When I first heard this song I wondered what made the lyricist to give so much importance to a dress once considered as the outfit of Punjabi's and Muslims inhabiting the North western parts of India.
Till recent times through out south India a girl on entering her teens switched over to half- sari ,from frocks and pavadai.When I look around me in Chennai not a single half sari clad girl is in sight.Every young girl looks like a Punjabi. When I travel deep south I see that even village girls have abandoned their half sari's and are clothed in churidhars!
Now I see only a sea of churidhar clad girls and women around me in the buses ,in shops , on the streets and in the beaches .
whilst the craze for cricket has unified young men all over India ,the churidhar mania of the current generation has unified all young women of India .It has become a national dress, the graceful but cumbersome sari to be worn only on occasions like festivals and marriages !
The churidhar has bridged class and religious divisions.First the urban middle class wore it .It was soon followed by the lower class and within a matter of few years villages considered citadels of conservatism witnessed a silent revolution with the' churidhar' replacing the half sari !
Girls studying in colleges have fought tooth and nail with their managements in courts of justice as far away as in W.Bengal and more recently from Porur in Chennai against the rules forbidding them to wear churidhar to college as against the sari and have been victorious in their battles as both the Calcutta High court and Madras High court passed orders declaring the churidhar as a decent dress of modern India more or less at par with the sari !
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