JOIN USA sigh for inequality
If you have lived in a relatively upscale apartment in any big city in India in the past two years, chances are that you were privy to heated debates on WhatsApp groups on the entry of house-helps during Covid times. The whole episode and the continuing discussions provided a revealing glimpse into how the community of domestic workers is viewed in India.
At such a time comes Nitin Sinha and Prabhat Kumar’s Lesser Lives — Stories of domestic servants in India — a translated anthology of short stories by celebrated Hindi and Urdu authors such as Premchand, Mahadevi Varma and Manto, among others. These 11 stories, set in the Hindi heartland, bring to the fore the many paradoxes of domestic servants and the Indian household, chief of them being the ubiquity yet invisibility of domestic servants. You could read them as innocuous short stories that give a slice of life of tier 2 India, but scratch the surface and you will see a whole range of relationships but mostly the relationship between the employer and employee that can best be described as “complicated”. While the stories themselves are great works exploring a range of emotions, what makes the book particularly interesting is the introduction to the topic of domestic workers that the authors provide. The powerful preface sets the tone for the rest of the book.
While academic work can bring much-needed rigour to any issue, fictionalised accounts provide a frame for a layperson to understand the issue at hand in a more accessible manner. The book is a delightful compendium of stories that present various facets of this complicated relationship — ranging from dignity and care to doubt and derision.
It begins with Premchand’s ‘Maidservant’ and lays out the societal norm that the job of the domestic servant exists because, among other things, domestic work is out of bounds for men in our society. In the story titled Whip Of Fortune, the author brings to fore the conflict in the minds of the servant when he sees so much comfort but is unable to partake of it. The servant transgresses the personal boundary and sits on the bed of the employer. The physical abuse he is meted out and his subsequent running away and the change in his fortunes from there form the crux of the story. While the storyline by itself felt a bit far-fetched, a closer reading will make the reader question pre-conceived notions.
Themes of defiance
Ratnaprabha is a story that one needs to read a second time to get the message. On the surface, it appears to be an incoherent tale with an absurd storyline. But peeling the layers, one can see themes of defiance on the part of the domestic servant and the need for control over morality, the expectation of surrender of agency, subservience, and the validation of virtue from the servant on part of the employer. The story also drives home the point that benevolence cannot be the basis of policy.
Mahadevi Varma’s Rama changes the mood of the book from a despondent one to a warm and fuzzy one. The narrator recalls with fondness the love and care she was showered on by Rama. It also takes the reader back to the preface about kinship stressed by the use of words like “kaka” and “kaki’ and the resultant manipulative possibilities that make the relationship structurally unequal.
Abuse, doubt, paternalism, and control with some doses of kinship, are dominant strands that define the relationship of domestic servants with their employers in all these stories that were set in 1960s India. It is 2021 and little seems to have changed. While the vocabulary has moved from domestic servant to domestic help, the work they do is much more than just “help” and the movement to accord them the status of workers has only just begun. This book plays an important role in holding a mirror to us and is a must-read to move the needle on that conversation.