Dr Riya Gupta - A Mughal Detour to the Met Gala: Dandyism across empires

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A Mughal Detour to the Met Gala: Dandyism across empires

08 May 2025

When the 2025 Met Gala unveiled its theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, it offered more than a sartorial spectacle. It foregrounded the cultural and political power of fashion. Tracing a lineage of Black dandyism, a movement where fashion became a statement of identity and resistance, it drew from Monica L. Miller’s Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. As the Met Museum’s official website elaborates, the theme:

… presents a cultural and historical examination of Black style over three hundred years through the concept of dandyism. In the 18th-century Atlantic world, a new culture of consumption, fueled by the slave trade, colonialism, and imperialism, enabled access to clothing and goods that indicated wealth, distinction, and taste. Black dandyism sprung from the intersection of African and European style traditions.

This exploration of ‘the importance of style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora’ prompted me to reflect on a resonant narrative: the embodiment of dandyism in colonial India. Central to this reflection is my research on the Mirzanamas, late-seventeenth century advice manuals outlining norms of ‘gentlemanly conduct’ for the ‘ideal man’, the mirza. While I have previously written about the Mirzanamas’ classed and gendered articularions—see ‘Revisiting the Mirzanama: Class Consciousness and the Mughal Middle Classes’ and ‘The Politics of ‘Becoming’ a Mirza: Shifting Masculine Norms and Gender Binary in the Mughal Society’—there is a curious marginal note in the British Library (BL) manuscript that, especially in light of the Met Gala, deserves renewed attention. A curious piece of colonial annotation suddenly brings the manuscript into conversation with the Met Gala. The BL Mirzanama bears a handwritten ‘subtitle’ referring to the text as a manual of ‘Manners of the Dandies’. It was added not by the author but by the anonymous collector in whose collection the manuscript probably existed and later found its way to the British Museum, which is now the British Library (see image below).

Source: British Library

That scribble is revelatory, isn’t it? In my view, this annotation suggests a perceived alignment between Mughal etiquette and Victorian dandyism, a connection anchored in a shared attention to decorum, distinction and stylised masculinity. The Victorian period (c. 1837–1901) overlapped with the height of colonial rule in India, and this marginalia invites us to ask: What aspects of the Mirzanama mirrored the dandy ideals of Victorian Britain?

While the Oxford dictionary defines a dandy as ‘a man unduly concerned with looking stylish and fashionable’, perhaps Fanny Parkes, writing from colonial India between 1822 and 1846, offers a more revealing lens. In her journal, later published as Begums, Thugs and White Mughals (ed. William Dalrymple, 2002), she writes in October 1834:

All natives, from the highest to the lowest, sport the moustache and pride themselves upon its blackness … The 16th Lancers, on their arrival in India, wore no moustache; after the lapse of many years, the order that allowed them the decoration arrived in India, and was hailed with delight by the whole corps. The natives regarded them with much greater respect in consequence, and the young dandis of Delhi could no longer twirl their moustaches and think themselves finer fellows than the lancers. As a warlike appendage it is absolutely necessary; a man without moustaches being reckoned na-mard, unmanly. A dandified native generally travels with a handkerchief bound under his chin and tied on the top of his turban, that the beauty and precision of his beard may not be disarranged on the journey.

How can one read that and not picture Diljit Dosanjh’s now-iconic Met Gala look: turban, tailored suit and the quiet confidence of someone who understands that style is never just aesthetic but an identity?

Nevertheless, in this discussion, the Mirzanama’s middle-class associations are crucial, considering that the rise of the Victorian dandy has been attributed to the growth of industrialisation, giving birth to a middling class of gentlemen, a point made by James Eli Adams in Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (1995). According to Adams, the dandy was a mimicry of aristocratic life and therefore, an early mark of its decline, as those of “humbler origins” found in dandyism a mode of self-fashioning meant to attract the public gaze. But, in my opinion, the Mirzanama also complicates this picture. Its emphasis on grace, polish and moral cultivation speaks to an emergent Mughal middling masculinity that, like the Victorian dandy, was both aspirational and more importantly, ambivalent. After all the Mirzanama states:

[A mirza] should avoid the company of such [self-proclaimed], self-opinionated, bastard mirzas who tie their turbans with great delicateness, who talk with the movement of head or with the gestures of body or of eyebrows, who are over-emphatic in speech … who turn away with affected delicacy from whatever is invigorating, who do not clean their teeth without looking in the mirror, who clad themselves in the single layer of a thin and transparent upper garment and wear trousers of satin and khamkhab (many-coloured, embroidered cloth), and who have the habit of eating pan frequently and blackening their teeth with missi [a black powder].

As I have argued in ‘The Politics of ‘Becoming’ a Mirza’, ‘[t]hat such mannerism was being associated with what was thought of as essentially feminine is clear from the statement that follows the above quote’:

Mirzahood is to be mirza-khan or Mirza-beg; not to be mirzada-begum or mirzada-khanum.

Thus, it is imperative to give due attention to the Mirzanama’s gendered aspects, particularly the ideas of the gender binary and consequently effeminacy, as in Victorian imagination, the dandy was also often viewed as an emblem of idle, aestheticised masculinity, even effeminacy. This is interesting in the context whereby in the Met Gala, women were overwhelmingly seen in tailored suits, creatively re-imagined versions of the traditional “men’s wear”.

Anyway, as Adams notes again in his essay ‘Dandyism and Late Victorian Masculinity’ (in Oscar Wilde in Context, ed. Powell and Raby, 2013), the dandy could subvert or uphold the gender binary. And as Mrinalini Sinha has shown in Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995) and her 1999 essay ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’, British colonial discourse often cast Indian men as effeminate in contrast to the “manly Englishman”. In that light, the Mirzanama becomes not just a text about manners. It is a map of contested masculinity and one that fed both colonial fantasies and indigenous negotiations of gendered respectability.

Additionally, in the context of Victorian dandyism, one immediately thinks of Oscar Wilde (not to forget W E B Du Bois, who keeps making an appearance in my blogs. See my post ‘Romanticise Academia? Can’t Relate’ for more on him) and his experiments with performative ‘dandy-ness’ including aspects such as costume, speech, bodily actions and literary aspirations. What Wilde did was to embrace the stigma of effeminacy based on the affiliation of a dandy with the traditionally considered feminine characteristics of excessive concern with external regard. This was perhaps a bit more provocative with consequences such as ‘suspicions of his “effeminacy” became more pointedly associated with homosexuality’. On the other and quite similarly, the Mirzanama reflects Mughal middle classes navigating their own codes of masculinity and comportment. The manuscript’s emphasis on grace, eloquence and presentation, not to mention literary refinement, parallels the dandy’s pursuit of elegance as a form of self-definition. Both figures navigate the fine line between visibility and vulnerability. If the Victorian dandy was suspect because of his polish, the mirza of the Mirzanama risked being feminised for his refinement.

And that is what I find striking: how the dandy, in both worlds, becomes a figure of contradiction, elegant yet suspect, admired yet mocked, both a spectacle and a strategy. So when I see the 2025 Met Gala invite the world to rethink the dandy as diasporic, defiant and stylishly subversive, I cannot help but return to this Mughal manuscript with its colonial footnote. Fashion, after all, doesn’t just dress bodies and style has always been about more than just looking good. It is about being seen, especially, on your own terms.