Traditional Barbarity?

10 April 2011 – What I thought was going to be a nice little neighbourhood gathering turned into a combination of culture shock and immersion for me. My Indian neighbours from a few doors down, the milkman Pachiappan (Raja) and his wife, Sathiyavani came by last week with an invitation to their two daughters’ ear piercing ceremony. 

I said yes gladly for a number of reasons. One, I believe good neighbourliness needs to be cultivated. If you share the good times, you will also have friends to share the bad times. Second, amid the increasing rift that politicians have forced between the different races, trying to get us to play against each other, I feel that a show of unity would be a show of strength. Three, as a parent, I would feel slighted if people I invited did not bother to come share the joy of my child at an especially important milestone. 

The ear piercing ceremony is indeed one of the biggest milestones of a child’s life. Traditional Hindus believe that regardless of sex, a true Hindu should have 9 holes in their body before their death. Seven are natural orifices: the eyes, nostrils, mouth, genitalia and anus, while two more need to be made. This manifests as holes in the ears. The ceremony is usually done when the children are quite young. This is possibly because there is less flesh to pierce, and that healing is fastest when young. Some traditionalists believe that if a person dies without holes in the ears, the ears need to be pierced before the body is prepared for burial. 

I guess what shocked me was that I never related ‘celebration’ to ‘pain’. Which is very strange, because as a Catholic, the penultimate point of a Mass is the Eucharist which recalls the suffering of Christ. 

Indian celebrations are explosions of colour and sound. More than any other race in Malaysia, the Indians love going all out to celebrate. Hence, I walked in to a rainbow of gorgeous sarees and beautifully dressed hair. 

A procession of family and friends begin the ear piercing ceremony.

The women carry the items used for piercing, as well as some offerings.

Traditional Indian classical performers play throughout the ceremony.

Some of the offerings and prayer gifts.

The ears are marked.

The agony begins.

The earring backs are screwed in.

Post-trauma. Raja with one of his bewildered daughters.

The event began with a procession of relatives bearing the items which would be used for the ear piercing ceremony. They are heralded by musicians playing the Indian horn and drum.

The musicians kept up their playing all though the ceremony, and I realized later, this must also be so that the screams of the children would be drowned out by the powerful cacophony of wind instrument and percussion. 

Ear piercing to me is a quick, bloodless issue, done with a quick stud gun, and over in a minute. I guessed that is why I ended up transfixed with horror and slightly appalled at the way traditional ear-piercings are done. Because Indian ear ornaments are heavy, the earring-posts of Indian earrings are made thicker and heavier, so as to evenly distribute the weight of the ornaments. The holes made by modern piercing guns are not big enough to accommodate traditional Indian jewelry, and that is why most Indians continue to practice this traditional method of piercing. 

At the ceremony, the child is placed in the lap of a priest while the traditional piercer marks the ears to ensure balance. New earrings, traditionally purchased by the brother of the child’s mother, are then pushed through the ears. “Pushed” sounds quick and effortless, but I broke into cold sweat seeing the process, my heart going out to the terrified child as the posts were screwed into her little lobes. 

While there were some murmurs of pity, the assembly took it all in their stride. It is a common enough occurrence that nearly everyone at the ceremony had a child who had undergone that, or had witnessed close relatives undergoing the same. 

After the piercing is done, the assembly is invited to a meal. I have to say the appeal of fragrant briyani, mutton marsala, chicken curry, vegetable dhall and prawns with quail’s eggs in sambal lost a lot of their appeal when I continued to behold the poor little girls, Pachaiammal and Nithyammal, clinging to their father in confusion at the pain they’ve had to endure. 

Raja’s family was very glad to have me present, and showed me off like a trophy, as I was the only non-Indian guest. I know that the pain will pass, and the girls will probably forget their ordeal soon, but I could not wrap my head around a celebration which made the two guests of honour shriek and wail. 

I went home with greater understanding of the significance of the ceremony, but I think largely, I was thanking my lucky stars that Erin would never be subject to this. If she chooses, at 15, to have multiple holes put into her lobes at once, as I did (I figured if I was going to hurt for one, I might as well go for broke and hurt for four holes at once in one ear), I’m not going to stop her. I’m just thankful that in this life of hard knocks I won’t need to hold her down to get her ears punched out.