On fashion and illusions: Designing interpassive Indianness for India’s rich

Abstract

Elite Indian fashion designers consciously attempt to abstract the essence of Indianness from India’s numerous and geographically multiply localized crafts, turning their designs into a montage of exquisite handwork transgressing the local and representing the nation at large. Indian designer garments are pregnant with ideological meanings, sentiments and beliefs crafted for the consumption of India’s transnational elite. However, the elite consumers have a troubled relationship with the nation; they are both proud of it and despise it, while feeling obliged to stage their love for it. Intimate relations with designer clothing imbued with nationalist sentiment enable the elite to ‘objectively’ present itself as nationalist and, through ethical consumption, also as moral. The garments then belong to the nation and believe for/on behalf of the wearer, thus the elite customer is relieved from his/her nationalist or moral obligation and can freely contemplate other loyalties as much as hatred towards the very same nation. This role of aesthetic consumption and of artistic nationalism is read through the lens of interpassivity, a theory developed by Robert Pfaller, one that resolves this ethnographic puzzle. This is a Submitted Manuscript that has not yet undergone peer-review. © 2017 Peter Lang AG