Ayahs Indian Domestic Servants

Sweta Singh began the third panel with her presentation exploring ambivalence expressed toward the domestic servant in private and the public spheres of colonial India. Swapna Banerjees presentation focused particularly on the role of domestic male servants in colonial India. The lecture was a part of a European Research Council-funded project, The History of Domestic Servants in Colonial India, ERC-STG DOS, 640627.

By exploring the historical experiences and cultural memories of ayahs and amahs, the project seeks to shed light on broader trans-colonial histories of domestic labour. Scholarship of historical forms of domestic employment is now exploring its international patterns, of which the home Ayahs played a role. As a social historian whose work has focused on the migrant labourers in colonial India, I set out to untangle the histories of Indian women domestic workers as they travelled to Australia, either directly or through Britain, and to other British colonies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Etymologically, the ayah is a recent import into Indian history, which gained currency when British officials began to establish themselves in India during the latter part of the nineteenth century. First emerging in India as a distinct group of occupations following the arrival of English wives in the late eighteenth century, ayahs replaced the male servants from the pre-colonial period starting from the late 1830s, becoming a significant base for childcare jobs for British Indians in the Raj. The Ayahs functioned not only as caretakers and surrogate mothers to the British children in India but also employed themselves to look after children while European/British families were transiting to England and back.

The ayahs also crossed murky waters (kalapani) to earn their livelihood as either indentured servants, women servants, or shipboard caretakers. Despite a dearth of evidence of about 100 Ayahs, they are known to have been generally older women, used to the care-taking duties, and were able to adapt both in the English and Indian worlds. The ayahs could be defined as the marginalised insiders and the intimate others within Anglo-Indian homes since ayahs provided the more intimate labour and were intimate with their employer's private lives.

In other cases, ayahs used their agency in situations where they travelled overseas with their employers, bringing complaints against their European employers, as was the case with Thomasee and eighteen other servants who served the Browne family in New South Wales, Australia (1818). As members of an Indian community in close proximity to the Europeans, the earliest ayahs were aggressive money earners, often challenging, disrupting, and undermining their Western employers.

The employment of the ayahs and other Indian servants was the primary marker of the racial, gender, cultural, and class differences between colonizers and the colonized. Indian ayahs lived and worked in British colonial homes as babysitters, housekeepers, nurses, and, on occasion, wet nurses, helping British families to prosper in an isolated setting. The Home for the Ayahs, London, provided housing to Indian and Chinese amahs (nannies) in the early twentieth century who had been mistreated, dismissed from their services, or were simply abandoned without any means to return home.

The ayahs would accompany British families home to the UK, whether it was on a seasonal journey to escape Indian summers or when a colonial official retired. The number of accompanied journeys was reduced by 4,500 miles following the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, resulting in as many as 140 travelling ayahs visiting Britain each year, accompanied by their employed families, the memsahibs (ladies-in-waiting) and children.

Many women who travelled to Australia, argues historian Samia Khatun, came as housemaids: the ayahs would accompany their white employers from Indian ports to Australian ports and interior cities. Hailing primarily from lower-caste groups like the Bagdi and the Jalia Kabarta, poor, powerless women, many poor young widows, worked as full-time ayahs, wet nurses, or domestic servants for wealthy Aboriginal and British families.

Ayah, a term that owes its genesis to the Portuguese cognate aia (Spanish: aya; Italian: aja; and Latin: avia, meaning grandmother), Ayahs were the indigenous female nurses, female caretakers for children, particularly in European families in India. In modern India, ayah is a widespread term that refers to women who are the caretakers of children and the elderly at hospitals and homes. These earlier associations help to explain the usage of ayah derived from its Portuguese cognate, aia (meaning mother, mentor, ward), to designate women's caretakers in Anglo-Indian households.

Nitin Sinha briefly mentioned her research focus, namely, the history of female servants in India during the late 18th century and the early 19th century. First, he stressed the importance of a long history of domestic labour regulations, which, he suggested, can serve as a starting point for a historical study of servants and services.

Focusing on the colonial period, Salma Vazis thesis, which draws from literary sources, sought to recover the domestic male servant's intimate labour that was constituent to their masculinity and that of their employers. Laura Wilks contends that the domestic servants (the women commuting workers in her case study) valued both the intimate relationship with the employers and the independence that contractual wage labour involved.

Among the evidence given by Ms Dunne, and also recorded in the correspondence between Ayah's home and the Indian Ministry, was the account of one ayah brought to Britain from Bombay by a British woman in 1908, who, as was customary, released her to Thomas Cook and Son to move her work to Thomas Cook and Son.

Cited Sources

• https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/04/14/locating-ayahs-in-transit-a-passage-to-australia-and-other-parts-of-the-world/ ⁰
• https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/europe-europeans-and-world/gender-and-empire/ayahs-in-british-india ¹
• https://www.newcastle.edu.au/research/centre/purai/ayahs-amahs-transcolonial-servants-in-australia-and-britain-1780-1945 ²
• https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0422485 ³
• https://servantspasts.wordpress.com/category/ayahs/ ⁴
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahs%27_Home ⁵