Honor, Desire, and Fashion: Textile Consumption in Northwest India and Pakistan, 1850–1947

Phulkari (literally Aflower work@) refers both to particular embroidery techniques and to the textiles women produced using them. I trace Panjabi women=s phulkari consumption patterns through interleaved sets of social relations and behavior associated with concepts of honor, desire, and fashion. Phulkaris could be used as clothing (chadar, odhini, ghungat), as handmade gifts, even as drapes for household walls to mark off a special place for religious ceremonies or for the reception of honored guests. Of course, not every consumer framed her actions as idealizing or participating in the same aspects of Panjabi social relations but, in nearly all cases, social bonds both initiated and were intensified by phulkari consumption. I will briefly describe some of these beautiful textiles, and then focus on their consumption in both physical and cultural terms between the 1880s and the 1950s.

Both the nature and the meanings of phulkari consumption changed during this period. In the 1880s, two groups consumed phulkaris: Panjabi women and international (especially Euro-American) customers. Colonial-era government officials and demi-officials commodified phulkaris through what might today be called commodity chains, a term indicating the international links between producers and consumers, the connections of people and places at different links along a chain. Panjabi women also commodified phulkaris through their own provincial social and commercial networks. By the 1950s, the Panjabi frame for consumption no longer rested on personal social relationships. Instead, the dominant themes were nostalgic evocations of Panjabi women=s idealized maternal emotions on the one hand, and patriotic handicraft revivalism on the other. Panjabi women and men then consumed pre-partition phulkaris represented as provincial Aheritage,@ apparently making more self-conscious choices to use the textiles crafted before Independence to display APanjabiness.@