Care Labor, Caste, and Race in Colonial India

Based on the award-winning book Colonial Caregivers, this seminar provides a cultural and social history of the figure of the South Asian Ayah, who took care of British colonial families in India, from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s, and eventually also worked for elite South Asian families. Prof. Chakraborty argues that the Ayah archetype not only provided gendered domestic labor, but also important moral labor for the British Empire in India. Drawing on colonial and vernacular archives to uncover the precarious lives of these marginalized maidservants, she will examine how the visual and literary sentimentalization of the Ayah morally legitimized British colonialism, and upheld British domestic respectability, white racial purity, and upper-caste Indian domestic modernity.

Satya Shikha Chakraborty is an Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). She is the author of Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. The book won the Edward Dimock Book Prize in the Indian Humanities, awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). She has also published on the history of mistress-maid intimacies in Mughal India and on European governesses in Indian princely households. She is currently curating a digital humanities project on the visual culture of domestic labor in the age of New Imperialism.