Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and Class in India

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Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, and 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, 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 conversation 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 come to grips with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.

This Indian edition with a new Preface is a timely contribution as the country grapples with modernity in the shadows of caste, class, and gender discrimination. It will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, anthropology and subaltern, gender and labour studies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Raka Ray

Raka Ray is associate professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asia studies and chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, social movements, and relations between dominant and subaltern groups in India. Publications include Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (University of Minnesota, 1999; Kali for Women, 2000), "Masculinity, Femininity And Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century" in Feminist Studied (26.3), and (with Seemin Qayum) "Grappling with Modernity: Calcutta's Respectable Classes and the Culture of Domestic Servitude" in Ethnography (4.4, 2003).