Musings
The Poetry in Women's Hair
Biren Shome, Woman with Bird, relief print, 2013.
When you speak of women's hair, you speak of beauty. There is an element of grace in a woman which has generally sprung from the manner in which she uses her hair or arranges it in a way that brings alive in us a strong sense of poetry. In the old days, and we are speaking of the 1950s and 1960s, Bengali women, in the opinion of many men, were a whole lot more beautiful than they are today because of their long tresses. The hair often went down to below the knees, almost up to the calf. And it was sheer delight watching the owner of all that hair swinging it from one side to another, especially when after a good shower she used a towel to dry it. Nazrul was right when he promised his beloved thus, “debo khonpaye tarar phool.”
But why Bengali women only? Across the subcontinent, women's hair was, until recently, an integral component of poetry composed on the eternal theme of love. Think back on Mehdi Hasan's zulf ko teri ghataon ka payam aaya hai or Mohammad Rafi's na jhatko zulf se pani ye moti phuut jayenge. Talat Mahmood takes the theme of hair-based feminine charm a step further with his zulfon ki sunehri chhaon tale ik aag lagi do deep jale. In Bangladesh, Bashir Ahmed's tomar kajol kesh chhoralo boley ei raat emon modhur remains a topper among songs. Robert Browning had Porphyria's lover strangle her with her long tresses. All this poetry, or call it melody, came at a time when women's hair was long, untouched by modernity. And by that we mean that certain desire on the part of subcontinental women to go western --- through having the scissors run through their long hair and having it come at par with the hair of a typical western woman.
There are women who age with grace. And the grace is defined by their hair as well. Some women, beautiful in youth, grow even more beautiful as they advance in years. Suchitra Mitra is a point of reference here. She kept her hair short; she was every inch an educated, modern Bengali woman. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, more salt than pepper. That lent her beauty exquisiteness of a kind. Feminine beauty, insofar as hair is concerned, was also part of the appeal in the writer Susan Sontag. A pronounced streak of gray gave her an appearance of a woman well-placed to deal with the world on her terms. Much the same was true of Indira Gandhi, whose trademark gray streak in her hair enhanced the beauty of her being. And gray hair, Bill Cosby informs you, is God's graffiti. Brinda Karat, a pre-eminent socialist politician in India, does not have any white streaks in her hair. It is all dark; and sometimes it appears in something of a small bun or is loose and therefore free. Karat is a hugely beautiful woman. The hair adds to her charisma.
Biren Shome, Woman, relief print, 2013.
Hillary Clinton ages into a terrifically beautiful woman, one reason being the many ways in which she uses her hair. And she knows how her hair can make people, both men and women, go delirious with pleasure. “If I want to knock a story off the front page”, she said not long ago, “I just change my hairstyle.” Which only reinforces the idea of how women still add colour to our world through the glamour inherent in their hair. As twilight descends around you, a woman of fiery beauty you love to distraction tells you in a whisper she misses you all day. You are on top of the world. You watch the breeze rush through her hair. You remember Kahlil Gibran, who once said famously, “And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”
Feminine beauty is not the preserve of long-haired women alone. When women crop their hair rather short, it is the grace of the neck, indeed of the shoulders, that comes alive. Seduction is in the air, in a meaningful way. The difference between women with long tresses and those with cropped hair is fundamentally one that separates tradition from modernity. Long hair in women has always been reason for poetry; short or cropped hair is more often than not symbolic of the career woman whose understanding of the world marks her out as an independent being. But, of course, Martin Luther was certainly not thinking of women of short hair when he noted that “hair is the richest ornament of women.”
And then there is the exotic in women with curly hair, especially if you are thinking of women in Africa. Women in Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea are often an underpinning of poetry because of their slim figures, their long necks and their curly hair. Mary Ann Shaffer was wrong to think that naturally curly hair was a curse. It is not. Sometimes it is a challenge, for one who craves some rich African romance.
A woman's long hair is always an invitation to beauty arising out of the dark. Submerged in its perfumed lushness, you are ready to push the world of the mediocre and the banal out of your life and succumb to the call of profound romance, unless of course it is the actress Bette Davis you have in your arms. Remember what she stated once? “I'd love to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.”
That is not how Rapunzel would have looked at it. She did not let her hair down, sure, when her Prince Charming expected her to. But she knew, and so did her prince, that sooner or later the hair would loosen out of its bind and dance its way down to the waiting lover. Promise of union was all.
Ah, woman and her (sometimes riotous) beauty! Ask Mirza Ghalib. He enlightens you thus:
“. . . even in bondage, there is fire under my feet, Ghalib / the chains that bind me are merely curls of singed hair.”
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
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