No, this isn’t yet another article about how various decisions and choices in life can be classified as either black or white, nor is it an article on settling in between the two – on the ambiguous grey. This article isn’t also about those black and white checks on a chessboard. And certainly not about how they are my favourite colours.
This is an article about the various connotations of the two colours in different cultures. What led me to research more on these lines was one simple observation – How Black is worn on the funeral ceremony in Christian Culture while white is worn by those in the Indian Culture.
My research led me to conclude that the white mourning wardrobe and the black mourning wardrobe has a long history but no particular reason as to how it started. However, I came across interesting facts like Queen Victoria wore black for forty years after her husband’s death and that set the funeral dressing standard and suddenly everybody was following it in the West. There have also been times when women who wore black when not in mourning were seen as “dangerously eccentric”.
The wearing of black seemed to have started in the Roman Empire with the wives of the deceased wearing a black toga and persisted through the Medieval Empire in the form of black veils. And if you thought India was the only country to have white as a colour of mourning, you have been mistaken. Most parts of Continental Europe had women wearing white in mourning prior to the French Revolution. The traditional mourning colour in the continent of Africa is white.
There are however exceptions to this rule of black or white. For instance, red is the traditional mourning colour in South Africa, Ghana and a few other west African countries. Also, purple has also been the colour of ‘half-mourning’ in the Victorian Era where in widowed women could incorporate purple or grey an year after being widowed.
But more or less, I found no substantial reason for this colour coding. I rather see it as a cultural colour coding. Irrespective, blacks and whites are certainly the most elegant colours and there are certainly no greys about that.
