NEWS FEATURE: From henna tattoos to toe rings, the spiritual has become the fashionable

c. 1999 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Let the theologians duke it out. Reincarnation is a fact of fashion. Styles are born, die and are born again in slightly different form. The latest incarnation comes, appropriately enough, from India. Images of Hindu deities dance across trendy T-shirts. Traditional sari fabrics show up as wrap skirts […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Let the theologians duke it out. Reincarnation is a fact of fashion.

Styles are born, die and are born again in slightly different form. The latest incarnation comes, appropriately enough, from India.


Images of Hindu deities dance across trendy T-shirts. Traditional sari fabrics show up as wrap skirts and tops. Henna tattoos and bindis, those decorative dots placed between the eyes, grace faces that have never seen beyond the American suburbs.

As in those hippie dharma days, the current interest in India incorporates everything from garb to gods. But this is spirituality in that deeply superficial, American-consumer-society way. It’s “Curry Soup for the Teen-age Soul.” It’s “Touched by a Yogi.” It’s “Embrace Your Inner Sadhu” _ and look darned cute doing it.

Even cosmetic companies have gotten into the act, offering products such as Aveda’s “Bliss” moisturizer and Maybelline’s Cosmic Edge line with “Instant Karma” body shimmer.

Geraldine Forbes, distinguished teaching professor of history at State University of New York at Oswego, has conducted research in India for three decades and watched, with mixed reactions, the appropriation of its clothing, jewelry and gods by American youth.

“Women (in the 1960s and 1970s) would often wear petticoats as skirts without the sari covering them,” she recalled. “These young people wore all kinds of religious beads that have special meaning _ such as the toe rings of new brides _ without any concern for what they meant to the culture.”

India is a country of almost 1 billion people, about 85 percent of whom are Hindu, and Forbes emphasizes that it’s impossible to generalize what Indians must think of this latest trend for bangles and bindis.

“Traditionally, it was believed that putting a mark on the forehead was to cool the place where the third eye could emerge _ and it was done in temples after people had prayed,” said Forbes. “It’s still done, often with sandalwood paste, but that’s different from the contemporary bindi.” These days in India, the bindi is mostly decorative, though it can also signify a woman’s marital or maternal status.

“The only woman who cannot wear a bindi is a widow,” Forbes said.

The elaborate henna tattoos many are sporting also have different meanings in different parts of the country, but they’re frequently worn by Hindu brides. Traditionalists must view it as a little odd, though not offensive, that non-Hindus are wearing them. What would Americans think if Indian teens took to wearing frothy white bridal veils because they thought they looked cool?


“In general, I believe that the appropriation of traditions across cultures is a natural process in this emerging global society,” said Sunil Khanna, assistant professor of anthropology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Culture contact and diffusion has happened before, is happening now (although at a much faster rate) and will continue to happen in the future.”

Khanna doesn’t think most Hindus would be offended by non-Hindus wearing T-shirts imprinted with Ganesha or Siva.

“However, I do feel that in the given religiously charged political climate in India and Pakistan, there may be a few Hindus who would feel objectified,” Khanna said. “I think most of it depends on the ways in which Hindu religious symbols are used by non-Hindus.”

DEA END MCINERNY

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!