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Colonial Caregivers offers a compelling cultural and social history of ayahs (nannies/maids), by exploring domestic intimacy and exploitation in colonial South Asia. Working for British imperial families from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s, South Asian ayahs, as Chakraborty shows, not only provided domestic labor, but also provided important moral labor for the British Empire. The desexualized racialized ayah archetype upheld British imperial whiteness and sexual purity, and later Indian elite 'upper' caste domestic modernity. Chakraborty argues that the pervasive cultural sentimentalization of the ayah morally legitimized British colonialism, while obscuring the vulnerabilities of caregivers in real-life. Using an archive of petitions and letters from ayahs, fairytales they told to British children, court cases, and vernacular sources, Chakraborty foregrounds the precarious lives, voices, and perspectives of these women. By placing care labor at the center of colonial history, the book decolonizes the history of South Asia and the British Empire.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of figures; Introduction: the Ayah archetype; 1. Queer intimacy, domestic slavery, and inter-racial sex in Mughal India: British imperial morality and the creation of the desexualized Indian Ayah; 2. Christianity, colonial uprisings, and colonial law: rescue and romanticization of the Ayah; 3. Mobility and precarity: South Asian Ayahs in Britain; 4. Race and caste anxieties: colonial medical naturalization of the care-labor of Ayahs and Amahs; 5. Fairy tales, letters, petitions: Ayahs' voices in colonial archives; 6. South Asian elites and domestic modernity: racialization of caste and sentimentalization of the colonial Ayah; Conclusion: Postcolonial legacies; Selected bibliography; Index.
About the author
Satya Shikha Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. She has published award-winning articles on the history of Indian ayahs in Britain and European governesses in Indian princely households.
