Servants' Pasts: Late-Eighteenth to Twentieth-Century South Asia – Vol. 2
Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma
Price
1785
ISBN
9789352876945
Language
English
Pages
340
Format
Hardback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2019
Territorial Rights
World
Imprint
Orient BlackSwan

The importance of domestic service as a growing area of occupation and employment in contemporary South Asia is marked by a surprising silence about it in historical scholarship.

The second volume of Servants’ Pasts covers the colonial and postcolonial periods. It lays out the intricate relationship between domestic work and employment in light of the growth of first, new moral regimes under colonialism and second, public avenues of employment under colonial institutions such as the municipality, school and hospital.

A ‘reformed’ language of intimacy, conjugality and ‘duties’ developed in middle-class households, which impinged on the mistress-servant relationship while a distinct grammar of ‘racialised distancing’ underpinned the relationship between Europeans and Indians. These changes redefined the social and administrative relationships between state and subjects, masters/mistresses and servants, and more broadly, between colonisers and colonised.

At the heart of this book is the claim to push for a ‘domestic turn’ in the writing of South Asian social history. The essays explore the making of the site of the domestic at each historical conjuncture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by exploring its interaction with, and plotting its formation through laws, customs, norms, and practices.

Nitin Sinha is Senior Research Fellow, Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project, ‘Domestic Servants in Colonial India’ (ERC-Stg. 2015–18).

Nitin Varma is Fellow, International Research Center ‘Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History (Re:Work), Berlin.

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Introduction
Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma

I. FEMALE DOMESTICS AND MORAL ORDERS
1. From Bibis to Ayahs: Sexual Labour, Domestic Labour, and the Moral Politics of Empire Satyasikha Chakraborty
2. The Many Lives of Ayah: Life Trajectories of Female Servants in Early Nineteenth-Century India Nitin Varma
3. Training a Servant Class: Gender, Poverty and Domestic Labour in Early Nineteenth-Century Educational Sources
Jana Tschurenev
4. Streamlining Paid Domestic Labour in Postcolonial India: The New Female ‘All-Rounder’ in Master–Servant Expatriate Relationships
Shalini Grover

Interjection 1
Slavery and a History of Domestic Work
Samita Sen

II. SERVANTS IN LITERARY AND PUBLIC WORLDS
5. Representing Servant Lives in the Household and Beyond
Prabhat Kumar
6. Servants and Mistresses: Literary and Legal Sketches in Early Twentieth-Century Uttar Pradesh
Charu Gupta
7. Caste–ing Servants in Colonial Calcutta
Tanika Sarkar

Interjection 2
Agency and Domestic Workers
Lucy Delap
Bibliography
Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Index
Release Date : 22-Nov-2019 Venue : Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi.
Servants' Pasts: Late-Eighteenth to Twentieth-Century South Asia – Vol. 2 | published in the H-Soz-u-Kult, 10 September 2020.