— Kerala · Community & Culture
The New Village
How Kerala’s women are rebuilding community — one workshop, one road trip, one circle at a time.
Over the past few years, a new kind of community has been taking shape across Kerala, in DMs and comment sections and rented halls on Saturday afternoons. Women-only groups, born on Instagram, have been organising gatherings in real rooms to do real things together: paint tote bags, make pottery, play games, eat food, and simply sit with each other in a way that the world outside doesn’t always make room for.
The Origin Story
Instagram provides the infrastructure for community that traditional social structures no longer reliably deliver. In a generation where women are moving cities, marrying later, working longer, and carrying more of their emotional labour in private, the old channels — neighbourhood, extended family, college friendships — often aren’t enough. The online world filled the gap because women found each other there, recognised something in each other, and decided to meet.
The groups that emerged from this recognition are explicitly safe spaces and low-stakes by intention, since the point is not networking or achievement but simply being together. And they are remarkably creative in how they bring people in: a pottery workshop, a Bollywood dance class, a potluck lunch with silly games. The event is always the door; the community is what’s behind it.
Girls for Girls Kochi
With over 9,500 Instagram followers, Girls For Girls Kochi is one of the most visible women’s communities in the state and a testament to how quickly a well-run, genuinely welcoming circle can grow when it meets a real need. It served as the stepping stone for similar initiatives in other cities such as Girls For Girls Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Calicut, and Bangalore.
The Kochi chapter carries the founding spirit: a space built on hope, trust, and sisterhood. Its events reflect a philosophy of inclusion through variety — there is always something for different personalities, different comfort levels, different interests. In a place where women are often professionally connected but personally isolated, a community that prioritises genuine human connection over productivity or performance is quite countercultural.
The smartest thing Kerala’s women’s community groups have understood is that the event is merely the permission slip. A crochet workshop or a game night is a low-pressure reason to show up. It gives the first-timer something to do with her hands, something to talk about, a reason to be there that isn’t just “I wanted to meet people” — even if that is exactly why she came. The founders have intuitively understood what social researchers have documented: that shared activity creates connection faster than shared conversation alone.
It is worth asking why Kerala has become such fertile ground for this kind of community. Part of the answer is demographic: Kerala has one of India’s highest female literacy rates, a large population of educated young women in urban centres, and a cultural tradition of women’s collectivity that makes the concept feel familiar rather than foreign. Part of the answer is also Instagram’s particular penetration in the state — Kerala has one of the highest social media engagement rates in India, and its women use the platform not just to consume content but to find each other.
She Rises Circle
Identifying itself as Kottayam’s first girls-only community, founders Alma Mariam Thomas and Amrutha Elza Prem built She Rises around a simple but powerful premise: a relaxed environment where women between 18 and 45 come to rise together.
Its events range from UNFOLD, a gathering that combined a makers market for small businesses with tote-bag painting, to ROMP, a members-only game night, to pottery workshops and more. Each is designed to feel like an afternoon with friends rather than a programme to be attended. The community describes itself as a safe, welcoming space for women who desire growth, confidence, and connection — three things that, for many women, are much harder to find in a mid-sized city than they should be.
The event is always the door; the community is what’s behind it.
The Digital-to-Real-Life Pipeline
The communities that are thriving today are not the ones that stayed online. They are the ones that used Instagram as a launchpad and then did the harder, more important work of gathering in person. The DM that turns into a workshop sign-up. The follower who becomes a regular. The regular who brings a friend.
Kerala’s Instagram-born women’s circles are still young. Most are fewer than four years old. But the foundations they lay — of trust, of recurring ritual, of a place that is reliably, unconditionally theirs — are what enduring communities are made of.
The Journey Is the Circle
Women travel differently because the world is experienced differently by women. The mental load of a solo trip — the background calculation of safety that runs constantly, the decisions about where to eat alone, where to stay, how to respond to attention that was not invited — is a tax that most women pay so habitually they have stopped noticing it. Women-only travel groups remove that tax entirely. In a group of women, the calculation changes. The evenings feel different. The version of yourself you can be on the trip feels different.
This is, for many women, the difference between travelling and not travelling: between the version of their life that includes adventure and the one that stays home because the arithmetic never quite adds up to safe enough.
Weekend Escape
Weekend Escape is a ladies-only travel group that does exactly what it promises. It takes women away, regularly and reliably, to places across India that most of them might not have ventured to alone.
What matters about Weekend Escape is not any single destination but the consistency of the offer: a recurring, trustworthy structure that makes travel feel accessible rather than daunting. For women who have been waiting for the right companion, the right moment, the right combination of safe and spontaneous, Weekend Escape removes the waiting. The right circumstances are a DM away. Groups like Weekend Escape are doing significant work in expanding what women feel entitled to. Every trip that a woman takes is a small act of reclaiming time and space as her own. Weekend Escape provides the container for that act — the adventures that happen inside it belong entirely to the women who take them.
There is a particular knowledge that travel produces that no other experience replicates. You learn something about yourself in unfamiliar places that familiar ones won’t reveal. You learn something about other women when you share a room, navigate a delay, eat an unexpected meal, or get lost together in a city neither of you knows. These are the conditions under which real friendships form — in the texture of actual shared experience.
Women’s travel communities understand this, even when they don’t articulate it in those terms. Friendships that form on these trips are frequently described by members as some of the most genuine they have. There is something about travel that strips away the performance that ordinary social life requires.
Travel Bezzie
The word “bezzie” is British slang for best friend. It is exactly the right name for what this community is trying to build.
Run by Ms. Sonia, who goes by @wanderingsonia on Instagram, Travel Bezzie describes itself as an offbeat travel concierge offering unconventional trips and immersive experiences for solo women travellers and mixed groups. With over 7,200 followers and 2,600+ posts, it has built a substantial presence by consistently doing something the mainstream travel industry rarely does well: designing trips for women who want to travel, who are not interested in the generic itinerary, and who understand that the best travel experiences are the ones that take you somewhere you didn’t entirely expect. “Offbeat” and “unconventional” are doing real work in Travel Bezzie’s identity — they signal to the curious, independent-minded, willing-to-be-surprised traveller and attract a community that self-selects for exactly those qualities.
Appooppanthaadi
Before the Instagram communities, before “women-only travel” became a recognisable category in India, there was Appooppanthaadi — and it is impossible to tell the story of women’s travel communities in Kerala without beginning here.
Founded in 2016 by Sajna Ali, Appooppanthaadi — named after the seed that travels wherever the wind takes it — began as a pocket-friendly women-only travel group operating across Kerala. Sajna organised trial trips before each journey to verify safety and accommodation standards with a rigour that built trust quickly and became the group’s signature.
What Appooppanthaadi has built over nearly a decade is multiple branches across Kerala, trips that now include international destinations, and a highly inclusive membership. The budget per trip has consistently been kept between ₹2,500 and ₹5,000 — a deliberate choice that ensures the group remains accessible to women from all economic backgrounds.
The Horizon Keeps Expanding
What is striking about women’s support communities, taken together, is how much ground they cover: geographically and otherwise. From tote-bag painting workshops to international tours, from solo travellers seeking companions to women rediscovering themselves after years of putting themselves last, these groups are serving a remarkably wide range of needs with a remarkably consistent spirit. And that spirit, it turns out, is not local. It is global.
The Wing
In 2016, Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan opened a co-working and community space in New York with a founding premise that answered the question: what would a space look like if it were designed entirely around the needs, aesthetics, and ambitions of women? The answer was good lighting, a library stocked exclusively with books by women, meeting rooms named after historical female icons, and a strict women-and-non-binary membership policy — which became The Wing.
At its peak, The Wing had locations across New York, Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, and Toronto, with waitlists stretching into the thousands. It closed its physical spaces in 2022, but the conversation it started about what women-only spaces can and should be, about the value of a room where women set every term, has not ended.
A Road of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs a room of her own. What a century of women’s community-building has added to that argument is this: the room is better with company. Kerala’s women travel groups, the community circles, the Instagram-turned-real communities — are all building different versions of the same thing. A space that is unambiguously theirs. A circle that holds.
A place where the journey, whatever form it takes, can begin.
