Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal

Salvaging information from the autobiographical narratives of middle-class men and women this paper explores an important aspect of employer-servant relationships in predominantly Hindu middle class families of colonial Bengal. The essay focuses on a selective sample of Bengali autobiographical writings by both the male and female members of the bhadralok population that describe the "strength"and "authority"of servants within colonial families. By juxtaposing the childhood recollections of male writers with women's experiences of personal interactions with domestic workers, the paper documents how the dominant actors viewed, constructed, and maintained employer-servant relationships on a basis of difference and "otherness"through the simultaneously nurturing and oppressive aspects of familial ties. It probes the basis of the emotionality and sentiments that turned servants into "important"actors and points out the politics that lay behind such representations. Questioning the employers' memories that mediated the representations of the domestics the paper investigates not only how domestic workers were represented but what justified a particular kind of representation by male and female writers. The attempt of the paper is to demonstrate how the employer-servant relationship acted as a site of articulating Bengali middle-class cultural identity. (190 words)