Why Can’t I Touch Yogurt During My Period?
Battling stubborn menstrual taboos in south India
I sat next to a group of sixth grade boys this week in a rural village in southern India eating a meal of rice and sambar on a banana leaf, traditional for the area. The woman serving put the banana leaf down in front of me with the shorter end on my right side. Santhosh, one of the boys, told me in broken English to turn it the other way, with the shorter side on my left. I looked at him and asked, “Why?” He shrugged his shoulders and said in two words, “It’s culture.”
The last few weeks we’ve been running a performance for youth, traveling to different communities on the back of a 22-foot truck. It’s a mobile performance we annually put on and this year’s theme is child marriage and reproductive health, major issues facing Indian teenagers. In the performance, which uses a comic book we’ve written as the basis for the plot, our two main characters travel between reality and an alternate universe where there is gender equality.
In one part of the performance the narrator and main actors sing and dance next to a skeleton where they learn about the menstrual cycle. Jyothika, the female protagonist, sings:
“I’ve got my period and that’s it for me for the next 3 days. I can’t touch this, I can’t touch that, I can’t go near the puja (prayer) room, I can’t touch the yogurt or milk, I can’t sleep near my family, I should not leave the house, they throw food to me on a plate like a dog. Why is it like this? Is being born a woman such a sin? Is this just? Is this fair?”
I think about Thilaga Palani, the actor playing Jyothika, who is also a facilitator for our NGO. I’ve known her since 2013 and she has been one of my guides to understanding Indian culture, maybe without her even realizing it. I remember back to when we first started working together 6 years ago. She came over to my apartment in Chennai for a meeting. I was new to the apartment and told her I’d recently discovered the puja (prayer) closet, which every Hindu home I’ve been to in India has some version of. I opened it for her to take a look but she quickly pushed my hand to shut the closet door while telling me, “Next time. I have my period this week.” I looked at her with inquiring eyes. And that began my introduction to the restrictions that many Indian women face while menstruating. Eventually, I’d observe more instances of these restrictions: a married friend of mine whose in-laws require her to eat separately at a TV table while the rest of the family dines at the kitchen table; teen girls sleeping outside the front door of their one-room home in the village, separated from the family; and a general acknowledgement from 95% of the women I’ve met that they shouldn’t go into a Hindu temple while on their period.
As the next act of the play begins, I snap out of my thoughts and take a look around at the crowd. I see the girls in the audience still caught in theirs — as if it’s the first time they have heard about life while menstruating summarized as succinctly as this. They’ve grown up learning that each month when they get their period they have to alter their lifestyle. But why? Because girls here are often taught that menstruation is “dirty” blood and they are unclean while menstruating. Again, why? That is debatable, but when I ask and ask and ask the most common reply is as Santhosh the 6th grader put it — “it’s culture.”
My naïve understanding was that men must be behind these restrictions — that the women of the house must be obeying the fathers or husbands who are restricting their movement, eating and sleeping habits, etc. But the reality is that mothers, grandmothers, aunties and older sisters are passing down these traditions, are teaching the younger women in their homes what they should and should not do while menstruating. The mother is requiring her teen daughters to sleep outside. The mother-in-law is requiring her daughter-in-law to eat separately. The aunties are yelling at their nieces if they accidentally touch the yogurt or pickle jars or one of the men in the house, as if they have a disease during this one week of the month. Husbands, sons and brothers seemed to me a little clueless as to why these things happen but clearly understand not to question it — that grandma, mom and auntie know best.
I wondered if women in the household knew that menstrual blood wasn’t dirty, if things would change. Or if they knew that being told you can’t enter a temple or touch food while menstruating during the most formative time of your life sets you up for body shame, fundamentally feeling there is a part of you that is impure. If they saw the statistics that having their teen daughters sleep separately from the family meant increased chances for sexual abuse, would it change? And I thought about my own mom and aunts and myself and how sometimes we don’t have the bandwidth in life to stop and think about these things. We just do as our elders did.
Over the past 3 years, Thilaga has become one of our top facilitators on topics like gender equality and menstruation. She has regular facilitation gigs at organizations and schools in Chennai and villages in southern India. I can see how she’s trying to incorporate what she’s teaching into her own family life, especially since she’s the second oldest of five girls, from a tiny village in rural Tamil Nadu. She pushes back on menstrual blood being “dirty”. She tells her sisters that menstrual blood begins as the lining of the uterus, the blood that gives life to babies. Then she asks them, “How can it be dirty? If it is so, that means we are all born of dirty blood, correct?” And waits for the lightbulb to flash above their head. Thilaga has stopped believing she can’t touch or do certain things while menstruating, and she’s showing her sisters, and even her mom and aunties, the same. She’s breaking the cycle but more importantly realizing that she is the key to change in her home.
