Cultures of Servitude

Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India

Raka Ray, Seemin Qayum

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804771092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Classes sociales et disparités économiques

Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere.

This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.

1

Approaching Servitude in Kolkata

Types of work that are consumed as services and not in products separable from the worker, and not capable of existing as commodities independently of him . . . are of microscopic significance when compared with the mass of capitalist production.

They may be entirely neglected, therefore.

Karl Marx, Capital

IN AN ICONIC SCENE in Aparajito, the second film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the destitute Brahmin widow Sarbajaya watches her son being led into servitude.¹ She has recently obtained work as a cook in the household of a rich Brahmin, where her employers are both considerate and inconsiderate in the manner of feudal lords. In a previous scene, for example, the mistress of the house casually assumes that Sarbajaya should be willing to move to a different town with the household.² In this scene, Sarbajaya is shown observing from the top of the stairs as the master of the house sends for her son, Apu, to light his pipe and tells Apu to pluck gray hairs from his head, for which Apu receives a tip. The screenplay notes that “[s]he frowns as she slowly comes down the stairs again.”³ In the next scene, we see Sarbajaya and her son on a train, having left the job behind.

Sarbajaya’s expression as she observes the master with Apu conveys that nothing could be more heart wrenching and sobering than watching one’s son become a servant. We mention “son” here deliberately because it is not clear that Sarbajaya’s reaction would have been quite as strong in the case of a daughter. Indeed, in the first film of the trilogy, Pather Panchali, the daughter, Durga (who dies at the end of the film), is shown at the service of her little brother, Apu, looking after him, feeding him, and ultimately being responsible for his well-being. Durga was born to serve in one way or another, unlike Apu, the Brahmin son, whose caste and gender combine to hold the promise of higher things. Notwithstanding the conventional correspondence between servants’ work and women’s work that Sarbajaya represents, in the eyes of the masters an Apu would be just as suitable as a Durga to become a servant.

We as viewers can apprehend key insights from Sarbajaya’s observation of Apu. First, although certain groups may be considered more appropriately or “naturally” servants, class—poverty and inequality in this case—more than caste or gender frames the potentiality of becoming a servant or being born a servant. Second, there are demeaning behaviors and expectations associated with a relationship of servitude that Sarbajaya silently declines to accept and departs jobless rather than have her son absorb. Domestic servitude is undeniably stigmatized, as the film shows, while also a normal and ingrained element of household life.

This book began as an attempt to think about an institution that lies at the bedrock of Indian domestic middle- and upper-class existence, yet it soon became an inquiry into not only the characteristics of domestic servitude historically and culturally but also the constitution of the classes on both sides of the employer-servant relationship. Domestic servitude, principally but not exclusively paid domestic work, became a dense site for us, the examination of which could illuminate the very constitution of society. In the spirit of Tanika Sarkar’s work on nineteenth-century Bengal, and Leonore Davidoff ’s work on Victorian England, with their insistence on seeing the public sphere as integrally related to the domestic, this book conceives of the relations within the household as a microcosm of the rules and comportment of societies, with the institution of domestic servitude providing a powerful lens through which to view social constitution and reconstitution over time.⁴ Particularly in societies like that of India, with long, unbroken histories of domestic servitude, the institution can be seen as central to understanding self and society.⁵ As we argue in this book, the relations of paid domestic work and servitude in India are intimately tied to the self-conscious evolution of a “modern” Indian elite. Through evolving techniques of servant and home management, employers produce themselves as the class destined to lead India to modernity, and servants as a distinct class, premodern and dependent on the middle and upper classes for their well-being. This book explores the relations of servitude in India’s recent past and present, what it means to serve and to be served, and through the lens of servitude seeks to understand contemporary Indian conceptions of domesticity, class, and modernity.

Domestic servitude when considered as a historically constructed labor relation in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the space chosen for our exploration, requires us to look more closely at the conditions and changes in Kolkata’s political economy, its history as a colonial city, rapidly transforming urban landscapes, and complex gender regimes over the past decades and generations. Yet as we foreground the home as a site where relations of class, gender, and caste/ race are produced and reproduced through the particular labor practices of domestic servitude, we find that these relations and practices are singular indeed. Home is not a jute mill, an apparel sweatshop, a company office, a rice paddy, or a street stall. We suggest that this distinction inheres in both the nature of the labor and the site of labor.

Domestic servitude confuses and complicates the conceptual divide between family and work, custom and contract, affection and duty, the home and the world precisely because the hierarchical arrangements and emotional registers of home and family must coexist with those of workplace and contract in a capitalist world.⁶ This uneasy inhabitation privileges domestic servitude analytically. Because it encompasses and is realized through differences of gender, race/caste, class, and power in the home, we must consider how these differences and their attendant emotional valences dialectically produce and reproduce the relations of servitude. Examining domestic servitude enables us, following the work of Arlie Hochschild and Andrew Sayer, to address the complex emotional and moral textures of quotidian relationships of inequality.⁷ Thus, we elaborate the contours of a “culture of servitude,” within which and shaped by which both employers and servants, as individuals and classes, conduct daily life.

Culture of Servitude

A culture of servitude is one in which social relations of domination/subordination, dependency, and inequality are normalized and permeate both the domestic and public spheres. Our use of “culture” refers to the interconnected realms of consciousness and practice and necessarily encompasses the dimension of power. We recognize, following Raymond Williams, that while the concept of “culture” has often been used in ways that do not adequately take into account power relations and inequalities, the category of “ideology” explicitly recognizes the dynamics of class power. However, “culture” does have advantages over “ideology,” where ideology is understood as a system of meanings and values that constitutes particular class interests, in that culture involves a total lived process not only of consciousness but also of experience and practice. For Williams, the Gramscian category that integrates and goes beyond these two concepts is “hegemony.”

It sees the relationship of domination and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living—not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense.... It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.⁸

The concept of culture of servitude aligns closely with hegemony because it treats the total social process of experience and consciousness in terms of power. As Williams puts it, hegemony “is in the strongest sense a ‘culture,’ but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.”⁹

Throughout this book we employ the concept “servitude” to capture the persistence of forms of dependency and submission in relations of what is today, for the most part, paid domestic work.¹⁰ We treat the nexus of labor relations that is domestic servitude as an institution rather than as an occupational category, as would be implied by the terms “domestic service” or “domestic work.” We use “servant” because of its popular usage in India. Even though the Bengali term chakor (servant) has been, by and large, replaced by the term kajer lok (person who works), the English words servant and maidservant have not been replaced by some equivalent of “paid domestic worker.”

By “normalized” we mean, first, that these social relations are legitimized ideologically such that domination, dependency, and inequality are not only tolerated but accepted; and second, that they are reproduced through everyday social interaction and practice. Those living in a particular culture of servitude accept it as the given order of things, the way of the world and of the home. A culture of servitude is akin in some respects to Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, “a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices.” ¹¹ Bourdieu suggests that not only does habitus organize practices and their perception but also converts these perceptions and practices into internalized dispositions. In a culture of servitude, servitude is normalized so that it is virtually impossible to imagine life without it, and practices, and thoughts and feelings about practices, are patterned on it.¹²

The culture of servitude is also a matter of collective patterns of subjectivity. For a deeper understanding of such inhabitations, we have turned to Williams’s notion of “structure of feeling.” Williams comments, “The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology.’ . . . It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.” He elsewhere notes, “In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organisation.”¹³ Thus, by culture of servitude we also mean the structure of feeling associated with the institution and relations of domestic servitude that is produced by the confluence of historical material conditions and prevailing social organization.

The structure of feeling, then, reflects the mutually dependent subjectivities of masters and servants. Ann Rubbo and Michael Taussig have noted that servanthood envelops servants “into the bosom of the employing family as part-employee and part-family, producing a dependent personality . . . and aids and abets the mystification of exploitation.”However, we decline to go along with their one-sided view of the servant’s dependent personality, and even less with their approval of Emily Nett’s statement that “the servant is the genetic carrier of the colonial patron-client relationship” (emphasis added).¹⁴ We opt for a reading of the dialectics of dependency and power in these fundamentally unequal relationships, where the subjectivity of each actor is shaped and informed by the other. Hegel’s lordship-bondage/master-slave dialectic attempts to explain the unfolding of human consciousness and history, but it can also illuminate the particular mimetic relation at hand: “One is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman. . . . The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman.”¹⁵ The slave exists to labor for the master and to affirm the master’s reality and humanity. Thus, the master is perversely dependent on the slave, and the relation of domination seems to be inverted. In Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel, precisely because the master does not recognize the slave’s human reality and dignity, the slave’s recognition of the master is always insufficient for the master.¹⁶ Frantz Fanon’s engagement with the Hegelian master-slave dialectic follows Kojève in important respects, especially the absence of mutual recognition, but crucially incorporates race and the colonial condition, which paralyze reciprocal recognition. In a trenchant footnote in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon categorically refutes the possibility of reciprocity across the colonial and racial divide: Within colonialism, the slave needs the master’s recognition, but the master only wants labor—not recognition—from the slave and dismisses the slave’s consciousness.¹⁷ Although we would argue that labor and recognition are both in play for the master, these debates are important because they bring to the fore the relationship of domination, dependency, and inequality that lies at the heart of the culture of servitude and that complexly constitutes both servant and master.

Although the core of the culture of servitude is, of course, the employer-servant relationship, its effects are wider and diffused through both the domestic and public spheres. In this book, we explore the workings of domination, dependency, and inequality in the intimate realms of the household, the family, and subjective consciousness. Even though we privilege the site of the household and home, this is a study of class relations and their reproduction that has broader implications for the social formation. The practices, dispositions, and feelings that inhere in cultures of servitude structure the social world, and thus cultures of servitude are vital to the constitution of both self and society. Indeed, we argue, they shape the way...