Description
Book SynopsisThe expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia.Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, Arunima Datta illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment.In doing so, Datta re-imagines the experience of waiting. Waiting is a recurrent human experience, yet it is often marginalized. It takes a particular form within complex bureaucratized societies in which the marginalized inevitably wait upon those with power over them. Those who wait are often discounted as passive, inactive victims. This book shows that, in spite of their precarious position, the travelling ayahs of the British empire were far from this stereotype.
Trade ReviewWaiting on Empire is a landmark book, giving long overdue attention to the most significant population of colonized women workers in Victorian Britain. Ayahs enabled British colonizers to maintain families despite their global mobility, critical to the resilience of British imperial rule. This beautifully written book restores these neglected women to the historical record, offering a sophisticated interpretation of women's agency and deftly recasting traveling ayahs as knowledgeable, enterprising, and resourceful skilled workers. * Laura Tabili, Professor of Modern European History, University of Arizona *
This book forever changes the history of domestic colonial service. Datta argues that traveling ayahs are a prism for the workings of imperial power from both above and below. Readers will be stunned by the photographic archive she has curated and by the way she practices care work for the subjects she so brilliantly moves out of the waiting room of history. * Antoinette Burton, author of The Trouble with Empire *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Mobile Caregivers for the Empire 1: Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire: Historical And Contextual Background 2: Waiting in the Heart of Empire: Abandoned Travelling Ayahs and the Contradictions of a Liberal Empire 3: Creative Resilience in Contexts of Crisis: Making Arguments and Evoking Sympathy 4: Capitalizing on Waiting: Creative Use of Time by Travelling Ayahs 5: Travelling Ayahs and Ayahs' Homes: Humanitarianism, Evangelism and Profit 6: Travellers' Tales: Negotiating Waiting in Wars And
