Sweet Briar anthropology professor Claudia Chang and her husband, Perry Tourtellotte, didn't have a stitch of homespun cotton between them when they arrived in Banasthali, India. Putting aside that the pair stood out like sore thumbs in the rural village, their western wardrobes presented another problem.

Banasthali Vidyapith University for Women, where Chang was beginning a semester-long teaching Fulbright, requires its faculty members to wear homespun garments. The rule keeps with the Gandhian principles the school was founded on in 1935. Mahatma Gandhi espoused self-sufficiency, and believed that local economies ought to provide for people's needs.

Chang pauses for a photo with a woman from the village of Banasthali at Banasthali Vidyapith’s newly formed Women’s Center.So Chang and Tourtellotte visited Banasthali's town tailor, who supplied them with new threads for their stay. Chang went with tunics paired with pants — outfits the Indians call salwar kameez - over the traditional sari. Problem solved.

In a way, the episode reflects one of India's defining characteristics. Contradictions are everywhere in a nation that is at once developing and modern.

"It's a place where you can see beggars and starving people on the street on the one hand and then you can see all these rich people driving their fancy cars and living in big huge houses and having lots of servants," Chang said.

At Banasthali Vidyapith University, women receive doctorates in cutting — edge technologies to prepare for the global marketplace. Adjacent to the campus in the hot, dry northwestern province of Rajasthan is a poor village and beyond that, sheep and water buffalo munch grasses amid wheat fields.

The school of about 5,000 students from the primary level up does provide an education to local children, including boys in the lower grades. But the Vidyapith's founders established the university to raise women to a place of honor and equal competitive footing in a male-dominated, gender-separated society through education.

Chang and Dr. Sangita Rayamajhi of Tribhuvan University in Katmandu, Nepal, take a break during a Fulbright conference at Visakhapatnam.Chang sought out a teaching Fulbright in India because the country is still developing, and she wanted to teach at a women's school.

"Do they face the same issues we do? How do women cope with traditional values in a rapidly changing society?" she said in an interview with @SBC before the leaving for India.

She found plenty of progress there, but the contradictions persist, within and without the school's community. For example, at large ceremonial assemblies such as graduation — where people sit on rugs under a tent — men and women were sometimes segregated.

Guests were arranged that way at a meal to celebrate the school founder's 80th birthday. "Women sat on one side of the room and men sat on the other," Chang said. "So it was odd. I mean some parts of the school were extremely rigid."

On the other hand, "There were peculiar aspects of the school that emphasized a lot of Gandhian principles which are not standard principles that everybody in India today holds."

For one, the school strives to live by Gandhi's rule of self-reliance by requiring faculty to do their own household chores. For some teachers, who often come from the upper castes of Indian society, it is the first time they've scrubbed a toilet bowl.

India is the world's largest democracy, Chang noted, but "the caste system is alive and well in all sectors of society."

The classes Chang enjoyed teaching the most dealt with globalization and women's rights. "They give you a text book and say, 'Look at the legal system, at what the legal rights of women are [under Indian law].' And there's a big gap between what legal rights women have and what rights they actually may be able to exercise."

Even so, "For a society that seems to be oppressive to women, it's not as if there aren't women activists out there. There's a whole history and tradition of women activists," Chang said.

"That was really fun for me because I think that feminism in America to the general public almost is a dirty word or it's something we have hard time dealing with."

Sweet Briar is strikingly similar to the Vidyapith, which also was founded by grieving parents of a young woman who died before she could fulfill the promise she showed in life. There, as here, single-sex education is seen as an equalizer.

Indeed, Chang returned to the States thinking a lot about where women stand in this country today. She also arrived in time to catch all of the buzz surrounding Randolph-Macon Woman's College's decision to admit men. She was frustrated by what she heard.

"What's been missing in the discussion of women's education is the acknowledgement of the power of power," she said.

"Women's education gives women leadership roles. Whether it's speaking up in class or being your class president, it really gives you access to power. I think we're scared to use the word power because it makes us sound like radical feminists."

She stresses it's not about taking away from men, it's about claiming a place for women.

"But let's just say it. I mean power is really important and it's especially important for people who tend to be disenfranchised. ... It would have made me a lot happier if they had talked about empowerment in some ways."