“Over by the dancing camels,” said Neel Lattimore, deputy press secretary to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The dancing camels were next to the dancing horses, and just after the six troupes of Punjabi dancers, and just before the Pakistani orchestra playing third-rate, 20-year-old disco music … and also just before the rose-petal altar, which stood in the center of a courtyard where an open-air dinner for 500 was to be laid on by the governor of Punjab-and the camels were dancing in the midst of thousands upon thousands of small, pungent oil lamps, lining the walks and walls of the ancient Muslim fort at Lahore, casting fairy-tale shadows from golden baubles of light. The First Lady approached now, moving along a red carpet passing the Punjabi dancers, flanked by her daughter, Chelsea, and Benazir Bhutto, pirme minister of Pakistan. All three wore the shalwar Kameez, a combination of long tunic and pants, which plainer form-has become the required uniform for Islamic women in South Asia. These, however, were brilliantly colored, bejeweled and embroidered - the First Lady’s was red, a gift from Bhutto. She looked dazzling. And she seemed to suppress an astonished giggle as two dancing camels bowed before her, then rose and highkicked together in the soft night air.
Let us talk about fashion and politics. Thirty-three years ago, Jacqueline Kennedy came to this part of the world and made a splash by wearing an Indian sari. The sari is a soft and sensual garment, a wrap of cotton or silk that often leaves the arms and midriff exposed. Hillary Clinton’s staff had studied film and photos of that trip and been surprised, not just by the sari, but by some of the other clothes Mrs. Kennedy had worn. “Sleeveless sheaths!” said an aide. “She rode an elephant in a skirt that came up above her knee!”
The State Department was warning against exposed female limbs of any sort no this First Lady’s trip to South Asia. Time had changed. The local cultures, especially Islamic ones, had grown conservative “The elite women of Pakistan cannot wear jeans anymore” an Indian feminist told m later in the week. “Now they must dress like the common people, the believers.” Hillary Clinton had lowered the hemlines on several skirts in preparation for the trip. But her fashion statement became the shalwar kameez, which is a curious, contradictory apparatus -and a rather neat metaphor for the enduring, torturous complications of her public life.
The shalwar kameez was invented by the Sikhs, Aho wanted to liberate their women from the sari in the early 18th century -so they could join the army and go to war against the Muslims. It was easier to ride a horse in tunic and pants. The combination was adopted by the Punjabis, the largest ethnic group in Pakistan, and institutionalized by the Muslims-when worn with a dupatta (scarf), it could seem as prim and furtive as the burka (the veiled dress of the truly devout). After the shah was toppled by the Iranian ayatollahs in 1979, a nervous Pakistani leadership leaned on the elites, quietly encouraging the shalwar kameez as required dress for women. At about the same moment - in a lovely irony of the modern world-a new generation of Indian businesswomen were adopting the costume because it was more practical, and comfortable, than the sari.
Modest and practical, a uniform for tradition-bound wives and women warriors… hmmm. As she wandered from Pakistan to India to Nepal last week, the First Lady seemed to be searching for the rhetorical equivalent of the shalwar kameez, a way to dress “activist” ideas in nonthreatening garb-for both domestic and overseas consumption. “It’s one of the most important questions I’ve been asking myself,” she said, curled on a couch in her New Delhi hotel suite several days after the dancing camels. “I think a new language of politics is being born. None of us have it quite right vet, but I’m beginning to see glimmers.”
There were glimmers in a remarkable scene at the Islamabad College for Girls, where a group of young women - children of the elite-wondered aloud, and quite eloquently, bow they could balance their ambitions with the increasingly conservative customs of the country, which most seemed to consider a source of cohesion rather than repression. “We need to establish trust with the [common] people,” said a girl who hoped to go into advertising, “so they I understand we’re not their enemies. They think that with education, girls will get out of hand. . .”
“That’s difficult to do sometimes-establish trust,” the First Lady replied. Then a girl asked about the “secularization, the loss of identity” that came with the new global economy. Hillary Clinton began tentatively: “I worry about it a lot. I tried to speak about it a few years ago. . . " The Politics of Meaning! And then, gathering herself up, she launched into an extended rumination about mullahs, American and Asian; about “the great struggle” to build a tolerant, but still “spiritual” response to the “rampant materialism and consumerism…because many of those who are concerned about the lack of meaning and undermining of family like would like to adopt a rigid response to it…” It slowly became clear, as she went on, that she had drifted into a recollection of the 1994 election, her health-care humiliation, all the awfulness. She was talking about America, but the Pakistani girls were rapt; they clearly understood her meaning. Indeed, she was reaching them in a way that she had rarely connected with Americans. But then, these were socially conscious children of the elite, caught in the same cultural whipsaw that she was, worried about how to pursue their ambitions without seeming “enemies” of the common folk, without seeming bossy.
In April of 1962 NEWSWEEK chided Jacqueline Kennedy for forging a somewhat less substantive (upper) class alliance with the South Asians and seeing “only the pageantry of the Indian subcontinent, not its poverty.” No chance of that with this First Lady. There were daily visits to villages and clinics and schools. But it isn’t easy to experience actual poverty on an Official Visit, and these were tarted-up exhibits -roads newly paved, open sewers newly retrenched, garbage dumps (and their human residents) camouflaged by flimsy walls of outrageously cheery print fabrics -all part of the great South Asian Poverty Theme Park that has engaged, and foiled, well-intentioned Westerners since Mrs. Clinton’s Victorian Methodist precursors were on the case. In such circumstances it isn’t hard to slip into egregious uplift mode. Indeed, Mother Teresa’s remarkable New Delhi orphanage-with its rows of well-dressed, ineffably gorgeous and incredibly serene infants in cribs -almost demanded self-righteous excess, but the First Lady didn’t gush. She cuddled and rocked several babies, then approached the cameras, and retreated into the stiff public perfection that seems almost a reflexive defense against untoward emotions: “Oh, they’re so beautiful,” she said, “and I’m so pleased because the minister says adoption is becoming more and more available.”
A constant struggle for her: seeming human in public, rather than perfect. She is too wary ever to be entirely open, although there were glimmerings here as well: after a few days on the road, the Stockholm Syndrome set in, entwining Her Ladyship (as some of the locals had it) and Her Traveling Hacks-she was our captive and we were hers-and the atmosphere became downright convivial. The mood changed quickly one afternoon when television reporters were led to believe they might ask Chelsea about her reaction to the Taj Mahal, which the wire services had already gotten. “No,” the First Lady flashed and her daughter was hustled off by aides. one wondered about the vehemence. Chelsea was a delightful and serene presence on the trip, a sure source of pride for her mother. But the First Lady’s insistence that her daughter never be used as media fodder, admirable in principle, suddenly seemed inflexible, fiercely dogmatic, a reminder of all that had gone wrong for the Clintons these past few years.
But that was only a moment. And there were many others that were much better, moments that could have veered into self-righteous territory, but didn’t. Her message was feminism and activism, to be sure -but clothed in the shalwar kameez of voluntarism. She proselytized programs that Newt Gingrich might adore, nongovernmental programs, safe havens run by altruists rather than bureaucrats, programs that loaned poor women money to start businesses and take care of themselves.
And perhaps the most powerful memory of Hillary Clinton’s first week in South Asia came at such a place: the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmadabad. She sat in a hot, dusty, but mercifully covered courtyard, with hundreds of women-a third Untouchables, another third Muslims; rag-pickers, street vendors, the most desperate of the poor-and they told her about their organization of more than 100,000 members, how it unified them, loaned them money and gave them the courage, as one said, “to walk into the village council and talk to … the police [who had, before SEWA, harassed them off the street], and speak our minds.” The meeting went on for an hour, the First Lady was moved-but, she later said, tired. She had just finished her final remarks *hen an older woman leaped to the microphone and said, “You’ve come into our courtyard and filled our hearts with iov and we will never forget you.” Suddenly, the entire throng began to sing. The song was familiar, but elusive. Slowly, it became clear: they were singing “We Shall Overcome” in the Gujarati dialect. Hillary Clinton later said she found herself thinking about the great circle from Henry David Thoreau, who was read by Gandhi, who in turn inspired Martin Luther King, whose anthem these women were now singing. A precisely perfect thought, of course. But the human reaction that accompanied it was far more memorable: as they sang, tears welled in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s eyes.
