Mane Course

THE WIG-MAKERS OF Baniban Jagadishpur in West Bengal like to describe their jobs in amusing ways. They will, for instance, often tell curious visitors that they don’t just make wigs, but mar­riages too, the suggestion being that a single bald­ing male, fitted out with a Baniban Jagadishpur wig, will find little trouble in landing a bride.

In this village, where many human hair-processing and wig-making workshops have earned it the name of Bengal’s wig village, one of the most famous of these workshops belongs to Sekendar Ali. Unlike many other workshops here, which are tiny enterprises operating out of houses, Ali’s is much bigger, with close to 150 people working for him. Some say it was Ali’s grandfather, a wigmaker named Pyar Ali, who after learning his craft working in then Bombay’s famous Maganlal Dresswalla, which supplied costumes and accessories for many old Bollywood classics like Mughal-E-Azam, set up the first wig-making workshop in the vil­lage. “My grandfather was the first one who started making wigs here. The people who worked with him, and later my father, then set up their own workshops in this area,” Ali says. “There are about 35 factories today in this small village, with many locals employed.”

Baniban Jagadishpur isn’t of course the only village involved in hair trade and wig-making. There are several places across West Bengal, in the districts of How­rah, Murshidabad, Malda, and Purba Medinipur, where waste hair collected from homes and barber salons, and higher qual­ity hair collected from tonsure halls in big temples, make their way to these workshops to be washed, soaped, processed, and turned into wigs, hair extensions, and a number of other hair products. Another large hub is south­ern India, in states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kar­nataka, where its famous temples provide a ready source of hair.

This collecting and processing of human hair in India is part of a largely invisible but thriving export industry. India today is considered one of the largest suppliers of human hair glob­ally. Raw Indian hair, collected and processed into semi-finished products, then makes its way abroad, often to China and other countries in Asia, where they are made into finished goods, and other places like the US and Europe. The global market for wigs and extensions itself is huge. According to the market research firm Future Market Insights, it was worth $6.78 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $15.27 billion by 2034. Despite the slump in exports in India during the pandemic, it is a trade that has been growing rapidly in recent years. Last year, Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Anupriya Patel told Rajya Sabha that exports of human hair had shot up from $34.46 million in 2018-19 to $169.23 million in 2022-23. There was a pandemic-induced slump of two years in this period when exports crashed to $5.70 million in 2019-20 and $11.65 million in 2020-21. But apart from this, according to traders, the market has been growing rapidly.

India today is considered one of the largest suppliers of human hair globally. Raw Indian hair, collected and processed into semi-finished products, then makes its way abroad

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But with this boom has come, not unexpectedly, an undesir­able growth—that of smuggling. Border forces in West Bengal and the northeastern states now routinely seize trucks trans­porting vast amounts of human hair across the border into Myanmar and Bangladesh, which are known to have thriving hair-processing industries with cheap labour. Two years ago, when the Border Security Force seized 38kg of human hair stuffed in 10 sacks in West Bengal’s Nadia district, the then DIG of BSF’s South Bengal Frontier SS Guleria admitted that just the previous year, his contingent had made two big busts of human hair, one of around 12kg and another of 397kg.

The Directorate of Enforcement, which has been investigating one such case involving hair smuggling by a Hyderabad-based hair exporting firm, has found, according to recent reports, that it was worth ₹11,793 crore. This case, which allegedly took place through a three-point corridor of Hyderabad, Mizoram, and Myanmar, involved several hair traders from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh selling hair to shell entities in the Northeast and Kolkata, from where the consignments were sent onward via land, first to Myanmar and then to China. Money was then sent to these traders via hawala networks or through Chinese apps.

“It’s a big issue,” says Sathish Gandhi, the director of the Chennai-based Allure Hair Products, which processes and ex­ports hair. “Smuggling has been going on for some time. But it has grown a lot more in recent times.”

“Indian hair is versatile and among the most demanded,” says George Cherian, the CEO of Raj Hair International, one of the larger Indian exporters of hair products, as he describes the qualities that make Indian hair so much in demand. “For the Eu­ropean market, for instance, in its texture and density level, it is very similar to those of the Europeans.” Another reason why it is so coveted is because of the way many Indian women take care of their tresses, growing and oiling them regularly, and staying away from dyes and bleaches and other such hair products. Some international firms like Great Lengths, one of the leading hair extension brands in the UK, even proudly boast of buying hair from Hindu temples, which it classifies as “ethical hair”.

“Indian hair is versatile and among the most demanded. For the European market, for instance, in its texture and density level, Indian hair is very similar to those of the Europeans,” says George Cherian, CEO, Raj Hair International

Trade in human hair relies on, the anthropologist Emma Tarlo writes in her book Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, a gap in wealth, opportunities or values between those willing to part with their hair and those who end up acquiring it at its final destination. The most popular hair that enters the global market of wigs, as Tarlo shows in her book examining the global trade in human hair, tends unsurprisingly to be black.

South Korea was the centre of wig manufacturing in the 1960s, but as its wealth increased, manufacturing moved to China. Today, this has further moved to other regions in Asia.

The trade in Indian hair is a bit different. Its supply does centre quite a bit on the economic limitations of its donors—the many women who collect their waste hair in homes and the kabadi­wallas who collect them—but there is also a cultural element, the people who tonsure their heads in temples out of devotion.

These two types are classified separately by human hair ex­porters and the prices they fetch vary widely. The hair called remy is the prized hair of devotees that is auctioned by temples. The other sort, colloquially referred to as “goli” or “chutti” or non-remy by traders, is waste hair collected from salons and the homes of the poor who save them. The non-remy may appear to have no value, but combine millions of individual strands left over from various combs, untangle and straighten them, then shampoo and process them, and they acquire a value. Estimates vary, but according to Cherian, the premium temple hair only accounts for about 35 per cent of the hair exported from India. The rest is waste hair. “So, while the large part is non-remy hair, value wise, the highest is remy,” he says. The prices for the hair vary widely too. “It all depends on the length and quality. But good quality and long hair, say one kg of 25-inch hair from the Tirupati [the Sri Venkateswara temple] temple can go as high as ₹33,000,” says AL Kishore Kumar, a hair trader from Chennai. “A kg of decent non-remy hair might get you a maximum of about ₹9,000.”

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The auctioning of hair is now an important source of revenue for many big temples. At the Sri Venkateswara temple in Tiruma­la, where it is estimated its barbers shave around 1.2 million heads annually, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) which ad­ministers the temple, revealed last year that it was expecting to earn about ₹126 crore through sale of human hair in the 2023-24 fi­nancial year. As the value of human hair has increased, there have even been disputes between temples and traders, with accusations of cartelisation by traders and fixing of prices, resulting in temples like the one in Tirumala opting to auction hair online. There have even been talks in recent times of increasingly many women be­ing reluctant to part with their hair. At one point, it is said, TTD was offering free laddoos as an incentive to long-haired women to get their heads tonsured, although this was quickly withdrawn after it drew criticism. “It is not alarming right now, but it is definitely happening,” Kumar says. “You don’t find the same eagerness to get their heads shaved among women who come for a darshan nowa­days.” Trade in human hair did occur in India in the past, too, but much of this seemed haphazard. “In earlier times, the collection and sale of pilgrims’ hair was far more sporadic and much of the hair simply went to waste or was used by local women for extend­ing the length of their own plaits and buns. In Allahabad, when it was realised that British hair dealers were discreetly buying up pilgrims’ hair for use in the wig industry, local people objected and the trade was temporarily banned. Nonetheless, by 1900, ‘native barber shops’ were selling ‘a mixture of animal skins and long native hair’ cut from ‘the religiously inclined’ at the bathing ghats of Benares,” Tarlo writes in her book Entanglement.

“You don’t find the same eagerness nowadays among women who come for a darshan to get their heads shaved,” says AL Kishore Kumar, hair trader

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Human hair exports from India saw a big boost sometime in the mid-1960s. The Cold War was at its peak, and the US, a big market for wigs and hair products, Tarlo writes, banned the import of hair from communist countries. But this boost to Indian hair exports was shortlived because of the arrival of synthetic hair, which many then believed would replace the use of human hair in wigs entirely. “The hair market just crashed globally then,” says Cherian.

Cherian’s father, the founder and currently the chairman of Raj Hair International Benjamin Cherian, started exporting hair in 1969, around the time the hair trade was bouncing back. The firm initially exported different things like granite, feldspar, quartz, seafood, and others, but started exporting human hair when they got an enquiry from a large Japanese firm. Initially, most of their exports revolved around non-remy hair collected from barber shops. “But that is a low-value item. So, we decided to focus on value-added products,” Cherian says. They moved towards specialising in high-quality remy hair from temples and began working on semi-finished and finished products like wigs.

Increasingly, more exporters in India are trying to move up the value chain, from being exporters of just raw and processed hair to developing semi-processed and fully-processed products. But this is easier said than done. Labour costs in places like Myanmar and Ban­gladesh are said to be particularly low, and countries like China possess the technical know how and machinery to produce these products.

This is where the smuggling of hair causes particular hurt. Gandhi, currently part of an Indian delegation to Bologna in Italy, to promote his products at the beauty trade show Cosmoprof, says that many smaller Chinese importers now get vast quantities of raw hair from India smuggled into Bangladesh and Myanmar, where plants using cheap local labour get the hair processed, and then moved to China, to make finished goods. “So, when these products then hit the global market, many Indian companies struggle to match their prices,” he says.

Two years ago, to check this growth in smuggling, the Indian government made it mandatory to acquire a licence for exporting raw human hair. Those involved in the trade however say hair con­tinues to make its way illegally across the border. What also took place after the new rules came into place, according to reports, is that smaller exporters, now unable to get licences, simply sold their products at big discounts to bigger exporters with licences. Some of these big exporters are currently being probed for under-invoicing the value of their consignment and smuggling. Most large Indian firms who process and export semi-finished products say the best option will be to enforce a complete ban on the export of raw unpro­cessed hair, making it available only for the local industry to process and export abroad as semi-finished or finished goods.

Like many products traded globally, the market of human hair tends to be dictated by elements often beyond its control. If it was the US ban on so-called communist hair in the 1960s that transformed the global supply chains of human hair; or the arrival of synthetic hair that sent the hair market crashing a few years later; then a couple of decades back, it was the discovery by a group of Israeli rabbis that the hair in most human-hair wigs came from Indian temples which sent shockwaves to Indian traders. Women from orthodox Jewish communities in countries like the US tend to be a big market for wig-makers, since they cover their hair after mar­riage as a mark of modesty, using items like wigs, scarves, and hats to do so. The rabbis deemed the wigs idolatrous and issued a ban.

Cherian does not worry too much about such volatility in the market. “There is always some new dimension,” he says. “Until technology develops to an extent where they make synthetic hair very close to human hair, I think human hair will do just fine.”

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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