Staying true to yourself and withholding your identity while in India is something that I think everyone on my program has struggled to deal with. It's tricky to find that right balance between not being culturally inappropriate and also being yourself. I think most of this experience has been comprised more of me trying to assimilate into their cultural and their lifestyle versus the other way around. I am more focused on understanding my surroundings and integrating myself into my host community than letting my identity shine. However, I don't necessarily think this is making me mute. Nor am I in any way saying that my host community is shutting me down and not accommodating my personal needs.
What's difficult is that we are not fluent in each other languages. Not just the verbal kind but body language, greetings, and gestures, among others, are all lost in translation. It's not common to hug our friends that we meet at school and eye contact can at times be perceived as too forward or aggressive. Things that would usually come natural to me in typical human interactions follow a different agenda here. For example, my roommates and I made a couple of friends from the university we are currently studying in. For the most part, we have great conversation and everyone is always really comfortable with one another. After our third outing together, I innately thought that a hug with a friend of the opposite sex would be completely fine. However, the awkwardness of the hug and the glares from others afterwards told me otherwise. Simple things like that, that we usually look over mean something. And, that has been where I find myself pulling back.
Being a woman in India also challenges how you identify yourself. A large number of Indians will agree with the equal treatment of both men and women and they won't discriminate based on gender. However, there have been instances that dispute this. In one situation in particular, a group of us met Indian students studying in an agricultural college just outside of Pune. We spoke to them for a while about their lives, ambitions, and hobbies. We discovered that the men in the college were granted unlimited wifi access and cellphone usage. The women, though, had restricted internet availability and were prohibited from having cellphones because administrators claimed they are too much of a "distraction." On top of that, the girls could only go out on Sundays for 3 hours at a time, after first having asked for permission from their chancellor. Boys, on the other hand, were given unlimited free time on any day of the week. So, it has definitely been a problem to try and stick to your values and what you believe as right when you don't see a lot of that around you.
On the flip-side, my host family is always warm and ready to help whenever we are feeling a bit homesick and/or overwhelmed. Our host mom brought us to the equivalent of a "Safeway" so that we could buy some peanut butter and Oreos. Because what could be more reminiscent of the great United States than that? She sits and chats with us whenever we are feeling down and always attends to our needs. Our study abroad program is also setting up an Indian style Thanksgiving dinner for us so that we feel more at home and organizes other events to make us more at ease, like pizza parties and s'mores bonfires.
In the end, we are all riding on this cultural rollercoaster together. While it can be difficult to completely stick to your identity while being respectful, it's a balance that I am in the process of achieving. And, I know that I can still be myself underneath it all.