Abstract
The voyages of worker-passengers, including 24:7 nannies, have long needed exploration in maritime historiography. These peoples’ economic nexus was as labourers for the private employers who paid their fares (as opposed to being employees of shipping lines, such as bo’suns). This status meant that the ocean passages of overlooked valets, nurses, bearers and nannies had many cultural spin-offs, which help us see seagoers of all sorts in a nuanced way. Arunima Datta’s new work on ayahs will help towards building an inclusive picture of shipboard and port diversity.
Travelling ayahs (South Asian nannies) were not the largest group of such worker-passengers – probably white maids were. Not white, not male and not in ‘technical’ jobs, ayahs were mobile ‘native’ domestic caregivers who are worth studying because they had unusual mobility for people of their gender and background. They were statistically significant and visible as Othered, but not alarming. A P&O steamer without an ayah would be ‘[a]s distracted as Piccadilly without Policemen’, claimed the Madras Weekly Mail in 1902 (34; other carriers were the British India Steam Navigation, Henderson, City, Clan and Bibby lines).
Datta shows that these passengers’ reason for travelling was to deliver round-the-clock childcare afloat for British families going to and from India (children’s hostesses had not yet been introduced, let alone bouncy castles and safety rails). Some ayahs travelled solo as surrogate mothers for ex-pat children, especially orphans. They did so bearing the surname of their employer, such as Ayah Churchill, not Pemkit Lepchani, and temporarily annexing the margins first class accomodation, usually. And some travelled back alone, usually deck class and under their own name. Few settled.
Datta has written a thorough and scholarly but accessible book on the history of these travelling ayahs arriving in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Necessarily, this path-breaking study includes a significant chapter about their voyages, although this is not a maritime history work.
The six chapters cover the following: ayahs defined and understood as mobile supports to the Empire; ayahs as visiting workers who waited in the heart of the Empire between contracts; and, finally, ayahs as creative people who developed resilience in the crises they faced abroad. Datta helps us sees ayahs as travellers who actively capitalized on the wait. They were not gendered units trapped like enslaved people going from West Africa to the Caribbean or like indentured Indian labourers headed for Guyanese canefields. Datta is keen to claim ayahs’ agency, their non-passivity.
An excellent appendix of over 124 pages (named ‘Profiles of Travelling Ayahs’) offers illustrated micro-biographies based on individuals’ applications for passports from 1932 to 1940. The index is impressively conceptualized but, puzzlingly, has an entire category missing: the names of the ayahs’ employers. This means that many individual ayahs are not mentioned (the majority were only known by their employers’ surnames – say, Ayah Evens or Ayah Wilson). This will not help genealogists’ searches. Nevertheless, Waiting on Empire is an ideal starting place to look for pictures; it includes far more images than any other work on ayahs.
Datta’s celebratory central contention is that ayahs waited – for the next ship, the next employer, or redress over breached contracts – but responded actively, creatively, and with agency and resilience. This is a revisionist perspective that upends the more common view of ayahs as often tragic casualties of Empire. Such a determinedly positive interpretation feels at odds with current escalating maritime industry concern about human rights abuses at sea such as rape on cruises. Today, it is recognized that voyages can bring cultural problems that require systemic redressing, rather than praise for resilient coping responses by individuals.
The trouble for historiography is that the available evidence about historic ayahs is so sparse. Ayahs’ own voices are largely absent. Instead, much of our understanding is built on fragments from surveilling authorities’ welfare-minded reports, augmented by blithe words from passengers who gazed upon ayahs as colourful picaresque figures in the landscape. It is ironic that – because ayahs were part of the gender seen as deserving chivalrous protection – the lack of protection available to them is far better recorded than the protection of males afloat such as lascars.
Datta’s knowledge of castes, language and religion adds richness to her research in archives in New Delhi and Kolkata, as well as the usual India Office sources in London. I particularly appreciated her explanation of the connection between official concern that all ayahs should be ‘helped’ to go back to India and the earlier East India Company practice of charging a mandatory deposit so that newly arrived ‘natives’ would not stay and be a drain on British resources, or expect free return passages.
Datta alludes to examples of the different relationships that were possible between the ayahs, crew, officers and employing families. She could have created more clarity by analysing the many factors that determined such transactions, such as the differences between confident ayahs, who were used to ships and handling Brits, and newer ayahs, who were overwhelmed by these intense sites of British India values and by up-close power relations with employers who were themselves coping with dislocation, or between ayahs who had been embedded for years in a family now on the move and those just working a one-off contract with strangers, as well as their linguistic skills, their physical tolerance of the ship’s motion, the actual voyage conditions and agreement about who had the final say in disciplining wayward children.
Some use of concepts such as total institutions (Erving Goffman) and heterotopias (Michel Foucault) would have helped us understand the scaffolding for ayahs’ shipboard emotions. Ayahs were both inmates and ‘micro-warders’ (of their employers’ children). But also they were themselves hegemonically controlled by ‘macro-warders’ under the captain and purser, as well as by disturbingly proximate memsahibs. As a voyage to the British metropole proceeded, we can imagine that new ayahs might become progressively more Othered and uncertain within the disturbing Otherness of a ship underway, a floating part of Imperial India unevenly blended with a convenient figuration of ‘home’.
Should maritime historians read Waiting on Empire? Yes, and respond to it with knowledge of shipboard sociology. Many readers will find that the book sits usefully with the proliferation of recent work on ayahs. 1 This work is far bigger than a book on South Asian labour history or women’s maritime history. It is a nuanced, wide-ranging account of imperial travel that interfaces with circular migration history as well as with mobility’s impact on the traveller’s body, including inhumanity and travel rage. To understand its significance, think of Marcus Rediker’s scope rather than Eric Sager’s focus, of Ruth Arlie Hochschild’s path-breaking discussion of flight attendants’ emotion work, and of studies of ‘coolie’ women’s shipboard survival strategies by Gaiutra Bahadu, Verene A. Shepherd and Datta herself. 2
Waiting on Empire is a crucial introduction to the field, not least because it implicitly points out that what happens to passengers in ports is relevant to the intervening voyage. Datta productively ‘extends’ the sea’s margins and the ship’s ‘walls’. She puts intersectionality in the maritime picture.
