--- On Sun, 15/3/09, ss <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: ss <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] What is "Indian culture"?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Sunday, 15 March, 2009, 9:35 AM
>
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
>
> On Sunday 15 Mar 2009 8:18:27 am
> Charles Haynes wrote:
> > There was a time when European Christians considered
> it vain to bathe
> > too often. Japanese woodcuts during the era of first
> contact sometimes
> > depict westerners with flies flying around them
> because the Japanese
> > considered them to have such a bad smell.
>
> This is interesting information. Could the "vanity" part
> have been because
> only the richest could afford to bathe often in those times
> and the Church
> was catering to the (unwashed) faithful?
>
> As a twenty something man my father was travelling to
> Europe (in 1945) en
> route to the US for a PhD. It turned out that he was put
> on, of all ships,
> the Queen Elizabeth, which doubled up as a troop carrier
> for US GIs returning
> after the war that had just ended.
>
> The first morning a woman (a chambermaid?) asked my father
> if he would like
> to bathe - and being Indian and Brahmin he said yes
> instantly, after which
> the woman readied a huge tub of hot water for him. The next
> morning the woman
> failed to turn up and when my father caught up with her and
> asked her to
> ready a bath she asked "What? Again?". I'm not sure how
> much my father got to
> bathe on the journey after that.
>
> In the mid-1980s I saw a news item in British
> newspaper in the UK claiming
> that British teenagers on average had more baths per week
> than French
> teenagers. The news would be laughable to the average
> Indian Brahmin because
> a bath (or at least personal washing in flowing
> water) is considered
> essential every day.
>
> But if you lived in the UK a couple of centuries or
> more ago - you would have
> to be wealthy enough to obtain fuel for heating water to
> bathe, and this
> factor is often not understood by obsevers who speak of
> "dirty" foreigners.
> On the positive side - you don;t perspire much in those
> temperate climes.
>
> Bathing in water at the ambient temperature in the UK is
> just not on. As for
> me personally - the only time I manged to consider it OK to
> jump into the sea
> in the UK was one early September aftrenoon when the air
> temperature was
> warm. but the North Sea was freezing cold to me - a far cry
> from the warm
> currents off Pondicherry where I spent ecstatic hours in
> the sea.
>
> How the Japanese got past this - I don't know maybe
> they have enough hot
> springs.
>
> I wonder who invented the shower - which I believe is one
> of the greatest
> hygiene related inventions ever.
>
> shiv
This, incidentally, was one of the signs that the Spanish Inquisition used to
pick out converted Muslims and Jews.
The weekly bath was a time-honoured Brit institution; sounds like you missed it
and hit Britain around shower-time. Showers were strictly American innovations,
not equal to a proper bath. However, apparently from Edwardian times onwards,
the rich had daily baths, surrounded by a due degree of ritual and
self-indulgence, accompanied by thermometers, soaps and salts, towels, and a
range of paraphernalia.
The Japanese used baths, too, constructed in place of wood generally (this is
from memory of texts and books) heated by placing heated stones under the bath.
They were indoors as well as outdoors.
A young man who was in Japan in the years before the First World War had found
lodgings with a Japanese family. Part of the facilities (sorry, Ram) was the
privilege of using the bath, which was located in the back garden. After a few
days of hesitation, due to unfamiliarity (the man had just reached the country,
and his knowledge of Japanese was as deep as your knowledge of Tibetan), he
ventured out and persuaded someone to shove in some rocks under the filled
bath, and gingerly divested himself of clothing and slipped in. To his horror,
after some blissful moments which washed away memories of the preceding sea
journey from Rangoon and Calcutta, some young maids trooped into the garden,
took up their positions fairly close to the bath and commenced a noisy
clothes-washing session; apparently the whole week's observations of each and
all of them was under review. Meanwhile, the temperature in the bath rose, and
rose, and rose. Finally, it was
unbearable, and my poor reporter was in danger of being cooked alive like a
lobster. In desperation, he leaped out and, er, streaked for the safety of the
house, accompanied by shrieks of mirth from the maidservants. The bath, alas,
was damaged as he kicked it over in his panic flight, and he had to pay for its
replacement from his meagre earnings as accounts clerk with a Sindhi
silk-merchant of the port. Arrangements were made to ensure that no females -
or males, for that matter - would intrude during his bath-time. An early
example of South-South cultural cooperation.
So -
* these baths were built in place, indoors or outdoors;
* stand-alone examples, small enough to be kicked over, were known;
* they were heated using stones placed in a fire, and then under the bath;
* this heating method could heat the bath continuously for a considerable
period of time, and might have lead to cooking a man alive;
* boiling prisoners alive has been reported as a punishment elsewhere in
literature.
Regarding your amusement about British and French teenagers, how can you call
it a bath when you jokers don't wet your heads? Shameful short-cuts, I tell you!
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