“How crazy is your maid?” Domestic workers in the “new India”

Abstract

India is celebrated as one of the largest emerging economies but domestic workers remain a large workforce that is unorganized and exploited. As the figure of the “maid” changes in contemporary popular culture, how do more elite, middle-class employers understand domestic workers in the “new India?” This article draws on inter-textual discussions on social media platforms such as Quora and Twitter where most discussants are urban, class and caste privileged, and display Hindu nationalist identities. It examines representation of recent conflicts at large condominium complexes to argue that new infrastructure projects become a crucial terrain on which class, caste and religion-based struggles are mapped, Second, it focuses on popular narratives of “entrepreneurship” for domestic workers and argues that these narratives worsen structural inequities. Finally, it studies new technology as a means of creating inclusion for domestic workers that serve to further mark them by class, caste and other marginalized identities.