Whenever I write something negative about India I struggle with whether I should write something positive too. To provide balance. To strive to see the positive. To make space for all the good I did experience that doesn’t sit at the front of my mind, and for all the good that surely exists that I don’t know and couldn’t see from 4 months of living as a foreigner in its most mega megalopolis. What I realize now is that much of what I write about is driven by culture clash. The intense feelings I had when my American culture hit Indian culture.
I see India through a lens, for sure, and the main tint of that lens is my Americanness. My culture prizes direct communication and, at its outer layers anyway, treating people with equality. Much of the focus of my writing here, and a major driver of my experience in India, is the culture clash I experienced: trying to understand what people were really saying when they spoke because the subtext was so nuanced and difficult truths were never actually said out loud but expressed in other ways, trying not to be shamed because I was a woman alone and by virtue of that was supposed to be, etc...
I’m sure there are many good things to say about India but, here’s the thing, I don’t have them to say right now. What stood out for me was the hardness of cultures colliding and the unfairness of major aspects of Indian culture, viewed, of course, from an American-centric point of view.
What I have said here has very much been from a place of feeling. How I felt when my culture hit India’s culture. I haven’t gotten to a more objective place yet and I think that’s fine. What I write is very valid in that it accurately represents layers of my experience but, at least at this point, those layers are still very much about the challenges of two cultures colliding.
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