Andhra Pradesh, South India's largest state, boasts a population composed of several religions, ethnicities, castes and tribes. Yet, all these diverse people - all the male ones, anyway - share one conspicuous commonality: the Andhrite mustache.
Last semester I studied in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh's capital city, at a university located on the outskirts of the sprawling city, about an hour by bus from downtown. On one ride I decided to count the mustaches. I strolled up and down the aisle, examining the male passengers. (That meant everyone. This phenomenon, though, would take much more than one column to examine.)
Out of 40 passengers, 38 had "mustaches" - hair exclusively between nose and lip. Full beards, van dykes and mustache-sideburn combos don't count. Some men look fine with mustaches - the guy from "The Jeffersons," for example. Others - most - do not. It took the Beatles only one album to shave theirs; Alex Trebek took a decade to come around. Gene Shalit still has not been set straight. Who is Gene Shalit, you ask? Precisely my point.
A couple of men on the bus were mustache naturals (think Mr. Feeney), and none looked as stupid as Gene Shalit. But about 30 of the 38 suffered the commonest fate of mustache wearers: they just looked like they had something on their face. Not something urgently offensive, but something that should probably be removed, especially if it could be done non-surgically.
As far as I could tell, the mustaches had no political or social significance. Unlike the hippie's hair or the skinhead's skin head, the Andhrite's mustache doesn't indicate a movement or subculture.
Some religions tell you what to do with your facial hair. Sikhism, for instance, forbids hair-shearing of any kind, and most Muslim men grow beards; indeed, one of the two dissenters in my bus poll was a Muslim. But half of Hyderabad's men, and 95 percent of Andrhite men, follow Hinduism, a religion that is silent on shaving. So religion provides no explanation.
Historians will tell you that fashion trends sometimes derive from figureheads. Louis XIV's flowing locks and imperious goatee unleashed a trickle-down effect of silly facial hair from which France is still recovering. But a quick scan of India's leadership seems to discredit the top-down theory: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a bearded Sikh, President Abdul Kalam is a clean-shaven Muslim and Sonia Gandhi, India's most revered living politician, is mustache-free. Mahatma Gandhi did famously wear a mustache, but most Indians today admire other icons of the freedom struggle, such as baby-faced B. R. Ambedkar.
So most Andhrite men are not following philtrum mandates given explicitly by God or implicitly by figureheads. Top-down advocates could argue that Andhra Pradesh's mustached men are emulating their movie stars. Tollywood, India's second-largest film industry, is Andhra Pradesh's rip-off of Bollywood, which is Bombay's answer to Hollywood. And, as it turns out, almost all male Tollywood actors do have mustaches. However, Bollywood stars almost never wear mustaches, and Andhrites watch almost as much Bollywood as they do Tollywood. It's just as likely that Tollywood's mustaches are a bottom-up phenomenon.
The onus, then, is still on the masses: Why would citizens do this to themselves? Barring mass hysteria or some sort of conspiracy, the simplest explanation is a sort of gradual fall from shaving grace. As the Andhrite mustache gained popularity, an increasing number of men never confronted the awful truth in the mirror. The mustache naturals were never separated from the Gene Shalits, and people grew complacent until the problem was pandemic.
Greater minds than my own have noted that Indian education tends to rely on rote memorization to the detriment of critical thinking. Perhaps if Andhra Pradesh's children are taught critical analysis now, we can avoid the scourge of the Andhrite mustache in the next generation.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 has been known to rock a neckbeard.
