> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: [[Aarti Kawlra]] > Reference:: Kawlra, A. (2014) ‘Sari and the Narrative of Nation in 20th-Century India’, in Nosch, M.-L., Feng, Z., and Varadarajan, L. (eds) _Global Textile Encounters_. Oxford, England: Oxbow Books (Ancient Textiles Series, 20). > Date:: 2014 > Tags:: #warp #India #textiles > WeftLinks:: [[Cultural value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Craft strengthens relationships between members of a cultural group]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > The unstitched garment is emblematic of the new independent India. ### Highlights Women’s sari-clad bodies were postulated by them as palimpsests for the inscription of gender-based standards of beauty recast as ‘traditional’ in a rapidly modernizing India Mother India and her sari were now instruments of territorial integration, symbolizing the freedom struggle and the burgeoning of a nationalist spirit established upon a feminine ideal By postulating stitched clothing as the attire of foreign invaders of the ancient land – Mughals and the British, the discourse established an unbroken legacy and indigenous preference for the ‘unstitched’ or draped garment as emblematic of the emergent, primarily Hindu, nation