How colonialism shaped post-colonial Indian fashion

The fashion landscape of post-colonial India is the fashion industry that grew from India's long clothing and textile traditions. This path helps readers understand how colonial rule, economic change and efforts to revive traditional crafts shaped the industry, and explores its history, designers and workers.

2 articles, 1 book · about 18 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   

   History of the Textile Industry in India: Ancient to Modern | UDIT · UDIT · 10 min read

   After the Industrial Revolution began in England, British goods entered the Indian market without import duties, while the English East India Company imposed heavy import duties on Indian clothes in British markets. Indian textile mills could not withstand competition from machine-made goods produced in Britain, and the Indian textile industry gradually declined during the colonial period. British colonial rule disrupted India's pre-colonial handwoven and hand-block-printed textile production as cheap machine-made imports arrived. After independence, the khadi movement and government initiatives helped the sector revive, and India eventually became the world's second-largest textile producer and exporter.

2. Read
   the fashion landscape of post-colonial india · Wikipedia · 8 min read

   Ritu Kumar, a Kolkata-based designer and textile print-expert, worked to revive Bengal's traditional hand block printing techniques and make them part of the fashion industry, establishing "ethnic chic." The Indian fashion industry remains academically understudied, despite research on textiles, craft traditions and the history of Indian dress. Tereza Kuldova's 2016 book Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique is the only anthropological study of the industry, based on ethnographic research in New Delhi and Lucknow and covering luxury fashion designers, craftspeople and workers.

3. Book
   

   The Inheritance of Loss · Bookshop.org

   The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai follows Biju, an illegal immigrant in the US trying to make a new life, and Sai, an Anglicized Indian girl in India. Their experiences show snobbery toward those who embody the Indian way of life and anger at English Indians who have lost their traditions.

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