Riding Solo: Photos of Indian Women Who Travel Alone

“I’m attempting to fight for a little space, so I can easily stand and not fall, and then this girl in front of me is like, ‘can easily you merely move a little? You’re making me uncomfortable.’ And I merely turned about and looked at her. There’s no place! I didn’t wake up today thinking I’d come and sit in your arms. It gets that crowded.”

Sushmita*, an assistant at one of Mumbai’s premier art galleries, recounts the a lot more intimate details of her morning commute to downtown Mumbai’s bustling arts district. She constantly spends her train ride in the girls-only compartment, marked on the platform along with pink arrows and a “Ladies Only” sign. Though the rest of the train is officially meant for the general public, it is heralded as a de facto men’s section. along with an incredulous laugh, Sushmita mentioned that, once, she saw somebody get hold of bitten for not moving from the means as soon as the doors opened on the subway.

Commuting women in India have actually lots of choices available as soon as it pertains to transport: the local metro, private auto-rickshaws, city buses, and now Ola and Uber cabs that are frequently cheaper compared to prepaid taxis. Traveling solo while female is still fraught along with the potential threat of sexual harassment (or worse, as in the case of the fatal gang rape of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh on a Delhi bus), leading to a boom in personal safety apps in the country. Still, this hasn’t stopped thousands of women—both local and tourist—from crisscrossing their means across the 1.3 million square mile country.

Shreya and Anvesha, two sisters in their twenties, talked to me regarding their experiences in Mumbai and Delhi. The sisters both commute to job alone along with self-confidence yet take precautions to be sure to “preserve themselves safe” whenever they’re out.

“We try taking the safer option,” Shreya says. “If I’m going to a remote place, I take a private auto-rickshaw. At night it’s much better to take a safe cab very compared to an auto. I send my parents or my friends the cab’s code too.” Sometimes, she added, she prefers to crash at a friend’s very compared to dealing along with late night transportation issues.

Ladies chat on Marine Drive in Mumbai.

But there isn’t much bitterness in their voices as soon as they mention that their guy friends never have actually to think about safety as soon as heading out late. “They don’t have actually to believe so much regarding [safety], that’s for sure. Comparatively it is safer for boys.” Often, it’s these guy friends that will certainly lose off the girls at house after nights out. “If we return at 12 AM our parents wouldn’t want us to return all alone. It’s not safe. It’s not a good idea,” says Anvesha.

When I asked them if they’ve traveled alone much in India, Shreya replies: “It’s not something that’s on my ‘bucket list’…if it’s vital we do it. If you should travel from one city to yet another and you don’t have actually anybody to go along with you, then obviously you go alone.” Citing necessity as motivation, Anvesha told me regarding the time she bravely ignored her parents’ prefers to go to a university interview in Bombay. She was 20, and left free of telling them. She seemed nonplussed that they weren’t angry upon her return to Delhi.

Train passengers gaze from the window.

At a hostel in Bangalore, I meet Erica, a Canadian, whose months-long backpacking trip was spurred by the end of a four-year relationship. The challenges she’s faced as a solo female traveler heavily revolve about the question of her own independence. “I didn’t understand exactly how uptight I was regarding safety. The last couple weeks I merely haven’t trusted anybody. This guy I met through couch surfing wanted me to rent a motorcycle and he made me pay for it and I kind of wondered if he got a cut. And I merely realized I’ve become rather distrusting, [I wonder if] individuals are fucking along with me, especially men.

“You don’t wish to be that paranoid person,” she adds, “yet there are bad points that happen to women as soon as they travel alone.”

Over the past week, she’s been deciding whether or not to go to Mysore, where she spent a lot of time last year practicing ashtanga yoga. “Because I’ve been sick and tired lately, I’ve surely relied on various other individuals and it’s kind of a myth that we go at it alone. You’re not truly alone, or, at least you don’t have actually to be.”

Three women by the edge of the road in Mysore, Karnataka.

On the train from Bangalore to Nagpur, I speak along with Kajal*. She confesses that she’s taking the train alone for the very first time as a result of a family emergency. Her assigned seat was a few booths over, yet she spent most of the 24-hour journey in our unofficial girl’s only booth because she felt safer along with women about her.

She explains her unease at sitting along with the men in our compartment along with her experience of the sleeper class. “Drunk men will certainly come and lay in front of you and sit rather close. You can easily see them fairly often, standing at the doors to the bathroom, harassing individuals that pass.”

Kajal appreciates the relative ease and safety of taking airplanes about India alone yet remarked that train travel was a lot more of a headache. “The state of India is such that whether you’re a man, a woman, a teenager, or a child, everyone has actually troubles traveling alone [with the train]. It starts along with a taunting tone, and goes from there. That’s why there are emergency numbers you can easily call if you have actually a problem.”

Karishma naps on the train from Bangalore to Nagpur.

On a local train, Kajal once had a man try to touch her from under his newspaper. She shouted at him, “Sit properly! Please behave yourself!” He stopped sheepishly. Despite her negative experiences, she maintained that there is nothing to fear on public transport: “You shouldn’t be scared. If you feel uneasy, you have actually to say something. If somebody is sitting too close, you have actually to protest. Men don’t say anything to various other men. You have actually to shame them in front of everyone and then only they stop.”

An older woman, Karishma*, shares our booth along with us. As the matriarch of her family, Karishma’s train journey is punctuated by hourly phone calls from her youngsters and her grandchildren, that had booked her train for her. “My family calls me all the time to check on me,” she says along with pride. “They bought the ticket on the net. They’re good at using the internet.”

She tells me her youngsters wanted to buy her a plane ticket, yet she said no. “The ticket costs 8,000 rupees [around $117] and the youngsters job hard, I don’t wish to waste their money. It’s not urgent that I get hold of somewhere, so I can easily take a train for two days, exactly what do I have actually to do so urgently?” And so, in the safety of the women’s only carriage, Karishma and Kajal spend most of their hours on the train staring serenely out the window, watching the panoramic view go by.

* Some names have actually been changed