Shame and Safety Pins: Dress Controversy and ‘Moral Technologies’ in 1900s Urdu Magazines for Women

Abstract

This article interrogates the changing bodily practices of shame (sharm) in colonial India at a time when a Muslim national identity was being shaped and gender expectations were being questioned with the growing presence of women in the public sphere. Focusing on a controversy on Muslim dress reform in two Urdu periodicals for women, Tahzīb un-Niswān (Ladies’ Culture, a weekly from Lahore) and Ḵẖātūn (Madam, a monthly from Aligarh) in 1905–7, I examine the way upper- and middle-class women navigated Islamic prescriptions and Western ideas of ‘progress’ while debating the contours of community identities. In the quest to safeguard their modesty, the new technology of the safety pin offered a creative solution. This article argues that it played an active role in allowing for new practices of female modesty and in creating tensions around group (qaum) formation in British India.

Keywords:

• Dress
• emotions
• femininity
• Islam
• technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lucien Febvre, ‘La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?’, Annales d’histoire sociale 3, nos. 1/2 (1941): 5–20; on emotions as ‘historical agents’, see Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Politiques des émotions au Moyen Âge (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2010); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

2. For instance, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello, ed., Histoire des émotions, Vols. 1–3 (Paris: Seuil, 2016–17).

3. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220.

4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 15.

5. Patricia Jeffery, Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000 [1979]); Catherine Thompson, ‘A Sense of Sharm: Some Thoughts on Its Implications for the Position of Women in a Village in Central India’, South Asia Research 1, no. 2 (1981): 39–53; Benedict Grima, The Performance of Emotions among Paxtun Women: ‘The Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Eunice De Souza, Purdah: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

6. Himani Bannerji, ‘Attired in Virtue: Discourse on Shame (Lajja) and Clothing of the Gentlewoman (Bhadramahila) in Colonial Bengal’, in The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender, ed. H. Bannerji (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 241. 

7. For a comparison between Hindu and Muslim practices, see Dorothy Ann Jacobson, ‘Hidden Faces: Hindu and Muslim Purdah in a Central Indian Village’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1970); Hanna Papanek, ‘Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 3 (1973): 289–325; Sylvia Vatuk, ‘Purdah Revisited: A Comparison of Hindu and Muslim Interpretations of the Cultural Meaning of Purdah in South Asia’, in Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia, ed. H. Papanek and G. Minault (New Delhi: Chanakya, 1982): 54–78; about purdah in early twentieth century India and Urdu magazines, see Asiya Alam, Women, Islam and Familial Intimacy in Colonial South Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2021); Melina Gravier, ‘La controverse du pardah dans les journaux de femmes en hindi et en ourdou (1918–1919)’ (unpublished Master’s thesis, Université de Lausanne, 2018).

8. Richard Antoun, ‘On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A Study in the Accommodation of Traditions’, American Anthropologist 70, no. 4 (1968): 671–97; 681.

9. For instance, Kaamya Sharma, ‘The Orientalisation of the Sari—Sartorial Praxis and Womanhood in Colonial and Post-Colonial India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 219–36; Arundhati Virmani, ‘Le sari à l’européenne: Vêtement et militantisme en Inde coloniale’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 36 (2012): 129–52; Abigail McGowan, ‘An All-Consuming Subject? Women and Consumption in Late-Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Western India’, Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 4 (2006): 31–54.

10. Himani Bannerji, ‘Textile Prison: Discourse on Shame (Lajja) in the Attire of the Gentlewoman (Bhadramahila) in Colonial Bengal’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 19, no. 2 (1994): 169–93.

11. See, for instance, ibid.; Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Judith E. Walsh, How to Be the Goddess of Your Home: An Anthology of Bengali Domestic Manuals (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005); Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).

12. Khoja-Moolji, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, 24; see also Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013).

13. Bannerji, ‘Textile Prison’, 176.

14. Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998): I accessed the issues digitised by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme and Rekhta.org.

15. Megan Robb, ‘Women’s Voices, Men’s Lives: Masculinity in a North Indian Urdu newspaper’, Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 5 (2016): 1441–73; 1446; Mohammed Afzal, ‘Gendering the Urdu Domestic Novel: Muhammadi Begum, Abbasi Begum, and the Women Question’, in Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction, ed. Haris Qadeer and P.K. Yasser Arafath (London: Routledge, 2021): 79–97; Khanday Pervaiz Ahmad, ‘Breaking the Silence: South Asian Muslim Women Begin to Write in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century’, Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies 33, no. 2 (2016): 71–90.

16. Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 29 (July 20, 1907): 347; Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 40 (October 5, 1907): 488. 

17. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 29 (July 29, 1905): 295–96.

18. Francesca Orsini, ‘Domesticity and Beyond: Hindi Women’s Journals in the Early Twentieth Century’, South Asia Research 19, no. 2 (1999): 137–60; 138–39, 154.

19. On Muhammadi Begum, see Naim Tahir, Sayyida Muhammadī Begum aur Unkā Ḵẖāndān (Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2018); Afzal, ‘Gendering the Urdu Domestic Novel’; Minault, Secluded Scholars, 110–22; Gravier, ‘La controverse du pardah’.

20. Shadab Bano, ‘Reform and Identity: Purdah in Muslim Women’s Education in Aligarh in the Early Twentieth Century’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 73 (2012): 607–14; 608; see also Shadab Bano, ‘Wahid Jahan, A Reformer’s Wife and Partner in Muslim Women’s Reform at Aligarh’, Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan 25, no. 1 (2018): 1–14.

21. Minault, Secluded Scholars, 123.

22. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 36 (September 9, 1905): 374–75.

23. Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 36 (September 7, 1907): 439; a negative reply was given the following week: Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 37 (September 14, 1907): 464.

24. The chick was called Gūgū, see Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 35 (August 31, 1907); a chronogram (poem) to mark the death date of Gūgū was composed by a correspondent and published a month later: Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 39 (September 28, 1907): 476.

25. Minault, Secluded Scholars, 127–28.

26. For instance, Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 7 (February 18, 1905): 56.

27. Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 20 (May 18, 1907): 241.

28. For instance, it was against chilla (isolation after giving birth, for instance) and long periods of wearing the ghunghat (a specific practice of veiling after marriage).

29. See Afzal, ‘Gendering the Urdu Domestic Novel’, for the period post-1915.

30. Ḵẖātūn un-Niswān 2, no. 5 (May 1905): 194; Ḵẖātūn un-Niswān 3, no. 9 (September 1906): 392.

31. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872): 334.

32. Ryan Johnson, ‘European Cloth and “Tropical” Skin: Clothing Material and British Ideas of Health and Hygiene in Tropical Climates’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 3 (2009): 530–60.

33. Kamya Sharma, ‘Orientalisation of the Sari’; Helen Callaway, ‘Dressing for Dinner in the Bush: Rituals of Self Definition and British Imperial Authority’, in Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, ed. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (New York: Berg, 1993): 232–47; Donald Clay Johnson, ‘Clothes Make the Empire: British Dress in India’, in Dress Sense: Emotional and Sensory Experiences of the Body and Clothes, ed. Donald Clay Johnson and Helen Bradley Foster (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Jayne Shrimpton, ‘Dressing for a Tropical Climate: The Role of Native Fabrics in Fashionable Dress in Early Colonial India’, Textile History 23 (1992): 55–70; Nandi Bhatia, ‘Fashioning Women in Colonial India’, Fashion Theory 7, nos. 3–4 (2003): 327–44; on dress and morality, see Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales: Naissance de la consommation XVIIe XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

34. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Sources of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Hardgrave, ‘The Breast-Cloth Controversy: Caste Consciousness and Social Change in Southern Travancore’, Indian Economic History Review 5, no. 2 (1968): 171–87.

35. Ju-Ling Lee, ‘“Civilising” and “Modernising” the Feet: Their Emancipation, Domestication and Aestheticisation in Colonial Taiwan (1895–1945)’, European Journal of East Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (2015): 225–60; 234, 240; Ju-Ling Lee, ‘Clothing the Body, Dressing the Identity: The Case of the Japanese in Taiwan during the Colonial Period’, Journal of Japanese Studies 43, no. 1 (2017): 31–64.

36. Bannerji, ‘Attired in Virtue’, 241.

37. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 153.

38. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Hindu Conjugality and Nationalism in the Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, Indian Women: Myth and Reality, National Seminar Papers published by the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, 1989, quoted in Himani Bannerji, ‘Textile Prison’, 171; see Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India, 3.

39. Bannerji, ‘Textile Prison’, 190.

40. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 132; see also Onur Inal, ‘Women’s Fashions in Transition: Ottoman Borderlands and the Anglo-Ottoman Exchange of Costumes’, Journal of World History 22, no. 2 (2011): 243–72; Elizabeth B. Frierson, ‘Mirrors In, Mirrors Out: Domestication and Rejection of the Foreign in Late-Ottoman Women’s Magazines’, in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (New York: SUNY Press, 2000): 177–204; Nora Seni, ‘La mode et le vêtement féminin dans la presse satirique d’Istanbul à la fin du XIXe siècle’, in Presse turque et presse de Turquie, ed. Nathalie Clayer, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone (Istanbul and Paris: Isis, 1992): 189–209.

41. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 35 (September 2, 1905): 364.

42. Patricia Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Canterbury: Kent State University Press, 2003): 98.

43. Arthur MacGregor, ‘Modelling India. Unfired Clay Figurines and the East India Company’s Collections: From Devotional Icons to Didactic Displays’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33, no. 3 (2023): 769–86; Jeanette Kokott and Fumi Takayanagi, ed., Erste Dinge—Rückblick für Ausblick (First Things—Looking Back to Look Forward) (Hamburg: MARKK, 2018): 52; McGowan, ‘An All-Consuming Subject?’, 46.

44. Ḵẖātūn un-Niswān 2, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1905): 95; on Rahat Khatun, see A.G. Noorani, Badruddin Tyabji (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1967).

45. Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 17 (April 30, 1907): 210; yet, there were contemporary British albums picturing Indian dress styles: see Sharma, ‘Orientalisation of the Sari’, 222.

46. Ḵẖātūn 4, no. 4 (April 1907): 148.

47. Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 19 (May 12, 1906): 219–20.

48. Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 32 (August 11, 1906): title page (news section).

49. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 24 (June 17, 1905): 227.

50. Ḵẖātūn 2, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1905): 97.

51. Ḵẖātūn 2, no. 7 (July 1905): 312.

52. Ḵẖātūn 2, no. 5 (May 1905): 196.

53. In 1866, J. Forbes Watson noted that ‘embroidery form[ed] the leisure occupation of the majority of females of poor Mahomedan families in town’: J. Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures of the People of India (London: George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1866): 117.

54. Amanda Lanzillo, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024): 74–86.

55. David Arnold, ‘Global Goods and Local Usages: The Small World of the Indian Sewing Machine, 1875–1952’, Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011): 407–29; 413.

56. Ibid., 417.

57. Ḵẖātūn 3, no. 9 (September 1906): 393.

58. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 16 (April 22, 1905): 132.

59. Fitted pants (tang pājāme) were better but too tight (for instance, the Hyderabadi style); they revealed the shape of the leg, which was also deemed inappropriate by some.

60. Tahzīb 8, no. 16 (April 22, 1905): 121.

61. Ḵẖātūn 2, no. 5 (May 1905): 195.

62. Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 19 (May 12, 1906): 224.

63. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 47 (November 25, 1905): 507.

64. William Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs, quoted in John Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures, 76. 

65. Christopher Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 285–321.

66. Bruno Latour, Changer de société, refaire de la sociologie (Paris: La Découverte, 2007): 14.

67. Hadas Hirsch, ‘Circulation of Fashions: Deciphering Foreign Influences on the Creation of Muslim Clothing in Early Islam’, Hamsa 7 (2021): 20; about the interdiction of wearing silk for Muslim men, see Bayly, ‘Origins of Swadeshi’, 290.

68. See Hirsch, ‘Circulation of Fashions’; Bayly, ‘Origins Of Swadeshi’, 289, 290.

69. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 40 (October 7, 1905): 426.

70. See Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, 112; McGowan, ‘An All-Consuming Subject?’, 34.

71. Ḵẖātūn 4, no. 4 (April 1907): 148–49.

72. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 46 (November 18, 1905): 499 (Abru Begum); Ḵẖātūn 2, no. 5 (May 1905) (Bint Nasiruddin Hyder); Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 40 (October 7, 1905) (Mumtaz Jahan Begum); Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 29 (July 21, 1906) (Abbasi Begum); Ḵẖātūn 4, no. 4 (April 1907) (Fatima Muhammadi).

73. See Marcel Moussette, ‘L’épingle et son double en Nouvelle-France’, Les Cahiers des Dix 60 (2006): 103–28; Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts—From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers—Came to Be as They Are (New York: Vintage Books, 1994): 57.

74. To search the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, I used the online British Newspapers Archive.

75. For instance, Civil and Military Gazette, September 18, 1901: 3; Civil and Military Gazette, December 15, 1885: 16.

76. Civil and Military Gazette, July 6, 1888: 9.

77. Civil and Military Gazette, February 6, 1893: 2.

78. Anna M. Miller, Illustrated Guide to Jewelry Appraising: Antique, Period, and Modern (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1990): 46.

79. For instance, Civil and Military Gazette, September 22, 1896: 4; on safety pins and male fashion, see Civil and Military Gazette, April 21, 1907: 7; on jewellery in Urdu women’s magazines, see the work of Melina Gravier (University of Lausanne). 

80. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 40 (October 7, 1905): 427; Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 29 (July 21, 1906): 341.

81. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions?’, 194, 200–01.

82. Adams, ‘Performing Dress and Adornment in Southeastern Nigeria’, 119. 

83. Bruno Latour, ‘La ceinture de sécurité’, Alliage: + Culture—Science—Technique 1 (1989): 21–27; 24; Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’, in Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future, ed. Deborah J. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008): 151–80.

84. Bruno Latour, ‘Morality and Technology: The End of the Means’, Theory, Culture and Society 19, nos. 5–6 (2002): 247–60; Jos de Mul, ‘Des machines morales’, Cités 39, no. 3 (2009): 27–38.

85. In another context, Sijapati and Harris have explored the shifting practices around Nepali Hindu pote (a beaded necklace worn by women after marriage), highlighting that urban generations sometimes used a beaded safety pin instead of the ‘inconvenient’ necklace, thus producing new ‘embodied spaces of belief’: Megan Adamson Sijapati and Tina Harris, ‘From Heavy Beads to Safety Pins: Adornment and Religiosity in Hindu Women’s Pote Practices’, Material Religion 12, no. 1 (2016): 1–25; 17.

86. Sahelī (Lahore) (May 10, 1932): 27. I consulted the magazine at the Abdul Majeed Khokhar Yadgar Library. 

87. Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses?’, 157; for Latour, the sum of morality increases with the ‘population of non-humans’. As he provocatively concludes elsewhere, in technological societies, we are no less moral than previously, on the contrary we are possibly more so, and this is exactly why technology was implemented: Latour, ‘La ceinture de sécurité’, 27.

88. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000): 127.

89. See Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 160; Laurence Lécuyer, Le ghunghat dévoilé: Voile, corps et société en Inde du Nord (Paris: Geuthner, 2021).

90. Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 19 (12 May 1906): 216.

91. For instance, Tahzīb un-Niswān 9, no. 19 (May 12, 1906): 216; Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 14 (April 6, 1907): 172; Tahzīb un-Niswān 10, no. 15 (April 13, 1907): 187.

92. See Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 64–91; 67.

93. Arnold, ‘Global Goods’, 407, 409; Bayly, ‘Origins of Swadeshi’.

94. Megan Eaton Robb, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021): chap. 3; Lanzillo, Pious Labour, chap. 6.

95. See, for instance, Daniel Miller, Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); David Morgan, Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London: Routledge, 2010).

96. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 21 (May 27, 1905).

97. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 27 (July 8, 1905): 305–07.

98. The wearing of unstitched clothes like saris is also considered ‘permanently pure’ in Hindu traditions and is hence worn for Hindu rituals: see, for instance, O.P. Joshi, ‘Continuity and Change in Hindu Women’s Dress’, in Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, ed. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (New York: Berg, 1993): 214–31; 217.

99. Margrit Pernau, ‘Shifting Globalities—Changing Headgear: The Indian Muslims between Turban, Hat and Fez’, in Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective, ed. Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen (Leiden: Brill, 2010): 249–67; 263.

100. Ḵẖātūn 2, no. 5 (May 1905): 194.

101. She opposed English and Indian clothes, explaining that the differences between them should be the same as between Christianity and Islam.

102. Brannon D. Ingram, Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018): 102–03.

103. Ibid., 104.

104. See, for instance, Syed Akbar Zaidi, Making a Muslim: Reading Publics and Contesting Identities in Nineteenth-Century North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

105. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 27 (July 8, 1905): 306.

106. On disgust and hierarchies in colonial South Asia, see Joel Lee, ‘Disgust and Untouchability: Towards an Affective Theory of Caste’, South Asian History and Culture, 12, nos. 2–3 (2021): 310–27; Layli Uddin, ‘Casteist Demons and Working-Class Prophets, Subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33, no. 4 (2023): 1051–75.

107. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 37 (September 16, 1905): 387.

108. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 27 (July 8, 1905): 307.

109. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 47 (November 25, 1905): 507.

110. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 40 (October 7, 1905): 426.

111. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 34 (August 26, 1905): 353.

112. Tahzīb un-Niswān 8, no. 32 (August 12, 1905): 326.

113. Iob has argued that when a Pakistani ‘national dress’ was discussed in the 1950s–60s, the sari was discarded as emblematic of neighbouring, and rival, India: Elisabetta Iob, ‘Wilful Daughters, Domestic Goddesses, Pious Muslims, and Rebels: Islam, Fashion, Commodities, and Emotions among Upper-Class Women in Pakistan, 1947–1962’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33, no. 4 (2023): 1–19.