:: Farrukh Dhondy

Uniform diaries: In search of a dress code

Farrukh Dhondy

"They said ‘take the long view’ —

He was short-sighted

They said ‘help thy neighbour’ —

There was no one for miles around

They said ‘time heals’ —

Yes, you die".

From Why Worry?

(The Bachchoo Archives)

May.02 : A Muslim scholar gets into an argument with his hostess at a dinner party and asserts that there is no reason why a good Muslim can’t be called Shiva, Ram Chandra or Harmohan Singh! (Yes, I go to some very stimulating dinner parties!). He goes on to explain what common sense should tell anyone, that there is no such thing as a "Muslim" name. People were called Mohammad and Ali before the Holy Quran was revealed to the Prophet. The names are, in fact, Arab versions of semitic names with their origins in Aramaic and Hebrew. The Arabic Booker prize (or its equivalent) for fiction has just been won by a Lebanese novel called Azazeel, which I am told is the name for Beelzebub, the devil. Our scholar went on to say that the name Absalom had been converted to Abdus Salaam and gave other examples.

I had to ask if there was an Islamic uniform as he wore a beard and a white skull cap even at a fairly secular dinner party where wine was being served. That too, he said, came from Judaism but was now accepted as an ideological badge. He hastened to add that he dressed in this fashion and retained his "Islamic" name out of loyalty to the memory of his parents rather than any ideology.

The conversation turned to ideological uniforms and I had to admit that at a particular age I had succumbed to wearing long hair, a beard and John Lennon glasses. I didn’t at the time align these with any ideology but in retrospect must confess that they were certainly the uniform of a rebellion against uniforms.

At the time and subsequently I came across Left-thinking Marxists who would shave their heads bald and wear pointed beards in order to look like Lenin, or indeed wear small round glasses and a goatee to identify themselves as followers of Leon Trotsky. There were certainly several people who grew their beards to look like Karl Marx. If any women dressed up to look like Rosa Luxembourg, I would have missed them, because to this day I don’t know what Rosa looked like and can’t think of any other female icons whom Marxist women could model their looks on. All these look-alikes were faintly ridiculous people and I can remember going some distance to avoid talking politics or anything else with them.

There was a time when young people who fancied themselves as thinkers of the urban Left in India used to dress in jeans and kurtas and carry a shoulder bag. A bigoted friend used to refer to them as "barsatiwallahs".

I knew several at university in England and even at the drama schools of London who returned to India and dedicated themselves to Communist parties and causes and began to adopt what they imagined would be the acceptable uniform of the proletariat or the peasantry.

The tradition of the political uniform had come down from the early Congressmen who all wore the obligatory white khadi kurtas and the little Nehru cap. The Communists despised the cap and dressed in a more demotic fashion.

A uniform is only a superficial avatar of the conviction. The real form is the whole lifestyle.

Indian Leftism has been adversely influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, his convictions and example. He was a revolutionary in many ways, but he was far from being a Marxist. His abandonment of the Middle Temple lawyer’s three-piece suits and watch chain, in favour of the dhoti and the bare chest protected by a shawl, was the mark of austerity which reflected the tenets of his ideology. From him came the very Indian idea that if you want to be taken seriously as a politician concerned with the fate of a poor people you have to be poor yourself.

Not that the tenet holds universally. Everyone knows that the politicians representing the poorest sections of the population today are very rich themselves, even though they maintain the uniform of austere and neat poverty. Mulayam Singh Yadav doesn’t wear flashy diamond rings, does he?

Communists, of course, want to identify in their life styles with the "proletariat" whom they purport to lead. One would not expect them to drive the most expensive cars, to have Swiss bank accounts, own factories in Gujarat or have an army of servants to dispense champagne and caviar to their guests. They may aspire to all these, but such indulgence would project the wrong image and the press would seize upon it and destroy their reputations with that self-same proletariat which expects, or they believe it does, the Leftists to follow a programme and life style of Gandhian austerity.

Even though very many Communist Party members in India would be at a loss to name the title of the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital (I do know the answers myself having ploughed through the tomes entitled Theories of Surplus Value and Grundrisse), they presumably have read potted biographies of Marx and Engels. Every Marxist knows or should know that Friedrich Engels owned a manufacturing concern and was required by his family to occasionally manage it in Manchester. He would exploit the workers by day, extracting every drop of surplus value of labour power that he could get from them and then return to his Primrose Hill mansion in London over the weekends to throw lavish parties, maintain open house for his rich friends and serve champagne, caviar, foie gras, the most expensive wines etc. He had a penchant for fine living and openly associated with the fancy professional (in the sex-worker, rather than doctor or lawyer sense) women of Paris.

He maintained Marx by paying him a stipend to live and though neither of them were dandies, both of them dressed in the uniform of the top bourgeois circles of Europe. Engels of course didn’t stand for elections, he just wrote books and gave speeches so he must have felt that he could live as he chose. There was no Communist Party in England at the time.

The first Communist to be elected to the British House of Commons was Shapur Saklatvala (a senior member of my paternal grandmother’s clan) of the Independent Labour Party. As far as I know he never wore a cloth cap or availed himself of the services of the Soho ladies — he dressed and behaved like the gentleman he was.