
That the sari is politicised first became evident to me when my strict Navy-run school in Islamabad refused to allow girls to wear saris to the O and A Levels farewell party, a tradition in most schools.
Over the years, reasons — from how the sari is an excuse for girls to wear revealing clothes to how it is an Indian dress — kept piling. Eventually, girls from an A Levels batch won this drawn-out battle somewhere around 2010. Around the same time, as I changed my school for A Levels, the teenage rage of being made an outlier in school farewell culture was replaced by an anxiety about my body being imperfect for a sari.
I did not then, and will likely never have a modelesque body. On the day of the farewell, I regretted not having gone on as severe a crash diet as many of the girls who had miraculously shrunk a dress size or two over the span of a few weeks. Saris were supposed to look good only on skinny girls.
It is a terrible feeling to realise that you will never be able to wear certain kind of clothes. It’s humiliating. It’s trying one pair of jeans after another, only to find that none of them fit. At that moment, standing in a dressing room, it is difficult to figure out whether to lay the blame on your imperfect body or on the fashion industry’s inability to make clothes that fit curvier bodies as well.
The sari has also been an inaccessible, will-wear-when-thin or married kind of a dress for many girls, but this is changing with small businesses offering everyday-wear saris at affordable prices. Women from the Parsi community, some Sindhi communities or those who immigrated from India during Partition have been wearing saris all their lives. But outside these groups, the sari was relegated to school farewells and weddings. The trend appears to be changing, and we are witnessing a revival of saris.
Small businesses selling cotton saris have cropped up online, high-end brands catering to urban women have begun introducing saris in almost every collection, fashion influencers have expanded sartorial horizons by donning the sari in a variety of ways and, most recently, the #sarisforallsizes trend was an attempt to normalise saris for all body types. It is difficult to say right now if this will remain restricted to mostly urban, upper-class women but, regardless of its penetration, the increased visibility of saris reflects new, perhaps even liberatory ways of draping the garment.
Saris are enjoying a revival in Pakistan for more than simple fashion reasons. For some they have become a statement of women’s body autonomy and a rejection of restrictive conventions
One such woman-led, online business is Saareeka Official. Saareeka’s head of Social Media and Marketing, Ramsha Shoaib, says that the business was set up, just before last year’s Covid-19 lockdown in Pakistan, to make saris accessible and affordable. “We really want to normalise the concept of wearing saris casually,” she says. “We also have a social and cultural reason. That plus-size women can’t wear saris, that unmarried girls can’t wear saris, needs to be challenged.”

Mina Malik-Husain, host of The Coffee Table on Indus News is often seen wearing casual saris on the show. “Many think saris are only for thin and tall women, and that the “correct” way to wear them is with a skimpy blouse,” says Husain. “None of that is, of course, true but the only way to prove it is by doing it and, in that respect, Instagram has been really useful as it provides a visual vocabulary.”
Husain is also behind the recent #Sarisforallsizes trend on Instagram and Twitter. “The hashtag came from a conversation I had with RJ and journalist, Sabah Bano Malik and the influencer, Baemisaal about body shaming,” she says. “The idea was that everyone is allowed to feel happy and beautiful in whatever they want to wear.”
John Berger, an art critic and author of the book, Ways of Seeing, describes that the social presence of women “manifest[s] in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, [and] chosen surroundings” as compared to men’s, which is based on the “promise of their power”. Since a woman’s appearance determines the presence she will have and thus the treatment she will receive, Berger argues that women spend their lives surveying themselves.
And so women do all that they can to present appearances sanctioned by the patriarchy. To turn away from wearing the sari because you deem your body imperfect is then, in some ways, a result of patriarchal conditioning of what kind of bodies are allowed to be made visible.

By providing a “visual vocabulary”, as Husain says, the visibility of saris on all kinds of bodies puts a resistance to patriarchal forms of appearances. By dressing up in the world as we wish, we are forcing the patriarchy to accept us on our own terms, rather than pandering to its fantasies of a desirable woman’s body — not to over-emphasise the revolutionary potential of wearing a sari, but to point out a potentially significant effect of rebelling against patriarchal conventions of wearing certain clothes.
It’s worth noting that women are turning to the sari, and not another dress associated with nostalgia. Perhaps Pakistan’s political history has an explanation. The oppressive Zia regime issued the first of a series of directives in 1980 regulating the dressing of women government employees. They were ordered to wear a chaadar over their clothes, and cover their heads publicly.
This was followed by a ban in 1983 on government officials wearing the sari, with other women discouraged from doing so on the basis of the sari being an un-Islamic way of dressing, although women in the armed forces wear it as uniform. In 1986, at a concert at Alhamra Art Centre in Lahore, the late Iqbal Bano who always wore saris, wore a black one to register resistance against Zia’s rule.
“I deliberately chose to wear a sari to the 2019 Aurat March in Islamabad because it’s a powerful dress in the sense that many women cannot wear saris casually,” says Laiba, a journalist and activist. “I felt that I am making a power statement in a society where it is not normal for women to wear one in regular settings. The feeling comes from resistance as well.”
Saris are providing women — and let’s not forget that so far these are upper or upper-middle class women — a means to explore their relationship with their bodies, as well as enabling them to break away from a patriarchal regulation of their appearances. The rhetoric around bodily autonomy, and a celebration of a woman’s body by her on her own terms has perhaps helped increase the trend through both a demand and visibility of saris, and through a greater supply of more casual and affordable saris.
Mariam teaches Sociology and Global Perspectives in Islamabad. She tweets at @unearthedd
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 23rd, 2021
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