Sartorial memories of a colonial past and a diasporic present in Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man

The fictions of the South Asian diaspora in Britain have recurrently dramatized many of the sartorial confrontations, negotiations, and creative exchanges resulting from the interaction between Britons and South Asians on British soil. Some of them have also looked back to “clothing matters” (Tarlo, 1996) in colonial India, thus establishing a dialogue between the sartorial past and present of the protagonists. This is arguably nowhere more evident than in Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), a novel where the politics and poetics of dress in colonial India recur and haunt the sartorial present of the diasporic subject. Drawing on anthropological and sociological studies on dress, this article aims at reading the clothing subtext that Markandaya weaved into the fabric of this novel. The contribution argues that in The Nowhere Man the motif of clothing is used to connect the characters’ diasporic present in Britain with their previous past in colonial India, showing how their diasporic experience is affected and haunted by the memories of a colonial past. History, argues Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting (2006), is often constructed out of archived memories, and in The Nowhere Man Srinivas’ memories allow us to visit and revisit the historical archive of the sartorial relations between Indians and Britons over more than thirty years and across two different loci, India and Britain.