Outside India, few will have heard of the ‘Tirupati haircut’, but on the Subcontinent it’s the most famous hairstyle and salon there is. Tirupati is a temple town in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, to which pilgrims stream to worship at the shrine to Lord Venkatesvara, and ask for the deity’s benevolence in helping them—whether to find a suitable spouse, have a child, recover from illness or so on—help they request, and if honoured, surrendering their hair as a sacrifice. 10,000 pilgrims daily make the trip, often barefoot, with 650 barbers working round the clock to expertly shear each head with their water-slicked razors.
The pilgrims’ devotional act is in fact just the first step in what has become a vast, elaborate and surprisingly mercantile industry: the centre of India’s contribution to the surprisingly large global human-hair trade. A photostory on the trade was my first international photographic assignment, and I returned a few years later with producer Amanda Burrell to make a short film on the subject. It was the first time I’d picked up a film camera and I marvelled at the storytelling possibilities of moving image.
Our short film records every step in the bizarre and spectacular process, from the pilgrims’ arrival in the town, lustrous dark hair adorned with bright garlands of jasmine, to the throngs excitedly penned into temple waiting rooms, to the gentle hullabaloo of those about to submit their scalps—people of every age from crib up, and from all walks of life. The film takes us from the din of temple music, and individual pilgrims’ experiences—some rapt, some giggling, some abashed, babies crying in outrage—and pans out to tell the wider story of the industrial machinations that depend on their offerings, as an army of professionals brushes, sifts, soaps, soaks, swirls, dries, measures, categorises, untangles and bundles up hair into bunches of mind-bending uniformity for onward sale.
With 400kg of it collected daily, and South Asian hair being one of the most prized in international markets, this is an industry that generates many millions of euros for the temple each year.
A wonderfully revealing and surprising story.