My Body and you
I was born with a full head of thick black hair. Over and over have I been told this with pride and joy, and stories of how although it is traditional to shave off hair on the 12th day according to my father’s community, my parents chose not to traumatise me instead. Apparently this need to prevent hair-related trauma ended there.
As a child, I remember often going to the barber with my father, my sister and I would both get ‘boy-cuts’ since it was convenient and no one particularly cared about our hair, or wanted to be perceived as radical in their choices towards their daughters. This extended also to the lack of housework thrust on us and allowance in wearing whatever we liked. If there was ever a sense of competitive spirit to be ‘just like boys’, it was never seen as patriarchy reinforced in the reverse, merely as equal treatment. So what if our parents didn’t have sons? They would have daughters with ambiguous gender roles. So it was that boy-cut gave rise to tom-boy, smashing and painting Barbie dolls instead of being prim and proper with them. In 3rd standard school debates on Barbie vs. GI Joe, I was the only girl fighting vehemently for the coolness of a marine rather than a brainless bimbo, as I saw it then.
Then came dance and the perceived beauty of long hair for Bharatanatyam dancers. The extensions we had to pin onto our heads were painful to say the least, and I figured long hair would be much easier to cultivate. Anyway the people-pleasing aspects of my personality were well-shaped by school ranks and excellence in extra-curricular activities.
Blessed, as my mother saw it, with thick, long, fast-growing hair, I submitted to a regime of oiling and braiding and washing with Shikakai and Ritha — natural cleansers, great for hair. The braids so commonplace in India suddenly became awkward in the sixth, a year spent in Minnesota, USA. While all the other girls were developing a sense of style along with their puberty, I stuck fast to a long, oiled tail, only once released for the intermediate school prom that I went to stag with a group of friends. Finding a date would be blasphemous at age 12, what with the need to protect sacred Indian culture in a loose foreign land. The tangling of my black Rapunzel locks was enough for me to never want to release them again anyway.
So it was that I returned to india the next year, maintaining my prized possession that my grandmother ever-so-valued and combed with love. In a year or two, it was all to go awry when skating came into vogue. A young girl thought it would be easy and entertaining to surf along using my braid as support instead of using her own muscles. So painful was the experience and so irritated was I, that I immediately demanded chopping off my then hip-length hair. I remember my mother reduced to tears at the hair salon, with the aunty cutting my hair lamenting at the great loss that it was to chop off the hair attached to my scalp.
I was starting to learn about my hair being a cultural commodity that everyone seemed to have a right to comment on. Especially women, but just about everyone. College years whizzed by with appropriate layered and styled hair that maintained status quo — with regular comments about dry scalp and frizz from every single hairdresser no matter how many times I changed them. It didn’t feel right to say, “You have no right to comment on my body.” Ever.
Even when I began my radical alternative lifestyle, traveling and never caring what state my hair was in, chopped off again to reflect that early-childhood boy-cut, I seemed to be enough within the boundaries of society that I could pass by with minimal scathing looks. Maybe my forgivable youth had something to do with it too.
At 25, when I started allowing dreadlocks to form in my hair, partly out of sheer laziness and partly in following a spiritual practice, my hair suddenly became a topic of national interest, or so it seemed. My mother lamented my beautiful hair turning so very repulsive and undesirable. Others would either kowtow to my perceived spiritual prowess or dismiss me off hand as one of those ignorant religious fundamentalists. I was once met with great pain and hatred in a look from a person who had undoubtedly been scarred by the religion he perceived me to belong to.
For a long time I struggled with this disparity in my nonchalance towards my appearance in general, and its opposition with the ripples it regularly caused outwards. Sometimes it would appear as a political statement, and not one that I agreed with at all. I had been told that such an appearance would allow me to declare my role as a practitioner and allow me to freely follow my spiritual path. Instead I saw more and more that in India, my appearance gave me power, and allowed me to be lazy in my practice and still be appreciated merely for half a kilo of entangled hair attached to my scalp.
When I no longer agreed with the institutionalization of spiritual practice, and when my city became a furnace in February, I chose to cut off my hair. So much was my own association with it, I found, that I was afraid that my practice would get chopped off along with the dreadlocks. So on the day it was cut I sang, and found that the song was not tangled in my hair after all.
But it was not enough. Soon I realized, that it was time to get the shave that I had never had. Grim looking, I went to a barber and got my hair razed. After that, it was time to look like a living portent of death. People would look at me and either stare or avert their gazes. Either way, it was like carrying a beacon on my head for everyone to judge.
A few weeks from then I sit and wonder, how it is that my hair, extensions of my personal dead cells, can be such a symbol of who I am and what I stand for. How everyone felt that they had a right to be so vocal about what I choose to do with my own body.
Shortly after the dreadlocks were shorn, I heard from all and sundry about how they were so concerned about my wellbeing before, and so relieved that I had returned to my senses. To the point that I had to appreciate my mother at least for being honest if not sensitive or caring.
My grandmother informed me of the deal she’d made with a local goddess regarding my hair, and shed light on the power of faith, never once questioning her right to an opinion on my hair in the first place. She also demanded a promise that never again would I entangle my hair, like those ignorant, uneducated lower caste women, apparently. It was insulting, infuriating and just heartbreaking to see the waves of truth that hair can churn up to the surface of the seemingly kind and educated.
My appearance, always a pointless aspect of me before this, suddenly seems to have taken on the role of a political statement. One that part of my mind insists on decorating with contrary things. Then I wait. And I breathe. And I reclaim the fact that my body is no one else’s but my own. In making a political statement, I offer a right to others to look and debate my appearance and that is the opposite of what I believe. I don’t give a fuck what they think, and while they continue to comment and ogle, my strength lies in staying true to what I believe — whether that makes me look butch, grieving death, crazy, fundamentalist, childish, sexy or any other arbitrary attribute society flings at me.
My only political statement is this essay, and the sadness I feel that anyone feels like they have a right to judge what anyone else does to their own body. I only hope that there are others like me, often judged and yet unswayed in their choices to remain true to themselves. For being who we are, exactly how we are, is the only path to freedom, and ultimately to love, kindness and inclusion.
