DOS

A glimpse into the past of domestic service in India Domestic service was an important category of labour and social relationships in early modern and colonial India, yet it has been relatively neglected in research. We spoke to Dr Nitin Sinha, Dr Nitin Varma, Sourav Kumar Mahanta and Vidhya Raveendranathan about the work of the DOS project in investigating the master-servant relationship historically, and clarifying its importance for wider social and labour histories.

Behind the curtain of domestic service in India

Lady Impey supervising her household, Calcutta, 1777-83.

Domestic service is a ubiquitous aspect of India’s historical past, yet this theme has attracted very little research attention.

Researchers in the DOS project are taking a new and fresh look at this topic, focusing on the period between the 18th and 20th centuries, approximately the time of British colonial rule in India. “We wanted to start the project from this time to try and build on the work that had been done on earlier and later periods,” says Dr Nitin Sinha, the project’s Principal Investigator. While the project is focusing on this particular period, Dr Sinha says it is also important to be aware of the preceding events and trends that led up to it. “In the project we have been in contact with scholars who worked on the early modern period, from the 16th to the 18th century, and we have solicited some contributions and papers from that period, which will appear in our published edited volumes and special journal issues in the near future,” he outlines.

There are examples of Indian households in the 15th and 16th centuries keeping domestic servants, many of whom served in the households of Hindu merchants, Mughal nobility, and a variety of other households, both the privileged and those of lesser means. What was new in the colonial context was that the occupational fluidity and mobility that servants had enjoyed in the pre-colonial period gradually petered out, to be replaced by a more formalised relationship. From the mid-18th century, a series of regulations were passed which defined the relationship between the master and servant as a contractual relationship. This is evident in work on Bengal presidency done by Dr Sinha and his colleague Dr Nitin Varma, and also research on Madras by Vidhya Raveendranathan, a PhD student who is also working on the project. The series of regulations – some of which failed, some of which were successful, and some of which had long-lasting unintended effects on the nature of domesticity, property and criminality – comprised the essence of masterservant laws as they operated in the colony.

Researchers are now building on these foundations to look in greater depth at domestic service in India, which is central to wider social, cultural and labour history. Labour history in India has largely centred on the development of industry and productive labour, while in comparison domestic service has been seen as relatively incidental and marginal, an imbalance that Dr Sinha and his colleagues aim to address.

“Our project is trying to address that gap,” he says. Researchers are working with a range of textual and visual material, including state departmental records, court records, censuses, surveys, private papers, diaries, memoirs, advice manuals, vernacular literature, paintings and photographs, through which they aim to build a deeper picture of domestic service at this time.

“For instance, we have looked at court cases and proceedings, which is challenging as its structure can be highly routinised; servants’ testimonies as witnesses can become formulaic. They are useful but they demand cautious treatment as

they do not readily represent the ‘authentic’ voice of the subordinate,” outlines Dr Sinha.

Master-servant relationship The relational nature of the term ‘servant’ is itself a topic of great interest in the project, as while it implies subservience to the master or mistress of the household, servitude itself can take different forms. Domestic service, servitude and forms of domestic slavery overlapped. With female servants and slaves, the question of reproductive labour and kin-making became crucial. While fully aware of the slave-servant overlap, the project argues that the expansion in domestic service was related to the firmer contractual basis of the master-servant relationship.

This, in turn, was premised upon – and reflected the expansion in – the domestic labour market itself. The project addresses some crucial questions: “How did masters and mistresses command servants beyond the institutional framework of law? What role did the use of language, gestures and speech play in the making of this relationship?

Did objects such as liveries and badges matter?

How could commodities such as wine and silver cutlery, which were often allegedly stolen by servants, help us in knowing the everyday relation between masters and servants? What forms of ‘complicity’ can one detect between private control exercised by masters and the state’s formal institutions of governing domestic labour,

... that’s why, stick.

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crime and market? What were the forms of overt and everyday resistance by the servants?” asks Dr Sinha. “We can look more deeply into this when we aggregate different sources, and assess how it changes over time.”

There may have been a wide variety of roles within a household, maybe in the stables or the kitchen for example, depending on the size of the household and the outlook of the master or mistress. Evidence suggests that during the early part of the 19th century, Europeans in India had established a hierarchy among servants, in part because of the size of the domestic staff. “It was thought that a European gentleman’s household should have around 28-30 servants – out of which 7 or 8 would be seen as upper grade servants, and the rest as lower-grade servants,” says Dr Varma. With a staff of this size, it was necessary to delegate responsibility to one person. For instance, for all the bearers in the household there would be a ‘head bearer’. “We can see that one person was responsible and was put in charge of a task,” says Dr Sinha. “The working of colonialism required the simplification of relationships.”

This extended to recruitment, as while the master may have selected one or two servants, those people were then themselves responsible for hiring the rest of the staff. They were also responsible for the performance of those servants. Violence was often used to exert discipline. “Punishment was not just verbal, there are instances of brutal violence, almost at the everyday scale,” says Dr Sinha. A master would not necessarily send an erring servant to court or ask the authorities to investigate, but rather

A group of Madras servants, 1870.

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DOS Domestic Servants in Colonial South Asia

Project Objectives

A study of domestic service and servant opens up the intimate history of social relationships and explains the long history of ‘legally constituted but formally absent’ history of regulation of domestic work, which is a matter of global concern in present times.

Master-servant relationship lay at the heart of the making of social identities, hierarchies, household relationships and the processes of state formation.

Project Funding

ERC funded three year project (2015-18).

Project Partners

• Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin • IGK, re:work, Humboldt University, Berlin

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Dr Nitin Sinha Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Centre for Modern Oriental Studies Berlin T: +49-(0)30-80307-113 E:nitin.sinha@zmo.de W: https://servantspasts.wordpress.com/ Dr Nitin Sinha

Dr Nitin Varma

order other members of staff to lash them. “This was very common. A lot of the violence wouldn’t even be reported in the courts – it was only if the person was seriously injured that it would become a judicial matter,” outlines Dr Varma. “Only the more brutal acts of violence are documented in court records. We work primarily through documents that are available in the archive, so we tend to see the more extreme examples.”

The nature of the master-servant relationship began to change over the latter part of the period, as cases of violence towards servants attracted increasing attention, while social expectations and behaviour also shifted in a rapidly changing political economy. The distinction between upper and lower grade servants started disappearing around the late 19th century with the consolidation of the identity of domestic servants, a time when Dr Varma says a new dynamic emerged. “The upper grade servants were now seen more as professional service providers, while the lower grade servants became the archetypal domestic servant. This was a distinct period of consolidation of ideas and practices attached to meniality, stigma, purity and work in the figure of the domestic servant. This marked the emergence of the category of servants as social marginals,” he says. Class distinctions, and caste identity, are important considerations in

European system of classification of occupation is suitable for the Indian context. Here, one line of dissenting opinion which emerged was that the adoption of the English system – the Dr Farr method – led to the under-enumeration/negation of women’s work.”

Rewriting social and labour history The initial goal in research is to build a comprehensive account of the different practices that defined and mediated the relationship between masters and servants, which will open up new insights into India’s social and labour history.

The master-servant relationship can serve as a template to understand some of the ambivalences and tensions that shaped the making of the colonial empire in South Asia, believes Raveendranathan. “The focus in the project has been on unearthing the quotidian aspects of law making and the servant’s role in shaping masterservant laws. Furthermore, it has also opened up the master-servant relationship, to talk not merely about domestic service, but also a wide range of labour relations that existed in colonial India,” she outlines. “Many of the insights of the project can be used to make inferences about a set of anxieties that shaped the process of colonialism.”

A study of domestic

Dr Nitin Sinha is a Senior Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) in Berlin. He gained his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2007 and has since held teaching and research positions at institutions in both Germany and the UK. Dr Nitin Varma is a Senior Research Fellow at IGK, re:work, Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied history at the University of Delhi and JNU (Delhi) and later received his doctorate degree from Humboldt University in 2011.

Project Members Heena Ansari, (January-June 2017).

Sourav Mahanta, (October 2017-July 2018).

Vidhya Raveendranathan, (November 2017July 2018).

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service and servants opens up the intimate history of social relationships and explains the long history of ‘legally constituted but formally absent’ history of regulation of domestic work, which is a matter of global concern in present times. this respect. “By the late 19th century, meniality became a function of caste to a greater degree and the work of some servants associated with ritually impure and dirty work (sweepers, for instance) became further stigmatised and devalued”, explains Dr Varma. In turn, stigma heavily defined domestic work itself. The devaluation of paid domestic work was also occasioned by other processes of feminisation and casualization, to a point where the part-time female domestic servant was the most representative example of domestic service by the end of the 20th century.

There are also other important sources of insights into the lives and experiences of servants during this period, including census records. As a research assistant on the project, Sourav Kumar Mahanta spent some time examining census records, and found files specifically on the classification system for different occupations. “These files give us details about internal debates and differences of opinion between the Census Commissioner and provincial census superintendents”, he outlines.

“One interesting aspect of these debates was the extent to which the adoption of the English/

Further, the project aims to steer away from the narrow focus of legally-inflected labour history and instead shift focus towards the domain of the everyday in which objects and materials (coats, badges and liveries), commodities and things (wine and arrack), and language and command were equally important.

A servant was valued as a marker of class status, but also feared for their subversive potential as they they occupied the private and intimate domains of the household, so the nature of the master-servant relationship can to some extent be seen as indicative of wider trends. This was the case not just in India, but other countries in the British Empire, a topic that the project will explore through a series of publications based upon individual research and collaborative initiatives. “We are trying to go beyond our regional focus on India, and have put forward a joint publication proposal on the theme of regulating domestic service across the British Empire. So we are in touch with scholars working on Hong Kong, South Africa, and Australia, while we are working on India,” he outlines.

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