Excerpts on period, blood, menustration etc.

In modern South Asia, the wedding ritual is all that protects most bride-grooms against the awesome powers of their virgin brides. This ceremony is, however, supplemented in many parts of India by an intervention on the part of the bride’s mother or some other close female relative, who ensures that the hymen is broken prior to marriage. Alternately, the role of absorbing the magical dangers of virginal blood, in puberty and marriage rites, will be filled by a female specialist, such as a midwife or the wife of a barber. Yet, in at least one case, the role of the male brahmin priest appears to have remained operative, at least until recent times. The “tying of the tali,” a mock marriage practiced among the high-caste Na ¯yar communities of Kerala, was, until recent date, a ritual defloration of a virgin by a surrogate “husband,” often a brahmin priest, enacted to defuse the power of menstrual blood shed following menarche. Interestingly, the present-day rationale for this rite is that it protects a traditional Hindu girl from dying a widow, regardless of her future sexual life.

Another Newar ritual also appears to echo Vedic concerns. During her first menstrual period, a maiden releases poisons from her womb such that were they to be exposed to the sun, would render that heavenly body impure. In this particular context, the danger of this and every successive menstrual flow is neutralized through the use of a barha khya, a cotton effigy of a part-deity, part-spirit that is believed to possess the girl and is hung on the wall of the seclusion room. The khya, commonly represented as a
dwarfed and pudgy figure who is black in color with curly hair and red pouting lips, would appear to be a surrogate vulva.

Karin Kapadia, noting that female puberty rites, while absent from the north, are widespread in the south, points to the fact that these rituals take the form of a symbolic marriage. Here, menstruation is viewed as a second birth for females, since it is with menarche that the mysterious power of creating children is “born” in women; in fact, a woman is not considered gendered until she menstruates. 

It is, however, among the non-brahmanic communities of Tamil Nadu (Pallars, Chettiars, Christian Paraiyars, and Muthrajahs) that female blood is accorded its greatest symbolic importance. These groups view female blood as a living stream through which kinship and family connectedness (sambandham), as well as the menarchal girl’s kinship with the stars and the destiny-giving planets, are transmitted. It is for this reason that menstrual horoscopes are cast, with calculations based on the moment at which the girl’s bleeding first began (however difficult such is to determine).

In present-day Kerala, rituals surrounding the menses of the goddess Chengannur Bhagavatı ¯ explicitly reenact the traditional puberty ceremony of high-caste Keralan girls, in which an examination of a girl’s first menstrual bloodstains on her petticoat serve to divine her future.

- Kiss of the Yogini, Ch 3.