Tokalapalli

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

Customs

Nighties can only be worn 7pm to 7am

Samson Raj, Wear nightie before sunset, pay ₹2k fine, November 10, 2018: The Times of India

For the past nine months, women in a village in Andhra Pradesh’s West Godavari district have stopped wearing the innocuous, flowing ‘nightie’ during the day. They put it on only after sunset, thanks to a diktat by village elders, who have decided that nightie, as the name suggests, is meant only for the night.

Though the diktat was issued about nine months ago, it went viral on social media only on Thursday night after which revenue officials visited the village for an inquiry in the morning.

A nine-member committee of elders of Tokalapalli village even has a carrotand-stick strategy in place to ensure none of the 1,800-odd women in the village disobeyed their diktat. Any woman found wearing a nightie between 7am and 7pm is fined Rs 2,000 and anyone who snitched on such an ‘offender’ is given a reward of Rs 1,000.

When TOI visited Tokalapalli on Friday, some villagers said the elders had threatened a social boycott if the guilty did not pay the penalty. They also said that they had been told not to inform government officials about the diktat. Tokalapalli sarpanch Fantasia Mahalakshmi told TOI that washing clothes in the open, going to grocery shops and attending meetings in a nightie ‘are not good’. She maintained that some women of the village had approached the elders for a ban. The sarpanch agreed that women were now wearing nighties only during the stipulated hours but denied imposing a ban or threatening social boycott of those who violated the rule.

G Adinarayana, a resident, said: “We have to protect our traditions. Nowadays cellphones are becoming dangerous objects and one has to be careful.” Another villager, Bhale Sitharamudu, said: “We are not controlling women and are only trying to maintain traditions as some of the women are coming out to pay bills wearing nighties in broad daylight.” Bhale Chandrakala, a resident of the village, said: “We are happy to wear nighties at night only and there is no pressure from anybody to avoid nighties during the day.”