10,000 close shaves—daily
Copy to introduce Adrian Fisk’s short film about the ancient practice of hair sacrifice in a South Indian temple
Outside India, few will have heard of the ‘Tirupati haircut’, but on the Subcontinent it’s the most famous hair-style 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, or to have a child, to recover from illness or so on. The God’s price? The pilgrim’s 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 flick-knives.
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 photo-story on the trade was Fisk’s first photographic assignment in India, and he returned a few years later with producer Amanda Burrell to make a short film on the subject. It was the first time he’d picked up a film camera and he marvelled at the storytelling possibilities of moving image.
The 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 £2.6M for the temple each year.
