My mother’s hair was often bunched in a substantial bun held together with half a dozen pins, or loosely tied in a thick braid reaching just below her hips. She always complained about not having time to look after her hair, but she could not bring herself to cut them short until after she was diagnosed with cancer in her late 50s.
Most of my childhood, she managed a household of one fussy husband, two picky kids, one fastidious father, a finicky dog, and a constant stream of guests, with occasional reliable help. She was also a university professor and a prolific writer. I will never know how she managed to have a thriving career with so many demands on her body and mind.
She decided early on, not to let her only daughter wear her hair long. Her reasons were purely functional, she had no time to oil, wash, comb, and braid an additional head of long hair like her own. Neither could she afford the time to manage the inevitable lice infestations of school going little heads. Supporting my mother’s rationale, my progressive father disapproved of all ‘girly’ elements that surrounded me in a deeply patriarchal society – dolls, dresses, as well as long tresses.
Long before our kid brother showed up, my father would take my younger brother and me to his barber for a haircut once every 4-5 weeks. Man, boy, and girl were often given similar haircuts, especially when it came to squeaky-clean napes of necks. As I was Nai ji’s only female client though, he would cajole my father to permit him to leave my hair long enough to cover my ears. My father would give in seeing my beseeching look, as long as I promised to keep the ‘long’ hair out of my eyes and forehead with a hair clip (It’s bad for your eyesight. Padhai ka socho, fashion ka nahin – Think about studies, not fashion). I was nearly fourteen when I finally succeeded in convincing my parents to send me to a ‘ladies salon’ – Kishore Hair Dresser in Chowra Rasta. Still my hair hardly touched my shoulders until after I finished high school.
Free from the tyranny of school uniforms and the hair-length imposition, in my first year of college, I started growing out my hair, bought big hoop earrings, and donned high heels and ‘girlie’ clothes, for a good month or so.
The earrings were the first to fail me as it turned out that I was severely allergic to costume jewellery. I bore the discomfort of my fancy shoes and clothes for occasional dress ups, but could not make a full transition out of my baggy shirts and pants. It was the late 80s after all.
Alas, I also realized that long hair take longer to wash, dry, and comb, adding several minutes to my daily morning rush routine. I found that tying my hair in anyway gave me a headache, as it was the beginning of a long phase of migraines for me that were set off by too many things.
While straight long hair is considered the paragon of Indian feminine beauty, untied long hair will invite disapproval from everyone. Whereas my parents called it a shabby look, stepping in the world outside earned worse comments such as bhootni (a she-ghost), kali (because of my combination of dark skin and hair), and chudail (a witch).
After valiantly battling all the complications of long hair for nearly a year, my shoulder-length hair were back to being by the scruff of my neck –thankfully by the skilled hands of my new favourite stylist in C-Scheme. Although I had graduated from a hair salon to a ‘beauty parlour’ in my college years, my six-weekly visits only led to my hair traversing the length of the nape of my neck, nothing more. I loyally settled for the blunt-cut, which I believed was best suited for my narrow scrawny face. This was of course more than a decade before I would worry about my round heavy face.
To an extent, my short hair served me well against the relentless sexual harassment of young women in public places, euphemistically referred to as ‘eve-teasing’ in India. Riding my bicycle or moped, I was often mistaken for a boy from behind by potential harassers. I was no stranger to lewd comments, and even outright assault, but I know that it could have been worse. Mostly, because, more than by my ‘boy-cut’ hair, I was protected by my class and caste privileges.
A few years later, there was even less reason to grow out my hair since I lived in a hostel in JNU, where we needed to fill buckets of water for personal use, as taps only ran for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evenings. By now in my mid-twenties, from being a non-wife-material-nerdy-bookworm, I was being adoringly courted by my would-be partner and mentally preparing for our marriage. We were breaking many traditional stereotypes in the choices we were making. For one, my fiancé had waist-long hair, rivaled only by his long beard.
We were both working on our doctorate, and we shared a worldview that annoyed most people as being either too idealistic or radical. To appease each other’s parents though, he got rid of his ponytail and beard, and I reluctantly agreed not to cut my hair, until the wedding. So much for our radicalism! But what’s an Indian kid to do in the face of gentle parental emotional blackmail.
I wish I could show my partner’s before and after hair, but he is averse to publically sharing his pictures. So use your imagination.
Despite my enlightened partner, however, I felt overwhelmed by the pressure of a completely new set of expectations that my parents, as well as my single status, had protected me from. In addition to the trauma of moving to a new country, I felt that by stepping into marriage I was expected to give up my mind and body autonomy. I was expected to shut my mouth, close my mind, hide my body, become invisible except in the kitchen, bear children as soon as possible, oh, and to grow out my hair.
Thankfully, expectations hardly ever match reality. Partner and I were on the same page, and none of the above happened to me. Except, as a white flag to new relationships, I chose the least offensive of these expectations to make my second serious attempt at wearing my hair long. That phase lasted a full year before my hairline was once again negotiating with the base of my skull.
In the ensuing decade, I hardly thought about my hair except to wash and comb them every day, until after my mother’s cancer diagnosis. She had trimmed her long locks a few times but never above her waist and mostly because she was self-conscious about the premature grey strands, which she occasionally hid under a chemical dye. Looking back now, I feel that like most women (often starting as very young girls) my mother had negative body image, despite her education and privileges. She regarded her thick long and naturally straight hair as one of her finer physical attributes in a society that relentlessly body shames women of all ages and sizes. Chemotherapy had turned her hair into a mass of scraggy silver grey, which she cut very short and stopped dyeing it. I couldn’t bear to go to my next hair appointment.
Over the span of that tumultuous year, without any planning, my hair lengthened down to my shoulders, and then some more. I discovered that I actually liked to wear my hair long, especially now that my oval face had gone quite round. Partially because of time constraint due to traveling but partially because I was now less averse to longish hair, I would let months go by between hair appointments. I still did not commit to growing my hair, acutely aware that this time consuming activity has been a tool of social control over women’s bodies, and that hair is political not just in India.
After that first bout of major surgeries and gut-wrenching chemotherapy, my mother recovered enough to return to her duties as the caregiver to my father whom we were losing to Alzheimer. Unbeknownst to us, at least since the mind-90s, in his early 60s, his bright mind and doting self was being gradually lost to the deadly disease. Months after my mother’s diagnosis, at the age of 69, his body finally succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer in January 2005.
It was a new chapter for my brave mother whose life and creativity had been on hold in the final years of my dear father’s tortured ending. She jumped back into writing, advocacy, and volunteering with a new verve, and I moved countries again.
After spending nine beautiful eventful years in SA with my loving partner, we decided to take a leap of faith. I accepted an academic offer at Athabasca University in Canada while he continued to work toward his eventual move out of SA.
My longish hair and I arrived in Edmonton to a new set of logistical challenges. You see, when the temperature is far below freezing, and you step outside with damp hair, your hair freezes. I bought a heavy-duty hair dryer and noticed an alarming rate of hair fall. A couple of days into my first winter, I inexplicably broke out into hives all over. The South African doctor at the walk-in clinic explained that he had seen such reaction to the cold temperatures in some of his other tropically oriented patients. Part of my adaptation to parkas and tuques was to chop off my copious hair.
For the next four years, life sort of stabilized into a grueling routine of extra-long working hours and exhausting trips to my two homes in South Africa and India, until the untimely passing of my mother in 2010. Of the two most important people in my life, one was gone forever and the other lived a continent away. I felt angry, lost, broken, alone.
My mother had passed away a week after my leaving her bedside. Before her body was donated to the medical college, I had requested my brothers to cut a lock of her hair and send it to me. I’m not sure why. Eight months later, before immersing it in the North Saskatchewan River with my partner, I held the lock of her silver grey hair in my hand and felt a visceral connection with my mother.
I did all I could to cope with my grief, aided greatly by my family of friends, and most importantly by my partner permanently moving to Canada. Among other things, my healing process included working on my mother’s intended writing project, and resolving to grow out my hair to donate to a cancer charity. In the first round, my hair growth was fast and furious, more than 12 inches in as many months. I donated my hair on my mother’s birthday in 2013, leaving nothing more than a buzz cut in the back of my head.
Being in my 40s was definitely getting in the way of hair growth as the second round of donation took nearly two years to grow out. Round three was even slower than before and I only had enough length to donate my hair again in 2018, the year my mother’s intended book was published. Unfortunately, it turned out that the local charity I supported had stopped accepting human hair in favour of synthetic fibre to make wigs.
The delay in donation gave me pause and I wondered what it would be like to grow out my hair for myself. Not because the society expects me to or as a call of duty, but because I finally like my thinning greying naturally wavy long hair. For a menopausal woman entering the fifth decade of my life, this may be my last chance to grow out my hair to any substantial length. I want to see how long it would grow, in terms of both length and my patience until I find another charity to donate it.
It has also made me reflect on my journey to arrive at the point of feeling safe and strong enough to make personal decisions without worrying about social consequences. The unconventional story of my hair has included navigating sexism, racism, rejections, and discrimination to create a career and community in places far away from my social or familial networks.
I have not walked on the road to ‘empowerment’ alone though. Along with my own actions, what helped me on my journey was my social capital of class and caste privileges in a deeply entrenched and exploitative class system which denies basic dignity to fellow humans. My privileges gave me a head start, not just growing up in India, but also as an immigrant. My ability to be a cosmopolitan ‘global citizen’ comes from the privilege of having generations of highly educated and extraordinarily courageous women as grandmothers, mothers, and aunts, and remarkably progressive men in my grandfather, father, partner, brothers, and friends.
Understanding our privilege is undoubtedly the first step to recognizing the unjust ways we treat each other, and ourselves, sometimes unknowingly. Recognizing my privilege does not invalidate my own struggles, but it does show why my Black, Bahujan, Dalit, Indigenous, and working class sisters have to work much harder for the same opportunities that I took for granted – such as a stable family and higher education. Indeed, by choosing to accept privilege, we can work to change it.
In the context of rampant and toxic sexism, for instance, men recognizing their privilege and supporting the freedoms and talents of the women in their lives benefits everyone. After all, regressive patriarchal norms based on control and separation not only rob us of the core aspects of our humanity, they are also bad for both women and men.
Unquestionably, and not just in my life, hair has deep roots in humankind’s social, political, and religious history. Long hair in men is often equated with asceticism or spirituality, and sometimes a sign of breaking social norms. For women in most cultures though, long hair is a sign of beauty, but also that of unruly sexuality and a tool of enticement. For most of my life thus, long hair has been one of the symbols of women’s oppression for me.
These days though, I am growing out my hair as a symbol of my strength.
MeenalS (Oct 27, 2020)
References
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Girl Scouts on body shaming in young girls (2020). https://www.girlscouts.org/en/raising-girls/happy-and-healthy/happy/body-shaming-girls.html
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Sridevi, Gummadi and Jyotishi, Amalendu (2020). How caste and gender are intertwined in violence against Dalit women, The News Minute. https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/opinion-how-caste-and-gender-are-intertwined-violence-against-dalit-women-135025
Vijayabaskar, M., & Kalaiyarasan, A. (2014). Caste as Social Capital: The Tiruppur Story. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(10), 34-38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24479227
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