South Asia, British Empire, gender and sexuality, colonial medicine, and visual culture.
She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India, with the following results:
Page 99 of Colonial Caregivers contains an image, and very little text. The image shows an oil portrait of a British family fleeing during the violence of the 1857 Indian Rebellion (fought against the British East India Company’s rule in India). It was painted in 1858, in commemoration of the rebellion’s anniversary, by the British artist Abraham Solomon, who had never visited India. The reason I have included this painting in my book is because of the depiction of the British family’s Indian ayah (nanny/maid). She is shown carrying one of the British children, as she faithfully follows her British employers, even as her own countrymen are rebelling against British colonial rule. The painting, following the tradition of European art, places the brown ayah in the shadow of the trees, while moonbeams bathe the British women and child, who are thus resplendent in a surreal white glow, in contrast to the dark shadowy figure of the ayah. The rest of the page introduces a British fiction from 1872, where the plot centers around the sudden disruption of the “very happy home” of a British family, the Ogilvies in colonial Calcutta, when the 1857 Indian Rebellion breaks out. The Ogilvies are saved thanks to the intervention of their loyal Indian ayah Tara, who hides them from the rebels. The page ends with quotes from the fiction highlighting the supposedly “strange contrast” between the white “little golden-haired girl” of the Ogilvies, and the dark “faithful ayah” Tara.Visit Satya Shikha Chakraborty's website.
While a random snippet, nevertheless, I feel, page 99 does give a good sense of some of the core arguments of my book – how the darkness of the South Asian ayah was used as a foil to highlight the white racial purity of the British family, particularly the British child. The chiaroscuro technique used by the British painter and the “strange contrast” mentioned by British writer demonstrate the visual and literary construction of race in a colonial context, particularly whiteness. The figure of the ayah, as my book shows, played a crucial role in British attempts to highlight their own racial purity at a time when inter-racial concubinage and “mixed” race children in the empire caused moral anxieties in Britain. The fidelity of the ayah to the British family, which we see in both the painting and the fiction, showcases another point my book makes – the sentimentalization of the love and loyalty of the colonial Indian caregiver, particularly during moments of anti-colonial violence (such as the 1857 Indian Rebellion), provided moral legitimacy to British colonialism in India.
So, the Page 99 Test sort of works for my book Colonial Caregivers, which argues that the South Asian ayah provided not only domestic labor, but also moral labor for the British Empire. The idealized ayah archetype, my book further argues, erased the precarious lives of real-life ayahs. Elsewhere in the book, we see numerous case-studies of ayahs who were sexually assaulted by their European masters, physically chastised by their mistresses, not paid their promised wages, taken to Britain to provide care-labor to British families during the long ship-voyage, but then abandoned without return-passages to India. The book also shows how colonial medical archives naturalized the care-labor of hardy brown women for fragile white women in the tropics, and upheld caste-based discrimination of ayahs in the name of hygiene. British cultural veneration of the ayah (which we see on page 99) obscured the vulnerabilities and everyday experiences of colonial domestic workers, which the book exposes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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