Long before Delhi’s sultans and Mughal emperors dictated fashion in the north, the kingdoms south of the Vindhyas were writing their own sartorial story. From the Satavahanas trading silk for Roman gold to the Marathas riding into battle in angarkhas, southern India’s rulers dressed to project power, piety, and prosperity, often in ways strikingly different from their northern counterparts. This post traces that visual history from the Vijayanagar Empire through the Wodeyars of Mysore to the Marathas and Rajputs of the west.
Table of Contents
Historical overview of the southern dynasties
While repeated invasions and the spread of Buddhism and Jainism reshaped culture in central and north India, the south largely stayed insulated from these upheavals, and Hinduism continued to flourish there with far less disruption. This continuity is part of why southern costume traditions feel so layered: styles built on one another over centuries instead of being repeatedly overwritten.
The Satavahana dynasty, the first major Deccan power to build an empire in the region, ruled from around 200 BCE and grew wealthy on trade, including a thriving exchange of textiles and luxury goods with the Roman Empire. In the centuries that followed, a succession of major dynasties, including the Chalukyas, Pallavas, Cholas, Pandyas, Cheras, and Hoysalas, rose and fell across the peninsula, each leaving its mark on the region’s art, temple architecture, and dress. Trade also brought new faiths to the coast. Tradition holds that Thomas the Apostle landed on the Malabar coast near present-day Kodungallur in 52 CE and established some of India’s earliest Christian communities in Kerala, adding another thread to the south’s already diverse cultural fabric.
What southern costumes had in common
Despite ruling different territories, the southern dynasties shared a common approach to dressing the body. Everyday clothing for both men and women started with a simple rectangular length of unstitched cloth, draped either as a dhoti around the legs or wrapped more casually as a lungi. Men across the southern states wore some version of the dhoti, though the name changed from region to region.
Women’s clothing evolved more visibly over time. For long stretches, blouses were not part of everyday wear, but fitted upper garments, known variously as the kanchukka, kanchulike, chola, or ravake, gradually became fashionable. These were stitched by specialist tailors called chippiga, marking an early professionalisation of garment-making in the south.
Vijayanagar Empire costume (1336-1565 CE)
The Vijayanagar Empire turned dressing into a form of statecraft. Wealthy men wore the Petha or Kulavi, a tall silk turban decorated with gold, and royal courts operated with real ceremonial pomp, attendants included, all dressed in heavy jewellery. Interestingly, court fashion also absorbed outside influences: research on Vijayanagar’s ruling elite shows they adopted the kabayi tunic and kullayi cap, garments with roots in Islamicate fashion, for public and courtly appearances, even while the empire remained a stronghold of Hindu institutions.
Jewellery, perfume, and festive dressing
Literary sources from the period describe both men and women adorned with anklets, bracelets, finger rings, necklaces, and earrings. Turbans, Pethas, and Kulavi headgear were especially popular among the wealthy, and jewellery was worn as much by men as by women. During festivals, both sexes wore flower garlands and perfumed themselves with rose water, musk, and sandalwood, a sensory dimension of dressing that rarely survives in textual or visual records elsewhere in Indian costume history.
Women’s attire in Vijayanagar
Everyday women’s wear still relied on draped cloth, but poetic accounts from the era, including verses attributed to the poet Hariharan, describe women in fitted blouses paired with shawls, suggesting that stitched garments were slowly gaining ground among women too, particularly in courtly and urban settings. This shift laid early groundwork for blouse styles that would become far more standard across the south in later centuries.
Wodeyar of Mysore and Maratha costume
When the Vijayanagar Empire collapsed in 1565, its feudatory territory of Mysore did not fall into chaos. Instead, the Wodeyar (or Wadiyar) rulers, who had governed Mysore since 1399, asserted independence and went on to rule the region, in one form or another, for roughly 500 years. Their long tenure meant southern courtly fashion did not disappear with Vijayanagar; it evolved under new patronage, carrying forward earlier traditions of turbans, jewellery, and fine silk while absorbing the tastes of successive rulers.
Further west, the Marathas were building an entirely different aesthetic, one shaped by mobility and warfare rather than courtly ceremony. Organised into a formidable fighting force under Shivaji, the Marathas favoured practical yet distinctive clothing. Men typically wore a dhoti or dhotar as the base garment, paired with a fitted upper garment such as the angarkha or a simpler sadara, and completed the look with a pheta, the structured Maharashtrian turban still worn on ceremonial occasions today. The pheta, along with a waistcoat or bandi, remained central to traditional Maharashtrian men’s dress well beyond Shivaji’s era. A fitted, tailored variant of the kurta-and-churidar combination also appears in historical depictions of the Marathas, reflecting practical adaptation for riders and soldiers who needed clothing that moved with the body rather than draped loosely around it.
The Rajputs of western India
The Rajputs, who traced their lineage to the Rajanya or kshatriya order, developed a costume vocabulary built specifically around martial life. Their jackets often featured fringed epaulets at the shoulders and padded protection at the elbows and lower arms, features that were as functional in battle as they were decorative at court. Everyday and ceremonial wardrobes included the churidar, pyjama, achkan, and angharkha, garments that, notably, also travelled into Maratha and later pan-Indian courtly fashion through shared trade and political contact across western India.
Facial hair carried its own symbolic weight in this culture. The moustache, in particular, was closely tied to ideas of masculinity, strength, and power among Rajput men, a detail that shows how costume history in this period extended beyond cloth and ornament into grooming and personal presentation as markers of identity.
What do you think?
What do you think? Looking at how the Vijayanagar court blended Hindu and Islamicate dress elements, do you think fashion in royal courts tends to reflect political alliances more than religious identity? And between the ceremonial opulence of Vijayanagar and the practical, battle-ready style of the Marathas, which approach do you think has left a more visible mark on regional Indian fashion today?
References
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Satavahana-dynasty
- https://testbook.com/ias-preparation/history-of-south-india
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Thomas-Christians
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/abs/sultan-among-hindu-kings-dress-titles-and-the-islamicization-of-hindu-culture-at-vijayanagara/A8E10BC312D6EEA409F8F26CE93C6BA3
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Vijayanagara_Empire
- https://mysorepalace.karnataka.gov.in/Wadiyar_Dynasty.html
- https://www.holidify.com/pages/culture-of-maharashtra-121.html
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