Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India - Softcover

Ray, Raka; Qayum, Seemin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804760721 ISBN 13: 9780804760720

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere.

This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Raka Ray is Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies, Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, and Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (1999). Seemin Qayum is a historical anthropologist and the author and editor of several works on nationalism, elites, and gender in modern Bolivia.

Raka Ray is Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies, Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, and Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (1999). Seemin Qayum is a historical anthropologist and the author and editor of several works on nationalism, elites, and gender in modern Bolivia.

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Cultures of Servitude

Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in IndiaBy Raka Ray Seemin Qayum

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6072-0

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................ixAcknowledgments.....................................................xi1 Approaching Servitude in Kolkata..................................12 Colonial Legacies and Spatial Transformations.....................323 Between Family Retainer and Freelancer............................654 Disquieting Transitions...........................................925 The Failure of Patriarchy.........................................1196 The Cultivation and Cleavage of Distinction.......................1457 Traveling Cultures of Servitude...................................1678 Conclusion........................................................188Notes...............................................................201Glossary............................................................229Bibliography........................................................233Index...............................................................249

Chapter One

Approaching Servitude in Kolkata

Types of work that are consumed as services and not in products separable from the worker, and not capable of existing as commodities independently of him ... are of microscopic significance when compared with the mass of capitalist production. They may be entirely neglected, therefore. Karl Marx, Capital

IN AN ICONIC SCENE in Aparajito, the second film of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, the destitute Brahmin widow Sarbajaya watches her son being led into servitude. She has recently obtained work as a cook in the household of a rich Brahmin, where her employers are both considerate and inconsiderate in the manner of feudal lords. In a previous scene, for example, the mistress of the house casually assumes that Sarbajaya should be willing to move to a different town with the household. In this scene, Sarbajaya is shown observing from the top of the stairs as the master of the house sends for her son, Apu, to light his pipe and tells Apu to pluck gray hairs from his head, for which Apu receives a tip. The screenplay notes that "[s]he frowns as she slowly comes down the stairs again." In the next scene, we see Sarbajaya and her son on a train, having left the job behind.

Sarbajaya's expression as she observes the master with Apu conveys that nothing could be more heart wrenching and sobering than watching one's son become a servant. We mention "son" here deliberately because it is not clear that Sarbajaya's reaction would have been quite as strong in the case of a daughter. Indeed, in the first film of the trilogy, Pather Panchali, the daughter, Durga (who dies at the end of the film), is shown at the service of her little brother, Apu, looking after him, feeding him, and ultimately being responsible for his well-being. Durga was born to serve in one way or another, unlike Apu, the Brahmin son, whose caste and gender combine to hold the promise of higher things. Notwithstanding the conventional correspondence between servants' work and women's work that Sarbajaya represents, in the eyes of the masters an Apu would be just as suitable as a Durga to become a servant.

We as viewers can apprehend key insights from Sarbajaya's observation of Apu. First, although certain groups may be considered more appropriately or "naturally" servants, class-poverty and inequality in this case-more than caste or gender frames the potentiality of becoming a servant or being born a servant. Second, there are demeaning behaviors and expectations associated with a relationship of servitude that Sarbajaya silently declines to accept and departs jobless rather than have her son absorb. Domestic servitude is undeniably stigmatized, as the film shows, while also a normal and ingrained element of household life.

This book began as an attempt to think about an institution that lies at the bedrock of Indian domestic middle- and upper-class existence, yet it soon became an inquiry into not only the characteristics of domestic servitude historically and culturally but also the constitution of the classes on both sides of the employer-servant relationship. Domestic servitude, principally but not exclusively paid domestic work, became a dense site for us, the examination of which could illuminate the very constitution of society. In the spirit of Tanika Sarkar's work on nineteenth-century Bengal, and Leonore Davidoff 's work on Victorian England, with their insistence on seeing the public sphere as integrally related to the domestic, this book conceives of the relations within the household as a microcosm of the rules and comportment of societies, with the institution of domestic servitude providing a powerful lens through which to view social constitution and reconstitution over time. Particularly in societies like that of India, with long, unbroken histories of domestic servitude, the institution can be seen as central to understanding self and society. As we argue in this book, the relations of paid domestic work and servitude in India are intimately tied to the self-conscious evolution of a "modern" Indian elite. Through evolving techniques of servant and home management, employers produce themselves as the class destined to lead India to modernity, and servants as a distinct class, premodern and dependent on the middle and upper classes for their well-being. This book explores the relations of servitude in India's recent past and present, what it means to serve and to be served, and through the lens of servitude seeks to understand contemporary Indian conceptions of domesticity, class, and modernity.

Domestic servitude when considered as a historically constructed labor relation in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the space chosen for our exploration, requires us to look more closely at the conditions and changes in Kolkata's political economy, its history as a colonial city, rapidly transforming urban landscapes, and complex gender regimes over the past decades and generations. Yet as we foreground the home as a site where relations of class, gender, and caste/ race are produced and reproduced through the particular labor practices of domestic servitude, we find that these relations and practices are singular indeed. Home is not a jute mill, an apparel sweatshop, a company office, a rice paddy, or a street stall. We suggest that this distinction inheres in both the nature of the labor and the site of labor.

Domestic servitude confuses and complicates the conceptual divide between family and work, custom and contract, affection and duty, the home and the world precisely because the hierarchical arrangements and emotional registers of home and family must coexist with those of workplace and contract in a capitalist world. This uneasy inhabitation privileges domestic servitude analytically. Because it encompasses and is realized through differences of gender, race/caste, class, and power in the home, we must consider how these differences and their attendant emotional valences dialectically produce and reproduce the relations of servitude. Examining domestic servitude enables us, following the work of Arlie Hochschild and Andrew Sayer, to address the complex emotional and moral textures of quotidian relationships of inequality. Thus,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804760721
• ISBN 13: 9780804760720
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 255
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland