In Imperial Service: Race, Mothering, and Household Management in British India

British households in the Raj infamously employed an excess of domestic servants—the author of The English Bride in India advised frugal housekeepers to keep a minimum of nine. Contemporary critics fretted that these arrangements made for idle wives and Indianized children, and historians of empire have noted the class and racial anxieties that developed out of these intimate domestic arrangements. But it was not only elites in the Indian Civil Service or military officers’ families who employed household staffs out of proportion to their social class. Enlisted men and their families did so as well. Men and women who had been in service in Britain found themselves in charge of servants of their own in India. This paper explores how women who had been in service transitioned to taking charge of servants in their own households and asks what this dynamic can tell us about the possibilities and limits of social mobility in the Raj. Nonelite white women’s position was particularly tenuous—dependent upon their husbands for status, they might end up returning to service if they were widowed during their time in India. Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, I examine how these women understood their relationships to their servants and managed their own unstable status. Nonelite women employed cooks and cleaners, but were unlikely to have nurses caring for their children and less likely still to employ wet-nurses. While nonelites did give over some aspects of household management to Indian servants, the embodied tasks of mothering formed a class boundary that was seldom transgressed. By focusing in on this discrete group of British women and Indian servants, this paper reveals how the contingent relationships between race, gender, and class that structured imperial life in India developed on the ground.