Cultural Adaptation

This post started as something written for the DF Sandbox Fellow's blog as a monthly requirement. I have edited it for my personal blog so that I can be more honest. To see the original: http://globalexchangeprogram.wordpress.com/. It might not be up until tomorrow or the day after.

One of the most challenging aspects of adapting to Hubli's culture (a word that often oversimplifies the complexities of what I experience) is the fact that locals will never let me forget that I look different. When I first arrived in India (for my second time) over a year ago, I thought I would never get used to the constant staring. Yet here I am, a year later, and not only am I used to the staring, but I also realize that I have license to stare back. I don't blame anyone and it's not always bad; sometimes it's advantageous. It's just the way it is.

There are many aspects of local culture that I have adopted into my daily life: I usually address my superiors as sir or madam, take the local bus to work every day, dress in salwar suits or saris, bathe with a bucket instead of a shower, cook Indian food and then eat it with my right hand, haggle over just a few rupees with a fruit vendor or rickshaw driver, use water instead of toilet paper when I use the bathroom, take my shoes off when I enter the house, don't say hello to people I pass on my street, use Kannada or Hindi when I actually know the appropriate words, bobble my head as an affirmative, and sometimes segregate myself from men whenever I see local women doing the same.

It's not always easy. There are certain things about my culture that I am willing to give up and certain things about Indian/Hubli culture that I am unwilling to adopt: I almost always eat a western breakfast (except when idli-sambar is available); I try to befriend street dogs; I refuse not to talk to certain people because of their caste, class, or professional designations; I find Indian corruption, whether at the national, local, or NGO level, abhorrent (yet complicated); and I won't drink water out of the tap.

There's a certain freedom about my foreignness that allows me to reject certain aspects of local culture and maintain certain aspects of my own. Yet the one thing I struggle with the most is how to maintain my independence, how to slip into anonymity when that's what I want and how to go wherever I want whenever I want to go there. I've learned over the past 13 months that many locals consider this kind of thinking "un-Indian," especially for a woman. But in my mind, it's still a constant battle.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, I recently walked along the coastline and beach in Mumbai fairly late at night (11 pm). To contextualize this, walking along the coastline is a popular activity, women are rarely (if ever) alone, and India has the largest concentration of young guys in groups (according to my good friend Rama- I swear he's right).

Now, I am very aware that walking along as a white woman is a rare sight, but I refuse to prevent myself from enjoying my late night walk. Of course there was the "bad" kind of starting, sexual harassment, propositioning, and numerous men who walked up to me to talk to me... one even dared to touch me. Here's a snippet from a conversation I had with Danish, one of the men who tried to approach me:

Danish: Why are you out so late? You should be walking in the morning.

Me: Why are you out so late?

Danish: I like coming here at night, but you should only walk here in the morning.

Me: I should be able to walk here whenever I want to.

He laughed, and then the conversation turned to him getting my phone number (he didn't) and ofering me a ride home (which would defeat the purpose of my walk, plus I'm not getting on some stranger's bike). I'm very aware that the sight of me out that late by myself really disturbs the gender dynamic, but I've gotten to the point where knocking down every man's BS sense of entitlement is worth it (I'm also doing much more than that when I think about it--good and bad--but I won't get into that here.

(No worries. I didn't compromise my safety.)