The exact significance which is to be attached to the removal by
mourners of their hair after a death is perhaps doubtful. Sir James
Frazer shows that the Australian aborigines are accustomed to let their
own blood flow on to the corpse of a dead kinsman and to place their
cut hair on the corpse. He suggests that in both cases the object
is to strengthen the feeble spirit within the corpse and sustain
its life, in order that it may be born again. As a development of
such a rite the hair might have become an offering to the dead, and
later still its removal might become a sacrifice and indication of
grief. In this manner the common custom of tearing the hair in token
of grief and mourning for the dead would be accounted for. Whether
the Hindu custom of shaving the heads of mourners was also originally
a sacrifice and offering appears to be uncertain. Professor Robertson
Smith considered [324] that in this case the hair is shaved off as a
means of removing impurity, and quotes instances from the Bible where
lepers and persons defiled by contact with the dead are purified
by shaving the hair. [325] As the father of a child is also shaved
after its birth, and the shaving must here apparently be a rite of
purification, it probably has the same significance in the case
of mourners; it is not clear whether any element of sacrifice is
also involved. The degree to which the Hindu mourner parts with his
hair varies to some extent with the nearness of the relationship,
and for females or distant relatives they do not always shave. The
mourners are shaved on the last day of the impurity, when presents
are given to the Maha-Brahman, and the latter, representing the dead
man, is also shaved with them. When a Hindu is at the point of death,
before he makes the gifts for the good of his soul the head is shaved
with the exception of his _choti_ or scalp-lock, the chin and upper
lip. Often the corpse is also shaved after death.