Generations of scholars have debated hair’s significance as a symbol of womanhood, fertility, and spiritual morality in South India. For contemporary Indian women, hair is a site of concern, often expressed as an everyday preoccupation with hair loss or “hair fall,” as it is known in the subcontinent. This exploratory study investigated hair fall among Kannada-speaking Hindu women in the South Indian city of Mysuru, Karnataka. It used a series of focus group discussions to explore how women talk about the causes and consequences of hair fall, and how women cope with hair-related distress. Participants articulated clear, shared ideas about why hair falls and how it can be managed. They connected hair fall to broader stressors in their lives both directly and symbolically. Hair fall, therefore, appears to function idiomatically in this context, both as an idiom of distress in its own right, and as a symptom of other idioms and forms of distress. Additional research is needed to establish the importance of hair fall relative to other distress constructs, and to more directly assess its potential value in research and intervention.

在南印度，头发作为女性气质、生育力和精神道德象征的重要性，几代学者一直在争论。对于当代印度女性来说，头发是一个令人担忧的地方，通常表现为每天对脱发或“脱发”（印度次大陆的说法）的关注。这项探索性研究调查了南印度卡纳塔克邦迈索尔市讲卡纳达语的印度教女性的脱发情况。它通过一系列焦点小组讨论来探讨女性如何谈论脱发的原因和后果，以及女性如何应对与头发相关的困扰。参与者就脱发原因以及如何处理脱发问题发表了清晰、共同的想法。他们将脱发与生活中更广泛的压力源直接和象征性地联系起来。因此，脱发似乎在这种情况下具有惯用的功能，既可以作为一种表达痛苦的习语，也可以作为其他表达方式和形式的痛苦的症状。需要进行更多的研究来确定脱发相对于其他困扰结构的重要性，并更直接地评估其在研究和干预中的潜在价值。