Indian Summer https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/ Sat, 2 May 2026 00:09:05 GMT World Nomads Adventures Walking through the narrow streets here, I enter unconsciously into the mandala of Indian gender paradigms. My awareness of my sex and my skin colour becomes heightened, acute. Traveling alone as a woman in India - or anywhere, for that matter - is not so simple. In Indian culture, it is not at all common for a woman to be independent - it is rather an anomaly, a reason for suspicion, an outward curiosity. She is always connected to a man, whether her father, brother, husband or son. The only women outside of this are orphans, prostitutes and widows. To be a westernized woman alone in India is to inhabit a sterotype: moneyed, capricious, loose and sexualized - and, above all, powerful. The discrepancy between the sociocultural standing of the Indian female, and the iconographical and religious symbolism of the divine female within Indian culture is vast and multivalent. It is, of course, the main topic of feminist criticism in Asian Religions 101 in universities across the world - and yet, it does necessitate a certain criticism. Particularly when one is both subject and object of the discussion. Within the Hindu pantheon, much like the Greek and Roman pantheon, a male deity is incomplete without his female counterpart, his shakti. Shakti is a word with a remarkable semantic range - it means something like vitality, empowerment, revitalization. It represents the balancing of male-female energy, and also of the cosmic and natural order. On the mundane level, Indian breakfast cereals advertise that their product has added shakti - strength, vitamins, caloric power, nourishment in the deepest sense of the word. In the Hindu esoteric tradition, this quality of nourishment and balance is the quintessential aspect of the divine female. Which is not to say that the role of the goddess is relegated merely to masculine empowerment. The Hindu goddess runs the complete emotional spectrum, just as her male counterpart: from peaceful and maternal, to wrathful and destructive. Sita, Radha, Tara and Saraswati are each invoked every day in Hindu culture for their symbolic relationships to art, music, poetry, harmony, life-giving, erotic love and mothering qualities. They represent the Great Mother, the dual principle of the two Marys in the Catholic tradition - mother and lover, virgin and courtesan. The wrathful goddesses - Kali, Durga, Vajrayogini - are revered and propagated for the raw female power that they wield and possess. Iconographically, they are depicted naked, hair loose and flowing, tongue extended, menstruating openly, bearing weapons and riding feral animals. She is the woman of Dionysian orgies, only she is in complete control of her faculties and her shakti. Hindu esoteric philosophy is somewhat Manichaean in its invocation of the union of opposites to create balance and harmony in the natural world and cosmos. The two most primary symbols of diametric opposition throughout the Hindu world are the lingam and the yoni - the divine phallus and its sacred vaginal inversion. The yoni statues are often enclosed and protected within public sanctuaries, but the ancient phalluses are everywhere. I have actually bumped into them while walking through crowded streets in the old city in Kathmandu - this is how commonplace and prevalent they are. And yet, the power of the Indian woman has been secreted away, despite the blatant paradox. In the midst of however many thousands of years of history, this paradox is intensified by the arrival and presence of the westernized woman. In South India, I feel forced to conform - I won't touch men in public or make eye contact, I wear loose clothing and long shawls, and tie back my unruly curls. The men are much more aggresive, particularly in cities. The aggression takes a peculiar form - it is not sexual aggression, such as in Parisian parks (where it is the worst I have ever experienced, anywhere in the world), but rather some sort of perverse need to devalue westernized women as symbols of power. This is done not through violence, but through a sort of victimization. A casual brush of the ass or the breast, standing too close, leering. The only way to subvert this paradigm of power, for the Indian man who engages in this, is to demean the woman through psychological cruelty and physical intimidation. In the north, however, it is much more liberal, and I am more comfortable here. The Tibetans are remarkably hip and unfettered by Indian conservativism, so it is quite easily to inhabit one's skin. I slide into my perfectly cut designer jeans, I wear my hair loose, I show my shoulders and my curves unapologetically. The Kashmiri men, with their black curls, strong Aryan features and startling green eyes nod approvingly - which, I must admit, is devilishly flattering in a world where sexuality is suspect and woman the culprit. https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/story/24518/India/The-Second-Sex Travel India jdennis1972 https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/story/24518/India/The-Second-Sex#comments https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/story/24518/India/The-Second-Sex Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:28:00 GMT 1 Six and a half years since I have last been in Dharamsala, and seemingly, a small lifetime. It is a strange thing, to return to a place that was never quite familiar to begin with. Memories come back to me in flashes, moments, with passing scents. I look through the curtained window of a small cafe ... and I have been there before. But with whom? What did we talk about, so many years ago? It is as if I encounter myself in a memory, in a dream. I was so young then, so fully vital and so alive. I am by myself now, and still quite young. In the early afternoon I walk out of McLeod Ganj along the Bagsu road. I remember a waterfall somewhere, and I want to find it again. Along the deserted road there is a small cafe with stone steps leading down to a small house. I remember that house, suddenly. It was the temporary house of a man called Gary, a crazy American who eventually left India to become an astronaut. Gary was a man of wild and ridiculous theories, and if he saw you from a restaurant walking down the street, he would run out shouting to you about his lastest idea. One thing he always complained about was the intrusion of artificial light in the night sky of the Himalayas. He argued that all artifical outdoor lighting should be replaced with red light bulbs, as it wasn't perceptible from space and didn't give the sky a purplish haze. Red light also has the added benefit, he said, of turning people on. So in addition to quelling the problem of light pollution, people would also become more sexually inclined in general. And how much violent conflict in the world might be averted, argued Gary, if people spent their nights making love and not war? He used to travel with this enormous telescope. He was a friend of my flatmate in Kathmandu, who told me he might be stopping by one day. The first time I met him, he was standing alone in my flat, all six and a half feet of him, wearing nothing but a sarong, looking into people's windows with his telescope in the middle of the afternoon. It's to see the stupa better, he reasoned, after introducing himself. I was in love with his best friend, and together we all had a few adventures in Nepal and northern India. I wonder what has become of him. I climb a shale path up through Bagsu and I eventually find the waterfall cafe - just a tin shack with a tarpaulin roof serving chai, in the middle of nowhere. I come upon a bend in the road, and a wilted rhododendron tree, and my mind flashes back again. There was a field of yellow mustard flowers, once upon a time, very near to here. On the roof of Gary's house I met two Swedish girls who taught me how to knit. One sunny day, I took my yarn out to this mustard field, when the rhododendron trees were in full bloom. There was in Indian woman there, picking rhododendron blooms and gathering them in her enormous shawl. She smiled at me, laughed at my knitting and sat next to me to pluck the blooms and collect the petals. She spoke to me in Hindi, and I tried my best to communicate in broken Nepali. Chutney, she said, I am making chutney. In response to my disbelief, she shoved a handful of flowers into her mouth, and gestured for me to do the same. Which I did. So we sat there together, plucking petals and eating them. She invited me back to her home for dal bhaat, and after lunch she began sewing and gestured for me to continue my knitting as I sat there on the dirt floor. I said goodbye after an hour or so, and as I left she gave me her beaded necklace. These are the things I remember. https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/story/24517/India/Deja-Vu Travel India jdennis1972 https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/story/24517/India/Deja-Vu#comments https://journals.worldnomads.com/jdennis1972/story/24517/India/Deja-Vu Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:26:00 GMT 0