How Flowers, Myths, and Menstruation Shaped South Asian Culture: A Deep Examination
London — Menstruation has long been wrapped in layers of myth, silence, metaphor, and cultural policing across South Asia and its diasporas. While small acts of resistance have chipped away at centuries-old stigma, many beliefs survive through intergenerational storytelling, religious characterisation, and linguistic traditions. One such belief — that menstruating women contaminate plants — forms the starting point of this deeper conversation.
A Childhood Memory That Reveals a Larger Cultural Pattern
Growing up in Kenya, writer and human rights lawyer Farah Ahamed recalls being warned by her mother not to touch the curry plant while menstruating. The caution was based on the belief that menstrual “impurity” could kill a growing plant. Driven by curiosity and doubt, Ahamed touched the plant in secrecy one afternoon. Nothing happened.
But when she informed her mother, the answer reflected a broader cultural anxiety.
Her mother insisted the plant had “survived by chance” and repeated the old warning.
Anthropologists studying South Asian diasporic communities in East Africa — including researchers like Rupa Viswanath and Thomas Blom Hansen — note that such beliefs travelled with migrants and adapted to their new environments. These transplanted ideas often retained their symbolic power long after their cultural origins became obscured.
Myths Rooted in Notions of Purity and Pollution
Across South Asia — including India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Pakistan — menstruation is still associated with impurity, restriction, and danger. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her seminal work Purity and Danger (1966), described how cultures perceive bodily fluids as polluting symbols, often used to enforce social order. Her framework is visible in how menstrual taboos operate:
- Women are barred from touching flowers used in rituals.
- Fruit-bearing trees are believed to stop yielding if touched by a menstruating woman.
- Some Hindu households restrict women from entering prayer rooms or touching sacred objects during their periods.
- In parts of rural Nepal, chhaupadi — the isolation of menstruating women in huts — persists despite legal bans.
The fear is symbolic, not scientific. As the late feminist scholar Kamla Bhasin often said in her lectures, “Menstruation is biology. The stigma is social.”
Flowers as Symbols of Fertility — Yet Devices of Exclusion
Flowers have always symbolised fertility in literature, art, and ritual. Ironically, the same floral metaphors have been used to restrict menstruating women.
Religious symbolism
- Hinduism:
During the Ambubasi Mela in Assam, when the goddess Kamakhya is believed to menstruate, devotees do not touch flowers or pick plants.
Religious texts use floral metaphors to describe divine feminine power, but the biological reality of menstruation remains taboo.
- Tantric Buddhism:
Adivasi traditions
Among the Santhal Adivasis in Jharkhand, menstruation is called “hormo baha” — “the flower of the body.” Unlike mainstream Hindu traditions, the metaphor here celebrates the body rather than restricts it. Ethnographic studies of Adivasi communities by researchers like Verrier Elwin document how indigenous views often counter patriarchal norms.
When Art Rewrites Cultural Language
Contemporary artists are reclaiming these metaphors, challenging stigma and creating new narratives around period positivity.Ms Sarah Welch, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, depicts the lotus-headed fertility goddess Lajja Gauri in a miniature sculpture from the sixth century.
Lyla FreeChild’s political reinterpretation
Her painting Aadya Shakti reimagines herself as Lajja Gauri, the ancient fertility goddess. But FreeChild’s version bleeds — literally. The artist paints with menstrual blood, allowing lotuses to flow from the goddess’s body.
Art historians compare her approach to the feminist art movement of the 1970s, where artists like Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta used body-based art to challenge patriarchal narratives. FreeChild, however, localises that resistance within Hindu iconography and South Asian political contexts.
She also critiques the political use of the lotus by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), reclaiming the symbol for feminist expression.
A Jharkhand mural that changed a village conversation
In 2019, young students in Naya Bhadiyara, under activist Srilekha Chakraborty, painted a mural of a gulmohar tree shaped like a woman’s body. The flowering canopy signified menstruation as natural, beautiful, and regenerative.
This form of public art echoes the work of activists like Sohini Chattopadhyay, who document menstrual stigma in rural India and highlight community-level initiatives.
Dance, motion, and menstrual symbolism
In Raqs-e-Mahvaari, created for Ahamed’s book, dancer Amna Mawaz Khan performs with a red flower in her hair, symbolising menstruation in corporate spaces — places where silence around periods remains strong.
Her performance draws from classical Indian dance mudras and modern feminist movement vocabulary, reinforcing how the body becomes a site of resistance.
The Political Power of Flowers — From Devotion to Protest
Several modern South Asian artists and activists use floral motifs to provoke thought or challenge taboo. For instance:
- Rah Naqvi’s embroidered menstrual textiles use red thread and sequins to beautify objects considered “dirty” — pads, tampons, underwear.
- NGOs like Days for Girls use a stylised flower as their symbol to normalise menstrual health.
- Brands such as Libresse, Anandi, and P-Tracker use flowers in their logos — sometimes criticised as infantilising women, according to critiques published in The Atlantic (2019).
The tension between beauty, stigma, and commodification lies at the heart of these debates.
Floral Imagery in Literature: A Weapon and a Window
South Asian literature has historically used flowers to represent sexuality, fertility, and femininity. But feminist writers have subverted these metaphors.
A classic example:
Ismat Chughtai, in her essays and fiction, invoked flowers and blood to describe resilience under patriarchal pressure:
“Flowers can be made to bloom among rocks, watered by one’s heart’s blood.”
In Ahamed’s reinterpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “What If?”, she replaces a symbolic flower with a broom — based on interviews with Lahore’s sweeper community lacking basic sanitary facilities.
This transforms a romantic metaphor into a socio-political commentary on class, gender, and sanitation inequality.
When Menstruation Meets Branding and Digital Culture
Floral imagery also appears heavily in period products and apps. But scholars of digital culture like Payal Arora argue that this reflects the “pinkification” of femininity — a commercial branding choice, not a cultural necessity.
Ahamed recalls distributing underwear and pads to women in a Kenyan prison, where many inmates preferred floral designs. This contradiction — rejecting flowers in some contexts while embracing them in others — highlights the cultural elasticity of floral symbols.
Beyond Flowers: Rethinking Menstruation in the Modern World
Although urban South Asia is witnessing more period-talks, workshops, and NGO campaigns, stigma remains deeply rooted.
Reports by UNICEF, WaterAid, and UNFPA show:
- Menstrual myths continue in 60–80% of rural communities.
- Only 12% of Indian girls feel comfortable discussing menstruation openly.
- Lack of toilets and sanitary products continues to restrict school attendance for young girls.
Scholars like Nivedita Menon argue that menstruation cannot be separated from caste, class, and labour politics — as seen in the Lahore workers' testimonies Ahamed references.
Conclusion: The Flower as Myth, Metaphor, and Mirror
Flowers, long used to symbolise purity and fertility, have also been deployed to police female bodies. Yet the same flowers have become metaphors for resilience, symbols of protest, and tools for artistic rebellion.
From a child touching a curry plant in secret, to murals blooming on Jharkhand walls, to artists reclaiming sacred symbols, the journey of floral imagery in menstruation is one of cultural transformation.
The question is no longer whether flowers wilt when touched by a menstruating woman.
The real question is: Can society finally let these myths wither — and allow women to bloom freely?
Final Thoughts
Menstruation sits at the intersection of biology, culture, religion, and politics. By tracing the floral metaphors that shape these narratives, we see how deeply symbolism influences daily life, restrictions, shame, and empowerment. South Asia’s evolving artistic, literary, and activist movements are rewriting centuries-old scripts, turning flowers into tools of resistance rather than oppression. As conversations around menstrual health gain visibility, the challenge now lies in dismantling beliefs that restrict women and celebrating metaphors that empower them. A society willing to let myths die creates space for women — like flowers — to grow without fear.
