Bras are not for burning: the bra and young urban women in Delhi and Bombay

Begum, Lipi (2018) Bras are not for burning: the bra and young urban women in Delhi and Bombay. In, Begum, Lipi, Dasgupta, Rohit and Lewis, Reina (eds.) Styling South Asian Youth Cultures: Fashion Media and Society. (Dress Cultures) London. I.B. Tauris.

Abstract

Scholars have analysed the meanings of western outer-clothes worn by women in India, however these studies seldom discuss the semi-hidden bra. Whereas the panty through the ‘Pink Chaddis’ campaign has been used as a symbolic tool of female power and resistance in India, the power meanings of the bra remain ambiguous. Bras have not been discussed as symbolic markers of female empowerment like chaddis, nor can be assumed objects of male oppression as in the history of western feminism.

This chapter explores the bra and its proximity to young (18–24 year old) urban Indian women’s bodies; the ambiguity of its hidden yet publicly viewed nature which discloses tensions of the sexualised female body and changing ideals of Indian femininities that outer western garments cannot always reveal. I discuss how the bra lends insight into Indian women’s bodies as paradoxical spaces of public and private power as India begins to rapidly urbanise. A power-play between that of an increase in the moral policing of urban Indian women’s sartorial identities and the emerging bi-cultural youth identities resisting these moral codes of dressing.

Taken from a qualitative study between 2010–2014, the author discusses how the bra in India centres on the discourse of shame and the anxieties of western modernity recycled from the Indian independence movement. Author reveals how patriarchal codes of shame are questioned by the symbolic meanings of power that young urban Indian women attach to their bras.

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Contributors

Author: Lipi Begum

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