The Sari & Burqa: Symbols of Imperialism

Do clothes like the Indian sari or the Afghan burqa justify empire?

British missionaries in the centuries after the East India Company took over India tried to change the sari because they thought Indian women wore it in a scandalous way.

Feminists, like Jay Leno’s wife, want to ban the burqa in Afghanistan. They see it as a symbol of subjugation.

In a fascinating essay  for the digital magazine Aeon, Rafia Zakaria, a writer and political philosopher, suggests that these “moral campaigns against such ‘offensive’ practices are in reality sophisticated imperial technologies of control.”

Zakaria also argues that the British condemnation of sati, the Hindu custom of women in some parts of India to self-immolate on the funeral pyre of their husband, further demonstrates the lengths westerners would go to justify their colonization.

Ending sati or widow immolation in 19th-century India, and founding women’s shelters to protect women from honour killings in 21st-century Afghanistan: these campaigns bookend two centuries of Anglo-Americans standing squarely against horrific local customs. Specifically: protecting brown women from barbaric local customs. The 19th-century British Missionary Register and The New York Times Magazine of the 21st-century both tell urgent stories of Anglo-Americans as the fragile ‘thin line of defence’ protecting vulnerable local women.

While sati and the burqa might be reprehensible, they are not the only only symbols of Indian or Afghan civilization.  According to Zakaria, “sati was barbaric, but as British colonial officials well knew, some parts of India did not practise it at all; in other regions it was restricted to certain castes, while in others still it retained relative popularity. It hardly deserved to be the one thing most Europeans knew about India.”

This is a compelling essay that helps us to understand just how devastating imperialism was in forming western ideas of the east.