Sari and the Hijab: Two faces of the same sorry coin

The sari as official dress code opens a can of worms, including religious-cultural hegemony, bigotry and sexism

All the fuss over that Govt directive ordering women school teachers to wear saris to school reminds me of the time when Mahinda Rajapaksa was President, mothers were asked to wear saris when visiting schools. It wasn’t a directive, but that was a time when ‘Your wish is my command,’ and some mothers who arrived in casual attire were barred from entering school premises. 

Just a reminder that this isn’t the first time for the whole sorry sari business, nor will it be the last. Protesting school teachers used economic hardship as an excuse, as saris are now, like everything else, quite expensive.

They could also have claimed global warming as a factor. The sari, elegant, impressive and colourful as it could be, would be quite uncomfortable to the wearer under drastically changed climatic conditions unless she travels in air-conditioned vehicles and works in air-conditioned comfort. 

In a country where the defence budget is more than that of health and education combined, schools and school buses are unsurprisingly not air-conditioned.

Dress is a matter of choice. State banks too had this mania for saris as official dress, but now they have relaxed that rule. Dress is a culture by other means. The sari as official dress code opens a can of worms, including religious-cultural hegemony, bigotry and sexism. This is why I call the sari (as official dress) just a milder form of the Islamic hijab.

This should produce a howl of protests from those who believe that our Buddhist-dominated Lankan culture is more ‘enlightened’ than the ‘backward’ recesses of Islam. 

Repression as cultural identity is a matter of degree. The sari doesn’t cover the female body as much as the hijab does. But, it is Lankan or indigenous as opposed to blouse and pants, jeans or blouse/skirt combinations, which are ‘foreign’ if we conveniently forget that the sari is of Indian origin. 

It can also reveal more of the female body than the above-mentioned combinations do. It can be quite sexy, too – just like the black garment covering Muslim women from head to toe. 

The idea of protecting female modesty can thus be quashed. Like beauty, modesty too is in the eyes of the beholder. But, alongside the modesty factor, the sari as the official dress is a sacred cow symbol of indigenous values, as opposed to foreign (i.e Western) influences. 

Take any old Sinhala film and you can see this dichotomy – the good girl is in a sari (or redda and hatte, cloth and jacket) while the notorious one is in a blouse and pants, and the blouse was often sleeveless to drive the point home. 

Lester James Pieris, while dressing Anula Karunathilake and Punya Heendeniya in a sari in his wonderful movie Ran Salu, dared to show them in sleeveless jackets. Note the nightclub singer/performer in a tight-fitting skirt in the film. Such was the cultural hegemony of our dress code for women, and things haven’t really changed (At least in the minds of some) in fifty years or more.

Sexism is very much part of this hegemonic desire to keep women in their correct station in life. The search for suitable indigenous attire for men has been there for a long time. You can trace it to Anagarika Dharmapala and other pioneer nationalists, but it is S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike who gave it definitive form with the ‘national.’

Many male teachers wore that to school. My Sinhala language teacher at Ananda College in the mid-70s wore a national, but it was very much on the wane by then. As far as I know, it was never an official dress code for school teachers (or State bank staff, for that matter).

This difference shows the deep-rooted sexism in the call for an official dress code, one standard for women, and another for men. 

The nation has been quietly dropped, but the sari reigns supremely in the imagination (that of males, at any rate).
This brings me to the hijab and the ongoing protests in Iran. Hopefully, no one will interpret this as 
anti-Islamic hysteria. 

My take on the hijab as an official dress code is this: If women in any Islamic society (Including minorities in non-Islamic societies) are willing to wear the hijab, that is their business. But if it is imposed by directive or any law (like our sari for teachers’ business) on those unwilling to wear it, then women have the right to protest. The same goes for any dress code in any culture.

Iran saw two massive waves of protest in 2017 and 2019. But these were working-class protests against economic hardships. This is different and is a flashing red light that Iranians from all sectors of society feel stifled under the repressive rule under various ‘supreme leaders’ since the Revolution of 1979.

This wave of protests which started in September this year, mainly by women by also supported by men, has been called Iran’s ‘Second Revolution’.

It started when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died from head injuries caused by Police action when she was arrested for wearing the hijab incorrectly’ and also for her skinny jeans.

Women from all sections of Iranian society began protesting, rattling the regime which reacted ruthlessly. Till now, at least 458 people including 63 children have been killed, hundreds more injured, and thousands detained, including journalists, lawyers, rights activists, celebrities and athletes who supported the protests.

The regime said the protests were caused by foreign plots (sounds familiar?). But it is hard to understand how schoolgirls, university students and women ranging from working class to professionals and civil society figures would burn their hijabs and cut their hair in public, often supported by their male partners, friends and family members, risking their lives, good names and careers in a culturally regimented society, simply at the call of foreign plotters looking for regime change in Tehran. 

They are up against security forces willing to use live bullets, not just water canons and tear gas. Protesters have been shot for simply honking their car horns in support of protests.

What dictators don’t realise is that the forced continuation of official codes, formulas and doctrines can rarely be sustained beyond one generation. 

In this age of digital dissemination of news and ideas at lightning speed, they can’t be sustained even that long.

 Iranians have been living under stifling laws for almost half a century.

This is what brought down the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, not just economic malaise. China is smarter in that Beijing has taken care not to stifle cultural freedoms (except in key areas such as freedom of thought in speech and writing). 

But the recent youth protests against China’s Zero Covid policy show that the new generation is not ready to swallow official dictums en masse.

In Iran, many people clearly regard dress as a key area in expressing their personal freedoms. They are ready to die in expressing their anger (Arrested protesters have been given the death penalty).

It is easy to say that this is a problem that Iranians need to resolve among themselves. But it is more than that – it is a worldwide problem pertaining to culture, and not limited to the hijab and Islam. 

The desire to impose dress codes on women while men are freer to wear what they want exists everywhere. When an Indian Minister says that rape victims are guilty of tempting men by wearing skimpy clothes, he is only confirming what the purveyors of all dress codes for women, anywhere in the world, are insisting on.

Also, the dress issue is simply the outer cover of Iranians’ anger towards an inflexible regime. Many of their rights have been stifled by successive governments in Tehran. They have had enough. This is a nationwide scream for change. 

The Iranian regime, like hardline regimes elsewhere, will crush this ruthlessly. If we take our April protests, it was a wake-up call to the regime by people from all walks of life who have had enough of being kept poor and subjugated by successive governments since independence. 

This official trend increased exponentially since the 1980s and coalesced into one family rule by the Rajapaksas since the 1990s. 

If the Iranians use the hijab as a symbol of their repression, Sri Lankans used the personae of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa as their symbol. Each country will find its own symbols, but the underlying message is the same. The Soviets crushed such calls for Change in Prague and Budapest, but it is Russia which became the biggest loser. China crushed protests at Tiananmen Square, but Beijing’s day too will come, sooner or later. 
And so will Tehran’s.