by Rose George
“Not even the bottom. You can say from a scrap of the pyramid.”
I like his humor. I recognize it, from other social entrepreneurs I have known: Jack Sim, who set up the World Toilet Organization, Mechai Virivaidya, who helped to revolutionize condom usage in Thailand and to reduce HIV. There is a connection: humor erodes taboos. Muruga knows this: his interviews are funny and charming. His charm and composure, though, seem excessive when it comes to his wife. She returned only after he became famous, when a TV show broadcast his mobile number. “I am starting to use mobile phone, one kilogram Ericsson.” Shanti called and came to live in the slum in Chennai where he was staying. “Every Westerner surprised!” he says. “You wait five years for the same wife?” He had, and he ignored the divorce papers her parents sent him, and he decided to use her absence to work on his research. And now, he had been proved right. With his marriage restored, they returned to the village that had wanted to chain him to a tree. “I’m coming back as famous. They said, ‘We knew Muruga would do something because his forehead is very wide.’”
He and his wide forehead are now “living as a celebrity in my own place,” sitting on the floor under his daughter’s doodles, no airs, no graces. When I take out my camera, Preeti rushes to her room and returns wearing a green Scream mask, then stands next to her dad under a framed photograph of him meeting the president of India, in his VIP glasses. It’s one of the oddest family portraits I’ll ever take, and one of the best.
* * *
The next day, Muruga takes me to Jayaashree Industries. He parks his jeep in a field that holds a neem tree, which is important to him. Early on, he didn’t have an office, so he arranged meetings under a neem tree near the burial ground where he tried out his sanitary pads. When he was working on the different machine parts, he hid them among the branches for storage.
He has cupboards now, and a whole factory. People are working: grinding, packing, posting. The machines are sent in wooden crates, and they still contain some wooden parts so that they remain simple to assemble. They must be robust enough to travel a long way: this month, one is going to Nepal and another to Afghanistan. There are forty-four hundred machines now operational in twenty-five countries, according to Muruga.
Now people approach Jayaashree, but in the beginning Muruga was the Menstrual Salesman. He traveled with his story and his machines. His first expedition was to Bihar. There, he stayed for two and a half months, and one day, he saw villagers running in a flurry, here and there, to and fro. A teenage girl had hanged herself in a tree because she thought she was pregnant. Muruga realized that providing sanitary pad machines was not the only thing he could do to assist women’s health. A simple pregnancy test would have perhaps saved the girl’s life, so now he provides those alongside machines, and what he calls a cervical cancer stick, a simple urine test for abnormal cells. He says, “India is the most affected country for cervical cancer.” Actually, globally it’s Malawi, and India isn’t even in the top 20, but cervical cancer rates in India are high and disturbing.6 Is poor menstrual hygiene a factor? Muruga thinks so: he says women were “converting the cloths into bacterial form.” They were hiding their cloths, not drying them properly, and getting infections as an inevitable result.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has found that “women who used reusable absorbent pads were more likely to report symptoms of urogenital infection or to be diagnosed with at least one urogenital infection (bacterial vaginosis or urinary tract infection) than women who used disposable pads.” A literature survey by SHARE, a sanitation research consortium, found no association between poor menstrual hygiene and poor reproductive health. But only fourteen articles were studied and all were judged flawed, with varying methodologies and an overall quality that was low. “It is biologically plausible,” wrote the authors of the SHARE report, “that unhygienic MHM practices can affect the reproductive tract but the specific infections, the strength of effect, and the route of transmission remain unclear.”7
Muruga wanted to fix things, but to get to the women of Bihar, a conservative state, he had to go through the men. He did this—just avoiding being beaten up—and the machine was installed. From then on, the project was on its own. This is his business model: he calls it the butterfly. Not like a mosquito, a parasite, which is how he thinks large corporations work. They suck what they need and they leave. The butterfly takes from the flower but leaves it undamaged. He is emphatic, though: his is not a charity. People must find a means to pay for his machine. It doesn’t have to be money: he believes in the barter system and has accepted payment in goats, buffalo, cattle. The same goes for when the machine is operational: women can buy pads with tomatoes or potatoes. Once, Unilever flew Muruga to London to get his wisdom. I ask if he was paid for it (as he should have been). “No, no, I don’t take money.” It sent him by business class and gave him good accommodations, but in England he didn’t trust the food, so he lived on chocolate. Fueled by big bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk, he told Unilever that the problem with its business model was that it couldn’t sell pads for potatoes.
He shows me photos on his laptop: look, here, he took a machine up into the mountains on a donkey’s back. “Eighteen-hour drive from Dehradun. The Ganges is forming there. These are tribals. Even if you have cancer, go live there, walk for six weeks with tribals, you will have a six-pack and cancer will be gone.” The machine is working, high in the Himalayas. “It’s rural marketing. Johnson and Johnson would take another twenty-three years to get there.”
He invites me to see for myself, but not nearly two thousand miles away in Uttarakhand. Instead, we travel a couple of miles toward Coimbatore, stopping on the way for him to buy me bananas that taste like toffee. He says we will get to our destination by luck, not by driving skill. No one gets anywhere on India’s roads with anything but luck. I was once being driven for ten hours from Dehradun to Delhi, when the driver invented his own contraflow for no obvious reason, suddenly swerving into the opposite lane and driving for a mile against oncoming traffic. It still makes me cold.
Our destination is an association with a Tamil name that translates as the Association for Parents of Mentally Retarded Children. It is Muruga’s equivalent of a show home, as the building houses the only operational pad machine in Coimbatore. Most of the work here is done by the parents—I see only mothers—because even this simple machinery is complex for a child with developmental challenges. But jobs are found for them nonetheless. A nonverbal autistic boy turns the compacted cellulose into what Muruga calls fluffy (the industry term is “fluff pulp” or “fluffy pulp”). The grinder is one of the few electrical parts, and all the boy has to do is push a button and time the process. His mother says he loves to do it, though sometimes he gets entranced by his watch and the grinder overgrinds. There is such a thing as over-fluffed fluffy.
After Muruga had his dog-related Eureka moment, he sourced the cellulose in India. Now he says, once self-help groups or entrepreneurs buy his machine, they can source the material from anywhere. He has patented the machine, but he put the design online in 2007. He wants it to spread. He wants a revolution. He says, “Man is dominating the world, and we are turning the world into olive green. I beg men, please give the world to women for at least half a century, they will make better what we did.”
The feminine hygiene industry has its eyes and margins fixed on India. With so few women using anything but cloth, it sees profit and possibility in pads. But there are obstacles. Commercial sanitary pads in India are not cheap, usually costing 140 rupees ($2.13). And they are usually to be found in pharmacies or shops staffed by men. Here at the association, there is a cupboard full of sanitary pads for sale. They cost 40 rupees (about 60 cents) for a pack of eight, the standard price for Muruga-machined pads, and each producer can choose a brand name. Here, it is Kangaroo. I’m puzzled by this, and Muruga thinks it funny—“wear it and you will jump like a kangaroo”—but one of the mothers gives a beautiful explanation. Kangaroos
protect their young with ferocity and intimacy. These mothers do the same, for their children who can’t speak or function fully, in a country where social care is difficult and self-help.
At Muruga’s flat, he has a cardboard box filled with various sanitary napkin packets produced by dozens of associations. He and Shanti spread them out and I sit among them, using a few packs as cushions. They’re as soft and comfortable as you’d expect. There is Pure and Free and Vings (as Indian English pronounces Wings); and Be Cool, and Mitra (“good”), and Sakhi (“friend”). There are 990 brands across India of pads made on Muruga’s machines. Unlike the big companies’ products, his can be sold as pick-and-mix of different absorbencies. The big companies do macro; he does something different. “What Muruga did,” he says, slipping as he does into the third person, which is never not unsettling, “is made it into a micro and decentralized model of doing things, by the woman, for the woman, of the woman.” How stupid it is to produce packets of napkins all the same absorbency, when a woman’s flow differs from day to day. With his model, “a woman will come to the place, she will say, I’m having a flow only on the second day. She will take two thicker napkins, three medium, six thin.” This is not all she will say. The sanitary pad production becomes something more and better. “The moment a woman uses [a sanitary pad], she goes to another woman, they are talking, they are getting educated. We are the first women-personalized sanitary pad–making machine in the world.” Muruga is so famous he has become a Bollywood film called Pad Man, a dramatized version of his life that begins with a bass voice-over booming that “Hollywood has Batman. India has Pad Man.” It is probably only the latest step on an appropriately colorful path for a man whose first office was a neem tree. “I wanted to show the world, when you do a good thing you don’t need a fourteen-floor building with a five-degree slant and a lot of glass panels. You can do good under a tree.”
* * *
Tangy. Kotex wants me to be tangy. Its 1970s ad featuring a moody beautiful woman draped in clinging orange fabric also wants me to be fresh, and an eye-opener. This, if eye-opening means attracting attention, is a mixed message. Like every other manufacturer of what is known as “feminine hygiene,” the last thing it wants me to do is attract attention. Or to smell. I definitely mustn’t smell of blood.
There are various figures for how much the feminine hygiene industry is worth. One recent market research estimate is $23 billion.8 The business of trapping blood in various cotton-based devices is lucrative and unstoppable. It is also single-minded: its entire purpose is to chase away blood into secrecy, silence, and discretion and to make its products simultaneously indispensable and unspeakable. It has been extremely successful.
Since the beginning of humans, women have coped with their periods in the same way: on their own, discreetly. They have been so good at this, historians must guess at what they used and how often and how they disposed of it. Women’s menstrual technology rarely made it into written history, as it was mostly written by men. Free-bleeding, into clothing or onto the floor, was probably popular, though periods may have been more infrequent. Compared to us, historical women were more frequently pregnant or breastfeeding or soon dead. This is a common view, but it is too broad. There would have been class differences: wealthier women were more likely to have absent husbands who were off battling at war or at court, making it difficult for them to be endlessly pregnant. So it is that the higher-class and religious-class women are the ones who have left us occasional mentions of periods, little glints in the historical record. Women throughout time have had access to cloth, and that is probably what they used if they used anything. The Old Testament book of Isaiah instructs that gold and silver idols should be cast away “like menstruous cloths,” although the Hebrew noun—niddah—is translated in more modern versions as “disgusting things” or “unclean cloths.”9 The seventeenth-century poet John Bunyan wrote of the fake righteousness of a Pharisee, which should be condemned “as menstruous rags, as an abomination to God, and nothing but loss or dung.”10 Among Queen Elizabeth I’s recorded possessions are “vallopes of Holland cloth,” held in place by black silk girdles. Other women used “clouts.” The latest Oxford English Dictionary lists “clout,” though its modern meaning is a punch. Its secondary meaning is “a piece of cloth or clothing, especially one put to squalid purposes.” An Italian medical book translated as The Diseases of Tradesmen, an early example of occupational health writing, mentioned that surgeons avoided using women’s old clothing to dress wounds, “notwithstanding they are frequently wash’d; and that by reason of the Virulency of the menstrual Blood.”11
Between 1854 and 1914, there were at least twenty patents filed for “napkins, catamenial sacks, sanitary supports, menstrual receivers, monthly protectors, menstrual receptacles, sanitary napkins, and catamenial supporters,” according to historian Vern Bullough. I’m intrigued by the catamenial sack, a patent filed in 1903 by Lee H. Mallalieu and Mildred Coke of St. Louis, Missouri. Its rigid ring and flexible sack, used internally, look rather like a condom but may be an early instance of the menstrual cup.12 But patents give no sense of how women felt about all these devices, nor where they were supposed to access them: the catamenial sacks shop? Mass marketing was decades away. In the 1890s, writes Bullough, Johnson & Johnson began selling Lister’s Towels, a gauze-covered disposable pad, but it didn’t flourish.13
The modern era of menstrual technology really began during the First World War. Probably, throughout many wars, nurses had been aware of the useful absorbency of wads of cotton that they used for wounds, and put them to other purposes. In the Great War, this practice became formally part of the origin myth of the feminine hygiene industry, when nurses began using a Kimberly-Clark wound product called “cellucotton,” made from a by-product of sugarcane processing, as a catamenial device. In 1920, the company launched its Kotex feminine napkin.14 Then came the tampon.
There are two ways to deal with catamenial flow: absorb it, internally or externally, or stop it, with hormones. Without recourse to hormones, women must choose among various types of what the industry calls fluid management devices. Kotex became the most successful example of the external variety; and then came the internal plug. Tampons existed already, but not for menstrual blood: plugs of cotton were frequently used by doctors. The historian Sara Read quotes a seventeenth-century author of The Royal Pharmacopœa, Galenical and Chymical, who described a pessary as “a sort of solid Medicine, about a fingers length, sometimes somewhat bigger, which is put up in the Secret-parts with a Riband fasten’d to one end.”15 (Leeches with strings; plugs with ribbons. These early medicine men were impressively thrifty with their devices.)
This solid medicine was intended to “provoke the menstruum or to stop them; to hinder the falling down of the Matrix,” a marvelous word for the uterus that casts a twentieth-century film in a new light. Wartime medics were probably familiar with plugs of cotton used to stopper bleeding wounds (they still have recourse to the occasional tampon for trauma: it still works). In 1879, the British Medical Journal ran a short article on a product devised by Dr. James Hobson Aveling, an obstetrician, in a section on innovations. This Vaginal Tampon-Tube was aimed at poorer women who couldn’t afford the expensive devices currently on sale for “passing pledgets of cotton-wool into the vagina.” This new tampon tube also used pledgets but was priced at only a shilling (7 cents). The pledgets could be soaked with glycerin, tied with string or stout thread, and inserted into a simple glass tube, propelled by a wooden rod. You insert the tube, push the rod, and hope the pledgets end up in the vagina. It was supposed to be straightforward enough for women to manage it all by themselves, but in the case of uterine displacement (perhaps by ski jumping), “further adjustment by the medical man will be necessary.” There is no record of the tampon tube having caught on, despite being the first such device to appear in a prestigious medical journal.16 (I am delighted to find the same Dr. Aveling elsewhere in my database, because he once saved a young wom
an hemorrhaging after giving birth by giving her 60 drams—7.5 fluid ounces—of blood from her coachman. She soon recovered enough “to be able to remark that she was dying,” though her mental state, noted Aveling, “was not as marked and rapid as I anticipated […] perhaps due to the quantity of brandy she had taken.”)17
Over the next couple of decades, companies launched cotton plugs, but their sales were not impressive and their names are forgotten. Then there was Tampax. It doesn’t take much investigative work to find its history on the American site: there it is, in the drop-down menu headed We Care About All Women, under Building Girls’ Confidence, Educational Tools, and Disaster Relief, alongside ads for boxes of Pearl tampons, with applicators, that women and girls in disaster situations could not afford. The company’s history is as “storied and colorful” as that of the tampon itself. Except this version isn’t. The origin date of March 7, 1936, is heralded as when “Tampax Incorporated is formerly chartered under the laws of the state of Delaware.”
A more storied and colorful history is on the British site, because it included Earle Cleveland Haas, a man who is elsewhere described as an osteopath but in the Tampax story is a more respectable general practitioner. The story varies depending on the source, but each version has satisfying Muruga elements: either Haas’s wife was a ballet dancer and had been using a sponge to stop her menstrual flow and her dancing also stopped because the sponge was inadequate; or he had traveled to California and met a woman who was not his wife who told him the same thing. Either way, he wanted the dancer to keep dancing, even on those days. In the official history of Tambrands, a book called Small Wonder, Haas is a courtly man in a white shirt, a general practitioner who sees women wearing bulky and cumbersome external pads. “I just got so tired of women wearing those damned old rags,” he told a newspaper at the age of ninety-six, “and I got to thinking about it.”18
