least half of Denmark’s MPs are always female.
The pink-chaddi movement, therefore, follows in the wake of much history and tradition. But as with all the other social movements that have been associated with clothes, the clothes are just symbolic. Nor does the CPLFW have much to do with anybody wanting to go to pubs.
This campaign is really about the right of any citizen to do what he or she wants with his or her spare time and money. There is an old Indian saying that translates: “If it’s not your father’s money, who are you to tell me how to spend it?” That is the tradition that the CPLFW embodies. That is really the only tradition that matters in this discourse — don’t miss it for the chaddis.
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