by Rose George
Because the process of pregnancy is so taxing—I’ve never been pregnant and I’m exhausted reading about it—the uterus will be extremely choosy about which embryos get to inflict such a drain on the mother’s body. A total of 30 to 60 percent of embryos are discarded. Anything not up to standard is ditched, along with the endometrium. “You’ve probably read,” writes Sadedin, “about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was the endometrium.” The biologists Deena Emera, Roberto Romero, and Günter Wagner wrote that this “evolutionary tug-of-war between maternal and fetal genomes” was similar to virus-host interactions. Not everyone agrees with this hypothesis, and research into what placentas have done throughout history is difficult when they fossilize rather worse—that is, not at all—than bones. But whenever species have this kind of invasive pregnancy, and the “spontaneous decidualization” of the womb lining, they also menstruate.
It’s a persuasive theory, if an unsettling one. Disquiet and distaste are things you get used to when you read about menstruation.
* * *
“The menstrual discharge,” wrote the male anthropologist M. F. Ashley-Montagu in 1940, “is most generally conceived to be a particularly noxious effluvium which automatically renders everything unclean with which it comes into contact. That being so, the female during her catamenial flow is considered to be herself unclean and as noxious as the effluvium itself.”13 Anyone writing about menstruation or, as I may call it from now on, the noxious catamenial flow, starts with Pliny. Gaius Plinius Secundus was known as Pliny the Elder and for his multivolume Natural History. There are many wonders in the thirty-seven volumes, but even Pliny admitted that it is difficult to think of “anything which is more productive of more marvelous effects than the menstrual discharge.”14 Human females, he wrote, are the only “animated beings” to have a monthly discharge. He was wrong about that. He was wrong in abundance.
On the approach of a menstruating woman, he wrote, nature would cringe and submit. “Seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits.” Her look, also, is formidable, because it will “dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel and take away the polish from ivory.” She can kill a swarm of bees, turn iron and brass rusty. She can scare away hailstorms and lightning, as long as she is both bleeding and naked. At sea, she doesn’t even need to bleed: a storm will flee before the sight of her unclothed body. What a useful creature. Farmers must employ their menstruating wives with great joy, because “if a woman strips herself naked while she is menstruating, and walks round a field of wheat, the caterpillars, worms, beetles and other vermin will fall from off the ears of corn.”15
I wish some of these were true: it would save time weeding. The editor of one edition of the Natural History adds a footnote to say that Pliny’s accounts are “entirely without foundation.” But they were built upon centuries of belief about the power of the menstrual woman and others built upon them in turn. It’s telling how many of the Pliny powers were judged to be witchcraft. Menstruation must have been unsettling. How could women bleed and not die, when men bled and did? Before agriculture and settlement, as Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth write in their book The Curse, women’s blood was judged to be good. It was like other cyclical processes that seemed magical—the sun, the moon, the tides—and deserved appropriate awe. “Worship and appeasement of the Great Mother and her bleeding fertility would ensure [early man’s] temporal safety.”16 The blood turned bad when man became a farmer, life became more stable, and he had less need of magical protection. Then, the menstruating woman became taboo, set apart and separated from things she may damage, like crops and harvests.
By the time of the Old Testament, the evil of menstruation was firm enough to be used as an analogy: the book of Isaiah urged the observant to cast away their sinful silver and gold idols as they would a menstruous cloth. Whoever wrote Leviticus was more straightforward. After pronouncing purity rules around leprosy, he moved on to sperm and menstrual blood. “When a woman has a discharge, if her discharge in her body is blood, she shall continue in her menstrual impurity for seven days; and whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening.”17 At least he was fair: men who emit sperm outside intercourse are equally unclean. Both men and women should offer two turtle doves or pigeons to the Temple at their end of their cleansing. (Knowing something of young men, I’d guess their turtle dove expenditure was higher than women’s.) Leviticus’s egalitarian pollution was not shared by Aristotle, who knew sperm was a much higher class of discharge.
In the thirteenth century, Nahmanides (Rabbi Moses ben Nahman or Rambam) judged the menstrual woman and found her wanting. “The dust on which she walks is impure like the dust defiled by the bones of the dead.”18 Most religions agree that a menstruating woman should stay away from God or holy books and places, and they are emphatic about cleansing. Buddhists are the most relaxed, but Japanese Buddhism requires women to cleanse for eleven days after a period. Women who have given birth have to cleanse for only ten.
The most creative response to the fearsome catamenial flow comes from the islanders of Wogeo in Papua New Guinea. This place was described by the anthropologist Ian Hogbin in a 1970 book as “the island of menstruating men.” Women’s menstrual blood is both dangerous—she can kill a man by touch when she is bleeding—and cleansing, enough that men simulate it with a creative technique involving crabs and penises. First, writes Hogbin, the man catches a crab and steals a claw. He spends a peaceful day of nil by mouth, then late in the afternoon:
He goes to a lonely beach, covers his head with a palm spathe, removes his clothing, and wades out until the water is up to his knees. He stands there with his legs apart and induces an erection either by thinking about desirable women or by masturbation.
Then, he takes his stolen claw and hacks at his penis until blood flows. He must wait until “the sea is no longer pink” (this makes me wonder how much blood Wogeo men contained), then returns ashore. At that point, both menstruating women and fake menstruating men observe the same rituals, though the woman has to stay at home and is not allowed to use doors. When answering a call of nature, she “has to leave and enter through a hole in the floor or the wall.”19
It is unclear whether the island of menstruating men developed its rituals because men were envious of periods or frightened by them. But anthropologists cite other tribes where the bleeding woman is treated with kindness and respect. Among the Yurok Indians of northern California, menstruating women are spared all chores and duties for ten days because they are on their “moontime.”20 The Kalasha women of the Hindu Kush retire to a prestigious structure called the bashali, where women hang out, have fun, and sleep entwined. In this reading of menstrual seclusion, the woman is prized for her blood, because it means fertility and power.21 She enjoys the time off (who wouldn’t?). In Nepal, I was told that some girls like to spend time in the chaupadi huts with their friends: they play online games on their phones (because poor people have phones, too) and have slumber parties, even if the slumbering is cold and likely to be disturbed by men and beasts.
Clearly women like to be clean after menstruating. They probably like time off from kitchen and marital duties. But I’m suspicious of ritual purity rules. If dirt is matter out of place, then maintaining purity is a matter of putting people in their place. Imaginary dirt is such an effective weapon of limitation. See India’s untouchables, imprisoned in filthy jobs—tanning, body removal, latrine emptying—because they are judged filthy. See the most powerful schoolyard taunts of disadvantaged children: they are dirty, they reek, they are inferior. See “you smell,” the hardest schoolyard insult to protest. Such a
system is an imaginative phenomenon, wrote Virginia Smith in Clean, “that rationality finds so strange—that ritual purity and impurity laws do not refer to observable cleanliness or dirtiness, but to a classified purity status.”22 You can touch something and not be dirty, but you are unclean. You can bathe in the shit-filled Ganges and be filthy, but you are clean. Mary Douglas once wrote that to understand purity rules, you have to ask whom they exclude. “The only thing that is universalistic about purity is the temptation to use it as a weapon.”23
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In 2005, the Supreme Court of Nepal made chaupadi illegal, without providing any mechanism to prosecute people who continue it.24 So it thrives regardless and in enough accessible places for Western media to have become enthralled by it in recent years. They seem less enthralled by the fact that Nepal’s menstrual taboos are so far from being eradicated, they are celebrated with a national holiday.
Kathmandu, three a.m. Anita from WaterAid has arrived to collect Poulomi and me from our hotel on a hill above the city. I am grumpy from my mutilated sleep and from the nerves that come with hunting. This morning marks the first day of Rishi Panchami, a popular annual festival that lasts for three days. It is, according to one listing of common Hindu festivals, “celebrated with great joy.”25 This is what it celebrates: Once, there was a Brahmin named Uttank. He lived with his wife Sushila and a daughter in a village. One night, the parents were horrified to see their daughter covered by ants. A local priest was consulted. The cause was obvious: she had committed sins in a previous life. Notably, she had entered a kitchen while menstruating. The answer was to cleanse away this past sin and the ants would depart. In another, even cheerier version of the tale, the daughter was reborn as a prostitute because she didn’t observe menstrual restrictions. To celebrate Rishi Panchami, the government gives all working women a day off. This is not to recognize their work but to provide them with time to perform rituals that will atone for any sins they may have committed while menstruating in the previous year. (The prepubescent and the menopausal are exempt.) Women especially enjoy it, I read on the Hindu website, and “strongly believe that this will wash away all their sins acquired by them knowingly or unknowingly.” The writer helpfully adds that “in the olden days women were not allowed either in the house or in the kitchen during their menstrual periods,” leading me to wonder whether he—a sure guess—is writing from space, or a cave, or the olden days.
We head for Pashupatinath Temple, Kathmandu’s grandest. In the morning dark its beauty is dulled but it’s not the star attraction anyway. That is the thousands of women, queueing in that intimate way that Westerners don’t: tightly, and hands on the shoulders of the person in front. It looks like a mile-long embrace. The women are waiting to pray, and they began lining up at eleven p.m. the night before, but there is no ill temper or frustration. The atmosphere is one of a concert or a festival. The chatter, the excitement, the Sunday best of red saris and gold jewelry: this feels like fun. I ask Anita to talk to the women about the legend behind Rishi Panchami, and wait for them to say they are just here for the merriment, that they know little about the truth behind this festival. This is my shameful arrogance. None of the women Anita speaks to is ignorant about the nature of the day. Their adherence is not empty but firm and fully aware. “We may have touched a man by mistake,” they say. “We have to do this because our ancestors did. It’s tradition.” Nearby I find female police officers watching over the crowds, keeping order. “Yes, we are modern women,” said one, leaning on her motorbike, gripping a mug of hot tea in the cold morning, her weapon at her hip. But Rishi Panchami must be honored. “I can’t do the rituals this year because I’m on duty, so next year I’ll do double.”
Once they have prayed, the cleansing rituals begin. The rules are strict: they must enter a river, then brush themselves with a holy twig 365 times to signify that they have purified themselves. Then they cleanse their hair with buffalo dung before washing it with cow urine and milk. This is the theory, but the riverbanks near the temple are empty. No one does the rituals there anymore, says Anita, because too many sewers drain into the river. She calls her mother for advice, and we are directed to the opposite bank and farther downstream. The water looks cleaner, though it probably isn’t. But we find five women dressed only in red petticoats squatting side by side on a log facing the river, jewels of vivid color against the dawn and dull water. They haven’t yet begun the ceremony, and they gesture to us to sit, to watch, to help them fend off the monkeys. The men doing urgent calisthenics on the far side of the river aren’t invited, but they also stay for the duration. They have a good view.
The matriarch is Gita Sharma, fifty-five in age but seventy in looks. She snaps at the youngsters, “You are not doing it properly. You must learn.” Muna Dhal is one of the learners. She is twenty-two, from eastern Nepal, and she accepts our strange questions with patience while she manages the bags, potions, and powders that make up the menstrual-sin-washing kit. “Because we maybe committed a sin during menstruation. Maybe unconsciously.” Why is it a sin? “Because it’s said so.” Ask her, Anita, if that means women are dirty. “Yes. They are cleaner now but still we do this.”
No one does the full 365 brushes of the ritual: that would take too long. Instead, they will do a symbolic number to stand in for the rest: with the appropriate twig, they brush their private parts, feet, knees, belly button, elbows, heart, underarms, hair, and teeth. Along the way, they chat and laugh and ignore the aerobic voyeurs on the far side, while preserving their modesty. It is an acrobatic and graceful endeavor and I am entranced, right up to their rubbing buffalo shit in their hair and pouring urine on their heads. Anita asks Gita whether she believes she had sinned and Gita responds with superior scorn. “Well, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have done all this, would I?”
Rishi Panchami enrages many educated Nepali women. It’s not so much the superstition but the legitimacy that the government gives it by providing a holiday that declares women to be dirty and polluting. Why can’t the festival simply celebrate women instead? Privately, female Nepali sanitation activists tell me that their male colleagues—even in NGOs that campaign against menstrual taboo—see no need to object to chaupadi or Rishi Panchami because it is tradition. Also, Nepal has made great headway in improving its sanitation, launching policies and promises, even while recovering from a dreadful earthquake. Rishi Panchami is a battle for another day, another year. It can wait. Until then the women will come, dressed and delighted, to atone for sins they didn’t commit, in water that won’t clean them, removing taints only the gods can see.
* * *
On our second day in Jamu, Radha leads us on a ninety-minute walk to Tatopani, a village of ninety-five households where she goes to school. Tatopani means “hot water.” Cold Water Village is down the valley. Along the way, the chaupadi sheds, initially visible in every yard, become rarer. This is because Tatopani has launched a chaupadi minimization program, and it’s working. In the village offices, a group of concerned citizens has gathered. Some sit on the village water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) committee. Some are health workers. Two are young men, a rare sight. These beautiful green paddy fields, dramatic forests, and rushing rivers do not pay wages; leaving home does.
The young men are the most passionate. Their families migrated here from Achham. That is where chaupadi is most rooted, but it is also where the first chaupadi-free villages emerged, and where a government minister’s wife in 1998 became the first menstruating woman in her district to spend a night in her own house. In earlier times, the villagers tell me, the menstrual restrictions probably made sense. Women could have a few days’ rest while they were weak from blood loss. The men were around to do the chores and there were family members to do the cooking. Things are different now. The men are gone, the women must work, and the deprivation and damage done by chaupadi is greater.
“They have to stay outside but still do all the difficult jobs,” says Kabi Raj Majhi, a young man who is the m
ost vocal of all the villagers and the chair of the committee. When WaterAid’s local NGO partner NEWAH arrived in the village to build a water point, its staff saw an opportunity to change things. “They said women should be allowed to use the main water point,” says Kabi, “even when they were menstruating.” Menstruating women are supposed to bathe away from others: in Jamu, we found one girl on her period trying to wash in a puddle. “A traditional healer objected and NEWAH said, fine, you use another water point then.” The healer soon capitulated.
An old man in the corner begins to speak: “Before, they were kept outside for seven days. Now it’s five and I think that’s fine, but it should stay at five.” He knows that chaupadi is necessary because of what happened during Nepal’s civil war, when thirteen thousand people were killed and thirteen hundred went missing.26 These western regions were full of Maoist rebels. “When the Maoists were here,” the old man said firmly, “they didn’t observe chaupadi. They let women in the house. And then the Maoists died in the war.”
The others shout him down. But the problem isn’t men like him or traditional healers. “We can change them,” said Madan Kumar Majhi, Kabi’s cousin and a member of the chaupadi minimization committee. “But it’s the women who are the barrier.” The mothers and mothers-in-law are the worst. A female health worker tells the room how she pretends to be menstruating just so her mother-in-law starts shaking and trembling and pretending to be sickened. “She acts as if she is ill, as if a ghost has come in. But when I am actually menstruating, I touch her and nothing happens.” She laughs, but she has to observe the taboos.
