00:00Are you looking at that?
00:01Chai Sita maa!
00:03Hey!
00:03Okay, so apparently Sita's blouse is now a national controversy again.
00:08Flashback to 2023, Adipurush, Kriti Sanon, plays Sita.
00:12She wears a saree, no blouse, very draped, very ancient Bharat aesthetic and the internet just loses it.
00:19Some guy who has never opened a history textbook in his life is suddenly a costume historian.
00:24Too much skin, too modern, disrespectful.
00:26Now let's fast forward to Namit Malhotra's Ramayana.
00:30Sai Pallavi plays Sita and this time, plot twist, she's wearing a blouse.
00:35You'd think, great, problem solved, right?
00:37Nope.
00:38Now it's…
00:41So, let me get this straight.
00:42No blouse, too modern.
00:44Blouse, also too modern.
00:46Sita is failing a fashion exam nobody wrote the syllabus for.
00:49Everyone's throwing around tradition as if we all agree on what that means.
00:53So let's actually go back.
00:55The Choli, the ancestor of the blouse, appears around the Chola dynasty sometime between the 3rd and the 13th centuries.
01:02It wasn't even stitched at first.
01:04Just cloth wound tightly around the chest.
01:07So blouse, no blouse, both have been Indian tradition at different points in different centuries and different regions.
01:13There was never one uniform robe.
01:15And here's the part that actually stops the whole cover up its respectful argument in its tracks.
01:20In the 19th century Travancore in Kerala, lower caste women were allegedly not allowed to cover their breasts in public.
01:27Unless they paid a tax.
01:29A tax that increased with breast size.
01:31For a lot of women, it was a privilege you had to buy.
01:34Some historians say this is part of why many women converted to Christianity when missionaries arrived.
01:40Because the church gave them the right to cover up that the caste system didn't.
01:44And there's a story.
01:44Nageli from a village near Cherthala who refused to pay the tax.
01:48When the tax collector came for it anyway, she cut off her own breasts, handed them over rather than paper.
01:53She died shortly after, the next day, the king of Travancore abolished the breast tax entirely.
01:59Meanwhile, historians can't even agree on who's responsible for the modern blouse.
02:04Some blame the British for treating bare skin as vulgar.
02:07Others say Indian women themselves adopted it during the Victorian era simply because it was more practical.
02:13Either way, it's messy, it's regional, it's contested.
02:16So, genuinely, what is the problem?
02:18Is it the blouse?
02:19Is it the absence of the blouse?
02:20Is it that people don't actually know what Tritayug fashion looked like?
02:24Because, shocker, none of us were there.
02:26The costume designers literally said this to themselves.
02:29There's no archaeological rule book for what Sita wo.
02:32Every version is somebody's interpretation.
02:35Raja Ravi Verma painted her one way.
02:37Amar Chitrakatha drew her another way.
02:39Krithi and Sai Pallavi both have a blouse problem.
02:42Meanwhile, actual women in actual history fought, converted, taxed themselves, broke,
02:47and even died over the right to just decide for themselves.
02:50And centuries later, we're still doing this.
02:53Just now, it's in the comments section.
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