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19th Century · South Asia · 1800 - 1900
Saris, dhotis, court robes, tailored coats, and working clothes in nineteenth-century South Asia, with regional examples and the effects of colonial textile trade.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
Nineteenth-century South Asian clothing included wrapped saris and dhotis, shirts and trousers, and several forms of long coat.20,10 Dress changed at different rates and in different settings: a Lucknow dyer's painted outfit, a Jodhpur court robe, and a fashionable Bengali figure offer more precise comparisons than a single costume for the entire century.23,24,27
| Place and date | Clothing in the example | Setting and limits of the evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Rajasthan, early nineteenth century | A flared jama; Mehrangarh describes court ensembles with silk sashes and fitted silk trousers.23 | Elite dress, rather than a model for all men in the region. |
| Lucknow, early 1830s | A dyer shown in a turban and pajama trousers.24 | A painting of work made for the market in occupational images. |
| Kolkata, about 1870 | A seated babu combining Bengali and Western style.27 | A Kalighat painting of a fashionable social type. |
| Jodhpur, late nineteenth century | A fitted, buttoned silk sherwani.23 | Ceremonial clothing adopted by the royal household. |
For the earlier jama and regional court traditions, see early modern South Asian clothing.
The sari, still the most typical form of South Asian women's dress, was worn throughout the 19th century, but its draping styles and the contexts in which it was worn shifted considerably.20 The unstitched cloth runs anywhere from about four to nine yards long and today is typically worn with a choli blouse.20 In nineteenth-century Bengal, Jnanadanandini Devi helped popularize a drape adapted from Parsi style, worn with a blouse and petticoat; accounts of her innovations also identify English influences on the blouse.7 Border&Fall's Sari Series credits her with lengthening the sari in the 1860s in its account of the nivi drape.6
The same documentation project describes the Gujarati seedha palla, in which the end passes over the right shoulder from back to front, as an urban style adopted from the late nineteenth century. It also records the pleatless Kalna drape of central Bengal.4,5 These are useful guides to how draping works, but the films were made in 2017, and the project explicitly says that its textiles and blouse combinations were styled for the present. A modern demonstration is not a photograph of an 1860s outfit.4,6
For men, the dhoti — an unstitched garment wrapped and tucked around the lower body — remained widely worn, as did the kurta (a long tunic) with pajama trousers, a combination still common today.20 As colonial social life grew more formal, the Indian elite adopted Western dress, while the middle class blended it with their own.20 The sherwani, a long structured coat, emerged during this period as a formal garment blending Mughal tailoring traditions with British frock coat influences.9,10
The arrival of the blouse and petticoat is covered in more detail in the history of the sari.
Changing cut matters as much as changing names. At Mehrangarh, an early nineteenth-century cotton jama has the long, flaring skirt associated with Marwar court dress. A late-century silk sherwani has a much closer, buttoned silhouette. The pair makes the change visible without implying that every wearer adopted it at once.23
Toolika Gupta's study distinguishes the achkan from the sherwani by construction. The historical achkan developed from earlier paneled robes and generally retained a waist seam. The sherwani was cut more like a fitted coat, without that seam. Both names are now sometimes used interchangeably, but treating them as identical obscures the changes in tailoring she documents.10
Gupta places the emergence of the achkan around the middle of the nineteenth century and the sherwani later in the century. Her comparison of court portraits and surviving garments also shows that older and newer forms coexisted. A long robe in a nineteenth-century image therefore needs examination of its fastening, waist, sleeves, and silhouette before it can confidently be named.10
Cleveland's Man Dyeing Cloth, painted in Lucknow in the early 1830s, shows a turbaned man in pajama trousers working with strips of fabric and earthenware vessels. It gives the survey a specific worker and task to set beside princely portraits. It also links the history of clothing to the people who colored and finished the cloth.24
The painting belongs to a market for images of Indian occupations collected by East India Company employees. Cleveland notes that such pictures could emphasize what their buyers considered exotic. We can describe the clothing shown, while avoiding the claim that it represents every dyer or all working men.24
Company painting was not confined to one city. The Met traces production in places including Calcutta, Madras, Delhi, Varanasi, and Patna. Artists made sets of occupations, costumes, and festivals for customers, drawing on both local painting traditions and European expectations. This makes them valuable evidence for represented dress, with the customer's interests part of the picture.26
Kalighat paintings add a different urban viewpoint. The V&A identifies a seated Bengali babu, painted about 1870, whose style mixes Bengali and Western elements. Its account explains that these inexpensive paintings were sold to a broad market, with secular social subjects joining religious ones. The image suggests how clothing combinations could become a recognizable social type; it should not be read as a uniform worn by all Bengali men.27
The 19th century was devastating for South Asia's textile export trade. India had long been one of the world's great textile exporters, renowned for its muslin, chintz, and calico fabrics.21,22,3 British colonial policies sent raw cotton to Britain for weaving and sold the finished machine-made cloth back in India, while restrictions and taxation crippled local handloom industries.11 The famed Dhaka muslin, once so fine it was called "woven air," nearly vanished as weavers lost their livelihoods.3
Yet cloth also became a vehicle for resistance. The Swadeshi movement of the early 1900s had its roots in nineteenth-century efforts to revive India's industries and support indigenous production.12 The khadi cloth — hand-spun and hand-woven — would later become the signature fabric of Indian nationalism.11 Meanwhile, the Parsi community in western India developed distinctive embroidered gara saris whose silk embroidery drew on Chinese styles encountered through the Parsi China trade, and the Kashmiri shawl remained one of the most coveted luxury textiles in the world, prized in both South Asian and European fashion.8,1
The shawl pictured here provides a dated example of that trade. Its large patterned ends frame a plainer central field, and its catalogue identifies the weave as double-interlocked twill tapestry. The museum describes Kashmir shawls as warm, supple luxury goods and connects their European imitations with the name Paisley. The pattern's later name should not be confused with the place where this particular shawl was woven.25
Despite the devastation wrought on India's export textile industry, regional weaving traditions persisted and in some cases flourished during the 19th century. Banarasi silk weavers in Varanasi continued weaving silks patterned in gold and silver zari thread — a surviving 19th-century sari blouse of rose silk carries Varanasi-woven zari motifs — adapting designs to changing tastes while drawing on techniques built up over centuries.2 In Gujarat, patola double-ikat silk weaving survived as a specialized craft of the Salvi community of Patan, with each sari requiring painstaking labor to align pre-dyed warp and weft threads into precise patterns.16
Ikat weavers around Chirala in southern India made lungis and turbans with bold geometric motifs, a craft that later moved to Pochampally, where it flourished from the mid-twentieth century;17 in western Odisha, Sambalpuri ikat favored continuous floral patterns in cotton,18 while Chanderi in central India wove fine, transparent, lightweight saris of silk and cotton.19 In the northeast, Muga silk — a golden-hued silk for which Assam is renowned — was woven into mekhela chadors prized for their luster and durability.15 Jamdani — a fine muslin textile historically known as Dhakai after the city of Dhaka — preserved the art of supplementary weft weaving, with weavers creating intricate floral and geometric patterns directly on the loom without sketching designs onto the fabric itself.13,14 These surviving traditions ensured that South Asia's extraordinary textile heritage, though diminished by colonial policies, was never extinguished.
A surviving cloth, a regional technique, and a finished outfit answer different questions. The Kashmir shawl above can be assigned to 1820–30. By contrast, the heritage descriptions cited for regional weaving explain techniques and their continued practice; they do not date every modern sari made with those techniques to the nineteenth century.25,14,17,18,19
When comparing images, start with the object's date and place, then its material, cut, and depicted wearer. The portrait of an elite family and the painting of a dyer belong to different social settings. Neither is a complete survey of its region. For women's dress, the sari demonstrations clarify the mechanics of wrapping, while the period photograph shows a particular family at a particular moment.4,6,24
The chronology also matters for political clothing. The nineteenth-century campaigns discussed by historian Dinyar Patel preceded the larger swadeshi movement of the early twentieth century.12 They belong in this survey as precursors. The later association of khadi with nationalism should not turn every earlier handwoven garment into a political statement.11
Continue to modern South Asian clothing for khadi, nationalist dress, and twentieth-century changes, or use the South Asian regional guide to compare the periods.
