Anti-imperialism, ambiguity and the emergence of the sherwani-topi style in Hyderabad state, 1860–1900

Abstract

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Indian ‘princely state’ of Hyderabad became strongly associated with a particular form of male dress based around the long sherwani coat and fez or rumi topi. Although often dismissed as a mere Indian frock coat by colonial commentators and historians, by 1890 the sherwani was widely recognized within India as a distinctively Hyderabadi garment, symbolizing the state’s continued autonomy and claims to civilized, modernizing legitimacy. Yet the sherwani encompassed many influences, from colonial European to Ottoman Turkish and regional Deccani, and was a product not of deliberate design, but gradual and often haphazard evolution within the specific social context of 1860–90s Hyderabad. Popular resentment of the soberly clad colonial and western-educated North Indian outsiders who predominantly staffed the newly reformed state administration, for example, drove a return to bright patterning, greater length and use of local fabrics like himroo. Using archives of photography, memoir and costume to trace the sherwani’s development, this article shows this era as one defined by a creative multiplicity of visions for identity and self-fashioning, engaging not only hegemonic-colonial constructs of civilized masculinity but also emergent North Indian reform movements and localized changes of sociopolitical structure, urban space and consumer opportunity.