Shame on you Jayaram!

The news is that Actor Jayaram made a nasty comment on his domestic help; specifically on her looks. He reportedly told a Malayalam TV channel, recently, that "my maid, a Tamil woman, is like a dark fat buffalo. So how can I look at her", when asked whether he had taken a second look at his housemaid in real life. The interview was in the context of his recent film. Of course, his comments put him up in a soup and there were protests against Jayaram’s comments in Tamil Nadu and a Tamil outfit went to the extent of ransacking the garden in his house in Chennai.

There are two or three points that I would like to make in this note. Firstly, I strongly feel that we must learn to treat any attack on the modesty of a woman (what Jayaram did in this case) as an assault on women irrespective of the colour, caste, religion, place, groups and so on. How does it matter whether the victim is a Tamil woman or a woman from Rajastan or Bihar? Hence the outcry “Tamil Woman” is unwarranted. It is yet another matter that the majority of Tamil Films too depict/treat women as a commodity rather than human beings.

Now about Tamil women! As a person who has been working with women for many years, I have had ample opportunities to travel all over India to work with the less privileged working women. The Tamil women, especially those from the lowest economic strata, had always surprised me with their endurance and fortitude. They are very enterprising and hard working and they take up any job without any inhibition.

In Tamil Nadu, there are many women headed families or families in which women are the main bread winner. They work in the agricultural field, run small eateries on the road side, work as flower vendors in front of temples, theatres, beaches and any other crowd pulling places and also a large number of them work as domestic workers; sometimes they manage to work in more than 6 houses and the with the meagre income they contribute largely to their households. So describing a human being, who also happens to be cleaning up your mess at home, by her colour and figure is a criminal and inhuman act. Hence Jayaram’s words, no doubt, are condemnable.

At a different level, I am not surprised by his comment, in the sense that, there is no dearth of Jayarams in Kerala, the most literate state in India. If you sit through any of the “comedy’’ shows in the Malayalam channels, the major event would be caricaturing politicians and second to that is vulgarising women through suggestive comments. In most of the cases women are being treated like commodities and there is no sense of shame in visualising them in such a way in the TV serials.

In real life too, women are intimidated in the public places and public transport. I still remember that in my college days; in the private buses, there is a “creature” called ‘kili’, who is supposed to be the cleaner of the bus. He would invariably stand on the steps of the bus and that used to be very inconvenient for the women passengers to get down from the bus. Sometimes, these kilis would rub their shoulder against the girls. As student activists, we used to protest against this and would insist that this man should get down while we got off the bus. And invariably, these men used to make rude comments insulting our looks. Their comment would be ``what you think? You are a world beauty or what that I am dying to touch”. They would drop some famous actress’ name too.

One of my CPM friends confessed secretly to me that he is scared to send his grown up daughter alone for tuitions in the evenings. He says, chechi, times have changed. “Yes the times have changed and so have the people. Now where is the movement comrade?” I wanted to ask. Let me leave it at that and may be for another occasion.

So Jayaram is in no way different from these larger groups. It is yet another matter that Mr. Jayaram’s pleasantly-plum-relatively-on-the-darker-side-wife (who was also an actress), was considered to be one of the fattest in that era. One may still be interested to know whether Mr.Jayarm addresses her as a brown fat buffalo and refuses to look at her at home???