| Description | Track 1: recording setup 0.23 mins
Interview with Jean Modi, an American woman who lives in Bombay. She talks about coming to India when she married her Parsi husband Navroz, who wanted to return there. She talks about being born in Oklahoma, her stopover in London with Navroz, and arriving in India in 1970, travelling overland. She discusses her preconceptions about India before meeting her husband and the knowledge she gained from talking to her husband and other people who had been to India. She describes her journey through Turkey and Iran, Kabul, Amritsar, and Delhi, and encountering the curious attitudes of some Indian men in Amritsar towards western women. She talks about how she coped with this attention and the assumption that western women are sexually available, and discusses the less overt behaviour in Bombay. She describes travelling in a third class carriage between Amritsar and Bombay and the culture shock that both she and her husband felt on this journey, and her first impressions of Bombay. She goes on to talk about the reaction of her husband's relatives to her and her acceptance by the majority of them, her general lack of religious beliefs and the fact that her husband does not attend the Parsi fire temple, her education at Smith College in Massachusetts, and meeting her husband while working in Boston, and the reaction of her own parents towards her relationship with her husband. She talks about her father's racist attitudes and her mother's acceptance of the relationship despite only meeting Navroz once (tracks 1-10).
Track 11: silence 0.54 mins
Jean Modi continues to talk about her mother's attitude towards her husband, her feelings of hostility towards certain aspects of life in Bombay after living there for a few months, particularly the noise levels, the ways her husband's mother ran the house, and the lack of privacy. She talks about feeling uncomfortable and upset at being harrassed and grabbed by men on the street, and contrasts this with the friendly and warm reception she received from family members and friends. She discusses her complicated reaction to people begging on the streets and her feelings of self consciousness and embarrassment about the problem, the difficulties she has had in building up a normal life because she has not had her own home or a job, but the gradual improvements she has noticed through having her own flat and getting some teaching work and the changes in her perspective on life in Bombay. She talks about her social life which is based around events organised by Navroz's friends who are from wealthy backgrounds, or by Navroz's friends from the university. She feels that she does not have much knowledge of Hindu middle class households and that most of the Indian people she knows are conservative in their political views and are certainly anti-Communist. She talks about their views about the Naxalite movement, and gives her own views about the Naxalites political aims and methods and the likelihood of social change in India (tracks 12-17).
Total: 32.46 mins
Dubber's reference number: PLA KF565D0559280 |