Paid Domestic Work and Temporal organisation of Households in the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern India.

Abstract

The paper proposes a shift of focus from historical studies on paid domestic work,
primarily exploring the conditions of employment and the nature of relationships (wage
and aEective), to how these work arrangements also linked households of diEerent
kinds and the temporal implications of such connections. The attempt here is to explore
how service was historically shaped by market institutions (wage labour market) and
mobility practices (migration) and how the subsequent expansion of this sector (waged
domestic work) fundamentally conditioned the emerging temporal organisation of
households in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Further, a shift from a
predominantly full-time domestic servant to more part-time workers also had a bearing
on the changing temporal organisation of households, and the growing proliferation of
technology further impacted the nature and organisation of household work and its time
management.
The paper will develop these arguments using a microhistorical approach. Here, I
intend to reconstruct the partial life trajectories of domestic servants from the late 19th
and early 20th centuries to carefully sketch the social context and networks in which
they lived and worked.