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India is a constant reminder for me of how other cultures view women’s rights.

Window at the Hawa Mahal, Jaipur, India By Sonja Bjelland

This ranges from my morning yoga class where some women cannot attend because their mothers-in-law won’t let them wear anything but a sari to being asked my father or husband’s name on a form to buy a cell phone.

Purdah is a Persian word and a concept brought to India about 1000 years ago by Muslim invaders from what is now Turkey and Afghanistan.

Depending on whom you ask, it means to hide women from the lustful eyes of men or to separate men and women, family and society.

At least that’s what the audio guide told me yesterday as I toured the Hawa Mahal, a palace built for the queens and concubines in Jaipur, India.

Tiny windows and marble screens allowed the women to see the festivals and outside on-goings. I thought of Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin and how she’d never left the palace.

The building went up several floors and some of the women would have been carried on palanquins. And of course, the king had a room there as well – where he could write poetry and be “entertained,” so says the audio guide.

More disturbing though was what I saw at the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, India.

After the death of the king, the women of the palace prepared themselves as if for a royal festival. They left their handprints on the side of the gate as they were carried out by palanquins and then died on the funeral pyre.

Handprints at the Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur, India By Sonja Bjelland

It is not a far concept, even today. I see women around, but men make up the majority of who I see on the streets. And in some cases, women continue to have their faces covered, either by a burqa or sheer headscarf. This is especially true in the more conservative areas where I have been traveling west of Delhi. But of course not the national as a whole. I also see women driving mopeds in jeans and T-shirts or saris.

Where I have seen women the most is working in fields or road construction.

I saw a sign that stated “Men at Work” but it was women in glistening saris with pickaxes digging up the road. The same can be seen from a train car while riding across India’s countryside. The men are sitting. The women, again in dazzling saris – green, red pink, edged with metallic thread and bedecked with adornments, griping the shovels.