The Ayah and Amah International Research Network

• Shalini Grover
  Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute (III), London School of Economics (LSE), UK.
  (Previous, Associate Professor in Anthropology, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi)
• Niti Acharya
  Manager of Hackney Museum London and PhD candidate at the University of Lincoln, UK.
• Swapna M. Banerjee
  Professor of History, Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY), USA.
• Satyasikha Chakraborty
  Assistant Professor of History, The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), USA.
• Srishti Guha
  PhD Candidate, University of Newcastle, Australia.
• Victoria K Haskins
  Professor of History, University of Newcastle, Australia.
• Samia Khatun
  Senior Lecturer, Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK.
• Charmaine Lam
  Research Assistant, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants of Australia and Britain, Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Australia and the USA.
• Claire Lowrie
  Senior Lecturer in History, University of Wollongong, Australia.
• Farhanah Mamoojee
  Feminist Activist engaged in a project to recognise the Ayahs’ Home in Hackney with a blue plaque and Client Strategist at Sotheby’s, UK.
• Samita Sen
  Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge.
• Nitin Sinha
  Research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies), Berlin, Germany.
• Florian Stadler
  Senior Lecturer in Literature and Migration, University of Bristol, UK.
• Jo Stanley
  Writer & Consultant on maritime diversity. Research Fellow, at Blaydes Maritime Centre, University of Hull, UK.
• Rozina Visram
  M Litt Edinburgh University; BA Hons. History, London; Dip. Ed., Makerere
• Tanmay Kulshrestha
  PhD Candidate in History at the University of Leeds

More information about our members is available here.

A year in the life of a late 19th-century Indian ayah
2025

Speaker: Derek Turner

Derek Turner has been involved with history as student, researcher, teacher, school inspector and author. His maternal grandmother worked in India as a medical missionary. His recent research includes little-known women: his paternal grandmother, pioneering professional head gardener and her female contemporaries, and Mabel Barltrop, founder of the Panacean Society, a millenarian, mainly female religious group in Bedford, England.

The talk is based on a general knowledge of British India derived from ancestors who lived and worked there, on the records of the Church Mission Society and on the diary kept by Lucy Summerhayes during 1896 of her life in the Punjab as a medical missionary. The talk briefly describes how Lucy’s early life made her in a sense both stateless and classless. It explains why the driving forces in her life compassion and conversion were and how these affected her unusual relationships with her ayah and other young women in her household. It recounts this relationship throughout the year, both routine and exceptional, mainly in the words of the diary, giving a glimpse of the trials and tribulations of both the ayah and her employer, not least when they were travelling.

In the Service of Empire
2 February 2024

Speaker: 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.

Thresholds of Care: Ayah-intervened Ageing in Contemporary India
29 September, 2023

Presenter: Sayendri Panchadhyayi

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.

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.
Friday 20 October 2023

Speaker: 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.

Creating a New Working Woman: Amahs in Shanghai
Friday 10 November 2023

Speaker: 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.

Violet Beri – An Ayah from the Hackney Ayahs Home
24 May 2022

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 2022

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 2022

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.

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).

Public Talks

• Niti Achary, Satyasikha Chakraborty, Claire Lowrie, Aisha Shukat-Khawaja and Jo Stanley - Ayahs and Amahs: Following Asian nannies around the world, Public talk for Royal Museums Greenwich, 21 June 2022.Get more information here.
• Farhanah Mamoojee, Niti Achary, Shalini Grover, Rozina Visram, Florain Stadler, Claire Lowrie and Jo Stanley: The English Heritage honoured the Ayah’s Home at 26 King Edward’s Road with a Blue Plaque on July 16th 2022.For our talks and contributions to this event see our Youtube videoand Facebook video.
  The Ayahs Home is known to have housed hundreds of destitute ayahs and amah’s, especially Indian and Chinese women who made voyages to the colonies from 1900-1942. The event was marked by a Flag inauguration with Meera Syal (independent filmmaker) and Anita Anand (BBC journalist) and had a large public turnout.The event was widely covered in by the international press (BBC, BACSA, First Post, Times of India)
• Jo Stanley, 'Anything like Lascars? Race, Gender, and Ayahs as working passengers, 1850-1950'. Webinar at Blaydes Maritime Centre, University of Hull on 16 November 2021.
• Jo Stanley, Female, proud- and precarious: Asian ayahs voyaging 1850-1950. Black History Month talk, in Maritime UK’s Ethnicity in Maritime Network on YouTube, 4 October 2021.

Interviews

• Swapna Banerjee and Victoria Haskins, Ayahs and Amahs, Interviewed by Jonathan Green for Late Night Live, ABC Radio National, 16 September 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/ayahs-and-amahs/13543860

Exhibitions

• Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Journeys - launched 8 September 2022 and ran until 8 June 2023. Research by the team: Victoria Haskins, Claire Lowrie, Swapna Banerjee, Srishti Guha and Charmaine Lam, with digital curator Lauren Samuelsson.

Prizes and Grant Awards

• The Edward Cameron Dimock Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities was awarded to Satya Shikha Chakraborty for Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India
• The Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Journeys exhibition recently won the 2022 Addi Road Multicultural History Award (NSW History Council).
• Florian Stadtler (Co-I, Bristol), Sumita Mukherjee (PI, Bristol), and Rehana Ahmed (Co-I, Queen Mary University of London) have secured a major AHRC standard grant for the project, ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1830 to the present’. In partnership with the British Library, ‘Remaking Britain’ will build a new digital and educational resource charting South Asian networks and connections across the UK. It will link archival resources, oral histories and research findings in a new publicly accessible database. Positioned at the intersection of the digital humanities, history and literary studies, ‘Remaking Britain’ will intervene in current debates about migration, diaspora and belonging and highlight the complexities of the lesser-known long intersecting migration histories of South Asian settlement in Britain. The project will run from January 2023 to September 2025.

Social Media

• Ayah's Home Instagram Account, Project by Farhanah Mamoojee for the Ayahs’ Home, Hackney - shortlisted for a Blue Plaque

Blogs

• Claire Lowrie, The Amahs of the SS Marama: Using shipping records to recover the experiences of Chinese amahs, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 10 December 2022https://ayahsandamahs.com/2022/12/10/the-amahs-of-the-ss-marama-using-shipping-records-to-recover-the-experiences-of-chinese-amahs/
• Victoria Haskins, The Ayahs’ and Amahs’ Home: A History – Part I, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 21 April 2022 https://ayahsandamahs.com/2022/04/21/the-ayahs-and-amahs-home-a-history/
• Victoria Haskins, The Ayahs’ and Amahs’ Home: A History – Part II, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 28 April 2022 https://ayahsandamahs.com/2022/04/28/the-ayahs-and-amahs-home-a-history-2/
• Jo Stanley, Facing fatal Infection at Xmas: the ayah on the threatened SS Nubia, Gender and the Sea,. 23 December 2021 https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2021/12/facing-fatal-infection-at-xmas-ayah-on.html
• Jo Stanley, Portuguese Ayahs: Early explorers of baby-minding sort, Gender and the Sea, 14 November 2021. https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2021/11/portuguese-ayahs-early-explorers-of.html
• Swapna Banerjee, ‘She Travelled: The Portrait of Joanna de Silva, the Indian Ayah at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 11 November 2021. https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/11/11/she-travelled-the-portrait-of-joanna-de-silva-the-indian-ayah-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-new-york/
• Avantika Binani and Claire Lowrie, ‘"For Nannie"? The controversial case of a Sinhalese "amah" in white Australia’, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 19 October 2021.https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/10/19/for-nannie-the-controversial-case-of-a-sinhalese-amah-in-white-australia/
• Jo Stanley, First ayah rescued from shipwreck, 1832. Gender and the sea. 9 August 2021.
• Victoria Haskins, ‘Thomassee: The first Australian ayah, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945’, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 6 August 2021.https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/08/06/thomassee-the-first-australian-ayah/
• Jo Stanley, Pioneering Indian ayahs afloat (South Asian Heritage Month). Gender and the sea, 11 July 2021.
• Andrew Hillier, ‘A Japanese Amah, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945’, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 18 June 2021. https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/06/18/a-japanese-amah/
• Jo Stanley, Wot dunnit? BAME nursemaid’s puzzling death, Suez Canal 1909. Gender and the sea, 16 May 2021.
• Claire Lowrie, ‘Chinese Amahs in Britain and Australia, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945’, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 14 May 2021.https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/05/14/locating-chinese-amahs-in-britain-and-australia/
• Swapna Banerjee, ‘Locating Ayahs in Transit: A Passage to Australia and other Parts of the World, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945’, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 14 April 2021.https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/04/14/locating-ayahs-in-transit-a-passage-to-australia-and-other-parts-of-the-world/
• Claire Lowrie, ‘Travelling Servants and Moving Images: A Photographic History of Chinese Domestic Workers’, Visualising China: Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol, 11 March 2021.https://visualisingchina.net/blog/2021/03/11/guest-blog-claire-lowrie-on-travelling-servants-and-moving-images-a-photographic-history-of-chinese-domestic-workers/
• Jo Stanley, Chinese women working with UK ships in 20C. Gender and the sea, 10 July 2019.
• Victoria Haskins, ‘Her Devoted Ayah’, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945, Blog funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 4 March 2021.https://ayahsandamahs.com/2021/03/04/her-devoted-ayah/
• Rozina Visram and Florian Stadtler, ‘A Home for the Ayahs: From India to Britain and Back Again’, Our Migration Story, 2016https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/a-home-for-the-ayahs-
• Jo Stanley, Wet nursing on ships: sisterly support and a necessary business. Gender and the sea, 14 Aug 2015.
• Jo Stanley, Ayahs working on 19C seas. Gender and the sea, 27 January 2011.
• Jo Stanley, Black History Month: Ayahs at Sea, Women’s History Network, 9 October 2011.

Articles and Book Chapters

• Banerjee, Swapna. 2022. ‘Ayahs in British India’, Digital Encyclopaedia of European History, March 11. <https://ehne.fr/en/node/21772> ( March 16 2022)
• Chakraborty, Satya Shikha and Grover, Shalini. 2022. Care-Work for Colonial and Contemporary White Families in India: Racialized Romanticization of the Ayah. Journal of Cultural Dynamics. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09213740221144045
• Chakraborty, Satyasikha, "From Bibis to Ayahs: Sexual Labour, Domestic Labour, and the Moral Politics of Empire", in Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma (eds.) Servants' Pasts: Late-Eighteenth to Twentieth-Century South Asia, Vol. 2, (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2019), pp. 41 - 72 https://d-nb.info/1212971108/34
• Chakraborty, Satyasikha, ‘"Nurses of Our Ocean Highways": The Precarious Metropolitan Lives of Colonial South Asian Ayahs’, Journal of Women’s History, 32: 2, 2020, pp. 37-64. DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2020.0019
• Chakraborty, Satyasikha, ‘Mammies, Ayahs, Baboes.’ Visual Culture & Gender 13, 2018, pp 17-31. http://www.vcg.emitto.net/index.php/vcg/article/view/112/114
• Grover, Shalini. 2022. Placement Agencies for Care-Domestic Labour: Everyday Mediation, Civilizing Missions, Regimes of Punishment and Training in Globalized India. Modern Asian Studies: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X21000585
• Grover, Shalini and Sanna Schliewe. 2019. Trailing Spouses in India. In, Petra Matijevic and Alena Ledenva (Editors)Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Vol 111. London: University College Press (UCL Press).https://www.in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Trailing_spouses_(India)
• Grover, Shalini. 2019. Streamlining Paid Domestic Labour in Postcolonial India: The New Female All-Rounder in Master-Servant Expatriate Relationships. In, Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma (Editors) Servants Past, Late-Eighteenth to Twentieth Century South Asia Volume 11. Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
• Grover, Shalini. 2019. English-speaking and Educated Female Domestic Workers in Contemporary India: New Managerial Roles, Social Mobility and Persistent Inequality. Journal of South Asian Development (JSAD). 13 (2): 186-209.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0973174118788008(Sage)
• Grover, Shalini, Thomas Chambers, Patricia, Jeffery (Editors). 2019. Introduction to the Special Issue: Portraits of Women’s Paid Domestic-Care Labour: Ethnographic Studies from Globalizing India. Journal of South Asian Development (JSAD). 13 (2): 1-18.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0973174118793782(Sage)
• Grover, Shalini. 2017. Revisiting the Devyani Khobragade Controversy: The Value of Domestic Labour in the Global South. In ‘Voices’ from Asian Feminist Activism, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies (AJWS). 23 (1): 121-128.http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/12259276.2017.1279892(Taylor and Francis)
• Haskins, Victoria. ‘Mrs Browne and the Bengalis: An Early Transcolonial Story of Domestic Service, 1816-1821.’ In Asian Studies: The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12) June 2022, Volume 1. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022: 216-224, https://doi.org/10.5117/9789048557820/ICAS.2022.022
• Haskins, Victoria, ‘Her Old Ayah’. In Responding to the West. ed. H. Hagerdal, 2009, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 103-115. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/35307
• Haskins, Victoria and Sen, Samita. 2022. Introduction: Regulation and Domestic Service in Colonial Histories.https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B8A0F115F2112987A1A53B3CCF52F884/S0020859022000074a.pdf/div-class-title-introduction-regulation-and-domestic-service-in-colonial-histories-div.pdf
• Stadtler, Florain, ‘Afterword’ in South Asians and the shaping of Britain, 1870-1950 A Sourcebook edited by Ruvani Ranasinha with R Ahmed, S. Mukerjee and F. Stadtler (Manchester University Press 2012)Lascars: (by Stadtler, Florain and Visram, Rozina) https://encyclopaedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/lascar
  www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/the-lascars-britains-colonial-era-sailors
• Stanley, Jo, ‘Invisible Hands: ayahs’ voyages,’ History Today, January 2022, 72 (1),
  
  https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/invisible-hands
• Visram, Rosina, ‘History of Asians in Britain 1600-1950’ in Migrant Britain Histories and Historiographies: Essays in Honour of Colin Holmes Edited by Jennifer Craig-Norton, Christhard Hoffmann and Tony Kushner (Routledge, 2018)

Books

• Banerjee M, Swapna recently published her monograph Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2022). This book breaks new ground by weaving stories of fathers and children into the history of gender, family, and nation in colonial India. Focusing on the reformist Bengali Hindu and Brahmo communities, the author contends that fatherhood assumed new meaning and significance in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India. During this time of social and political change, fathers extended their roles beyond breadwinning to take an active part in rearing their children. Utilizing pedagogic literature, scientific journals, autobiographies, correspondences, and published essays, Fathers in a Motherland documents the different ways the authority and power of the father was invoked and constituted both metaphorically and in everyday experiences. Exploring specific moments when educated men, as biological fathers, literary activists, and educators, assumed guardianship and became crucial agents of change, Banerjee interrogates the connections between fatherhood and masculinity. The last chapter of the book moves beyond Bengal and draws on the lives of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to provide a broader salience to its argument. Reclaiming two missing links in Indian history—fathers and children—the book argues that these biological and imaginary "fathers" assumed the moral guardianship of an incipient nation and rested their hopes and dreams on the future generation. See the book here
• Banerjee also co-edited a volume with Padma Anagol and Paula Banerjee, Mapping Women’s History: Recovery, Resistance and Activism in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Stree-Samya, 2022). This volume of essays by noted scholars of India and the US honors Professor Barbara Ramusack (Charles Taft Professor Emerita, University of Cincinnati) and Geraldine Forbes (Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita, State University of New York, Oswego), who charted the field of Indian women’s history for a global audience and acted as exemplary mentors to their students. Ramusack and Forbes launched their research and made field trips to India in the late 1960s, and the editors and contributors look at the forgotten histories of those global connections. Thus they restore lost knowledge of international networks and alliances along with struggles of this generation of women scholars and activists from both hemispheres. The work of scholars and their peers from UK, USA, and India who have been influenced and motivated by Ramusack and Forbes are presented here.In four parts: I Recovery and Reminiscences; II Feminism, Agency, and Resistance; III Activism; and IV Reflections, the book engages South Asian feminism and contributes to sociology, history, psychology, law, political science and women’s and gender studies. By historicizing the emergence of Indian women’s history, especially in the US academia, the volume breaks new ground. See the book here
• Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India Author: Satya Shikha Chakraborty 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.
• Visram, Rozina updated her school book — The History of the Asian Community in Britain -- bringing it to the present at the request of the publishers, Wayland. It came out in 2021.
• Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. Pluto Press, 2002.
• Visram, Rozina, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The story of Indians in Britain 1700-1947. Pluto Press, 1986.