Take a walk through your local areas — past the gleaming glass offices, artisanal cafés, or even university campuses — and you’ll spot men in jeans, joggers, cargos, the occasional kurta-pyjama.
But the dhoti?
Rare. Almost extinct — unless you’re at a wedding, a temple, or caught in a reel romanticising “tradition.”
The question is worth asking: Why aren’t Indian men wearing dhotis anymore?
Are We Still Holding Onto Our Colonial Hangover?
The dhoti wasn’t always marginal.
Au contraire, for centuries, it was the national norm.
Worn by kings, scholars, revolutionaries, and reformers, the unstitched garment signified purity, ease, and cultural rootedness.
Go back to images from India’s freedom revolution, and you’ll spot as many men in khadi dhoti (both a political uniform and a rejection of colonial pretensions) as women in sarees.
But post-independence, India’s aspirations changed.
The dhoti came to signify ruralness, not refinement.
Though we got rid of the colonisers, the colonial hangover has still persisted — and changing names of different cities to beat it isn’t really going to impact you on a personal level.
But your clothes embrace you every day. They tough it out with you too, so why aren’t more people challenging the
Why is it that by default, Western clothing — stitched, structured, buttoned-up — became aspirational? Who declared that shirts were more urban, modern, and professional?
Who decided the dhoti, soft and unstitched, was to be cast as the opposite: backward, unambitious, and unfit for “serious” spaces?
Not to answer my own question, but social signifiers of wealth also doubled down on the idea of Western clothing being superior. Perhaps the thinking was that by blending in with the world, we’d catch up and push aside centuries of mistreatment by the very people we aspired to become.
Now, this isn’t to say that there is anything inherently wrong with wearing shirts or pants.
After all, not everything needs an “East vs. West” comparison, right?
However, the problem arose when these garments started being treated as the “superior” choice in a country that, ironically, has always led the way with its textiles and fashion — and then this thinking cemented itself in the mainstream consciousness.
How Our Economy Impacted Our Fashion
Modernity in India isn’t just about bigger houses, salaries, and promotions — it’s about looking the part. And looking the part means dressing like the West.
As India’s economy opened up, so did its sartorial choices.
But one area played a key role in establishing Western clothing’s chokehold in India: the corporate workplace.
As India transitioned from a majorly socialist to a majorly capitalist state, our fashion evolved alongside it.
Economic liberalisation in the 1990s didn’t just flood the market with global brands — it also brought with it an unspoken dress code for ambition. Success began to look like something out of a Manhattan boardroom: sharp suits, pressed trousers, collared shirts, leather shoes.
The traditional dhoti slowly retreated to the margins, especially because more people cared about proving they had made it — that they, too, were the very emobident of success in this modern world.
Besides, if the world is a stage and all of us are actors, then the workplace is where most of us dole out our best performances — along with our “best” costumes.
In a country where the masses experience record-breaking heatwaves everywhere, the expectation that men show up in stiff shirts and sturdy blazers to prove their “professionalism” seems to go against our environment.
While women still get to choose between breezy fabrics like cotton and linen, men often have a uniform of discomfort — polyester blends, buttoned-up collars, and trousers that cling more to corporate norms than climate logic.
One has to ponder: couldn’t the dhoti challenge this strange narrative in a manner that also provides respite to the average man?
The Hidden Masculinity of Fabric
Let’s be honest — a lot of the unease around dhotis isn’t just about tradition versus modernity. It’s about softness versus structure. Jeans, suits, joggers — they all sculpt the male body. They project control.
The dhoti? It flows. It drapes. It hides.
And in a culture where masculinity is expected to be hard, controlled, and visible, it could be the case that the dhoti’s softness makes people uncomfortable. It doesn’t conform to the contours of the body; it doesn’t assert, it suggests. It carries with it a kind of vulnerability — a refusal to shape the self into straight lines and sharp angles. In other words, it’s too soft for the hard masculinity modern men are told to perform.
There’s also a glaring gendered irony here.
Indian women across generations have known — and been expected — to learn the art of the saree: how to pleat it, pin it, and carry it through 10-hour workdays, weddings, and protests. It’s part of their cultural toolkit.
But most men today wouldn’t know how to tie a dhoti to save their lives.
So, Will the Dhoti Make a Comeback?
Sometimes, the dhoti isn’t always about soft power. In parts of South India, it still has swagger — often paired with sunglasses, attitude, and Allu Arjun-level dhoti-flipping.
Designers like Ujjawal Dubey and Rajesh Pratap Singh are slowly reworking it into structured silhouettes. Many male fashion content creators like Rohit Bose and Prraful Makwanaa have rediscovered and championed the humble dhoti, using their platforms to teach men today how traditional Indian clothing need not be limited only to the next family friend’s wedding.
So, we really need to ask ourselves a few hard-hitting questions about what our traditions and clothing really mean to us.
Do we need to armour ourselves in belts and zippers to be taken seriously?
Can comfort be powerful?
And why does the general conscience always default to copying what the West does?
Look, this isn’t a call to relaunch a second Swadeshi movement. It’s a plea to self-reflect on why our culture still hangs onto the idea that the white man always does it better — even when we know what we’re capable of as a nation.
Reclaiming the dhoti doesn’t mean rejecting global styles — it simply means making space for our own alongside the rest.
Right now, the dhoti is a ghost in the machine of modern India — occasionally summoned for rituals or rebellion, then folded back into the closet of memory. But maybe that’s exactly why it matters.
Because what’s more modern than dressing on your own terms?
