reluctant dependencies

“Uh Oh... only one thing is worse than bad maid: No Maid!

All the best in the quest for a new maid.”¹⁴⁹

The quote from a 2009 internet discussion between anonymous In-dian women about their maids is a response from a fellow-employer to a woman whose female cook had resigned after she had called the food bad. As an articulation of the mutual but asymmetrical reliance of employers and domestic workers on one another previous studies have used the terms ‘mutual dependencies’ (Dickey 2000a) or ‘pre-carious dependencies’ (Gill 1994, quoted in Shah 2000). I propose to describe the relationship ‘reluctant dependency’, since it is a depend-ency neither side really wants.

Employers of both part-time and live-in workers, as well as both wage working women and housewives, emphasised their depend-ency on the workers. As the quote above emphasises, the employers’

149 http://orangeicecandy.blogspot.com/2009/03/who-moved-my-paneer.html

dependency is most clearly manifested when a worker is absent be-cause of the live-in workers’ biannual vacation or bebe-cause of disrup-tion of the labour reladisrup-tion. Such disrupdisrup-tion is often very stressful for employers. A couple of women said that doing the maids’ work for some time is not a problem, but others complained of great difficul-ties while they found a new worker. For example, Swati, a housewive, described the prolongation of her maid’s initial one-week vacation to several months as a “very heavy” period in her life. Since middle class women, especially the wealthiest, are not used to manual work, they seem to find even light tasks arduous.

Another woman repeatedly told about the difficulties she had faced since her cook had gone to Nepal for a month, which coincided with the visit of a sick relative for one and half weeks. Her discomfort seemed to grow day by day to the point of exasperation, aggravated by the unexpected resignation of her other live-in worker, responsi-ble for everything else, half way through this period.

Domestic workers are particularly important for young daugh-ters-in-law in joint middle class families, still common in Jaipur de-spite the increase in nuclear families in India (see Agarwal 2000, 56).

Upon entering the in-laws’ house, the bulk of the responsibility for domestic work shifts to the daughters-in-law, even if overall control remains with the mother-in-law.

One recently married young woman who had moved to her sas-ural (the in-laws home), compared the relatively carefree life in her original home and her new situation. There had been several domes-tic workers in her upper middle class natal home and her mother had the main responsibility for cooking. Now she had several responsi-bilities, including the meals. When I last met her, she was exhausted because the live-in cook had been on his biannual leave for about a week. She almost burst into tears while explaining that the cook would not come back for three more weeks. This meant that she had to wake up to prepare the breakfast for her husband and in-laws at 6 a.m., and to prepare all the other dishes as well. The shock of the new

responsibility was evident when she complained that life had become a burden and despairingly sighed: “Work, work, nothing but work”.¹⁵⁰ Yet this family employed not only a live-in cook but also part-time workers, which shows how demanding the homely tasks are. Her desperation also reflects the link between women’s sense of power and their position within the relational network of the family (see Tiengtrakul 2006, 44). The workers they employed served as a status symbol, but they also served a very real utilitarian purpose by saving the poor daughter-in-law much time.

To my question as to which is more dependent on the other – the workers or the employers – employers invariably responded by say-ing that it was they, sometimes accompanied by a warm laugh or a humorous comment. Shanti, the working woman, elaborated:

I think I’m more dependent (laughs). What I feel is that I’m really depend-ent. Sometimes I feel that my key is in their hands. Sometimes, like, the last woman will come with the message that she’s not turning up so it becomes so difficult for me and sometimes my programme I have to, I mean, coordi-nate with their programme. So I have to negotiate my programme accord-ingly, like my bai has gone on leave so I had to negotiate my programme with her leave. “I don’t know, as long as my bai is not there so I won’t be able to come to do this or that”. So I am a bit controlled by them, that’s what I can say.

The offhand and humorous manner with which Shanti refers to her dependency also seems to include the recognition that ultimately the workers depend on her even more. While employers and work-ers alike said that each depends on the other, the workwork-ers’ depend-ency is of a different kind, as their everyday survival depends on the income from the work.¹⁵¹ But part-time workers’ dependency today

150 In Hyderabad, Säävälä (2010, 53) found that daughter-in-laws who entered a family through a love marriage, and without a dowry, were made to do excessive house work compared to those who entered a family through arranged marriages along with a dowry.

151 An interesting angle on the question of dependency is provided in Kidder’s (2000) analysis of her own experiences as expatriate employer in Delhi, where

is, perhaps, above anything else economic. Workers were also aware of their employers’ sense of dependency. Punam, one working girl, mentioned that if she had to take some time off due to a funeral or wedding, employers manage, but “only with great difficulty”. The sense of being dependent makes employers uncomfortable, even resentful.

As Shanti continued: “What I feel is that whatever way you treat them, they never feel that they are treated well, they always feel that, they always try to take advantage of your situation.”

These comments show that working women cannot rely on their husbands to participate in house work even in the workers’ absence.

However, a few women emphasised that they want to raise their sons to behave differently and to start taking part in household work. One employer, a working woman, proudly told me of her son’s ability to prepare tea or to make an omelette if need be, not to mention the extraordinary fact that he once cleaned the floor when the maid was absent and she herself had to leave to work early in the morning:

“Can you imagine, my son did the sweeping and mopping.”

Previous studies have discussed the question of children who grow up with workers to serve them (see Froystad 2003). Although all children of those who employ several workers in Jaipur generally do little housework, the gender difference in the socialisation into domestic tasks was evident. Girls participated in several activities, es-pecially cooking, but boys did not.