Image below: photo by Gurumustuk Singh
Roundtable
Pre-Turban Grooming:
The Roundtable Open Forum # 40, August 4 - 10
EDITOR
The Rules of the forum are posted here on the right, and need to be followed strictly by all participants.
The following is this week's (August 4 - 10) topic for discussion, which should focus on the questions posed therein:
Pre-turban Grooming
Concurrently published on sikhchic.com is an article - "Life Before The Patka". Please read it ...
Building on it, we would like to know of your experiences - as a young boy or girl, or as a parent of one - in grooming hair before you or your child was old enough to wear a turban.
Your experiences with a joorrah or gut, a patka or parna, keski or dastaar ... and what triggered your final switch to the turban!
Your stories, good or bad, are part of our collective experience ... and our history.
Conversation about this article
1: Balwant Singh (New Jersey, U.S.A.), August 06, 2010, 12:24 PM.
Sunday mornings from my childhood are so rich with images of all in the family washing their hair, letting it hang over their towel-draped backs, and just hanging around in the garden sun, relaxing, playing, reading, snoozing, shooting the breeze. It was a mandatory weekly ritual and we all looked forward to it. We still do it here but there's something missing - maybe it's the servants who kept us fed with whatever tickled our fancy - pakoras, fried fish, mutthee and achaar - and ah yes, the bottomless pot of chaa!
2: Jasbir Singh (Ludhiana, Punjab), August 06, 2010, 3:52 PM.
I grew up in the state of U.P. in Eastern India, in the heartland of the Hindi/Hindu region. There were two of us Sikhs in my class in high school, one wore a gut and the other a joorrah encased in a handkerchief. There were four or five amongst the Hindu boys in the class who, according to Hindu custom, wore a choti or tikki (a tuft of longer hair hanging at the back of the head, pig-tail style). I don't know why, but being Sikh gave us an aura of power over the others - the others deferred to us 'Punjabis'. On the other hand, the Hindu boys in the chotis were treated badly by all, and deemed nerds. It's a dichotomy I've never been able to explain away in all of my years.
3: Sunny (London, England), August 09, 2010, 9:50 AM.
Born and raised in London, England, until I was four years old, my hair was styled in a braid. The next few years until the age of 14, I wore a traditional joorrah with a white handkerchief, occasionally flirting with a patka but nothing consistent. The switch to full dastaar was made at age 14. I being a relatively tall and growing teenager, my parents felt I had out-grown the joorrah and hence a switch to the turban was required. Having worn a joorrah for so long, I can't say I welcomed the switch, but once the turban was on, there was no looking back and it was and still is 'me and my turban all the way'! A few people have mentioned the evolution of the patka style, noting current day trends. I've noticed a lot of young boys wearing a patka almost like a bandana, i.e. rather than tie the patka securely around the joorrah, they simply leave the cloth flowing off the back of the head.