In the past few weeks, you may have come across an article entitled "India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear" by an undergraduate named Michaela Cross.
If you haven't, here's a link to it: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1023053I first saw this article circulating across social outlets among my University of Chicago network, and then later came across it posted on Reddit. A few days ago, I went to cnn.com and was surprised to see the article and a picture of Michaela staring back at me, front and center. Since then I've had several conversations with friends and co-workers about it.
I had a pretty strong reaction to Michaela's article because she and I had several things in common going into our India experiences. She is a woman in her early twenties, and so am I. She spent three months in India about a year ago; so did I (and two years before that, I spent 6 weeks in India right after graduating college). We even share the same alma mater, so I'd argue that our surroundings and student life before we went to India were comparable. To sum it up: we were both privileged young non-Indian women who jumped at our respective opportunities to go to India.
I do acknowledge that we differ in our appearance. She has fair skin and red hair; I do not. I probably did not stand out as foreign or exotic as she did to the locals. But despite looking less like a foreigner, I still was one, including by my appearance. I also spent a significant amount of time traveling with white women; women who stood out just as starkly against the backdrop of an overwhelmingly-Indian population as Michaela did throughout our travels within Delhi, Agra, Goa, Bangalore, Mysore, Hampi, and Pondicherry.
So with all that in mind, I wanted to share my experience and reaction to hers.
In the 18 weeks I spent between my two trips to India, I was never grabbed at. I was never masturbated at. I danced around and wasn't filmed. And I certainly never found myself in the situation she did of locking herself into a hotel room as a hotel staff member who allegedly attempted to rape her roommate called her again and again. Nothing I encountered came close to the horrible experiences that she went through.
Yet other parts of her account resonated more closely with my experience. I did find that I attracted stares. I did have street hagglers chase me. And a few times, strangers did take pictures of me without my permission (I should add that plenty of others did ask for permission). Those experiences left me feeling unsettled, but not unsafe.
The staring can be hard to quantify. What's appropriate and what's inappropriate? What's the intent of the staring? It's natural for people to look at each other and people everywhere do it - perhaps here in the US we do it more covertly and with a quicker tendency to look away when caught - but we still do it. When I've traveled to other countries where the staring culture/etiquette is not as conservative, I felt that I received a similar number and duration of stares from Italian and Peruvian men as I did in India. I also received plenty of stares from women and children. It can be uncomfortable at times, yes. But I attributed it to people's natural propensity/curiosity to look at things that they aren't used to seeing. Never did I interpret the stares as a threat to my safety.
I had street hagglers follow me, yes. Sometimes briefly, other times at length. I saw street hagglers follow foreign men too, and Indian women, and Indian men, and basically anyone else who expressed interest in their wares, just as frequently and with the same gusto. Again, to me those experiences certainly were an annoyance, but they never escalated to the point where I felt unsafe. My interpretation was that they were persistent because I looked like a sucker who would overpay for their goods.
And yes, I had pictures taken of me, sometimes without permission. Of the three behaviors discussed thus far, this is arguably the most severe. But again, I've heard of and witnessed this happening in countries all over the world; and every time with no harm or harassment, sexual or otherwise. In her article Michaela laments, "who knows how many strangers have used my image as pornography?" - a question that never crossed my mind and that frankly I was shocked to see as a conclusion that she had jumped to. I never had reason to believe the photos that people were taking of me were to be used as pornography. I recall a time when a white male I was traveling with was asked by an Indian man to pose for a picture with the Indian man's son, a toddler. I highly doubt that photo was used as pornography. Rather, I believed these pictures were captured to proof to friends and families that they saw someone interesting or different in their day. Was it right or permissible for them to take pictures of me without permission? I'd argue probably not, because it seems disrespectful based on the values and culture I'm used to. But was it a threat to my safety? Did I feel that the photographs made me into a sexual object? No, no.
All of this comes down to interpretation, which by nature is subjective. I don't think it's valuable to argue that my interpretations are more correct than Michaela's, or vice versa. I also don't think they are necessarily equal; if I had encountered some of the more aggressive behavior that Michaela did, perhaps they would have cast a shadow on these milder acts. If I'd been filmed dancing, maybe the picture taking wouldn't have been so easy to brush off. Or if I'd been groped, any more stares may have appeared as a menacing preamble to inappropriate touching. I don't know, because those things didn't happen to me or to any women I was with during my travels.
What I did experience during my travels were immense displays of kindness and hospitality by the Indian people I met. I spent time at an orphanage where I was offered cola. I was invited to spend holidays with my co-worker's family in lieu of not being near my own. I was offered a sari to wear, sweets to eat, walks to my apartment at night, suggestions of places to go, and help just about every time I asked it. I feel that I was left India with an overwhelmingly positive imprint of its people, which is why it saddened and surprised me to read Michaela's account and the subsequent effects that her trip had on her.
I could go on and on about the good things I experienced - but the point I want to make is that I felt safe the whole time I was in India. Much safer than when I lived in a neighborhood in the south side of Chicago. And before we are so quick to blast foreign places like India for putting up with such horrible treatment of women, we should look at our own numbers; in 2010, for every 100,000 people, 1.8 incidents of rape were reported. In the United States, for the same year, that number was 27.3 (source). If India was a "woman's hell" to Michaela, what do these numbers say about our home country?
Above all, I do not condemn, dismiss, or question the experiences that Michaela had on her trip to India or the way she interpreted them. I also do not condemn raising awareness of the rape culture in India. Those are important issues that need to be shared, to have attention drawn to, and to be fixed. I believe her account has helped to bring light to those issues in some ways.
Where I am concerned is that the picture that Michaela paints does not capture anything about Indian individuals other than the dirty actions of the men she had the misfortune to encounter. I fear that through the choice of words and experiences that Michaela used in her report, which she qualifies as "the story you need", readers will believe that India is a country that tolerates or celebrates a culture where depraved men exploit and sexualize all foreign women who enter their lands. And I fear that they will vow to not go to India as a result of their fear, or to look at all Indian men (and women) with disgust, or slander the country.
I know that as a young woman, had I never gone to India, or perhaps if I did not interact frequently with people of Indian descent, I would have been fearful of traveling to India after reading her report. I would've looked at the blurred-out anonymous Indian man in the background of Michaela's picture and shuddered.
So I offer my own account, one where Michaela's conclusion of "India [as] an extremely unsafe place for women" was not one that I or the other women I was with had reason to believe.
There are places that can be situationally dangerous for women (and every other subculture or subgroup of humans) everywhere in this world. In India, in the US, in every country. The danger posed is brought on by ignorance and inhumanity and hate that are not limited to one place or one group of people. As Michaela's article reaches an increasingly wide audience, I implore its readers to remember that it is one woman's report, one that focuses exclusively on the negative experiences that she had. Do not judge the whole nation, its culture and its people by her account alone.
