Colonial Caregivers
Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India

Colonial Caregivers uncovers the history of Indian ayahs, showing how British sentimentalization obscured their vulnerability and voices.

Satya Shikha Chakraborty (Author)

9781009467148, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 October 2025

318 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.627 kg

'Colonial Caregivers is an exemplary exercise in subalternist historiography. With great scholarly rigor and imagination, it brings into view the history of the Indian ayahs who performed the most intimate care of the women and children in British colonial households. While capturing their experiences and perspectives, it shows that the domestic labor of these brown women was crucial not only for the reproduction of colonial families but also for the representation of imperial morality, respectability and racial purity. The book astutely advances our understanding of colonialism by placing the subaltern women's domestic labor at the center of its history.' Gyan Prakash, Princeton University

Colonial Caregivers offers a compelling cultural and social history of ayahs (nannies/maids), by exploring domestic intimacy and exploitation in colonial South Asia. Working for British imperial families from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s, South Asian ayahs, as Chakraborty shows, not only provided domestic labor, but also provided important moral labor for the British Empire. The desexualized racialized ayah archetype upheld British imperial whiteness and sexual purity, and later Indian elite 'upper' caste domestic modernity. Chakraborty argues that the pervasive cultural sentimentalization of the ayah morally legitimized British colonialism, while obscuring the vulnerabilities of caregivers in real-life. Using an archive of petitions and letters from ayahs, fairytales they told to British children, court cases, and vernacular sources, Chakraborty foregrounds the precarious lives, voices, and perspectives of these women. By placing care labor at the center of colonial history, the book decolonizes the history of South Asia and the British Empire.

Acknowledgements
List of figures
Introduction: the Ayah archetype
1. Queer intimacy, domestic slavery, and inter-racial sex in Mughal India: British imperial morality and the creation of the desexualized Indian Ayah
2. Christianity, colonial uprisings, and colonial law: rescue and romanticization of the Ayah
3. Mobility and precarity: South Asian Ayahs in Britain
4. Race and caste anxieties: colonial medical naturalization of the care-labor of Ayahs and Amahs
5. Fairy tales, letters, petitions: Ayahs' voices in colonial archives
6. South Asian elites and domestic modernity: racialization of caste and sentimentalization of the colonial Ayah
Conclusion: Postcolonial legacies
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]