and has been supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society, and the University of Rochester's Humanities Center.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Working-Class Raj: Colonialism and the Making of Class in British India, and reported the following:
Page 99–the first page of Working-Class Raj’s fourth chapter–begins with the story of what Ada Lee did on her summer vacation:Learn more about Working-Class Raj at the Cambridge University Press website.When George Lee’s commanding officers learned that his wife had lost their baby, they summoned him to the orderly room. Mrs. Tucker, the district commissioner’s wife, was planning to spend the summer in the foothills of Nanga Parbat and needed a new lady’s maid. Would Lee’s wife like to go along? Ada Lee wanted to get away from the plains and spend the summer out of the heat, but men of her husband’s rank were only offered time in the hills every other year. She decided to join the Tuckers and their staff for the summer. For Mrs. Lee, this was part vacation, part job. She occupied a special position in the family – one determined by strict demarcations of race and malleable borders of class. Mrs. Tucker liked to employ European lady’s maids. The woman Mrs. Lee replaced had returned for the summer to her native France. As likely the only white servant in the Tuckers’ household, Mrs. Lee was responsible for providing companionship to her employer as much as a stylish coiffure and well-looked-after wardrobe. She would also serve as an object of conspicuous consumption; European help was hard to find in India. A European lady’s maid provided not simply the usual benefits of personal care and grooming, but added ones – companionship, familiarity, and the luxury of a white servant in a country where even poor whites could afford help.The Page 99 Test works (almost) perfectly for Working-Class Raj because Ada Lee’s story encapsulates many of the central themes of the book–the interplay between racial and class hierarchies, the instability of status in colonial India, the way longing for home could at once strengthen and threaten relationships. Working-Class Raj asks what happened when British men and women from working-class backgrounds went to Victorian India and found their social position changed by new hierarchies of race and class. For a woman like Ada Lee, from a working-class background and married to an NCO, life in India meant a dramatic change in both social position and material conditions. She could hire a cook if she felt like it; her husband George had servants to look after his clothes. Because of the exploitative nature of British rule in India, working-class British men and women did not live like the British working class “at home”. But, as we see from this opening anecdote, racial hierarchy alone cannot capture the complexity of British working-class experience in India. Women like Ada Lee could be at once servant and mistress, a duality that flummoxed British elites and forms an untold part of the history of the British working-class. Working-Class Raj draws on stories like those of Ada Lee to uncover these histories of change in social status, material conditions, and life experiences among the British working-class in India–and their effects on the working-class in Britain. The one essential element missing from Ada Lee’s story on page 99 is the importance of communication between working-class men and women in Britain and their family and friends in India. Letters, sent across vast distances and often written by correspondents with limited literacy, attempted to sustain relationships, maintain family incomes, and bridge the gulf between those living very different versions of working-class lives in Britain and India.
--Marshal Zeringue
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