Politics of the Intimate Pt. 3: The Brahmin Mistress and the Bahujan Maid
I was nine years old the first time I remember finding the PearlPET jar of turmeric among my clothes in the Godrej almirah. Flummoxed, I took it back to the kitchen only to find the chilli powder in there the next day. I remember my maternal grandma — Ajji — shushing me as she buried it in my underwear and told me to let it stay put until the maid was done for the day. Nearly 23 years later I watched the film Piku, bemused as Deepika’s titular character chides her old father for hiding the salt from the kitchen, so that his cook wouldn’t over-salt the food. There is something about age that pulls the paranoia out of our older relatives, as the film suggests, but there’s also something about caste relations that renders the Brahmin pensioner paranoid for as long as the Bahujan help occupies the kitchen. (I use the term ‘Bahujan’ for the rest of this essay as Saheb Kanshiram intended it to be used, to refer to the vast variety of India’s working-class minorities, particularly several of its lowest caste groups. I also use the term “maid” rather than “domestic worker” to engage with how popular media discourse refers to these women, who are not recognized as workers with rights protected by the law.)
Throughout my childhood, Ajji had driven constant suspicion in our family’s minds that our maids were always out to get us, maybe steal from us, or cheat us, or slack off work, or just generally resent our good karma. In her mind, the Bahujan maid was a figure of necessary evil, needed for her cheap domestic labour in handling the Brahmin household’s cleaning chores, but also to be reviled for her “polluting” nature because of the those very menial tasks she was required to perform because of her caste position. Ajji’s behaviour created genuine chaos and drama for my working mother, whose primary job it was to handle these confrontations, but it also significantly traumatized the severely underpaid maids who came to work for us. For years, our household had a fairly accurate reputation of being a terrorizing place for domestic help.
The Bahujan maid is a singular contradiction in the Brahmin household. The era of the Brahmin maid who could solely function as a cook, has (apparently) long disappeared, as one casteist Puneri Brahmin recently discovered. The Brahmin maid is unlikely to to do things like clean toilets and bathrooms and piles of dirty laundry, “menial” tasks for which the Bahujan help has always been at hand, especially for Brahmin communities. However, as more and more Brahmins moved into cities or suburban areas, their “modernization,” particularly with educated and employed women in the household, meant that household work was too much of a burden for the Brahmin wife and mother to handle. Bahujan labour was and is an indispensable way through which the feminist “independence” of working Brahmin women like my mother and grandmother has been enabled.
In fact, I believe the entire relationship between the Brahmin mistress and her Bahujan maid needs to be deconstructed, re-examined with regards to the tropes of benevolent employer, good/bad worker, and the didi-bai referentiality. The dependency structure between the Brahmin woman managing the household and her hired help (usually Bahujan) is a conversation that causes great tension when I bring it up among my family members. No amount of consistent critique makes the proudly “independent” women in my family concede that the system of hiring maids is an exploitative structure, and in fact, it’s the converse. The Brahmin women in my family will double down to demonstrate how much our maids have been a member of our family, how much they (and their families) have benefited from being employed in a (Brahmin) household like ours, and how a maid is actually fortunate to be working in such a benevolent and kind (Brahmin) household.
My particular objection has been with the emotionalization of the mistress-maid relationship, the kind of pressures this puts on the Bahujan maid working in a Brahmin household, and the way it provides a redemptive façade for the Brahmin mistress to alleviate her guilt at the exploitative framework of employing maids and servants. This last point is of particular significance to me, as I believe the Brahmin woman is fully aware that she is using emotional ploys to extort extra unpaid labour out of her maid — that extra help during Diwali, or during that intense spring-cleaning, or during a family function, or when an old family member is sick/infirm. However, Brahminical ideology trains these women into a second-order epistemology of ignorance as I have mentioned before:
… negating the humanity of Dalit-Bahujans, as well as subordinating female Brahmin will to the larger male Brahmin project.
This larger Brahmin Project involves creating a continual epistemology of ignorance by both male and female Brahmins, but its patriarchal wing strategically demands ignorance by the Brahmin woman about the nature of Bahujan exploitation within their own household, subduing any sympathy or compassion for their own benefit.
In this essay, I want to talk about how the Brahmin imagination tries to reconcile its distaste for Bahujan labour by conjuring up condescending images and narratives of the Bahujan maid’s personhood in the media, through the aforementioned epistemology of ignorance. I focus on the female maid more than male Bahujan help here, because I think there are more intricate and casteist sets of interactions between women, for whom their gendered subjugations should create sisterhood, but instead tends to reify caste hierarchies. These exploitative relationships are represented in the media as awkward, humorous interactions, a can’t-live-with-her-can’t-live-without-her dynamic that trivializes the structure of caste.
But these media narratives also trivialize how “modern” (a.k.a. casteless) Brahmin women often use their power over the maid as ways of negotiating patriarchy with Brahmin men and articulate it as feminist empowerment. The Bahujan maid becomes the recipient of the upper-caste woman’s abuse/exploitation as an expression of the latter’s vulnerability in handling Brahminical male authority. The Brahmin woman’s subordinated status within her own household affords her only one outlet where she can assert her own form of authority— the Bahujan hired help. And this authority takes on a devious method, the forging of an emotional bond with the Bahujan maid that strategically uses affective ploys to extract surplus labour.
These dynamics of caste labour, emotional labour, and patriarchy I believe have presented “modern” Brahmins with some deep anxieties. How to reconcile the “unclean” maid in one’s “clean” household? How to differentiate caste labour when caste discrimination has become politically incorrect? How to forge an emotional bond while offsetting the exploitative elements of this relationship? I think one way this has been narrativized is through the use of humour, and pretending that laughing about the “awkward” situations with maids neutralizes the power balance in the relationship. Comedy has been one arena where the maid has become a consistent figure to ridicule or satirize. Sample these images where the maid is “ironically” shown to be so all-powerful that her employers have to be subservient to her (instead of presumably the converse being the norm).
This seemingly-powerful Bahujan maid has been a figure made all the more notorious in the popular imagination through media, mythology, folklore, and even simple gossip. She is meant to be identified by a series of signifiers in these discourses — her “loud” personality, her nagging ways, her attempts to escape work, her shoddy quality of cleaning/scrubbing when she does work, her audacious insistence on being paid fairly and on time, and her questionable appearance (which can be represented as anything from dark-skinned, badly-dressed, or cheaply accessorized to hypersexualized clothing and body language). Because a Bahujan maid can and does look like any other woman, stereotypes about the Bahujan maid need to cover this range of possibilities. The point is to demonize the Bahujan maid no matter what, as a figure who is dominating, aggressive, and kaamchor or lazy in her work. Never mind that all of those traits are rarely universal, or could ever be attributed to having evolved out of the Bahujan maid’s vulnerability in the caste system.
These stereotypes become all the more pervasive in web comedy videos, particularly by YouTube channels peddling humourous content.
In the above video titled Maid in Heaven by the appropriately titled channel, Shitty Ideas Trending (SIT), working woman Shalini finds herself stranded without a maid, takes time off from her office to do housework, and with the help of a friend desperately makes a checklist for the ideal maid she hopes to hire soon. On the list are qualities such as “personal hygiene,” “reliability,” and “pleasant disposition.” Each of these (among the others I haven’t mentioned here) has specific caste-class connotations that suggest they are markers to differentiate caste and emotional labour. Additionally, Shalini stresses that the maid must be married, but I’ll come to that detail a little later. While Shalini and Bibhooti are not depicted with significant caste markers, it is not a stretch on the imagination to see that Shalini embodies an upper-caste/Savarna habitus and disposition, while Bibhooti, that of the Bahujan working-class.
First, the maid being interviewed first says her name is “Baby,” then clarifies it as “Bibhooti” in a clearly identifiable Bihari dialect. She is thus already marked as Bahujan by this reference to Bihar as well as her non-English- and poor-Hindi-speaking skills. She is then instructed to bathe before coming to work, and to clean, dust, and cook in particular ways. What makes this a revealing bit of media, is that at every point on Shalini’s checklist, Bibhooti is shown to dodge committing to any kind of quality work. When Shalini asks if she can be on time, she asks for a Scooty to ensure that is possible, and then negotiates auto rickshaw money into her salary. When Shalini asks her to dust regularly, she argues that depending on when Shalini will check, the house may still not be clean. When Shalini asks her to shower, she asks if she can do it in their house and Shalini promptly says that will be unnecessary. Significantly, Bibhooti asks for a seemingly exorbitant salary of Rs. 10,000, a monthly salary so outrageous that Shalini’s friend warns her that she seems “over-smart” and “over-friendly.”
The idea of a smart maid in the popular imagination is loaded with all sorts of race-caste overtones. One of my mother’s favourite stories was Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from the Arabian Nights, and her favourite character was actually his slave-maid Morgiana. In the climax of the story, Morgiana kills the forty thieves by pouring hot oil over them and is rewarded by Ali Baba with her freedom. Morgiana’s “smartness” (which was almost always accompanied by sexualized dancing-girl art) was a constant highlight when it was read to me as a child, and as a quality that when harnessed in this “ right way” in favour of the employer was a good skill. In contrast, Hindu scripture has Manthara from the Ramayana who is considered to be so smart/crooked, it is literalized physically through her drooping eyelid and a hunchback (with connotations of lower-caste status). Manthara then goes on to engineer Rama’s exile from Ayodhya for 14 years by poisoning Kaikeyi’s mind. The religious side of my family constantly referred to Manthara with “Vinasha kale viparith buddhi,” (when one’s doom approaches, one’s intelligence becomes perverse) as a form of “over-smartness.” Bibhooti’s “over-smartness” in the above video is therefore representative of this “danger,” and a liability for her Savarna employer. This is proven subsequently when Shalini is shown as letting her maid nap in peace, and making chai for her maid instead of vice-versa. The maid, in her “over-smartness” has made the mistress work in her stead.
Even more significant is Shalini’s insistence that the new maid be married, and her relief at evidence that Bibhooti has a husband and children. The indication is clear that an unmarried maid presents a far bigger threat than mere inefficiency — she is a sexual being, rather a sexual rival for the Brahmin male, and threatens to disrupt the conjugal relationship of the Brahmin-Savarna saab-memsaab. The “sexy maidservant” is a trope that is highly glamourized in India’s mediated imagination. In a 2009 column on Indian men’s sexual fantasies of the bai, feminist journalist Kalpana Sharma unproblematically suggests that the subservient, “nonthreatening , non-competitive” nature of the maidservant is what seals her position as an Indian male sexual fantasy. No analysis of class relations for Kalpana Sharma. Similarly, Bollywood celebrates the sexual availability of the maid with images of the sexy Maharashtrian bai, like this scene in No Entry with Anil Kapoor’s character, desperate to cheat on his wife, lusting after his maid whose body the camera hungrily follows. Or even in low-grade web comedy such as this overdone character of the maid Pari, in a series called Dilli Wali Maid by the YouTube channel Nuteq Entertainment.
The truth is quite the opposite — the maid has always been at physical risk of physical and sexual assault from her employers, particularly the master, the saab, the predatory male head of the household, looking for vulnerable prey.
This has been evidenced in numerous ways, most recently being the maid at Mahagun Moderne in Noida, accusing her employers of illegally locking her up and detaining her that led to domestic workers protesting en masse in the gated community. But the risk of sexual assault for Bahujan maids was spotlighted long ago when Bollywood star Shiney Ahuja was convicted of raping his Bahujan maid. In his defense, his lawyer suggested that as the maid was the lower-caste, being “aggressive” was natural to her, unlike Shiney who was from a “respectable” family. This is clearly relying on the racialized sexual proclivities of Bahujan maids in popular imagination. But these also highlight how the nature of caste exploitation can and does extend into sexual exploitation within the Savarna household.
What is also notable is that the Maid in Heaven video ends with the friend casually stating that a working woman’s relationship with the maid is possibly even more important than her relationship with her husband. This is a claim that gets highlighted in other comedy videos as well. For instance, in the below video by the comedy channel Girliyapa, the scenario staged is that of a memsaab who is having to “break up” with her bai during Diwali. This is dramatized as a traumatic event for both the memsaab and the bai.
There are a number of troubling things about this video. Immediately obvious, is that the maid is racialized with dark skin that is not the actress’ natural skin tone, as a way of signifying lower caste-class status. Second, the relationship of the memsaab with the bai is strongly emotionalized with Shashi addressing her boss as didi, demonstrating the affective façade of the maid-mistress relationship. Third, the video subtly questions the bai’s audacity in sitting on the same chair as her memsaab and attempt to speak ‘cool’ English using phrases like “We were on a break,” and again suggests she is a slacker who is shoddy at her work. Finally, the scene culminates with the memsaab firing her (with no notice) and demanding the house keys back. Losing the bai is an emotional and material loss to her Savarna employer, who sees the maid’s work in other households as a betrayal on the same level as infidelity. The memsaab-bai relationship is dramatized through a hyper-emotionalized analogy of love and betrayal.
The curious question is where does the Brahmin-Savarna male fit into these equations? If the Bahujan maid is irreplaceable for the functioning of the Brahmin household, then in the urban and more “modern” setting, the single Brahmin-Savarna man who no longer resides in the family household still needs to avail Bahujan help. This scenario is illuminated in all its anxieties in the web comedy of Sumukhi Suresh as Parvathi Bai, by the YouTube channel Sanjay Comedy. In these scenes, the single male Sanjay who works at Infosys, hires Parvathi Bai with the input of his current girlfriends at the time. The humourous element is in Parvathi Bai’s “over-smart” machinations in ensuring the Brahmin-Savarna girlfriend has no power over her, and that her own subordinated caste-gender position can be a weapon to “tame” the Brahmin-Savarna male.
In this first sketch, the Savarna girlfriend is already shown as nagging and somewhat irritating to the male. The friction in the romantic relationship between the Brahmin-Savarna male and female is shown as exploited to the hilt by Parvathi Bai. She passes snide comments, is able to slack off on work, and present herself as a sympathetic ear to both parties. However, it is the position of the Brahmin-Savarna male that becomes interesting, as he is often sympathetic to the Bahujan maid over his own girlfriend. This is amplified by the fact of “New Didi” in the second sketch, who as the new girlfriend finds herself playing second fiddle to Parvathi Bai. However, by the end of this sketch, Sanjay has to fire Parvathi Bai because nayee didi didn’t like her. The Bahujan maid is not as valuable as the heterosexual relationship for the unmarried Brahmin-Savarna man.
The contrast between the mistress-maid and the master-maid relationship in these videos cannot be made starker. Unlike the upper-caste mistress and the Bahujan maid whose relationship is emotionalized through female bonding, the Brahmin-Savarna male’s relationship with his maid is shown as unemotional, a ridiculous one-sided manipulation. The male seemingly has no power over his own household, the power being constantly battled between the mistress and the maid. In fact, the implication here is that Sanjay is an un-manly, effeminate and cowardly man because he is constantly manipulated by either class of female. This is quite an amazing feat — to suggest that the Brahmin-Savarna male is in reality powerless, and that this household tussle for power is actually between the Brahmin-Savarna female and the Bahujan maid. Sanjay Comedy takes the mistress-maid relationship to its natural culmination — exonerating the Savarna male from what seems like a petty power-play among women in the household.
These power equations now develop a new language with the conversion of a feudal relationship into a capitalist one. Maid agencies and domestic help services are attempting to “streamline” processes of hiring (and firing) domestic help in ways that consolidate the exploitation of Bahujan help. In October 2015, a maid agency called “Book My Bai” ran into controversy when its ad campaign featured a series of print and web ads with the below slogan and images.
The criticism the company faced on social media was noteworthy in terms of the objectification of the maid. But what mostly went uncommented was that it was the male head of the house offering to purchase the services of the maid to his wife. If the Brahmin-Savarna female is the direct beneficiary of a maid relieving her of mundane household chores, the Brahmin-Savarna male is the indirect beneficiary of both his wife’s free time and attention, as well as of Bahujan labour that sustains a clean and orderly household. The Bahujan maid’s presence in the home is still intended to primarily benefit the male Brahmin householder indirectly through the female Brahmin householder.
Book my Bai ran into further trouble when they opened up religious preferences for maids. The CEO, a Bania named Anupam Sinhal addressed the accusations of communalism, saying,
When we started, we did not have the religion column. However customer demand made us make the change. Customers were calling constantly on the board-line to ask whether that particular maid is hindu or muslim. We dont like it but if someone wants a certain info, we have to provide that.
Enabling customers to discriminately choose a Hindu Savarna or Bahujan maid is justified through this demand-supply logic. Book my Bai’s website allows customers to select religious identity and age as preferences, but the shortlist displaying the maid’s full name also allows potential employers to locate the caste identity of the maid. Maids are thus required to provide a full disclosure of their gendered caste identity as a precondition for working with Book my Bai. However, why not the employers? If capitalism in India was truly neutralizing caste relations, as many proponents of capitalism argue, a Bahujan maid as a client of Book my Bai should have the power of knowledge of the gendered caste identity of her employers. Of course, Book my Bai does not see any need for a two-way disclosure of this sort, indicating the ways in which caste still persists in the master-servant economy. They are instead smoothing the way for easier hiring, firing, and replacing of predominantly Bahujan labour.
Book my Bai has since made a public statement declaring they have put a blanket-ban against Bollywood celebrities using their services, because of a high number of abusive experiences. However, a close reading of their blog post constructs a narrative where it is Bollywood celebrities who are presented as lousy and abusive, not the entire system of master-servant caste relations itself as lousy and abusive. It should be perfectly obvious by now that the very premise of gendered caste-labour creates the perfect scenario for abuse to take place, with Bahujan maids having no support structures in place to protect them — and how can it protect them when law and order, bureaucracy, and healthcare are all Brahminical in their design.
In recent times, I have foregone hiring a maid in any capacity in my home as a single woman, much to the chagrin of my family and friends who have to visit and do their own cleanup. This has been bolstered all the more by witnessing the still-feudal behaviour exhibited by extended family with their household help. Recent altercations with an uncle who has been sexually involved with their Bahujan live-in maid — who is an undocumented refugee from Bangladesh — has left me emotionally drained, with few illusions about such a system and the utter vulnerability it forces on servants, particularly Bahujan women. Trying to convince my parents to commit to the same praxis has been impossible however, and I get the same excuses of their old age, social expectations, and their “benevolent” status that should exempt them from criticism.
The excuse of benevolence is one that has to be stringently attacked. A system which underpays and offers little security to workers cannot be construed as benevolent when employers are willing to occasionally gift things to maids, or come to their financial assistance in emergencies. A radical overhaul of the caste-capitalist economy in India is the need of the hour, and that can only happen with an annihilation of caste and with Brahmins having to wash their own dirty clothes. Till then, we can try to critically hold our media and its representations of Bahujan maids and domestic accountable. And at the very least, stop laughing at distorted caricatures.
Note: The politics/thought process of this essay was triggered by Amba Azaad’s excellent Twitter thread on emotional labour and unequal relationships which was in the context of Savarnas and Bahujan workers in my head, and I am indebted to her analysis of caste, race, and gender power relations.
