Editor’s Note: The following excerpt has been adapted from an essay originally published by the author on her Medium profile.
I have been home in Northeast India for over a month now, and wherever I go, I seem to end up rubbing people the wrong way. They say it’s my wanting to be at par with men that pisses people off. Okay, whatever.
Just last week, my uncle’s wife was “offended” that I wore a pair of shorts in the presence of “grown-up men” in the house — it was 40 degrees outside! This week, my maternal aunt passive-aggressively asked me to hide my lacy lingerie sets that were hanging out in the sun to dry.
“But why?” I asked her, politely at first.
“Because there are men in the house and it’s uncomfortable for them, and us!” she yelled. Soon, other female members of the family rallied around her, sniggering at me as a mark of collective protest.
“Well, their underwear stays out in the sun for days on end. No one seems to complain then. WHY ONLY ME?” I sniped back.
I later learned that my aunt was sobbing over my ‘disrespectful’ behaviour. Everyone had unpleasant things to say behind my back, but no one, of course, felt the need to ask her one pertinent question:
“If men can flaunt their underwear for the world to see, why are women expected to hide theirs away?”
In India and the subcontinent of South Asia, the secrecy around women’s underwear is not just an appalling cultural phenomenon but also a measure by which a woman’s character is judged. If she wears mesh, underwired, or padded bras, she is seen as sleazy and “asking for it,” and if someone like me wears lacy lingerie, she is considered a lost cause, deserving of all the terrible things that could happen to her.
It is almost a sin if she doesn’t hide her stack of lingerie in the deepest corners of her room. Everybody knows that women wear underwear underneath their clothes, like men do, but the onus is only on women to maintain modesty in their households. Men can leave their underwear in the living room, and it will be laughed off as an innocent oversight. The sheer hypocrisy is jarring.
Growing up, I had no control over what I wore, who I dated, what I ate, or who I loved, but I had one thing under my thumb: the size, colour, and design of my underwear. It was, in essence, my freedom from the strict patriarchal society and home I was born into.
Choosing undergarments on my own was my first real shot at freedom. When puberty hit and my bosom grew as I sprinted towards womanhood, I experimented with various kinds of lingerie sets without anyone telling me what to do or how to wear them.
But as I grew bolder with my choices, the people around me were quick to ‘put me in my place’.
“You’re no Bollywood actress, wear simple bras like me and your mother,” an aunt once remarked.
“Women from good families don’t wear such atrocious underwear sets, beta,” my ex-boyfriend’s mother politely said.
“You are no rich Westerner, don’t spend so much on these modern bras,” came my mother’s ultimatum.
It may sound ridiculous to some, but in middle-class Indian and South Asian families, the only time a woman wears an expensive and high-end lingerie set is on the night of her wedding. Hint: it involves pleasing a certain someone, not feeling sexy herself.
True, revolting over bras, panties, thongs, and lingerie sets may seem trivial to some, but when that basic right is snatched away from you, it is not trivial anymore. I fight for the most private garments that hug my body so that I can revolt against the other forms of oppression I face in the outside world.
Because if you let family and friends decide the shape of your bra, they will eventually take over the rest of your life. And yes, this is coming from personal experience.
We have heard of the Free the Nipple movement in the West and seen models sashaying down Victoria’s Secret shows year after year, but in South Asia, especially India, women wearing underwear in public is, unfortunately, often an act of protest against the atrocities they endure regularly.
For instance, in 2007, a woman in Rajkot, Gujarat, marched in her undergarments to protest against domestic violence and dowry harassment allegedly inflicted by her husband and in-laws. A year later, she had to seek police protection following her neighbour’s alleged death threats over that public protest.
In 2009, a group of women from Mangalore launched a viral campaign called the ‘pink chaddi campaign’ (pink underwear campaign) after men with political affiliations harassed them for being pub-going, alcohol-drinking, and supposedly ‘morally loose’ women. Through this campaign, these women received over 30,000 pink underwear items from women all over India, which they sent to the Sri Ram Sena party office on Valentine’s Day.
Another campaign that garnered nationwide attention was the Besharmi Morcha movement (Shamelessness Front), an offshoot of the global SlutWalk movement. Indian feminists from cities such as Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Bhopal paraded in their undergarments or had ‘slut’ written on their bodies to protest against the mindset of blaming female victims of sexual aggression and patriarchy-induced violence.
When I asked acquaintances from Bangladesh why such protests are not held there, one of them said that women protesting in underwear would be “stoned to death” before they even dared to leave their homes in two-piece sets.
The reality is that South Asian women hear the ‘good women wear bad underwear’ narrative so often that wearing good underwear, especially in public, has now become an act of defiance against everything they have ever been taught to believe about womanhood. It may not make sense to many, but to me it does, and I salute these women for their boldness in the face of everyday adversity.
This morning, I woke feeling a little extra rebellious, so I decided to wash my onion-pink mesh-and-lace lingerie set and hang it to dry in the front yard, right next to where my uncles and cousins had hung their underwear. My aunts — creatures of steady habits — rushed out to hide my lingerie set under my towel. They glared and shook their heads in disappointment. I laughed and winked at them.
“Don’t do that again,” one of the aunts warned before walking away to pack her husband’s lunchbox.
On a different planet, I would have listened to her, but I have a big pile of clothes to wash tomorrow, including my beautiful undergarments in different hues: beige, teal, red, and classic black.
Sure, my aunts will be livid again, but I am hanging my ‘bad woman’ undergarments where I hung them today. No shame or regrets. None.
