In the early 1900s, elite Indian families started employing the ayah as a symbol of domestic modernity. Chapter 6 shows how the ayah’s intimate labor enabled the emergence of the “modern” Indian wife, who left the multigenerational joint family to live with her conjugal family. Deploying Aryan race theories, “upper”-caste Hindu, Muslim, and Parsis racialized their “low”-caste, “low”-class, and “tribal” ayahs. The racialized mistress–maid relationship was transposed to ancient Indian history, when fair-skinned Aryan invaders (supposed ancestors of “upper” castes) enslaved dark-skinned indigenous Dasas/Dasis (supposed ancestors of “low”-caste servants). South Asian elites sentimentalized the ayah, just like the British did. However, newspapers and official archives reveal cases of Indian elites financially and sexually abusing their ayahs. Some elite Indians took ayahs to Britain and abandoned them, just like British families did. Despite growing anti-colonial nationalism, Indian elite nationalists forged transracial alliances with British employers in India and repeatedly blocked legislation that sought to empower domestic servants and make employers accountable.

The book concludes with a summary of the domestic and moral labors of the ayah from the mid 1700s to the mid 1900s. The Conclusion explores the transformation of the ayah’s role from a child’s nurse and ladies’ maid in the colonial era to elder-care and patient-care responsibilities in contemporary India. More broadly, the Conclusion traces the nonregulation of domestic labor from colonial capitalism to today’s neoliberal capitalism and its impact on the lives of India’s care workers and domestic workers, who form the largest section of the informal female workforce. Finally, the Conclusion discusses how the increasing gig-ification of domestic labor, the rise of digital platforms and placement agencies, and increased mobility of domestic workers serving elite urban and transnational Indian families, has increased the precarity of South Asian care workers and domestic workers in recent years.

Chapter 4 argues that colonial science medically legitimized and naturalized the care labor of “hardy” South Asian women for “frail” British women, whose white bodies were believed to be debilitated in the tropics. Colonial medics’ race and class anxieties towards brown nursemaids were couched in the scientific language of hygiene. South Asian Brahminical notions of casteism also shaped British medical discourse, making British employers reluctant to employ “low”-caste ayahs and amahs. Bodily anxieties in the imperial home, however, were not experienced by British employers alone. “High”-caste Indian maidservants – sought-after by the British – feared loss of caste purity for working in close proximity to casteless British bodies and for consuming food from the impure British kitchen, and demanded compensation for their caste loss. Despite the tensions of race and caste, British families in remote areas desperately depended on the healing knowledge of their Indian servants. Although British biomedicine marginalized South Asian medical epistemologies (Ayurveda, Unani) as unscientific, Indian nursemaids continued to bring local magico-medical knowledge into the British imperial home.