Who Is (Not) a Servant, Anyway? Domestic servants and service in early colonial India* (original) (raw)
Related papers
Servants' Pasts II, 2019
Domestic servants have been ubiquitous in the modern Hindi literary corpus. Their representation, however, is contingent upon inhabiting the domestic world of the master and less on their own. This is because, until the 1990s, writers—although far from homogeneous in their approach—have invariably belonged to the class of masters. The story of servants’ lives, if not central, has been intermeshed with their masters’ subjectivity. Literary representations nonetheless capture the lives of domestic servants with richness and complexity, albeit they remain ostensibly inflected with their masters’ moral and ideological concerns. The changing moral-political climate in history brings palpable shifts in such representations, along with nondescript continuities. We shall therefore examine the politics, poetics and history of servants’ representation across several genres and over a relatively long period, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We shall briefly touch upon the self-styled reformist educational manuals of the nineteenth century and highlight some aspects of the discursive formulation of the master–servant relationship. We shall then juxtapose and discuss the figure of domestic servant in selected early Hindi novels, a new literary genre which, amongst other things, brought the household (and its constituents, including servants) to the centre of literary–political imagination in late nineteenth-century colonial India. We shall examine the similarities and/or differences between the two literary representations, without overlooking their complicated interconnections with questions of domesticity and nationalism. Next, we shall explore visual and literary representations of the domestic servant between the 1920s and 1930s. Along with cartoons, which arguably aimed at reforming and entertaining readers, we shall also deal with some short stories and sketches which self-consciously endeavoured to represent these subaltern social characters and their predicament during the high tide of anti-colonial nationalism. In doing so, we shall tease out the shifts and continuities in the language and politics of representation of the servant in late colonial times.
Studies in History, 2018
This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging 'ideal' servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.
Servants' Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia. Vol. I
2019
This book is part of a two-volume publication on the history of domestic servants in early modern and modern South Asia. The volumes have emerged out of the research conducted under the European Research Council (ERC)-funded Starting-grant project (DOS 640627, 2015-18). The project has run for three years at two different institutions in Berlin. Nitin Sinha is based at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) and Nitin Varma at IGK, Re:Work, Humboldt University. They were the main researchers on the project. They thank the ERC for funding this project, and the members, both academic and administrative, of their respective host institutions for all the support they have received in successfully running the project. The project was stipulated to cover the period from the mideighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. However, it was not easy to compartmentalise the history of domestic service, servitude and servants into neat brackets of historiographical periods. In choosing the above timescale , the quest was to understand the nitty-gritty of the colonial period but we were also aware of the importance of putting this period in dialogue with what happened before, and what social, political and discursive regimes of master-servant relationship carried into the colonial period from precolonial times. This indeed pressed on us the necessity to take the early modern period very seriously in our efforts to write the history of domestic servants. Our association with Pankaj Jha grew gradually over the last three years: in the beginning from being the 'temporal cousins' across the divide of the modern and the early modern with similar interests in questions of social and political formations and historical changes related to social marginals to a firm friend and colleague female guards waqianavis news reporter zanan-i parsa women-servants zikr/dhikr to mention, to remember
International Review of Social History
Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal...
Representing Servant Lives in the Household and Beyond in Sinha& varma eds Servants' Pasts-II
Orient Blackswan, 2019
Domestic servants have been ubiquitous in the modern Hindi literary corpus. Their representation, however, is contingent upon inhabiting the domestic world of the master and less on their own. This is because, until the 1990s, writers—although far from homogeneous in their approach—have invariably belonged to the class of masters. The story of servants’ lives, if not central, has been intermeshed with their masters’ subjectivity. Literary representations nonetheless capture the lives of domestic servants with richness and complexity, albeit they remain ostensibly inflected with their masters’ moral and ideological concerns. The changing moral-political climate in history brings palpable shifts in such representations, along with nondescript continuities. We shall therefore examine the politics, poetics and history of servants’ representation across several genres and over a relatively long period, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We shall briefly touch upon the self-styled reformist educational manuals of the nineteenth century and highlight some aspects of the discursive formulation of the master–servant relationship. We shall then juxtapose and discuss the figure of domestic servant in selected early Hindi novels, a new literary genre which, amongst other things, brought the household (and its constituents, including servants) to the centre of literary–political imagination in late nineteenth-century colonial India. We shall examine the similarities and/or differences between the two literary representations, without overlooking their complicated interconnections with questions of domesticity and nationalism. Next, we shall explore visual and literary representations of the domestic servant between the 1920s and 1930s. Along with cartoons, which arguably aimed at reforming and entertaining readers, we shall also deal with some short stories and sketches which self-consciously endeavoured to represent these subaltern social characters and their predicament during the high tide of anti-colonial nationalism. In doing so, we shall tease out the shifts and continuities in the language and politics of representation of the servant in late colonial times.
The domesticated public sphere: Women's work and service in late colonial India
In the first half of this paper, I explore the construction of 'public domesticity' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to argue that with the centrality placed on the spatial geography of the home in the nineteenth century, domestic work undertaken by women began to gain prominence under civilisational pressures of colonial modernity. In the second half of the paper, I discuss how the domestication of the public sphere, another practice of colonial governmentality, became essential for the entry of upper caste and upper class educated women into the public sphere. This paper will thus raise questions of feminine modesty visa -vis bourgeois domesticity and moral economy and how this domesticity of public sphere led to the granting of agency to the respectable middle class woman but shifted the relationship lower class and lower caste women had with the public sphere in late colonial India.
Servants Pasts Late Eighteenth to Twentieth Century South Asia Vol II
Orient Blackswan, 2019
The New Perspectives in South Asian History series publishes monographs and other writings on early modern, modern and contemporary history. The volumes in the series cover new ground across a broad spectrum of subjects such as cultural, environmental, medical, military and political history, and the histories of 'marginalised' groups. It includes fresh perspectives on more familiar fields as well as interdisciplinary and original work from all parts of South Asia. It welcomes historical contributions from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.
Servant Testimonies and Anglo-Indian Homes in Nineteenth-Century India
To be at Home, 2018
On August 21, 1818, Ramonee, a thirty-year-old woman from Patna in eastern India, appeared before the Supreme Court at Fort William, Calcutta.1 Ramonee, who worked as an ayah (child's nurse, lady's maid), was called as one of the witnesses in a case brought by her former employer, Major Cunliffe. A British military captain stationed in Cawnpore (a cantonment in northern India), Cunliffe was accusing his wife Louisa of adultery.2 A charge of adultery directed against wives, as in England at that time, allowed husbands to sue their wives' accused lovers for damages. This was usually followed by proceedings in the ecclesiastical side of the court over the separation of bed and board of the estranged couple (similar to legal separation). A full divorce was extremely rare and often the privilege of the rich and influential. This required a private act of the British parliament and usually cost a fortune.3 There was another problem for the British residents of India if they wished to or were capable of taking this route. The witnesses required to establish the charge-servants, other household members, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues-could not usually travel to England to appear before parliament. In 1820, a change in regulation allowed the Supreme Courts of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay to summon witnesses and collect evidence to substantiate the allegations made by the husbands on behalf of the British parliament. The evidence and trial details were then forwarded to London for further action. The details of this particular case, including Ramonee's testimony, became available when Major Cunliffe applied for a full divorce in 1823. A premium on morality marked a break from the nabobs (Europeans who made a fortune in India and often imitated the lifestyle of Indian elites) of the late eighteenth century who lived a life of excess and had several liaisons with the native bibis (Indian mistresses of nabobs).4 The growing presence of white women in the colony in the nineteenth century provoked new anxieties and their transgressions appeared to threaten the patriarchal order; the act of 1820 was a gesture in that direction.5 The change from white nabobi homes to memsahib households was noted in handbooks written for British subjects and servicemen in India published in 1810 and 1825.6 Here I 1 I am extremely grateful to Felicitas Hentschke for her constant encouragement and intellectual input in finalizing this essay. I must also extend my gratitude to James Williams for his extremely useful feedback on an earlier draft. This essay forms part of a larger research project on the history of domestic servants in India funded by a European Research Council Starting grant project (ERC stg. DOS 640627). I am grateful to my friend and principal investigator Nitin Sinha for helping me develop many ideas presented here. 2 The details of the divorce proceedings are recorded in the annual Proceedings of the British House of Lords for the relevant years. I have been able to collect around thirty trials spanning a period of forty years (early 1820s to early 1860s) held at the