I chose to examine the sari, a feminine garment that is close to home, and yet is worn very differently all over South Asia. The sari itself is merely a long piece of fabric, usually about six yards in length and three yards in breadth. The manner in which it is worn, or draped, indicates the origins of the wearer, and it is this facet of the sari that fascinates me, given the fact that the fabric has no shape until it is wrapped around the body. The images above show the Kandyan sari, or the osariya, worn primarily in Sri Lanka. It has a frill at the waist, and the sari blouse often has puffed sleeves. (See here for instructions on how to drape the osariya.) The whole costume consists of the sari, a sari blouse, an underskirt, and traditional jewellery.

It was adopted by upper-class women in the provinces of Kandy in Sri Lanka. Today, it is considered the national dress of the island, although feminist historian Nira Wickramasinghe points out that this method of draping the sari has “a definite origin from across the Palk [Strait]” (i:e: from India).[1] Sinhalese nationalists proclaimed the drape to be “the true Sinhalese dress, a morally acceptable dress because it covered the entire body,” and (male) nationalists laid down the sari specifications: “A proper blouse should cover the breast, stomach and back completely. A cloth ten riyans long should be worn as the osariya or sari.”[2]

Wickramasinghe notes that the main reason for the choice of the osariya as the national dress was because of its Kandyan origins. Sinhalese nationalists viewed the Kandyan kingdom, historically more insulated from colonial influences than Sri Lanka’s maritime provinces, so despite the fact that the sari itself had origins elsewhere, “it was seen  not only as the ‘moral dress’, but also as the authentic, unspoiled and ‘pure’ dress of the Sinhalese.” This invented tradition follows Hobsbawm’s observation that the invention is necessitated by a temporal rupture (in this case the bid for independence from the British) and has a very small group of initiators (here, a vocal group of nationalist Sinhalese males). I am particularly intrigued by the act of collapsing time and the carefully imposed erasure of the fact that the osariya is in fact testament to miscegenation and hybridism in Sri Lanka, rather than purity. (The nationalists did such a good job that I did not realise until I commenced my research that the osariya was not necessarily Sri Lankan origin!) Included in the images is a picture of a batik sari - although the batik dyeing process originates from Indonesia, it has migrated to Sri Lanka, and a batik osariya is considered an "authentic" Sri Lankan dress.

Today, the osariya is the uniform of stewardesses on Sri Lanka’s national airline (see image); meanwhile, a 2009 article on the website of the National Olympic Committee of Sri Lanka, bemoaning the lack of a common standard for attire of athletes representing  Sri Lanka, lays down the rules for the Opening Ceremony dress for women: “The female costume consists of a handloom saree, the osariya worn in the Kandyan style. The set of jewellery and accessories consist of the traditional agate “Agasthi” necklace, “kudu karabu”, “hawadiya”, and the bracelet similar to the “bola valalu”.[3] All of these stipulations ignore that not all Sri Lankan women necessarily identify with this garment . While the Sinhalese comprise Sri Lanka’s major ethnic group, they are not its only constituency. Also, naturally, only a small number of Sri Lankans actually hail from Kandy.

I am also interested in what we call a “made-up” Kandyan, in which the sari (which is time-consuming to drape) is literally deconstructed – it is cut up into several smaller pieces that are worn somewhat like a wrap-around skirt with a frill. It then becomes particularly easy for working women, or for young Sri Lankan women going to college in other parts of the world to quickly dress themselves in their “national dress” for cultural events and other occasions, while it would usually require considerable deftness and practice to wear a sari without assistance.

[1] Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the modern age: a history of contested identities (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006), 93

[2] Ananda Guruge (ed.), Dharmapala Lipi, (Colombo, 1963), 37, qtd. in Wickramasinghe, 93

[3] An attire for Athletes representing Sri Lanka, http://www.srilankaolympic.org/2009/07/an-attire-for-athletes-representing-sri-lanka/, accessed September 5, 2014