Since the mid-twentieth century, successive generations of Hindi film costume designers and costume workers have asserted claims to an aesthetic and professional distinction. As each new cluster of designers comes on the scene, they draw a contrast between their practices and knowledge
and those of past designers (or other costume department personnel) in ways that boost their own claims of being the first to do the job ‘professionally’. Such claims often tend to revolve around evolving (and often competing) notions of what makes a costume ‘real’.
Based on in-depth interviews and ethnography among a cross-section of film costume producers from different eras, this article points out the ways in which discrepant discourses among designers and makers, and between designers of different generations, reveal important differences in how
‘real’ costume is understood. Paying attention to a wider range of voices within costume production also reveals the linkage of narrative, costume, and aesthetics in collaborative, albeit conflicted practice, as opposed to being the direct outcome of an intellectual and somewhat
disembodied process of design.
The heroine of Kahaani, in taking on a powerful persona in the quintessentially female garment of the sari, represents a sharp contrast with conventional ways of dressing powerful women in western cinematic tradition. There is ample cultural and mythological precedent
in India for coding action and violence as female, but Kahaani’s affinity with the contemporary superhero film emerges in an unexpected way in its treatment of costume, specifically the use of the sari as a distinct article of clothing that the heroine assumes only for
the first time as she embarks upon the dispensation of justice. Demarcating an ordinary set of clothing from the ‘special’ sari mirrors the superhero division of the everyday person from the heroic one, only here the sari, which is a quotidian form of dress, performs
as an exceptional one. The copious symbolic potential of the sari permits this move, while at the same time pointing to many of the tensions and contradictions of life that engage contemporary metropolitan audiences in India. The sari thus functions to help solidify the film’s
complex positioning in twenty-first-century Hindi filmmaking.
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