Down memory lane: representations of domestic workers in middle class personal narratives of colonial bengal

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2004 by Swapna M. Banerjee

If one rummages through the pages of autobiographies and memoirs left by Bengali middle-class men and women living in colonial times one cannot possibly miss the characters and activities of the domestic workers surrounding the authors as they were growing up. The repeated appearance of servants and maids in middle-class reminiscences testifies to the importance of this working population in the lives of their employers. Numerical evidence from the Censuses of India (1911, 1921, 1931) also suggests that domestic service constituted one of the principal occupations of colonial Bengal. (2) From the 1880s on, there was an increasing demand in the hiring of servants in Bengal and by the first decade of the twentieth century domestic service accounted for 12 per cent of all occupations in Calcutta, as opposed to 7.3 per cent in Bombay, 6.68 per cent in Madras, and 6.1 per cent in Delhi. (3)

The last few decades in South Asian history have witnessed a remarkable engagement of scholars with marginal social groups such as slaves, bonded labor, prostitutes, and working class women, not to mention women of upper and other middling classes. The new literature also brings to the fore the wider political implication of the home and the domestic space and their importance in the construction of individual and national identity. (4) Striking by their absence in this literature on lower social groups are the domestic workers who constituted a major segment of the urban economy and were widely represented in different genres of Bengali writings. Meredith Borthwick (1984), while studying the changing roles of nineteenth-century Bengali women, has included brief accounts of servants, matchmakers, washing women, and midwives in bhadralok families of colonial Calcutta. (5) Radhika Singha (1998), examining the criminal justice system under colonial laws, gives us an account of the nature of employer-domestic relationships in the British households in India. (6) Indrani Chatterjee (1999) brings to light the importance of slavery in ruling households of eastern India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (7) But the existing literature that concerns itself with family and domestic workers mainly tends to focus either on the contemporary period or on the middle class nationalists. (8) The literature misses out the significance of the colonial era and leaves the sphere of the household and the family relatively unproblematized. (9) The family metaphorically represented by the ghar (private/home/domestic) is projected in opposition to the world represented by bahir (public). (10) The composition of the colonial Bengali family, its changing structure, its workings, and most importantly, the distribution of power within the household remain unaddressed in most works. The excessive focus on the middle-class members writes off the presence of different caste-class groups thereby completely ignoring the subordinate workers who were a common feature of colonial households. In spite of the close connection between the Bengali middle class and the domestic workers no attempt has been made yet to explore in depth how the middle-class culture and the associated reforming trends in society and economy impacted on domestic workers in colonial Bengal. Nor is there any account of how the Bengali middle class and the domestic workers interacted with and were perceived by each other. The acute dearth of primary sources or written documents left by the servants themselves in the colonial period acts as a stumbling block. Since household remained the "site of production" for the domestics the latter were also ignored by the past generation of Indian labor historians who did not consider them as a constitutive segment of the "working-class" engaged in the daily battle for survival. While the story of domestic service in Bengal demands attention in its own right, the importance of the serving population in shaping the lives and identity of its employers in urban households compels us to re-think and re-situate them in proper historical perspective.

Attempting to fill this lacuna, my paper explores one of the many facets of employer-servant relationships through a selective reading of middle-class personal narratives. The preoccupation of South Asian scholars with the middle class has been often attributed to the abundance of data and written documents available from the elites. Undeniably, it holds true for any country that the service class as subordinate actors in a hierarchically structured relationship rarely spoke freely or captured their feelings and imaginations in writing. (11) Most of what we know about them is expressed in the discourse of their employers. (12) Yet albeit restricted in number, in countries where research has been conducted on domestic workers there exist some public documents such as government or non-governmental organizations' reports and surveys, or records of the servants themselves, that provide the servants' perspective of the employing class. (13) Given the remarkably high rate of illiteracy among the working population and the general apathy of preserving records there is almost no direct evidence on or from servants in colonial India. Domestic workers did appear as an occupational category in the Indian censuses but that information is far from perfect. Since the lives and views of domestic servants have not been recorded in Indian history, this paper, relying on the perceptions of the middle-class writers, seeks to infer from them the nature of the relationships between employers and servants in middle-class households of colonial Bengal. (14) Here household and family are both treated as cultural constructs and not mutually independent and exclusive of each other. Family is recognized as the "conjugal kin group living in the same household," marked by symbols, values, and meanings, while the household is concerned with activities like production, consumption, and reproduction directed to the satisfaction of human needs. This essay underscores how people through their commitment to the notion of the family are recruited into the "material relations of the household." (15) Instead of looking at the family as a single unit representing unified interests we will consider the family as a locus of struggle where each member with different roles, hierarchical positions, and interests, entered into both conflictual and consensual relationships with one another. In the context of colonial India, not only several generations of families lived in a common household, the household was the primary arena where age and sex roles were determined, kin solidarity forged, socialization, and economic cooperation took place. (16) Furthermore, urban households in colonial Bengal entailed several ethnic and racial varieties belonging to different socio-economic strata: the households of the European/British officials working in India, the wealthy households of the early aristocrats such as that of the Tagores, and the households of the ordinary middle class are among the many that hired servants for domestic help. For our purposes here we will consider only the indigenous households--that of the Tagores and the ordinary Bengali middle class.