Ananda Coomaraswamy on Arts and Crafts:

A Review of Ayesha Wickramasinghe’s ‘The Dress of Women in Sri Lanka’ – part II

by Laleen Jayamanne
(Continued from yesterday)

Dr. Ayesha Wickramasinghe, with her technical skills and historical interests, appears to have heard Coomaraswamy’s implicit call to study the neglected crafts of Lanka, to look back at our traditions of dress, even as she is focused on the technological future of the craft with her students. As a contemporary designer, she is interested in developing new industrial techniques and materials suited to the 21st Century, with sustainability as a value. She has researched clothing and ornament to understand their forms and functions within a rapidly changing modern era, unlike the relatively stable era of pre-1815 Kandyan Kingdom, where the traditional crafts were practised as they were perennially, nourished by South Indian and indigenous craft practices and craftsmen. Despite its modest disclaimer, Coomaraswamy’s scholarship is peerless. Wickramasinghe on her part, dedicates her book to, ‘The unknown designers who have created clothing fashions of ancient Sri Lanka.’ She draws from a wide variety of sources including Coomaraswamy’s text and the handful of books on clothing and costume in Lanka and also from Lanka’s long history of art which includes temple paintings and stone sculpture. What she does with these sources is ingenious.

The book is broadly divided into six sections and a conclusion. The presentation begins with the variety in female ornamentation and textiles and then progresses chronologically. She shows examples of female dress sculpted on stone figures, from the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa periods and in temple paintings within the colonial era. A stone sculptural figure (Anuradhapura Museum), the life-size bronze of the Bodhisattva icon Tara (8th Century, British Museum), and a female Doratupala (13th Century) Dalada Maligava, Yapahuva, are all seen clad in very finely woven garments covering the lower part of the bodies, while the breasts are left uncovered. The more familiar Sigiriya frescoes are also presented. Perhaps with the Indian Hindu influence, the display of semi-clothed bodies is accepted and appreciated without the sense of shame endemic to the Christian European traditions of the colonisers, in relation to human flesh, and the body, burdened by the idea of ‘Original Sin’. Puritanical, Victorian patriarchal values are said to have been introduced to Lanka by the Christian English colonisers and consolidated by Lankan middle classes themselves, such as the influential nationalist and social reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala, who incorporated these values, according to the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekera. He coined the astute phrase, ‘Protestant- Buddhism,’ to capture this phenomenon. More of this later.

Wickramasinghe takes account of the island’s geography, situated on trade routes, as a factor in its hybridised forms of dress. The topic of colonialism explores the Western influence on local upper-class women’s taste. The broad political theme of decolonisation of dress, emphasising ethnic differences, nationalism and dress among the Sinhala folk and dress among other groups, including the low caste, and very poor women of the Sakkiliya caste or Dalit women, are also presented. The final chapter deals with the period after 1977 when the economy was opened up to neo-liberal globalisation, which created a ‘free-trade zone’ to manufacture garments, to encourage foreign capital by providing cheap female labour.

Genesis of Art in Human Craft Labour

In the feudal 18th Century that Coomaraswamy studied, there was of course a hierarchical social structure, but even the most humble craftsman belonged to an integrated community. It is worth noting that he thought it worth publishing in the book a large number of songs kavi that crafts persons sang while working. In English, the word ‘yarn’ means both thread and also to tell a tale, as in ‘to spin a yarn’. These two examples indicate the vital fact of the link between the deep history of human craft skills and the creation and emergence of art itself (story-telling and song, for example), from these very craft practices, that is from human labour. This is the deep link between arts and crafts, like twins, linking the hand and the mouth, dance and song emerging from spinning and weaving. This is the very heart of his philosophical intuition of the integral links between craft, human labour and art. It is this civilisational loss which Coomaraswamy wrote about and documented and preserved for posterity, at the Boston Fine Art Museum in the US, where he was the curator of Indian, Persian and Islamic Art. He lived and worked in the US from 1917 until his death in 1947. He was forced to leave England because he spoke up against joining WWI and also against British colonial rule in India and Ceylon. His property was confiscated but America gave him refuge, where he published some of his major works.

Lankan Elephants and Ivory Crafts

I saw at the Boston Fine Art Museum an exquisitely carved little ivory box and was delighted to read that it was from Ceylon! Though indeed in his book Coomaraswamy says that the collection of ivory carvings is rather large in Lanka, whereas there is relatively very little ivory work in India. Then he goes on to say that the Hindus would have found working on a material from an animal source unacceptable, polluting. One wonders how a Buddhist country reconciled this, especially because Coomaraswamy says that tusked elephants were very rare in Lanka. Were the tusks taken from dead elephants, who by the way have long natural lives, and what of the huge tusks that are ceremonially such an integral part of contemporary Lankan Sinhala Nationalist State ceremonies and religious ritual? Learning this deep history, I find the tusk decoration rather grotesque, inhumane. We know that the English loved to go on shooting sprees killing Lankan wild animals, but then they left in 1947 and the profound Buddhist doctrine of Ahimsa (non-violence) toward all sentient life is not a Christian virtue.

Fashion Industry: Cheap Female Labour

Wickramasinghe goes on to say that the fashion industry in Lanka is now very large and provides employment for many women. Whether the young women get burnt out by very poor work conditions in the free trade zone, appears not to concern successive governments. According to the young trade union leader, labour lawyer and prominent political activist, Swasthika Arulingam, the garment workers have very few labour rights even now after over four decades.

However, a plethora of global styles and materials were made affordable as a result of the garment industry, democratising sartorial tastes and providing access to fashion to a large number of people across social classes. One can view the rather wide use of denim jeans by young women, as an example of equalising gendered dress through a unisex-garment. It would appear that traditional ideas of femininity are also being questioned by women through access to new forms of clothing, education in feminist ideas and politics and access to the internet which diminishes Lankan insularity.

Pop-Cultural Influence

Two unusual examples of dress innovation for comfort and style are presented in stills from two popular Sinhala films from the 1960s, which have now returned in newer styles. A popular star at the time, Jeevarani Kurukulasooriya, is seen lounging in a salwar kameez, while in Hithata Hitha (1965), Vijitha Mallika lounges stylishly in slacks and a top with a shirt collar, all in a single dark colour. The ‘60s are presented as an era when mini-skirts and bell-bottom pants and jeans became popular among the middle classes who enjoyed the freedom of movement and sense of fun these garments provided in feeling connected to the youth pop culture of the West seen in Hollywood films and fashion magazines. This was indeed part of my world along with that of my school friends during that period in Colombo. We also loved a frock called a Tent, which looked like one, where the body floated in the garment.

The Sari-Drama in Parliament

So, with this diverse, long Lankan sartorial history, it’s surprising to see the current controversy about the female dress mandated for Lankan school teachers, who are expected to wear either a sari or the upcountry Ohoriya to school. The ‘problem’ arose when a group of teachers decided recently to collectively flout this mandate by wearing comfortable clothes they thought were appropriate for their professional work. Among the photos they posted, there was a teacher wearing a smart salwar kameez, a set of clothes worn by Muslim women with the Dupatta shawl, and also a Kurta, again an elegant, uni-sex garment traditionally worn by men across North India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, going further back to the ancient Persian Imperial era. It is a tailored garment, unlike the draped clothing of ancient India and Greece. During the Persian wars, they introduced the tailored garment to Classical Greece where both men and women wore draped clothing.

In the 19th Century, the highly influential Sinhala Buddhist social reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala expressed the following, says Wickramasinghe.

“Dharmapala stated that the Ohoriya and sari were the most suitable attire for Sri Lankan women. The morally acceptable dress covered the entire body with a proper blouse and a cloth ten riyans long.” (N. Wickramasinghe, Dressing the Colonised Body; Politics, Clothing and identity. New Delhi; Longman, 2003) p195.

This is an encapsulation of a ‘Protestant-Buddhist’ sentiment identified by Obeyesekera, referred to earlier. It appears then that in linking morality with forms of dress, some Sinhala male attitudes to women’s clothing are still stuck in the puritanical and patriarchal mores of the 19th Century English Victorian era. Besides the Dalit women who did the municipal labour of sweeping streets and cleaning public toilets and the Malaiyahi women who plucked tea would not have been able to afford the stipulated 10 riyan. But then he was not addressing them!

Women in a Teachers’ Trade Union have calmly and rationally explained to the public that they wanted the freedom to wear garments of their choice to the schools in which they teach, clothes that combine comfort and professional decorum. They have said clearly that to mandate the sari for teachers is an unreasonable rule. Its cost, its considerable upkeep and lack of ease of movement in scrambling onto packed buses have made some of them choose to wear garments they deem suitable for their workplace which combine comfort and ease. It would appear that some men fear that their ability to control women is at risk. Dress is a powerful means of expression of a sense of freedom and comfort of self-enjoyment in ease of movement. This is amply demonstrated in the history of the Western Women’s Movements of the 20th Century. The teachers who question the sari mandate do not dislike the sari or Ohoriya – how could one, when the two garments are mostly so beautiful, for the right occasion and time? But Lankan women will decide when they would like to wear it and how exactly to drape it and the way in which they will style their hair and blouses.

Women’s Dress and Resistance to Patriarchy

Coincidentally, Ayesha Wickramasinghe’s book provides a timely synoptic vision of the diversity of Lankan women’s dress across the ages, at this very moment of an important feminist act of political resistance, within the wider ongoing political struggle in Lanka. Lankan teachers and other professionals with a social conscience have repeatedly highlighted how the current economic crisis is affecting poor young school students’ ability to learn, or even attend school because of the cost of travel, lack of proper clothes and shoes and even food. As many say, these are the matters that need to be addressed urgently in parliament. If ignorant men invoke the ‘sanctity of Sinhala- Buddhist tradition’ against western influence, sitting in a Westminster style Democratic parliament, one could rhetorically ask, which Buddhist traditions, because there are several and the many Taras are clad in marvellous clothes and ornaments in Tibet and Nepal, in the Mahayana traditions of meditation.

Guru-Shishya-Parampara in Lanka

Because I have chosen to frame my account of Ayesha’s book on The Dress of Women in Sri Lanka with Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, I would like to conclude with a few personal thoughts about this most gifted of scholars. Of mixed parentage, with an English mother, on his father’s side he comes from one of the most illustrious Jaffna Tamil families of Lanka. His father, Sir Muttu Coomaraswamy (who died when Ananda was just three), had two brilliant nephews, Arunachalam Ponnambalam and Arunachalam Ramanadan, who played major public roles in colonial Ceylon. Two halls of residence at Peradeniya University are named after them. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s very name (a serendipitous combination of Sinhala, English and Tamil), appears now, more than ever, as a beacon of light to contemporary Lankan scholarship. His profound work admonishes us not to delimit Lankan humanities research within a narrow Sinhala-Buddhist- Nationalist, supremacist-ideology of art and politics, but rather, to widen our perspectives by understanding the rich diversity of cultures, languages and religions of Lanka which includes its many traditions of dress. Ananda had hoped to spend his last years in his beloved India as a Sanyasi, but he died suddenly of a heart attack, in his Japanese garden in New England, beside his Brazilian wife. His ashes, it is said, were released into the Ganga but some of it set afloat in a river in Lanka.