HAIR AND WAR; ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW

I thought about hair and betrayal when I first read about Israel bombing Iranian nuke factories. There was a time when India could have stopped Pakistan from making the Islamic Bomb. Morarji Desai, our piss drinking prime minister asked Zia if they were building a bomb. Zia tricked the old piss pot in spite of RAW telling him the opposite telling him there was not a strand of truth in the reports. “Get me more proof,” said the idiot Desai, taking a long sip of the smelly yellow nectar. S RAW agents infiltrated barbershops in Kahuta posing as barbers stole hair samples of Pak nuclear scientists who came to het a haircut - a true example of superb spycraft. Desai dipped his dhokla in a piss pot and told Zia he believed him. The rest is hair-raising history.

Which prompted me to write about hair and how it has affected global civilisation

In 2023, a viral Instagram reel showed a newlywed bride at a temple in southern India shaving off her long, oiled braid. Draped in crimson, still in her silk wedding saree, she bowed her head as a barber circled her, clipper in hand, while family members watched solemnly. The caption read, “Offering her hair to the gods for a blessed marriage.” Comments alternated between reverence and discomfort. Some praised the sacrifice, others recoiled from the image of beauty being stripped down so ruthlessly. What most viewers missed is that this was not merely a moment of piety—it was an act encoded with centuries of social hierarchy, gender control, ritual symbolism, and economic exploitation. In India, hair is never just hair. While men's hair was a sign of status, women’s hair was a repository of virtue, beauty, and bondage. In classical Sanskrit poetry, a woman’s long, fragrant braid is eroticised, described as “black snakes,” “fragrant vines,” or “ropes of desire.” But in real life, that braid came with rules. Texts like the Manusmriti and Dharmaśāstras contain references to how hair should be worn depending on caste and stage of life. A woman was expected to keep her hair long, oiled, neat, and covered before marriage, tied back as a sign of chastity and discipline. Once married, the braid took on another role—as a symbol of fertility and loyalty. To lose it was to lose face. Widows, especially among Brahmin communities, were traditionally forced to shave their heads. The rationale? Aesthetic deterrence. A woman stripped of her hair would be stripped of desire. It was punishment cloaked as piety. When women became widows, they were shaved. Their beauty was erased as a mourning rite. To lose one’s hair was to lose societal standing.

As early as the 18th century, European travelers noted this custom with shock. The French missionary Abbé Dubois wrote of “the cruel and indecent practice” of shaving widows’ heads in India, noting how it made them pariahs within their own homes. In Bengal, under reformist pressure, the ritual began to fade—but not entirely. Even today, some widows at Varanasi’s ashrams retain this vestige of loss, wearing their cropped hair as an unchosen badge of renunciation. Much like in ancient Greece—where the hair, or kóme, symbolised strength, status, and sanctity—India has for millennia regarded the human head as both a canvas and a battleground. Across regions, castes, and faiths, how one wears, washes, or cuts one’s hair has functioned as a declaration of self—and more often, of submission. But if the Brahmin’s hair was sacred, the Dalit’s hair was suspect. In many parts of rural India, lower-caste communities were denied the right to grow or ornament their hair. Oral histories from Tamil Nadu recount how Dalit men were beaten for daring to wear their hair long, or to don a turban—a privilege reserved for landowners and upper castes. In Maharashtra, Dalit women were historically forbidden from tying their hair, a regulation enforced by social taboo and, in many cases, physical violence. In such a world, hair was less adornment and more declaration. To grow it was to challenge hierarchy. To lose it was often to suffer public shaming. Even today, among caste-oppressed communities, the act of wearing one's hair with pride can be an act of reclamation.

For millennia, the head has spoken before the tongue. The hair upon it has whispered prayers, declared wars, mourned the dead, proclaimed desire, and demarcated who could walk in the sun—and who could not. This is the story of how civilizations combed identity into the scalp and made hair a matter of power. In ancient Greece, the hair on one’s head had a name of its own—kóme (κόμη)—and it was more than an adornment. It denoted status, strength, social alignment, and spiritual identity. It was grown, shaved, bleached, tied, offered to gods, and mourned with. Achilles cut his golden locks at the funeral of Patroclus. Spartans oiled their long hair before war, believing it gave them pride before battle. Young men were clean-shaven; beards marked adulthood. Women wore ornamental bands, and slaves were shorn.

This wasn't vanity. It was language.

And Greece was not alone.

From Indian temple tonsures to Chinese queue laws, from Persian perfumed curls to African braided dynasties, from European powdered wigs to Native American ritual braids, human hair has always been civilization’s most intimate text—both a poem and a passport. In India, where every body part is encoded with symbolism, hair has always been a marker of hierarchy. The śikhā—a Brahmin’s tuft—is the Indian parallel to the Spartan topknot: sign of discipline, knowledge, and elite malehood. The act of tonsuring (mundan) marked a child’s spiritual birth; the cutting of a woman’s braid on her wedding day was a symbolic submission to new gods, new kin, new rules. But beneath ritual lay reinforced caste control. Dalit men were historically forbidden from growing or adorning their hair. In parts of Tamil Nadu, it was illegal for lower-caste boys to wear a turban or tie their hair. Dalit women were denied jasmine in their plaits. Hair was not personal—it was permissioned. Hair in India is not merely cut—it is sacrificed. The mundan ceremony for infants, common across Hindu, Buddhist, and even some Jain communities, marks a child’s first symbolic entry into society. The shaving of the head is not cosmetic but karmic—it is believed to rid the child of birth's impurities and past-life sins. A similar logic governs the famous tonsure rituals at Tirumala or Palani, where devotees shave their heads as acts of submission, humility, or thanksgiving. What remains largely unspoken is the gender imbalance in these rituals. At temples like Tirupati, women make up a significant number of those offering their hair. But unlike their male counterparts, they lose more than just strands—they often sacrifice their self-image, their femininity as socially defined, their sense of beauty. In some families, women are coerced into it under the guise of devotion. Yet, this very hair—offered in silence—is collected, sorted, sanitized, and sold globally, feeding a billion-dollar extension and wig industry. Hair that once adorned a Tirupati devotee now swings from the shoulders of a pop star in Los Angeles or an heiress in Milan. Despite these layers of control, hair has also been a site of protest. In Sikhism, unshorn hair (kesh) is one of the five kakkars, or sacred articles. It is a theological rejection of caste purity rituals, a refusal to let the body be policed. During the anti-caste Dalit uprisings in Tamil Nadu, young men began to grow their hair long and wear sunglasses—a style that came to be known as “Ambedkar style.” In doing so, they inverted the old codes, declaring aesthetic freedom as political defiance. Among women, too, the braid has been both relinquished and reclaimed. In the 1970s, feminist poets like Kamala Das wrote of “the long hair I carried like a corpse,” while in contemporary times, queer and trans activists experiment with hair to blur boundaries and break binaries. In each case, the message is clear: the head is no longer merely to be bowed. The irony is profound: what begins as renunciation in India becomes commodified glamour in the West.

Across the seas, in Qing Dynasty China (1644–1912), men were forced to adopt the queue—a long braided ponytail—while the front of their heads was shaved. This style, imposed by the ruling Manchus on the Han Chinese, was not fashion. It was submission. To resist the queue was treason. The braid marked political allegiance. “Cut your hair, lose your head,” they said. And so, millions complied. When the dynasty fell, the first act of many Chinese revolutionaries was to cut the braid—not just as rebellion, but as rebirth. Much like India’s temple tonsures, the Chinese braid was a tether to dynastic identity. Once severed, it was both liberation and loss. Nowhere has hair been more art and archive than in pre-colonial African cultures. In Nigeria, among the Yoruba and Igbo, intricate braids were maps of ethnicity, clan, age, fertility, and status. Hairstyles like the zig-zag cornrows, the Bantu knots, and the Fulani braids weren’t just decorative—they were systems of knowledge, handed down like sacred verse. A woman’s braid told you if she was married. A child’s knot said whether he was first-born. In times of war, warriors fashioned their hair as signals to allies. In times of slavery, women sometimes braided seeds and rice into their plaits, hiding food for the unknown journey. Their hair became the last homeland they could carry. Centuries later, during the Black Power movement, the Afro emerged as a defiant revival of ancestral hair—untamed, unapologetic, and radically resistant to white beauty norms.

In ancient Persia, hair was royal theatre. Kings like Darius and Xerxes appeared in sculpture with elaborate ringlets, perfectly curled beards, and braided hairlines. Fragrances were integral—rosewater, saffron oil, and myrrh—used not just for beauty, but to signal divine favour. For Persian women, veiling began early—but inside the harem, the hair was ritualised elegance. Plaited with gold threads, tied with silk, their styles echoed Hellenistic aesthetics brought from the conquests of Alexander, but with Zoroastrian soul. Here, too, to touch or see a woman’s hair without permission was not just transgression—it was desecration. In Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, hair became drama—and weapon. With the rise of syphilis and the fall of hairlines, powdered wigs became symbols of rank. By Louis XIV’s court, a man’s wig could weigh two kilos and require daily flouring, curling, and scenting. Women’s hairstyles resembled ships, birds, entire mythologies. The higher the hair, the closer to God—or at least, court. But wigs also covered disease, shame, and lice. Behind the pomp was the pathology of power—to mask decay beneath ornament. Much like India’s bridal buns or Greece’s knot of Heracles, the European peruke was simultaneously sacred and absurd.

During the French Revolution, as heads rolled, so did the wigs.

Among many Native American tribes, hair was deeply spiritual. The braid was a prayer—unbroken strands representing unity between mind, body, and spirit. Warriors often braided their hair before battle. Children were taught never to cut their hair in anger. To cut one’s hair was to mourn. The Native Americans took scalps as trophies of war, or rebellion against Western settlers. In many traditional belief systems, hair is viewed as an extension of the soul or life-force. Because it grows from the body yet can be separated from it, hair occupies a liminal space—both of the body and independent of it—which gives it spiritual potency. Witchdoctors often exploit this quality. In African, South American, South Asian, and Oceanic traditions, obtaining a strand of someone's hair allows a practitioner to:

·         Cast spells

·         Bind or control the person

·         Heal or harm through sympathetic magic

This belief is rooted in the idea that hair retains the vibration or imprint of the person, much like a spiritual fingerprint.When colonial schools in the 19th and 20th centuries forcibly cut Indigenous children’s hair, it wasn’t hygiene—it was cultural decapitation. These children were stripped of language, land, and lineage in a single shearing. In today’s Indigenous resistance movements, the return to braiding is sacred reclamation. Like the Afro, the turban, or the śikhā, it is a return to identity. Across continents, what unites all these traditions is this: hair is never neutral. It is gendered, racialized, politicized. It has been regulated by state, sanctified by ritual, and reshaped by commerce.

• The Greeks bleached theirs to look like heroes.

• Indian widows lost theirs to grief.

• African women braided maps of memory into theirs.

• Chinese men were forced to grow theirs into dynastic queues.

• European men powdered theirs into caricatures of class.

• Native Americans offered theirs to the sky.

Hair, in all these contexts, is both private matter and public message. It is the last thing we touch in love. The first thing we lose in mourning. The marker we shave in penance. The symbol we reclaim in protest. The trophy we tear from the enemy. What is overlooked in the follicular debate over culture is the hair of the worker: the domestic help, the field labourer, the tea-plucker. Tied back tight, dry, stripped of oil and time, this hair carries as much history—but none of the poetry. Hair care is a luxury. Access to coconut oil, quality combs, or safe salons is determined by class. In rural areas, girls may not grow their hair beyond shoulder-length because long hair requires maintenance, and maintenance costs money. Among the urban poor, hair loss from malnutrition or pollution is common—but rarely spoken of. In this silence lies another kind of exclusion. To not have beautiful hair in India is to be seen as undisciplined, unclean, unfeminine. Thus, class is written not just in the home one inhabits but in the hair one wears.\

In the 21st century, hair has been flattened by industry—shampoo ads, salon blowouts, the tyranny of Instagram sheen. Yet beneath the layers of conditioner and capitalism, the ancestral codes remain.

·         When a Dalit woman oils her braid in defiance of centuries of casteism.

·         When a Sikh man ties his turban with the care of scripture.

·         When a Black girl weaves her cornrows and walks past corporate stares.

·         When a Greek Orthodox monk lets his beard grow wild in the desert.

·         When a Chinese elder still parts her silver hair into the same knot from childhood.

·         When a Persian bride perfumes her braid with rose oil before the wedding.

·         When a young boy in Banaras, hair newly shaved, feels the first breeze on his bare scalp.

We are not watching fashion. We are watching the long, uncut history of civilization.