Who Gets to Decide the ‘Right’ Way to Respect Tradition?
Tradition has a way of becoming everybody’s business the moment someone practises it differently.
An outfit can become a debate about values. A personal way of celebrating a festival can be treated as disrespect. Before long, what began as an individual choice turns into a much larger argument about culture, propriety and who gets to decide what is “right.”
It happened again recently when an advertisement featuring Kriti Sanon attracted criticism over the outfit she wore. There was also backlash over the campaign showing her tying a rakhi to a dog. What began as a festive jewellery advertisement quickly turned into a debate about clothing, rituals and what counts as an acceptable way to participate in a festival.
Sanon responded by questioning why a woman’s respect for her culture should be measured through her clothes. The brand later withdrew the advertisement after the backlash.
The incident will eventually disappear from timelines, but the argument behind it is much older.
Clothes Rarely Remain Just Clothes When Women Wear Them
People judge each other by appearance. That is hardly new, and it certainly does not happen only to women. But women’s clothes seem to acquire meanings very quickly.
A sleeveless blouse can become “too modern.” A short skirt can become “attention-seeking.” A bikini photograph can suddenly invite opinions about modesty or values. At the other end, dressing conservatively can bring another set of assumptions about how traditional, old-fashioned or restricted someone must be.
Sometimes she simply liked the outfit. Apparently, that is not always explanation enough.
Clothes can communicate identity. People use fashion to express religion, profession, politics, personality and belonging. But there is a difference between expression and assuming that every clothing choice reveals something deeper about a person’s character.
Women are often expected to explain their choices even when no explanation was offered in the first place.
The Word ‘Appropriate’ Does a Lot of Work
Much of the policing of women’s clothes hides behind one apparently harmless word: appropriate.
There are reasonable dress codes. Most people understand that different settings come with different expectations. A workplace, a formal event or a place of worship may have its own norms.
The word becomes harder to define when it leaves an actual dress code and enters public opinion.
How deep can a neckline be before an outfit becomes inappropriate? How short is too short? What should a married woman wear? At what age does someone suddenly become “too old” for a certain style? Why is an outfit acceptable in one setting and criticised in another?
The answers often change depending on who is answering.
Women learn many of these unwritten rules early. Do not wear that around relatives. Carry a stole. Change before you go there. That dress is fine with friends, but maybe not in front of the family.
Most women in India will recognise some version of that conversation.
Tradition Somehow Finds Its Way Into the Wardrobe
Things get more complicated when culture enters the argument.
Indian clothing has never been one fixed thing. The sari alone has numerous draping traditions across regions and communities. Blouse styles have changed. Salwar suits have changed. Wedding clothes have changed. What one generation considers traditional may already be different from what came before it.
Yet we often talk about “traditional clothing” as though there is one final version everyone is expected to follow.
Fashion changes because people change.
A woman wearing a sari with a sleeveless blouse is not necessarily less connected to her culture than someone wearing a more conservative version of it. Modern clothing and cultural identity have never been mutually exclusive. Someone can enjoy dressing traditionally for one occasion and choose something completely different the next day without either choice cancelling the other.
Culture is larger than a single outfit.
Even Rituals Are Becoming Personal
The reaction to the recent advertisement also showed that clothes are only one part of this larger discomfort.
Some viewers objected to the image of a woman tying a rakhi to her dog because Raksha Bandhan is traditionally associated with the bond between siblings. For many people, that meaning is deeply personal and important, so it is understandable that an unfamiliar interpretation of the ritual may not appeal to everyone.
At the same time, festivals do not remain completely unchanged from one generation to the next.
People already celebrate Raksha Bandhan in different ways. Sisters tie rakhis to sisters, friends exchange them, and some people include pets who are very much part of their families. None of these personal choices necessarily replaces the traditional meaning of the festival. They simply show how people sometimes make rituals their own.
A person can choose not to relate to that version of a celebration without treating someone else’s version as an insult.
That distinction has become harder to hold on to online.
Social Media Has Made These Judgements Much Louder
Earlier, a comment about what someone was wearing or how someone celebrated an occasion may have stayed within the family or a small social circle. Social media has given those opinions a much larger audience.
A photograph can reach thousands or millions of people, and everyone gets an opportunity to approve, criticise or advise. Celebrities experience this at a huge scale, but ordinary women are hardly exempt. Comments arrive under wedding photographs, travel pictures, dance videos and reels.
Sometimes they are framed as concern. Sometimes they arrive as jokes. Sometimes they are simply opinions about how another person should present herself or behave.
Social media did not create this kind of policing, but it has made it much easier for judgement to travel.
Someone does not need to know the person, understand the context or even care deeply about the issue. A photograph can be enough to start an argument. Very quickly, an outfit or a personal ritual becomes something everyone feels entitled to discuss.
When Clothing Becomes a Character Assessment
Men are criticised for clothing too. A man can be underdressed, overdressed, badly styled or dressed in a way that does not suit an occasion.
With women, however, criticism often moves beyond the clothes themselves. An outfit can become part of a discussion about modesty, family values, seriousness, motherhood, marital status or respect for tradition.
Age brings another layer of expectation. There are clothes considered acceptable for teenage girls, another set of expectations for unmarried women, another after marriage and yet another after motherhood.
None of these rules are written down, yet they are familiar enough for many women to recognise them.
That is where criticism of clothing begins to become something else. It stops being about whether an outfit works and starts becoming a judgement about the person wearing it.
Disagreement Does Not Have to Become a Moral Judgement
None of this means every outfit, advertisement or interpretation of tradition deserves praise.
Fashion is subjective. People can find a dress ugly. They can think a stylist made a poor choice. They can believe an outfit does not suit a particular occasion. They can also feel that a brand’s interpretation of a festival does not resonate with them. Advertising is open to criticism because brands deliberately create images for public consumption.
There is, however, a considerable distance between saying, “I do not like this,” and deciding what the woman involved must believe about her culture, her values or her traditions.
We cross that distance far too easily.
Perhaps we could get better at separating personal taste from moral judgement. An outfit can be unsuitable to us, unattractive to us or simply not something we would wear ourselves. A version of a ritual may feel unfamiliar to us without becoming an attack on everything we value.
Traditions can mean different things to different people while still carrying the histories and emotions that made them important in the first place. We do not have to participate in every new interpretation of them. We can disagree with some of them too. But deciding that there is only one correct way to respect a culture leaves very little room for the people who are actually living it.
