Thresholds

I take my daughters to ballet most Saturday mornings. One of the things they practise is good toes/bad toes. The teacher instructs the girls to sit on the floor and stretch their legs and then raise their feet up. When the feet are raised upward the girls all shake their heads, tut and then to add insult to the toes they callously call out baaaad toes! After this, the girls elongate their toes, serve up a morphine-high happy clapping sound whilst calling out gooood toes!

Ballerinas are not the only ones with a thing about toes. I too have been developing a thing about toes. I recently discovered, whilst researching for the Ramayana, that women in ancient India would probably have worn toe rings on each of their ten toes; that each toe-ring would need to be appropriate for enhancing the beauty of each toe. So potentially, every woman would have ten different toe-rings on their feet. As the women would not necessarily be wearing anything so cumbersome as shoes, and as they would probably be wearing clothes to cover most of their body, it would seem that toe-rings would have taken on a great social responsibility.

I asked Sarah-Jane and Mark at MAA to show me some old Indian toes rings they have in their collection. Plus too, any anklets and suchlike things, please…This research would help me furnish my version of the Ramayana with vital concrete details.

Mark has provided some images to accompany this piece. You will note some seriously potent anklets that weigh a few pounds each. But I’m not so interested in anklets (I think Mark’s your anklet man!), it’s toe-rings I’m after. You will note that some of the images show toe-rings festooned with double-breasted bells. Why bells? Why, so the skilled walker can perform a dandy tune whilst executing a mesmerising walk when out shopping for gourds or when strutting at a mela.

I have yet to observe an interest in toe-rings around our shores; apart from Brighton and Totnes, and there it’s only a faddish once-in-a-decade-on-one-toe-only thing thank-you-very-much.

If you happen to be adorning Indian-style toe-rings this summer along the canals, parks or grottoes of Cambridge you will know I have seen your feet and savoured them, for you will hear me from behind a bush clapping and cheering with gooooooooood toe-rings!

Images: Toe rings from New Delhi, India. Collected by Captain Henry R. Lawrence. MAA E 1909.96 a, f & g

Daljit Nagra