A Brief History of Women in Jeans

Timeless elegance of white on
blue: Cindy Crawford

Many years ago, as evening was about to descend on a   grey-coloured city, I saw a girl in blue jeans and a crisp white shirt from a bus window. It was a small road, more like a lane in Calcutta’s crowded Burrabazar area overflowing with people (almost all working class male) and buses stuck in a nightmarish traffic snarl, so typical of Calcutta in those days. All buildings, shops, everything around were covered in soot and dust. There were small puddles in the road after a sharp pre-monsoon shower and of course, no sidewalk. In the midst of all that she walked in her blue jeans. Even then I did not really notice her features but the timeless elegance and romance of a girl in blue jeans – in this case, heightened by the unlikely surroundings of grimy working class Calcutta is still fresh in my memory.

Jeans: A Riveting Story

The word ‘denim’ came from de Nimes (that is from the French city of Nimes), where such twill fabric was originally produced. French weavers were actually trying to reproduce a sort of cotton corduroy much in vogue among the workers and soldiers of the Italian city of Genoa (Gênes in French, thus ‘jeans’).

Almost all such denim cloth was daubed in indigo, a plant-based dye from India (I have blogged about indigo here). This shows the British connection to blue denim.

Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis

As the story goes, the modern jeans or denim trouser with metal rivets was invented in California when a tailor Jacob Davis started making such trousers for miners. Soon, Davis in partnership with his cloth supplier Levi Strauss obtained a trade mark for their unique trouser on May 20, 1873. This was however known as ‘overalls’ till the 1960s, when baby boomers started calling them ‘jeans’.

Romance in Blue

Patent of Strauss and Davis expired in 1890s and by then blue denim overalls had become the uniform of the American working class. In the First World War, Lee Union-Alls jeans were the standard issue for all US military workers.

Gary Cooper: Denim by then became the favourite dress of Hollywood cowboys

In the 1920s and 1930s, handsome Hollywood cowboys like Gary Cooper started wearing blue denim trousers. This was the beginning of the romance with jeans. During the Second World War (1939-1945), American soldiers introduced their off-duty blue overalls to the World. This was how the global conquest of denim began.  But before we talk about the women in jeans, we need to rewind a bit.

Freedom Machines

Between 1880 and 1895, a women cycling craze swept through the western world. Riding bicycles did not only give them the freedom of movement but also ushered in a great change in women’s fashion. Women wearing trousers was something absolutely dreadful for most of the 19^th century in Europe and the USA. In fact, in many US cities it was a punishable offence.

Thanks to this bicycle craze, soon the Victorian fashion of long gowns/skirts were replaced by different types of leggings. For a while, conservative observers struggled to decide what was worse – women smoking or showing their ankles in public. Eventually this change paved the way for women wearing trousers in western societies.

Ginger Rogers in jeans

By the 1930s, some of the top Hollywood icons including Gingers Rogers wore denim pants, turning it into a fashion statement for women too.

Rebellious Jeans

James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause

Marlon Brando wore jeans on and off screen

Post-War, in the 1950s, denim trousers became the preferred leisure wear for the American youth. With stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean wearing jeans on and off the screen, denim trousers became a rage. In the 1960s, both the hippies as well as the youth protesting against the Vietnam War were invariably denim-clad. Now known as jeans, denim trousers emerged as the uniform of protest.

Madonna in ripped jeans

Ripped jeans also started life as part of this counter-culture trend sometime in the late 1970s- early 80s. Celebrities like Iggy Pop (who claimed to have pioneered this in 1978), Sex Pistols and then Madonna popularized ripped jeans.

Nothing comes between me and my Calvins: The most scandalous campaign of that time

By the end of the 1970s, jeans conquered the world of high fashion too. In 1976, Calvin Klein became the first top designer to put denim on the ramp. And in 1981, when a 15-year old Brooke Shields famously declared that nothing comes between her and Calvin Klein jeans, it came to the fashion centre stage.

Jeans as Fashion

Youngsters started sporting jeans in India from the late 1970s. Amitabh Bachchan was spotted wearing a denim in Sholay (1975). But teenagers in the 80s were mostly dependent on relatives bringing them a fashionable pair from abroad. Before we graduated to Levi’s, Lee or Wrangler, we all had Newport, Ruff & Tuff or Excalibur jeans (most of these brands were from Arvind Mills, which by the mid-1990s emerged as the largest denim manufacturer in the world).

Like in the West, by the 1990s in India also, Jeans emerged as a truly democratic fashion transcending social, economic and gender barriers. There were almost seasonal changes in Jeans trends in the West (check out here), but in India, we roughly remember the transition from classic fit to baggy trousers of the 1990s to low-waist of the 2000s and then back to a more fitted classic look. And of course, not to forget acid-washed or ripped varieties or the embroidered ones for girls.

For men, Khakis replaced jeans as the go-to leisure/casual trousers in the late 1990s. For Indian women, however, by then not only jeans were irreplaceable but also perhaps the most versatile trouser option. Jeans could be paired with white or simple tops for a casual chic looks or with kurti and bangles for an ethnic look or with boots and stylish tops/jackets, jeans could also hit high fashion notes.

Jeans as Freedom

In the 1920s, when a handful of progressive Indian women started cycling to Lucknow’s Isabella Thoburn College or on the streets of Lahore, it was a shock for the urban middle class India. Today even in the most socio-economically backward states of the country, there are popular government schemes to provide cycles to girls.

There is no better friend for most Indian women, especially students and working women, than a pair of hardy blue jeans to travel in crowded Indian public transport, braving water-logged streets in monsoon or numerous other roadblocks. Bans announced frequently by some village/khap panchayats or college principals on women wearing jeans are nothing but an expression of patriarchy, crude attempts to curtail their freedom.

Look beyond those (rightly) protesting on Twitter against a recent thoughtless remark by a politician; every time you see a girl coming out of tenements or rural areas to go to work in her denim trousers - like those ladies riding cycles to their freedom decades back - you know she wants to give wings to her dreams. 

Epidemic Goddess and the First “Tika”

It was a worship like no other. Amidst chanting of mantras and beating of drums and blowing of conch shells, the priest specially called for this ceremony would approach a child, make a small incision on her forehead and apply something he brought with him. The child would then be isolated and given cold food for the next few days. Women would draw alpanas/rangolis outside the room and often break into songs or stories related to the goddess they worshipped in this fashion.

As the child contracted mild fever they would celebrate the success of their effort – this was the surest sign that the child had been blessed by the deity. Over the next few days, this fever would subside and the child would recover. For the rest of her life, this goddess would protect the child and she would carry that mark, ‘tika’ on her forehead.

Goddess Sitala, rides on a donkey and holds a broom to ward off disease and a pitcher of cold water – Kalighat Patachitra

The special priest (often called ‘tikadar’) normally came from the lower castes like that of mali (gardener) or napit (barber) in Bengal and even when they were Brahman by caste, they were often lower in status. Working between November and early March, they collected pus from small pox patients, preserved it carefully in bamboo containers and then diluted it to apply on children in exchange of a fee.This was the unique ritual of goddess Sitala, the cold one, who promised to drive away fever (more specifically small pox and measles). From the Puranas, which described her as another form of Durga, who rose from a sacrificial fire along with Jwarasura (the demon of fever), she was celebrated in folk stories and medieval mangal kavyas of Bengal.

Taming Jwarasura

Till it was eradicated worldwide through vaccination in 1980, there was no cure for small pox. For centuries, small pox outbreaks killed millions globally. But it was known that the survivors of small pox did not contract the disease again. This observation led to the invention of artificially inducing immunity.  

The method of inoculation followed by the worshippers of Sitala is called variolation (from variola or Latin for pox). It appears from the descriptions of European observers in the 18^th century that such inoculation was widely prevalent in Sitala’s home territories of North and Eastern India. But not so much in deep South, where goddess Mariamma takes over her role. Learning from Brahman practitioners in Odisha and Northern Andhra, British doctors started inoculating Europeans and Company soldiers in and around Madras in the late 1780s.

Variolation in China happened through blowing of powdered small pox material into nostrils

By the 17^th century, apart from India this was a common practice in China (where the practice might have started around 1000 CE and we have documentary evidence from around 1600 CE) and large parts of Africa. Variolation might have originated independently in these three geographies or spread from one to another.

Lady Mary Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Court in Istanbul in 1717 famously wrote a letter to her friend Sarah Chiswell in England describing variolation practice she witnessed in Turkey. Lady Mary, herself a victim of small pox, had her children inoculated and played an important part in spreading the practice in England.

Dr Zabdiel Boylston inoculating patients in Boston 1721 after Cotton Mather learnt about inoculation in Africa

Similarly after a devastating small pox epidemic in Boston in 1721, a Puritan Minister Cotton Mather promoted variolation – a practice he learnt from his West African slave Onesimus.

Goddesses of Plague

Sitala was not the first goddess of epidemic. Buddhist goddess of small pox, Hariti appeared in Gandhara around two thousand years ago. Buddhist myths say, Hariti (the name suggests someone who steals), was a child eating ogress but turned into a protector of children after coming into contact with Gautam Buddha.

Hariti Statue (Gandhar region - 1st-2nd century CE), her iconography was inspired by that of Greek Goddess Tyche

Between 165-180 CE, a small pox or measles epidemic killed 5 million people across Europe and Asia. In Roman history it was known as the Antonine Plague. At least three decades before that a similar plague ravaged the Kushan Empire, leading to a profusion of Hariti images in Gandhar region. Historians believe probably the same epidemic travelled to Europe through the Silk Route.

Gradually, Hariti transformed into both fever and fertility goddess and lived on for many centuries across the subcontinent. Her images have been found from Afghanistan to Rajshahi in present Bangladesh and also in Andhra. She even travelled to Japan as goddess Kishimojin.

Parnashabari - 11th century statue from Bangladesh, a small Sitala visible as her companion at the bottom right 

The other Buddhist fever goddess was Parnashabari. Her name literally means leaf-clad tribal lady. She was popular in Vajrayana/tantric Buddhism in Eastern India. Interestingly Sitala initially appeared as her companion. Her cult gradually disappeared or ceded ground to Sitala but even now she lives on as a goddess in Tibetan Buddhism

In the absence of any effective treatment, it was normal all over the world to invoke deities for relief from dreaded diseases. Bengal is still dotted with temples or areas marked after Sitala or such other deities like Olai Chandi or Ola Bibi (for Muslims) for cholera, goddess Raktabati for blood infection and Ghe(n)tu for skin disease.

But Sitala is different from all other deities in the sense that her worshippers tried to address the disease through scientific intervention.

Variolation to Covid Vaccine

English physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823) is considered the father of vaccination. On 14^th May 1796, Jenner inoculated (he took pus from cow pox blisters of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes) his gardener’s 8 year old son James Phipps, who had mild symptoms for a few days but recovered soon. Small pox did not have any effect on Phipps during subsequent inoculations.

Edward Jenner

In rural England, many people noticed that dairymaids did not suffer from small pox and that led them to think about a possible connection between cow pox and small pox. We know at least two cases before Jenner (Benjamin Jesty in England in the 1770s and Peter Plett in Germany in1791), where similar methods were used to inoculate a few. But the credit for scientifically pursuing it and convincing people for vaccination goes entirely to Edward Jenner (the word vaccine came from “vacca” – Latin for cow).

In 1879, Louis Pasteur came up with the first laboratory-made vaccine (for chicken cholera). Since then vaccines for polio, tetanus, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) and other killer diseases have revolutionized not only medical science but also human history.

From those early days of inoculation by Sitala worshippers to the latest Covid vaccines, technology has changed immensely but the essential approach - of inserting weakened antigens to trigger immune response - remains the same. And the legacy of early small pox inoculation is preserved through the continuous use of the word ‘tika’ in Bengali, Hindi and several other Indian languages.