When I arrived in India, it was August, and I was chock full of enthusiasm and suffering from a pretty decent case of jet lag (pictures from the first day we arrived can attest to this). I had gotten cozy with the Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai airports, and had my fill of airline samosas. I was thrust into a group of 9 other new faces similarly marked with jet lag. Torn between wanting to make a good first impression and sleeping for a million years, I remember feeling frantic, excited, grateful, and overwhelmed. Now, looking back at that moment, I cannot believe how much has happened in 3.5 months.
I would like to note here that being in India is NOTHING like the Eat, Pray, Love fantasies that Western travelers often anticipate (and for the record I find these images/expectations of India highly problematic; while it is not my job to police how people experience India, you cannot be a foreigner and stake a claim to a kind of spirituality or cultural identity that is not yours, and before trying to make it applicable to your life make an effort to study, experience, and appreciate these various cultural components). It’s hot, there are mosquitoes, the toilets are different, and sometimes you just drop all of your rice on the floor because you’re learning how to eat with your hands!
I have collected some pretty awesome memories in my time in Madurai. Here are some just to name a few:
petting my friendly neighborhood cow on an evening walk with my appaa,
playing peek-a-boo with my host nephew,
tickling Ganesh’s belly with Dr. V,
eating jigarthanda for the first time,
recreating the image of Vishnu, Srilakshmi, and Bhudevi at a local cave temple,
watching my ammaa make egg dosa and fish curry (in her beautiful clay pot),
going to the flower market and encountering PILES of jasmine, lily, and lotus flowers,
speaking broken but earnest Tamil with the owners of JP’s restaurant,
jumping in the Indian Ocean,
watching Tamil movies and discovering Dhanush,
conducting an independent research project that I found myself meaningfully invested in (and excited about because learning is awesome!)
eating a ghost chili at a spice farm in Thekkady
drinking from a tender coconut
One of the most important things I have learned here is that India is not a single identity; it is fifteen different states with their own language, cuisine, and lifestyle that have different political, economic, and environmental landscapes, and that’s pretty cool! I was only in India for a relatively short time, but got to experience Madurai and aspects of Tamil culture I had never known about before coming to India. Additionally, I have learned a lot about how my identity as a Western, white woman impacts my interactions with residents of the community. Seeing whiteness privileged in interactions with vendors and acquaintances at weddings, and seeing the larger implications of privileging whiteness in media and their constructed standards of beauty, was eye opening and very disheartening. However, I am extremely grateful to gain this new perspective and intend to carry it with me throughout the rest of my travels and future involvement in international communities.
However, I am continually grateful for the personal growth I have had through my time in India. I have learned about my ability to adapt, how to better take care of myself when I am feeling overwhelmed (i.e. drinking buckets of water and eating a coconut sweet), and being more open to new experiences, even when those experiences are scary (see speaking in Tamil to strangers, finding a new restaurant without Google Maps or a strong sense of direction/street names, trying to understand the nightly news, climbing a mountain to see a Jain temple, encountering lizards in your house, and negotiating friendships with cows on your walk to school). Some experiences are scarier than others (like engaging in discourses with an NGO that poses unanticipated ethical dilemmas, or asking questions about the caste system), but ultimately contribute to what I think is the goal of being abroad: learning new things about yourself by taking on challenges and embracing a new culture!
This blog post doesn’t even begin to capture all of the valuable experiences I have had in Madurai, and I am sure that more of these valuable moments will come to mind as I am travelling home, back to snow and Christmas and cheeseburgers. I hope that I will find my way back to Madurai and south India in some capacity, and treasure (as corny as that sounds but it’s true!) the times I’ve had here. While it is hard to leave a place that has become so familiar to me and one that I have genuinely grown to love, I am very excited to commence some post-program travel with fellow students! Our first stop is Sri Lanka, followed by some adventuring around Malaysia and Thailand before I head home!