Mundan — the first haircut

On the muhurta day the family travels to the chosen sacred site — a Kuldevi / Gosaun shrine, a Devi-sthan, or a sacred riverbank. A favourite Mithila choice is Uchchaith Bhagwati, the headless Vana-Durga near Benipatti, where mundan is one of the temple’s listed rites.

The acharya worships the Kul-Devata and the Panch-devata (Ganesh first), rice spread over a banana leaf on an alpana; the deity’s permission is taken and the vow acknowledged. Only then does the hair-cutting begin — often in the precinct or on the adjacent riverbank, so the hair can be offered there.

The hair is prepared in the old Vedic sequence: the priest moistens it near the right ear with warm-and-cold water (sometimes a little ghee or curd), parts it with a porcupine quill and sets in three young kusha shoots. He takes up the razor with the verse “śivo nāmāsi” (“friendly by name art thou”) and makes the first symbolic cuts — assisted by the father or the maternal uncle.

The barber (hajaam) then shaves the head, leaving the shikha — the crown-tuft. Throughout, an elder woman holds the child in her lap and gathers the falling hair in her sari-end, while the women sing to soothe him.

The gathered birth-hair is treated as sacred — never simply swept away. In Mithila it is collected in the elder woman’s aanchal and, in the evening, laid at the roots of a bamboo or immersed in a river; the classical rite lays it on a lump of dung and hides it near water. At a Devi-sthan or tirtha it is offered straight into the holy river.

The birth-hair is held to carry impurities and traits from past lives, so its respectful disposal signifies a clean break — and, read another way, returns the hair to nourish the soil and the bamboo.

After the shaving and a bath, the women perform chumaon — blessing the freshly-shorn child by touching him with durva and rice (durbakshat) and anointing him with tilak, each in turn. He is dressed in new clothes, often the maternal uncle’s gift, and the acharya marks his head and recites long-life blessings.

The rite closes with a bhoj — a feast for kin and community (or at least a distribution of sweets) — to folk singing. The mundan completes the “clean slate,” the retained shikha pointing forward to the Upanayan.

Mundan is the Chudakarana, the eighth of the classical sixteen saṃskāras of the Gṛhyasūtras. The shedding of the birth-hair is understood as a shedding of impurities and traits carried over from past lives — a cleansing that lets the child begin afresh — while a single tuft, the shikha, is left at the crown as the mark of a Hindu life and the thread that connects this rite forward to the Upanayan. In Mithila it is held at an odd age (one, three or five) at the family Kuldevi shrine, a Devi-sthan or a riverbank, and the cut hair is offered to a river or laid at the roots of a bamboo. It remains a popular, festive rite of childhood across the region.