Tailor master tales can be interesting. When did the first tailors come into prominence? Must have been in the days of genesis after Adam and Eve were driven out of paradise dressed only in skins. Adam is believed to have lived 930 years and Eve for over 800. So their children may have been better clothed because of the progress of human ingenuity despite the rhyme, “When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then the gentleman!” In Christ’s days garments were stitched for the privileged few who could afford more than one in a lifetime. But Christ had only one which too was given away in a draw of lots after his crucifixion. That it became a prized possession as “the Robe” is another story.
Earlier in the Ramayana and Mahabharata days dhotis and shoulder wraps couldn’t have needed tailors. However, during the Delhi Sultanate the tailors were mostly Central Asian, though there were some local tailors too. The garments of the ruling class were tailor-made, the poor were not so fortunate. Housewives stitched their clothes and of neighbours also to add to the family income. So the darzin made her appearance. She was herself very poor and a latter-day poet portrayed her plight in this verse: “Dukhtar-e-darzin ka seena dekh kar/Ji mai ata hai mal mal doon”.
The shair was not above the charge of using a double-entendre. On the other hand, his wish to give malmal cloth to cover up her breast could obviate the hint of a massage. Now for the darzis, they too were poor and led lives of penury but were an important part of society all the same. Hardships made some of them eccentrics. There was Toori who had taken to smoking charas and sometimes got his measurements all wrong. But in more sensible moments could stitch some of the best clothes. Then there was Masterji who became a mental case after his wife eloped with someone youngster. Masterji left his tailoring shop and went about with just a razor blade, a needle and thread, altering shirt collars at people’s homes. He was pretty good at it and sometimes lapsed into reveries. Pointing to his palm where two lines incredibly merged into a birdlike image he would say, “This is chidya – Sheela’s chidya and she gives it to anyone she likes.” Sheela was his wife’s name and that was Masterji’s way of getting back at her.
Joseph Gabriel was a school tailor who stitched khaki uniforms for Anglo-Indian boys. He got very little for his labour but could still be magnanimous. Once an orphan boy was sent away from class by the lady teacher as he was wearing a torn shirt. The boy’s tale of woe touched Joseph Darzi’s heart and he collected all the katran (cloth clippings) he had to stitch a new shirt for him, though it took him till midnight to do so. But he went home a happier man and didn’t mind eating a cold, tasteless supper and his wife’s grumbling. Unfortunately, both died in the plague that struck Delhi and Agra in the first decade of the 20th Century.
Then after Bhuddhi Master and Master Mehboob, there was Balloo the tailor who stitched memsahibs’ clothes while visiting the Civil Lines bungalows. Sometimes he was helped by Mrs Whelpdale and Mrs Saldhana, two seamstresses of St. Xavier School’s tailoring department. He sat in the verandah with a Singer machine and as he worked on it told old tales to enliven his task. Incidentally, Mohd Umar & Sons, CP tailors stitched Jawaharlal Nehru’s shervanis and achkans. Once when Lal Bahadur Shastri was asked to proceed to Kathmandu in cold December, Nehruji told him to take two shervanis from his house since Shastriji didn’t have much of a wardrobe.
The tailors of the Metiabruz area of Garden Reach in Calcutta, who have been carrying on their profession from Mughul times, through the Nawabi days and the British period to modern times, have their counterparts in Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Moghul tailoring, which began in the days of Babur and Humayun, influenced Agra and later Lucknow, from where it spread to the Nawabs of Bengal in the decadent period of the Moghul empire.
That was when the sherwani craze had already begun to spread in preference to the traditional angarkha of the old courtier. Tailors began to learn new fashions and by the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s downfall the poets of Delhi had begun to parade the streets of Chandni Chowk in their well-cut sherwanis. Of course, they couldn’t vie with the Bankas, whose long moustaches and romantic gait was the envy of the tie-collared British.
And then came Nawab Budhan, the dandiest of the nawabs whose sherwani cut was the cynosure of all eyes and led to immediate imitation. It was the tailors who flourished at the expense of the well-dressed and their ways became arrogant to the point of exasperation. But the tailors and their clients were redeemed by the onslaught of Western fashions and “London-trained” tailors sprouted everywhere. Those who viewed the change in fashions with dismay set up a chorus of “Charkhata” (clothes cut on all four sides). But this phase too passed and the tailor’s goose still rules the fashion world.
The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi
