Colonial Caregivers

Satya Shikha Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. She has published award-winning articles on the history of Indian ayahs in Britain and European governesses in Indian princely households.

• Acknowledgements; List of figures; Introduction: the Ayah archetype; 1. Queer intimacy, domestic slavery, and inter-racial sex in Mughal India: British imperial morality and the creation of the desexualized Indian Ayah; 2. Christianity, colonial uprisings, and colonial law: rescue and romanticization of the Ayah; 3. Mobility and precarity: South Asian Ayahs in Britain; 4. Race and caste anxieties: colonial medical naturalization of the care-labor of Ayahs and Amahs; 5. Fairy tales, letters, petitions: Ayahs' voices in colonial archives; 6. South Asian elites and domestic modernity: racialization of caste and sentimentalization of the colonial Ayah; Conclusion: Postcolonial legacies; Selected bibliography; Index.

'A timely intervention in the growing scholarship on the politics and economics of care and the ethics of caregiving, Colonial Caregivers' rigorous recovery of the ubiquitous but occluded figure of the ayah is an exemplary demonstration of the power of decolonial and feminist historical labor and writing.' Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University