Book Excerpt: 'The Art Of Decluttering' By Bhawana Pingali

From the '5 skincare must-haves' to the 'little treats', our world has normalised consumption as a marker of self-care and identity. However, Bhawana Pingali's book, The Art of Decluttering, challenges this mindset by inviting us to embrace simplicity, mindful choices, and ancient practices that nurture both the body and the soul without excess. Drawing from her deep understanding of traditional Indian rituals and sustainable living, the book offers practical tools and heartfelt reflections that encourage readers to reassess what truly adds value to their lives.

Bhawana Pingali, a seasoned fashion journalist and academic, advocates for intentional living in The Art of Decluttering. She takes the readers through nine retellings of clothing, home and body, which make aspects of ancient Indian ritualistic life relatable to our modern lifestyles. 

Excerpt from The Art of Decluttering by Bhawana Pingali

‘Aiyyoh! Why wear torn clothes?’
Mending or tearing clothes using soodhi dharam repairs ‘dishonour’

What if we tore-and-mended clothing with needlework (soodhi dharam in Telugu) as cathartic textile art to feel joy or release pain?

Bharati Aunty, Mumbai (2003)

‘Aiyyoh thalli! Malli iddena officeuki veskuntavu, chirigulu toh—ona Thurzday a? Adi utthakaledu emo [Oh girl, are you going to wear this to work again, with tears—on a Thursday? It probably isn’t even washed]!’ Bharati aunty shrieks in Telg-ish (our word for her mix
of Telugu and pidgin English).

‘Yes, Aunty!’ Irritation snakes into my voice. 

‘Breathe. Do not react. Respond,’ Nannagaru’s (dad) voice like an earwig buzzes in my ear . . .

‘Amma (mother), please let her be!’ Aloka, Aunty’s daughter and my flatmate, twirling in her short skirt and knotted tee, screams from the other end of the room.

‘Listen-listen, awll I’m saying isz, weaaring torn clothes will disssipate your bady’s yenergy and will attraact a laaazy life, wokay [Listen, listen, all I am saying is, wearing torn clothes will dissipate your body’s energy and attract a lazy life, okay]?’ The line is immediately followed by: ‘Whaat will people say, amma? We pyarents don’t lookh awfter eyou or whaat [What will people say, dear? Don’t we parents look after you]?’ Bharati aunty is relentless.

All of twenty-four years and a cub reporter at a fashion magazine, I manage a smile as my torn denims (hacked at the knees and costing nearly a quarter of my salary), sleeveless vest, flip flops, kohl eyes and body piercings seem to rub uneasily against my skin.
Aloka and I stealthily move towards the door before Aunty’s good old soodhi dharam attack my denims.

Ten minutes later, we are in an auto, feeling utterly proud of our collective uprising. The memory of Aunty mending Aloka’s shredded denim shorts (with a crochet scalloped edging covering the hem and crochet patches hiding holes) in the name of ‘status and honour’ a few weeks ago makes us giggle all the way to Kandivali (East) station.

Bharati aunty is a lovely, sari-clad, turmeric-smeared, kohl-eyed, shrill-voiced lady with a kumkuma bottu (red vermillion bindi) that almost always is leaking down her nose. Her Brahminical religiousness is overwhelming, but her food is calming. Her voice is piercing (patronizing at the drop of a hat), but her undertone is nurturing. Her acts are smothering (insists on organizing or stitching our clothes her way and cooking every meal at home), but her love is cushioning. No wonder then that our relationship stays a contradiction. Every day, she snatches a lip-smacking part of our new-age cosmopolitan independence and gives us a spicy slice of our ancient Andhra culture in return (I can still remember her glistening pickles, which she struggled to teach us how to do).

This is the fifth month she is staying with us in our one-bedroom apartment in Mumbai. And her focus is singular—to make sure we, the ‘Telugu Niyogi ammayilu (Telugu Brahmin1 girls) living in a big, bad city dress appropriately’ to become ‘fit for marriage’ before we are twenty-five. To her, torn-and-tattered clothes (tees, dresses or skirts bought or torn at home) are ‘inappropriate and shameful’. They are ‘silent sagas of carelessness and penury that ruthlessly tear her heart more than the torn clothes themselves’—her poetic rendition in Telugu, which is impossible for me to pen down. 

When we wear torn clothes, she rises with a vengeance to rebel against our rebellion. ‘Who will marry you girls if you wear all this?’ she asks, pointing at our tatters in shock. And: ‘Why would you pay money to buy something torn and then not mend or hide the holes, ever?’ Her belief in the ‘good’ practice of mending anything beautifully that is torn takes my love for torn clothes a notch higher.

Rips = ‘Unclean’, ‘Incomplete’ and ‘Dissipated’?

Today, global fashion futures have made electricity-generating clothing to power our devices a reality. Scientists have unleashed solar and kinetic power through clothing to charge our smartphones. Engineers can generate power by using the intrinsic surface energy of fabrics.4 The ancients would not have been surprised. They believed clothes, as matter or energy, affected our physiological and psychological systems. Former senior teacher Gopa Datta, master’s in Sanskrit and English, says some ancient Indian religious and
esoteric narratives and leaders believed basic clothes in the raw form, as a visual and physical extension of a human’s life, were already strong enough to absorb or dissipate energy from the body and the environment. They believed that for an energetically balanced living, our clothes ought to be clean, whole (like electrical circuits), stable and presentable to the self and others. 

Datta says that is why some religious groups perceived torn clothes as unable to close or reconnect the human body’s auric energy systems, hence tagged ‘defective’. Probably that is why torn, shabby or crushed clothes were tagged ‘unclean’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘imbalanced’ by advocates like Bharati aunty. They felt these clothes from religious and spiritual angles affected the ‘connectivity’, ‘purity’ and ‘cleanliness’ of daily rituals and prayers, too. Such clothing could either attract undesirable energy (through negative occult practices)5 and lead to downfall or deplete the bioenergy field to make one vulnerable to depression and illness. ‘Whole’ clothes, on the other hand, were seen as perfect for the same. 

Extracted with permission from Bhawana Pingali's The Art of Decluttering; published by Penguin Random House India.