The physique is first taught obedience via cloth. The swaddle earlier than speech, the college uniform earlier than dissent, disgrace earlier than pores and skin. Clothes is behavioural earlier than — and since — it’s cultural.
In Quantity IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies, Kolkata-based artist and dressmaker Kallol Datta invitations us to have a look at clothes as a protracted and loaded handbook of social instruction. Drawing from Classes for Girls, a 2,000-year-old guidebook written by Chinese language historian Ban Zhao for her daughters, Datta unpacks how clothes have instructed folks, particularly ladies, find out how to sit, stand, transfer, behave, belong, and be excluded.
Kallol Datta
| Picture Credit score:
Rusha Bose
Guidelines written in thread
Zhao’s guide could have been written as a manner for moms to organize daughters for survival in a inflexible society, however its recommendation — on find out how to be modest, obedient, restrained — has caught round for millennia. It retains surfacing in new varieties: in Sixteenth-century Confucian revivalism, within the ‘values’ taught to women throughout cultures as we speak, in viral movies preaching ‘female behaviour’ and the brand new aspirational ‘trad spouse’. All markers of neo-fascism and an imminent recession.
Datta was shocked by how acquainted the textual content felt. “Whereas feminist actions and ideologies have advanced,” they are saying, “the dominant forces… proceed to subscribe to antiquated notions of social and behavioural propriety.” Even as we speak, classes dressed up as care — particularly from mom to daughter — can quietly reinforce management.
Quantity IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies
| Picture Credit score:
Anil Rane
Clothes is political
Datta, together with his kohl-rimmed eyes and love of all issues black, was a big determine on the Indian vogue scene — till the Central Saint Martins-trained “garments maker” made the change a couple of years in the past from mainstream vogue to artwork. Since then he’s tapped into textile, craft and his connections, however this time to discover clothes as websites of stress. Like his 2022 showcase of textile sculptures, titled Quantity 3, ISSUE 2, which regarded on the position of imperial edicts in Japan’s late Shōwa interval.
Quantity IV is structured like a narrative in 4 components: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, and Lies Our Garments Have Advised Us. It travels throughout Asian clothes — from the Japanese kimono to the Manipuri phanek — to indicate how vogue has lengthy been used to sign standing, implement gender roles, and mark caste. The sari, usually seen as a timeless image of Indian femininity, is likely one of the most revealing examples. The shirt and petticoat, although they now appear inseparable from the unstitched garment, had been launched throughout colonial rule, formed by British-Victorian concepts of modesty. These info, usually tucked away from public reminiscence, are central to Datta’s work.
Their items — textile posters, sculptural varieties, and layered cloth compositions — are constructed from donated garments and stitched with historical past. In these collages of fabric, Datta asks: who will get to be snug? Who will get to maneuver freely? Who will get to be seen?
Poster 04 (Reconstructed kimono)
| Picture Credit score:
Courtesy Kallol Datta and Experimenter
Poster 18 (Reconstructed saries)
| Picture Credit score:
Courtesy Kallol Datta and Experimenter
Unbuilding the house
Probably the most placing components of the present options two textile ground plans. The primary maps out a Korean hanok (a standard home), the place the design displays inflexible gender roles: male quarters in entrance, feminine quarters on the again, separate doorways for servants and labourers. The second plan reimagines the home with solely ladies residing in it. Now, there are large corridors, shared rooms, areas for leisure and ease.
In Datta’s imaginative and prescient, simply as clothes teaches us find out how to shrink ourselves, structure teaches us to shrink our motion; the place we’re allowed to go and the place we’re not. By redrawing these areas, they ask: what if properties had been constructed round freedom as an alternative of self-discipline?
Blueprint 01 (Reconstructed kimonos, saries, sarongs, kebayas and haori)
| Picture Credit score:
Anil Rane
Blueprint 02 (Reconstructed phaneks, saries, haori, residence linen, and repurposed yarn)
| Picture Credit score:
Anil Rane
Inherited stains
Every garment utilized in Quantity IV comes with a reminiscence. “Each donation was accompanied by data from the donor… reminiscences, episodic occasions related to the gadgets of clothes,” Datta shares. When previous garments are handed on in elite areas, they’re referred to as classic vogue; however what’s seen as nostalgic for one group is seen as shameful for one more. In lots of Indian properties, for example, garments worn by decrease caste home employees are stored separate, by no means touched, not to mention or reused. In Datta’s view, “class hierarchies and abject caste constructions… live on within the areas of my curiosity”. So, the artist’s act of amassing and reworking these textiles turns into a manner of rejecting this imbalance and displaying how quietly and deeply caste and sophistication form even one thing as intimate as a hand-me-down.
Jeogori 15 (higher garment of the normal Korean hanbok)
| Picture Credit score:
Vivian Sarky
Gradual resistance
The place the state makes use of surveillance and legal guidelines to self-discipline, Datta makes use of slowness. Stitching, assembling, disassembling, their course of turns into a form of quiet refusal. “There are recurring motifs within the works which are markers of small acts of resistance, of dissent, lack of entry to financial exercise… Garments, and by extension, fabric, will at all times stay our first line of defence,” says Datta, who collaborated with Kolkata-based Ek Tara Creates, which employs ladies from susceptible backgrounds, for the sequence.
In Quantity IV, the garment just isn’t valuable or sacred, it’s unusual. Datta, nevertheless, doesn’t goal to shock. They ask us to look once more. On the folds of our clothes. On the guidelines we’ve absorbed. The exhibition is rife with silences which are stuffed with questions. If each sew is a sentence, then perhaps the garments we put on are attempting to inform us one thing. If solely we’d hear.
Quantity IV is on until August 20 at Experimenter in Mumbai.
The author is founding editor of Proseterity, a literary and humanities journal.
Revealed – August 02, 2025 08:28 am IST