Blurring boundaries, distant companions: non-kin female caregivers for children in colonial India (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

This paper examines the history of child-care by non-kin, “non-family” members and their representations in colonial India. It focuses primarily on Bengal and relies on several genres of literary documents. Bengal harboured the seat of the British imperial capital in the city of Calcutta until 1911 and its culture was shaped in unique ways compared with other Indian cities. Based on a reading of select literary documents such as European advice manuals and Bengali personal narratives, the paper argues that the relationship between caregivers and children in colonial households attests to the building of new ties and deep ambiguous, multi-dimensional relationships with non-kin members thereby revealing the plasticity of Indian families where sociocultural boundaries were blurred and intimate relationships forged. Beginning with the literary representation of a wet-nurse in Mahasweta Devi's short story Breast-Giver, the paper delves into the world of European and Indian accounts to recuperate the history of the caregivers. It demonstrates that despite the emphasis of recent scholars that the construction of a respectable middle-class identity was based on a sharp distinction from lower social groups, such as working women and prostitutes, the history of child-care by hired domestics reveals the sharing of a common world by different caste-class groups and the interpenetration of the two domains of culture.