It’s below the waist but its time has come: Veshti Vogue

And it was not just Dayanidhi Maran and SS Palani Manikam, but the Veshti Vogue grabbed the coat-tails of Congress leaders like Harvard-educated P Chidamabaram, our new Finance Minister, and Oxbridge outer, Mani Shankar Aiyer, the brand new Petroleum and Panchayati Raj Minister.

Chidambaram’s family says the Finance Minister has been wearing the Madras Wrap in Delhi since the early ’70s, when he was a fledgling Youth Congress President.

‘‘And his collection has grown to have almost every type—from Salem silks to the Mayilkana dhoti,’’ says a family source. Aiyer draped his Myladutharai Mauve to show his constituents where they sent their man to.

Says Aiyer, ‘‘I wore the veshti because I knew the swearing-in ceremony would be widely seen on television. And I wanted to show the people of Myladutharai, who have a genuine interest to see me as minister and be given this high position, looking like them.’’

So, what is this feisty veshti, which has leapt from the sambar suburbs to slick city? Couture chroniclers liken it to the most ancient recorded Indian drape for men and women, in fact, the sari evolved out of the veshti-angavastram (two-piece wrap) and has withstood the fickleness of fashion over the millennia. Veshti designs veer from plain cotton with sober borders to fine silks with 18-carat embellished trims.

For the veshti-anxious, the four-yard fine cloth is draped like a bath towel around the waist.

But the Madras Lungi is laden with irony—Tamil assertion has finally come full circle. After the misspent days of the 1920s and 30s demanding secession from the Indian Union, and the riotous decades of the anti-Hindi agitation, the veshti has come to command over the Hindi plains.

But the DMK brigade believes Tamil is not yet a rage in the cow-belt states. Dayanidhi Maran, DMK’s Union Minister of Communications and IT, says the veshti is not a seditious garment.

‘‘I am from Tamil Nadu, so I wear my traditional veshti on formal, ceremonial occasions. It is the garment of the south, be it any of the four states, so do you expect me to wear the kurta-pyjama instead?’’ asks the debutant Maran.

But James Bond did (only Madras cotton) and Ralph Lauren makes his vintage-inspired summer dress only with Coimbatore weaves, so is the Madras Wrap soon going to become fashion’s fetishist obsession?

Cho Ramaswamy, satirist and a fierce critic of dravidian politics, waves all this away: ‘‘I do not expect a dozen ministers to turn the kurta-paijama culture of Delhi into veshti culture. Instead, they will be kurtaised because people going from the south are always anxious to get accepted up north.’’