The Malayalee Man’s Trademark: The Lungi
The lungi is an important cultural garment for South India.
As a third-culture kid of Indian descent, I am always out of the loop when it comes to Indian customs. The most infuriating tradition I have not mastered was wearing a lungi. The lungi is legwear worn by Malayalees, the Indian community I come from, situated in Kerala—a southwestern state in India.
Whenever I think of Malayalee men, the first thing that crosses my mind is the trademark style of the lungi. However, with more research, I realized lungis aren’t just legwear. The way a lungi is worn reflects certain nuances within the Malayalee community.
According to a news article by The News Minute, the lungi is usually a “two-metre long cloth, in floral prints or in colourful check patterns, draped around one’s waist or at times pulled up to the knees to make a knot.”
Usually, lungis are casual clothing you wear while relaxing at home or going for a walk around the neighbourhood. However, they are also the vestment of choice for the blue-collar working class. This tendency has made lungis symbolize lower levels of education, while Western clothes symbolize higher levels of education. This trope is particularly propagated in movies.
An example is the Malayalam movie Meleparambil Aanveedu, which features a family with one educated man among its family of non-educated men. Throughout the movie, Jayram is featured wearing Western clothing to show how he is educated and works at a company. Meanwhile, his brothers and father always wear lungis, signifying their lack of education and occupation as farmers. Therefore, we can say that the lungi is a garment that can reflect the social class of the wearer.
Many of the lungi’s nuances come from how you wear the lungi. A common way to wear a lungi is to wrap it around your bottom half and tighten it by bunching and tucking it towards your right. However, Tamilians—people from Tamil Nadu, Kerala’s neighbouring state—also wear their lungis towards the left. Therefore, the lungi also acts as a type of identification or as a signal to show others where you are from.
Another variation of wearing the lungi is by repeating the same above steps, and then folding half of the lungi upwards and repeating the bunching and tucking process. This is the shorter style of wearing a lungi. This is typically worn by people while they are engaged in physical labour since the longer length makes it harder to move around. However, the shorter style means something entirely different for me.
In South Indian action movies, the protagonist always dons the shorter style before he destroys the villains. In a blog post, the author m@dness perfectly describes the hype when the lungi-wearing main character fights the bad guys:
“It usually occurs right before an action sequence and will most probably be in slow motion (especially if it’s a Mohanlal starrer). The hero bends down slightly, does a mini hop-skip flicking the end of a lungi into an outstretched palm before he ties it around his hips and proceeds to demolish the villains; with every lungi-addict in the audience silently, or sometimes not so silently, cheering him on.”
The author’s explanation shows exactly how sensational this style of wearing the lungi is. Meanwhile, the longer style is more ‘decent’ and ‘polite.’ For example, whenever a Malayalee sees someone socially ‘above’ them, they immediately undo the extra fold and go to the longer style as a show of respect. Therefore, the lungi also plays a role in the social interactions between Malayalees.
As a garment that has many societal and religious connotations, the use of lungi can even lead to controversy. An example of this is the ‘lungi’ protest in Kozhikode, Kerala caused when a man wearing a lungi was not allowed in a family-friendly restaurant, supposedly due to the fact the lungi is a ‘low class’ garment.
Another incident is when a man wearing a lungi was not allowed in the visitors’ gallery of the Kerala assembly. While he argued that it was custom in Malabar, a region in Kerala, to wear a white shirt and kallimundu (another name for lungi) for auspicious events, he was rejected as the lungi is an informal dress.
Personally, after learning more about lungis, I want to be able to actually wear one. I don’t have to wear a lungi to be Malayalee, but a lungi is undoubtedly a trademark of Malayalee culture. It’s a clothing style that is tied to how Malayalees live and interact with each other—a style that represents us like none other.
Features Editor (Volume 51); Associate Features Editor (Volume 50) — Madhav is a third year student completing a double major in mathematics and computer science, and a minor in professional writing. Everyone in UTM has a unique story that makes them special and deserves to be told. As the Features Editor, Madhav wants to narrate these types of stories with creative and descriptive writing. In his off-time, Madhav loves watching anime, reading manga or fantasy novels and listening to music.