HAIR LOOM: TheTirumala temple and (below) devotees after getting tonsured. Pictures by Reena Martins

A pilgrim getting his head shaved at the Tirumala temple in Andhra Pradesh probably doesn’t know his hair is in the midst of a battle in court. But the legal wrangle — which could make the devotee’s hair stand on end — has pitted temple authorities against hair exporters. And at stake is hair worth hundreds of crores of rupees.

Every four months, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) auctions kilos and kilos of hair, which are mostly bought by businessmen who export it to countries where wigs are a lucrative business.

But trouble broke out in February when an auction was underway. Suddenly a group of TTD officers entered the auction hall and asked the bidders to leave, recounts Kishore Gupta, who is one of the growing ranks of businessmen exporting hair to Europe, China and the US. “They said we had set our bids lower than the initial bidding amount.”

The TTD declared that bidders who had quoted a minimum bidding rate lower than the one stipulated by it would lose their deposits — some 20 per cent of the intended purchase, which could be no less than 200kg. The TTD auction officer, Srinivasa Rao, says the bidders forfeited Rs 35.5 crore, though some buyers claim it was twice as much.

The issue hit the headlines when a group of hair exporters moved the Andhra Pradesh High Court recently, resulting in a stay on the hair sold at a TTD auction in March. “We could sell only Rs 14 crore of the Rs 50 crore worth hair at the March auction,” complains Rao.

The battle revolves around the price of hair, which exporters claim the temple authorities have been raising arbitrarily. “The TTD hikes its rates by 10-15 per cent at every auction, whereas the international market revises its rates only once or twice a year,” says George Cherian, a Chennai-based hair exporter.

The TTD, on the other hand, says the buyers are ganging up against the temple. “The buyers form a syndicate and quote a low price,” says M. Balaji, deputy executive officer of the TTD’s kalyanakattas or tonsuring halls. The price of hair varies according to its length and quality — going up from Rs 60 a kilo to Rs 12,000.

While some hair exporters have moved court for a refund of their deposit, Gupta is fighting a legal battle to be allowed to buy Rs 12 crore worth of hair from the TTD. He says he had to forfeit the Rs 7 crore he had deposited with the TTD before the February auction.

“After the TTD objected to our bidding rate as being lower than theirs, I raised my rate, in keeping with theirs,” says Gupta, who stayed away from the next TTD auction in protest. The TTD’s September auction will be online through the website of the government-owned Metal Scrap Trading Corporation Ltd, says Rao. “We will be inviting global tenders.”

The legal battle has brought many issues to the fore. The hair, Gupta points out, is sold without the buyers getting to check the goods. “When we buy sandalwood at auctions, we can see what we’re bidding for,” he says.

He also believes TTD’s categorising of hair lengths is “unscientific”. Clumping together hair that ranges from 16 to 30 inches in length has no rationale, he argues.

Cherian complains that the hair in the TTD’s warehouse is in danger of disintegrating as it has no provisions for moisture checks.

But Rao argues that before being stored, the hair, which is weighed in the presence of an auction officer, is manually sorted out and sun dried — 1,200kg at a time, under polycarbonate sheets. “In summer, twice the quantity can be dried in a single day,” says Rao.

At peak times, 45,000-50,000 people have their heads tonsured daily at the TTD’s 16 tonsuring halls — two of which run round the clock. The daily average of 800kg of hair harvested could easily cross a thousand kilos on weekends and at peak season. In a six-hour shift, any of the 650 TTD barbers — 60 of whom are women — could shave off an average of 60 heads, says Balaji.

With the increasing number of devotees, the TTD plans to raise the number of barbers. Nowadays, they are also paid better. Thirty years ago, Rama (not his real name), a genial, potbellied barber attached to the TTD’s VIP wing, began on a daily wage of Rs 15. He now earns Rs 25,000 a month. On rare occasions, the tips even exceed his salary. The Telugu star-cum-politician, Chiranjeevi, once tipped him Rs 1 lakh, Rama says.

The barbers at TTD have to pass a test before they are hired, says Balaji. But to take the test, you have to belong to the mangala or barber caste. “They are born for that purpose,” says Balaji nonchalantly.

The conflict with the TTD, exporters like Gupta fear, could result in the “worst kind of undercutting” and a subsequent reduction in export prices.

But its impact on the local market suggests quite the contrary.

Rajesh Thakur, who sells wigs to Bollywood, says he has been buying hair at a 15 per cent price hike from agents in south India over the past four to five months. His wigs for Bollywood actresses need 50-60 inch long hair, which would cost him up to Rs 1.5 lakh a kilo, says Thakur, who entered the business as an apprentice in 1991 when wigs sold at Rs 2,000-3,000 a piece. Now he sells women’s wigs for Rs 20,000-60,000 and male ones for Rs 6,000-10,000.

Kailashnath Gupta, another bigwig in the hair business in Mumbai who supplies wigs to the film industry, says he has been buying double drawn remy — which is the trademark for good quality, uniformly trimmed hair — by paying an extra Rs 6,000 per kilo over the past six months. When he joined the business over four decades ago, a kilo of hair cost Rs 600-1,400 a kg.

With temple hair being harder to come by, exporters make their money by sourcing and selling non-remy hair, which is broken and waste hair, discarded from the comb, bought off ragpickers or collected every week from rural households. “About 70 per cent of the hair export market runs on non-remy hair, which costs one third the price of remy,” says Cherian.

Remy hair has a big market in Europe and US, where it is woven into wigs. Most of the non-remy hair finds its way to China, which in turn makes wigs and sells it to the American or African market, especially Nigeria.

In the international market, hair that is 10-15 inches long sells better, though longer tresses of 20-23 inches have their exotic appeal too. “If Shakira wears her hair long and curly, everyone follows,” says Cherian, explaining that the demand is decided by fashion trends.

Clearly, there is more to hair than meets the eye. And for the time being, at least, hair is turning into a knotty affair.