Indecorous dresses make even decent men indecent-II

It is a thin line that separates the guardians of tradition from those who favour free choice. In the case of the female body, for instance, the argument in favour of modesty sometimes takes the form of just a few inches of cloth to cover a tennis star’s thighs. Only a few years ago, Taliban allowed their zealous reformist young men to walk the streets of Kabul (Afghanistan) wielding whips to lash at the feet of young girls who dared to use high heels. These moralists, using the power of police, were even allowed to mutilate the body parts of their victims, for having tempted them into rape. Writing in The Hindu (Oct. 09) Geeta Doctor recalls: “It’s interesting to note that in the old days, the Balinese women who performed the ritual dances in front of the temples were not only bare chested but also so beautifully built that some anthropologists actually studied their upper body musculature to determine whether they had a genetic disposition for a firm upper body! They didn’t.” “Basically”, says Ramli Ebrahim, a Muslim dancer-choreographer from Kuala Lumpur from Malaysia, “what makes a costume vulger or otherwise is not just the design, but more importantly, the context of how a dancer ‘costumes’ the Dance. Just as the scantly clad sculputures of celestial maidens and goddesses became a potent symbol of religion and art, but their human counterparts wearing the same in the present crass films can only attract lasciviousness from the public.”