Shalwar kameez
Shalwar kameez (also spelt salwar kameez or shalwar qameez) is the dress worn by both men and women in South Asia and Central Asia. It is a unisex dress similar in manner to shirt and pants worn by westerners. Traditionally, it has been worn in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India. Since the 20th century, women in Southern India have also copied this dress complementing the Sari, the traditional dress of India. The Shalwar or Salwar (as pronounced in India) is a loosely-fit pajama-like pant. The legs are often wide at the top, and narrow at the ankle, although there are several styles of shalwar pants in modern times, some trendy and jean-like. The kameez is a long shirt of tunic length which hits at the middle of the thigh, but traditionally, it would come down to the top of the knee. The side seams (known as the chaak), left open below the waist-line, give the wearer greater freedom of movement. On a female, the shalwar kameez ensemble is completed by wearing a dupatta (loose scarf) around the shoulders, draping over the breast.
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Description
Shalwar are gathered at the waist and held up by a drawstring or an elastic band. The pants can be wide and baggy or more narrow, and even made of fabric cut on the bias.
The kameez is usually cut straight and flat; older kamees use traditional cuts, as shown in the illustration above. Modern kamees are more likely to have European-inspired set-in sleeves. The neckline, sleeves and bottom edge (daaman) are many times decorated with embroidery or laces.
For women, an integral part of shalwar kamees is the dupatta — a long shawl wrapped around body or to cover head in more conservative families. The shalwar kamees fashion has revolved around the cuts and lengths of shalwar and of kamees and the print styles and color palette of the dupatta. Most women in Afganistan were forced to hide their faces even when wearing a shalwar kameez by the Talibans
In Britain, especially during the last two decades, the garment has been transformed from an everyday garment worn by immigrant South Asian women from the subcontinent to one with mainstream, and even high-fashion, appeal.[1]
Etymology and history
Portrait of a Muslim girl from Karachi, Sind, in a salwar and blouse. c. 1870. Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library.
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Hill women, Kashmir, in salwar-kameez. c. 1890.
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Portrait of a Hindu girl from Karachi, Sind, in narrow salwar & kameez. c. 1870. Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library.
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Garments cut like the traditional kameez are known in many cultures; according to Dorothy Burnham, of the Royal Ontario Museum, the "seamless shirt," woven in one piece on warp-weighted looms, was superseded in early Roman times by cloth woven on vertical looms and carefully pieced so as not to waste any cloth. 10th century cotton shirts recovered from the Egyptian desert are cut much like the traditional kameez or the contemporary Egyptian jellabah or galabia.[2]
Salwar kameez dates back to the 12th century, the Islamic or the Iranian era, which was then followed by the Mughal empire in the region now called Punjab.
The pants, or shalawar, are known as shalvaar qameez (شلوار قمیض) in Urdu, salvaar or shalvaar (शलवार क़मीज़) in Hindi, salvar (ਸਲਵਾਰ ਕ਼ਮੀਜ਼) in Punjabi and salvaar or shalvaar (શલવાર કમીઝ) in Gujarati. The word comes from the Persian: شلوار, meaning pants.
The shirt, kameez or qamiz, takes its name from the Arabic qamis. There are two main hypotheses regarding the origin of the Arabic word, namely:
- that Arabic qamis is derived from the Latin camisia (shirt), which in its turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European kem (‘cloak’).[3][4]
- that Mediaeval Latin camisia is a borrowing through Hellenistic Greek kamision from the Central Semitic root “qmṣ”, represented by Ugaritic qmṣ (‘garment’) and Arabic qamīṣ (‘shirt’).
English spelling
Transliterations starting from Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Turkish languages use "sh". Both spellings are found in common English usage. Transliterations starting from Punjabi and Hindi often render the sibilant sound at the start of salwar/shalwar as an "s". The shalwar spelling seems to be most common in Canada and the United Kingdom, and is the preferred spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. Salwar seems to be more common in the US and is found at many online stores selling shalwar kameez. The word kameez is often incorrectly spelled with an H, as in khameez.
Gallery
 Woman wearing churidar and kameez |
 A man wearing a cap and salwar kameez. |
 Woman in green cotton salwar kameez. |
See also
References
- ↑ Bachu 2004
- ↑ Burnham, Dorothy. 1973. Cut My Cote, Royal Ontario Museum. p. 10.
- ↑ "Online Etymology Dictionary: chemise". http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=chemise.
- ↑ p. 807, "camise", entry in The Oxford English Dictionary, J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, vol. 2, second edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, ISBN 0-19-861214-1.
External links
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