Fashion and India: coercion or a flag for freedom?

In 1931 the official flag adopted by the Indian National Congress to represent Indian independence (Purna Swaraj) was a tricolour with the traditional spinning wheel in the centre symbolizing Gandhi's goal of making Indians self-reliant by fabricating their own clothing. Saree, shalwar kameez, dhoti, Sikh’s turban, kacchera … are ideal symbols of Indian cultural, spiritual, legal, and political identities. As such they could be used, at once, as coercive and liberating tools. We cannot ignore, for example, the white sarees traditionally worn by widows, which make their female impurity manifest to everybody, while concealing their human individuality in favour of a shared spiritual status. The inextricable connection between fashion and identity has outlived the achievement of Indian independence and remained a strong motive in literature and cinema. In many postcolonial novels fashion plays a fundamental role in shaping the cultural generation gap. It actually happens that second generation migrants assert their own belonging to "one" country by wearing clothes either after the occidental or the oriental fashion. My paper aims at investigating these symbols in some of the most representative postcolonial films and literary works.