Linen Legacies: Colonial Cloth and Contemporary Fashion in Pondicherry

This research will study the history of linen in Pondicherry. It will explore where it came from, how it has developed, and why it continues to matter as a fabric of fashion and style. Linen was not locally manufactured in India like cotton or silk. It was brought into Pondicherry in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the French people to signify order, sophistication, and colonial power.