The “faithful” ayah in colonial households: gender, caste, and race of South Asian domestic labors

This dissertation analyzes domestic labors, exploitation, and intimacies in a range of colonial households from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries through a social and cultural history of a South Asian maidservant, the ayah. I argue that the gendered labors of the racialized ayah were crucial for the production and reproduction of the racial purity of the British imperial family, and the upper-caste upper-class Western modernity of the South Asian elite family. Excavating the stories of individual ayahs from legal, cultural, and medical archives, my dissertation provides an intimate domestic history of British mimicry of Mughal culture, British liberal imperialism, free-market colonial capitalist circulation of labor, anti-colonial Indian nationalism, and postcolonial South Asian modernity. In the process, it brings together British imperial and South Asian historiographies and weaves together the intersecting histories of gender, caste, race, sexuality, and labor. Race and caste are rarely analyzed together in the field of South Asian history, which this dissertation does through the critical lenses of gender, sexuality, and labor. I trace the two-way flow of colonial hierarchies by showing how caste entered British imperial households and how race entered South Asian elite households to shape the relationship between employers and maidservants. Theoretically and methodologically, this dissertation draws upon postcolonial subaltern studies as well as black feminist intersectionality. Although I argue that domestic hierarchies of caste and race did not always neatly intersect in South Asia, paying attention to the (non)intersecting gendered histories of race and caste adds an intersectional perspective to the study of subaltern and domestic histories in South Asia.While the existing literature on colonial domestic labor primarily focuses on employers’ perspectives and state regulation, this dissertation foregrounds the experiences, struggles, and anxieties of ayahs themselves as they worked for colonial employers, both British and South Asian. Ayahs not only negotiated with employers and the colonial bureaucracy, but also internalized South Asian socio-religious and patriarchal injunctions to preserve their caste-purity, morality, and gendered respectability. The enduring cultural sentimentalization of ayahs, this dissertation argues, invisibilized the precarious everyday realities of colonial maidservants.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference