(Published in Mint Lounge, October 11 2025)

In February 1620, somewhere in the vicinity of Daulatabad, the Mughal emperor Jahangir had his imagination captured by a woman. It wasn’t the conventional, lusty type of obsession that we associate with kings, however. For, as the emperor diarised later, it was some unusual physical traits in the lady that drew his eye. The girl, we read, had “a full mustache and a good handful of beard. Outwardly,” Jahangir added, “she resembled a man.” In a flash of sovereign will—but also the distinctly offensive attitude of a nosy uncle—he commanded some women to “take her aside” for an examination. The idea was to determine if she was genuinely female. “Apparently,” India’s greatest ruler of the time exclaimed—yet again channelling his inner uncle—“she did not differ from other women by an iota.” Her ordeal over, one trusts the girl was allowed to get on with her day.

If facial hair on a gardener’s daughter triggered an unbecoming curiosity in our man, in male circles, the same article provoked very different feelings, including threatening ones. Men, after all, used their moustaches and beards as proof of everything from virility to political affiliation. For instance, though their central Asian ancestors glorified beards, the Mughals had, from Akbar’s time, shaved their chins. This was not about fashion; Akbar was adopting the Rajput style, as part of a strategy of political seduction. Jahangir followed the same, as did most of his dutiful court. However, around the same time the emperor met the bearded woman, one of his own children stopped shaving. Relations between father and son had lately been frosty, and the prince’s flaunting of facial hair was neither a case of sloth nor of sartorial innovation. Instead, it was a mark of defiance. In a household full of shiny-cheeked men, the beard was the proverbial middle finger to daddy.

But because we are an argumentative species, there were also disputes over exactly how much facial hair made one man enough. Orthodox Muslims at Akbar’s court, for example, insisted that the beard was key to masculinity. Those who endorsed shaving, disagreed. One charming theory they propounded linked beards directly to the testicles. That is, facial hair exacted large amounts of power from the nether regions and, thus, left men less virile. Men, in other words, shaved to protect their manhood; to prevent masculine energies depleting via unchecked follicles. The conservative Islamic elite snorted at this. Indeed, even in the 19th century, one way in which the odd firebrand maulvi could inspire resistance against the British was by arguing that a government of the clean-shaven— “men with women’s faces”—could never be tolerated by manly (bearded) Muslims. The hairy had to prevail over the smooth.

Facial hair was also, in India, a mark of faith and identity. A central grievance that led to the Vellore Mutiny by East India Company troops in 1806 was that British officers had imposed standardised moustaches and banned beards altogether. It might have felt like a simple matter of military uniformity, but what the sahibs ignored was that facial hair advertised each soldier’s social category. Or as a subsequent enquiry rued, “Nothing could appear more trivial to the public interests than the length of the hair on the upper lip of a sepoy.” Yet to the latter, “the shape and fashion of the whisker is a badge of his caste, and an article of his religion.” To be clear this wasn’t only an Indian preoccupation: a century before, Peter the Great in Russia had even imposed a beard tax to enforce shaving, personally scraping the faces of some nobles. But his ideas faced objections, including from religious dignitaries, who viewed beard-removal as blasphemous.

Of course, there were yet times that saw men willingly shed facial hair. When, during the great rebellion of 1857, Jhansi fell to the British, the latter unleashed unimaginable horrors in the city. Some of the defeated soldiers who had served the legendary Rani Lakshmi Bai are said to have “rushed to find barbers to cut off their moustaches and sidelocks”. Those who couldn’t locate any, “hacked off their beards with their own swords”. For facial hair gave them away as military men, and therefore as targets for violence; getting rid of these appendages held out the possibility of survival. But dangerous situations aside, there were also comical ones. In 1849 the (clean shaven) British governor-general Lord Dalhousie casually pooh-poohed white men with giant moustaches. The comment was unexpectedly relayed all over by the press, leading to an epidemic of shaving, till, as Dalhousie chuckled, “moustaches fell like leaves in October.”

References to facial hair also appear in contexts of resistance, in rousing men against various injustices. A song by Damodar Chapekar—who with his brother was convicted for assassinating a British official—demands of Indians, for instance: “Fools, what is the use of your being men? Of what use are your big moustaches” if they could not reject imperial “servitude”? Not long after, in the south Ethiraj Surendranath Arya too fired up Indians by citing the principle behind moustaches. Merely sporting facial hair was nonsense, for “even prawns had long moustaches”. It was action that mattered; only by rising against the British could Indians truly earn the right to facial accoutrements. All along, anti-caste leaders also drew on the glamour of the moustache. As marginalised groups asserted themselves, their menfolk began to wear upturned moustaches, appropriating and subverting the privileges claimed by erstwhile caste superiors.

In fact—in what might tell us something about contemporary India—flaunted as an assertion of right and status, hair on the upper lip remains dangerous. It is all very pleasing that Indians twirled their moustaches provocatively at white men to make a nationalist statement. But Indians performing the same act before other brown men can lead to hideous consequences. Every few years news surfaces of Dalits being attacked for sporting handlebar moustaches, for example. It does not matter if you are a farmer or a “techie” on a trip to the village: this specific form of twisting facial hair is still, in many parts of the country, seen as the prerogative of local elites. Dalit youth have been dragged to barbershops at knife point, their violent shearing recorded and circulated on social media to stress a point. Moustaches, in that sense, remain, even in the 21st century, a contested mark of identity.

There’s a lot, then, to bear in mind as we approach the month of “Movember”. Some will let their facial hair run riot for a cause, others to look attractive (or so they imagine). But to all that overgrowth, there is a long history—and while much of it is entertaining, some remains disturbing.