Broken Biographies: framing Migration among Female Domestic Workers in India

ABSTRACT Domestic work has emerged as a widespread occupation amongst rural women migrating to urban cities in India for lucrative employment. Their accommodation is fraught with a challenging adjustment to the city as a space which is unfamiliar and isolating. I focus on the nature of the city and how migrants re-define it. Through this article I try to delineate the interrupted lives, or rather, the broken biography of the female worker as migrations from rural to urban areas create socio-cultural disruptions to her story. I postulate this disorienting exposure to an unfamiliar urban setting as an important requisite in situating her labour in middle/upper-class homes. Paid domestic work has commonly been understood as extensions of unpaid housework. She is familiarized into doing tasks by her urban employers. This familiarization however, at an ideological level, rhetorically questions female domesticity as she is re-trained into gendered roles that society has historically believed to be hers. Ethnographic research conducted at Jeevanlalbasti/working-class neighbourhood, located in an urban residential area of south Delhi, attests to this. Oral history as a methodological tool has allowed this study to account for upheavals experienced in social lives and interpret local histories of migrant domestic workers.