தமிழர் ஆடைகள்/003
Introduction
The history of costumes is as old as the history of humans, a knowledge of which will be of immense use to the historians of human civilization. The complexities of culture and civilization cannot be unfathomed fully without a deep understanding of the customs and conventions underlying the day-to-day lives of the individuals. These customs and conventions are an organic blend of various things of which the costumes are of cardinal importance. We cannot think of a human being who could not ‘obsess’ himself with his dress, at least a few moments of his every-day routine. That costumes have become deeply embedded in the life of man and consequently in the culture of mankind is too obvious to need further elucidation. A complete understanding of the costumes of a people is not just one of the essential realms of a historian's exploration; it is of unceasing interest to the generality of mankind too, in so far as it unravels before them the nuances of the daily lives of a people at a particular point of time, and also it may both in positive and negative ways influence our ways of dressing. We cannot afford to be the students of human history without having a ‘working’ knowledge of the history of costumes, since, as the Tamil saying goes, without cloths to cover him a man is but half of himself.
And, living is a serious business, tremendously serious and important. All our modes of knowing and being costitute this vital business of mankind. Our ‘being’ is the infrastructure and ‘knowing’ the superstructure of this wonderful edifice of human life. No doubt, these two structures, well-balanced, complete the life on this earth. But there is an elencat of crudeness and primitivity in this ‘building’. It must be polished, given emblishment. An extrinsic ornamentation done with the same seriousness and care must be added to its intrinsic strength and beauty. Such a refinement may not enhance the inner splendour of the structure, but it is never a luxury; it makes the ‘form’ of the building what it ought to be. This external beauty is the clothes. As long as human civilization continues, costumes will be there, organically connected with our modes of living.
Hence a study of the costumes is as important as the study of any other facet of human life. No literature worth the name could ignore it. After all, literature and the other arts are but the off springs of the artist’s passion for life, a fuller life, and his inexhaustible interest in representing it in the artefacts. In fact even a superficial survey of the literatures of the world reveals the astonishing fact that the modes of dressing of the individual literary characters and personalities have a significant bearing not only on their individual lives but on the thematic organization of the literary works also. It is not uncommon to come across a change in the course of events, an unexpected shift in emphasis, a dramatic appeal to the readers, a felt compulsion and immediacy in the evolution and interrelatedness of life portrayed in the works of art due solely to the costume styles which the writer conceives for the people of his artistic world. In the hands of matured artists it is much more than this. The adoptation of a particular kind of dress may give an unmistakable clue to the unfathoming of the very conception of the writer that underlies the overall thematic structure of the work. The garments worn by the characters have been used by many poets as a rich source of creating images and symbols. The inward greatness or littleness of a man could be judged through his outward appearance, the obvious manifestation of which is his dress. It is not for nothing that Shakespeare has given considerable importance to the robes and crowns and jewels and garments in his plays wherein live the universal man and woman. They may give a clue toward unravelling the puzzle behind his overriding concern with kings and nobles and courts. The assignment of garments and ornaments to his characters is not the result of any arbitrary conventions. For Shakespeare, for that matter, for most of the writers of the Classical age crowns and robes, rich costumes and jewels were the fitting outward manifestations of the person's inward majesty. Such costumes of the characters along with their other outward grandeurs may indicate something of the conception of human being by the writer as a supreme being and also they many point toward the artist’s vision of the amplitude and greatness of human life. The modern writer’s preoccupation with the commonplace souls and their unglamourous adventures, and their ultimate conception of human soul as commonplace and its emotions as mean may be reflected among other things by the attire assigned to the characters. Consequently, a comparative study of the costume-pattern of the characters in a literature of one epoch with that of another epoch, of the costumes used by one cultural group with that of another may lead toward the discovery of valuable materials for a historical and sociological study of the peoples of different ages and cultures.
Again, as Dr. Sachidand Sahay puts it, rightly, “Dress is the most eminet form of individual as well as racial self-expression. It is at the same time an excellent embodiment of their sense of beauty...... For individual self expression no human activity affords so much scope to the average man or woman as does dress or personal adornments” (Indian Costume Coiffure and Ornament, Delhi, 1976 p.I.) It is not only that One's way of dressing may, in unmistakable terms, determine one's tastes and temperaments in general and one's aesthetic sense in particular. The more subtle and finer spheres of human life like love and sensuousness are, at least in a limited way, organically connected with one’s self-expression’ through one’s costumes. Or, to put it precisely, one’s manner of dressing may help us to ‘judge’ though not dicisively, one’s whole mode of aesthetic living. Applying the principle of reductive process, we may even go to the extent of saying that this ‘style’ in dressing may have a hearing on one’s material existence too. since one’s wordly living and aesthetic living are not unrelated to one another.
So much for the relationship of dress with life and literature. A detailed study of the ‘evolution’ of costumes among different cultural groups may bring to the fore hitherto unexplored avenues in the civilization of mankind. But this is too ambitious a project for the present writer who has to remain contented with the study of the costumes of Tamils, an illustrious race which is at once complex and unsophisticated, highly cultured and primitive, extraordinarily valorous and yet incredibly gentle and soft. An attempt to gain some insight of the cultural pattern of this people has had to be made only on the basis of the evidences we find in their literature, sculpture, and painting since there is no concrete historical evidence. This is especially so with the Cankam Tamils, a people who lived, as their literatures passionately illustrate, an exemplary life at the dawn of the Christian era and even before. But art is not a figment of imagination nor is it the off-spring of a ‘neurotic’ mind. It is the product of the living experiences of a member of the society, its unique spokesman, its ‘unacknowledged legislator’. He is different from the historian in the sense that he is an inseparable blend of a historian, a bard (a creator), and a prophet. The sense of history in poetry is masked by prophecy and ‘creation’, no doubt, but it is only masked, never destroyed. A learned and skilful critic can unearth it and reconstructure the cultural facets of the people represented in the given work of art.