How women should dress in Delhi

Last night, I met a friend for dinner. She's Chinese, married to a white American journalist.

While we were gulping down salty lassis, the subject turned to Delhi's dress restrictions on women. Foreign women, even those who come warned that Delhi culture is more conservative, are sometimes shocked not just by the level of modesty required in this city but also by the constancy and fierceness of the male gaze. This is largely because the city has such a large population of migrant young men. (Another friend, a man, told me accurately - "When it comes to sex, like with everything, Delhi is a city of haves and have-nots.")

Another woman friend, an Indian settled in Dubai, told me an interesting story: apparently, the Dubai authorities recently tried to pass an Act saying that anyone who wasn't a Dubai citizen wouldn't be allowed into shopping malls after dark, unless in the company of a family. (These sorts of laws aren't rare in the Arab world, where shopping malls are one of the few places where groups of single women gather and enjoy themselves.) The law wasn't written in a racist way, but much like France's face veil ban, the meaning and the letter of the law were two very different things. White men were allowed into malls after dark, whether or not they were with family. The young Indian men who work in construction, etc, were kept out.

My friend concluded by asking: why is it that our young Indian men have such a hard time respecting women? (To someone who hasn't lived in India, this may seem like the wrong question. It's not.)

This is really a cosmic question, and the answer is beyond me. Every so often, right as you think that Delhi really is becoming more liberal, you get a series of stories like these.

But when the honor killings stories broke, young urban Indians watched with the same horrified fascination as the Western world. It's a mistake to assume that "Indian culture" really exists.

I told my Chinese friend the truth. For an Indian woman, your gender can be either your biggest blessing or your biggest curse. In some ways, Indian culture is much more chivalrous than that of the West - Indian men think nothing of picking up a bill, pulling out a chair, or going out of their way to drop a girl home at night. In this culture, friendship between the sexes is sometimes easier because sex is less taken for granted. Professionally, many Indian women are well-educated, and those from well-off families often work after marriage (especially nowadays). On the other hand, plenty of Indian women choose to stay home with their kids, and in this culture, that choice isn't ridiculed. In India, women seem to have more of a diversity of life choices available to them (this does not, of course, extend to sex. About which Indian society remains painfully conservative - women who have sexual relationships outside of marriage are in for a world of discrimination)

But then there are also women for whom their gender is a daily curse, because it denies them the most basic human rights. Because they hail from a rural culture (even if they live in a big city!) where fathers seem willing to murder their own sons and daughters over something like an inter-caste marriage. These cases are extreme, but they're not as extreme as we'd like to think.

Those of us who belong to one part of society sometimes like to pretend that these other people aren't real - in the sense, they're not a part of us. Which is true, they're not. But at the same time...

Ultimately, you can't change people. I obeyed Delhi's bizarre dress diktats for a little while, but I soon realized that there was no way to dress such that I could disguise that a) I'm female and b) I'm young. And neither of these alone should be grounds for discrimination. Although I swear off my smallest shorts and skirts, I frequently wear knee-length shorts and skirts and sleeveless tops. Sometimes people stare. But what I've discovered is that they'd stare no matter what I wore.