Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India

Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere.

This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.

Author: Raka Ray, Seemin Qayum
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 02/27/2009
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780804760720

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 05/22/2009 pg. 16
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2010 pg. 118

About the Author
Raka Ray is Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies, Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, and Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (1999). Seemin Qayum is a historical anthropologist and the author and editor of several works on nationalism, elites, and gender in modern Bolivia.

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