Dolly Kikon (University of Melbourne)
Bengt Karlsson (Stockholm University)
The People Channel is a placement center that offers grooming classes. According to the director, Rozelle Mero 80% of the students and alumni come from rural Nagaland, and have successfully secured jobs in the high end hospitality sector in India and abroad. Located in Dimapur, this center has consistently managed to provide placements for its trainees in the hospitality industry, especially in the Five Star hotels across cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune. The term Five Star is an international hotel rating based on luxurious service and facilities offered. What is significant is that the Five Star brands in the hospitality industry is premised on a wholesome experience where guests can unwind because they are looked after by a fleet of service providers, of course, for a substantial amount of money. Therefore, all Five star luxury hotels explicitly spell out the goods it offers such as spa, world cuisine restaurants, banquet halls, swimming pools, and the categories of guest rooms and the views it offers.
When we started our ethnographic fieldwork tracing tribal migrants from Northeast to the metropolitan hubs across India, we did not expect that that it would lead us to the heart of luxurious Five Star hotels and restaurants in Mumbai, Trivandrum, Bangalore, and Delhi. These conversations about high quality service, personality development, and communication skills were terms that were carefully underlined at The People Channel in Dimapur city. Our first impression of The People Channel was the impressive signboards where monthly bulletins were put up announcing the extraordinary placement records. We quickly realized that we were not the only ones impressed with its success rate. Many other people in Nagaland noticed this exceptional trait of the center and had arrived there to get the training. A trainer at TPC said, “Most of the students who come here are raw and fresh. Some of them come here with no idea about make up at all. So it becomes a little difficult for me to teach them. Suddenly from no make up to full make up – they are also shocked and feel awkward. So what I do initially is that I study their background. As in like what kind of family do they come from; do they come from the village. I look at all these things. They have to apply make up for their interviews.”
It was clear thatThe People Channel was not solely a training and recruitment center. The driving force about this center was the intensive grooming class offered to the students. The knowledge about serving and working in the high-end hospitality sector imparted here was instilled as work ethics about self-respect and dignity. Students were made to reflect about their future and the opportunities about working in a prestigious and privileged working environment. One of the features about tribal migration from Northeast India that came up in our research work was about physical appearance.
Even as increasing number of cases about discrimination and racist attacks on migrants from Northeast India took place, we found that hotels and restaurants serving pan-Asian food employed a high number of migrants from the tribal states like Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Arunachal Pradesh. It appeared that while the citizenship test in India had consistently failed to recognize indigenous migrants from Northeast India, the hospitality industry and corporation in global India embraced this diversity. However, this jubilation of this diversity was not based on constitutional guarantees about equality and respect for human rights, but one that asserted the privatization of labour, elimination of unions, and the imposition of a corporate value and culture.
Indigenous students, during the placement and grooming classes at The People Channel underwent various trainings – from picking up facial expressions, communication skills, adjusting body languages – all the way to learning makeup color that captured sobriety and grace. These skills were defined as soft skills knowledge. These practices captured how the hospitality industry in contemporary India presented notions of racial diversity through their employees, especially the indigenous face from the Northeast, as a representative of a global Asian and cosmopolitan expression in India. Such processes, as we observed in our research, called for a particular kind of care, value, and labour practice that needed to be communicated with expressions. How could features that had been at the center racist abuse in India, ever become the face of the company?
The larger Indian public attributes racism as a practice that exists only in the west, and the non-west world, including Indians as mere victims. Such an understanding of racism only reinforces and legitimizes institutionalized racist practices and discrimination. During our fieldwork at The People Channel in Dimapur, we were intrigued with the conversations about appearance and the face. The significance of the indigenous migrant’s face is an important aspect to reflect upon. What are the high-end hospitality sectors in contemporary India selling their customers? Can we say that it is a neoliberal gaze in global India where the inequalities and hierarchies, combined with disciplining of the most vulnerable and poor citizens into servers taking place? These are, indeed, some of the more difficult questions that we need to engage with.
