Indira Singh, Week 7

Of Rasoi Ka Kaam/Bathroom Ka Kaam

Perspective of Women Domestic Workers

Summary

Practices of purity and pollution have been a critical area of inquiry in paid domestic work relations in India. This paper revisits the idea of purity and pollution in the space of the home in paid domestic work, but with the intent to turn the gaze around. It shifts the focus by looking at workers as the subjects and examining their responses. It argues that the existing frameworks for looking at the space of home and the practices of purity and pollution are limiting and have to be revisited to develop a dynamic understanding of the everyday reality of domestic work and caste hierarchies at work. Domestic Work in India has done much to highlight practices of purity and pollution as an aspect governing relations between employer and worker. Here, the employer being the origin or the “doer” of the practice and worker as passive objects, always at the receiving ends of these practices. It is narrative that assumes congruence between class and caste, imagining the world in which the employer is always upper caste and the worker always lower caste.

Caste finds mention in two distinct ways in contemporary discourse on paid domestic work in India: first, domestic workers’ and employers’ caste, as an identity, becomes important to understand the organisation of work. The symbolic practices, of segregating “dirty” from the clean, on the basis of “hygiene” or “pollution,” are key to the social construction of space. Practices of segregation by middle class employers in their household space in the name of privacy, hygiene, pollution and intimacy, shed light on some of the ways in which boundaries of “home” and “outside” are (re)drawn. These are responses to the intimate interactions of otherwise two distant social classes who tend to inhabit different social and physical spaces.

In this paper, workers’ narratives that reflect caste-based practices of purity/pollution are thematically arranged in two categories: the first section explores the practices of caste and enquires about the increasing specialisation/segregation of tasks under the dominant arrangement of part-time work, and  the second section examines workers’ perceptions about their employers and the household space that they work in. It is not just employers who identify workers based on their caste and function through popularly held notions of purity/pollution: often, workers themselves practise untouchability towards employers.