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CHAIRPERSON

Prof Denise L. Spitzer, University of Ottawa, Canada, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In existing histories of domestic service and the British Empire, the story of traveling Indian Ayahs between Britain and India remains absent. With the expansion of the British Empire, which led increased frequency of ‘colonial families’ traveling between the colonies and the metropole, Indian ayahs became crucial in facilitating these travels. The ayahs became mobile servants of a ‘mobile Empire’, servicing the European families on high seas; some even settled in Britain taking up jobs of child nurses or domestic servants. This paper begins by examining how Indian ayahs became essential towards assuring ‘mobility’ of colonial families across the Empire, which in turn also contributed towards expanding the Empire. Next, drawing case studies from colonial archives of Britain and India, this study explores how Indian ayahs in Britain negotiated their labour rights within the intimate spaces of colonial families and the larger context of the Empire. In doing so, it investigates how Indian ayahs in Britain influenced and sometimes challenged the ‘workplace’ culture, both at the societal level and at the more intimate level of domestic space of colonial families, and the dialogues this mode of ‘native’ female labour migration created within the Empire. The paper finally concludes by demonstrating the shortcomings of viewing the master-servant relationships and white-black racial paradigms from a functionalist perspective alone.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Arunima Datta is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, NUS and simultaneously lectures at the South Asian Studies program at NUS. Before moving to Singapore, she was a lecturer in Calcutta University for two years after which she joined NUS for her PhD in 2010, for which she had been awarded the Presidential Research Fellowship for her outstanding research progress. She has also won the Graduate Student Teaching Award for her teaching & tutoring assignments during her PhD at NUS. During her research for her dissertation, she has held visiting fellowships at the Asiatic Society of Kolkata, India and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, UK. Currently, she also serves as an Assistant Editor of the Journal of Malaysian Branch of Royal Asiatic Society. She has published several articles related to her dissertation, “Life beyond Dependency and Victimhood: Indian Coolie Women on Rubber Estates of Colonial Malaya (1900-1945)”, most recently in Women’s History Review, 2016.

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