The housemaid or “maidservant” as she is popularly called, is an invisible member of most middle and upper class Indian homes. She earns anywhere between Rs.300 and Rs. 3000 ($6 – $60) a month, depending on the number of homes she works in, and is one of the few million Indian women who work in the unorganized sector.

The story of India’s domestic workers is long and ridden with every line that has cut into the history of the nation’s people – caste, language, religion, and most importantly gender. Over 55% of domestic workers are women (National Classification of Occupations, 1991). As Sujata Gothoskar notes in a report on organizing strategy in the informal economy, domestic work in India has its origins in feudal service rendered by lower caste serfs and tenants to upper landowning castes. She quotes a report by the Indian Social Institute, which describes the condition of domestic workers in ancient India: “They were served inferior food, subjected to corporal punishment and were thrown out when they were old and could work no longer”. Gothoskar notes that it was a common practice for the Jajmans of the Peshwa years to buy domestic servants – in effect, slaves. 

This culture of servitude by obligation, if anything, thrived and multiplied during the British years. The ayah, cook and manservant became necessities, as also the sweeping woman and the toilet-cleaner. Race became another discourse in their history in these times. However, caste was still important, as these “servants” were, almost without exception, traditional performers of these services – domestic workers by birth.

The second chapter of the story of domestic labourers is testimony to the difference in the way India’s development over the post-independence decades affected women in different socio-economic strata. As Gothoskar notes, on the one hand, women became more employable in the urban upper-middle-class and began to leave their homes for full-time careers, while on the other, increasing mechanization and cost-effective agriculture drove poorer tenants out of their lands, leaving women more than men, unemployable in anything but housework – the one line of work that required no skill that had to be learned at the expense of family economic resources.

An irony: The upper-middle-class (often also upper-caste) woman wants to assert her feminist side and start on a career. Gender-roles however, have not changed and keeping house is still her job. She can’t do both, and keen on keeping her feminist convictions, she hires a maid. Soon enough, Ms. Middle-Class is “expounding passionate socialistic views but completely oblivious to…her underpaid servant working in the same room or sweeping underfoot,” as Nishtha Jain, maker of the critically acclaimed film “Lakshmi and Me” writes. Jain’s film discusses this difference and explores the director’s relationship with her maid, twenty-year-old Lakshmi.

Lakshmi, as Jain says in her narration, is a migrant from Tamil Nadu – a Tamil speaker living and working in Maharashtra. Several domestic labourers are migrants away from their own native states, pushed out by the exigencies of unproductive land, and of lost homes in “development projects” where the women concerned are tribal. Gothoskar says that several interviewed employers preferred women coming from other linguistic groups than their own, as this meant less argument. From the other side of the bank, that means less bargaining power.

Caste is, however, quite probably the prominent discourse, forming the basis for systemic exploitation. According to various surveys that Gothoskar cites in her report, the percentage of domestic workers belonging to backward and scheduled castes and tribes ranges from 55% to 98% (varying by area).  Gothoskar notes that employers often prefer maids from tribal or low caste backgrounds as these girls are conditioned to be docile and unquestioningly obedient. In this author’s observation, a high-caste sexagenarian housewife from an upper-end apartment building in central Chennai often chides her live-in maid, a lower caste native of rural Tamil Nadu, for her “unrefined habits”, blaming the girl’s “low-caste upbringing”.  This employer also subjects her cook to a lot of criticism for “cooking like them (people of lower castes)”. Kathyayini Chamaraj, writing about housemaids in Bangalore notes that many high-caste employers  (often also highly-educated professionals) often “purify” the dishes that their maids have washed, by washing them again with tamarind.

A housemaid usually earns about one-third of what she needs to meet her family’s monthly expenses (SJS study).  This is in spite of working at three to eight houses everyday, without paid sick leave, no weekly day off or holidays (and in fact having to work double when there’s a festive holiday) or pay for overtime work. According to the survey, many employers pay their maids less than 1% of their earnings and refuse to pay a minimum wage as low as Rs. 53 a day for 8 hours’ work. Most of these families do not see paid domestic work as belonging to the public sphere and are resentful of government interference in a privately concluded agreement. Another question that needs to be asked is whether gender has everything to do with this tendency to underpay housemaids. Housework is seen as intrinsic to women – something that needs no learning or skill. This has to be examined alongside the fact that all “woman’s work” (for e.g, cooking) tends to be underpaid, whether performed by men or women.

Even though a Domestic Workers’ (Condition of Services) Bill was introduced in Parliament as early as 1959, no act has yet been passed to regulate the employment of housemaids. Domestic workers don’t come under the Minimum Wages Act, the Equal Remuneration Act or any other Parliamentary act regulating labour. Employers, in consequence, are not obliged to pay a decent wage, fix reasonable hours of work or offer any security. The Pune Molkarin Sanghatana, The Bengaluru Gruha Karnikara Sangh, the Domestic Workers’ Movement and other organizations have attempted to create some support for the domestic worker; however, the majority of housemaids are unaware of such organizations and fight their own battles.

The maid inhabits a middle-space, neither within nor without. She is privy to every skeleton in the closet, but may not sit on chairs. She is vulnerable to sexual, physical and verbal abuse (the latest case in the media has been the rape of a young maid by actor Shiney Ahuja), but rarely has access to health care and may get fired or risk having her pay cut when she’s on maternity leave. She lives in democratic India but inhabits a feudal world where she is expected to live on what she’s handed, or else branded “demanding and greedy”, by an employer who in turn might raise hell if her boss refused to give her paid leave when she needed it.  The double standards evidently need to go. 

 

Picture Source: The ICA, London

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The Author
 Sneha Krishnan is an economics-obsessed, pasta-loving history student bound for Oxford this fall. She is usually found curled up in sofas with her ever-present macbook perched on some surface in the vicinity. Sneha first started thinking about doing Sa when she and Shweta realized that they were ranting about the day's news/ happenings practically everyday and everything they said had something to do with their feminist convictions. So they wondered how it would be to write about these things and more... and KaBoom... seven months and laborious code-learning (trial and error, the only method for us) sessions later, Sa came to be. Sneha’s favourite pastimes, besides feminism and Sa, are reading the New York Times, playing Scrabble and watching every movie that looks remotely interesting.

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