British fashion icon Zandra Rhodes often wonders why South Asians in the West prefer jeans to saris and salwar kameez.
Famous for her purple hair creations, Rhodes was the first Western designer to present a sari show in India and is credited with helping popularise Indian fashions in the West.
On the eve of the launch of a book about the sari in London, she told rediff.com, "There are such a lot of Westernised Asians when you look at films like My Favourite Launderette and things like that. You see them in jeans and ask yourself why aren't they in saris or salwar kameez.
"I've been to India about 10 times and I've done a show with saris in Bombay (now called Mumbai) and Delhi in 1987. I think we just have to treasure the sari. We just have to make sure that it's preserved."
Rhodes endorsed the book, The Sari, as a timely check on how some South Asian women in the West are ignoring a garment that has withstood the test of time for thousands of years.
In the book the authors -- anthropologists Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller -- touch upon an intimate aspect of the daily lives of contemporary Indian women. They show why the sari continues to flourish though most of the world has adopted Western clothing.
Banerjee told rediff.com, "This book is really as much about contemporary India as it is about saris. Unlike other books on the sari, which treat it as a piece of textile -- and there are gorgeous books about how they're made, where they're made etc -- this book is about the sari as clothing.
"With the sari, putting it on is just the beginning. Its ambiguity and dynamism are being used constantly during the day to change one's appearance and to respond to different environments. It creates a kind of conversation between the sari and the woman."
The India-born co-author, who earned her doctorate at Oxford, added, "People are at the centre of this book. It's about their lives, their working lives, the lives of their mothers, how the sari plays a role in the relationship between mothers and infants, how people have different ways of adapting the sari for the different jobs they do.
"One of the main things to get across in the book is to understand the garment at two levels. One is the very intimate feel of the sari itself because its not fixed clothing, so it's not obvious what it feels like on the body. The visceral feeling of the sari on the body is very unfamiliar.
"At the same time, we're also trying to talk about the sari in a pan-Indian way, to talk about modernity and how India can be modern in a very uniquely Indian way, (a country) where you can wear something that looks so traditional. People say: how can you do jobs in this ankle length garment. But people do, whether its nurses or policewomen, they're all wearing this thing.
"One of the things we're trying to get across is that there are different ways of being modern. In wearing a sari, you can be thoroughly modern and yet look different at the same time."
About the authors:
Mukulika Banerjee lectures in anthropology at University College London.
Daniel Miller is professor of anthropology at UCL
