Why is the name "Inday" associated with Filipino servants?
That's because "Inday" is a common Visayan name as "activist" Inday Espina Varona points out.
If you think Inday is a disparaging term, you probably need to check your own worldview there :) may TV shows ba na tawag sa kasambahay ay Inday? Eh sa madami talaga kaming Bisaya na Inday ang nickname — across classes. I remember a year there were three indays at home.
This means the name "Inday" just happens to be a victim of statistical emergence. It is, after all, a fact that many Visayans migrated to Metro Manila to work as servants. And because Metro Manila is the cultural capital of the Philippines, mainstream media and pop entertainment producers merely picked up the common conception.
It also did not help that one of the most famous Indays is erstwhile Queen of Talk in the Philippines, Inday Badiday, who appealed to the bakya crowd of the time. Her show See True was popular with the masa and many a Conyo kid grew up seeing their household servants watching the show on their spare time.
Visayans are best reevaluating the notion that Tagalog is the "national language" because it is essentially just a quaint dialect forced upon them by the indigenous tribes of the river around which Metro Manila would eventually grow. Doing so may go some way to erase these vestiges of domestic colonialism. That will likely deliver more results than merely pontificating about the "issue".
Yup, it's just another form of Tagalogs feeling superior to the rest of the nation because it is the capitol... Without acknowledgment that they were the bitches of the Spanish
ReplyDeleteNow they wander around the country with a Spanish family name trying to figure out the culture of Filipinos without a clue the nation has never been united.
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