On a road trip through south India last year a group of my friends wanted to stop at a Hindu temple of particular significance, but one held back. “I want to come …” she said, “but I can’t, as I have my period.” Here was a 38-year-old Indian woman, a barrister with a postgraduate degree, afraid to set foot in a temple because she was menstruating.
The taboo surrounding menstruation still prevails in both rural and urban India, where menstrual blood is considered impure. Some women are forbidden from preparing food or even entering the kitchen, one in five schoolgirls drop out of education when they begin menstruating, and more than 70% of women don’t have access to sanitary products.
Nikita Azad, 20, an English student at Government College for Girls in Patiala in Punjab recently launched the #HappyToBleed campaign after the board of the Hindu Sabarimala temple in Kerala – which has never admitted women aged between 10 and 50, whether or not they have their period – said that they may one day consider allowing women to enter, but only after the invention of a machine to detect whether or not they are menstruating. The board’s president, Prayar Gopalakrishnan, has since claimed that the quote was taken out of context, but stands firm on the refusal of admittance to women.
Azad wrote an open letter to Gopalakrishnan in which she questioned the “retrogressive, barbaric, and misogynist customs” and took to Twitter and Facebook posting photos of herself holding up sanitary pads along with the words “Happy to Bleed”.
“I was surprised to hear such a statement from one of the most so-called historic temples,” says Azad. “But as Indian women we regularly encounter these things in our daily lives. My mother used to tell me that I’m not supposed to go to the temple, and whenever an advertisement [for sanitary products] came on the television everyone would rush to the remote control to try to change it.”
For Azad, along with millions of Indian women, menstruation was presented as a taboo from the day of her first period. “If I went to the bathroom with a sanitary napkin, I couldn’t carry it in my hand, or even my pocket – I had to take the whole handbag in. Shaming menstruation is a sign of patriarchy. The hashtag #happytobleed is a sarcastic dig at the authorities that shame menstruation. We bleed. Accept it and deal with it.”
The Sabarimala temple has a longstanding tradition of not admitting women of menstruation age, and followers of the temple’s deity have often argued that the exclusion of women has been misinterpreted; that they are, in fact, being singled out during their period as goddesses to be nurtured. Azad laughs: “We don’t want to be considered as goddesses, or objects of pleasure, we want to be considered as humans.”
The HappyToBleed campaign has attracted thousands of followers – as well as a good number of men attacking Azad online and accusing her of being “overeducated”.
“There are pessimistic people who have called us whores and prostitutes and stopped me on the street,” she says. “This always [happens] when you oppose long-standing traditions, but when we do have support from people who want to change, then it doesn’t matter.”
The #HappyToBleed campaign ends on 4 December but Azad’s goal isn’t to be granted entry to the temple, so much as to break the taboo around menstruation and encourage conversation. “It’s a matter of gross negligence, and we want to push for the state to take responsibility for providing menstrual care to women.” She also hopes to present her case to India’s health ministry though she is aware that it will take more than one person to create a shift. “If society wants to change, then it will.”
