Cha-cha heels, strapless lurex gowns and Swaroski abayas: on Glamour and Glitz in a south Indian urban Muslim trading community.

Caroline Osella

Calicut (Kozhikode) Muslims have been engaged in modernist projects of rational self-improvement – including strong commitment to Islahi (‘salafi’) Islamic reformism - since the 1930s.  But the 19th and 20th centuries also saw a heyday of trade, wealth accumulation and frantic spending and hospitality, as the community thrived from its Indian ocean business links, especially those with Gulf Arabs.  Lucrative commodity export and gold smuggling have been replaced with export of labour as fortunes reversed, Calicut dwindled, and the newly oil rich Arabs became patrons and employers.   Memories of Calicut’s past of ‘luxury living’ bleed into contemporary dreams of Gulfie excess and the lifestyle opportunities of post 1980s India.  While commodity trade dwindles, Calicut’s women - as major consumers of fast fashion - continue to keep the bazaar moving.  Shopkeepers and non-Muslims alike claim to recognize a particular Muslim aesthetic – flashy, prone to excess and show, attached to the cheap transient shine: thinly euphemized codes for ‘vulgar’.  I discuss some ethnography of women and girls’ fashion, and both accept but also give trouble to local distinction hierarchies and their category of ‘Muslim style’.  I draw attention to the importance of the figure of the girl child and the connectedness of mother-daughter relationships.  Finally, I ask the ethnography to suggest to us how recent moves towards giving objects their due (Object Oriented Ontologies) might shift our analyses of fashion cultures.

Biography

Caroline Osella is Reader in south Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London UK. Recent publications include ‘Desires Under Reform’, Culture and Religion 2011, and (ed) ‘Islamic Reformism in South Asia’ (CUP 2012).Caroline’s current projects are: research with Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, on Arab-Gulf encounters; and a book which thinks through 20 years of Kerala fieldwork among women in order to unpick the processes by which categories, identities and subjectivities congeal and get put to work.
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Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk