One of the relatively silent revolutions that has played out on Indian streets is the growing popularity of jeans as a form of attire. Across class, town category and gender, jeans have secured a place for themselves in the everyday life of its wearers, an act of cultural adoption that is surprising given its relative recent introduction and its distance from existing and adopted cultural norms. For a long time, jeans were present but in a marginal sort of way. Growing up in the eighties meant that jeans though highly desirable were impossible to procure till such time as a kind relative from overseas took pity and hustled a pair through customs. This meant that the few people who wore jeans had to make do whatever arrived- usually ill-fitting trousers that needed to be rolled up a lot. In the early days, ‘pirated’ jeans started to become available (for Delhi dwellers Mohan Singh ‘Palace’ was the place to go) and even then, wearing jeans remained a highly restricted phenomenon for a long time.

A big part of the reason was a feeling of cultural unfamiliarity- for most Indians, jeans were simply too disruptive an idea. The idea that unwashed and un-ironed garments that lose colour and hug bodies are in any way desirable, has historically been a difficult pill to swallow, and even now there are parts of small town India where a line is drawn at torn jeans. Jeans do not fit the image of orderly inconsequence that the adopted-from-the-English form of trousers do. Jeans infused a shock of American disrespect in the English model of hierarchy-inspired order. And yet, given their popularity in American popular culture, they were somehow meant to be desirable. Which is why jeans became more acceptable in this part of the world in their jeans-ka-pant avatar; surrogate trousers that were stitched and worn ironed (with a crease running down the front), like any other self respecting pants. This has changed gradually and with time, jeans of the more regular kind are everywhere, and today come in all kinds of shapes, forms and designs, the more elaborate the better.

What we see today is a significant shift in attitudes as jeans help signal a new state of in-betweenness that allows one to idle in modernity while evading concrete self-definition. Wearing jeans is like being vaguely modern without any accompanying intent of a specific kind. It allows one to opt out established social categories without any outward show of protest. The fact that they are unisex garments helps blur the strong gender marking that most other forms of clothing try so hard to amplify. In that sense, unlike the West, jeans work because of their inability to communicate- they carry little by way of automatic meaning. In India, given that the mode of adoption has been top down, they do not represent a blue-collar ethos, nor do they carry a sense of rebellion. They are for most part, and particularly for men, mild mannered costumes of modernity, that underline the individual but not in any socially significant way.

Where they do become more radical is in the way they interact with and show off the body. Jeans ‘instead of clutching the waist, held the hips’ said Umberto Eco. The body hugging and form fitting nature of jeans makes it a potent carrier, even if not entirely intended, of a message that places the body at the centre of self-expression through fashion. The contours of one’s body get placed in the public domain. Clothes otherwise fall off the waist or drape the lower half in a way that is designed to cover rather than reveal. Trousers in the case of men decorously hung from the waist while creating an artificial silhouette through the act of ironing in a centre parting, with a crease down the middle. In the case of women, the saree veiled the lower half of the body with layers of cloth while the salwar kameez, even in its chust (tight) form was modest in its display of the bodily form.

Jeans give the wearer a physicality of presence that most other clothes strive hard to deny. Jeans confer a matter-of-fact visibility to the lower body- even the act of walking becomes an exercise in visible bio-mechanics. Culturally, jeans are part of a larger process by which the young are in India reclaiming ownership over their own bodies. The body is being seen as their primary asset, one over which they have the most direct power. The ability to embrace their own bodies, to shape it, sculpt it, and improve upon it in a variety of ways is more than an act of fashion or grooming- it is a sign of experiencing a greater sense of control over their immediate circumstances. The reason why jeans are a target for many who fear a loss of moral values, is precisely because of this- jeans helps women regain control over their bodies, even if only to a modest extent. The problem with jeans is not that they show any skin, for they obviously don’t, but that they refuse to use cloth to camouflage the body. The body is celebrated without fanfare and reverts to being owned individually rather than by a cultural collective. When Khap Panchayats object to girls wearing jeans, they understand the power of what they are up against, for wearing jeans does change the world even if just a little bit. It is part of the process by which the individual is gradually extracting herself from a collective, and finding self-definition that begins with what she has of her own for sure- the body. It is a modest revolution to be sure, but it is one.