עד"ח געט זיך אונטער און אסרט שייטלען

July 14, 2004
A Religious Tangle Over the Hair of Pious Hindus
By SARITHA RAI


IRUPATI, India - V. Subhasri regards each pilgrimage she has made to the Hindu temple here as an act of divine deliverance.

When she came to the temple three years ago, Ms. Subhasri, 35, offered her waist-length hair to the temple deity, Venkateshwara, in a sign of absolute devotion. She then prayed that her husband, Satyanarayana Raju, be cured of his acute stomach ulcers.

Last week she was back, offering her hair again in thanks for the recovery of her husband, and saying a new prayer for the success of her older son, Veeraraju, 15.

"He has scored 490 marks out of 600 in his recent school exams and, god willing, he will be a doctor one day," Ms. Subhasri said, wiping her tears with one end of her sari.

In her devotion, Ms. Subhasri was completely unaware that the hair she offered to her deity was collected along with that of thousands of others each day and eventually turned into high-priced wigs as part of India's lucrative wig industry. The hair is a significant moneymaker for the temple, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, and for many like it across the subcontinent.

A majority of Hindus, who make up 85 percent of India's billion-plus population, have their heads shaved at least once in a lifetime as prescribed by Hindu ures, and much of India's hair exports, which totaled $62.5 million last year, come out of the customary Hindu tradition of offering one's hair at temples.

But if most Indians who offer their hair in religious devotion are unaware that it is made into wigs that are sold abroad - mainly in Europe and the United States - most of those who buy the wigs are equally unaware of the religious aspect involved in the collecting of human hair for commercial use. Or at least they were until recently, when a group of Orthodox Jewish rabbis in Israel declared that wearing wigs made with even one strand of ritually tonsured hair constituted idolatry, and was thus forbidden.

Among Orthodox Jewish women, who observe a code of modesty that prohibits the public display of their hair after marriage, the rabbis' ruling created an uproar. Thousands of these women, who account for significant numbers of wig sales in the United States, have publicly burned wigs costing thousands of dollars and have rushed to find wigs that are guaranteed to be made of European hair or to get synthetic hair replacements. Many have foregone wigs altogether for snoods or hats to cover their heads.

Like polished diamonds and software, two of its better-known exports, human hair has become a lucrative international business for India. The hair gathered from temples and hair salons is cleaned, processed and sold and in the form of high-priced wigs, hair extensions and toupees, mostly via wig factories in China.

Reaching Tirupati at the end of their pilgrimage from a small town called Kapileswarapuram in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, the Rajus - Ms. Subhasri, her husband and two teenage sons - joined a crush of people to descend on one of the dozens of thronged community centers in the temple complex.

They stood in one of the snaking lines alongside hundreds of other pilgrims waiting their turn for a free tonsure. When her turn came, Ms. Subhasri sat on a flat, wooden platform, head bowed before one of the dozens of expert barbers. Within minutes, her wavy, black tresses were shorn, and immediately swept away by a broom-wielding temple employee. Bathing in lukewarm water after this ritual, the Rajus joined a milelong line of devotees with shining pates like theirs, and prepared to go into the innermost area of the temple to pray to the deity.

The head shaving ritual is repeated every day by thousands of Indians, both male and female, in the Tirupati temple as a symbol of the surrender of a person's ego to god.

The Tirupati temple is a sprawling structure which an average of 50,000 pilgrims visit daily. More than a ton of hair is collected each day from the devotees.

"We run through about 20,000 blades daily," said Ajeya Kallam, the temple's executive officer. He said the sale of hair brought in $6.17 million last year, adding to the already substantial earnings of India's richest religious institution. (The temple's primary income, about $333 million annually, comes from the monetary donations of its faithful and wide-ranging investments.)

The controversy over Indian hair in wigs sold in the United States and Israel appears to have made no dent in the temple's earnings from selling hair. On the contrary, said Surendra Babu, the temple's marketing chief, at a recent hair auction, bidders paid 10 percent more than they had at the last auction.

It takes about a year from the time the hair is cut off to its appearance as wigs in the West. Every other month, when two warehouses are piled high with stocks of some 100,000 pounds of hair, officials at the Tirupati temple call for a hair auction. The auction is a regulated process: notices appear in three newspapers, in four languages each, and on the temple's two official Web sites.

The bidding at the temple hair auction is highly competitive, as Indian hair tends to be fine, lustrous and free from chemical treatments. A kilogram of hair 16 inches long sold for $166 at the recent auction, though short hair fetched as little as 50 cents a kilogram. Gray hair was auctioned at $144 per kilogram.

"The end product is extremely high-glamour, but the process of getting there is not," acknowledged Benjamin Cherian, managing director of Raj Impex Private Ltd., one of India's leading human hair exporters, who regularly bids at hair auctions at the Tirupati temple.

Mr. Cherian dismissed the controversy over Indian temple hair being part of a ritual.

"What is ritualistic about humbling yourself in the most basic way?" he said. "In India, shaving your head equals shedding all vanity and becoming modest."

Mr. Cherian said his business was not affected by the controversy at all.

At his hair processing units, based in the southern Indian city ofMadras, hair is sorted into varieties, then washed, sun dried, categorized by size, bleached and stitched. The company's 100 employees do most of the work manually.

Mr. Cherian sells some of his processed inventory directly to the haute salons and hair accessories retailers like Extension Plus in Los Angeles, and others in Pennsylvania and New York. "The United States is the world's biggest market for human hair accessories," said Mr. Cherian, whose company earned $4.44 million from processed human hair exports last year.

A major part of his sales is to Chinese hair factories, where the hair is converted into an assortment of wigs and extensions, some customized to the exact requirement of clients of high-end salons in the United States. Gupta Enterprises, also based inMadras, has dominated the Indian human hair export trade for more than a decade and its buyers regularly attend the temple hair auctions. Kishore Gupta, a business school graduate who recently inherited the business from his father, said the company had Western fashion trends to thank for its flourishing business.

"India's torrid climate doesn't allow for wigs, but in the West some women change their hair three or four times a week," he said.

The business had humble beginnings in the village of Madepalli in Andhra Pradesh. The villagers were deft at untangling knotted hair, and the business began by employing them. Now, Gupta Enterprises exports processed human hair worth $16.88 million a year to 30 countries.

Like his competitor, Mr. Gupta said the wig-burning controversy had not affected his business at all. "In fact, in the recent auction, our bid prices went up," Mr. Gupta said