The other side of 'Find me a Maid'

Try this on for size. You're a smart, articulate, young professional, just stepping into your stride at the new corporation you've joined. You are just getting comfortable with being part of a new team, and then, somebody says... "By the way, could you do me a favour? What I really need is a full time maid, preferably an Adivasi girl from a village. I'm sure that you could help us out, being a tribal and all..."
Is this the way mainstream India looks at Tribal citizens?

“Do you know what trafficking implies? It’s enticing young girls and women from villages to the city with the promise of giving them jobs. And yet, my non-Adivasi friends and colleagues don’t give a second thought before saying, ‘Jasmine, you are an Adivasi, find us a girl to work in our houses!’ So that’s my identity. They don’t see me as an educated, articulate and smart bank professional, but as some jungle-dwelling entity with such low self-esteem that she will willingly traffic her sisters to the city to work as servants,” says Jasmine Tigga, a  bank officer serving at the State Bank of India.

What makes up one’s identity? Is it your birth-place, your blood-line, your language or beliefs, or does it lie in your achievements, your education, or is it just the way everybody else looks at you? What does it mean to be a tribal professional in the world today?

Let's call a spade a spade. The urban middle-class largely believes that Adivasis should remain in the jungles or continue to provide the unskilled and semi-skilled labour in our sweat-shops.

I remember, way back in my childhood days, how certain Hindi teachers at my school would look down on our third grade Hindi teacher, Miss Toppo, who, I learnt much later, had genuine BA degree in Hindi. 

You see, they were quite polite to her, but none of the teaching staff members except for a couple of Anglo-Indian ladies turned up at her brother's wedding. You see, Miss Toppo's own mother had worked as a maid (a 'maid-servant' was the term in those days), and the high caste women teachers just couldn't treat Miss Toppo as an equal.

 It was cultural, in those days. Miss Toppo retired after teaching brats at St. Xavier's Doranda for a good twenty five years or so. Forty years on, things haven't changed, have they?

 “The strength of Adivasi culture is that we do not consider any work too low, or too mean to perform. We do not look down on others because of the job they perform. And so, this gives us tremendous scope to better ourselves. As a woman, I can assert that Adivasi men have no hang-ups about helping their wives with the housework or looking after the babies. So we have an egalitarian society,” says Jasmine. And that's a damn sight better than a whole lot of crass, rich, high-class Indian women who are really unpaid servants, catering to every whim of their husbands, and their husbands are usually boring, boorish louts....

Jasmine refuses to let anybody take advantage of her good nature. 'At first my boss thought that he could fob off extra work on me, just because I was a harmless submissive tribal. he now knows better than to try that trick again.' she says.

More power to Jasmine Tigga... you rock girl!