EVERY YEAR, 42-year-old Habbu Ali waits eagerly for the month of Shravan on the Hindu calendar, which stradles July and August on the Gregorian one. Ali belongs to a family of traditional tattoo artists, for whom Shravan, considered the holiest month of the year, is a time of peak business. This year, however, he was badly disappointed. Even after visiting numerous villages and melas around his home village of Khewrajpur, in Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad district, Ali found only a small number of customers.
“Every year the demand for tattoos is diminishing,” he told me when I visited in August. Sitting outside his thatch-roofed house, he looked frail, and older than his 42 years. “I only made around five dozen tattoos this season. A decade ago, I used to get that much business in one or two days time.”
Many generations of Ali’s ancestors made a living from their art, but Ali, a father of 11 children, no longer can. Average incomes from tattooing, he said, are down to at most Rs 1,500 a month. “I don’t want my kids to take this profession forward,” he said, “and neither do they.” To make ends meet, he has opened a bicycle repair shop.
As tastes and beliefs change, practices of traditional tattooing are dying out in much of India. And as those practices fade away, they threaten to take with them entire lexicons of symbols and meanings that have endured for centuries.
In north India, and especially among Hindu communitties, tattoos were once widely believed to possess remarkable powers. A tattoo on a woman’s forehead, for example, was thought to promote the safe delivery of children. Tattoos also represented financial status, and carried social meaning. A girl married without a tattoo was taunted that her parents were mean and poor, and every married woman was supposed to have a Sita ki rasoi tattoo—the name translates to “Sita’s kitchen”—considered a charm for women managing a household. Another popular tattoo for young women involved five dots in a cross, representing the five Pandava brothers of the Mahabharat—a reminder for brides-to-be to live amicably with their bothers-in-law, as Draupadi did. Other designs were meant to ward off the evil eye, and myriad forms of misfortune.
“The art has gone under transformation over the period of time,” Swapna Samel, co-author of an unpublished paper titled ‘Religious Tattoos: Their Socio-cultural Significance in Indian Society,’ told me. “Earlier a tattoo was worn for religious purpose. After that it was identified with social hierarchy, occupation and then caste. Today it has become a fashion statement. The art still stays relevant and practiced in tribes. It is being redefined in urban areas, as there is disconnect between today’s generation and earlier ethos.”
But there is more to the decline of traditional tattooing than just evolving beliefs. Many young men in rural areas, where the army and the paramilitary forces are large employers, have shunned tattoos ever since those organisations introduced restrictions on body art. Also, many of today’s tattoo enthusiasts prefer intricate and multi-coloured designs, but traditional artists only work in black, with crude home-made machines that restict them to basic patterns. And they re-use needles for multiple customers, which scares away those wary of HIV and other communicable diseases.
Many old artists simply don’t have the resources to upgrade to modern equipment. “When it is hard for us to make ends meet how can we buy such expensive machines?” 43-year-old Waseeb Ahmad asked when I visited Taukalpur, a village of tattoo artists in Uttar Pradesh’s Pratapgarh district. “Even if we buy, no one will come to us,” he added. “The city folks go to studios to get themselves inked.” Taukalpur consists entirely of mud houses, which are synonymous with poverty in rural India. The entire community has pledged not to pass their art on to newer generations, and many have already taken up alternative professions.
It’s not just among tattoo artists that the old art and beliefs are disappearing. Even many people who received traditional tattoos in their youth are unaware of what the designs stand for. Early in August, I met Rajkumari, a 50-year-old mehendi artist with a Sita ki rasoi on her right hand, outside a Hanuman temple near Connaught Place in central Delhi. “This is just how they were made in our time,” she answered to my questions. “They have no meaning.”