The Courier-Mail 7 Jan 1953 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50555305
One morning in January, 1953, the men of Ranchi, India, woke up to find that their beards and moustaches had unexpectedly vanished…..
The mythical Chardeva was blamed for this unusual event. Apparently the Chardeva was a small rat-like creature which had not been seen for the previous 10 years. Being licked on the head or face by this creature while sleeping is believed to cause baldness.
Being licked by a rat and then having your hair disappear? I wonder if all the hairy-legged women waiting for their wax to heat would prefer to be gently licked in their sleep, and the hair to fall out painlessly, rather than suffering the riiiiiip of waxing? Doubtful.
Interestingly, my searching didn’t give me any other results for the term Chardeva and vanishing beards. Brace yourself people, this may the only reported ‘sighting’ of this creature… At least we are forewarned, time to stock up on the Ratsak guys!
As much as I would like to believe in a depilatory rat I wonder what was really going on here? Did the affected men wake up in a nest of unattached hairs, or had the face fur just vanished?
Sounds a bit like the traditional drunken shaving prank gone wrong in the course of an out of hand bucks night, but on a village-wide scale!
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It is not unusual to see similar stories about men in some communities having problems with unexpectedly and drastically reduced ummm…. family jewels…. You might be interested in this link to the Fortean Times if you haven’t heard of this phenomenon before.
Hello, with all you period trawling through the Press then something you might be interested in is the Oxford English Dictionary’s appeal for instances of the earliest uses of words and phrases.
I saw “blue arsed fly” on their list and thought of you, but I checked back and saw it was you using it, and not from an old source. If you are interested their appeal list can be found here: http://public.oed.com/appeals/
Thanks to you I didn’t get to bed until some ungodly hour of the morning after having a poke around for something newer!
I can see that this will be an ongoing project now, there must be something newer than the one they have!
I just thought that as you trawl so much through old documents it might be of interest, but… they’re looking for older, not newer! Good luck though.
Aaargh!! I meant older! See what lack of sleep does to me! (make me overuse exclamation marks too!!)
Hmm, I wonder if I can rent my four girl out to people too lazy to shave? I’m not nodding off while they’re out just in case.
I wonder if rat licking as an alternative hair removal would garner any public interest? I think that people would probably spent all night shrieking in horror at the smallest touch of a ratty tongue.
Stubble would be the last thing on their mind when they haven’t slept since the rat fashion started
No Chardeva in the OED… closest word is Chardonnay… well, perhaps that explains it!
I was really surprised, when I googled -chardeva beard- only three things came up and this article was one of them (before I posted).
No matter how obscure the things I find in the papers generally there is something somewhere else about them. I was really interested to see how truly obscure this one was
And here’s a combination of words I never thought I would see in my lifetime: “depilatory rat.”
Metan, I’m going to be thinking about this alllllll day.
As I was writing the post that term dropped into my head, there was no way I would have been able to resist using it, even if I had to rewrite the entire thing to include it!
I’ll warn the G.O. to look out for suspicious looking possibly razor or Veet bearing rats, and avoid any sort of hand shaking… I had a mental picture of a hairless, genital-less, gold toothed man… it wasn’t pretty
Ewwww…. Remind me not to hire you for the visual marketing of my new hair removal product!
I am reminded of the hilarious story, The Buggalugs Bum Thief, by Tim Winton wherein people’s bottoms go missing one night.
A ratbag Australian classic! We love that one.