BAWDY LINE. The topi

“In those days everybody wore a topi? All the time?”

It was in the middle of the limpidly uplifting Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory (about the rather chaotic making of Raja Harishchandra by Dhundiraj Phalke), during a scene where Phalke is showing the outcome of his exertions to a bunch of bewitched locals in a tent theatre in Mumbai, that my seven-year-old son asked me that. Paresh Mokashi’s filmic images of Mumbai in the early 20th century are delicious and bring a sugar rush; and, indeed, there isn’t a bareheaded male to be seen on the streets of the city. The unexceptional Marathi chapeau is everywhere, almost part of the landscape of Mumbai, leading us to a silent cache holding the lives and stories of its peoples.

It is a topi that my son is familiar with — a kind of side cap stiffened by cardboard within its seams. A slightly reduced version of the topi that KB Hedgewar, the RSS founder, was often photographed in. And a stiff forerunner of the limp Gandhi-Nehru-Congress topi. He has seen it being squirreled out on festivals and birthdays to perform a ritual called aukshwan , where the male members of the family (perforce in their topis) are ennobled by the women in their lives by first dredging them with turmeric and vermilion, then moving around their faces a betelnut, gold ring and, finally, light from a ghee-soaked wick. It is a ritual common in most Maharashtrian households and introduces into the present an oddity that is distant and gauche, for which there is no room in everyday life — the topi.

In old photographs of crowds in Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Nashik, an unbroken profusion of topis and other headwear can be seen. Wearing a topi was a given, like wearing footwear. It wasn’t just an essential and integral part of the attire, it was the most prominent article of clothing on a man’s body. The oldest extant RSS ideologue, MG Vaidya remembers a time in his youth when topis were a social necessity. Men were unable to leave their homes without one: they couldn’t be seen in the streets bareheaded. Bareheadedness was a disturbing condition, a sign of wretchedness, an indicator of death in the family. The 13 days of postmortem mourning provided the only exemption from the chapeau.

Contemporaneously, it was quite the same with hats in America — the social pressure, the obligation of conformity. Hatlessness, at the dawn of 20th century, was viewed with alarm: the man was considered demented, or insolvent, or drunk, or even a sociopathic fiend of sorts. Or perhaps he had been robbed, or been in an accident.

Quite apart from all the utilitarian functions that hats served, they were wonderfully eloquent agents of expression: they were tipped, raised, tossed, handed, waved, tilted, snapped, cocked, passed. And these motions prolapsed their way into being social graces. This never happened with the topi.

The topi’s particular burden is that, for some ineffable reason, it seems parochial. This is odd, as it has never been defined by the geographical particularities of the regions where it prevailed. That a brimless, non-functional headpiece that offered no protection against the elements in the tropics became an obsessional cultural neurosis should be reckoned as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry.

Obviously, hard work is involved in the study of history and culture theory, and before I could go scavenging in those precincts, I startled myself by fortuitously locating the solution in that other great conservatory of culture (where the top quintile never go) — regional television. In a televised blood meal in Marathi on the life of the social reformer Ramabai Ranade called Unch Maazha Zhoka (UMZ) or On the Swings and Soaring, serialised on Zee Marathi. Again upon some prodding from the seven-year-old, who was watching with me and asked: “Why are all of them bald?”

UMZ is about a family of Chitpavan Brahmins in late 19th-century Mumbai, the same stock as the Peshwas, who ruled pre-colonial Maharashtra. All the Ranade men in UMZ have neatly shaved heads, except for the occipital tuft, the shikha. The tuft emerges from a thatch of hair the size of a calf’s hoof and is kept tightly knotted. When the Ranades step out, they’re never bareheaded; the tuft is manoeuvred under a Puneri pagadi or a topi for shelter. The Puneri pagadi is a glorious thing: a prefabricated turban, a sort of operculum for the scalp, first introduced by the Peshwas and subsequently made fashionable by Mahadev Govind Ranade — Ramabai’s husband — and later, BG Tilak aka Lokmanya.

Well, there aren’t too many letters of recommendation here. Manusmriti provides the only injunction. The shikha was mandated for all twice-born (savarna) Hindus, not just members of the priestly brahminical genus.

“By oblations to fire during the mother’s pregnancy, by holy rites on the birth of the child, by the tonsure of his head with a lock of hair left on it, by the ligation of the sacrificial cord are the birth taints of the three classes wholly removed.” (Chapter 2, verse 27)

The shikha was the vital Hindu appendage. The spiritual antenna, without which yagna, charity, penance, suffrages, fasts and other auspicious acts were fruitless (Katyayanasmriti: Chapter 1, verse 4). When a male child was born, the father could handle him only on the sixteenth day, rising early in the morning, after his ablutions, coming home with a wet head, and pouring a few drops of water from his sopping shikha into the infant’s mouth. Savarna Hindu males were never meant to have the unseemly vanity of the display of hair. The tuft, however, was important; it had to be sheltered. Ergo, the chapeau.

Culture doesn’t arise out of an opinion-clogged handbook. It is the prodrome, the sequela, of all national life. The Puneri pagadi, in an attempt to make it aspirational, was granted Geographical Indication status in 2009. Currently, it is aired only at weddings. The residual functions of the topi form a triptych: the sacerdotal, the political and the rural. I know of at least three Marathi priests in Delhi who treat their black topis as nearly animate parts of themselves. They’re never to be seen without it.

For citified Maharashtrians outside the triptych, the topi is a footnote, to be ritually imagined through the aukshwan , by calling upon a sort of collective, cultural memory.

( Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer )

asatwik@gmail. com

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