Anewspaper picture of Mrs Sonia Gandhi talking to a victim of the Assam riots intrigued me. The victim, presumably a Bengali-speaking Muslim or Assamese, wore a salwar-kameez with a dupatta across her chest. In contrast, Mrs Gandhi had draped herself in a sari. You might say she is never seen in anything else.

But here’s the rub. The Italian-born leader of India’s Congress Party had decorously pulled the sari end over her head right up to the front. The bare head of the Assamese/Bengali girl glistened in the picture.
Time was when no respectable woman anywhere was ever seen uncovered. For Hindus, it was the sari or dupatta. Muslim women had the burqa or hijab and, in Iran, the chador that the intrepid Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, flung aside and strode out of an interview with Ayatollah Khomeini. European women wore hats, which were de rigueur in church. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is probably the hat’s last champion, never being seen without one herself, and ordaining that no hatless female should be admitted into Westminster Abbey when her grandson, Prince William, was married. The decree created some elegant millinery in feathers and diamonds providing a token covering.
Earlier, when the Queen issued a similar order for the royal enclosure at Ascot, the late Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur merely pulled the sari over her head and sailed in. Sari language can be as expressive as any flamenco dancer’s fan, and I was most impressed once on board a warship watching Admiral Mihir Roy’s wife, Aparajita, draw the sari over her head as the band struck up the national anthem. The simple gesture conveyed grace, dignity and respect. Her head remained covered as in church or temple while the strains of Jana Gana Mana lasted.
Modernism is taking a savage toll of many graceful customs. It began in 1925 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, father of the Turkish revolution, banned the fez in a crushing blow to orthodoxy in a nation aspiring to secular modernism. Muslim men were as particular about headgear as Muslim women and the last nizam of Hyderabad muttered disapprovingly about the uncovered heads of the Hindu maharajas at Lord Mountbatten’s dinner for the princes. Tunisia’s founding father, Habib Bourguiba, who called the headscarf an “odious rag”, continued Ataturk’s revolution.
But the wheel is turning — or has it turned full circle already? — in the Islamic ummah where more and more women, including Turks, are returning to the hijab. The effect is contagious. I asked a young woman colleague of Pakistani origin in Singapore why she had suddenly started covering her head after two years of going about bareheaded. Instead of a lecture on religious ritual, I received a lesson in pragmatism. “If you live in a place it’s best to do as everyone else does” was her conformist reply. Even sari-draped Bangladeshi women in Singapore and Malaysia wear the hijab which seems both ungainly and redundant since all they need to do as a concession to propriety is follow the example of the late rajmata or the admiral’s wife.
Perhaps as Muslims, they feel they ought to flaunt a recognisably Muslim garment. Politics has always shimmered in a sari’s folds and when Pakistan was created, Fatima Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam’s sister, declared the garment unpatriotic. The implicit charge of being exclusively Hindu was echoed many years later when an Indian reporter asked Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s wife in Delhi her preference in saris and whether she had bought any. She didn’t wear them, she retorted. Period.
Though British women have abandoned the hat, one sees more and more hijabs in the streets of English cities, especially in the Midlands and the North. It was also so in France until President Nicolas Sarkozy banned all overt religious symbols. Curiously, the stoutest defence of the headscarf comes in England not from Arab immigrants but from Englishwomen married to Asian Muslims. They maintain that no one forces them to cover their heads, they wear the hijab willingly and voluntarily, and no government has any right to interfere in a matter of personal choice.
Back to Mrs Gandhi and her head covering. It took me back to Mother Teresa’s funeral in Calcutta. The Duchess of Kent, representing her cousin, Queen Elizabeth II, wore a hat. Though a Muslim, Queen Noor of Jordan, sitting on the sofa beside Mrs Gandhi, took out a silken scarf from her bag and draped it over her head as the priest began celebrating Mass. But sari-draped Mrs Gandhi sat with uncovered head throughout the ceremony. She did not participate in the Mass, perhaps because she is no longer a Roman Catholic, perhaps because she was not then in a state of grace. But not covering her head sent out as decisive a signal as the sari she always wears.
Tony Blair’s wife Cherie sported a sari when canvassing ethnic Indian voters. Chester Bowles’ wife wore nothing else, hoping to impress her Indian friends when her husband was US ambassador in Delhi, but embarrassed them instead because she wore it so badly. Elizabeth Hurley appeared in a sari at a New York fundraising event. No doubt Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii’s Congresswoman-elect, will also wear one when she visits India. Though without a drop of Indian blood, Ms Gabbard claims to be a Vaishnava Hindu whose “spiritual lineage is the Brahma-Madhva-Gaudiya sampradaya”.
But native Indian women prefer other attire. If it’s not the salwar-kameez ensemble, it’s Western dress. The sari for them is becoming more and more like Japan’s kimono and China’s cheongsam — exotic attire for high days and holidays. We must be thankful that ethnic foreigners keep it alive.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author