Every year, I watched very young girls participate in the Rishi Panchami puja. A few were very young and their embarrassment was evident in their body language. Despite this, some women and male priests would comment on their youth, and relate it to sex, marriage, a husband and the future. I would feel sorry for these girls while also thinking that the day would come when the priests would tease and the women would makes jokes about me.

Public and private

The girls who had undergone their first menstruation could be easily identified because they would come to the river with a few unique materials, like a small water pot made from mud, a ghaito. The puja they would perform was called Ghaito Puja. I always hated Ghaito Puja as I always scared of it. Being a girl, I knew I would menstruate like my mom, my sisters and my friends, but I didn’t want to make

this public knowledge by carrying around a ghaito and doing the Ghaito Puja. I knew about the processes of how and why women took dips in the Narayani and what type of materials they used to purify themselves. They needed to wash their genitalia 365 times, once for each day of the year. This implied that their genitalia was dirty or impure. Likewise, they would also have to brush their teeth 365 times with a green twig called dattiwan. My young brain questioned all of these practices but I never received an answer and was left with no other option but to follow dutifully in my mother’s and sisters’ footsteps.

Fortunately, I had science and health as my majors in high school. Unfortunately, neither my health or science teachers taught us about menstruation nor did I dare to ask them about it. I was good student so I passed easily but I really didn’t understand what menstruation meant. In the second year of my nursing course, I learnt about physiology in depth and this gave me strength. Knowledge about my bodily processes encouraged me to live with pride, proud of my womanhood.

During those days, I was living away from home. But later, I tried to educate my mother, sisters and nieces about menstruation and its values and how Hindu socio-cultural values were associated with this natural process. Eventually, my mother started to gradually abolish restrictions during menstruation. One day, she allowed me to work in the kitchen during my period, and that too, during Dashain. Having many daughters, my father wasn’t really aware of who had their period and when. But he always sought cleanliness in person and place.

A gut feeling

Even without having a deep knowledge of gender equality and rights, I had a bad feeling about what I was supposed to do during my menstruation. I saw that so many of my classmates were absent in school for more than a week due to menstruation or were stigmatised for staining their school uniforms with blood. Armed with all these experiences, I chose my Bachelor of Nursing thesis to be ‘Menstrual practices among educated and uneducated Newar women in Gokarna village, Kathmandu’. During my research, I learned about many more horrific practices during menstruation for women, including Chhaupadi. There were other dangerous practices too, like when the same piece of cloth was used by three generations. Later, when I went to Jumla, my landlord didn’t touch the foundation of my house and even slept under the open sky during winter due to Chhaupadi. My heart shrank and I started to work aggressively to get rid of this harmful

traditional practice.

I have studied all the major religions, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, and none of these religions talk explicitly about restrictions during the menstrual period. However, fundamentalists tend to have their own interpretations. In Hinduism, the Vedas do not talk about menstruation but a holy book, the Garud Puran (used for death ritual), says that menstruation is impure blood which is given by the god Indra. Furthermore, it says that during a woman’s period, she is not allowed to show her face.

In Nepali society, we have many such values which have been imposed on women and girls such that they are forced in live in cowsheds and refrain from touching others, eating together or entering many communal spaces. But because I believe in science and nature, I am doing everything during my period as I do during other times, such as going to temples, cooking in the kitchen and touching my father.

Changing practices

In 2005, I went to Muktinath, where I learned that women were priests in a Hindu temple. This gave me a lot of strength. Finally, my younger sister and I even performed the death ritual for my mother, which is traditionally a son’s task, in 2009. While travelling in Jumla, many friends and relatives followed strict norms during menstruation because they considered that their family god would get angry. In the meantime, I was eating in their kitchen and attending religious programmes. It was all very funny to me, because none of the hotels, which were mostly operated by women, would close down, and no working woman takes a five-day leave for her period.

The problem with us is that we are still living under extreme ignorance, chronic deprivation and excessive poverty. Even ensuring 33 percent representation for women in political, cultural and social spheres encountered many obstacles. Every day, women continue to suffer  various forms of physical, mental and psychosocial torture, including rape and death due to restrictions related to menstruation. All this needs to change and I am hoping that women and girls, as they start to go to school and educate themselves, will abandon such unscientific and irrational practices and try to do best to live with dignity as human beings, equal to men.

Paudel is founder and president of Action Works Nepal, an NGO