Dr. Swapna Banerjee is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
This presentation is an exploration of the visual ethnography of care focusing on pictorial representations of ayahs from the late 18th to the early 20th century. Through selected paintings and a passport picture, Professor Banerjee will elucidate the ubiquity and indispensability of native female workers in Anglo-Indian life. While scholars have deliberated on specific images of ayahs in visual arts, this presentation will highlight the multiple “ways of seeing” (Berger) these women by the foreign employers. Going beyond questions of agency (Chakraborty 2024; Datta 2023) which the ayahs surely wielded, the presentation highlights the contexts that conditioned the depiction of gender and labor in interracial employer-servant relationships. It argues that with the expansion of British power from the Company Raj (ca. 1757-1858) to Crown rule (1858-1947), the documentation of native caregivers also evolved. The visual depictions of ayahs demonstrate that they were not "ordinary" servants but were "subjects" without whose labor and care the empire could not have thrived.
The series is supported by the Department of History, the Mershon Center, the South Asian Studies Initiative, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
