Girl Power in the Land of the Maharajahs

Travel Stories: Terry Ward took heat from her American friends when she strayed from convention to travel the world. In an Indian guesthouse, she learned that some struggles are universal.

Shyam and I sat in the living room while the women prepared chai, tea served milky and spiced with black pepper and cardamom seeds.

Their home, a 250-year-old haveli, had been in the Sharma family for eight generations. The living room walls were indented with shallow alcoves that housed fake flowers and family photos. Trap doors in the floors concealed subterranean safes. And the spindle over the doorway, Kamla told me, was once used by servants to operate a hand-turned fan.

They are Brahmans, from India’s highest caste, Shyam explained. According to ancient ascetics, Hinduism’s four major castes arose from different parts of Brahma, the creator. Brahmans, traditionally priests and teachers, came from his mouth. Members of the Kshatriya caste, the warriors, sprang from his arms. Vaisyas, mostly merchants and farmers, emerged from Brahma’s thighs. And Sudras, the laborers, from his feet.

A guest book on the table was full of comments from past visitors, and I browsed it curiously. A Canadian traveler wrote about “Mama-ji’s mango chutney.” An Englishman marveled at having the fort to himself at sunset. But it was a short sentence penned by a San Franciscan that caught my eye. “This girl-power guesthouse is an amazing place. If you hear Kamla, Rachana and Arachana’s stories you will be amazed.”

As we sipped chai, the women began to talk.

Arachana and Rachana had worked as teachers until their mother opened the guesthouse in 2003. Thousands of foreign visitors arrive in Bundi each year, and the Sharmas weren’t the first to abandon their traditional livelihoods for a stake in the burgeoning tourism trade. But they were the first women in town to open their own guesthouse, and they faced a good deal of criticism.

“Before, Mama is selling wheat and vegetables from our agricultural field,” Rachana told me, as her mother reclined nearby. “Then for three years the monsoon is very bad and there were not so many things growing, so we decide to make our home a guesthouse.”

They named it R.N. Haveli, after their father, Ramnandan Sharma, who died of a heart attack in 1988 when Kamla was 36, leaving her with four small children.

“Life is very hard when my husband died,” Kamla said. “The neighbors and family is saying I must be sad only, and not to work. But how can I feed my children?”

“Everybody is giving Mama the pressure,” Arachana said. “They ask her why is she working. And now they are saying that women shouldn’t be having a guesthouse, with foreign men as guests. Mama was very stressed. Then she is getting the power. I think God is giving her the strength.”

I’d been in India for three weeks, and it occurred to me that the guesthouse was the first place I’d stayed where all the proprietors were women.

“The neighbors are always talking. They ask Mama why me and Arachana are not married,” Rachana said. “They give Mama big problem with this, why she is not finding a husband for us.”

“Some things in India are very good, some things are bad,” Kamla interjected calmly.

“If the neighbors see me talking to a foreign boy, a guest, on the street, they say bad things about me to Mama, and I have to cry,” Arachana said. “But Mama says you can’t be making worries about what other people say.”

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Terry Ward

Terry Ward is a Florida-based writer and a long-time contributor to World Hum.


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