Metaphors have a purpose. They allude to a deeper meaning that represents the human initiative to hedge a bet. The veil is mankind’s oldest metaphor—the curtain between life and death through which the soul passes into the great beyond. The purdah is a metaphor for mystery; it hides from the male gaze or seduces with anticipation. It has been used both in love and war, both considered metaphors for each other. Salome famously wore seven veils while dancing before Antipas to ask for John the Baptist’s head. The absence of a description of their unveiling in Oscar
Wilde’s celebrated play ‘Salomé’ makes the erotica of death and sex powerfully suggestive—the modern striptease is attributed to the play. Nowhere is the veil’s sexuality as apparent as in Islamic literature. For example, in the immortal One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade tells the ‘Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies’: “One day he was standing in the market, leaning on his basket, when a woman approached him. She wore a Mosul cloak, a silk veil, a fine kerchief embroidered with gold, and a pair of leggings tied with fluttering laces. When she lifted her veil, she revealed a pair of beautiful dark eyes graced with long lashes and a tender expression, like those celebrated by the poets.” The veil is the divider between promise and revelation, mystery and exploration.
It was Saint Paul, regarded the “inventor of Christianity,” who ordered that Christian women wear veils “...every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonours her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.” (Corinthians 11:2-16). The Devil has enough material to quote from the Scripture, obviously. But as with everything, the veil, too, changed when the Medieval world discovered fashion between the 13th and 14th centuries and women hit back.
The 13th-century friar Minor Salimbene de Adam of Bologna, Italy, reported that “women learned to use the veil prescription to become ten times more beautiful and to attract even more attention, by wearing veils made of silk, byssus and woven gold. They then converted the veil’s obligation of modesty to a form of visibility and even of luxurious display,” according to the history professor Maria Giuseppiana Muzzarelli. Statues and paintings of the period began to depict the Madonna and Saints in elaborate, beautiful and luxurious veils adorned with pearls and peacock feathers. Writes Muzzarelli, “Evidently, this headgear did not indicate modesty and submission.”
In parts of feudal North India, initially, only ladies of exalted rank and lineage wore the ghunghat, or veil in public; the richly embroidered diaphanous fabric was not affordable to all. Many anthropologists attribute the Hindu purdah as a protective reaction to Islamic invasions. Known as ghunghat, ghunghta, ghumta, orhni, laaj, chunari, jhund, kundh, it covers the heads and faces of many married Hindu, Jain, and Sikh women. Clearly, the invasions have not stopped.
Across faiths and societies, the metaphor for the female veil is modesty. Forcing women to take it off is considered an outrage. The female body has been the battlefield of morality since the Garden of Eden. Hindu, Muslim or Christian, there is little difference between the veil and the shroud when both the invaders and the guardians come calling. The metaphor of purity is lost in the allegory of public virtue.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com