by A. j. PHILIP
“Hey woman, why are you sitting here? Get out, get out fast” shouted the policeman in his hoarse voice. “Why should I go out? I have a berth reserved in my name”, said the lady attired in Gond’s traditional dress. When the policeman heard her speak in fluent English, he made a hasty retreat.
This was not her first such experience. At Itarsi in Madhya Pradesh, she was comfortably seated in a reserved compartment when a Keralite family boarded the train. They did not like her sitting there. The man made a nasty remark about her appearance to his wife in Malayalam. Then the lady took out her diary and started writing something. When the man noticed it, he told his wife, “she knows English”.
At that point, she pulled out from her bag a Malayalam journal and started reading it. The couple looked at each other in amazement. If she had worn a “mainstream” dress and jewellery, neither the cop nor the couple would have looked askance at her. Why then was she singled out for this kind of treatment? We fancifully call tribals “adivasis” or aboriginals i.e., the original inhabitants of the land, but we do not want them to travel by trains and occupy public space.
The lady in question is not even a tribal. She has just adapted herself to the tribal way of life. Unlike most tribal women, who remain steeped in illiteracy, she is a polyglot, who is as comfortable in high society as she is in a tribal household. She is Dayabhai, who left the cloistered life in a convent to live her life on her own terms.
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