I never really thought of myself as coming into Gujarat as an outsider, but that is exactly what I was…not just in Gujarat, in India in general.  I always thought I blended in really well; perhaps physically, I did for the most part but as I quickly began to realize I was also somewhat of a foreigner.  In fact, I learned just how different I was when I began to speak one on one with our informants and general friends who were accompanying us to these many different scenes in Gujarat.

I recall speaking to one woman who was part of an action group to fight discrimination among different religious groups in Gujarat and learning that our similar age and background, did not mean we were similar at all.  She was a student like me, but she was studying commerce and she was working for this organization as an extracurricular activity.  She also firmly believed that the British ruined India and left it weak and easy to manipulate.  Then she began to talk about how she was studying so she could eligible for marriage and that she couldn’t wait.  As I was listening to her speak, I admired her motivation and her passion, but I also admired that she was not scared to show how strongly she felt about her opinions.  Although we didn’t have the same goals in life and were very different inside and out, we were still strong in our own ways; and that I could relate with many other women I met.

On another level, in a group discussion we were talking to a few informants in a village.  We spoke with a few elders, a few middle-aged persons and I spoke with many of the young girls that lived and went to school in the village.  As we sat listening to this woman, one of the elders of the village, I began to compare her ideas with that of my own family.  This woman was very set in traditional ways and believed that women should be covered at all times and should be modest and not outspoken for the sake of their moral reputation.

I began to view her the way my nani, my grandmother on my mom’s side, viewed Indian women.  She used to yell at me and tell me I should not talk so much or share my opinion because it did not matter.  However, my mother was the exact opposite.  She would tell me to express myself and to be independent and never to rely on a man. My mom, who was happy in her marriage with my father, had seen enough in her lifetime to teach her daughters differently and my father supported this, as well.  But when we were talking to this woman her daughter, her daughter did not talk so much about her mother’s opinion of the way women should act nor her mother’s belief that girls should not be educated.  Instead, it was her son in-law that was motivated to get his daughters educated and be more than he could be.

My opinion about all of these things was very fluid the whole time I was in India.  Even when I was meeting women and other Indian people, I was extremely conflicted on how I felt and the comparisons I made to my upbringing just confused me more.  Eventually, I began to separate myself from the equation and tried to view everything in the eyes of a foreigner. This is where I began to apply the idea of perceptions and began to realize the way I was raised was although similar in the customs and traditions of an Indian family, but perhaps not so much the teachings.  I was in school for different reasons that some of the Indians I met in Gujarat but they were similar at the same time…our outlook of the future was very different because our pasts were very different. As an American-born Indian in Gujarat, I was foreign in almost every respect, and barely similar in all.