'And why aren't you in uniform?' Social media spoofs on Euphoria hit differently in light of the Karnataka hijab row

Inspired by the new season of _Euphoria_, content creators on TikTok and Instagram have simultaneously spoofed and churned out bold, avant-garde looks set to the audio of Spongebob’s Squidward asking, “And why aren’t you in uniform?” The joke is in the divergence from the banal aesthetic of high-school students of their onscreen club-ready counterparts. The joke hit different when a few Indian influencers participated, and the difference in freedom enjoyed by people online versus analog was stark. A “lewk” that gets you a high quota of sweaty red-face or fire emojis equals in the unwanted stares you might draw on the street. Indians are hardly prissy, yet there is a whole lot of fuss about good ‘sanskar’ and we are started young. “You don’t come to school to do fashion,” we are told as we internalise our disciplinarian’s outlook on slut-shaming and soft misogyny – fashion is instantly equivalent to vanity. A uniform is slapped onto a shape-shifting sense of self, ignoring any dysphoria and historicism that this fancy dress might be a product of old Victorian propriety. Uniforms have no place in an intersectional and multi-identity society. With militaristic force, they dismiss the student’s identity as purely discursive or performative exercises, when they are more often than not another means of “surveillance of the un-powerful.” And the barely-socialist view that uniforms remove class and caste differences in the school is an absurd excuse.

Do class and caste differences really go away in school because of a uniform? Uniforms in fact tend to cement these differences as they are a locations of pride for ‘posh’ schools.

In all this, religious markers resisted these processes of normativeness. Where cis-and trans female students were not allowed to wear pants and regularly had their hemlines monitored, Sikh students and Muslim students could attend class in turbans and hijabs. Religious identity would be taken seriously where other identities were not. “After decades spent in vilifying Muslim men, the next project is the vilifying of Muslim women. Where the authorities have not been able to sexualise them and make them a threat in that particular way, they say that the women’s sheer presence will upend an educational institution. If it wasn’t the hijab , then there would have been some other way. Too sexual, too political, too much beef, too something else,” writes author Nisha Susan, whose article in The News Minute iterates how every hijab is different . When hijab-wearing students are barred from attending college on the basis of a uniform style, it reveals the uniform as a weapon of discrimination. This imposition is an attempt to alienate the Muslim woman’s identity. It is no secret that women are viewed as the property of their families. Certain schools issue salwar kameez as the dress code to their students and a sari to their teachers to appease families, according to Twitter user @JaaiVipra. In consonance, the hijab ban i s an attack on their families as well. A mention must be made of the comically literal type of counter protest that sprung up in the Government Pre-University College in Byndoor. The second part of a notional binary – male, Hindu students wore saffron shawls to campus to enforce some sort of scarf-shawl standoff. Although Muslim students did not take issue with the saffron shawls, the potential of a fight was taken as justification enough to ban the hijab . The Karnataka government cited law and order maintenance as a reason to validate the decision of the institutions. The whole thing was a false compromise, played out to the satisfaction of the Hindu protesters, suspected political plants. A more potent equivalence would be if the Hindu students were asked to discard their sacred threads. A similar debate took place in 2018 with the uniform civil code. Muslims feared that bringing civil and personal liberties under one law, no matter its fairness, would mean that their traditions would become secondary to a larger morality. The Hindu government posed as the emancipator while stereotyping the Muslim woman as weak or backward and needing rescue. And certainly in defending the hijab ban, Hindu men have made weak attempts to cast the hijab as a symbol of their oppression. But while the UCC bill could be seen as Centre to State process, the Udupi incident shows how local curbs go hand in hand with nation-wide bans just like the nationwide beef-ban was accompanied by incidents of cow vigilantism. From such blanket bans, a demand for one language, a citizenship amendment, we are living in the build-a-country workshop of a society that employs revisionist patriotism and seeks an ethnic state and a homogenous Indian identity. But uniforms do not have a place in a multicultural society, just like ethnocentrism can have no place in India. Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.