Satya Shikha Chakraborty, "Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

About this episode

The episode discusses the cultural and social history of ayahs in British India, focusing on their roles in domestic labor and the implications of race and gender.

Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India (Cambridge UP, 2025) 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.Satya Shikha Chakraborty is an Associate…

People in this episode

Guest: Satya Shikha Chakraborty

Topics covered

• colonial history
• race and caste
• gender studies
• domestic labor
• South Asia
• British Empire

Keywords

• ayahs
• colonialism
• domestic intimacy
• exploitation
• moral labor
• cultural history
• British imperialism
• care labor

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The College of New Jersey, Columbia University

Books & works: Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India

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