Last month, I was holding evening durbar at the outdoor bar area of a Delhi ‘institution’. It may not call itself a club, but it has all the qualities and features of one, including dead giveaways like regulars, hierarchy of recognition from the service staff, members, and (club) rules. I happened to be there as the ‘guest’ of a member, an infiltrator of sorts, a Rabri to a Lalu.
Having sat down for about five minutes with my guest – who confusingly happened to be a ‘member’ – I was about to order, when I saw the gentleman waiter bend and whisper something to my bar buddy. My first reaction was, of course, to check my zipper. But the moment the server disappeared, my companion explained, ‘He’s getting a collared shirt for you. I’d forgotten. They don’t allow collarless shirts in the bar or dining area.’
I was flummoxed. But I dutifully put on the collared shirt brought to me to ‘cover my shame’. I suddenly found the collars to be astoundingly fascinating, as a pencil might appear to a person who has dropped some acid, not H2SO4 but LSD. While patting my new collars as if they were wings on a dog, a big question started taking up almost all the room in my 3BHK mind: what is it with club rules pertaining to attire?
Do they serve a functional cause? Or like the wedding ring or a ‘786’ tattoo, do they have an important semiotic, even political function important and immediately recognisable to their signifiers like caste marks in Gorakhpur?
The insistence on collars, of course, is part of a wider cluster of rules and regulations related to attire, which are passed off as aesthetics but used as a shorthand to separate the chaff from the wheat like checkers do outside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, where there’s a ‘Muslims only’ club rule since 2000 that no bouncer-money can breach. Or, as notice boards near swimming pools in many housing societies and clubs proclaim less subtly, to separate the driverlog and ayaalog from the babalog. These attire rules, to keep up with principles of ‘equality’, are heavily loaded towards what people can’t wear, rather than what they should wear. So no club in an Indian city will state that wearing a ‘sola topee’, bow-tie and suspenders in July is ‘okay,’ but wearing a churidar may not. Decent slippers may soon find allowance, I suspect, if the wearer points out that what he or she is wearing are not Mamata Banerjee ‘chappals’ but Silicon Valley ‘flipflops’. I once wore a perfectly decent, stainless pair of jeans to another ‘institution’ but was made to sit ‘outside’ since ‘jeans are not trousers’. When I had to use the facilities, I had to pass through the ‘inside’. As I walked towards the loo, I sensed a roomful of ‘I say, bea-rah!’ people burn through my Levi’s with their reproachful gaze.
But the lack of collars? Seriously? What horrors do a ’round-collar’ shirt (read: no-collar kurta or t-shirt) dredge up in the collarati? Would I spatter drinks and food all over myself minus collars serving as some sort of bib? Is a collar-wearer – blue collar or white – somehow imbued with a certain social standing that a collarless one isn’t? Do families sitting nearby a collarless man shield the eyes of their teenage daughter lest…
How can a smart pair of sandals, decent collarless shirt/kurta, perfectly non-JJJs (jhuggi-jhopri jeans) look offensive?
Much is being talked about these days of decolonisation. I think tropical India in circa 2023 is ready to start a conversation on decollarisation. Enough of Brit Raj-dyed wool being pulled over our eyes, shoulders, heels, ankles….
