The Chinese, particularly those who guide public behaviour in Shanghai, have launched yet another campaign to dissuade people from going out onto the streets in their pyjamas. It is “uncivilised” and “embarrassing”, doesn’t give a good account of the city or its citizens, say the arbiters of social mores. But the citizens, particularly those who are not trendy and young, are unimpressed.
News reports speak only of Shanghai. What about the countryside and other cities? Surely love of pyjamas is not restricted to the country’s premier city. The answer probably is that backwardness can thrive in the back of beyond but should not be on display in the country’s biggest and richest city that is showcased to the rest of the world as a symbol of China that has arrived.
There was a time when China and India were in the same state of backwardness. I remember a Chinese drycleaner next to the nursery school I went to on Kolkata’s very genteel Elgin Road. The family that owned it seemed to have many children and the mother, who was neither old nor anglicised, regularly helped out in the shop, in her pyjamas.
She looked neither careless nor dishevelled. The pyjamas were in fact a suite, top and bottom, made of different light cool cotton prints that she wore on different days. My school was strictly English medium and the first thing children were taught was to say ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’. The Chinese family seemed okay to me, only different.
Today’ visiting Chinese are all in well cut western clothes and naturally never in pyjamas. The prize for Indianising attire and being comfortable in the Indian weather goes to western tourists doing it on the cheap. They freely sport lungi and singlet (for men) or any kind of top (for women). And some of them make a cultural statement by very demonstratively puffing at bidis. Or used to, until the ban on smoking in public came.
Indians’ love of the pjyama has very fortunately not clashed with seeking to be upwardly mobile. It was quite common in the sixties and seventies in a Delhi market in the morning to find a gent on a scooter (note, he owned one) sporting a sleeping suit, pjyama and top, made of classical striped cotton, as ordained by richer folks in cold countries who didn’t go to bed in their day clothes.
Till the early years after Independence in Kolkata, an educated and well-placed gentleman was usually westernised in dress at the workplace, in tie and maybe a jacket too, depending on how high up the pecking order he was. On social occasions he of course sported an elaborate dhoti and kurta (I don’t know why we call the latter punjabi), the flourishes in both bearing the stamp of feudal excess. Not everybody wore the same kind of dhoti in the same way. How you carried off your dhoti absolutely classified you.
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Kolkata, being the birthplace of the educated, culturally inclined leftist, had to devise the genre’s signature attire. This was made up of pristine white kurta and pyjama, the latter with very loose and broad legs that swept the ground. I remember Satyajit Ray receiving guests in his study in such dress. Far from being the garb of the backward, that pyjama-kurta ensemble was the hallmark of the avant-garde.
The pyjama in question, the cool comfortable wear in which you easily move about indoors and outdoors, also has fairly deep roots in China. The two-piece Mao suit, a derivative of the suit that Sun Yat-sen made the national attire, is not so very different in structure. Only today, China has very decisively discarded the Mao suit for the western suit, the same way the Japanese did when they decided to modernise and progress.
India’s inability to keep pace with China, not to speak of catching up with Japan, may have something to do with its inability to discard the pyjama. The influential Indian male happily continues to sport kurta and pyjama, aligarhi or churidar. What is almost totally discarded is the western dress code. People no longer formally dress up for dinner at club, restaurant or mess. The last vestige of the raj disappeared with those like the general who lives in folklore as the pucca sahib who would dress up for dinner even if he was dining all alone.
The good thing about Bangalore is that its mild weather round the year has turned it into a totally shirtsleeve city where the jacket and tie are real outliers except in the corporate wings of MNC offices. I do not go to the local market in the morning on a scooter in pyjama but my preferred social attire is the kurta and aligarhi. A couple of my dressy kurtas with elaborate embroidery in the Lucknow chikan or Bengali style almost always draws appreciative comments.
Being unable to discard the pyjama, India has naturally fallen behind China and will probably never come near Japan. But all is not lost. In embracing the aligarhi/churidar and kurta ensemble India has enshrined its ethnic chic, a cultural statement which could have a historical denouement.