Can We Stop Our Selective Outrage For Parlour Didis*?
On why the seemingly progressive attack on beauty parlour employees reeks of our own savarna bias of class and merit.
His fingers busy scrunching my hair after he washed them, he said “They are so uneven ma’am. Who cut them the last time?” I racked my brains, sitting propped up in a salon chair. Before I could recall it, he said, “I’m sure it was some parlour aunty.” “Why?” I asked, suddenly realising I had not been attended to by a male hairdresser or beautician in the previous sixteen years of my life. “Bilkul professional nahi dikh raha hai”, he added. I took him quite seriously. He was a smart, well dressed older man, hence sensible — or so I thought then.
For the next couple of years, I would avoid going to places which looked like they were run by women. Even identifying myself as a feminist didn’t prevent me from having a strong bias in the seemingly trivial act of choosing a salon. While I spent much time and efforts deconstructing myths of beauty and standards set by patriarchy, I looked down upon parlour aunties* and female makeup artists at weddings. My hypocrisy wasn’t completely questioned until recently.
When I came across a number of memes, comics, spoofs and listicles on various web platforms that target the stereotype of the parlour didi*, I felt very restless. All of a sudden, the conversation about body shaming had reduced to an attack on ‘loud-mouthed’, ‘uncultured’, ‘semi-literate’, ‘ganwaar’, ‘evil’, Hindi-speaking female employees in ladies’ parlours. Their representations as hyper enthusiastic, unprofessional, extra curious gossip mongers was uniform across women’s websites.
*Titles like ‘didi’ and ‘aunty’ itself further informalize a profession and take away from its dignity and deserved respect. (Which is why I am going to refer to them as parlour employees from hereon).
When I was still in primary school, an older and distant cousin of mine had started working in a parlour right after her 12th std exams. Unlike ‘professionals’ who got trained at academies and institutes, she learnt by working at the parlour itself, along with other girls. After a year, she got married and set up a small plastic chair and mirror in the corner of her bedroom. Her husband was not allowed entry when she would finish haircuts and threading in this corner. She acquired her first few clients from her own community of Marathi Brahmin women, a part of her caste privilege. Slowly she had a diverse set of clients who kept her busy all day. The money she made helped her in raising the child she had. Expected to be a ‘housewife’ as she couldn’t opt for higher education, she would later proudly tell us, “I can send my child to a better school now.”
She was not the only one. Several women started as trainees when they were younger under older women, and eventually started their own corners, rooms and if possible their own parlours. Their walls are now adorned with photos of models sporting different hairstyles. Often in the center, there’s a yellowing photo frame. It shows them receiving a certificate from Jawed Habib, the famous hairdresser.
These women, who will never be awarded or covered by magazines for their entrepreneurial journeys, have to acquire certification from a male expert for years of their labour and experience. Jawed Habibs and Sanjeev Kapoors are almost emblematic of a patriarchal caste society where savarna men are ‘number 1s’ in labour traditionally performed by women. Women whose journeys are neither appreciated by a misogynist society nor a feminist one.
The personal transformation they themselves have through their experience is also under-noticed. The pressure on them to maintain themselves is far more, as compared to that on other women, now that they need to showcase those standards themselves — at the parlour and outside. Imagine having working weekends all year, dealing with their bosses (who might make much more money than them) and managing domestic work expected at home. Instead of finding respect or concern for their labour, we have chosen to stereotype them into a caricature of crass sounding body-shamers who deserve our scorn for everything that’s wrong with our society’s beauty standards.
It can be understood why the implicit and explicit messages received at parlours are problematic. There hasn’t been a single parlour visit where I haven’t been criticized for having curly hair, for refusing to sport the pain caused by threading and waxing. While body shaming, unrealistic beauty standards, normalization of pain have been feminist concerns for decades, these memes and listicles targeting parlour employees seem to attack the weakest link in the network of the beauty industry. Such seemingly feminist and progressive tirades are ironically against women — those who work in this industry.
These representations show them talking in Hindi, and one can presume that these parlour employees are economically weaker than their angry clients. The class and possibly caste difference between them raises other questions: do we engage in similar venting out sessions when it comes to women of our own backgrounds? Isn’t body shaming a regular event plugged into the everyday life of our families?
Mothers and aunts discuss shapes of our thighs and hair growth on our upper lips. They control our sexuality and decide how we should groom ourselves. It is they who get to decide when is the right time to allow us to visit a parlour. Toning down our lipstick shades, tying up loose strands of our hair, ensuring we match the Brahmanical standards of decency their mothers taught them — form an everyday practice of policing at home.
There are women outside the home, our teachers, colleagues and other professionals like gynecologists — from whom we get all kinds of advice on beauty, morality, the unwanted visibility of bra straps and the wanted reduction of our waist size. Even if we have written/spoken about it, have we stereotyped their entire profession into one body-shaming lump? Have we labelled our personal relationships with these women negatively? Is it because they come from our own ‘respectable’ savarna circles with ‘respectable’ jobs? Then why do parlour employees get all our outrage? Is our outrage misdirected? Isn’t it also classist and castiest in nature?
The absence of men in this debate is ominous. Where are the boyfriends who crack muffled jokes about the time their girlfriends take at parlours, without admitting they are the ones who want the porn-inspired hairlessness in the first place? The homophobic male friends who find the word ‘unisex’ funny and mockable? The owners of beauty products and the advertisers of Veet and Anne French? While I am not denying that their critique exists, I wish to highlight that unlike the tirade against parlour employees, this critique is kinder in a way that it still upholds the dignity of our personal relationships with certain individuals. The absence of men in this conversation thus paints it into another “women are their own enemies” narrative.
While unisex salons are popping up on every other street in tier 1 and tier 2 cities, ladies beauty parlours are looked down upon by progressive feminist circles. New identities of metrosexuality are created at the unisex salons to pamper the fragile masculinity of the savarna upper-class male. English speaking men and women hospitably cater to the clients. Words like pampering, self-care, indulge, do-it-for-yourself are used to appease the clients. Scientific knowledge is thrown in to make the message seem more legitimate. “Aapke baal bohot itne rookhe sookhe kyu hai didi” turns into “ma’am would you like to try out our new keratin treatment? They will moisturize your dry hair ma’am”. An air of sophistication normalizes body shaming and body negativity.
Parlours and salons, like many other spaces in the service sector, are expected to create an ego-boosting environment where services are catered towards making one feel good about themselves, more beautiful, more updated, more confident. Perhaps it is the last place where people expect to be told disheartening things like their body parts are grossly imperfect, that their hair growth and sweat glands are in overdrive, that they suck as their natural selves. Yet within this twisted irony, if sophisticated messages in English from salon ‘professionals’ hurt our egos far lesser than straightforward messages in Hindi from parlour ‘didi’s it reflects on our own urban savarna biases about class and merit.
