All through history, there has been a tension between what was, what is, and what will be. The tendency is to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses and glorify it as a better time. I remember an old man telling me how wonderful life had been under British rule. Personally too, I look back at my childhood, wistfully recollect all the time I spent on various playgrounds, and lament how my children don't go out and play as much. Such nostalgia becomes insidious because it tends to make us try and resist the future. It is as futile as trying to stand firm against a tsunami.
One field where this tension is constant is in fashion. No generation is ever happy or satisfied by the clothes worn by other generations. An oft repeated complaint by older generations is that the girls in the current generation cover too little. I am not going to go into the patriarchal aspects of this argument here. Anecdotally, I find this doesn't bear out in real life. The girls around me, more often than not, cover as much (or as little) as girls in my time.
By using history and tradition to justify anger towards skimpy clothes, we tread into dangerous territory. In Kerala, for instance, both men and women never covered themselves from waist upwards. This just made sense given Kerala’s weather. There are enough accounts from travelers telling about the bare-chested queens of Kerala. Blouses under the saree or even a shawl to cover the chest was brought to Kerala by the British as part of their Victorian sensibilities. But today, if a woman were to walk bare-chested in Kerala, she would be told she is insulting her tradition and culture. These very same people who criticize her will also lament how Western culture has misled our girls to dress in skimpy clothes.
The point is not that women should walk around bare breasted. I don’t care one way or the other. It should be the woman’s choice, and not because someone told her what to do. The point is two-fold. Firstly, most of the time the people preaching to us about our culture don’t have a clue what they are talking about, if they did they would shut up. What they preach are their assumptions about our culture. Secondly, culture never was, never is, and never will be a constant.
Culture evolves to reflect the times in which we live. It changes to reflect our needs.
There is no culture that we are beholden to simply because there is no way to draw a line to indicate where our culture began. Research has shown that we share DNA with a myriad of peoples, there is just no way for us to say which one is OUR culture just as there is no way to say which one is OUR language. Trying to model ourselves on the lives and choices of a people long gone is a futile endeavor. There will always be somebody who wants to draw the line further back in time than you. It’s a battle nobody can win. Our debt is not to the dead; our duty is to those who are to come. Just as every parent wishes their child will outdo them, we don’t honor our ancestors by imitating them. We honor them by building on what they did and by leaving the world a better place for our children.
Every time someone throws the word culture to justify their support or lack of it for something, I see a person who is scared of the coming tsunami. They are scared that they will be irrelevant in the new world. They don’t see how they can be relevant because they have stopped growing in their minds. It is a display of their impending inconsequence.
They are akin to those grandparents who constantly tell us stories of how things were in their times. They tell you that they had to walk 5 km to go to school. But what they don’t tell you is that they had to walk because there were no buses plying that route. It wasn’t because they loved walking or because it was their tradition to walk to school. If they had buses, you better believe that they would have used them.
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land And don't criticize what you can't understand Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin' Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'
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