Bhopa Rabari girls and their marriageable ears

“Your daughter is all grown up and you have not yet got her ears ready for sulava?” The elder women will ask. Turning to the daughter next they will say, “Ben, have tara lagan mate pan aaveshe. Sasara pakshvalae sagaima kareli bolini mudat poori thai gai chhe. [Ben, you will be married soon. The time they gave at the engagement is about to finish.]” Such voices of elderly women, coaxing a young girl’s mother to get her daughters’ ears ready before marriage are still familiar within my community of Bhopa Rabari.

I remember my cousin Nathi Ben Mori had started getting her ears ready when she was 17. She is now 24. She always wears sulava – a set of big gold hoops, more than a centimetre wide. The family in which the girl is getting married would gift this pair of earrings weighing about two tolas (22.32 grams) to the would-be bride at the time of engagement. The earrings cost anywhere around two lakh rupees.

Sulava is our asset that will take care of us in times of need. But often families incur debt in getting these made. Things are expensive these days and we people are not so well off. We are pastoralists. In our own village, there about 3,000 people in the community and 60 per cent of those do wage labour and the remaining 40 per cent are into rearing livestock.

There are many Rabaris across Kachchh, North Gujarat, and Saurashtra regions. In Kathiawar region Ahir, Bharwar and Gadhavi (Charan) communities wear thoriya, but sulava are worn only by our women. The women of the Bhopa Rabari community, in Jamnagar and Dwaraka district also wear thoriya (inner conch piercing) and vaait (helix piercing), but sulava are exclusive to our community.

They pierce the girls’ ears early and by the time they are 15 or 16, they place a small piece of a tender neem stick (rachis) to begin with, slowly adding one more thin stick every other day until the piercing is large enough for the hoops. I never got this done but whenever I wear traditional clothes, people say that if only I wore sulava I would look perfect.

Most married women wear it all the time and on days when they do not, they wear ponkhadani instead. It is a ring you place to keep the piercing in shape when you are not wearing the sulava. “I remove these at night,” says Nathi Ben. “I usually wear it when I am attending a function in the community. I never wear it when I travel alone.”

And now things are slowly changing. A tiny proportion of our women, like me, go out to work in offices and do not want to get their ears ready for sulava. If we want, we can get those made like regular earrings in the market.

This story was originally reported in Gujarati