Surat – Borderless

The Last of the Barbers: How the Saloon Became the Salon (and Where the Gossip Went)

By Charudutta Panigrahi

If language were a haircut, “saloon” got a buzz cut and a blow-dry and came out as “salon.” That change in spelling is the visible tip of a larger style transformation: one rough, male-only ritual space has been trimmed, straightened, scented and repackaged into a gleaming, multi-service, mostly woman-centred retail experience. Along the way, the loud, fragrant, argument-heavy mini-parliaments of small-town India — the saloons — have been politely ushered into warranties, playlists and polite small talk.

Barbers in India are almost as old as conversation itself. The profession of the barber — the nai or hajam — is embedded in pre-colonial life: scalp massage (champi), shaves, tonsure at rites of passage, and quick fixes between chores. These services were usually delivered in open-fronted shops or under trees, with tools that were portable and livelihoods that were local.

The “saloon” as a distinctive, Western-flavoured, male gathering place began to consolidate during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Port cities and colonial cantonments — Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai) — saw the rise of dedicated shops selling not only shaves and haircuts but also imported tonics, straight razors and a distinctly public atmosphere shaped by newspaper reading, debate and gossip. Over time, that form blended with older local practices and spread inland. By the mid-20th century, the saloon — a recognisable, chair-lined, mirror-fronted social stage — existed in towns from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Gujarat’s chawls to Assam’s market roads.

So ancient barbering traditions fed into a colonial-era intensification of the barbershop as public forum; by the 1950s–70s, the saloon as we remember it was firmly a part of India’s social furniture. The precise start date is a quilt of custom and commerce rather than a single founding ceremony — and that is part of the saloon’s charm.

Walk into a saloon in Nagpur, Nellore, Shillong or Surat and you’ll notice an uncanny resemblance. The reasons are simple and human:

Low price point: Saloons survive on quick volumes and walk-ins. That encourages many chairs, fast turnover, and layouts that invite waiting men to talk rather than sit quietly.
Ritual services: Shave, cut, champi. These are short encounters that thread customers through the same communal space repeatedly — ideal for gossip to collect and ferment.
Social role: The barber doubles as ear, counsellor, news-disseminator and crossword referee. That role is culturally consistent across regions: a saloon’s psychic geography is the same whether the tea is masala or lemon.

The result is that a saloon in Kutch and a saloon in Kerala will differ in language, politics and local jokes — but both will produce that same satisfying racket of opinion, repartee and advice. They are India’s unofficial, peripatetic fora for public life.

Enter the salon: padded seats, curated playlists, appointment-booking and a menu so long it reads like a restaurant wine list (colour, rebonding, keratin, facials, pedicures, threading, and sometimes a minor festival of LED lights). A couple of business realities did most of the heavy lifting:

Women’s services earn more and recur more often. Regular facials, hair treatments and beauty routines translate into steadier, higher bills. The money follows the customer, and the space follows the money.
Franchising and professional training created standardized staff who follow brand scripts — which tighten conversation and reduce the barber-confessor vibe.
Unisex salons consolidated footfall, but that consolidation shrank male-only territory. Men who once had a semi-public living room now sit in chic, quieter spaces that discourage loud, extended debate.

The practical upshot: the saloon’s boisterous mini-parliaments were replaced by stylists with laminated menus, muted background music and an etiquette that favours privacy over political salvoes.

What we miss (and what we gained)

We miss the moralisers, the wisecracks, the boisterous consultancy of unpaid experts who knew which councillor was friendly with which shopkeeper and which wedding was scandalous; the loud education in rhetoric and local affairs; the bench-seat apprenticeship in how to perform masculinity in public.

We gain in expanded choices for women, more professional hygiene and techniques, new livelihoods for trained stylists (especially women), and spaces where people can pursue personalised care without the social cost that used to attend public rituals.

It’s not a zero-sum game — but it does reorder who feels proprietorial about public grooming spaces. The new economics say: she who pays more — and pays more often — gets the say.

Not all saloons are extinct. In smaller towns they still hum. In cities, they’ve evolved into hybrid forms:

Old-school saloons persist where price sensitivity and cultural habit remain strong: walk-ins, communal benches, loud conversation and a barber who’ll recommend both a haircut and the correct candidate for local office.
Nostalgic barbershops in urban pockets lean into the past with “vintage” decor, whiskey-bar vibes and sports on TV — except now they charge a premium and call the barber a “grooming specialist.”
Some entrepreneurs stage “men’s nights” or open-mic gossip hours in neighbourhood shops, trying to recapture the civic pulse while keeping the modern business model.

If you want the old saloon spark, look for places without appointment apps, with too many phones in sight but none in use, and with a tea flask on the counter.

What’s lost isn’t only a loud, male-only gossip pit; it’s a training ground for public argument and a place where local memory was kept live and messy. The saloon taught people how to spar without a referee; the salon teaches how to look good while being politely neutral. If you mourn for the saloon’s barbed banter, you can grieve — but also take action: host a “Salon for Men” in your local café, revive a community noticeboard at the barber, or convince your neighbourhood salon to schedule a weekly “open-chair” hour for community talk (and maybe offer tea).

And until then, if you miss the salty, pungent chorus of small-town democracy, go to any saloon that still has a kettle on the stove and a barber who knows the mayor’s schedule by heart. Sit down, get a shave, and watch a mini-parliament assemble around you. You’ll leave clean-faced, better informed, and maybe a little animated — exactly how democracy used to feel.

Charudutta Panigrahi is a writer. He can be contacted at Charudutta403@gmail.com.

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Love and Crime in the Time of Plague

Title: Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Maya is Discomfited

What shall we talk about?’ Maya asked in her irrepressible way, a lilt in her voice. That afternoon she was out cycling with Henry when the rain came down, turning heavy in moments. It was August and the middle of the monsoon season.

‘Tell me more about what you found. More about those…mysterious sketches. You have two minutes,’ Henry rolled his eyes playfully as he pulled out his watch.

Dark, thick clouds loomed over the sea and gathered by the palm trees and rocks lining the shore. Leaving their bicycles against the tall, old Ashoka tree, they had run, like many times before, toward the old Prong’s lighthouse to their right. Its white walls were damp-streaked and moss-stained, and the grey rocks huddled by it were dotted by foamy flecks. The sea swirled in noisily with an insistent rhythm.

They stood on the low stoop, looking out at the gravestones across the road. The door behind, blue paint flaking in places, creaked in the wind. The room in the old lighthouse always smelt musty. It was sparsely furnished with wooden chairs, a table, and a cupboard. Faded red curtains fluttered on the windows. A part of the roof near the fireplace leaked, and rainwater often dripped down into a large wooden tub. Soon, Henry always joked, it would fill up with fish. The keeper, an old Eurasian, waved to them from an upstairs window, his beard flailing through its rusting iron bars.

They were right at the tip of the city on the island of Colaba, and the new bicycles—shipped to Henry only that summer—were safe to ride on, with their evenly spaced wheels, pneumatic tyres, and a chain system. Henry was pleased with these new ‘Rover’ cycles, made by a company in Chicago, Henry’s home town. The wind left a mist on their faces, the gulls were noisy on the rafters, and they waited for the rain to ease.

The Causeway, its white stones grey in the wan light, stretched to the mainland. Built some fifty years ago, it now connected what had been the separate islands of Colaba, and the Old Woman’s Island to the bigger island of Bombay. If they craned their necks and looked to the left, through the palm trees, the stone walls of the old fort were clearly visible.

Henry took his cap off, twirled it with his fingers then placed it back on his head. Maya scraped the soles of her muddy boots against the stoop, and leaned against the door. They heard a sharp clear call, two eagles were majestically scouring the skies, their wings spotted white, and lighting up when the sun momentarily breathed through the clouds.

‘You’ve been thinking about the sketches, haven’t you?’

Maya nodded, her eyes the colours of the stormy sea. The eagles, she was thinking, maybe they were the White-bellied Sea Eagles familiar to these parts.

‘Tell me about it,’ Henry encouraged, stealing a look upstairs, and noting the open window. The keeper was probably all ears. They were always the subject of gossip, and Henry ruefully accepted this, always with a turmoil in his heart. He enjoyed Maya’s company and tried not to think too much of the future; most times he failed. Sometimes he thought Maya felt the same way.

Maya had found the sketches only a fortnight ago. In a room, dark, mysterious and unused, at the very back of the grey-stone ‘doctors’ house’ where Maya lived. She had wanted to use the room as a study. The doctors’ house stood on a narrow lane leading off the Colaba Causeway, on the sliver of land where Bombay stretched into the sea in a crab-like way. One walked through the house’s main hallway, and the study appeared after a series of small steps. Next to the study was the covered courtyard and on the left, its lone window faced the garden, with its wooden latticed fence, the bougainvillea and oleander creepers, and tall palm trees. Farther beyond, closer to the sea, lay the asylum and a part of the lighthouse, always visible from the upper floor windows of the doctors’ house. Sounds of the horse-drawn tramcars, the bells of the Afghan Church, the train coming in every morning and in the late afternoon, and the constant rolling of the sea, shaped a pleasing backdrop to everyday life in the house.

Once owned by Hormuzji Dorabji, a merchant whose business interests spread across Bombay, Surat, East Africa and Natal, the doctor Edith Pechey had first rented it when she came to Bombay to manage the city’s first women’s hospital. Soon there were two of them, when Charlotte Ellaby responded to Edith’s invitation, and that was how the bungalow got its name. Then about two years ago, though Maya felt it was much longer, the doctors’ house had a new resident when Maya joined them, a few weeks after reaching Bombay as part of a travelling theatre troupe from Lahore. The troupe soon moved on to another city, but Maya had stayed back. For a while only, she had thought at first, but months had flown by and the ‘doctors’ house’ was her home now. Edith had moved out when she married Herbert Phipson, an American businessman with offices in Bombay, and Maya still stayed on with Charlotte. Finding her feet in a city, warm and lively. Finding her heart too, but with that Maya wanted to take more time.

For Maya, the string-bound folder with the sketches was an unexpected find. It lay in the old wooden almirah, lost among dusty old account ledgers, old books, in old Pali and Persian, and crinkled maps brown with age.

‘They look so old, and so skilfully done.’ Henry still remembered the awed expression on Maya’s face the afternoon she told Charlotte and him about it. They had shared Maya’s delight, looking at the sketches—lifelike depictions of birds, drawn mainly in black ink, with distinct colours on some.

(Excerpted from Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2025)

ABOUT THE BOOK

It is 1896. A ship docks in Bombay Harbour, and as the workers rush to unload the cargo, a scream rings out. A large black rat, frothing at the mouth, has bitten one of the men.

Within weeks, a miasma of fear engulfs the city as ship-borne rats overrun its nooks and crannies, and more and more of its inhabitants fall sick—and die. Dr Acacio Viegas is the first to ring the alarm—it is the plague. The only way to control it is to sanitize the city’s slums, clean its drains, report any fever, and stay at home. The British Administration embarks on these measures on a war footing—until warning notes begin to turn up at Doctors’ House, where Maya Barton lives with Dr Charlotte Ellaby, and at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital—notes that threaten those who are ‘interfering’ with people’s religion and customs with dire consequences—all signed by the ‘Native Society’.

Maya and her friend Henry Baker, the American trade counsel, are soon hot on the trail of the Society, which leads them to the formidable Rangnekar Bhau, the Society’s founder, and its Secretary, the treacherous Satarkar, who hates everything new and ‘modern’, whether the British and the brown sahibs, and their so-called anti-plague drive, or women like Maya, who think too much of themselves.

As Maya and Henry unravel the mystery, they draw closer to each other and to what could be a future together. And Maya learns more about Reverend Barton, who could have been her father, and the Kashmiri woman who might have been her mother.

Anuradha Kumar once again uses her talent for recreating a period setting and engaging characters to brilliant effect in this sequel to the acclaimed The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, her first Bombay Mystery.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anuradha Kumar has worked for the Economic & Political Weekly. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA). Her stories have won awards from the Commonwealth Foundation, UK, and The Little Magazine, India. She writes regularly for Scroll.in. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications like Fiftytwo.in, The India Forum, The Missouri Review, among others. Two of her essays received notable mention in ‘Best American Essays’ editions of 2023 and 2024. Her essay collection, The Sound of Lost Memories, was recently a finalist for the Gournay Prize (University of Iowa) and will be published (2027) by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin, Stevens-Point).

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL