This is an essay reflecting on
myself in relation
to my identity as a Sikh— a member of a religious group
spanning five centuries, ten Gurus, and countless devotees all over
the world. Navigating the tenets of my religion as a young woman, I
found many aspects of it to be contradictory to its promise of
egalitarianism; in this essay, I will reflect on one such aspect and
how I learnt to navigate such contradictions so that I could
reconcile my identity as a Sikh with my own personal principles,
instead of blindly following a religion as taught by preachers with
oft-outdated ideals of how society should function. This is, at its
core, an essay of my personal struggle to be a ‘modern’,
emancipated woman without letting go of my heritage and familial
traditions.
This is slightly different for everyone:
the men tie their hair up in turbans every day, while the women wear
their hair in buns or braids. My mother and grandmother used to both
wear their hair down every day, naturally pin-straight and
thigh-grazing, the kind of hair that their staff at the hospital
would gawk at as they walked down the hallways. Even as a little
girl, I was raised to aspire to that kind of hair. Every time I
walked into the hospital, the staff would come up to me and ask, “How
long is your hair now? Is it as long as Dr. Ramnik’s yet?”
It wasn’t as long as my mother’s was yet,
but it was already very long in its own right, going past my skirts’
hemlines and flowing in waves around me every time there was a
breeze. My classmates petted it and fawned over it. And initially, so
did I.
But my Rapunzel-like hair had a mind of its
own. It
wasn’t pin-straight like that of the other women in my family;
it fell loosely, openly, nakedly. I hated leaving it untied because
it would keep getting tangled in everything, from doorknobs to other
people’s bracelets. I used to swim every day back then, and my
hair would never fit into the swim caps because none of them were big
enough. So I would have to wash my hair every day, because it would
always get wet in the pool, adding nearly an hour to my daily routine
to wash and dry three feet of hair. It got in my way, tripped me up,
tickled my eyes, ears, lips. It wasn’t my shield, the way it
was for my mother and grandmother. It didn’t cover me. If
anything, it exposed me.
My life was mal aux cheveux: literally,
‘hair
sickness’ (which also means ‘hangover’ in French).
This was apt: my hair hung over my routine, my clothing, my range of
activities: It hung like a pall over my sense of identity as a woman,
writer, activist. Who, exactly, was in charge here? I complained to
my mother, who, in return, brought me back a book from the Gurudwara,
the Sikhs’ place of worship. It was very beautifully
illustrated, and spoke eloquently of the beauty of Sikhism. I still
remember it having this one passage about ‘Kesh’
(the word in Sikhism for holy, unshorn hair):
"Ah! Well, let my hair grow long; .... I
cannot
forget the knot He tied on my head; It is sacred, it is his mark of
remembrance. The Master has bathed me in the light of suns not yet
seen; There is eternity bound in this tender fragile knot. I touch
the sky when I touch my hair, and a thousand stars twinkle through
the night.”
But still, my hair became a burden--a
weight, both
literal and figurative, on my shoulders. There it was,
getting
onto the bus with me in the morning, my braid getting caught in my
busmates’ bags’ zippers ; it was there at ballet class,
all .5 pounds of it, not able to hold all its weight in a bun as I
twirled and pirouetted. I’d open a notebook, and there it would
be again: a forty inch-long strand, shedding because haircare is
practically impossible when you have that much of it, and aren’t
allowed to do anything about your split ends. I often imagined what
it would be like to be free of it, but guiltily tucked my fantasies
aside.
As I got older, I started seeing the gaps
in my
family’s reasoning for following the practice of kesh. Why, for
example, do the males wear turbans, while women’s hair has to
be worn free? Diving into Sikh literature, I found that all Sikhs
were instructed by our Guru to wear turbans: the turban was chosen
because at the time it was a symbol of aristocracy, and allowing
women and lower-caste people to wear it aimed to abolish the
structure within itself. But most Sikh women today don’t wear
turbans: they are seen as a masculine accessory. I began feeling that
the male gaze dictated a Sikh women’s practices almost as much
as the Guru’s teaching; I started losing faith in this
superficial tradition, though I wasn’t ready, just yet, to take
the plunge and be seen as ‘different’ or ‘disobedient.’
So when I first saw “Self-Portrait With
Cropped
Hair” by Frida Kahlo, I saw myself in it. In ‘Self-Portrait
With Cropped Hair,’ Kahlo depicts herself sitting on a chair in
a bare room, staring directly at the viewer, wearing a man’s
suit and with a man’s haircut, holding a pair of scissors, with
locks of her hair strewn all around her. Inscribed at the very top
are lyrics from a Mexican folk song, about a relationship ending
because the singer’s lover cut her hair: “Mira que si te
quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no
te quiero”—which roughly translates to “I only
loved you for your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t
love you anymore.”
Frida’s stony gaze spoke to me. I connected
her
act of cutting her hair to my own inability to make that same
decision for myself. I felt trapped by my religion to live my whole
life with three feet of hair trailing after me, against my will, like
a sinister shadow. Just like Frida felt like she had to do certain
things to please her now ex-husband, Diego Rivera, I felt I had to
keep my hair long because I was born into a certain way of living.
The steely expression on Frida’s face as she stood in the
middle, with locks of her freshly-cut hair surrounding her, conveyed
a sense of freedom: a chance to finally make choices for herself,
which was a direct result of her no longer being bound to her
relationship with Diego Rivera. I was surprised by how much I envied
her.
I only loved you for your hair. Seeing
Frida got me
thinking about what my religion actually means to me, and to what
extent I want to follow beliefs that had been propagated over
generations. The lyrics of the Spanish song reflect a seemingly
simple dilemma, but it’s what I had been afraid all these years
that God would do to me. I’d spent my whole life thinking God
would love me less, would think of me as unfaithful, if I cut my
hair. But would He really, actually do that, as long as I still
devoted myself to him, still prayed to Him, still visited the
Gurudwara on a weekly basis? Does simply cutting my hair mean I am
less faithful to Him?
So I decided to test my faith -- I got a
haircut.
With my sister, I visited the salon at which I was regularly taken by
my mother to wax my eyebrows, my mustache (hair which, of course, I
was not theologically bound to retain). After spending my life with
hair that draped to my mid-thigh, when the hairdresser asked what
kind of haircut I wanted, I took a deep breath, thought about it for
a few seconds, and said: Make it so short that it doesn’t even
dare to touch my chin. Free me of it. The hairdresser clapped his
hands.
Two hours later, I had a new look, and a
new outlook.
Three feet of hair, fifteen years, a few ounces. I felt lighter. I
didn’t care what my mother would say. Because I suddenly knew
the truth.
I chose to end my hair, punctuate it and
round it
off. But what I was most surprised about was the way this actually
felt like a beginning: a reclamation of my own self. Hair grows: that
is its teleology. But so do people, through the exercise of their
will and judgement, through the operation of their criticality and
skepticism, through their ability to question received wisdom and,
occasionally, challenge the status quo. Today, my hair is but a
memory, existing in pictures, in my mother’s occasional comment
(but it was so long and beautiful…). But I am closer than ever
to God, our relationship newly empowered with my will to see it
through in my own way. I am still a Sikh, even though I have short
hair; except, now, more than ever, I ‘seek’ my own
answers.
Diya Sabharwal is a rising senior
at the Modern
School, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi, India. She is a budding writer,
and the Head of the Writers’ Guild in her school, as well as an
Editor of her school magazine, the Sandesh.
She is an advocate for the
advancement of literary
studies, and has founded the Great Books Project, a non-profit social
initiative through which she spreads the joy of literature to
marginalised communities, ranging from students in her own city to
students as far as Abuja in Nigeria.
