Over two decades post-millennium, Indian cities, and suburbs have increasingly grown to become sites of the socio-economic and political advancements. These cities have been propelling the service and knowledge economy of the country. Among other things, Indian cities are the sites of real estate development, policy experiments on public-private partnerships, increasing disinvestments in public services, and large scale removal of low-income working-class areas. A noticeable outcome of this has been the emergence of the new urban Indian ‘middle class’. As a sociological category, this middle class is a result of India’s relatively new relationship with the global economy in both cultural (socio-symbolic practices of commodity consumption) and economic terms (beneficiaries of skilled employment in the liberal economy).
While the middle class characterizes itself with access to and privilege of private English education and work opportunities in higher positions of government and private employment sectors, there is another aspect to it. All middle-class households are dependent on external help for their day to day running. This help predominantly comes from the informal sector of urban poor residing in the slums of the same cities. Society or colony guards, sanitation workers, housemaids, milk and vegetable sellers, newspaper distributors, car washers, delivery boys – the list of these people who are vital to sustaining the middle-class everyday life is endless. The present article largely limits itself to a discussion of housemaids or domestic helpers based on personal experiences and observations of the authors. Domestic workers in India are largely women belonging to low income urban poor families, often subjected to exploitation at home as well as their workplace. The abuse is so normalized that a lot of them do not even question it.
The mechanisms for differentiation, segregation, and ramification for violations have always been there for maids. Bourgeois environmentalism (Baviskar, 2003) and ‘nuisance talk’ (Ghertner, 2012) engaged in by the Indian urban middle class which is the reason for the displacement of thousands of urban poor in the national capital comes into play even when these people come for informal employment in these gated communities.
In upscale localities of the Delhi and its surrounding areas in NCR, separate lifts, lack of decent seating areas, lack of communal toilet facilities, etc. have been part and parcel of everyday lives of maids. Even inside flats, employers often keep separate utensils for maids or make them sit on the floor instead of any furniture citing hygiene as the primary reason. The practice is widespread to the extent that a popular home appliance company recently marketed its dough maker by advertising it as more hygienic and disease-free than a maid’s hand.[i] Further, pay-cuts are seen as a legitimate and acceptable consequence for unforeseen or unannounced leaves which are mostly due to illness.
The nationwide lockdown and the subsequent unlocking has given Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) of urban societies a free rein to legitimize these practices with brainstorming sessions on WhatsApp groups and public notices with elaborate instructions for segregation – all in the name of safety, hygiene and the greater good of residents.
In such circumstances, it is hard to miss the caste-class dynamics that come out in urban India. For instance, in the suburban middle-class localities of NCR, the human face of the lockdown was the thousands of maids who lost their jobs and income overnight. These people were the backbone of the comfortable homes in high rise apartments inhabited by government and corporate employees, largely dominant castes. These apartments are inhabited by owners and tenants, all sharing more or less the same socioeconomic background. They lead more than comfortable lifestyles with personal cars (and people to wash those cars before they leave for work), access to 24 hour supply of water and electricity (also, park, swimming pool, gyms, and recreational clubs), affordability for movies and dining out every weekend, financial appetite for extravagant holidays more commonly called wanderlust, so on and so forth. While the lockdown has stopped these ventures, it has not stopped them from consuming extra resources and conspicuously so, courtesy of social media. However, a considerable number of these very people have failed to pay their maids since March. The people who often form the RWAs in these plush apartment complexes and gated societies, on the other hand, have made rules for the return of the maids due to unlocking. There are elaborate lists whichstate that if maids are to return to work, they cannot use lifts, they must sign declaration forms, their temperatures must be checked at gates, they must be sanitized and kept at bay at all times.
This is a classic case of the poor and marginalized taking over the burden of the progressive liberal middle class. While regulating the new normal, it is forgotten that the maids and people of low-income groups were not the ones who brought the disease into the country. They were not the ones who went to Europe for vacation or to UAE or US for business. They do not have the means or resources to study, teach, or work in the first world countries. It was urban India that failed to maintain the hygiene that is now so dear to them. The maids and other workers form convenient scapegoats to give the middle class its tokenism for action. There have been instances where families have kicked out their full-time maids with no means, just because they tested positive, even though in all likelihood, they contracted the disease from a member of the same family.
Security guards, who cannot be dismissed but must be shown their place, are yet another category of urban poor who have been blamed for “bringing the virus inside the colony”. In localities where residents can resort to assaulting white collared essential workers like airline pilots and crew or doctors, it is a matter of concern how the blue collared workers who have no social or economic capital would be treated.
The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown has brought out the best and the worst of humankind out in the open; sadly, more of the former. Be it migrant workers dying of hunger, thirst, and sheer exhaustion from walking back to their villages; be it frontline workers like doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and airline crew being assaulted and evicted from their homes – the ideas of humanity or humane have collapsed. The upwardly mobile Indian middle class and privileged political and social elite have shown collective deafness and blindness, except for when they were called on to play with utensils and light candles (and crackers) to post on social media. People are donating to PM-CARES, maybe more for tax exemptions than charity; a minute number of the rich and famous are trying to provide aid to those in need, but a large chunk of all aids, initiatives, and ventures, remains impersonal, inaccessible and without much accountability. These unprecedented times have exposed phenomenal ruptures in humanity.
References:
Baviskar, A. (2003). Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi.
Ghertner, D. A. (2012). Nuisance talk and the propriety of property: middle-class discourses of a slum‐free Delhi. Antipode, 44(4), 1161-1187.
[i] https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/why-the-outrage-over-kent-ad-it-spoke-the-truth-before-apologising/431029/, accessed on 9th June 2020.
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Shreya Urvashi is a doctoral scholar in the Centre for Studies in Sociology of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. Ushosee Pal is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), New Delhi.