Kozhikode: A Cosmopolitan City
With a population of roughly 500,000, Kozhikode4 is the third largest city in Kerala. It has a rich and complex history of maritime trade dating back to the tenth century, and by the twelfth century had become a commercial hub between West Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. It also has long-standing trading links with the Arab world, which continued right up to the 1970s. More recently, since the 1980s, Kozhikode's economy has become dependent upon revenues and remittances from Gulf migration. This diverse history contributes to the city's popular reputation for "cosmopolitanism." As a result, for local Muslims, dress objectifies the triple-strandedness of a highly specific self: south Indian Malayali, pan-Islamic, and Arab-connected. At times these orientations are in tension, as when claims for a specifically south Indian aesthetic pull against recent reformist imperatives towards pardah for women. While it is often noted that women are the cultural and symbolic bearers of community identity (Nelson 1999; Tarlo 1996; Yuval-Davis 1997), it should be pointed out that men's bodies are also, albeit more subtly, marked as Muslim, something widely overlooked in popular and academic literature alike. Kerala Dress Styles Kerala prides itself upon being a relatively secular state, not prone to the extremes of communal disturbance or religious chauvinism found in north India. In the Indian context, secularism is defined as the constitutional guarantee of equal respect for all religions, even if this is not always upheld. In Kerala, as elsewhere in India, dress codes increasingly mark out the religious identities of the different groups living within a plural state. To some extent it is possible to plot the geography of dress in Kerala according to the densities of different religious groups in different areas. Kozhikode is considered a conservative town because of the strong Muslim presence in contrast to Ernakulam, a city with a Christian majority where dress codes are more permissive. There, fashion items such as jeans or sleeveless T-shirts (for women) and Bermuda shorts (for young men) are a common sight. Such items are rarely seen outside of this Christian-dominated city and are considered inappropriate dress by all Muslims and by many Hindus. In Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum) city to the south, where the Hindu influence is strong, gold-bordered cream handloom cloth known as cassava is frequently spotted, worn both as a female sari or male mundu (waist-cloth). Tobe contd... Engr sulthan | 
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