Opinion Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the bandhgala is Indian

What makes something “Indian”? In a country of a thousand languages, whose people count in their heritage contributions of migrants and conquerors, poets and pirs, stories and histories that originate beyond its current borders, that is not an easy question. Take the bandhgala, which, to most people who aren’t enthusiasts of sartorial history, appears Indian by its very name. The formal garment is worn by ministers and bureaucrats and at weddings across the country. It can trace its history and evolution from the erstwhile “royal” families of Rajasthan, to the Mughal court, through the polo grounds under the British, to a uniform for Indian Railways. Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has now discontinued the bandhgala for IR employees, dismissing it as “colonial”.

There is an argument for the view that the garment as we know it emerged during the Raj. But then, so did the Indian Railways. And Rudyard Kipling, defender of an exploitative empire and the racist “White man’s burden”, also wrote Kim: A novel that made apparent as early as 1901 that despite colonial roots , the Railways are exceedingly “Indian”. The search for Indian-ness should not be about purity of origins but rather, experience. In food, there’s tandoori momos, aloo tikki burgers and gobi manchurian. In literature and art, like the novel and modern painting with their notions of individual creators, there are many forms that are “Western” in origin, which Indians have made their own.

Advertisement

Some colonial-era relics need to be discarded — an imperious state and disconnected elite, to name just two. Banning the bandhgala, though, doesn’t attack the “colonial mindset”. It just makes alien something that is quintessentially Indian.