The Body Grows

Annaprashana, Chudakarana, and Karnavedha: three samskaras that mark the body's first food, first shave, and first piercing

At six months, the baby tastes its first solid food, a spoonful of cooked rice and ghee. At three years, the child's birth hair is shaved at a temple hall in front of the family priest. At one year or three or five, a fine gold needle pierces the earlobe at a precise point. Three samskaras of the body, three thresholds, three moments where the family marks the child's growth on the calendar of dharma. This lesson unpacks the three: Annaprashana, the rice ceremony; Chudakarana, the first tonsure; Karnavedha, the ear piercing. Scripture, symbolism, habit science, modern research on amylase enzymes and scalp microbiome and acupuncture meridians, and the largest single-location hair offering operation on earth, processing twenty thousand tonsures a day at Tirumala.

A Mother at the Tirumala Tonsuring Hall, with a One Year Old

In the great tonsuring hall at Tirumala, on a Tuesday morning in August, a young mother named Lalitha sits cross legged on a stone bench with her one year old son Aditya in her lap. The hall is enormous. Two hundred barbers in white dhotis sit in two long rows. The floor is wet from the constant water and shaved hair. The line of families stretches out the door and down the steps toward the Pushkarini tank.

Aditya wakes in his mother's arms. His grandfather has fulfilled a vow made before the child was born: if the boy was healthy, his first hair would be offered to Sri Venkateswara.

The barber takes Aditya gently and sits him on a small wooden stool. He wets the head with cold water and recites chudakaranam karishye, I will perform the chudakarana. The razor moves in long even strokes. Aditya cries for thirty seconds, then settles. In four minutes the head is bare.

The mother gathers the cloth, ties it into a small bundle, and walks with her father in law to the offering chute that funnels the day's hair into the temple's collection vault. The Tirumala vault collects approximately one tonne of human hair every day. The hair is auctioned by the temple for export to wig makers in the United States, China, and Italy, and the proceeds fund the daily annadanam that feeds one hundred thousand pilgrims. The boy's first hair has, in a single morning, fed a hundred strangers.

Back in the courtyard, the mother applies a small mark of sandalwood paste on the bare scalp, ties a thin red and yellow raksha sutra on Aditya's wrist, and takes a photograph. The photograph will live on the family altar for the rest of the boy's childhood. The bare scalp, the mother's smile, the grandfather's hand on the child's shoulder. The first samskara of the body that the child will remember from photographs.