Any account of historical Indian costumes runs into
serious difficulties not for want of literary evidence or of
archaeological and visual materials: of both of these there is a fair
measure that is available. The difficulty arises when one tries to
collate the information that can be culled from these sources. The
descriptions in literary works, for all their great poetic beauty and
elegance, are, in the nature of things, not precise and one has to guess
and reconstruct.
Sometimes the descriptions are so general that they
can fit more than one costume quite different from each other. All this
is not to say that a broad, general idea cannot be formed of the kinds
of costumes worn in the ancient, medieval or the late medieval periods
in India.
What one is denied is the possibility of going into
the many subtleties that Indian costumes possess. Their range is
remarkably wide, according to the great size of the country, and
geographical differences, and the bewildering diversity of its ethnic
groups is added the complex factor of the coming in, at regular
intervals, of foreign peoples into India at different periods of time
and in varying numbers.
The costumes that these people brought along did not
stay necessarily apart from the mainstream of Indian dresses - that one
could have dealt with - but, with the Indian genius for adaptation and
modification, these costumes become altered, even metamorphosed, and
eventually assimilated to the broad, native Indian range of dress.
One has, therefore, to sift and isolate, and then
relate and bring together, the evidence available which is not the
easiest of tasks in the context of Indian history where material culture
does not always get the attention it does elsewhere.
Through sharp analysis of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and
Hindi, as much as Arabic and Persian sources, they have brought within
reach a rich body of material. The inherent difficulty in the matter of
interpreting this material and relating it to surviving archaeological
and visual evidence naturally leaves some matters obscure, and others
open to controversy. But a very substantial body of information has been
collected.
A question that needs to be disposed of rather early
is whether, in the indigenous Indian tradition, stitched garments were
known or used at all. From time to time statements have been made that
the art of sewing was unknown to the early Indians, and that it was an
import from outside. Serious and early students of Indian costumes, like
Forbes Watson, have stated, mostly on the authority of other scholars,
that the art of sewing came to India only with the coming of the
Muslims.' This statement needs no longer to be taken seriously.
As has been established, not only was the needle and
its use known to Indians from the very beginning of the historic periods
that we know of; the art of sewing was practiced, and one comes upon
clear and early references to stitched garments that leave very little
doubt about the matter.'
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