Aga Ahmed Hussain Week 7

Sonal Sharma in her article, “Of Rasoi ka Kaam/Bathroom ka Kaam Perspectives of Women Domestic Worker”, writes about how the relationship between an employer and employee when it comes to domestic labour. There is a sense of pure and dirty which are also implications of the caste and class segregations. Therefore, there exists an intersectionality to this where gender, class, caste and religion play a part. The author uses the perspective of Delhi domestic workers to show how these spaces work. She shows how only a certain group of people are given domestic labour work but turns out this selection of people is not done by the employers as such rather it is done by employees. Only a certain caste or class of workers work as domestic workers while the rest, even if from a lower strata or caste, will disassociate from it because they believe that housework is for the other lower castes. The resources available to them, the way they speak, walk and dress all distinguishes the domestic labour from the other lower castes. The employees also deem some households as clean and unclean; for example, working in for a Muslim household by a Hindu worker is considered working in an unclean house. The workers themselves have made stereotypes on considering what is clean and what is polluted. Thus, we understand how stereotypes are not only created by the employers for the employees but also by the employees themselves. This social hierarchy created among the workers themselves show the want of one group to be considered cleaner or less polluted than the other which leads to assertion of power and status of one class of individuals from the other.