Light Skin and Soft Skills: Training Indigenous Migrants for the Hospitality Sector in India

ABSTRACT

In a recruitment centre in Dimapur, Nagaland, indigenous youth are trained for employment as service personnel in luxury hotels, restaurants and airlines. Most of them are unemployed, seeking new future prospects outside the region and the harsh existence of subsistence agriculture. English language skills, a general cosmopolitan outlook and their fair complexion have proven key assets in securing work within the new hospitality industry. In this article, we deal with the activities at the recruitment centre itself, looking at the skill sets – the ‘soft skills’ – and habitus that the instructors try to instill in the participants to make them employable. We apply the notion of ‘affective labour’. Such labour is all about care, or more precisely in this context, caring for customers. But care also has a wider resonance in the lives of the young migrants, that is, to care for the family, community and ancestral lands back home.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous youth
• migration
• hospitality work
• affective labour
• soft skills
• race
• Nagaland
• India

“Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” (Message on white board at The People Channel. 2015)

Introduction

In this article, we locate how soft skills reveal the connections between care and control. As prospective indigenous migrants in Nagaland are trained to seize opportunities to work in the high-end hospitality industry in India, their caring and hospitable services are constantly monitored and controlled by the managers, Human Resource offices, and their employers. While it can be argued that ‘care is always shot through with asymmetrical relations of power’ (Yeoh & Huang 2015: 250), in the case of the hospitality industry we highlight how care is shaped in relation to a market where the receiver of care is a customer who is paying for the services.

In other spheres, say within the family or in institutionalised care of the elderly, sick or children there is a stronger normative bias insisting that compassion, empathy and emotional attachments structures informs the relation between caregivers and care receivers (Yeoh & Huang 1998; Gramenz 2017). On the contrary, by highlighting how training centres in Dimapur (Nagaland) teach prospective migrants about care as soft skills essential for the hospitality sector in India, we offer an analytical lens that goes beyond a framework of capital and class to explore practices of care. Instead, we present how race, labour, and gender in the hospitality industry requires to be communicated and perceived as ‘professional’ by the server and the customer simultaneously. Analyzing care in this context, we highlight how experiences of serving and processes of training to become servers in neoliberal India is founded on a relation of control, power, and the market.

As the literature on affective labour and transnational migration shows, the market logic of care as a commodity is also evident in social relations more generally, penetrating even the most intimate relations (cf. Mackie 2014; Akalin 2015). While the work situation in a five-star hotel¹ or on an airplane might be much more pleasant than what an industrial worker would have on the factory floor, affective or emotional labour might be more exploitative. As Hochschild (1983) convincingly shows in her pioneering study The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, such labour penetrates a deeper level of the worker's self, thereby, risking to estrange the labourer from his or her own feelings (ibid: 17).

As a placement centre, The People Channel (TPC) offers grooming classes to facilitate placement of its indigenous trainees in the high-end hospitality sectors like five-star hotels and aviation. Located in Dimapur, the commercial hub of Nagaland, most of TPC's students come from rural Nagaland in Northeast India and have been successfully placed in cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. It is the making of such labourers, turning rural and small-town youths into exclusive service personnel, that interests us here. In this ethnographic article, we trace the experiences of indigenous migrants from Nagaland who are trained as waiters for the hospitality sector and explore how they negotiate their roles as caregivers. We examine what constitutes care for young migrants, and how grooming centres like TPC which teaches prospective migrants to be hospitable define care as a soft skill to be acquired. These ongoing development, as we will highlight in this article, show how indigenous migrants experience elements of vulnerability and precariousness as they undergo trainings and classes to care for their customers in the hospitality industry.

Focusing on this connection between care and indigenous migrants from Nagaland is important for three reasons. First, it allows us to understand how elements of care are closely shaped by the hospitality sector prior to the migration among indigenous societies. Second, it raises important questions about people, who have lived through violence and armed conflict, learning how to care. Finally, we show how indigenous migrants, once they become waiters, translate their trainings about care to negotiate a complex web of citizenship, racial perceptions, and adopt different strategies and styles to navigate their lives as indigenous migrants in the hospitality sector.

In addition, the element of care, as we highlight in this article, can be regarded as a double-edged experience. On the one hand, indigenous migrants are required to care for their customers, but on the other hand, they have to contend with their role as caregivers for their families back home and the respective ethnic territories that most of the indigenous communities in Northeast India struggle to secure. While the hospitality sector to large extent builds on global formats, we still have to consider the specific backgrounds, experiences and aspirations of those that make up its workforce. Important in this case is the recent history of prolonged civil war and massive human rights violations as well as popular struggles for rights to ancestral territories, indigenous livelihoods and cultures in Nagaland. The young indigenous migrants are vested in this history, concerned with the welfare and political mobilization of their respective communities; yet still seeking a life outside the geographical confines of imagined ethnic homelands. As we suggest, there are key dynamics at play that makes the mobility of these indigenous youths different from labour migrants, more generally. Being indigenous is a form of identification and a political assertion that stresses particular rights; above all, the right to self-determination (cf. Karlsson 2003). With so many young people leaving the indigenous homelands, new questions emerge about caring for families and land they have left behind (Karlsson & Kikon 2017). Exploring the issue of care as young migrants become servers in the hospitality industry, we demonstrate how notions of care, skills, and value are constructed and experienced among indigenous migrants themselves.

The reason why most Northeastern youth migrate is to escape several impasse: the lack of education and employment opportunities, widespread conflict, insecurity and corrupt state institutions in the region. However, with their migration they end up in another impasse, one that seems even more challenging, that is, the disciplinary control of the corporate world. The situation appears like what Gregory Bateson calls ‘double bind’, ‘a situation in which no matter what a person does, “he can't win”’ (Bateson 1972: 205, cf. Green 2014; Eriksen 2016). The anxiety and high level of tension that we note among the young migrants as well as their families at home seems to stem from this impasse.

Race and physical appearance are critical aspects of the indigenous migration process discussed here.² The fair complexion and generic Asian features – along with English language skills and a general cosmopolitan outlook – makes the indigenous youth of Northeast India particularly appealing to the employers in the hospitality sector. Fair complexion is generally associated with beauty and other positive attributes in South Asia, especially for women (cf. Reddy 2006; Osuri 2008). While this also applies to people from Northeast India, their particular looks, for example, the assumed ‘yellowish skin tone’ also index a less favourable foreign – East Asian or Chinese – origin; hence the derogatory term ‘chinkies’. Racial attributes hence work to the advantage of Northeasterners in securing jobs, it simultaneously marks them as different and as outsiders to the dominant communities of metropolitan India. Many migrants face discrimination, racist attacks, and sexual harassment as a regular experience in Delhi and other main cities in the country (cf. Northeast India Support Center and Helpline 2011; McDuie-Ra 2015; Kikon 2009). While focusing on the activities at TPC in Dimapur in Northeast India, we place our ethnography in relation to a larger context of the growing importance of what is known as ‘affective’-, ‘intimate’-, or ‘emotional labour’ and connect it with conversations about care. Such labour is not geared towards the production of material goods, but, as we will see, towards the ‘production of good feeling’ (Muehlebach 2011: 61).

Our focus is not directly on feelings, but more on the production of certain bodies or bodily habitus as a central dimension of affective labour. Embodiment implies tacit structuration, a process that the subjects themselves might not directly be aware of. The migrants we met very rarely talked about exploitation, but rather about how tired they were, about skin problems, body aches, stomach problems and other health related aspects linked to their long and stressful workdays. They also talked about lack of time to meet people outside the workplace, to hang out with friends, or attend church regularly. Such experiences allows us to understand the experiences of individual indigenous migrants and their positions of vulnerability and the everyday lives of serving in the hospitality industry.

In the following sections, we connect with the theme of care and control and describe how questions about ethics, gender, race, and labour emerges in the training centre at Dimapur, and in the hospitality industry thereafter.

At The People Channel

The CEO and director of TPC, Ms. Mero³ is a confident entrepreneur. Her commitment and vision is to secure employment for Naga youths outside the region in the expanding hospitality industry. But, as she stated with emphasis, her sole focus was the high-end luxurious hospitality sector like Five Star chains, private cruise ships, boutique spas, and prestigious national and international airlines.⁴ To ensure safe, secure jobs for her students, she made sure that the recruiting employers were big and reputable companies who offered good benefits and career prospects for their employees. She was equally focused on selecting responsible and trustworthy students for the companies, as she told, to maintain the reputation of her placement and grooming centre. Explaining her philosophy, the director stressed the importance of the customer and described why interaction in these spaces would be helpful for the students who were aspiring migrants. She said;

… Because the students who come from very low level are interacting with people from a very high level, their intellect is being broadened. Because, really, at the end, it is who you interact with. You do not grow if you do not interact with the right people. The challenges and the exposure these students are getting is about growing up in life. If you go from the top down, the respect is more. If you go from the bottom up, the respect you get is not as much. Why we do well is because we are connected at the top; that is why our boys and girls are treated better.

Ms. Mero explained that despite the meticulous training, some students were not ready to take up good job offers as they didn't want to leave their families behind, or because they lacked educational skills.⁵ At other times, there were unpleasant incidents where the alumni had drinking problems and caused trouble. As researchers, we were initially apprehensive about our chances to explore the activities at the training centre. However, from our first meeting the director welcomed us and allowed us to engage freely with her students, trainers, and gave us contacts to speak to families and the alumni of the centre. She believed that our research offered students an exposure to another world, which she encouraged.

Our first visuals at TPC were the impressive signboards with catchy slogans and words of wisdom by business gurus and global celebrities presented along with monthly bulletins announcing the extraordinary placement records of the agency. Students were showcased the opportunities of working in prestigious and privileged environments and made to reflect on their possible futures. Serving and working in the high-end hospitality sector was packaged as a respectable form of employment with self-respect and dignity. Taking part in the TPC courses which carefully underlined personality development and communication skills, became a transformative process that set them on to a new path in life. Since a predominant number of students at TPC came from rural areas, these trainings were seen as a way out of the village and away from subsistence farming. A key part of the trainings related to acquiring new skills to reinvent their looks, postures, and paying attention to hygiene. 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 is the meticulous training that makes TPC one of the early and more successful grooming centres, but similar training centres are popping up all over Northeast India. While most centres are private, the Indian government is also launching a major programme for skills development to enhance the employability of Northeastern youths; significantly in collaboration with these privately run centres. Between 2011 and 2021, it is estimated that as many as 17 million youth will come out in the job market to compete for 2.6 million new jobs in Northeast India, hence creating an ‘excess of 14 million jobseekers’.⁶ It is this latter group that the Government seeks to target for service sector jobs elsewhere in India and abroad. Such a scenario with large-scale outmigration of the young raises critical questions relating the future of many of the indigenous peoples in the region; who will be caring for the land and the community when the young is out catering to the needs of others? In looking at the production of migrant labourers for the hospitality sector, we subsequently also think about the wider societal transformation this engenders.

Affective Labour

The training for the hospitality sector in India can productively be analyzed through the emergent scholarship around ‘affective labour’, or the analogous terms ‘intimate labour’ and ‘emotional labour’. In the Introduction to a special issue in Positions: Asia Critique, the editors explain that, ‘(i)ntimate industries rely on affective labour or work that “produces or manipulates affect such as feelings of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion”’ (Parreñas et al. 2016: 3).⁷ The proliferation of such industries has a particular salience in Asia, quickly becoming institutionalised in different sectors of the economy. With the commodification of intimate relations, social relations more generally are radically transformed, as is evident in Mankekar and Gupta’s (2016) study of call centre workers in Bangalore and Eileen Otis’ (2016) study of rural migrant women turned into cosmetics sales represents for a major global retail chain in Kunming, Yunnan. The call centre agents are trained to adopt particular affective repertories that resonate with those of their overseas clients in the US or the UK. Even if the relation with clients is through speaking or voice only, to establish an intimate relation of trust and care implicate a bodily transformation.

The training to become an affective agent involves body posture, hygiene, manners and style. As these agents work strange shifts, often inhabiting multiple time-zones, their body clocks are disrupted with stress symptoms and ailments like sleep deprivation, disrupted menstrual cycles, depression and emotional exhaustion. Their social life is also disrupted and, instead of family and earlier friends, intimacy and leisure is now mainly with people at the workplace (Mankekar & Gupta 2016: 38, cf. Patel 2010: 123–141). The corporeal aspect is central in the case of the Chinese cosmetics sales representatives, for whom the cultivation of a new body aesthetics is experienced as ‘pleasurable and part of a personal project of upward mobility’ (Otis 2016: 157). But the learned bodily practices also instil a new labour discipline – ‘embodied hegemony’ that makes it harder for the women to question their low salaries and precarious conditions of employment, according to Otis (ibid: 157–158). The embodied aspect of affective labour as well as the social relations that follows this new type of work, emphasised in these two cases, speaks directly to our ethnography.

The skills that the trainers at TPC seek to pass on to the young indigenous students – from picking up facial expressions, adjusting body languages and all the way to learning what kind of make-up colour captures sobriety and grace – are all defined as ‘soft skills’ knowledge. As we will highlight in the following sections, such processes call for a particular kind of care, value, and labour practice that needs to be communicated with expressions perceived as real or genuine by the client. However, several migrants working in the hospitality sector also told us about the challenges of managing their ‘Professional face’ while simultaneously experiencing personal turmoil. Tiala, a Naga woman working with Qatar Airlines shared her emotional and mental trauma as she worked in the hospitality sector.

Tiala joined a Five Star hotel in Mumbai after completing her higher secondary education in Nagaland and working there for five years. However, she wanted to move on because she felt, ‘ … stagnant; the progress was not there. The salary was not good enough. Then my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and that pushed me. I thought I had to earn more money’. She joined an Indian airline company called Kingfisher Airlines and worked as a stewardess for a year while simultaneously taking care of her mother's medications during that period. When the airline closed down, she applied for Qatar Airways. She was successful at the interview. However, before she could return to Nagaland, her mother passed away and she was unable to attend the funeral. Reflecting on her experiences, Tiala said;

… My Mom passed away, but (she) had the confidence. She knew that I was going to join some international airline and I was going to be paid better than before … She had confidence in me. So I had no regrets that I left her when she wanted me to be there. But I was not there. It was not because I did not want to take care of her. It was because I wanted to do something and show her that don't worry, I can stand on my own! She understood that. I am very happy that I got through the job interview.

For Tiala, her independence was her way of honouring her mother. The ways in which she channelled her emotions to understand her achievement and respect her mom's courage to push her toward financial independence was apparent. Yet, it was clear that Tiala still struggled about her absence at her mother's death-bed and the funeral.

Understanding and supporting the new lived realities of the migrant children, is also part of the new parental experiences in these communities. During a conversation with Naro, the mother of an alumnus from TPC, she shared how her daughter had told her that the most important person in the high-end hospitality industry was the customer. The mother fondly remembered her daughter, currently working as a front-desk employee in a Five Start hotel in Pune. Explaining why the figure of the customer was very important, the mother summed it up with an example;

If the Customer comes to the hotel tired and drowsy, she has to know how to welcome him. For example, she has to say, “Are you very tired? Are you coming from a long journey?” Then there are different kinds of rooms. “There are different kinds of facilities and these are the price range. Which one would you prefer?” If you would like a calm and quiet room, then there are specific rooms for that as well.

And the mother continued;

I hear that some of the rooms are 70,000 rupees per night. It is a Five Star hotel. With tax, it will come to 85,000 rupees. If she is able to sell that room, her reputation will go up. The customer comes with money. If she can convince the customer, the company is making a profit. She will get the perks for such sales. The company will reward her for the hard work.

The students at TPC, like the alumnus who was working as a front desk employee, were made aware of expressions and how to make their sales pitch, along with their roles as servers. The customer is assumed to be a traveller – a global, mobile, moneyed person checking into the high-end Five Star hotel from a long journey. As the figure of a tired, moneyed customer becomes part of the training manual in a placement and grooming centre in Dimapur, the actual experiences and incentives was often something else. The students are worlds apart from the clients. Despite the training, several of TPC alumni told us, they had little idea of what actually awaited them at work. A young man who had served for two years in a luxury hotel in Mumbai said it was a daily struggle to live in the city. It was filled with difficulties he had never foreseen. ‘Nagas are good at hard work, but this is not enough, you need to be smart also’, he told us. Such smartness which he implied becoming competitive to make sales pitch and securing bonus, it seemed, was not a human trait he valued or wanted to embrace in his life, adding with remorse that several of his friends had asked why he didn't go to college instead.⁸

In the cases narrated above one can sense how work in the hospitality sectors not only transforms the looks and body posture but also the inner self of the young migrants, and eventually relations with family and wider social relations. As we will see further, this affirms the bio-political significance of affective labour, as put by Hardt and Negri (2006: 110) – ‘(a)ffective labour is bio-political production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life’.

Grooming in a Militarised Society

Grooming, presentation, and confidence were critical aspects of affective labour, and hence, important components of the training at TPC. The trainer stressed the importance of being expressive and the importance of body language. As majority of the students came from rural households engaged in subsistence farming, grooming had to begin with the ‘basics’. The trainer Ms. Lucy explained what constituted basics as follows;

I teach them about hygiene and how to trim their underarm hair. I teach them about body odor and how to get rid of it. By prescribing home remedies that I see on YouTube, I advise them accordingly. Many of them do not know these things, since they directly come from the village.

It is easier for the students from Dimapur to catch up since they know about fashion and make-up. At least they know what is kajal and what is ‘foundation’. But those from the village are not exposed. They have no idea about cosmetics. I go through the basics with them. I also make them walk, and ask them to walk straight and not to drag their feet.

Before students were registered to attend the grooming session, the trainers carried out the height/weight/skin assessments during the admission process in order to customise the grooming sessions. As one of the trainers explained,

The airline companies require a particular body type. Many students come to the center with a desire to join the airlines, but we are honest with them. We want them to be realistic. So after the physical assessment, we tell them that there are other options besides the airlines.

The experiences of the young men and women at TPC might be similar in other parts of the world, but the activities at the placement centre and grooming sessions in Dimapur need to be understood in the backdrop of the political history of militarisation in Nagaland. Since India's independence in 1947, the Naga people's demand for the right to self-determination and a sovereign Naga homeland have led to the longest armed conflict in South Asia. In 1997, the government of India and sections of the Naga armed groups signed a cease-fire agreement that led to a series of peace talks and negotiations. While the cease-fire talks continue to take place in New Delhi, Naga society have witnessed immense changes in the post cease-fire era.

In the years after 1997, an increasing number of Naga youth and families migrated from the villages to urban centres such as Kohima and Dimapur for seeking employment and education. A growing number of Naga households gave up subsistence cultivation, known as jhum cultivation and took up cash crop plantation such as rubber, ginger, tea, and cardamom. Yet, the everyday violence and militarised state structure meant that overlapping authorities ranging from Indian security forces, state police, traditional bodies, and the Naga insurgent groups governed different aspects of the social and political lives of Naga public sphere. Like many Naga youths, several students at TPC also acknowledged that they were anxious and tired of the persistent conflict and sought to get away from Nagaland. In 2016, speaking about the migration among Naga youth, Mr. Vikheho Swu, the then state cabinet minister in Nagaland, noted that one of the main factors was the absence of development in the ‘rural areas’ and the dysfunctional governance (Morung Express News 2016).

Located in Dimapur, the largest city in Nagaland, TPC attracts prospective migrants seeking to acquire training to join the hospitality sector. These aspirations and subsequent trainings are significant given how classes in Dimapur are imparted in the English language and are aimed at making Naga youth employable in ‘high paying jobs’ in the hospitality sector in India. A city with a population of almost four hundred thousand (according to the 2011 census), the exceptional point about TPC in Dimapur is its ability to translate and define what constitutes care and service for its students who have witnessed trauma and violence. While there are many reasons for migration besides armed conflict and militarisation, the escalation of outmigration from Nagaland in the last two decades shows the connection between the aspiration of the youth to find employment and the politics of care and hospitality. What is distinct is the process of teaching and translating what constitutes care and being hospitable, to youth who were perceived as members of ‘former headhunters’ (Larmer 2015) and ‘dangerous’ (Kikon 2009) in the eyes of the Indian state. The same demography is now praised for having a ‘natural flair’ and a ‘pleasant disposition’⁹ to serve as they become servers.

It is against the backdrop of a militarisation that training centres like TPC groom their students. During our visits to TPC in 2015 and 2016, there were routine power failures and the faculty relied on inverters to continue with their classes. These challenges remain as Dimapur's infrastructure continues to crumble. For example, in 2017 the power transformer that supplies electricity to the city broke down, which led to different locations in Dimapur receiving electricity for less than two hours a day (Morung Express News 2017). In addition, two bridges within the city collapsed and the absence of sewage system led to unprecedented flooding in the low-lying areas across the city. This was not the first time the citizens faced a power breakdown though. In 2013, the city of Dimapur experienced a similar situation where certain locations received electricity for an hour a day due to the acute power shortage (The Assam Tribune 2013).

In this city with a crumbling infrastructure, symbols of militarisation are strongly visible nonetheless. The check gates, armed forces patrolling the streets, Naga insurgent camps, and the military camps highlight how militarisation have become part of the city's landscape. For instance, TPC is located in Walford Colony opposite an Indian military camp. A road lined with potholes divides the centre from the military barrack. For prospective migrants who attend the classes where they are trained how to care for their customers, the stark visible military presence is normal and associated with the modern Indian state. This is part of the befuddling experience of what it means to learn how to care and be hospitable for prospective indigenous migrants from Nagaland.

Despite, these experiences, Naga migrants are becoming ideal employees to care and render service in the hospitality sector. In 2017, Ms. Mero, the CEO of TPC said that the centre had trained over thirty thousand prospective migrants in Nagaland to secure lucrative jobs in India and abroad.¹⁰ The challenge, also under such conditions, is that the training schools in Dimapur like TPC receive students who might not have a background or interest to work in the hospitality sector. For instance, many students we met at TPC came with strong experiences of working in their local churches, choirs, or in some cases as primary school teachers.

The experiences of Naga youths from Northeast India is different from accounts of people from conflict areas around the world who cross international borders as transnational migrants and refugees. As we discuss in greater detail elsewhere (Karlsson & Kikon 2017) though they travel to far away places, culturally very different from their home societies, their migrant experiences do not revolve around the common trauma of border crossing, acquiring visa and gaining a legal status in their new destinations. Nor do they follow the pattern of internal migration, for example, the type of seasonal or cyclical migration common among many tribal or indigenous peoples of central India (cf. Breman 1996; Mosse et al. 2005; Shah 2010; Mishra 2016). In the case of the indigenous migrants from Nagaland and its neighbouring states in Northeast India, the question of return is more uncertain. The new life they envisioned seemed to be away from their villages and rural livelihoods. In this context, structural violence, poverty, the long history of armed conflict, lack of infrastructure and industrial development aided to the increasing migration of Naga youth from the state, as argued earlier.

Un-Indian Looks

Unlike the migrant workers we met from the Brahmaputra valley of Assam and other parts of the plains, most of the indigenous youth from Nagaland had fairer complexion and generic Asian features that made them look ‘un-Indian’. English language skills and a sense of dressing and body language became a point of reference during several conversations about tribal migrants being cosmopolitan and desirable. Yet it was these very features that created tensions and drew racist comments. Wouters and Subba (2013: 127) note that Northeastern phenotypes like ‘high cheekbones and yellowish skin tones have not found a place in common imaginaries of the Indian Face’, something that is leading to discrimination and marginalisation (ibid), yet again something that works to the advantage of those in the service sector, is ‘their lighter skin and mongoloid phenotypes’ (Wouters & Subba 2013: 131).

An employee named John from Nagaland who worked in an upscale Japanese restaurant said he routinely experienced racial discrimination but he was determined to stay on and work hard. His aspiration was to join a cruise ship and eventually leave India. He did not want to return to Nagaland. ‘All my friends in the village are married and have children. 14 of us completed our high school, but only 3 of us graduated from college’. After a hotel management course in 2010, he was hired directly by a Five Star chain in Mumbai. Describing his experiences with different kinds of customers. He said;

Indian customers who come to the restaurant do not believe that we are Indians. A Muslim customer once asked me whether the meat was halal. I said “yes”, but he told me, “I do not believe you”. He asked for an Indian waiter. A darker person came to the table and he was happy.

As John narrated further, ‘Due to Mary Kom¹¹ and other popular figures, now they know Northeast India,but how does it matter? Nothing will change even if they (customers) know Nagaland or Manipur’. Among many other migrant workers in the high-end hospitality industry we met, John came across as someone who struggled to keep up with these experiences. The contradictions he faced as an ‘Asian’ face working in a Japanese restaurant, yet being an Indian citizen reproduced a peculiar kind of practice. It was as though his face in a Japanese restaurant gave the customer an authentic experience of eating Japanese food being served by a Japanese waiter. Yet, this performance was broken when the customer required an authentic Indian to validate his values and food taboos. In other words, John's face constantly operates as a bridge for Indian customers in the Japanese restaurant to consume a global experience, but only as far as these experiences do not break their honour, beliefs, and status (class and caste). By demanding to see an ‘Indian waiter’ and rejecting John, the customer in global India emerges as an important agent that defines and produces citizenship values, and expounds the legitimate acceptable face to speak on behalf of global India.

McDuie-Ra’s (2012) work on tribal migrants in Delhi captures the everyday lives of migrants from Northeast India. He describes their encounters with different kinds of customers and employers in India's capital New Delhi, and highlights how indigenous migrants live with their anxieties and aspirations as they navigate the different identities and locations in the city. During our fieldwork, a Naga bartender named Richard who worked at a high-end bar in Mumbai said that he had to teach new employees from Northeast India how navigate their new work environment. He said, ‘In Five Star, we have to know how to work with hierarchy.’ and continued,

During the 2012 exodus when Northeast migrants were attacked, the hotel gave us security. Nothing happened to us. The management cared for us and used to send us home early. Now they provide transport for women employees with security. (I)t was scary in the beginning to work here. Especially serving the Very Very Important Persons (VVIP) like Anil Ambani's wife, Bajaj, Tata, Shahid Kapoor, Preity Zinta … 

The names of customers he listed out were wealthy industrialists, entrepreneurs, and Bollywood celebrities.

Richard shared an anecdote. One day a wealthy Indian industrialist named Ashish Raheja walked into the bar alone. Before he ordered, Richard served him his preferred drink. ‘Oh! You remember?’ the gentleman commented and smiled at Richard. Richard's story seemed to capture the essence of what constituted high-end hospitality. As much as it was about service and the element of care, the server has to acknowledge the wealth, class, and status of the customer. Unlike John's case where his face became a contentious site about authentic Indian citizenship, in Richard's case, it was different. The knowledge that he was a visible bartender came only by embracing the hierarchy that operated in the hospitality world. The established structure, power, and privilege of the wealthy and rich that accessed these places meant that the servers became visible only through the kinds of service they provided. The moment of connection between the service provider and the customer took place within the realm of patronage between a servant and a master and not as fellow citizens or two equal human beings.

Richard's ability to remember faces of important customers made him an ideal employee. Once he alerted the other servers about this particular VVIP customer, the manager came and greeted him personally afterwards. The security guard who had failed to recognise the tycoon was summoned by the manager and warned for being indifferent to a wealthy and important customer. Richard and John's experiences speak about what it requires to care for costumers in hospitality industry. Therefore, lessons about serving and caring in the training centres like TPC defined as ‘soft skills’ become crucial in the overall packaging of a desirable recruit in the hospitality industry.

Soft Skills

All students at TPC, both male and female attended the soft skills classes in formal or business attires. The female students had to apply make-up before entering their respective classrooms. They came in the morning with their grooming make-up kits and business attires in a bag. Once they arrived at TPC, they changed into their business outfits, which constituted of pants and suits, pencil skirts and blouses, or dresses. No one was allowed to wear jeans or clothes that were outside the outfit guidelines provided by the teachers. According to the trainers, learning to dress up in the morning was part of the training that aimed to equip the students with soft skills. Such skills involved teaching them how to walk, talk, stand, dress, apply make-up, and acquire communication skills that would be perceived as professional and pleasant by the customers. The trainer for make-up and hair, Ms. Lisa said;

See, it is not only about how they look; it is also about how they present themselves; posture, the way they talk, communicate. At the TPC, when we train them, we do not only train them about grooming but we train them for communication and soft skills (added emphasis). So the package at The People Channel is different.

The emphasis on soft skills at TPC was critical. The gaze and vision of the eyes was articulated and bodily experienced. It was impossible to sever the eyes from the face, and the face from the limbs, and, subsequently, from the entire body. In short, inculcating soft skills was a corporal experience. The trainers seemed aware of this, and presented soft skill development as the unique selling point of the centre. One of the trainers said, ‘It (soft skills) means things like pronunciation, the way they talk, the way they walk etc. So, we are also sending them off to work in the different companies as products of The People Channel’. Another trainer named Lucy underlined why soft skills were important. She said;

Soft skills are required for the airlines, corporate offices, and the hotel industry as well. We do a lot of mock interviews. How to sit during the interview, how to respond; we show the videos and all the trainers have their own modules; so we show them accordingly.

Curious to learn about the trainer's concept of soft skills, we also enquired with Lisa, the make-up and hair trainer. For her too, it was a matter of how you present yourself, not least how you look, saying;

See, when I was with the airlines, in order to serve a person we have to look really good. We had to be clean; the makeup has to be done well. Thik thak! (An expression in Nagamese to emphasize perfection). The clothes should be well ironed because we are representing the face of the company. We cannot look shabby and just go and serve people.

Despite the focus on make-up, there was an effort about training students to perfect the art of caring and serving wealthy and important customers. These demands were highly gendered; many companies were primarily were looking for female employees. However, male students also received tips how to become attractive servers. A trainer who taught Hair and Make-up said;

For the boys, it is not much since we do not use make-up for them. They should look decent. We advise them to wear pastel colors. If they wear brown shoes, they should wear brown belts; and learn to trim their nostril hair and shave well.

The hospitality industry followed a well-established gender divide. We learnt that irrespective of whether a female student had finished college, if she had the disposition and physical appearance to care and serve VVIP customers, she stood a good chance of securing an attractive front-desk job. The male students often tended to end up as security guards or in hotel housekeeping section unless they had good skin, and mastery over the English language including soft skills. The face, ultimately, for both sexes, was required to be presentable, being a metonymic representation or an embodiment of the company.

The Face of the Company

The refined Northeastern face was the very commodity that the recruitment agency was selling to the hospitality sector. James T. Siegel describes the face as an aesthetic character that possesses a fragile stability. Siegel notes that the face has an ‘explosive power’ referring to the facial expressions, because the face is located as the site that gives access to the soul through the gaze of the eye. Siegel argues that in real life, ‘We imbue what we see with significance’ (Siegel 1999: 105). The living gaze and the social relations it produced resonated with the experiences of the two waiters we discussed earlier. For instance, the racialized gaze that John endured in a high-end Japanese restaurant or the moment of recognition when the tycoon Mr. Raheja looked at Richard and acknowledged his usefulness. This is the neoliberal gaze in global India where indigenous migrants as caring and hospitable servers experience the inequalities and hierarchies.

For the trainers at the TPC, it was important to recognise this reality. This was the process of learning the values and knowledge of becoming servers in the high-end hospitality industry. The rules of the hospitality sector govern which face of the indigenous migrant is able to signify the meanings and qualities of a luxurious experience. Critiquing Simmel of attributing the painted eye to see pure image and form, Siegel notes that in life we reject the painted gaze. Instead, we ‘ … appropriate our facial expression, choosing to be endowed with control of them, endowed with soul, at the expense of a more powerful vision … ’ (Siegel 1999: 106). This living ‘more powerful’ vision located within a power network of the market and capital measures the tone of the skin, the structure of the face, and the make up on the face. As indigenous migrants from Northeast India continue to be branded as outsiders and foreigners (Wungkhai 2016), the hospitality industry and corporation have embraced this diversity. However, the celebration of diversity in a profit-driven market is not based on constitutional guarantees about equality and respect for human rights, but one that asserted the privatisation of labour, and the imposition of a corporate value and culture driven by capital and individual success.

Caring for the Community

The successful student at TPC is someone who manages to land a job outside Northeast India, in any of the major Indian cities or, even better, abroad. Exposure to the outside world is indeed presented with an intrinsic value for one's professional career as well as for the personal growth. Ms. Meru, the CEO of TPC, including many trainers at TPC use their experiences from living and working in various parts of the country and abroad while training students. A move back home is explained in terms of responsibilities to aging parents, taking care of family property, or as in the CEO's case as a kind of mission to support and give a vision to the community. At a seminar, Ms. Meru explained how as a child of a mixed marriage she was denied full recognition and membership in the Naga community.¹² This was most painful to her because she grew up among Nagas and knew ‘no other way of being’. She left Nagaland as a teenager, and studied and worked in Delhi, Mumbai, New York, and several other places. After a successful career outside, she returned and started the training centre. Even if she was a driven business woman, she was also on a quest to reconnect with and establish a more secure sense of caring for the community as a Naga herself.

Among students and alumni of TPC, we sensed a similar type of care for or responsibility towards the community. They sought to get out in the world, highly aware that personal achievement was not all what was expected of them. This might be universal. We all have responsibilities towards family and kin, yet for the indigenous migrants such responsibility had a wider significance involving the obligation to the culture and ancestral lands of their respective communities. The latter is akin to what Catherine Allerton (this volume), describes as ‘long term care’. A TPC alumni working as an airline hostess and based in West Asia said that when she came home to visit her mother the question of marrying a local Naga boy kept coming up, but she said she was not ready to marry. One of her worries was that if she returned to Nagaland the insurgent outfits would pressure her for the money she had saved while working outside. That they would demand their share was hence taken for granted, but her dream was to eventually start a training centre for grooming indigenous youth in Nagaland to secure good jobs. These reflections spoke about more general longings and anxieties about the homes and communities that the young migrants had left behind. As they increasingly become visible as hospitable and caring servers, memories of homes and returning were entangled with social relations, the homelands they long for, and their families.

Conclusion

Focusing on the training and work of young indigenous migrants in the hospitality sector, we addressed the wider social significance of this new type of mobility and form of labour. As this is a recent phenomenon – gaining in salience during the last decade – we focused on our ethnographic findings and cautiously stayed close to the ground. Many of the youth are choosing to leave the ancestral lands their parents have suffered so much to defend. In transforming themselves to appeal to the corporate sector and cater to the privileged elite that stay in five star hotels and dine in posh restaurants, the question of care and service, as we highlighted in this article, raises larger questions whether young indigenous migrants will eventually lose touch with the lifeworld and everyday concerns of their respective communities in the hills. Yet, what is clear is the determination and skills of these migrants in neoliberal India, which itself speak about their ability to craft new indigenous beginnings.

The care for the self that the indigenous students practice in Dimapur set them on a new path in life; it facilitates their movement out in the world, away from their families, the community and an active engagement cultivating the land. The young migrants want more than what they could get from a life as subsistence farmers in the backdrop of a troubling militarised history. As highlighted in this article, the hospitality industry opens an avenue to work and travel outside. Yet, the new life as migrant labourers is not an easy one. For many, it is a lonely existence in a hostile environment where many of them endure racial harassment and discrimination. Some have to perform racial Asian stereotypes and dress up during long work hours in Japanese or Chinese outfits. Many of the young migrants are torn by expectations and demands from their workplaces and those of their families and communities back home. The mobility they experience certainly creates a space of freedom, outside the grip of the coercive state in Northeast India as well the rebel groups and ethnic organisations that control much of public life in the region. But as we have shown, entering the hospitality industry imposes other forms of control and power, exercised through the refashioning of their bodies. They are produced as servers for the market under a highly disciplined labour regime that is founded on a slippery corporate framework of soft skills and being presentable. The situation, as we suggested, has something of a double bind to it. Staying back or migrating, neither seems a winning proposition.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Johan Lindquist, Mark Johnson and Paul Boyce for organizing the Care and Control workshops. We have benefitted greatly from the discussions and comments by participants at these events, not least the rich comments by the special discussant Nicole Constable.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [grant number p12-1342:1].

Notes

1 The term Five Star is an international hotel rating based on luxurious service and facilities, premised on a wholesome experience of service and care. All Five Star luxury hotels explicitly spell out the high quality facilities it offers, such as spas, world cuisine restaurants, and different categories of rooms and suites. But more than the material comforts, high-end hospitality is about personalised services. The more exclusive the hotel, the more personalised the care, even to the extent of the staff being able to anticipate and satisfy demands that have not been explicitly articulated by guests. (cf. Sherman 2007).

2 In case of Latin America, Peter Wade (2013) makes a similar point showing the connection between the articulation of eroticism and race. However, he specifically focuses on domestic labour and the aspects of subordination of being a servant. He highlights the implications of connecting black and indigenous people as backward and subordinate and shows how domestic labour is perceived as servitude due to the intersections of race, class, and gender. In our article, we focus on aspects of how an un-Indian physical appearance is seen as appealing in the hospitality sector and associated with a global service where a complex interplay of citizenship, race, and rights comes into play as experienced by indigenous migrants from Northeast India.

3 We are using the real name of the training centre The People Channel as well as the owner Ms. Mero, as this was her explicit request. Other names used in the article are pseudonyms.

4 Ms. Mero underlined that her students were recruited by international airline companies such as Emirates, Air Asia, Jet Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Air Vistara. Among the high-end Five Star chains, the alumni of The People Channel worked at the Ritz Carlton, Hyatt Regency, JW Marriot, Hilton Resorts, The Leela Hotels, and the ITC Resorts.

5 More than 70% of the students that enter primary school in the region never make it to high school (Education Today 2016, cf. Neinu 2015).

6 These figures were repeatedly mentioned at a government conference in Guwahati in February 2016 on the potential of the service sector for the Northeast. The conference proceedings are available on the internet, http://www.icsiindia.in/erm_20160211.html. The scenario was based on a 2013 PricewaterhouseCoopers study called ‘Development and Employment Generation Potential of the North-Eastern states’. We have not been able to get hold of this document.

7 The quote in the quote is from an original article on affective labor by Hardt (1999).

8 Public statement at a seminar on migration that our project group organised in Dimapur, December 3, 2016.

9 Communication in a private interview between a Human Resource officer at a Five Star hotel in Mumbai and Dolly Kikon, October 2015.

10 For the complete interview refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNlpu2JPgQ (last accessed 4 June 2018).

11 Mary Kom is a national boxer and hails from the state of Manipur in Northeast India. She is the most visible tribal face in India and appears for commercials and national integration campaigns including government of India's programmes to emphasise racial and religious diversity in contemporary India (cf. McDuie-Ra 2015).

12 The seminar was organised by us together with various civil society organisations in Nagaland as part of a series of event addressing the issue of migration from Northeast India.