From benevolent maternalism to the market logic: exploring discursive boundary making in domestic work relations in India

ABSTRACT

Framed within a discussion of boundary work and its many facets, this article develops a critical understanding of the discourses that shape the material and symbolic hierarchies of power asserted by employers of domestic workers in Indian households. We analyze the nature of discourses that are mobilized in the boundary work practiced by different groups of employers in India as they negotiate their relationships with their domestic workers. Drawing on fieldwork in Mumbai and Chennai, our analysis outlines two different discourses within the nature of boundary work – one centered on the trope of benevolent maternalism and another which mobilizes a market-based trope – and delineate how these diverge and converge in the relationship between employers and domestic workers. We also show how these discourses differ according to two key factors: on the one hand, whether the employers hire full-time or part-time workers, and on the other hand, the specific positional attributes of the employers in terms of age, occupation, and family background. We argue that these two discursive categories are not watertight compartments, but are located on a spectrum, and that employers therefore exhibit elements of both maternalism and market-based approaches within the relationship with their workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic work
• India
• maternalism
• class
• caste

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Padmaja Barua is a PhD candidate in the Department of Health Promotion and Development, University of Bergen, Norway. She received her MPhil in Gender and Development from the Department of Health Promotion and Development at the University of Bergen in 2007. She also holds a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Delhi, India. In addition to conducting ethnographic research in India, she has long-term experience working in the NGO sector in India.

Anne Waldrop is a Professor of Development Studies at Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo. She has published widely on the politics of class and gender in urban India, most recently Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India (Anthem Press, 2014, co-edited with Kenneth Bo Nielsen).

Haldis Haukanes is a Professor of Social Anthropology, Gender, and Development in the Department of Health Promotion and Development, University of Bergen. She has done gender-related research in sub-Saharan Africa and has recently headed a Norway Research Council project entitled, Gender in Poverty Reduction. Critical Explorations of Norwegian Aid Policy on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights.

Notes

1 Ray and Qayum 2009.

2 Ray and Qayum 2009, 3.

3 The concept of boundary work, developed within cultural sociology, is defined as “the strategies, principles, and practices we use to create, maintain, and modify cultural categories” (Nippert-Eng 1996, 7). Boundary work is a process of distinguishing the self by defining distance and closeness to others. See Nippert-Eng 1996, 7; Lan 2003, 2006.

4 See, for example, Cock 1980; Rollins 1985; Constable 2007; Ray and Qayum 2009; Romero 2002; Dill 1988; Rollins 1985; Constable 2007; Lan 2003, 2006; Parrenas 2001; Gill 1994; Mourkabel 2009; Barua, Haukanes, and Waldrop 2016.

5 Part-time or live-out workers are those workers who live in their own homes while working for multiple households where they undertake the same tasks for each household. They are called “part- time” as they do part-time work in each household while actually working the whole day for multiple employers. Full-time or live-in workers are those who live with the employing family and work only for this family. Their tasks are not as specialized as those of part-time workers.

6 The term “benevolent maternalism” was used first by Judith Rollins in 1985. However, we use it in a context where the primary power relations that shape this benevolent maternalism are class and caste rather than class and race, as in Rollins’ context.

7 Romero 2002, 110; Lan 2003.

8 See Mattila 2011; Romero 2002; Rollins 1985; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007.

9 Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007, 207–208.

10 Instrumental personalism is defined by Mendez (1998) as strategically establishing personal work relations to secure tangible and non-tangible benefits. Employers incorporate this element in their relations with their workers to secure good quality work and control over their workers’ labor and autonomy.

11 Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007, 207–208.

12 Mattila 2011; Ray and Qayum 2009.

13 Mattila 2011; Ray and Qayum 2009.

14 Due to constraints of space and in order to develop a fine-grained understanding of employers’ discourses pertaining to boundary work, we focus exclusively on employers in this article. We have highlighted workers’ boundary work in a previous article where we decipher the agency of workers in contesting the boundary work done by their employers and show, among other things, how some workers prefer to be drawn into fictive kin relations with their employers – a “member of the family” ideology as this status yields many lucrative material and social benefits (see Barua, Haukanes, and Waldrop 2016).

15 In order to limit the number of participants of this study, only women workers who were involved in cleaning tasks were interviewed.

16 Banerjee 1989; Banerjee 1996.

17 Banerjee 1996.

18 Banerjee 1996; Fuchs 1980, 157–158.

19 Mattila 2011.

20 Banerjee 1996, 7.

21 Ray and Qayum 2009; Chatterjee 1993, 233–253; Banerjee 2004.

22 Ray and Qayum 2009, 50. This discourse continues in contemporary India. It is manifest when by affirming “the status of the woman of the household as a manager rather than laborer, reproducing a particular middle–class lifestyle and respectability,” employers retain their domestic roles whilst maintaining distinction from their domestics. See Rao 2011, 762.

23 Gothoskar 2013; Neetha and Palriwala 2009.

24 As argued by Fernandes and Heller (2006), the “new middle class” is not new in terms of its social composition but rather in the way in which it seeks to assert a middle-class identity through the language of economic liberalization.

25 Fernandes 2006; Ray and Qayum 2009.

26 Gothoskar 2013; Neetha and Palriwala 2009.

27 Ray and Qayum 2009.

28 Neetha and Palriwala 2009.

29 Dickey 2000; Neetha 2009; Raghuram 1999; Ray and Qayum 2009.

30 Lan 2003, 2006.

31 Ray and Qayum 2009.

32 Ray and Qayum 2009, 26; see also Cock 1980; Rollins 1985; Hansen 1989; Constable 2007.

33 Maternalism, while being derived from paternalism, refers to the tradition wherein women who are the employers of other women use the distinctly feminine emotions of “motherliness and protectiveness” to exert control and authority over their workers. See Rollins 1985, 179–186.

34 Romero 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Ozyegin 2001; Rollins 1985.

35 Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007.

36 Ray and Qayum 2009, 96.

37 See also Mattila 2011.

38 Lan 2003, 533.

39 See Rollins 1985. While we are aware that maternalism is exemplified by a whole range of discourses and practices, some of which may be more feudal than others, we do not present the full range in this article but only those forms that relate to our data.

40 Ray and Qayum 2009; Lan 2006; Rollins 1985; Ozyegin 2001; Romero 2002.

41 One United States dollar is equivalent to approximately sixty-six Indian rupees.

42 Cock 1980; Rollins 1985; Romero 2002; Weix 2000.

43 Mauss 1954.

44 Ozyegin 2001.

45 Ray and Qayum 2009.

46 Ji is an honorific used as a suffix in the Hindi language. It is a gender-neutral term which is used to denote respect for a particular person.

47 Lan 2003, 2006; see also Cheng 2006.

48 Barua, Haukanes, and Waldrop 2016.

49 A common practice in many households in India is to use a designated set of crockery and cutlery for domestic workers and a different set for the family. Care is taken to ensure that the two sets do not get mixed up with each other and in order to do this, the plates and cups used by the domestic staff are kept at a pre-specified place in the kitchen and are washed and maintained only by the workers. In common parlance, this is sometimes referred to as the “double tumbler” system.

50 Dickey 2000.

51 Dickey 2000.

52 Romero 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007.

53 We do not purport to represent this group of employers as unquestionably egalitarian, but we argue that, as part of the discursive work performed, they sought to represent themselves as being so. In this way, they sought to distance themselves from the older employers who adhered to a discourse of maternalism.

54 See also Ray and Qayum 2009.

55 See also Ray and Qayum 2009.

56 The considerable and stark material inequalities between these employers and their workers are difficult to disguise and subsume under the rhetoric of equality. This was reinforced by the significant difference between the salaries earned by these employers and the wages they paid their workers, with the latter being a miniscule percentage of the former.

57 See also Ray and Qayum 2009; Lan 2003, 2006.

58 Mattila 2011.

59 For a similar argument, see Mattila 2011.