Women, Labour and the Economy in India

From Migrant Menservants to Uprooted Girl Children Maids

Deepita Chakravarty, Ishita Chakravarty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415844703
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317362777
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

The last available census estimated around 10 per cent of total urban working women in India are concentrated in the low paid domestic services such as cleaning, cooking, and taking care of the children and the elderly. This is found to be much higher in certain parts of India, emerging as the single most important avenue for urban females, surpassing males in the service since the 1980s.

By applying an imaginative and refreshing mix of disciplinary approaches ranging from economic models of the household, empirical analysis and literary conventions, this book analyses the changing labour economy in post-partition West Bengal. It explains how and why women and girl children have replaced this traditionally male bias in the gender segregated domestic service industry since the late 1940s, and addresses the question of whether this increase in vulnerable individuals working in domestic service, the growth of the urban professional middle class in the post liberalization period, and the increasing incidences of reported abuses of domestics, in urban middleclass homes in the recent years, are related.

Covering five decades of the history of gender and labour in India, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and labour relations, development studies, economics, history, and women and gender studies.

1 Introduction

A migrant boy child domestic worker living with his employers in a middle class family in Kolkata, sleeps on the kitchen floor. One fine morning, the employer couple finds the child lying dead. It was winter, and the child chose to sleep in the locked kitchen near a burning coal oven to keep warm. Post-mortem report confirms death by carbon monoxide poisoning. The employers immediately feel a prick of conscience, but are much relieved when the case is declared to be closed. This, in brief, is the story line of a popular film Kharij [The Case is Closed] (1982) by Mrinal Sen, based on an earlier novel of the same title by Ramapada Choudhury (1974).

Kharij, an example of experiment with realism after the 1940s, chose to focus on a typical theme in Bangla literature, that is, middle class duplicity in its treatment of the subaltern. The social question which the film deals with is still very much relevant. However, both the novelist and the filmmaker portrayed the child as a boy and not as a girl, while in reality girl children domestic workers, mostly migrant, had started frequenting the city already in the 1970s, and they were vulnerable in their isolated workplaces of employers’ homes in many more ways than boys in the same age group. In fact, the urban areas of the eastern state of West Bengal surpass all other major Indian states in the rate of its girl children working out. Most of them are engaged in paid domestic work (Chakravarty and Chakravarty 2008). This is remarkable in a state which historically has a low work participation rate (WPR) of adult women. However, women started dominating some labour market activities in urban Bengal during the closing years of colonial rule. Domestic service emerged as the single most important avenue for urban females in the state. They finally outnumbered males in the service from the 1980s onwards. This feminization of domestic service, traditionally a male domain, was most prominent in the youngest age group. The continued and increasing importance of domestic service in women’s work in urban West Bengal during the post-Independence period, and the frequent entry of girl children into it, need exploration.

Moreover, there is no dearth of report in contemporary newspapers on abuse of girl children whole-time domestic workers (living with the employer’s family) in city homes, ranging from keeping in starvation and physical assaults to rape and murder. For example, a 12-year-old girl working as a domestic maid in a middle class family was found hanged in her employer’s residence (Ananda Bazar Patrika, 10 July 2009). The dead body of another girl child domestic worker (aged 11 years) was reported to have been dropped on the street by her employers (Pratidin, 29 July 2008). Others, more fortunate, managed to flee from their employer’s places with severe injuries caused by burns or beating (Ananda Bazar Patrika, 4 September 2013; 11 October; 11 May 2012; 25 February 2008). These cases are reported from Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal. Among these tortured whole-time domestic workers, two were even below 9 years old.¹

According to the last available census estimates, around 10 per cent of total urban working women in India are concentrated in the low-paid domestic services such as cleaning, cooking, taking care of the children, and the elderly, and so on. In West Bengal, the estimate is around 23 per cent. For a single work category, the concentration is indeed very high. Among these women, a considerable number are girl children below 14 years of age. This observation suggests the remarkable importance of paid domestic service for India’s employment scenario in general and for the employment status of women and girl children wage workers in West Bengal in particular. Domestic service slowly emerged as an important arena of women’s work in all urban centres of India, especially in the better performing states of Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and former Andhra Pradesh. Though the concentration of urban women in domestic service is not as high in these states, as it is in West Bengal, according to recent data, it is more feminized in some of the above-mentioned states.

Many of these women and girl children domestic workers in West Bengal are commuters and migrants from the rural interiors to the urban areas of the state, as well as to that of other states of the country. All cases of abused girl child domestic workers mentioned above migrated to the city from the rural interiors. Unfortunately, some stray efforts apart, we do not find significant research on this emerging labour market in India, which is segregated both by gender and age and is also dominated by migrants.

The relationship between women, work and migration is, in any case, problematic. Scholars have suggested that the gender dimension of population movements has not been enough focused as a consequence of an overemphasis on labour migration (Grieco and Boyd 1998). Men have dominated discourses on population movements. It is usually taken for granted that migrants are men, and if women migrate at all, they do so only as dependents. Women therefore found a place in migration literature only in the context of family and marriage (Weiner 2004). However, as figures suggest, women have migrated in almost the same numbers as men. According to Zlotnik as quoted in Jolly et al. (2003: 6), in 2000, 85 million women migrated as compared to 90 million men. Women constituted 46 per cent of the overall transnational migration from the developing countries. They surely migrate as part of a family or in connection with marriage in a large number. Studies point out that a sizable number of women also migrate for work, and there is a clear increase in such kind of migration with the primary purpose of employment in the recent years (Phizacklea 1983). In 2000, there were 6.1 million temporary migrants in Asia; about one-third, almost two million, of this migrant workforce are women (Yamanaka and Piper 2003). The most important point to note about these 2 million women who migrated for work is that they were concentrated in some particular occupations in a gender-segregated labour market. These occupations include the entertainment industry, health services and especially domestic service which predominantly consists of occupations such as washing, cleaning, cooking and also care giving, that are extensions of women’s traditional roles in most societies. Thus domestic work has become one major occupational category, which migrant women from across the world and especially from the developing Asian countries tend to crowd (Agrawal 2006).

Although literature on women, work and migration focuses more on cross-border movement, women have formed a substantial component of internal migration flows in Asia as well. Such internal migration takes place especially from the poor rural hinterlands to the richer urban centres of developing countries in Asia. These internally moving women from the rural areas to the urban centres are also found to be concentrated in some specific areas of work predominantly in the informal sector characterized by a gender division of labour. For instance, unlike the Srilankan or the Philipina poor women who migrate across the border, Indian women mostly migrate internally, in search of employment, and a significant percentage of them are engaged as urban domestic workers (Neetha 2004; Roy 2008). They are not among the top foreign currency earners like their Srilankan counterparts (Gamburd 2000). Neither are they equipped with educational degrees and other associational skills like the migrating Philipina domestic workers (Ogaya 2006). In India, they are mostly the poorest of the poor, illiterate or semi-literate, migrating from the less developed rural areas to the rich urban centres of the same state or other metropolises of the country, for a pittance.

Moreover, as already mentioned, a considerable proportion among these internally migrating poor women for employment, in India and particularly in West Bengal are small girls below 14 years. Census data provide information on migrant girl children from the rural areas of West Bengal seeking employment in Kolkata, the capital city of the state. Primary data reported by Save the Children from Kolkata and some neighbouring districts during the middle of the 2000s suggest a significant number of migrant girl children (many of them between 5 and 9 years of age) come alone, and not as part of a migrating family, to work as whole-time domestic staff in middleclass homes in Kolkata. Ananya Roy (2008) around the same time, in her survey finds the same trend. The large number of newspaper reports on the abuse of migrant girl children domestics in the recent years as well as the abovementioned reports published by Save the Children corroborates this finding. Chakravarty and Chakravarty (2012) note that many girl children from rural Bengal often also migrate outside the state as whole-time domestic workers. Most victims of the ‘Nithari case’ (2006)² near Delhi turned out to be migrants from rural Bengal. Children are migrating as domestic workers to big cities like Delhi from the neighbouring Jharkhand as well (Wadhawan 2013).

We try to locate in this book the factors which pushed and pulled increasingly large number of migrant women and girl children in domestic service in post-Partition West Bengal. The changing society and cultural practices recreated and sustained both a labour market option (domestic service) and the home as gendered spaces. In what way has this increasing participation of women in domestic service changed their lives? The question is a complicated one. Any work option possibly leads to the formation of some sort of decision-making power. At the same time the facts of being women, underage, single migrants and working in isolated places invisible from public gaze can seriously challenge the notion of agency. Finally, we would also like to see whether the growth of the urban professional middle class in the post liberalization period, the incidence of increasing participation of the most vulnerable section of the society (poor women and particularly girl children) in domestic service and the continuing incidence of reported abuses of domestic workers in urban middle class homes in the recent years are in anyway related. Increasing demand for domestic service has played an important role in determining the outcome. We have touched upon the issue in almost all the chapters. However, our focus is to unravel the complexities of the supply side.

While domestic service was historically more prevalent in Kolkata compared with other important urban centres of the country, it has primarily been a male domain, like most other paid work outside the home.³ Studies have pointed out how domestic service became increasingly feminized in late colonial Bengal as a result of women’s withdrawal from modern and traditional industries (Banerjee 2006; Mukherjee 1995). The development of the idea of separate spheres for men and women among the Bengali bhadralok (gentleman) at about the same time affected the poorer section of the society as well (Bandyopadhyay 1990). Many women were forcibly withdrawn from paid outside work and those who were not, found domestic service to be their only option as it was considered to be an extension of women’s ‘primary’ duties at home (Banerjee 2004). Waves of migration from across the border further feminized domestic service in post-Partition West Bengal. Domestic service was also segregated by age with the frequent entry of girl children into it in the state during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Urban middle class employers who had earlier started replacing male servants by cheaper refugee maids (female domestic workers), now probably preferred girls to boys as girls were expected to be ‘naturally’ more obedient and more caring than boys of the same age. Parents of such children, who decided to send their young daughters to work at city homes as part of their survival strategy, were also guided by the prevailing concept and practice of domesticity.

Two more findings on the basis of the census data are to be noted in this context. First, the work participation rate of girl children was increasing in West Bengal during the closing years of the twentieth century, and it was also the highest among the 15 major states of India in 2001. In addition, the National Sample Survey (NSS) round of 2004–2005 reports that among the 15 major states of India, the maximum number of girl children in the youngest age group (5–9 years) work outside the home in West Bengal. In no other major state children are reported to work for wage at this tender age. Second, among the working girl children in urban West Bengal, almost 57 per cent were engaged in domestic service in 1991 (Chakravarty and Chakravarty 2008). Girl children outnumbered boys in the same age group and also became a major constituent of the adult women, in domestic service, in urban West Bengal, for the first time in 1981. Before that year, their presence in the urban work force, though on the rise since 1961, was negligible. The above figures also suggest that the migrating girls from the rural parts of the state constitute a considerable portion of the whole-time girl children city domestic workers in the state today. Moreover, especially in the context of the dwindling economic scenario, chances are very high that rural–urban migration of girl children for domestic service is responsible, at least to a significant extent, for the dramatic rise in the WPR of very young girls. Unfortunately even in the scanty literature on internal migration of poor women for work, barring a few exceptions, such girl children remain almost absent.⁴ This happens probably because a similar mental framework that refuses to see women as more than dependent migrants is also at work here. Studies on women’s migration which mostly focus on transnational movements and sometimes attempt to argue that poor women’s agency is thereby enhanced, probably find it difficult to incorporate in their paradigm the 7- to 8-year-olds who are forced to leave their homes to earn a living.

The period under consideration in this study is between 1951 (the first year of census after Independence) and 2009–2010 (the last round of NSS on employment and unemployment). As domestic service is primarily an urban affair in India and also in West Bengal, we focus on the urban areas of the state. The main secondary data sources used include the Census of India, the National Sample Survey and National Family Health Survey (NFHS). But from the objectives, it is clear that only large scale data on broad indicators such as incidence of work, number of people engaged in different categories of work segregated by gender and age and similar such figures would not be sufficient to capture the sociocultural aspects of the present study. It is true that the above-mentioned macro indicators along with a few others reveal the status of women’s work over a period of time. But these figures are not able to unravel the complex process of interaction between various factors that led to the specific state of affairs we are talking about. Especially when we are not looking for straight-forward relations between two variables such as fall in government expenditure in social sector and girl children’s school enrolment figures and the like. We therefore have to look at various other sources. Reports of primary surveys conducted by others, at different points of time, have also been used. Apart from these usual secondary sources, in order to capture the social and cultural aspects of the problem the study has heavily drawn on contemporary newspaper advertisements and reports and also on contemporary autobiographies and memoirs. Fictional writings of the period under consideration have also helped enrich our understanding of the society and the psyche of the period and the people concerned. As the study is not mainly focused on the status of domestic workers, we did not consider of a large scale primary survey among such respondents. We did conduct primary surveys of selected households who have sent women and girl children for paid domestic work as well as the middle class homes that have been the employers. The households are chosen mainly on the basis of a purposive sampling as the present study does not attempt at making any quantitative generalization. In fact, the very nature of the problem this study probes into does not permit any generalization as such. Our aim in these surveys was to verify a set of conjectures we could make from our reading of secondary data. This study uses a descriptive analytic method using quantitative information as and when required. The analysis draws on theoretical approaches of more than one social science disciplines.

Plan of the book

Recent research on domestic workers focuses on global migration of labour. As poor women usually do not migrate outside (except from Kerala) India to seek employment as domestic workers like their Srilankan or Philipina counterparts, they remain absent in the international discourse on paid domestic service. Also there is no full scale study on the historical evolution of paid domestic service either in India as a whole or in West Bengal in particular. The not so significant volume of work that has been done on the subject focuses on short-term micro developments such as the status of domestic workers. We instead take a wider perspective both in scope and time frame. Existing literature recognizes the increasing importance of domestic service in poor urban women’s work in India, but in most cases, girl children domestic workers are absent in these academic discourses. To understand the full implications of the increasing importance of domestic service in poor urban women’s and girl children’s work in the state, the question has to be contextualized against the backdrop of changes at the macro level. Chapter Two introduces the problem in the wider context of broad trends in political and economic changes during the post-Partition period.

We focus on the Partition of India, the birth of a new state called W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The backdrop: Partition, land reforms and the new industrial policy
• 3 Domesticity vs. paid work: domestic service in urban West Bengal
• 4 For bed and board only: the refugee maids
• 5 When daughters migrate and mothers stay back
• 6 From family members to invisible essentials: masters, mistresses and their domestic workers
• 7 The case of Bangladesh
• Index