Who is (not) a servant, anyway? : domestic servants and service in early colonial India
| Statement of responsibility: | Nitin Sinha |
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| Published in: | Modern Asian studies. - Cambridge [u.a.] : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967. - 55(2021), 1, Seite 152-206 |
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
27 March 2020
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| ISSN: | 1469-8099 |
| Subjects (GND): |
Indien ;
Sklave ;
|
| External Sources: | Open Access Open Access |
| Summary: | The article deals with one of the under-researched themes of Indian history, which isthe history of domestic servants. Thinking about servants raises two fundamentalquestions: who were they and what did domestic service mean? The identities of aservant as a contract wage earner or a person either belonging as a member ortied to the family throughfictive/constructed claims of kinship were not mutuallyexclusive. Servants’identity existed in a continuum running from‘free’wagedcoolie on the one hand to‘unfree’slave on the other. The article traces the historyof domestic servants along two axes: the slave–servant continuum, but, moreimportantly, the coolie–servant conundrum, which is a lesser-exploredfield inSouth Asian labour history or burgeoning scholarship on domesticity andhousehold. Charting through the dense history of terminologies, the space of thecity, and legal frameworks adopted by the Company state to regulate servants, italso underscores the difficulties of researching on a subaltern group that is soubiquitous yet so fragmented in the archives. In order to reconstruct servants’pasts, we need to shake up our ownfields of history writing—urban, labour,gender, and social—to discover servants’traces wherever they are found. Fromserving as witnesses in courtrooms to becoming the subject of a city’s foundationalanecdote, their presence was spread across straw huts, streets, and maidans. Their work, defined through‘private hire’, was the product of a historical process in which aseries of regulations helped to intimatize the master–servant relationship. |
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| DOI: | 10.1017/S0026749X19000271 |