Attachment, Aspiration, and Inequality in Domestic Labour in India

Anindita Chatterjee is Visiting Professor at Ashoka University (Delhi, India) in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She is affiliated with BRAC University. Prior to joining Ashoka, Chatterjee has held academic appointments in Bangladesh, American University of Sharjah (UAE), and Symbiosis International University (India). She has held postdoctoral fellowship at Max Weber Stiftung IBO (New Delhi) and was a Postdoctoral Research Consultant with Sarah Lamb (Brandeis University) on Dr. Lamb’s Andrew Carnegie Fellowship project on ‘Successful Aging’s Global Moment: Visions and Dilemmas of Aging Well’. Her research and teaching engage with the fields of globalization, labour, migration, structural inequality, ethics and culture, gender and sexuality, reproductive health, ageing, and well-being. Chatterjee has presented her research findings at multiple international and national conferences over the past 16 years, and she also has a record of producing collaborative research with an international network of scholars.

"Anindita Chatterjee has written an in-depth description of domestic workers’ lives in Kolkata, Noida and Delhi. There are ties that bind all of them, yet each woman has her singular relationship to aspirations, work, family and space. The chapters are well written, rich in terms of conversation between ethnographer and her interlocutors. Using in depth ethnographic research that spanned over four years, the author demonstrates her participation in women workers’ quotidian lives, meeting them in their homes, in tea shops, and in the households where they work. Overall, it is well-written and gives a window into the aspirations of these women. This will be an important book for college students learning about the aspirational lives of women in domestic work."-- Lamia Karim , Professor of anthropology, University of Oregon, and author of 'Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love Among Garment Workers in Bangladesh.'"Based on six years of ethnographic research, and grounded in the author’s own early encounters with domestic workers, this illuminating book explores domestic labour as a deeply intimate yet unequal relationship in contemporary India. It shows how affection, kin-like attachment, and care coexist with structural inequality, compulsion, and exclusion. Attending to women workers’ and employers’ everyday emotional lives, the book reveals how class and respectability are reproduced through ordinary interactions. Attachment, Aspiration, and Inequality in Domestic Labour in India offers a compelling account of how love and labour intertwine."-- Sarah Lamb, author of 'Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion and Possibility and White Saris' and 'Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in India', and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University. "This is a compelling and insightful book that examines the forms of “domestic attachments” forged by domestic workers across diverse contexts in South Asia. The author demonstrates an impressive command of the relevant literature, and the ethnographic material is both rich and highly engaging. The book offers a nuanced and original lens through which to understand domestic labour relations, using the concept of attachment as a prism to analyse the intersections of gender, class, and ethnic inequalities within the household. The empirical material is both distinctive and complex, and the overall scholarship is of an exceptionally high standard."--Alessandra Mezzadri, Professor, Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London

• 1 Introduction2 Affective Attachments and Embodied Labour: Kolkata and Delhi3 English as an Aspirational Mechanism for Migrant Domestic Workers: Social Mobility, Inequality, and Language4 Construction, Negotiation, and Articulation on Class Among Domestic Workers and Employers: Living Within Boundaries5 Patterns of Exclusion Among Female Migrant Domestic Workers: Uneasy Coexistence6 Embodied Gender Inequality Among Migrant Domestic Workers: Exhausted Bodies and Suppressed Desire7 Narrative Accounts of Women’s Working Conditions in Bangladesh: Cross-Border Migration 8 Conclusion