‘That unit of civilisation’ and ‘the talent peculiar to women’: British employers and their servants in the nineteenth-century Indian empire

Abstract

Domestic servants across the British Empire were instrumental in constructing colonial domesticity. In metropole and colony, they marked the physical boundaries of the house and family and the categorical boundaries of class, gender and racial difference. However, in colonial India, the gender and racial status of Indian servants, relative to both their colonial employers and their metropolitan counterparts, disrupted the dynamics of dependence that structured metropolitan employer/servant relations and identities. Despite efforts to dutifully ‘civilise’ households according to a ‘British’ standard, the day-to-day reality was one in which ambivalence and uncertainty towards servants were commonplace among colonisers and where servants participated in the creation of a way of life that was specifically colonial, even while it sought to preserve and proselytise ‘Britishness’.

Keywords:

• servants
• gender
• race
• colonialism
• domesticity
• India

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Catherine Hall, Rebecca Spang, Alan Lester, Molly and Georges Dussart, Mischa Gorchov Brearley and the editors for their advice and assistance. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board under Grant Competition B.

Notes

1. I use the word ‘servant’ in this article according to its nineteenth-century usage.

2. I use Anglo-Indian throughout this article according to its contemporary usage to refer to white Britons resident in India.

3. Nabob: an Anglo-Indian name for an East India Company employee. Sahib: a form of respectful address, usually applied to European men in British imperial India.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fae Ceridwen Dussart

FAE DUSSART is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.