Book Review | South Asia Journal

Fashion is often celebrated as an expression of beauty, creativity, individuality, and prosperity. From the glittering runways of New York to the fashionable shopping districts of major cities, clothing represents aspiration and social identity. Yet behind the elegance of a finished garment lies another world, largely invisible to consumers: a world of factory workers, exhausting production schedules, inadequate wages, personal sacrifices, and human suffering. Rochelle Potkar’s The Fabric Goddesses explores this disturbing contradiction through an imaginative, emotionally compelling narrative that connects three women across three continents and cultures.

At the center of the novel is an ordinary brown coat, an apparently insignificant garment that becomes a powerful literary instrument for examining the global fashion industry. Through its journey, Potkar introduces readers to Gita Hangal in Bengaluru, Beli Rahman in Dhaka, and Adharshini Shenoy in New York. Although separated by geography, economic circumstances, and personal ambitions, these women inhabit different sections of the same international fashion economy. Their experiences reveal how an industry associated with elegance and glamour frequently depends upon the exploitation, discipline, and vulnerability of women's bodies.

Gita Hangal's story unfolds against the social and economic realities of contemporary India. Employed in the garment industry, she struggles to rebuild a life marked by violence and interrupted opportunities. Her determination to complete her education, secure professional advancement, and raise a son born of violence reflects the extraordinary resilience required of women confronting multiple forms of disadvantage. Through Gita, Potkar examines how gender, caste, poverty, and limited educational opportunities intersect to restrict individual freedom.

Yet Gita is not portrayed simply as a helpless victim. Her aspirations reveal an independent spirit unwilling to surrender to circumstances. She seeks dignity through education and economic mobility, even when the social environment offers few guarantees of success. Her experiences raise an important question: how much freedom can an individual genuinely exercise when economic survival dictates nearly every decision?

The novel's Bangladeshi dimension is particularly significant for South Asian readers. Beli Rahman, a garment worker in Dhaka, represents the millions of women whose labor has transformed Bangladesh into one of the world's leading apparel-exporting nations. The country's ready-made garment industry has created jobs, generated substantial foreign exchange, and increased women's participation in the formal economy. Nevertheless, its impressive commercial achievements coexist with persistent concerns about wages, working conditions, occupational safety, and workers' bargaining power.

Beli's daily struggle to support her children exposes the human realities behind impressive export statistics. Her exhausting work is not merely an economic activity; it is a struggle for family survival. Through her experiences, readers encounter the contradictions of industrial development, where national prosperity and individual hardship can coexist.

For Bangladeshi readers, Beli's circumstances inevitably recall the Rana Plaza disaster of April 2013, when the collapse of a commercial building housing garment factories killed more than 1,100 people. Although the novel should not be mistaken for a documentary account of that tragedy, its treatment of garment workers' vulnerability resonates with the broader questions of accountability, workplace safety, and economic justice that Rana Plaza brought to international attention.

The third protagonist, Adharshini Shenoy, inhabits an apparently different universe. Working as an aspiring model in New York, she pursues success in an industry that measures beauty against unforgiving physical standards. Her struggle to achieve the idealized size-zero figure reveals another dimension of exploitation. Unlike Gita and Beli, whose bodies are shaped by industrial production, Adharshini confronts a commercial culture that turns physical appearance into a tool for professional survival.

This contrast is among the novel's most interesting achievements. The garment worker and the fashion model may occupy opposite ends of the economic hierarchy, yet both experience pressures imposed by an industry that assigns commercial value to women's bodies. One must produce clothing efficiently; the other must display it according to prescribed standards of beauty. Their circumstances are not economically equivalent, but the comparison reveals a shared absence of complete bodily autonomy.

Potkar's narrative device, the brown coat, provides a unifying thread across these otherwise separate experiences. A garment ordinarily appears to consumers as a finished commodity, detached from the people who designed, manufactured, transported, marketed, and displayed it. By tracing its connections to different women, the novel restores the human relationships concealed within the international supply chain.

The coat becomes more than clothing. It serves as a repository of memory, suffering, aspiration, and endurance. Fabric takes on symbolic significance, carrying the emotional histories of those whose labor and ambitions make it possible.

Potkar's lyrical prose strengthens this symbolism. Her writing combines sensory description with psychological observation, allowing the material world of fabric to acquire emotional depth. Rather than directly denouncing capitalism, she explores the intimate consequences of economic structures through individual lives.

Nevertheless, the novel's expansive ambitions may challenge some readers. Its movement between countries, social environments, and personal histories requires sustained attention. The symbolic significance assigned to the coat may occasionally feel more elaborate than necessary. Yet these qualities also distinguish the work from conventional social realism.

Ultimately, The Fabric Goddesses is both a feminist narrative and a critique of globalization's unequal rewards. It reminds readers that economic development cannot be measured exclusively through production volumes, corporate profits, or export earnings. The welfare, dignity, and opportunities of those who create wealth deserve equal consideration.

For readers in Bangladesh, India, and the wider South Asian diaspora, Potkar's novel offers a particularly relevant perspective on the relationship between industrial progress and human dignity. Its central message extends beyond fashion: every commodity has a human history, even when the marketplace encourages us to forget it.

The Fabric Goddesses makes those forgotten histories visible. Thoughtful, compassionate, and socially conscious, it challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between what they wear and the lives of those who make it. Long after the final page, the ordinary brown coat remains a reminder that behind fashion's elegance are human beings whose stories deserve to be told.