Blame it on the Brazilian: Why do Indians attach such a premium to hairlessness?

It seems like every few years, a young woman who missed the last genital-waxing piece (on account of having been prepubescent, no doubt) will come home with a peculiar walk, sit gingerly at her computer and type out a snappy article about how liberating it is to have had a Brazilian.

If you’re in your 40s, like I am, you will, for the third or fourth time in your life, wonder why, in fact, the procedure is not called "The Indian". Because in India, cleanliness may be next to Godliness but I’m willing to bet that's only after fair-skinnedness and body-hairlessness.

Those glorious traditions of our past – the multani mitti (Fuller's earth) face pack that pulled the down off your cheeks, the chane-ka-aata (chickpea flour) massages, the sweaty beauty salon attendant threading your eyebrows, her hands redolent of her triple Szechwan lunch – still thrive.

But they’re not enough for the urban, aspirational tranche that seems to regard personal grooming as a competitive sport. This is the reason behind the proliferation of spas, gourmet massages, nail art bars and skin clinics with licences to mildly electrocute you into tautness. But it is hairlessness that is the holy grail.

Culture Call

As with all aspects of beauty, the cultural cues are strong. A European friend loved the idea that women were so obsessed in India with being hair-free. She would rave about a local electrolysis clinic that did the job at a fraction of what it would have cost her anywhere else she’d lived. Yet, while she was happy to do her armpits and her legs, she found the Indian woman’s obsession to be totally tonsured in the nethers alarming.

Not everyone wants to be glabrescent in the inguina. In fact, there is a basse-couture look-book as Cosmopolitan’s handy guide to pubic hair styles indicates. We already know culture dictates what trends are in bikini lines around the world. So, it may seem confusing that in a country that hasn’t quite embraced the bikini, our ladies seem to favour the same look popularised by a need-to-see-more trend in the porn industry. Or did it take off only 16 years ago, as modern media tells us, when it was turned mainstream by the mildly imbecilic Sex and the City? (Come to the bike shed later, we’ll debate that with fisticuffs).

No. The Indian obsession with the smooth criminal predates both. In the book, Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures, anthropologists Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara Miller quote Owen Lynch reporting from Western Uttar Pradesh, where he learned, amongst the Chaubes, “female pubic hair is thought of as ganda (dirty) and considered by males as being an impediment during intercourse”. This is echoed by Erin Moore who confirms that once a month, “in rural Rajasthan, women use a special soap that completely removes their pubic hair”.

Down under

Though they are no doubt long-prevalent cultural norms, the reports are from 1987, the very same year, the Padilha sisters – Jocely, Jonice, Janea, Joyce, Jussara, Juracy and Judseia – opened the J Sisters Salon half a world away. Introducing the "brazilian wax" to Manhattan, they pulled the rug out, literally, from under hitherto female complacency about vaginal-vanity. By 2010, when the so-called sex professor Dr Debby Herbenick conducted an internet study on nearly 2,500 US women, she found a definite preference for the mowed-mound amongst younger, sexually active but not necessarily partnered women.

It reminds me of a story my mother told me once as part of a sexual-safety conversation about "not going to deserted places with young men", citing a young woman her age, who did go to a deserted place but decided not to have sex with her paramour because she was quite au naturel down there. The implied logic was that the brambles protected the virgin territory (much like that Sleeping Beauty fairytale) but the subtext was that a lack of pubic hair was loaded with cues about sexual liberation.

(This does not explain, however, why until very recently, and only if you shouted very loudly, maternity hospitals would insist on shaving your pubes entirely. I have yet to understand how this helps the doctor deliver a baby but I do know that it does add a facet of itchy-stubble growing back wretchedness to the usual perineum bruising, episiotomy biting, post-birth bleeding, contractions and all the other wonderful inconveniences of the new mom.)

It has been argued in several feminist tomes and websites that we need to stop talking about what we do with our pubes. That whatever we choose to do, is up to us. But it’s not so easy to give up on the conversation when you realise the hair-shaming starts early.

Girls as young as seven comment on each other’s hairy legs or lack thereof. By the time they’re 12, only a hardy few are left untouched, Frida Kahlos to their waxed and threaded contemporaries. The salon lady recommends starting leg waxing at the age of 10. “What’s the harm?” she asks. Victoria Beckham, in 2003, suggested making Brazilians compulsory at age 15. I wonder what she thinks of that statement now that she has her own daughter.

Virgin territory

Whoever you are, the idea that female pubic hair is dirty is abhorrent and speaks of an atavistic mindset. Sure, come swimsuit season, a little grooming is welcome on all accounts. But in India, there is a far more discomfiting angle. "No one should go entirely bald down there," said my European friend, fan of the so-called landing strip, a French favourite. "For heaven’s sake! Surely your man wants a woman… not a little girl!” I had to wait till the bells stopped going off in my head.

We talk about the sexualisation of young girls in western society but look at our cultural obsession with virginity; the idea that a woman who has had sex outside of marriage has been spoiled. Child marriage, expecting subservience, guaranteeing a woman’s abject financial dependence on a man by denying her right to education and a career all come from the insecure male ego unable to cohabit with an equal, our pusillanimous patriarchy.

We have, in our tiny, disenfranchised, cultural-minority circles decided to challenge this. We don’t wax our legs on the clock and still wear shorts. We put off bleaching and threading our faces for weeks. We go to sports in our sleeveless shirts, just like the boys, armpits unwaxed. We just stopped short from dyeing our pits blue but there is no doubt that these are our feminist armpits.

And while yes, it is no one’s business but ours what sort of bikini lines we choose or why, let me reassure you, we are all sitting very comfortably.