Indian Summer

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.