10 December 2012, 06:07 PM IST
The story about a Haryana headmistress who has banned wearing of jeans at her college has had me, shall we say...in stitches? Here's yet another instance of misplaced swadeshi spirit. Quite besides the fact that a pair of jeans covers a whole lot more than a sari, jeans and denim have a fairly intimate connection to India. They are not all that ''foreign'' to India; not in the past, and certainly not now.
Jeans came into the fabric of American life around time of Mahatma Gandhi's birth (1869), and there is much Gandhian about it. There aren't any accounts of Gandhiji wearing jeans (although khadi comes close to it), but it's something he might have approved. It's a long-lasting, working man's clothing. But first let's roll back a little because the history of jeans go even further back than Levi Strauss, who it is usually associated with.
Jeans are typically made from the fabric denim. Both words, jeans and denim, are of European (and not American) provenance. The term jeans owes its origin the Italian city of Genoa, whose navy ordered it in large quantities for its sailors from the French town of Nimes (hence 'de-nim&rsquo
where the fabric was made. Jeans were dyed blue even in those days (hence called blue de Genes or literally blue of Genoa). The dye came from Indian Indigo, from the plant [Indigofera Tinctoria] which was first domesticated in India.
There's another interesting Indian connection here. At some point, the Genoan denim trousers for sailors evolved into what were called overalls or boilersuits, probably to protect their shirts. The overalls (also called bibs-and-brace) were made from coarse undyed calico, a fabric which owes its name to Calicut (now Kozhikode). Yet another Indian connection: The main manufacturing center for these overalls made from denim was the Mumbai area now called Dongri. Hence…Dongris…Dungarees.
So denims are jeans-come-lately in America. It's 'founding father' in the U.S was a Bavarian immigrant named Loeb (Levi) Strauss, who ran a clothing business in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. In the 1870s, Jacob Davis, a tailor from Reno, Nevada, who bought fabric from Strauss, noticed that some of his customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants. He hit upon an idea of using copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners (many of his customers were prospectors who may have carried heavy tools in the pocket causing them to tear). He teamed up with Strauss, and the two men received U.S Patent 139,121 for their riveted (and riveting) product.
Levi Strauss Co. dominated the jeans market for a century-plus and became synonymous with blue jeans. The widely-admired company (not just for its product but also for its policy of treating workers fairly) clothed the rock-and-roll generation. There are several songs celebrating jeans and even a Tamil movie called Jeans for which A.R.Rahman scored the music. There was a time in India in the 70s and 80s when the younger generation lusted after Levis, the last word in jeans. Our shopping list for family returning from abroad always included jeans -- preferably Levis.
Things changed in the 1990s. The rock-and-roll generation gave way to the hip-hop crowd. Blue collar made way to white collar. The craze for jeans began to fade. Khakis kicked in for the dot-com dudes. Denims made way for Dockers. A company that once had 90 per cent of the market and made 90 per cent of its jeans in the U.S started to fray. Today it has branched out to khakis and other apparel. It now parcels out 90 per cent of its production far and wide so that it can have a leg up on the fast evolving market.
Fittingly, one of the principle beneficiaries of the worldwide spread of jeans manufacturing was India -- in particular Arvind Mills -- which is one of the largest denim manufacturers in the world. Like Levis, Arvind has had its own share of troubles, but it is now said among the top three denim makers in the world. Fitting because the company was born in Gandhi's Gujarat in 1931, and its patriarch, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, was a Gandhi acolyte. Today, the company's licensed brands include Lee and Wrangler jeans. Would Gandhiji have worn swadeshi jeans? Your Guess is as good as mine.
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