A University of Chicago student recently wrote about her experience in India on a study trip. RoseChasm (the name she’s written by) recalls “men filming our every move” when she and her friends danced in the Ganesha Festival, “clawing at our breasts and groin”, “the smiling man who masturbated at me on a bus”. She also describes how she lay in her hotel bedroom holding a pair of scissors while the staff member of the hotel who had attempted to rape her friend called her over and over on the phone. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder on her return to university.
It is no doubt a difficult account to read, but for various reasons. It is distressing to hear of RoseChasm’s perpetual fear and experience of instances of violence. It is probably more so because I and most, if not all, women in India can relate to those experiences – getting into an auto-rickshaw and being vigilant to see if the driver is indeed taking you where you want to go, being brushed against and groped in busy buses, trying to hide from staring eyes and so on. But it is also disconcerting to read that RoseChasm assumes that it’s because she’s white that she experienced sexual harassment in India: “I knew that as a white woman I would be seen as a promiscuous being and a sexual prize.”
RoseChasm’s contention is problematic because her only view of India seems to be as a white woman. I am not alleging that Indian men do not see white women as different from Indian women; however, ‘different’ doesn’t necessarily imply easy to sexually harass and assault. If anything, the delivery of justice in India in cases of rape, functioning as it does under pressure, has been more of a sure shot for travellers than for Indian women. One of the quickest rape trials to be conducted in the country was that of the rape of a German tourist in Rajasthan in 2006 which concluded in 15 days. By contrast, the trial of the case of gang rape of Delhi student in December 2012, which saw large scale protests in India, is still ongoing eight months after the incident.
Unintentionally, RoseChasm’s narrative obliterates, and paradoxically overstates, violence against women who live in India. It obliterates because she doesn’t mention talking to or sharing her experiences with other women in India (even though it is stated that she wrote this account in hope of spreading “international exposure about what women travellers and residents experience in India”). And it overstates because it quite easily lends itself to the assumption that it must be really bad for women in India if it’s that bad for a female traveller; an assumption that leads to the Chinese Whispers myth that the rest of the countries in the world don’t have a ‘rape problem’.
This very paradox underlies my own dilemma when writing about violence against women in India and, in this specific case, in criticising RoseChasm’s account without invalidating her experiences. It’s the same dilemma I face when I give out advice to friends planning to travel to India – the time they should get back to their hotel by, the people they shouldn’t talk to, and a few Hindi words that could help them manage emergencies – without making them feel like they’d be responsible if some wrong came their way. My issue indeed is not with what RoseChasm has described (which, as I said, I can personally identify with) but with how she’s described it.
Interestingly, a fellow student of RoseChasm who went on the same study trip followed up RoseChasm’s account with her own experience of travelling in India. The only black student on the trip, twoseat (the name she’s written by), writes: “I felt that I stood out even more because I stood out very starkly from the Indian population and especially from my white and Asian peers.” However, she wishes to steer clear of generalisations and emphasises that she met many warm and honest men too while in India. Her account is important because it drives home that travelling in India is, as in any other country, plural in the experiences and interactions it presents.
RoseChasm’s dilemma of how to respond to friends and family when they ask about her trip to India is also part of this story. India still conjures up colonial images of colour, chaos, virile men and oppressed women in travellers’ minds which often seem to inform all those questions about that one trip to India that a cousin or a friend or a neighbour took. This narrative that portrays India as a singular entity, the land of elephants and snake charmers, the rape capital of the world, needs to be challenged but without refusing the experience of fear and violence by women living and travelling in the country.
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