poonam

plural poonams

1. IndiaA sari made of imported polyester, as opposed to a traditional cotton sari.

   Shantamma, a Dalit smallholder, once said to me, “People like us, people like you, everyone wears poonams (polyester saris) these days”

   2014, Leela Fernandes, Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   She went on to explain, "Now only old women wear those coarse cotton saris, control cheeralu [cheeralu is the Telugu word for saris]. They are like gunnysacks. Poonams are modern. They are brightly colored and do not fade. But they cling to the body, and you need a separate underskirt and blouse to wear them." Still later she added, "What else will we wear? We work in the field all day -- in the sun, in the rain. Poonams don't tear. They don't fade. They don't crumple. Dirt and mud just wash away. they dry easily."

   2003 November, Priti Ramamurthy, “Material Consumers, Fabricating Aubjects: Perplexity, Global Connectivity Discourses, and Transnational Feminist Research”, in Cultural Anthropology

   Egged on by their sisters-in-law, two widows gaily dressed themselves in the polyester saris they were not supposed to wear because poonams are considered too bright, too colorful, too clingy, and, all in all, just too sexy for widows, who are desexualized in the normative gender order.

   2013, Wilma Dunaway, Gendered Commodity Chains, →ISBN, page 64

1. A Hindu female given name from Hindi.