🌅 The moment I realized my feminism was a suitcase I’d packed wrong
I sat cross-legged on a cracked mud floor, grinding mustard seeds with a sil-batta—a heavy stone mortar and pestle—my palms raw, knuckles dusted with grey powder. Outside, Meera’s laughter rose above the clatter of goats and the rhythmic thud of her mother pounding millet. No one offered to take over. No one apologized for the work. And no one—not Meera, not her grandmother, not the three other women sharing that sun-baked courtyard—spoke of ‘empowerment’ as if it were a destination. They lived it, quietly, relentlessly, without translation. That afternoon, my carefully curated ideas about what femininity ‘should’ look like—autonomy defined by choice, strength measured in independence, care as optional rather than constitutive—began to dissolve. How living in rural India challenged my perception of femininity wasn’t an intellectual exercise. It was physical: blistered hands, sweat-slicked hair, the weight of a brass water pot balanced on my hip—and the slow, steady recalibration of everything I thought I knew about women’s roles, resilience, and relational power.
🗺️ The setup: Why I went—and what I thought I’d find
I arrived in the village of Khera, near Jodhpur in western Rajasthan, in late October 2022—a season locals call Sharad, when the monsoon’s dampness has lifted but the desert heat hasn’t yet sharpened into winter’s bite. I’d spent six months planning this solo homestay through a small, Rajasthan-based NGO that connects travelers with families practicing sustainable agro-pastoral livelihoods. My intention was clear: document everyday life through photography and field notes, focusing on intergenerational knowledge transfer. I carried two lenses, a notebook bound in recycled cotton, and a well-researched list of ‘gender-sensitive practices’ to observe—things like access to land titles, participation in village councils (gram sabhas), or girls’ school enrollment rates.
What I didn’t carry was humility about my assumptions. I’d read Arundhati Roy and Flavia Agnes; I’d attended workshops on decolonizing development frameworks. I believed I understood structural inequality. But I’d never washed clothes in a dried-up riverbed at dawn, never walked four kilometers carrying firewood while negotiating goat paths with bare feet, never watched a woman deliver her third child unassisted in a room lit only by a single kerosene lamp—and then return to kneading dough before sunrise. My framework was analytical. Theirs was embodied.
💥 The turning point: When my lens fogged over
The rupture came on day five—during chhaunri, the pre-dawn water run. At 4:45 a.m., Meera, 19, tapped my shoulder. Her eyes were already open, alert, calm. She handed me a brass matka, its interior cool and faintly metallic. “Hold it like this,” she said, adjusting my grip—not with correction, but with quiet demonstration. Her thumb pressed into the curve of my palm, guiding my fingers to distribute weight across the base, not the rim. “If you hold tight here, your wrist tires first. Not your back.”
We walked in near silence, the path barely visible under starlight. Crickets paused mid-chirp as we passed. My breath hitched; my shoulders burned. After 20 minutes, Meera stopped beside a shallow, rocky depression where water seeped from limestone fissures. She knelt, dipped the matka, and filled it in one smooth motion—no splash, no wasted movement. I fumbled, spilled half, refilled clumsily. She didn’t sigh. Didn’t hurry. Just waited, her posture relaxed, gaze fixed on the horizon where indigo was softening to lavender.
Back at the compound, I tried to photograph her pouring water into the clay cistern. She turned, smiled faintly, and said, “You see the water. But you don’t see the hand that holds it steady for twelve years.” Then she walked away, barefoot, to feed the calves. That sentence lodged itself behind my ribs. I’d come to document ‘women’s labor’—but I hadn’t considered labor as continuity. As memory held in muscle. As dignity encoded in repetition.
🤝 The discovery: What the women taught me without naming it
Over the next three weeks, I stopped taking notes during chores. Instead, I asked questions that weren’t about policy or statistics—but about rhythm, preference, consequence:
- “When you decide to plant bajra instead of wheat, who do you talk to first?” (Meera: “My grandmother. She listens to the wind in the neem leaves. If it sounds thin, we wait.”)
- “Who mends the calf’s rope when it frays?” (Laxmi, 62: “The girl who last tied it. If she doesn’t, the calf walks farther. We all walk farther.”)
- “What happens if someone refuses to grind spices for the family?” (Chhaya, 34, laughing: “Then she eats plain roti. And the rest of us laugh—but only after we’ve ground enough for her too.”)
These weren’t anecdotes. They were governance systems—non-hierarchical, reciprocal, anchored in consequence rather than command. Femininity here wasn’t performed against constraint; it was forged within it. Strength wasn’t absence of vulnerability—it was knowing exactly where your body could bend without breaking, and trusting others to hold the space where it did.
One rainy afternoon, a flash flood swelled the seasonal stream bordering the fields. Men gathered tools and debated reinforcing the embankment. Women formed a line along the bank—not with shovels, but with woven grass mats and bundles of dried kikar branches. They wove barriers mid-current, their movements synchronized, voices low and steady. No one assigned roles. No one shouted instructions. When the water receded at dusk, the eastern field remained dry. Later, Chhaya showed me how the same mats would be repurposed as compost covers, then as shade for newborn lambs. “We fix what breaks,” she said. “Not because we must. Because we know how.”
🚂 The journey continues: From observer to participant
By week three, I stopped saying “I’m documenting.” I started saying, “I’m learning.” I learned to roll chapati dough with even pressure—not too thick (it won’t puff), not too thin (it tears). I learned to recognize the subtle shift in cow dung texture that signaled optimal drying time for fuel cakes. Most importantly, I learned when to speak—and when silence was the most honest form of listening.
I also made missteps. I offered money to help rebuild a collapsed goat shed. Meera declined gently: “We build together. If you give money, you build alone—and then it belongs to you, not us.” I asked if they wanted solar lamps. Laxmi replied, “Our oil lamps burn clean. The flame tells us when the wick needs trimming. A battery doesn’t speak.” These weren’t rejections of progress—they were assertions of sovereignty over pace, scale, and meaning.
Travel logistics folded into this recalibration. Buses ran twice daily—but only if enough passengers gathered. I learned to arrive at the roadside stop by 6:15 a.m., not because of a published schedule, but because that’s when the driver’s son brought his father tea and the engine warmed. Trains required verifying departure times at the station each morning—the board changed without notice. What seemed like inefficiency was actually distributed coordination: information flowed through relationships, not infrastructure.
💡 Reflection: What this experience taught me about travel and myself
This wasn’t cultural immersion. It was epistemic unlearning. I arrived equipped with theories of patriarchy, but I left understanding how patriarchy operates differently when survival depends on collective stamina—not individual ambition. Femininity in Khera wasn’t oppositional. It wasn’t about claiming space *from* men—it was about stewarding space *with* land, livestock, seasons, and lineage.
My own identity as a ‘feminist traveler’ had been built on visibility: speaking up, asserting boundaries, demanding accessibility. In Khera, power lived in restraint—in knowing when to yield weight, when to hold silence, when to let another woman’s hand guide yours on a stone mortar. That kind of strength doesn’t seek witness. It simply persists.
Travel, I realized, isn’t about collecting perspectives—it’s about letting them dismantle your scaffolding. The most valuable souvenirs weren’t textiles or spices. They were new thresholds of tolerance—for ambiguity, for slowness, for labor that leaves no paper trail.
📝 Practical takeaways: What readers can apply to their own travels
None of this required special status, funding, or fluency in Hindi. It required showing up—with hands ready to learn, not just record. Here’s what shaped my experience practically:
- Stay longer than you think you need to. Three days shows you hospitality. Ten days shows you routine. Twenty-one days shows you how people negotiate disagreement, celebrate small wins, and absorb loss. Homestays under seven nights rarely move past performance.
- Carry skills, not just gear. Bring needlework, basic first aid knowledge, or literacy support—not as charity, but as barter. When I helped transcribe oral folk songs into Devanagari script, it opened conversations about inheritance rights no survey could access.
- Ask about work—not ‘what do you do?’ The latter invites polished answers. ‘How do you prepare the flour for festival bread?’ or ‘Who decides which tree gets pruned first?’ reveals decision-making hierarchies, knowledge transmission, and tacit authority.
- Respect temporal sovereignty. Don’t schedule around your convenience. Ask, “When is the best time for you?” Then wait. In Khera, ‘best time’ meant after milking, before the midday heat broke—never ‘after lunch,’ because lunch wasn’t fixed. Time was cyclical, not linear.
Most crucially: Don’t translate their lives into your framework. I stopped comparing Meera’s choices to Western benchmarks—‘Why doesn’t she go to university?’ became ‘What knowledge does she inherit that university can’t teach?’ That pivot changed everything.
⭐ Conclusion: How this trip changed my perspective
I returned home with cracked heels, a notebook full of Hindi verbs I still mispronounce, and a profound discomfort with the word ‘empowerment.’ It implies deficit. In Khera, women weren’t waiting to be empowered—they were exercising power daily, in ways so embedded in ecology and relationship that naming it felt like exposing a root system to air. My perception of femininity didn’t expand. It deepened—like groundwater finding older, cooler strata.
Now, when I plan travel, I ask different questions: What rhythms govern this place? Whose labor holds it steady? What knowledge circulates outside formal institutions? I still carry my camera—but I keep it in my bag until invited. And I always bring extra mustard seeds. Not as a gift—but as acknowledgment that some truths are ground slowly, by hand, over decades.
