No one knows how many women work in domestic service in India. Official figures suggest 5 million. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) assesses the number at 40 million and the International Labour Office reckons it is somewhere between 20 and 80 million. Some observers believe even this higher limit is an underestimate; if true, this would indicate that up to ten per cent of the female population over the age of 12 are employed in domestic service. There has never been a systematic count, although it is the second largest employer of women after agricultural labour.
Invisible, unregulated, poorly paid, even a definition of domestic servant proves elusive and contradictory. The term ‘maidservant’ – widely used in India – is an unhappy one: the word ‘maid’ implies a girl at puberty; and although an estimated twenty per cent of servants in India are children, the expression ‘maid’ infantilises those it describes. It implies both virginity and vulnerability; which, combined with her subordinate position, make her potential prey to males in the neighbourhood and in the households where she works. When the ‘maidservant’ lives with the family, in a small room, on a rooftop, sometimes on a mat in the kitchen, it is not uncommon for wives to connive at their husbands’ relationships with her, since this contains marital straying in-house, as it were, and does not risk external scandals.
This is why it is even more diminishing to call an older women ‘maidservant’. A recent phenomenon in Indian cities has been the migration of elderly parents to join their children when they are no longer able to perform agricultural labour in the village. A majority of these survivors are women, who must work to contribute to family income. Many, sometimes sick and infirm, wash utensils and swab floors and generally make life easier for the already privileged.
Those who benefit from domestic labour are liable to delusion. First of all, they tell themselves they are charitably ‘giving’ work to women who would otherwise be without an income. Many like to think of themselves as benefactors of those they employ, and pass on to them clothing and food from the family. Some pride themselves that they are ‘friends’ of the maidservant, taking an interest in her children, advising her how to deal with a husband who drinks, sometimes helping out with medical or educational costs. It is not unusual for a woman to say of her maid ‘She is like a daughter to me’; it is rare to hear a maidservant describe her employer as a mother.
The philanthropic view of domestic service is misplaced. Employers, however generous – and many are – remain employers. Many maidservants have children of their own, but are summoned from their duty towards them by the superior money-power of those who can compel them to give priority to the minding of their children. When they depart each morning for their place of labour, women often express anxiety about the children they must leave at home to fend for themselves, look after the house, mind younger siblings and take responsibility for household chores. Some women take their older girls to work with them, since they fear leaving them at home in slum settlements exposes them to the restless male desire which, a universal predator, stalks the community.
When she comes home after a day’s work, in perhaps five or six houses, her own work – scarcely less onerous because she lives in a dirty or hazardous environment – is still waiting for her. It is debatable whether the financial reward women receive for domestic service outweighs the risk and damage to their own children through necessary neglect; a large number of children who do not attend school are the children of domestic workers.
Are the energies of women working in this way stolen from those they love, or are they contributing to their well-being by the money they receive?
This is not an easy question; but it is certain is that the greater beneficiaries are the employers, since their own tasks are made easier by hands that open doors, fetch and carry, clean, swab floors, chop vegetables, clean vessels, supervise children. You do not have to look far to find examples of abuse, ill-treatment and overwork. The children of one family I knew, well versed before the age of 10 in the nature of power relations, would humiliate the woman paid to care for them, ordering her to bring their toys, pick up things they had dropped, and ‘play’ with them – games in which her dignity was routinely assailed.
There are, of course, many examples of women without family dependants, older women whose children have grown up, widows or deserted wives, who survive by means of working in the homes of those who pay them, and who are treated with kindness and consideration. But as soon as employers of maids get together, it is not long before talk turns to their dependability or honesty; and suspicion lurks in almost every mind. Although a majority of householders do not padlock the fridge or mark the bottles of condiments to make sure they are not being robbed, such practices do occur. A few newspaper stories turn into moral panic – a servant (usually male) has cut the throat of his mistress and decamped with jewellery and other valuables. Women regularly say they prefer to employ ‘unspoilt’ girls from Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, since these have not been ‘contaminated’ by city ways. There is always an edge of distrust, an unbridgeable gap between those who have the means to pay and the dependants who work for them.
India is reminiscent of Victorian London in this respect, where domestic service was by far the greatest single employer of poor women. There, too, it was regarded as inevitable that the poor would always be available to service the rich; although this proved not to be the case. The employment of servants to do things which able-bodied and robust young adults can quite easily do for themselves is now seen by many in the same light as child labour – once also universal in Britain – as an affront to dignity and humanity.
Is this large-scale and largely unquestioned exploitation of poor women just a stage in the development of India; or is it an expression in the modern world of a mindset of power that regards social inferiors as a different order of human being? This question will no doubt bring its own answer in due course. But it haunts the ill-distributed wealth of the ‘new’ India; and it is scarcely credible that the frieze of shabby servitude, which trudges each evening from fortified villa to a home in the slums will continue, submissive and unprotesting, for ever.
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Jeremy Seabrook is an author and journalist specialising in social, environmental and development issues. His latest book is People Without History
