Use Matters An Alternative History of Architecture 1° Edition Kenny Cupers (Editor)
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- 5. Use Matters An Alternative History of Architecture 1° Edition Kenny Cupers (Editor) Digital Instant Download Author(s): Kenny Cupers (editor) ISBN(s): 9780415637329, 0415637325 Edition: 1° File Details: PDF, 10.08 MB Year: 2013 Language: english
- 7. Use matters: an alternative history of architecture From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative fields. Expanding utility to embrace people’s everyday experience brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the twentieth century. Use Matters is the first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways. Kenny Cupers is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- 8. Use matters: an alternative history of architecture Edited by Kenny Cupers
- 9. First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 selection and editorial material, Kenny Cupers; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Use matters : an alternative history of architecture / edited by Kenny Cupers. -- First edition. pages cm Includes index. 1. Architecture and society--History. 2. Functionalism (Architecture) I. Cupers, Kenny, editor of compilation. NA2543.S6U84 2014 724’.6--dc23 2013015537 ISBN: 978-0-415-63732-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-63734-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-88414-1 (ebk) Book design by Nienke Terpsma, typeset in Neue Helvetica and Letter Gothic Std.
- 10. Acknowledgements Introduction Kenny Cupers I SUBJECTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE Chapter 1 ISOTYPE and modern architecture in Red Vienna Eve Blau Chapter 2 Architectural handbooks and the user experience Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache Chapter 3 Laboratory modules and the subjectivity of the knowledge worker William J. Rankin Chapter 4 Architects, users, and the social sciences in postwar America Avigail Sachs Chapter 5 Spatial experience and the instruments of architectural theory Brian Lonsway II COLLECTIVITY, WELFARE, CONSUMPTION Chapter 6 The shantytown in Algiers and the colonization of everyday life Sheila Crane
- 11. Chapter 7 New Swedes in the New town Jennifer S. Mack Chapter 8 Henri Lefebvre: for and against the “user” Łukasz Stanek Chapter 9 Designed-in safety: ergonomics in the bathroom Barbara Penner Chapter 10 Intelligentsia design and the postmodern Plattenbau Max Hirsh Chapter 11 WiMBY!’s new collectives Michelle Provoost III PARTICIPATION Chapter 12 Landscape and participation in 1960s New York Mariana Mogilevich Chapter 13 Ergonomics of democracy Javier Lezaun Chapter 14 Counter-projects and the postmodern user Isabelle Doucet
- 12. Chapter 15 The paradox of social architectures Tatjana Schneider Notes on contributors Index
- 13. Acknowledgements The origin of this book lies in the April 2011 conference “Before and Beyond: Architecture and the User,” organized at the School of Architecture and Planning of the State University of New York at Buffalo as part of my tenure as the Reyner Banham Fellow. Many thanks go to the speakers and contributors who made that event a success. I would also like to thank the School—and Omar Khan and Robert Shibley in particular—for their support, financial and otherwise. Adam Levin’s editorial assistance has been crucial to the publication of this book, as was the critical feedback of Hadas Steiner, Curt Gambetta, Mariana Mogilevich, Gerard Forde, and many others. Gratitude also goes to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for its financial support of the publication and to Nienke Terspma for her graphic design work.
- 14. Introduction This collection of essays examines how architecture has dealt with the question of use and how use, in turn, has shaped architectural thinking and practice over the past century. Utility is central to what architects do in practice as they deal with clients, norms, and building regulations. It is also a category of architectural theory, too often glossed over as that one part of the Vitruvian triad distinguishing architecture most clearly from art. Whether through the register of type, function, program, experience, event, or performance, the production of architecture relies on both concrete knowledge and latent imagination of how it is used. But utility also governs an unknowable universe of everyday experience that remains outside of the designer’s direct control. If a lot of architecture’s meaning is made not on the drafting board but in the complex lifeworld of how it is inhabited, consumed, used, lived or neglected, that world is at once central and peculiarly under- explored. In recent years, this blind spot of architecture has become particularly pertinent to practitioners. From the resurgence of activism and social engagement in architecture to the development of new spaces of interaction using the latest technologies, the interest in the agency of the user across many creative disciplines today delivers new promises for the social role of design.1 Against the view—still widely held—that such an agenda undermines
- 15. architecture’s autonomy or its formal potentials, this volume explores instead how use has been a critical motor of architectural invention. Accepted wisdom has it that the extent to which architecture takes into account those who use it is a matter of the designer’s personal ethics, dividing the discipline into a formalist and a user-friendly camp. No matter how clear this front line may seem to contemporary observers, it is hardly an unchanging fact that transcends shared preconceptions or historical change. As this collection of essays shows, the user is neither a timeless humanist category nor a simple externality of design. It has a history of its own, both within and beyond architecture. What does it mean to talk about users rather than subjects, people, clients, inhabitants, consumers, or citizens? How do we situate “the user” vis-à-vis the realms of domesticity, the market, or government? How do those we identify as using, experiencing, or inhabiting it actually use, experience, or inhabit architecture? And how does knowledge of this trickle back into the conception and production of architecture? If use cannot be understood as a simple consequence of planning or design, it is far from clear in what ways it constitutes architecture—as a practice, a discipline, and as built space. Collectively, the chapters in this volume argue that the user is not a universal, but a historically constructed category of twentieth- century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways. Over the course of the past century, architecture has laid claims to the organization of life through unprecedented experimentation with new technologies, mass production, consumption, and planned urbanization. The category of the user became central to these claims because it allowed architects to address both what informs and what follows the controllable process of design. Functionalism was but one of the manifestations of architecture’s social ambitions, albeit a
- 16. particularly successful one in ideological and discursive terms. Over subsequent decades, the notion of the user transformed to give rise to a number of emerging paradigms—from programming and participatory planning to architectural populism and interaction design. Its emergence and transformation was not just the result of a single discipline, but of changing market forces, government interventions, new technologies, different fields of knowledge and expertise, and unexpected social or cultural dynamics. The user is not the product of architecture alone; nor does it transparently denote the actual or imaginary people that populate it. The user is both a historical construct and an agent of change, too often relegated to the margins of architectural history. The chapters in this collection thus explore the changing stakes for architecture presented by the user across the modern, the postmodern, and the contemporary condition. In doing so, they make up an alternative history of architecture. Against the dominant periodization of twentieth-century architecture based on authorship, form, or discourse, the contributors provide a more relational history of architecture that connects the accounts of architects, projects, and ideas with a larger social, spatial, and material history. Their primary geographies are European and American—speaking perhaps less of the state of scholarly knowledge than the dynamics out of which the user emerged as a particular register of discourse and intervention. What is known and cultivated as architectural invention shows clear bias towards a relatively small set of authored works—often by a self-proclaimed avant-garde. When use was addressed in this rarified discursive context, its complexity tended to be both reduced and romanticized. From Rudofsky’s “architecture without architects” 2 to Jencks’ and Silver’s “adhocism,” architects have tended to interpret architectural phenomena located outside their professional purview as nothing but anonymous improvisation—a simple
- 17. reversal of the cherished distinctions of authorship and intention.3 A more lucid view was offered from the outside. In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand provided a rare and brilliant reading of the history of buildings through their changing uses over time, but its influence in architectural discourse remained limited.4 Another much-needed study came from the architect Jonathan Hill, whose theoretical examination was more successful in linking architects’ intentions with users’ creativity but relied heavily on linguistic analogy, following in the footsteps of postmodern architectural theory.5 A history of the relationship between architecture and use requires paying attention to a more diverse set of actions and actors and to the many determinants of both marginal and mainstream architectural production. Covering a wide range of practices, the contributors to this volume thus explore how various fields of knowledge and design have worked to define and shape specific uses and users, from the smallest room in the house to the problems of urban life at large. They examine the ways in which architectural knowledge has developed in relationship to other disciplines, from social science and ergonomics to industrial design, landscape architecture, and urban planning. They explore reciprocities and contradictions between intention and practice. And they reverse the dominant view that places architecture and everyday use in opposing realms of reality, experience, and action. Finally, the combination of contributions by both scholars and contemporary practitioners brings historical arguments into dialogue with contemporary debates in architecture. At least four different disciplinary lenses can be trained on the notions of use and the user. Anthropological approaches to material culture have long focused on the relationship of objects to their makers and their users, but its transposition to architecture can imply reading environments as objects.6 Phenomenological
- 18. approaches in architecture have approached use in as much as they replaced function with sensory experience, but did so by reducing it to a transhistorical intention of architecture.7 The work of Henri Lefebvre and the generation of Anglo-American studies following in its wake undoubtedly provide the most robust theoretical framework for approaching use in architecture. Their shift in focus from architectural concepts and experiences to the production of space has inspired both architectural history and contemporary discourse.8 And last, more recent developments in social studies of science and technology, in which the notion of the user has become a growing domain of inquiry, promise a fresh, more pragmatic look at architecture.9 some of their theoretical arguments, which revolve around the mutual shaping of design and use and emphasize the active role of users, remain limited, however, by the reduction of architecture to a social technology. While this collection selectively takes up some of these lenses, its overall contribution lies not in bringing them together but in historicizing some of the concepts and categories they are based on. If history is the analysis of the forces from the past that together make up the present, this book traces three such genealogies. The first part begins with the construction of the modern subject in the first decades of the twentieth century, the second with the changing role of the state and the market at mid- century, and the third with the advent of participation in the 1960s and 1970s. These constitute the three major historical forces without which today’s discussion of the user in architecture cannot be understood. The parts are chronologically organized and run up to the present, ending with a contribution by a contemporary practitioner or theorist who takes up a more explicit position with regards to the theme of each part.
- 19. I The first part, “Subjectivity and Knowledge,” explores how attention to the user emerged in architectural modernism during the interwar period and spawned new types of knowledge to support the production of architecture up to the present. The chapters depart from dominant accounts of architecture’s role in the construction of modern subjectivity by shifting the focus of analysis from avant- garde representations of subjectivity to its actual production through architectural and spatial practice. The import and popularity of literary criticism in architecture over past decades allowed scholars to speak of architecture as constructing a subject in the same way a text could construct a reader.10 In the worst case, that meant that it sufficed to describe the formal attributes of a single architectural object to present sweeping claims about modern or postmodern subjectivity. The chapters in this part analyze how such discursively and formally constructed representations of subjectivity are both shaped by and affect the realities of architectural production and experience. In doing so, they reveal how knowledge has shaped the relationship between architecture and use, from the emergence of new types of architectural knowledge in the interwar period, to their transformation in the research economies of the postwar decades, and their role in the contemporary developer-led production of architecture. The figure of the user is directly tied to the historical emergence of the mass subject in late industrial capitalism. While the origins of this type of subjectivity can be traced well into the nineteenth century, its repercussions were most directly interrogated by the modernist avant-garde. Mass production, rapid urbanization, the development of mass culture, and the proliferation of new technologies in everyday life exacerbated interest in the unknowable universe of architecture’s consumption and use.
- 20. Scholars have located the construction of a new, modernist subjectivity in the artistic import of such regimes of production and experience. Its architectural exemplars include Hannes Meyer’s Coop-Zimmer—a stage set for a new, modernist, and anti- bourgeois subject—and Grete Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen—in which Taylorist analyses of bodily movement were mobilized to construct the modern kitchen and with it, the new housewife.11 Here, the notion of use in architectural modernism appears to be interchangeable with that of function and is predominantly carried by the application of scientific management principles to architecture. Yet, if the metaphor of the human subject as machine is indeed located at the basis of the idea of the user in architecture, its contemporary legacy lies not so much in the way it inspired architectural form but in the underlying systemization of architectural knowledge.12 Not Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier, but much less heroic figures like Ernst Neufert helped shape that legacy. His Architects’ Data, first published as Bauentwurfslehre in 1936, has become a universal reference and can be found on almost every architect’s desk across the globe. It bases architectural design directly on norms and standards of human inhabitation and use. The standardization of use may have been at the basis of architectural modernism, but its goals and methods were fundamentally contested. Departing from the dominant narrative of functionalism, in Chapter 1 Eve Blau examines architectural approaches based on radically different concepts of use and thus alternative constructions of the modern subject in architecture. Shifting the focus from Germany to Austria, Blau demonstrates how Josef Frank and Otto Neurath, in their engagement with municipal socialism in Red Vienna, advanced a modern project that served rather than dictated use and informed new strategies for the circulation of knowledge among citizens.
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- 22. NAIKIN IN KANARA The existence of such a class, regarded in the light of ultimate truths, may fall far short of the perfect state. But the remedy in any country lies not in their repression and degradation, the most disastrous of all attempts. It lies in the freedom and education of the married woman. When the married woman also is freed from the oppression of narrow codes and the dull monotony of house-work, when she too is able to be accomplished and graceful, witty and artistic, free to choose as she pleases and to be true to her nature, then no doubt the professional beauty must by the mere weight of facts become extinct. But what nation, what society will risk the experiment? and what conditions can make it possible? This at least is clear that where a rigid matrimonial system, supported by all the sanctions of religion and inspired by a tradition of asceticism, is fast entrenched and fortified, where woman is limited and narrowed to the duties of a housekeeper or a mother, there the fulfilment of the deeper cravings of human emotion and the satisfaction of artistic
- 23. sensibilities will depend upon a class that has in it much which is not ignoble. Woman’s Dress
- 24. “Upon my right hand did stand the Queen in a vesture of gold wrought about in divers colours.” Psalm XLV. GIPSY WOMAN
- 25. Chapter VIII WOMAN’S DRESS Dress in India can be comprised within a few typical forms. Fashion, which in Europe is so frequently variable and occupies itself with line and contour, is in India far more stable and persistent. Fashion exists, of course, as in every land where women live and grow and change. But it busies itself rather with what may be called the accidents than with the essentials of attire. In the choice of colour the women of India display a rich variety; and selection, though less subject to sudden and violent alteration, is governed by those moods of temperament which are generalized under the name of fashion. No less operative is changing temperament upon the designs of jewelry and the choice of gems to set in gold. Even in respect of the textures which women choose for their clothes, there are collective changes of mood and mode to be noticed. But in point of dress and adornment, as in most other activities, in India there is a governance by authority and a quasi-religious sanction which is foreign to the strongly individualist tempers of the West. The shapes and to some extent even the colour of dress and the design and manner of wearing jewelry are among those distinctive marks of social rank and ceremonial purity, in a word of caste, which are guarded jealously as if almost sacrosanct. It is only in the additions and embellishments permitted upon the normal habits of the caste that the human personality finds room for self-display. A woman must first of all make her dress conform to the approved habits of her class. That done, she is free to express her own tastes and talents within the range of such permissible colours and superfluous ornaments as do not alter the essential lines of her costume. The interest of dress centres mainly upon the human psychology of which it is one among many other expressions. And it is not a
- 26. little surprising that this inner and living bond has so often escaped the writers who have made costume their subject. Dress, regarded as form and colour only, has no doubt its own value to the painter. Like every arrangement in which selected hues or lines are grouped for the creation of a new beauty, it has an emotional appeal apart from its meaning or history. The uses of drapery in sculpture and the sensuous pleasure given by rich velvets and gold brocades in the paintings of Titian or Veronese are instances of the fascination of clothes, merely on their decorative side. But an intenser interest comes to being when dress is known to be also the expression of a character that in one sense may be called individual but may with more reality be regarded as part of a vast national life. For by its very nature dress is a means selected to heighten the attraction of the sexes for each other. The use of clothes as a protection against the extremes of climate is merely secondary and is even something of a reproach to natural adaptation. It is as adornment, and in its purpose of attraction, that it has its real and ultimate meaning. That dress comes to be used incidentally to preserve modesty does not affect its primary purpose. Modesty itself is one of the secondary properties of love and one of its most powerful weapons. But it is when mankind becomes sophisticated that the value and function of modesty are properly understood; and it is then that dress and ornament are so designed as to combine their direct and, under the guise of modesty, their indirect attractions. It follows, therefore, that in any people the use of the means of attraction which are supplied by dress and jewelry must correspond to the attributes of the persons whom it is desired to attract. If the dress did not conform to some inbred desire in those who see it, it could have no power to please; even it might become repellent. But similarity of birth and training tends to mould the majority of each nation to something of an average, and it is after all as a response to the desires of the average person that dress is designed. It responds, therefore, to the psychology of the people in which it is found.
- 27. Looked at from this aspect, the fundamental difference between the costumes of European and of Indian women becomes at once more deeply significant. In Europe, during the long centuries that have succeeded the fall of Rome, one quality above all has clung to dress, that is, bizarrerie of form. The Teutonic barbarians who uprooted the Mediterranean civilizations and imposed in their place those tribal feudalisms and customary rules from which Europe is not yet fully freed, seem whether from their primitive particularism or their inborn brutality to have largely been lacking in the sense of form. Symmetry and simplicity were conceptions beyond their northern brains and outside their temperament. Even to this day the German (who with least admixture of blood or education represents the primeval Teutonic savage) is hardly able by any effort of reason to comprehend the meaning of these words. In essence, it would seem, his mind is formless, vague, amorphous. So in their buildings, the Goths could find no use for purity of form. What they sought always and with a great effectiveness achieved was a shape, or rather a conglomeration of shapes, complicated and exaggerated, with lengthy spires and cumbrous altitudes, that should be curious, awful, and bizarre. They never sought to soothe the mind. Their churches do not so much attract attention, but capture it, as it were, by an audacious ravishment. And as this purpose was congenial to their own psychology, so did they win their effect among their own and kindred peoples. Similarly their women, if they were to excite the desires of men habituated to bloodshed and the strong stress of war, had to take their attention by storm, with the aid of the fantastic and unexpected in their costume. Without the subtlety of imagination and finesse to excel by a fine harmony or a graceful nicety, they were forced upon the extravagant and exuberant. The lines of their dress were not designed to be congruous with the human body or to agree in beautiful drapery, but were meant rather to amaze the onlooker by a sudden onslaught upon his vision. At any cost they were to be effective—to produce, that is, an immediate effect by the strangeness and extravagance of their form. In regard to colour they had less invention and hardly any taste; and the grey skies of the north are not suited to the richer hues. So it was to
- 28. contortions of line and form that they had recourse. However mitigated, these are characteristics that remain to this day. Even in modern dress, the lines tend to be abrupt and exaggerated, and an ever-changing fashion varies them in a discordant manner. Every ten years, it has been said, the shape of womankind, as it is visible, changes in Europe. Each new change means, of course, an attempt to capture attention by a novel attitude. This is the cause that, out of the whole nineteenth century, it was only for a few years under the Consulate and early Empire that woman’s dress appears tolerable to an artist’s eye or even, upon reflection, to the common man or woman. A GURKHA’S WIFE Indian dress, on the other hand, has this in common with the classic style, that it is simple in form and harmonious. It exacts no distortions or deformities. It veils the body but it does not misrepresent it. Still less does it attempt to substitute a fictitious for a natural line. But while the Indian mind, like that of the classic
- 29. Mediterranean peoples, approves a natural simplicity of design, unlike the other, it delights in a profusion of extraneous ornament. Even the monstrous temples of the South are in essence simply planned, but they are overlaid and even overloaded with masses of strange carving and decoration. Indian psychology, in this not dissimilar from the Teuton, has a craving for the wonderful and bizarre. The people are of those that look for miracles. But, by a fortunate dispensation, they are content to leave the pure lines of form undisturbed—a quality that keeps them in regard to the broad facts of life true to nature. For their wayward fancies they find scope in bizarrerie of colour and external decoration. Thus the Indian woman wears dresses that in shape are easy and simple and beautiful, but she seeks further to attract by a marvellous variety of colour and a curious adornment. A GLIMPSE AT A DOOR IN GUJARÁT The limits of the bizarre as it appears in India are probably reached in the dress of the Banjara women. They belong to a tribe
- 30. that, far from unmixed, has in it much of that gipsy race, which has also migrated across the Sind deserts and Asia Minor to the furthest corners of Europe. For centuries they were the carriers of India, transporting salt and opium and grain on their pack-cattle along the trade-routes across the continent. They have settled down now, some of them, in little settlements where, under their own chieftains, they till the soil and deal in cows and buffaloes. But many of them are wanderers to this day, daring smugglers, dangerous when they are cornered, often even thieves and robbers. The men are especially handsome, with a free and fiery look, and a manly air. But the women also are not by any means unattractive, and the striking dress they have chosen, with its bold colours and its swinging skirt, sets them up well and handsomely. The pity is that they will wear it till from age and dirt it drops off with its own corruption. The bright colours they affect reach their limit in the pleated skirt with its glaring reds and yellows, a motley that has in it something of the clown or mountebank. The bodice in no real sense fulfils its part but is rather a bright-decked screen dropping from the neck to just below the waist-line, stiffened with pieces of glass and thick stitching. The mantle which they adopt, unlike that of most Hindu women, is short, like that of the Mussulman, but coarser. Their jewelry is peculiar to themselves, and in shape strange and striking. It is worn about the head in great profusion, so that the twinkling cunning face seems almost set in silver. The hair has two pleats at each side into which tassel-like ornaments of silver are hung. But most bizarre of all is the horn or stick, twined into their hair, which rests upon the head and props up their mantle like a tent. Originally perhaps designed to give the head a better protection against the eastern sun, it has now acquired a religious significance and is never doffed, even at night in bed, except by a widow. That with this inconvenient attachment, they still can balance by its nice adjustment heavy pots of water on their heads is one of the minor wonders of the Indian country-side. The Banjara encampment with its boldly-clad and boldly-staring women, also it may be added with its strong fierce dogs of special breed, is a sight
- 31. too picturesque ever to be forgotten, especially in a country where life tends in the villages to a brown monotone. The bizarre is again to be found prevailing even over form on the Mongolian borderland of Northern India. In Nepal, whence come the brave Gurkha soldiers of our wars, dress, like the shape and decoration of the wooden temples of the people, has in it something alien to the normal lines of Aryan and Indian womanhood. And the strangeness is heightened by the quaintness of the jewelry and the uncut turquoises in which they delight. But in most of India proper the essence of dress is simple. Shoes are not in general worn, though loose wide slippers of velvet or of leather may be sometimes seen. The natural result is that the foot retains a beauty which can never be expected when it is cramped by constant pressure. The working woman, tramping miles along the roads or over fields, with heavy burdens on her head or her child upon the hip, loses of course too quickly the springing instep and sinks to a flat and sprawling foot. But in the higher classes, or among the womanhood whom caste preserves in a moderate seclusion, the foot is small, well-curved, and light. It is a thing of infinite fascination, tinted perhaps with the henna’s pink, almost like a flower. Even aged women there are to be seen, their faces worn and wrinkled, who still have the unspoilt feet of youth and well-born blood. Among the richer ladies of the greater cities, where it is smart to be “advanced,” Parisian shoes and silken stockings are nowadays worn, at least out of doors—a habit enforced by the security thus gained against plague infection; but the greater number still preserves the foot free and beautiful. For the rest, among Hindu women the dress consists of three portions only, never more, though they may be only two. These are a skirt, a bodice, and a mantle. The skirt is not very different from the petticoat of Europe in cut, but may either drop simply or be made up in accordion pleats, something as a kilt is pleated, so cut as to stand out a considerable way at the ankle. The latter shape, worn mainly by the women of Márwár, but in painting invariably given to
- 32. Rádha and the loves of the god Krishna, is most beautiful with its brush and swing. The skirt is fastened plainly by a silken cord tied fast at the waist and is sometimes girdled by a silver belt. The Indian bodice again is designed in the main to support the breast whose form it defines and even, by its pattern, accentuates. It may either fit all round the person, fastening in front by buttons or a ribbon, or be a covering for the chest only, put on from the front and tied across the open back by two tapes. But the most distinctive feature of all is certainly the glorious drapery of the sari, which has been translated “mantle” in default of a better word. The sari is an article of dress as distinctive as the Spanish mantilla and as difficult to wear with the right charm and manner. It is an oblong of material, hemmed when possible at one side with gold embroidery and edged with a sort of closed fringe. When, as is most common, it is worn with a skirt, its length is about fifteen feet and its breadth about three. When, however, as in a contrasting style, it has by its intricacies to take the place of an absent skirt as well, it measures some twenty-five feet in length. It is to these mantles that the Indian lady devotes her deftest thoughts and on them, within the limits conceded by caste and fashion, that she displays her personal tastes. Their hues and patterns have an infinite range. Some are in plain natural colours, white or red or blue—solid, unbroken colour, not least beautiful in the stark sunlight. Others are delicate cotton prints, flowered and sprigged and dainty. Sometimes they are printed in a bold decorative pattern, formal and conventional. Neutral and half tints at times mix in a bewildering wealth of hue, till the eye is at a loss to know whether the ground be green or pink or purple. The border may be a plain hem-stitch or a two-inch broad piece of gold brocade, sumptuously woven in the acanthus pattern or in the shape of birds and flowers. But in the draping of the mantle, so simple in cut yet of such infinite variety, consists the highest art and the true expression of personality. One end is taken round the waist a couple of times and tucked into the waist-band at the centre, falling to the feet in formal folds; the other passes over head and shoulder, with the breadth decorated and displayed across the upper half of the body. In the management of the upper half lies
- 33. the true secret. It must show the full beauty of the cloth, yet by a sort of innocent accident, without a hint of ostentation. At the same time it must be loose enough to allow graceful folds to drop naturally from the head to the shoulders, and tight enough to sit close at the breast whose curves it accentuates while it seems to veil. Enough but not too much of the bodice must be shown with a fine nicety. The border is at times allowed to turn carelessly up, till the gold armlet above the elbow can be seen even on the covered right arm. At one moment, a modest gesture brings the mantle across the face, as in shy courtesy before an elder or an illustrious man; in a crowd it is draped to hide both arms and conceal the figure; when it slips, it is quickly drawn forward over the head with a charming pretence of timidity. The Márwári woman by a trick peculiar to herself makes of her mantle a screen held open between two fingers, through which only her lustrous eye appears, melting and languorous; and in the armoury of every Indian woman the mantle by its nice management is the chief instrument of love. A WIDOW IN THE DECCAN
- 34. The short mantle, worn as described, should of course imply a skirt. But in the south of Gujarát, from Surat to Bombay, whether from the steamy warmth of the climate or from some subtle change of mood, ladies of the richer classes, while continuing to drape the mantle in the same graceful way, have of late years given up the usage of a skirt and wear at most a trim lace petticoat. The effect is not unlike that of a recent ephemeral fashion in Western Europe. Seen in the bold Indian sunlight, the double thicknesses of light silk or cotton are little less transparent than a veil of gauze and limbs are revealed in a shadowed fulness, which is less modest than it is suggestive. In the Central plateau, however, and the south of India the skirt is also dispensed with by a fashion that can claim at once antiquity and respectability. There it is the long mantle, twenty-five feet in length, which is worn. Of thick coarse silk and dark solid colour, it is so draped as to be caught between the legs in a broad, low-hanging fold, tucked loosely at the back. Its folds are carefully arranged to leave a double thickness, marked by the border of the mantle, over the upper part of the legs. It is a style inherited from a remote antiquity, descendant from the dresses seen even on Buddhist carvings in the great rock temples of the Deccan. Beautiful it can hardly be called, with its effect of a divided skirt and its too clumsy folds and thicknesses; but it is certainly not frivolous. Rather perhaps should one say that it is eminently respectable, with its sameness and stiff conventionality. The pressure of the ascetic ideal is shown even more strongly in the monotonous colours, dark blue usually or dark green, which are the ordinary wear in those parts of the country. To the artist the costume, one would think, had little value; yet that it can be idealized is seen from the effects achieved in the simplifications of early sculpture. This contrast in dress between the southern part of the Peninsula and Gujarát or Northern India reflects once again that contrast in belief and character which has already, perhaps with a too frequent repetition, been remarked. This monotony of asceticism is even more noticeable in the south in the dress of widows (poor creatures with shaven heads, their limbs
- 35. untouched by a single jewel!)—a dress of a mantle only, white or of a strange dull, dingy red—a dress that kills all looks and attractions, save where the light of religious duty, nature overcome, makes the starved face seem spiritual. A WOMAN OF THE UNITED PROVINCES In the dress of Mussulman women the main feature is that trousers are substituted for the Hindu skirt. They may be wide and baggy, cut in loose full curves from the hips to the tighter openings at the ankles, a style not too precise to be devoid of all attraction. Or, as worn by ladies of the Upper Indian aristocracy and by other women who lay claim to Moghul descent, they may sit tight like gloves from ankle to knee, a fashion at once ugly and repellent. It would be difficult, even after long reflection, to design a style of dress so unbecoming to a woman’s gait and figure, so crudely frank, so hideously unsuggestive. A bodice may or may not be worn, as Hindu influence is more or less strong. A long fine shirt, half open at the neck and falling to about the knee, is an invariable article of
- 36. dress, which on a young woman fits well and gracefully. In former days, and even now among the older-fashioned, a long full-pleated skirt and jacket in one was worn above the other garments, fitting tight to below the breast, then from the high-set waist-line spreading out in wide stiff pleats like a broad petticoat. Over her head the Mussulman lady wears a shawl or mantilla, less long than her Hindu sister’s mantle, which is made of the finest textures and is dyed in the most delicate of colours. It is the full dress of the Mussulman lady that, except in Southern India, the dancing girl has made her own for professional uses and embellished with every device of pattern and every richness of material. It would be interesting to digress here, in relation to Indian dress, upon that long conflict between the decolleté and the retroussé, which in Europe has from time to time been settled by the successes of the former. But a full discussion would go beyond the purpose and necessary limits of this book. Briefly it may be said that, in this matter too, Indian dress quite correctly expresses the difference which subsists between the present European and immemorial Indian temperament. For, with reasonable exceptions, it may be said that in India, on the whole, no special feelings, either of modesty or the reverse, attach to the lower limbs. The skirt is, therefore, not the hampering, stiff garment that it usually is in Europe. But the upper half of the body, on the other hand, has a far greater significance than in Western Europe. And this it is which has made the use of the covering mantle or sari the most distinctive feature of Indian costume. Dress even in its simplest form has been seen to have its sectarian meaning and restrictions. A widow for instance, at least among orthodox Brahmans in the Peninsula, is limited to certain solid colours, never black or dark blue, red as a rule, or white. And every woman is restricted to definite shapes and cut. To transgress beyond these limits would be to offend against caste rules with a sanctity defended and sanctioned by a caste tribunal. But greater significance attaches to the use of jewelry. Some stones are valued for this or that magical virtue; certain metals can or must be used
- 37. only at definite times and places: some shapes of ornament are bidden or forbidden to a certain caste. The prohibition against wearing gold upon the feet is the most obvious instance. Here a value of a magical kind, as a purifying agent, is ascribed to the metal, and its use was not allowed on limbs where it might be contaminated by the dust and dirt of the road. Only in royal families is the prescription ever disregarded; and even then only by few. Of forms and modes of ornament peculiar to one caste and partly at least sanctified by superstition, something has already been said in describing the fisher and the gipsy women. But instances might be multiplied without end. Each section nearly of the community has at least one peculiar jewel, associated with a religious festival or a caste ceremony or belief. Perhaps the most obvious examples are the charms and talismans freely worn by all classes of Mussulman women. In these the stones and their settings are the symbolic expressions of deep and mysterious thoughts and the instruments of a magical significance. On amulets of white jade or carnelian are inscribed in Arabic characters the highest names of the Most High. On other cartouches are engraved the sacred symbols of the Jewish Cabbalists, just as Hindus draw and venerate that sign of the Swastika which from the time of the Bronze Age has presented the beneficent motions of the sun. They have little boxes of chased gold in which are enclosed written charms to protect the wearer from the malice of jinns and the malevolence of the evil eye. On heart-shaped plates of silver they cut the sacred hand which persists in the escutcheon of Ulster baronets, and on others are inscribed the name of “Tileth” and the injunction, “Adam and Eve away from here.” But the use of jewelry has a religious tinge no less among Hindus. It is for instance a common belief that at least a speck of gold must be worn upon the person to ensure ceremonial purity. Thus in Northern India there are castes where married women wear plates of gold on some of the front teeth; while it is general when preparing the dead for the burning to attach a gold coin or ring to the corpse. Moreover, the wearing of jewelry by women is prescribed by the sacred text which says: “A wife being gaily adorned, her
- 38. whole house is embellished, but if she be destitute of ornaments, all will be deprived of decoration.” This again is one reason why there is so little change in the design. Variety there is, and indeed the number of ornaments, each with a different name and use, is almost bewildering. But in each kind the design passes from one to another generation almost unchanged, and the craftsman has no need to devise new forms and varying settings. What has been worn by the grandmother will be equally pleasing to the grand-daughter. When there is change and variety, it is only in the large commercial cities, where European patterns are being exploited to the ruin of indigenous craftsmanship. The bracelet is the most significant and the nose-ring the most peculiar of Indian ornaments. For bracelets are above all the visible sign of marriage. Young girls before their wedding may wear bangles of many kinds: but the first act of widowhood is to discard them all. Some which are made of lac are peculiar to the married woman, and next to them in significance are the bangles of variegated glass which are so much appreciated. On the husband’s death these are at once shattered; and the same breaking of bangles is the accompaniment of divorce. The nose-ring, as it is called in English, is only seldom in shape a ring. In Northern India indeed, in certain castes, a real ring of large diameter passes through the cartilage; and its effect is not beautiful. But in most places and classes, it is not so much a ring as a small cluster of gems affixed by one means or another to the nostril. That worn most commonly in the Deccan— a sort of brooch with a large almost triangular setting—is also clumsy and unbeautiful. Another type, worn by the cultivators of Gujarát, is like a button in which the jewelled top screws, through a hole bored in the nostril, into the lower half—a form no less ungainly. But Mussulmans adopt a different and more graceful form. Through the central cartilage of the nose a small gold wire passes on which drops a jewel, at its best a fine pear-shaped pearl, dangling down to the central curve of the upper lip. But the prettiest of all—a real aid this to a pretty face—is a small stud of a single diamond or ruby fixed almost at the corner of the left nostril. Here it has the
- 39. value of a tiny beauty-spot, more attractive by its sheen, and draws the eye to the curve of a finely-chiselled nose and down to the petulant smiling lips. Among the most beautiful of Indian ornaments are the champlevé enamels made by Sikh workers who have found a home in the pink city of Jaipur. In golden plaques they scrape little depressions which they fill with oxides of various metals, fixed by the nicely-varied temperature of fire. Gems also are worn in great profusion by the richer classes, though little by those who have to regard their ornaments also as an investment. To the poor of course the purchase of silver or gold jewelry is still the only form of saving with which they are familiar and in which they have confidence; and it is quite impossible even to guess the millions of bullion hoarded unproductively in this form in India. In regard to gems, many a superstitious belief still remains. Thus it is believed that in an evil conjunction of the sun the ruby is propitious, while the diamond is remedial against the baleful influences of the moon. On the day of the week named after Mars or War, the coral should be trusted, and the zircon is efficacious against Mercury known as Buddha. The pearl is specially designed for wear when Jupiter is dangerous. The cat’s eye deflects the radiances of Venus and in the ascending node the emerald is sovereign. This lore of gems is set out at length in the Ruby-garland of Maharaja Surendra Mohan Tagore. The graceful dress and finely-designed jewelry of the Indian women is a covering and an embellishment, suitable and, as a rule, singularly attractive. But the person that is so covered receives no less care. An almost scrupulous personal cleanliness is observed by nearly every woman. Among the gipsy and criminal tribes indeed clothes are worn until they drop off from age; and the untouchable castes who perform the lowest menial services and cluster in sordid hovels outside the village also leave much to be desired. In the crowded slums of the industrial cities, too, it is to be feared, there are many, especially of the professional beggars, who from vice or dulled apathy allow themselves to become foul and loathsome. But even the worst of these could perhaps be equalled in the mean
- 40. streets of Europe. These degraded classes once out of account, however, there is no question that the niceties of personal cleanliness are followed in all ranks with a fine devotion which can be equalled only in the upper class of Europe. In some points they may put even those to shame though they cannot vie with the modern luxury of the English or French lady’s bath, with its sponges and gloves and powders and perfumed salts. Washing in India is a religious ordinance, scrupulously observed, and the body is cleansed with water and made smooth like bronze with orpiment and tinged with henna and perfumed with the essence of flowers, till it is a mirror of purity, worthy of adornment and respect. The Moving Finger “A creed is a rod And a crown is of night, But this thing is God To be man with thy might, To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit and live out thy life as the light. … I bid you but be. I have need not of prayer; I have need of you free As your mouths of mine air, That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair.” Hertha. SWINBURNE.
- 41. Chapter IX THE MOVING FINGER The aim of this book has been as far as possible to show the Indian woman as she is, living and acting and expanding. But life, properly speaking, cannot be represented. Representation must always be of something that is already past and therefore lifeless and mechanical. It breaks off and pins down, like a specimen in a museum, a mere fragment out of the moving continuity of life. So a photograph for instance, when it impresses a discontinuous moment on the plate, merely fixes something which is artificial and unreal. Perhaps in literature it would be impossible to give vitality to the picture of an Indian woman, unless in the form of poetry or prose fiction. But the picture would then be endowed with personal character and an individual shape. Here it was desired rather to analyse national characteristics and to display the varieties of Indian womanhood and their values. It was necessary, therefore, to embody the typical rather than the personal and to lose something of concrete reality in the effort to generalize usual habits of mind and body. It is, however, true that neither man nor woman can ever be so well known, as through the ideals which they feel. In those ideals, in the spirit with which they meet the incidents of life, consists all that is most real and permanent in their actions. Other desires and emotions, peculiar to the individual, which help to make his whole concrete life, are after all unharmonized and, as it were, accidental. Essential are the thoughts which guide his purposes and the social atmosphere in which he breathes. Regarded in this way, the womanhood of India appears on the whole to be moving in all its million lives towards a more or less similar ideal, more or less clearly recognized as the social class rises or sinks in education and self-consciousness. There are, of course, exceptions. The nobility of
- 42. Southern India form a social back-water, fed by other traditions from a secluded source. There are wild tribes on whose crude minds the common thought has hardly yet had time to become operative. And the Mussulman population is, at least in name, ruled by an ethic far more rationalistic and liberal. Yet there is not a class which in some form or other, however indirectly, has not had to submit to the supremacy of an ideal which in its purer lines is truly national. With the increased ease of communication and the rigidity given to accepted Brahman custom by the Courts of Law and common education, the movement towards the same ideal throughout the various communities has become more marked and rapid. Peculiarities of caste and race tend to be swamped in the general current. In a few cases, new diversities have come into existence, where, for instance, some of a small highly-educated class have revolted against traditional restrictions or sought a new salvation in the close imitation of European customs without a European environment. It is in the comprehension of these ideals, manifested in typical castes and classes, and of the social atmosphere that any real image of Indian womanhood can alone be formed. But it is not enough to see a woman in her girlhood and growth, in her love and marriage, and in her relations to her family and society. To grasp her as she really is she should be seen also as a mother. For if love is a duty of womanhood, biologically the function of motherhood is even more important. It is the most decisive of all her functions in a primitive society. As the race advances, it does not lose its place, but beside it ascend other functions, first and most essential that of love or wifehood, and afterwards that of polishing and refining a mixed society. In value to each life and each generation, the greatest of these is certainly love; and the successful wife or mistress ranks higher in art and literature and with the finer spirits and civilizations than even the best of mothers. For the former implies gifts which are not only rarer but also emanate from higher and nobler qualities of mind, while it responds to needs which are felt above all by loftier natures. Maternity, on the other hand, is the instinct of reproduction in action, controlled by intelligent care and
- 43. affection. It is not peculiar to the human being but is as strong a force in the animal. It is of course essential, like everything else that is primeval in our life; for humanity is broad-based upon the animal. But wifehood is a conception of the creative human intellect, a specialized object of human feelings. The perfect beloved is an ideal form created by a developed intellect and fastidious emotions. Hence the worth of a nation’s womanhood can best be estimated by the completeness with which they fulfil the inspirations of love and its devotion. And judged by this standard, the higher types in India need fear no comparison. Whenever race and belief have combined to resist the mere negatives of ascetic teaching, there is a rich literature of love, there is a mastery of rapture, and with it the constant service of undying devotion. Yet fully to estimate the value of her life, it would be necessary also to watch the Indian woman in her performance of a mother’s functions. The strength of her desire for children, the warmth and selflessness of her affection, the extent of her care and teaching, her readiness or unwillingness herself to learn the needs of childhood, above all, the place in her heart that she affords her children—all these are factors which should be not merely weighed or analyzed but actually felt by a creature intuition. But only another woman could have such comprehension or attain such intuition. No man— even in regard to the women of his own country, where he is illuminated by the examples of his mother and his wife—could have the needed sympathy, the necessary similarity of feeling, to comprehend the woman’s emotions to the child she bears and over whose growth she watches. It would be impossible to attempt the task in a foreign country of women by whose side one has not grown from infancy. Some points, however, which lend themselves to any observation, may be noted, all the more since they have not infrequently led to misunderstanding. It is the case undoubtedly that every Indian woman, whatever her rank or race, has a clamorous wish to bear children, above all a son, for her husband’s sake. “How many
- 44. children have you?” is the first question every woman asks another. In order to get children they go on pilgrimages and tolerate austerities, they give alms to beggars and are deluded by impostors. A childless woman becomes only too readily the butt of scorn and even of her own self-reproach. Not to have borne a son is to the Indian woman to have missed her vocation and have failed in life. She has a certainty of belief—“She knows” she would say—that it is her function, even hers, to have children; and if she be fruitful, she counts herself blessed. From these data, it has often been inferred that Indian women in all classes have an overpowering desire for motherhood and are especially mastered by the maternal instinct. But that this inference is wholly just, may well be doubted. In the upper classes at least it must be admitted that the woman wishes for children because of reasoned and intelligible motives, and that these motives are so strong as to overcome any instinctive passions. And a will moved by a mere calculation of reason may be as powerful as and even more effective than an act of will which, really responds to a deep and eternal, unreasoned, self-creating emotion. The Indian woman at any rate has every reason to desire to be a mother, above all the mother of a son. Hindu science and philosophy have never hidden from her that, regarded as a living being merely like any other animal, her primary function is to continue the race. And religion has impressed this teaching upon every mind by the legend that a man’s soul can be released from the torments which follow death only by the prayers and ritual of a living son. Moreover, she fears that barrenness may impose the presence of a second wife, a rival in that love to which, after all, she gives first place. Then, again, the end may prove to be subjection to another woman’s son, heir to his mother’s hatreds. Or at the best there is the pressure of religious faith—to think herself accursed, if she has no child, while even her husband may in time shrink from her as from a being judged by the doom of God. All these are motives which can be weighed by the intellect but which move desire and will-power. Yet their action does not in itself show that the instinct of maternity is strong beyond the usual.
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