29th September 29th, 2023
Presenter: Sayendri Panchadhyayi
Thresholds of Care: Ayah-intervened Ageing in Contemporary India
To tackle the puzzle of care deficit in old-age and facilitate well-being of the older population, an alternative form of care arrangement and care management is on the rise — ayah-centred care. In the contemporary period the term refers to paid care workers for childcare and eldercare in India. They are hired through ayah-care agencies as well as other informal routes. While home-based, family-centric, intergenerational care is deemed as time-tested and ideal for healthy ageing and positive ageing, this emerging ayah-centred care promises to carve an alternate path. Often pitched against the trained nurses, ayahs are stereotyped as untrained, incompetent and unskilled for elder care. Contrarily through their experiential, grounded and “lay-knowledge”, ayahs render deep insights on convalescent care, disability care, end-of-life care, dementia care and ambulatory care. Rooted in an understanding of well-being, sickness, cusp of bodily disintegration and disrupted selfhood, and healing drawn from their local-moral-cultural worlds, their insights are critical to navigate the threshold of care. Through this talk, I will situate the world of ayahs, the essence of their labour for an ageing population in urban India, and the strategies adopted by them to make sense of their labour.
Friday 20 October 2023
Diving: Ayisha’s Story: using fictional narrative as a contribution to understanding domestic power relationships from the ayah’s perspective within a white colonial family in British India between 1933-1947.
Presenter: Arne Sjögren
The project, Diving, is the overall title of a series of three interconnected film installations involving both live performance and film. Each of the three installations articulates, through fiction, differing viewpoints of the power relations generated within a colonial family at a particular moment (1933-47) of British colonial rule in India, and the aftermath beyond Indian independence. As a method of enquiry, this series of installations allows for different readings by the audience, and for different voices and experiences to be represented.
My presentation for the Ayah and Amah Research Network focuses on one of the three film installations, Ayisha’s Story. Ayisha’s Story presents a speculative fictional narrative, from the viewpoint of the ayah herself. Her story is set on the eve of Indian independence and is articulated from within the colonial family setup. In the form of a poetic monologue, Ayisha’s Story recounts the intimate relationship with her young English charge, Wendy, the domestic bonds that tie her to the colonial family, her treatment by the British family, her relationship with her own family, and her brother’s part in the independence movement.
Firstly, my presentation will reflect upon the research informing the scripting of this fictional poetic monologue. This research accessed the available literature relating to domestic servants in India between 1933-47. In addition, I have drawn upon other relevant sources such as British Raj childhood memoirs, literature, and film. I have inferred from these combined sources a speculative interpretation of, and an artistic form of, portraying the ayah’s viewpoint through the words and images of the poem.
Secondly, in a brief analysis of the poem, I will explore both the ambiguous position in which the ayah is situated relative to the power relationships within the colonial family, and also her own agency and resistance to the subaltern role she has been subjected to.
Lastly, I explore, from two strands, my own positionality. First, as the author of the speculative fiction that aims to “speak nearby” (Balsom, 2018) rather than “speak for” (Spivak, 1988; Alcoff, 1992) the subaltern. Secondly, as part of a third generation of a white colonial family, the question arises whether I am implicated, by association, through my own family involvement in the use and abuse of power in British rule in India. The latter question is briefly discussed using Michael Rothberg’s (2019) concept of the ‘implicated subject’, which provides a way of thinking beyond the binary opposition between victims and perpetrators and moves toward active political solidarity.
Friday 10 November 2023
Creating a New Working Woman: Amahs in Shanghai
Presenter: Charmaine H. Lam
In Republican Shanghai, Chinese amahs working in Anglo-American households became emblematic of the ‘other’: mobile across communities yet stark in their difference. Chinese and western communities alike grappled with the amah’s positionality amidst the city’s incomplete imperialism and cosmopolitanism through the newly imported concept of the amah. Within the British colonial tradition, the devoted amah reinforced racial hierarchies within empire. For Shanghai’s Chinese community, however, the amah intersected with the ‘modern woman,’ who sought economic opportunities outside traditional confines of the patriarchal family. This paper examines convergences and divergences between media portrayals of the amah in Chinese- and English-language material as the concept emerged and evolved throughout the Republican period. As western portrayals of the amah developed alongside Shanghai’s unique colonial condition, the Chinese community also refashioned the amah to highlight the agency of Chinese women in the face of encroaching western imperialism. At the same time, media portrayals grappled with evolving understandings of women’s labor to encompass the amah, as a domestic worker outside the patriarchal family structure. This paper widens our understanding of family and women’s labor in modern Chinese history within global forces of imperialism and modernity.
2nd of February 2024
Presenter: Fae Dussart
Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, ‘the domestic servant’ was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested. In her book In the Service of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) Fae Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it. This book explores the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was critical in the making of metropolitan and colonial British identities and relations of power.
2022 Seminar Series Programme
Violet Beri – An Ayah from the Hackney Ayahs Home (24 May)
Speaker: Sam Leigh
Chair: Farhanah Mamoojee
Sam Leigh’s great-grandfather on his mother's side married an ayah from the Hackney Ayahs home. Her name was Violet Beri. She came to London via sea and was listed on a ship passenger list as an ayah. His great-grandfather lived in Hackney and married Violet in the early 1920s but she died of tuberculosis seven years later. Sam is still in the process of researching and is happy to share anything he has found.
Concubinage, Race and Law in Early Colonial Bengal (16 September)
Speaker: Ruchika Sharma
Chair: Shalini Grover
Dr. Ruchika Sharma has been exploring themes like Interracial domesticities in early colonial times through legal archives, Nautch women in European colonial writing, Figure of Sakhi and Duti (friend or messenger) in Riti poetry & service culture, etc. She is the recipient of 'Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Book Writing Fellowship’ in 2019. She is also a Kathak dancer and performer, trained in both Jaipur and Lucknow Gharana (styles).'
Gendered Mobilities: Chinese Wives, Maidservants, and Sex Workers in British Malaya in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries (14 October)
Speaker: Sandy F Chang
Chair: Satya Shikha Chakraborty
This talk examines the migration of over one million Chinese women who travelled as wives, domestic servants, and sex workers to British Malaya between 1877 and 1940. Although historians have often argued that global Chinese was predominantly a masculine enterprise, I illuminate how women’s intimate labor networks served as linchpins that sustained the overseas migrant community and the regional economy. From makeshift brothels to polygamous households, migrant women engaged in adaptive labor strategies and intimate relations across the Malay Peninsula. I argue that Chinese women’s mobility across the South Seas was deeply consequential: it laid the foundations of early border control practices and left an indelible mark on Malaya’s social landscape. These women’s movement across national and colonial borders transformed traditional households, labor relations, and intimate practices.
2021 Seminar Series Programme:
Indian Ayahs in British Imperial Visual Culture (21 May 2021)
Speaker: Satyasikha (Shikha) Chakraborty (The College of New Jersey, USA)
Chair: Jo Stanley (Blaydes Maritime Centre, University of Hull & Liverpool John Moores University)
Shikha will be talking about the visual representation of Indian ayahs in British imperial family portraits, Company paintings, children’s fictions, postcards and photographs. In the process she will discuss how and why the de-sexualized and sentimentalized figure of the Indian ayah got visually constructed in British imperial imagination. Shikha is working on a book manuscript (The “Faithful” Indian Ayah: Gender, Race and Caste of British Empire’s Intimate Labor) based on her PhD dissertation on the social and cultural history of ayahs.
Locating Ayahs: From Representation to Agency? (25 June 2021)
Speaker: Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA)
Chair: Claire Lowrie (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Any subject of investigation from the past requires historicization. Some subjects, needless to say, are easier to document than the ones who are on the margins. Our topic of study, namely the ayahs and amahs, are one of those liminal figures who compel us to rethink the evidence we are using to recover and restore them as crucial historical actors. This brief presentation has a threefold objective: a) to identify the sources that help us locate the ayahs in history; b) to retrieve information on the social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds of the ayahs; c) to interrogate the connection between the varied representations (mainly visual) of the ayahs and their agency. Attendant to these queries are the questions of linkages between indentured and domestic labor; the connected histories of different European powers inhabiting the subcontinent; and more importantly, for our Australian Research Council funded project “Ayahs and Amahs,” the colonial history of the Indian diasporic labor population. The presentation seeks active support of the audience to fill in the necessary gaps in this preliminary research.
Mrs Browne and the Bengalis: An early transcolonial story of domestic service (30 July 2021)
Speaker: Victoria Haskins (University of Newcastle, Australia)
Chair: Florian Stadtler (University of Bristol, UK)
In 1816, the Lucknow-born Sydney merchant and landowner, William Browne, brought a group of Indian servants into the New South colony to work for him. Three years later the colonial governor Lachlan Macquarie would hold a magisterial inquiry into the alleged mistreatment of these workers, and 35 Indian workers were then sent back to India. This episode in Australian history is regarded as one of the very earliest of the fleeting and failed attempts to experiment with indentured Indian labour. In this paper, I draw upon the 1819 testimonies of Browne’s workers – later deployed as evidence for a British inquiry into slavery under the East India Company – to focus on the key role played by Browne’s wife Sophia. Approaching the story from the perspective of women’s labour illuminates the often overlooked importance of carework in colonialism. By considering the fraught nature of the relationships between women within the Browne household, we can also see how expectations of mistress and servant were simultaneously transported and transformed in the journey from the British Raj to the Australian colonies.
This paper, to be delivered (pre-recorded) at ICAS12 Kyoto 2021, is part of an ARC Discovery project, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, led by Victoria Haskins (Newcastle), with Claire Lowrie (Wollongong) and Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn CUNY).
Ayahs, Inter-Racial Servitude and the Christian Dominance: Historical Transitions and Contemporary Caregiving in India (3 September 2021)
Speaker: Shalini Grover (London School of Economics, UK)
Chair: Victoria Haskins (University of Newcastle, Australia)
The paper is built around the opening chapter of my forthcoming book (work-in-progress) that foregrounds gendered caregiving transitions from the colonial past to the globalized present. In this seminar, I will draw on the history of female domestic workers reproductive labour as ayahs and caregivers in the colonial era. I will then highlight current gaps, primarily how the racialized labour of female domestic workers is remiss for globalized India. Thus my key question is, has the gendering and racializing of domestic service changed over time? The gender-race-class historiography and the connections I attempt to make across time-zones are by no means exhaustive. More so, and in connection with the above, I will set out to explore the theme of inter-racial servitude through the contemporary social spaces of the Church. The ‘Christian dominance’ represents the Tamil domestic worker community, Christian Euro-American employers and Christian transnational alliances. I will argue that female domestic workers economic, religious and spiritual sociality as regular Churchgoers, cultivates the Church’s role in inter-racial servitude.
Domesticity, Agency and the pitfalls of representations - Ayahs in literature and visual culture (8 October 2021)
Speaker: Florian Stadtler (University of Bristol, UK)
Chair: Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA)
This paper discusses how ayahs have been represented in literature and art to further examine how particular persistent cultural tropes about these domestic workers were perpetuated or challenged. The paper will consider examples from both the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, though mainly focused on travelling ayahs, will also consider non-travelling ayahs as well. In particular, it will focus on Tanika Gupta’s play The Empress to analyse different modalities of representation that challenge some received notions associated with ayahs, especially pertaining to their perceived ‘docility’. It will also consider how the play works with key source materials and the historical record to bring the story of ayahs to life. Important to these considerations, in the absence of direct testimony from ayahs themselves, is how these texts develop the societal position of the ayah, negotiate questions of agency, and make, albeit in fictional form, their voices resonate.
The Amahs of the SS Marama: Chinese nursemaids travelling from the Straits Settlements to Britain in the aftermath of the First World War (12 November 2021)
Speaker: Claire Lowrie (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Chair: Charmaine Lam
On the 9th of May 1919, eighteen Chinese amahs docked at the Port of London following a month-long journey from Singapore. They travelled aboard the SS Marama, a vessel of the New
Zealand Union Steam Ship Company. During the war, the Marama had been converted into a hospital ship fitted out to treat and transport injured troops. In its voyage from Singapore, however, there were few soldiers onboard. Instead, the passenger list consisted of hundreds of British women and children desperate to return home from Malaya now that it was deemed safe to do so. The Chinese amahs onboard the Marama were employed by well-to-do British families to care for infants and children during the long voyage.
In recent years there has been growing academic and popular interest in the travelling Indian ayahs (nursemaids) that traversed the route between India and Britain in the company of imperial families. The presence of Chinese amahs in Britain has also been acknowledged. However, there has been no detailed analysis of these women’s working lives and experiences. This paper represents a first step towards addressing that gap, concentrating on amahs that travelled from the Straits Settlements to Britain in the years following the First World War.
This paper is part of an ARC Discovery project, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, led by Victoria Haskins (Newcastle), with Claire Lowrie (Wollongong) and Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn CUNY).