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Waiting on Empire
A History of Indian Travelling
Ayahs in Britain
A RU N I M A DAT TA
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For the brave travelling ayahs and their enduring spirits
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Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Introduction: Mobile Caregivers for the Empire
xix
xxv
1
1. Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire:
Historical and Contextual Background
17
2. Waiting in the Heart of Empire: Abandoned Travelling Ayahs
and the Contradictions of a Liberal Empire
45
3. Creative Resilience in Crisis: Making Arguments and Evoking
Sympathy65
4. Capitalizing on Waiting: Creative Use of Time by Travelling Ayahs
83
5. Travelling Ayahs and Ayahs’ Homes: Humanitarianism, Evangelism,
and Profit98
6. Travellers’ Tales: Negotiating Waiting in Wars and ‘Exotic’ Spaces
125
Conclusion145
Profiles of Travelling Ayahs
Bibliography
Index
153
279
287
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List of Illustrations
1. Advertisements offering the services of Ayahs on hospital walls in Kolkata
xiii
2. Advertisements pasted on various market streets in Kolkata
xiv
3. Traffic of travelling ayahs between India and Britain (1835–1940)
20
4. Children’s Christmas dinner at sea by Godefroy Durand
22
5. Looking after a British baby
23
6. English girl and her Indian nanny or ayah, sailing to England,
watch pet parrot and monkey
24
7. Ports from which travelling ayahs most commonly embarked in India
(1876–1940)25
8. Ports where travelling ayahs most commonly disembarked in Britain
(1876–1940)26
9. Religion of travelling ayahs
26
10. Age groups of travelling ayahs
27
11. Marital status of travelling ayahs
28
12. Motherhood status of travelling ayahs
29
13. Structural plan of a deck on Viceroy of India41
14. Ayahs on streets of Glasgow in 1925
99
15. Nineteenth-­century postcard with an Indian ayah at Edinburgh with
her ‘charges’
100
16. Painting of a travelling ayah named Nasiban (1895)
101
17. Ayahs’ Home sitting room with ayahs (1910)
102
18. Advertisement for the Ayahs’ Home claiming it was self-­supporting, 1885
106
19. Advertisement for the Ayahs’ Home without the phrase ‘self-­supporting’, 1887
107
20. Ayahs’ Home at 26 King Edward Road, London (1900)
108
21. The same building (as in Fig. 20) in 2017
109
22. Ayahs’ Home at 4 King Edward Road (1921)
110
23. The same building (as in Fig. 22) in 2016
111
24. Travelling ayahs with their matron at the Foreigners’ Fete114
25. Ayahs’ Home advertisement, 1890
116
26. British propaganda poster, World War II Indians in Civil Defence
132
27. Mary passport image
155
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xx
List of Illustrations
28. Sarah passport image
156
29. Bril passport image
157
30. Anthony passport image
158
31. Ruth passport image
159
32. Jessiah passport image
160
33. Elizabeth passport image
161
34. Byrhui passport image
162
35. Bhagiramibai passport image
163
36. Amaravathun passport image
164
37. Hari Kala passport image
165
38. Magdaline passport image
166
39. Kajuli passport image
167
40. Haliman passport image
168
41. Sabastiamall passport image
169
42. Santhamam Mary passport image
170
43. Basiran passport image
171
44. Kunshi passport image
172
45. Teresa Johnson passport image
173
46. Niazan passport image
174
47. Annamah passport image
175
48. Saribon passport image
176
49. Arica Mary passport image
177
50. Hajra Begum passport image
178
51. Bhagwanti Natha Singh passport image
179
52. Yeddu Ramannah passport image
180
53. Radhabai Govind Parab passport image
181
54. Anastasia passport image
182
55. Dunamma passport image
183
56. Imelda Emma passport image
184
57. Jethi Lipchany passport image
185
58. Ruth Fancis passport image
186
59. Pasang Dolma passport image
187
60. Elizabeth Munisomey passport image
188
61. Mercy Panjul passport image
189
62. Adil passport image
190
63. Anthony Anmall passport image
191
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List of Illustrations
xxi
64. Uma Bai passport image
192
65. Mary Anthony passport image
193
66. Maili passport image
194
67. Ka Plisimai Kharkongor passport image
195
68. Josephine passport image
196
69. Ruth passport image
197
70. Jatan Bai passport image
198
71. Lachhi passport image
199
72. Antree passport image
200
73. Mary Abaranam passport image
201
74. Bagubhai passport image
202
75. Danamah passport image
203
76. Kanti passport image
204
77. Gracie passport image
205
78. Muthuswami Chinaswami Ruth passport image
206
79. Pochammal passport image
207
80. Saema passport image
208
81. Yellamah passport image
209
82. Ka Krisibon passport image
210
83. Valliamma passport image
211
84. Loorthumarie passport image
212
85. Meenakshi passport image
213
86. Margaret Ernest passport image
214
87. Louisa Thomas passport image
215
88. Arpudamari passport image
216
89. Radhabai passport image
217
90. Thomas Bappoo Thresya passport image
218
91. Bhimmai Khasia passport image
219
92. Shaik Muram Bi passport image
220
93. Adeline Prem Gurdial passport image
221
94. Manoo passport image
222
95. Bali passport image
223
96. Mussamat Nageshar Mariyam Kesho Narain passport image
224
97. Palliyam passport image
225
98. Sukhmon passport image
226
99. Arockiamary passport image
227
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xxii
List of Illustrations
100. Gladys Shilla passport image
228
101. Agnes Dowmony passport image
229
102. Basanti passport image
230
103. Nadran Bibi passport image
231
104. Kanickamary passport image
232
105. Bakiam Mari passport image
233
106. Yessamma passport image
234
107. Teresa Lawn passport image
235
108. Soniya passport image
236
109. Kurmama passport image
237
110. Sita passport image
238
111. Elly passport image
239
112. S. M. Aruldas passport image
240
113. Ammonie Chinnen Ayer passport image
241
114. Lackhi passport image
242
115. Aysuk Kenchi passport image
243
116. Nakki passport image
244
117. Jivi Bai passport image
245
118. Hungoon Napalni passport image
246
119. Nima Sarbani passport image
247
120. Elizabeth Bernard passport image
248
121. Gamboo Madria passport image
249
122. Mary Samuel passport image
250
123. Gracie Williams passport image
251
124. Lusai Joseph passport image
252
125. Rosie Pail passport image
253
126. Jatan Bai passport image
254
127. Rosa passport image
255
128. Zainab Bibi passport image
256
129. Katey Ammal passport image
257
130. Josephine Chinch passport image
258
131. Lakhi passport image
259
132. Pranpathi Lizie passport image
260
133. Gracie Violet Burkinson passport image
261
134. Gangubai Ramchandra Bhand passport image
262
135. Kochuparampil Anna Oothupan passport image
263
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List of Illustrations
xxiii
136. Phulmaya passport image
264
137. Margaret passport image
265
138. Elizabeth passport image
266
139. Maharaji passport image
267
140. Suzana Rocha passport image
268
141. Miranda Pedro Sequeira passport image
269
142. Ka Lisbon Kharsing passport image
270
143. Mini Phemalu passport image
271
144. Dhan Maya passport image
272
145. Maili passport image
273
146. Sakinabai Ahmed Husain passport image
274
147. Ka Derissamon passport image
275
148. Gangabai Makan Misa passport image
276
149. Sivbai Narayan Shinde passport image
277
150. Rajpati passport image
278
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List of Tables
1. Male travelling ayahs
30
2. Ships with only one travelling ayah onboard for ships travelling to Britain
(1890–1940)38
3. Details of travelling ayahs recorded in the ship’s manifests of S.S. Golconda,
1891 and 1901
43
4. Examples of cases of abandonment of travelling ayahs
52
5. Emotions and emotional lexicons captured in various archival records
concerning travelling ayahs in Britain
68
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Introduction
Mobile Caregivers for the Empire
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Online Advertisement for Maids from India (2020)1
The above advertisement for ‘maids for abroad’ in local dailies and various
online websites in 2020 India can be seen as an almost direct descendant of the
advertisements placed by or on behalf of the ‘travelling ayahs’ during the imperial
period. The term ayah derives from the Portuguese word aio, which closely
translates to meaning tutor, carer or servant. In British India, ayah came to mean
a child’s nurse or nanny, or a lady’s maid, and was widely applied to female
domestic servants. Travelling ayahs comprised a particular subsection of the
profession who specialized in serving colonial families travelling by sea between
India, Britain, and other destinations.2 Mobile caregivers and domestic servants,
then, are not entirely a product of late twentieth-­century globalization as they are
often portrayed. Consider these two advertisements for travelling ayahs which
appeared in newspapers in the late nineteenth century. The first, published in
India in 1886 by a servant brokering agency in India on behalf of its client, a
European family, read: ‘EXPERIENCED AYAH WANTED for voyage to England
in April, must be a good sailor and accustomed to young children. Apply stating
1 ‘Maids From India: Hire Indian Maids For Abroad: Home Help Service Agency in Vikhroli’,
https://maid-­in-­india.business.site/.
2 Primarily colonial families although there were few cases of privileged Indian families travelling
with travelling ayahs.
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2
Waiting on Empire
terms to “S”. ’3 The second, published in Britain in 1890 by a brokering agency in
London, read: ‘. . . Experienced Ayahs always waiting for engagements to return to
all parts of India.’4 These advertisements, placed by agencies on behalf of both
servants and their clients, demonstrate continuity between past and present in the
mobile domestic service industry, albeit in changed geo-­political contexts. In
both cases, South Asian domestic workers, primarily female, were being recruited
via brokers to work across the world in the capacity of caregivers.
The expansion of the British Empire had facilitated movement across the globe
for both colonizers and colonized. Travelling ayahs had to deal with the challenges
of long sea voyages during which they were expected to provide crucial care to
their employers and especially to employers’ children. Some of them travelled
between India, Britain, and other destinations scores of times, making them some
of the most experienced travellers of the imperial era. The ‘ordinary’ labour of
these extraordinary women provided an essential part of the infrastructure of
Empire, allowing imperial soldiers, planters, merchants, and administrators,
amongst others, to undertake long sea voyages with the confidence that their
families would be adequately cared for during the passage. Yet the travelling
ayahs, a familiar sight in British port cities over a period of more than two
centuries, have faded remarkably quickly from British public memory.
The historiography of South Asian labour migrants under the British Empire
focused. This book seeks to disrupt male-­
remains overwhelmingly male-­
dominated narratives by focusing on the gendered work of mobile South Asian
women as they engaged with the process of labour migration, interacted with
host societies, negotiated colonial laws, and engaged with temporalities in the
migration process.5 While contributing to the fields of gender, transnational
labour history, and Empire studies, the book also addresses the absence of Indian
migrant women workers employed in domestic work from colonial history,
especially in the British case. Whilst there is a flourishing literature covering other
forms of migrant labour amongst Indian women—­such as labour on plantations
and in public works in the Caribbean and other parts of Asia,6 the work of
migrant Indian caregivers has remained almost invisible.
3 British Newspaper Archives (henceforth BNA), Times of India, 24 February 1886.
4 BNA, The HomewardMail, 9 June 1890. I discuss such advertisements in further detail in Chapters
1 and 4.
5 This book continues the focus on Indian migrant women workers within the British Empire initiated in my first book, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya
(New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
6 Datta, Fleeting Agencies; Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Gurgaon:
Hachette Book Publishing, 2013); Shobita Jain and Rhoda Rheddock (eds), Women Plantation
Workers: International Experiences (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Brij V. Lal, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women
on Fiji Plantations’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 22.1 (1985): 55–71; Marina Carter,
Lakshmi’s Legacy: Testimonies of Indian Women in 19th Century Mauritius (Stanley, Rose Hill,
Mauritius: Editions de l’Océan Indien, 1994); Marina Carter, Women and Indenture: Experiences of
Indian Labor Migrants (London: Pink Pigeon Press, 2012).
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Introduction
3
Furthermore, studies focusing on domestic caregiving work in colonial contexts
have overwhelmingly looked at ‘local’ labour and not necessarily migrant labour
in mobile domestic spaces.7 Waiting on Empire breaks this silence, centring the
history of migrant care labourers recruited for caregiving on the high seas, on
which the power-­relations of Empire were daily enacted. Exploring fragments
from the lives of socially marginal women care-­workers, who played vital roles in
the British Empire’s everyday functioning, Waiting on Empire interrogates
colonialism and colonial migration history from a subaltern perspective, and
places women’s labour migration and care work in a broad global context. In so
doing, it foregrounds South Asian labour history and women’s history as
important lenses through which we can study world history and history of the
British Empire specifically. The title of this study, Waiting on Empire, of course,
has a dual meaning. It refers both to the service the travelling ayahs provided to
the Empire, but simultaneously to the active process of waiting—­that is, spending
time in contexts where further movement depended upon actors more powerful
than themselves.
Waiting on Empire focuses on the everyday histories of travelling ayahs, some
of whom travelled up to fifty times between India and Britain. In particular, the
book focuses on the temporal period of waiting which usually interrupted their
migration loops between India and Europe. This waiting period began once they
arrived at Britain and lasted until they could find a passage back home to India.
The various chapters of the book show how the dynamics of gender, class, ‘race’,
and religion, in various combinations, played crucial roles in the ways travelling
ayahs experienced waiting in the metropole.8 At a broad scale, this book explores
how different actors and institutions interacted with female migrant care workers
in the metropole, whilst at the personal level, the book allows the individual,
everyday histories of travelling ayahs to emerge, thus recognizing their status as
rightful citizens of the Empire: a recognition which they repeatedly demanded
during their lifetimes. In the process, the book takes its readers on a journey
7 Fae Dussart, ‘Family and Household: Domestic Service in Colonial India’, in A Cultural History of
the Home: In the Age of Empire, ed. Jane Hamlett (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 43–65; Swapna
Banerjee, Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-­Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); Indrani Sen, ‘Colonial Domesticities, Contentious Interactions:
Ayahs, Wet-­Nurses and Memsahibs in Colonial India’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 16.3 (2009):
299–328; Joyce Grossman, ‘Ayahs, Dhayes, and Bearers: Mary Sherwood’s Indian Experience and
Constructions of Subordinated Others’, South Atlantic Review 66.2 (2001): 14–44; Suzanne Conway,
‘Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-­Indian Children’, in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed.
S. Robinson and S. Sleight (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Sucharita Sen, ‘Memsahibs and
Ayahs during the Indian Mutiny: In English Memoirs and Fiction’, Studies in People’s History
7.2 (2020).
8 Whilst the term ‘race’ is regarded as scientifically meaningless today, during the imperial period
under discussion, scientific racism remained respectable; the concept of ‘race’ was regarded as a
meaningful distinction between different human groups and was used to build social hierarchies.
I use the term in parentheses to emphasize that this social significance was built upon a scientific
fallacy.
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4
Waiting on Empire
through the everyday lives of travelling ayahs who waited on colonial families,
but also were made to wait once they arrived at their intended destinations in
Britain. Using a variety of archival records, the chapters allow us a glimpse into
the experiences of travelling ayahs whilst they waited to repatriate: their struggles,
their ordinary and extraordinary encounters, and the different kinds of interpersonal relationships they developed at the heart of the Empire.
There is a considerable body of scholarship on the long presence of colonial
migrants in the United Kingdom.9 Antoinette Burton’s seminal study shows us
how the late Victorian metropole was itself a colonial space and thereby implicated
in the changes occurring across the Empire. Burton argued that Britain, as much
as her colonies, was a space of encounter between colonizers and colonized.10 In
another equally important study, Caroline Bressey has shown that there were
many ‘black’ migrants from British colonies employed in service industries in
Britain during the same period, noting that the voices of these imperial subjects
are largely absent from the archives and consequently from the writing of British
history.11 Rozina Visram’s landmark work has been one of the few to address this
absence with regard to labouring South Asians in Britain. Whilst travelling ayahs
are highlighted in the title, however, engagement with their histories in the main
text is limited.12
Subsequent crucial works by Michael Fisher, Laura Tabili, Sumita Mukherjee,
Susheila Nasta, and Rehana Ahmed have given rich accounts of the presence of
South Asians in Britain, including students, travellers, seafarers, artists, and
doctors, from the nineteenth century onward.13 Tabili, Ahmed, and Mukherjee in
9 See, for example, Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial
Encounter in Late-­Victorian Britain (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998); Rozina Visram,
Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986) and Asians in
Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black
Working Class in Britain (Brookfield, VT: Gower, 1987); F. O. Shyllon, Black People in Britain,
1555–1833 (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1977); James Walvin,
Passage to Britain: Immigration in British History and Politics (New York: Harmondsworth, 1984);
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984); Norma
Myers, ‘The Black Poor of London: Initiatives of Eastern Seamen in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries’, Immigrants and Minorities 13 (November 1994): 7–21; Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain
Anglo-­Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
10 Burton, At the Heart of the Empire.
11 Caroline Bressey, ‘Looking for Work: The Black Presence in Britain 1860–1920’, Immigrants &
Minorities 28 (2010): 164–82; J. Wolffe, ‘Plurality in the Capital: The Christian Responses to London’s
Religious Minorities since 1800’, Studies in Church History 51 (2015): 232–58; N. Ahmed, J. Garnett,
B. Gidley, A. Harris, and M. Keith, ‘Historicising Diaspora Spaces: Performing Faith, Race and
Religion in London’s East End’, in Religion in Diaspora: Cultures of Citizenship, ed. Saundra Garner
and Jane Hauser (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
12 Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.
13 Burton, At the Heart of the Empire; Antoinette Burton, ‘Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian
Travellers in Fin-­de-­Siecle London’, History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 126–46; Visram, Ayahs,
Lascars and Princes; Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers to
Britain 1600–1857 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Collin Chambers, ‘A Flute of Praise: Indian
Theatre in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century’, in India in Britain, ed. S. Nasta (London: Springer,
2013); Sumita Mukherjee and Rehana Ahmed (eds), South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947
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Introduction
5
their respective studies present dynamic accounts of South Asians engaging in
radical discourse, economic negotiations, and political activism in imperial
Britain, revealing the permeable interstices of British society through which
South Asians made their voices heard.14 These bodies of work show that South
Asians in Britain were not passive victims of imperialism but social and political
agents who worked to transform British society.
The landmark works discussed above focus on colonized migrants to Britain
who were, for the most part, privileged by class, education, or, in the case of the
Indian seafarers known as lascars, privileged by the public nature of their
professions; female domestic workers, who were less visible as a result of their
gender, class, and the private spaces in which they worked, remain neglected.
Recent work by Olivia Robinson, as well as my own previous papers, have briefly
addressed the history of Indian travelling ayahs in Britain, but in our respective
works we were only able to explore snippets of their experience.15 In Waiting on
the Empire, therefore, I use the case studies of travelling ayahs to explore how
colonized women labour migrants asserted their rights, made their voices heard,
and negotiated their needs with the imperial powers that kept them waiting in the
metropole. Whilst one of the first appearance of travelling ayahs dates to the
eighteenth century, I primarily focus on the period from the mid-­1800s to the late
1930s, since this is the period for which most evidence is available in the records
of the India Office, British courts, and various other institutions. Using archival
case studies, I explore how travelling ayahs actively negotiated survival and
employment opportunities in precarious conditions, capitalized upon sympathy
amongst sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with
various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane
treatment.
Travelling ayahs did not write memoirs of their experiences: their stories have
to be unearthed from traces in the archives. Those archival traces, however, are
sufficiently substantial to position them at the heart of histories of colonialism
(London: Continuum, 2012); Laura Tabili, Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in
Provincial England, 1841–1939 (Basingstoke: Springer, 2011).
14 Tabili, Global Migrants; Mukherjee and Ahmed, South Asian Resistance in Britain; Sumita
Mukherjee, ‘Locating Race in Suffrage: Discourses and Encounters with Race and Empire in the
British Suffrage Movement’, in From Suffragette to Homesteader: Exploring British and Canadian
Colonial Histories and Women’s Politics through Memoir, ed. Emily van der Meulen (Halifax and
Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018); Rehana Ahmed, ‘Equality of Citizenship’, in South Asians and
the Shaping of Britain, 1870–1950, ed. Ruvani Ranasinha, Rehana Ahmed, Sumita Mukherjee, and
Florian Stadtler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
15 Olivia Robinson, ‘Traveling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Global Networks
and Mobilization of Agency’, History Workshop Journal 86 (2018): 44–66; Arunima Datta, ‘Responses
to Traveling Indian Ayahs in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain’, Journal of Historical
Geography 71 (2021): 94–103; Arunima Datta, ‘Stranded: How Travelling Indian Ayahs negotiated
War and Abandonment in Europe’. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 30.1 (2023); Arunima Datta,
‘Becoming Visible: Travel Documents and Travelling Ayahs in the British Empire’, South Asian Studies
38.2 (2022): 141–60.
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Waiting on Empire
and labour migration within the British Empire. Through these archival traces,
Waiting on Empire explores the power-­dynamics which formed the travelling
ayahs’ world, showing the ways that their experience was conditioned by
intersections of class, gender, and ‘race’: the hierarchies upon which imperial
power was built.
Waiting on Empire brings into focus the everyday socio-­political history of
South Asian migrants in the heart of the Empire and analyses the complex
relationships that developed between colonized mobile subjects, on one hand,
and imperial institutions and British civic society, on the other. It explores how
travelling ayahs dealt with long periods of waiting in Britain and sometimes
elsewhere in Europe; how they survived between voyages; how they built
solidarity with others and found emotional and social support; and how they
overcame challenges ranging from abandonment without pay by unscrupulous
employers to the dangers of shipwreck and war. In so doing, it provides a historical
context for ongoing political debates around ‘race’, class, labour and migration.
Understanding Waiting: Historiography
One of the principal historical objectives of the book is to re-­vision historical
understandings of waiting. Waiting is arguably one of the most recurrent and
universal human experiences, from the palaeolithic fisherwoman waiting to hook
her prey to the twenty-­first-­century knowledge-­worker waiting for that crucial
email. Yet it is an experience that is often marginalized or even ignored as a
non-­experience, particularly in historical studies. In complex bureaucratized
societies, waiting tends to take particular forms in which the subordinated and
marginalized wait for those with power over them to make decisions which will
determine their future. Consequently, when waiting is left out of historical
accounts, what are also overlooked are the power dynamics that determine who
waits on whom and in what conditions they wait.
Waiting forms a significant part of histories of migration, and yet it has not
always been a focus of historical studies focusing on migration. Some scholars
have engaged with waiting as an important part of the migration experience,
however. Joya Chatterjee, Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, Clive Glasser, and others have
focused on the struggles of the relations of migrants who are left behind and wait
for news, remittances, or their loved one’s return.16 Shahram Khosravi, who
focused on waiting experienced by the people on the move, conceives of waiting
16 Joya Chatterji, ‘On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the “Age of Migration” ’, Modern Asian
Studies 51.2 (2017): 511–41; Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, ‘Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration
Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905–1915)’, Journal of Southern African Studies
42.3 (2016): 463–81; Huifen Shen, China’s Left-­Behind Wives: Families of Migrants from Fujian to
Southeast Asia, 1930s–1950s (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012); Clive Glaser, ‘Home, Farm
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Introduction
7
as ‘stolen time’ which delays or prevents migrants from achieving the mobility
which they had planned.17 Studies by Salim Lakha, Christine M. Jacobsen,
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and many others focus on the precariousness and
uncertainty of waiting and the emotional experiences of anger, frustration,
anxiety, shame, and fear of failure which can accompany the experience.18
Similarly, Ghassan Hage conceives of waiting as ‘stuckedness’: a period of
nothingness which individuals have to endure. For Hage waiting thus becomes
more about endurance and ‘sticking it out’ rather than calling for change.19 These
studies are all valuable, in that they recognize the reality and the significance of
waiting as part of the migration experience and also recognize the power
dynamics involved.
This study accepts the insights previous scholarship has offered into the effects
of hegemonic power on the waiting subject, but it goes a step further, by
examining the responses of migrants, specifically travelling ayahs, to the
experience of waiting and the constant threat of becoming ‘stuck’. What we find is
that for travelling ayahs, waiting was never a space of resigned acceptance. Rather
it was a space of constant striving and struggle, in which travelling ayahs actively
deployed a wide range of methods and tactics to overcome difficulties, win
support, change minds, increase their material or symbolic capital, and ultimately
to improve the conditions of their lives. In Waiting for the Empire, then, I show
that people, however marginalized, never just wait; rather, they actively engage
with waiting—­emotionally, socially, economically, and politically. In this study,
therefore, I emphasize that ‘wait’ is a verb: a term that refers to doing.
In focusing on waiting as an active process, this study recognizes that the idea
that waiting as an experience of passivity, or wasted time, is largely derived from a
capitalist worldview in which time is commodified and related to production
processes. These associations are not universal. In several languages from South
Asia, ‘to wait’ can be expressed using various terms, some of which have
connotations of active ‘watchfulness’, suggesting that those who wait are awake
and observant.20 Thus, in re-­
visioning waiting, we can also move towards
and Shop: The Migration of Madeiran Women to South Africa, 1900–1980’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 38.4 (2012): 885–97.
17 Shahram Khosravi, ‘Deportation as a Way of Life’, in Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and
Transnational Issues, ed. Rich Furman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
18 Salim Lakha, ‘Waiting to Return Home: Modes of Immigrant Waiting’, in Waiting, ed. Ghassan
Hage (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009); Christine M. Jacobsen, ‘They Said Wait, Wait—­
and I Waited: The Power of Chronographies of Waiting in Asylum in Marseille, France’, in Waiting and
the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, ed. Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-­Anne Karlsen, and Shahram
Khosravi (Oxon: Routledge, 2021); Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ‘Filling the Apps: The Smartphone,
Time and Refuge’, in Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, ed. Christine M. Jacobsen,
Marry-­Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi (Oxon: Routledge, 2021).
19 Ghassan Hage (ed.), Waiting (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009).
20 Words such as dekho, dekhtehain, in Hindi, and darao, in Bengali, have connotations which suggest
waiting is seen as an active state of being rather than a state of inactivity or passivity.
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8
Waiting on Empire
decolonizing our understandings by recognizing that time not spent in the
generation of profit is not necessarily time wasted and that waiting is not,
therefore, necessarily a passive or neutral condition, but rather can be an active
process replete with possibility, planning, and doing.
In framing waiting as an active space and experience, I find allies and
inspiration in histories of gender and sexuality and in queer studies which have
engaged with waiting in more nuanced ways. Ishita Pande, for example, in the
context of marriage in India, has explored waiting as a process of coming of age,
which in colonial and nationalist discourses was seen as a universal and natural
measure of human capacity, particularly in the legal and political realms. Waiting,
in Pande’s study, means acquiring the required training and maturity to ‘come
of age’. For Pande, then, waiting is an active state and has no connotations of
paralysis or passivity.21
Taylor observes that waiting is a common experience in
Victoria Pitts-­
medicalized gender transition processes, wherein patients are often put on
waitlists and experience myriad medical delays which Pitts-­
Taylor sees as
expressions of biopolitical power. Yet those who wait create narratives to express
their weariness and precarity in their own ways. In waiting, they create a
community, a voice, and a potential movement to attract support for their cause.22
Similarly, Stacey Jones Holman explored waiting as the manufactured delays to
which queer families are subjected in adoption processes, due to the biopolitical
presumption that transgender individuals cannot biologically reproduce.
Holman, in exploring how queer parents wait anxiously for ‘the call’ bearing news
of a child, considers not only the subjectivity of waiting but also the active
performances during the waiting period which make it a zone of becoming in
which ‘acceptable’ families emerge.23
For travelling ayahs, waiting was an inevitable part of their lives. Their waiting
usually took place far from home in situations where payment of wages and
provision of promised passages home was uncertain and where gendered
expectations might have been at odds with the exigencies and opportunities of
circular migration. Consequently, for them, waiting could involve isolation and
lack of both support networks and material resources. Whilst such waiting
undoubtedly involved precarity, the evidence presented in this study shows that
this did not lead to passivity or paralysis. Paul Corcoran has argued that an
anxious hunter waiting to capture prey necessary for his own survival is in a
21 Ishita Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020).
22 Victoria Pitts-­Taylor, ‘ “A Slow and Unrewarding and Miserable Pause in Your Life”: Waiting in
Medicalized Gender Transition’, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health,
Illness and Medicine 24.6 (2020): 646–64.
23 Stacey Jones Holman, ‘Waiting for Queer’, International Review of Qualitative Research 10.3
(2017): 256–62. For further discussions on related topics, see J. E. Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then
and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
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Introduction
9
precarious situation, but his waiting is an active act of preparation and is full of
possibilities.24 Like the hunters in Corcoran’s study: travelling ayahs exhibited
preparedness, resourcefulness, and endurance in negotiating precarity and
pursuing their aims. Most of the many thousands of travelling ayahs who arrived
in Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries probably spent a few
weeks waiting before securing passages back to India without incident and
without, therefore, any appearance in the archives. Of those who do appear in the
archives, many found their waiting to be precarious because they had been
abandoned by their employers upon arrival in Britain and their active appeals for
help from the imperial authorities resulted in their appearance in the records. In a
smaller number of cases, travelling ayahs appear to have actively chosen to wait in
Britain to explore new opportunities or create a new home. Again, these cases
only appear in the archives when they emerged as anomalies or problems which
administrators felt obliged to address. In waiting, then, travelling ayahs found
both challenges and opportunities, which made it a busy space within which
different kinds of negotiations, voices, and emotions came together. Whilst
waiting had its pitfalls, it also had stories of difficult negotiations being won and
opportunities being gained.
While analysing the various racialized, classed, and gendered experiences that
travelling ayahs had to negotiate as temporary labour migrants in the metropole,
the study also shows how these extraordinary women positioned themselves
within the context of debates around labour, migration, imperial subjecthood,
governmental responsibility, and humanitarian help. Examining the discursive
positions adopted by these marginalized colonial subjects in the imperial
­metropole and administrative responses, or lack of response, to them exposes the
cusp of the Empire’s power and vulnerability. Travelling ayahs seemed amongst
the least powerful and therefore least threatening subjects of Empire: colonized
single women far from home with limited support networks and no revolutionary
political goals which might challenge the power of Empire. And yet, their appeals
for the humane treatment which they saw as their due repeatedly exposed the
contradiction between the rhetoric of Empire as a civilizing process and its reality
as a process of exploitation, thereby bringing imperial fallibility and hypocrisy
into the public eye in ways which sometimes frustrated even the bureaucrats
whose task it was to enforce imperial power.
In focusing on the active engagement of waiting subjects, this book also
highlights how the space of waiting has a complex social life of its own. Waiting
becomes a space of interaction wherein we can witness the association and
disassociation of people from different backgrounds, classes and ‘races’. In
studying travelling ayahs’ myriad experiences of waiting, we observe not only the
24 Paul E. Corcoran, ‘Godot Is Waiting Too: Endings in Thought and History’, Theory and Society
18 (1989): 495–529.
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10
Waiting on Empire
diverse personalities and goals of the women who waited but also a range of
different socio-­cultural responses to their waiting. Thus, through exploring the
waiting experiences of travelling ayahs, this study exposes other histories
including the way the Empire was conceived and emotionally related to in the
metropole; social understandings of ‘charity’; and the ways waiting itself became a
commodified process for certain social actors, including newspapers, brokering
agencies, and missionaries. The study reveals how travelling ayahs, imperial
administrators and other members of civil society interacted legally, commercially,
and socially in response to the process of waiting. In short, this study does not see
waiting simply as the shadow of mobility but as an important space of social
interaction in its own right.
Reconstructing Waiting: Historical Sources and Charting
Travelling Ayah Histories
Much of the evidence upon which this book is based is elicited from a close reading
of passage permission records, ship manifests, ancestry records, travelling ayahs’
passports, travelling ayahs’ legal case files, official correspondences about travelling
ayahs, children’s story books, newspapers, institutional reports about ayahs, and
images from over ten archives: the National Archives of the UK (Kew), the India
Office Records in the British Library (London), the London City Mission records at
London City Mission Archives (London), the British Newspapers Archives
(London), Hackney Archives (London), the National Maritime Museum (London),
the National Army Museum (London), the National Archives of India (New Delhi),
the West Bengal State Archives (Kolkata), the National Library (Kolkata), and Arkib
Negara (Kuala Lumpur). It is from these records that the identities and voices
of travelling ayahs emerge: voices which until now have remained largely muted,
forgotten, and absent from the pages of imperial histories. Yet the ways in which
these documents were recorded, which aimed to serve agendas that were not
those of either travelling ayahs or historians, provide a selective and sometimes
frustratingly partial picture of these women travellers. For instance, the names of
travelling ayahs were often only partially recorded and frequently not recorded at all.
Often the story of a particular travelling ayah may appear briefly in documents in
London, only to disappear before, perhaps, reappearing in the archives in India,
whilst remaining untraceable in between. Nonetheless, though these records
were made and circulated for official purposes, they offer tantalizing glimpses into
migrant women workers’ everyday lives within the context of British colonialism.
The faint and often muted voices of the travelling ayahs which emerge through
their individual files help us understand complex histories of migration and
migrants. I use the evidence from these sources to reconstruct ‘waiting’ as a social,
political, and economic experience for migrants within c­ olonial contexts. These
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Introduction
11
documents show how both imperial institutions and travelling ayahs used periods
of waiting to secure advantage in active processes of assertion and negotiation.
Exploring the archives reveals that the presence of imperial subjects from the
colonies was seen but not necessarily administratively recognized, whilst the
voices of the travelling ayahs were rarely recorded. I turned, therefore, to the work
of historical geographers who have argued that historians must map the archives,
defining available and unavailable sources, in order to reach a fuller understanding
of past societies. Mapping both the information that the archives present and that
which they leave out allows us to interpret the broader contexts and specific
power dynamics in which certain voices are recorded whilst others are muted or
even silenced.25 The transient presence of travelling ayahs in Britain and India
adds an additional layer of complexity to the task, as records remain dispersed
across many geographical spaces. Hodder et al. observe that the transnational
nature of such scattered archival materials reveals the uneven and ambiguous
day
decisions of administrators in the past which influences the present-­
availability of global histories.26
One of the most difficult aspects of this archival research was that the
fragmentary records of travelling ayahs’ lives were not only scattered across
different geographies but also across different kinds of records: sometimes
appearing in colonial office correspondence, sometimes in ship’s ledgers,
sometimes in legislative and political files, and sometimes in files discussing
economic issues within the British Empire. Moreover, whilst part of a travelling
ayah’s story might appear in a legislative file it often disappeared abruptly, never
to reappear. An exhaustive search would sometimes result in a fleeting glimpse of
the same case in a coroner’s record or in official correspondence regarding
international trade, yet some records were incomplete, damaged or missing. Thus,
there are no clear signposts for scholars researching global histories. Historians
researching subaltern subjects in global contexts must therefore engage in a two-­
stage process: first, understanding the organization of archives maintained in
various imperial sites and institutions and uncovering relevant material within
them; second, constructing their own archives from the fragments recovered to
piece together the scattered glimpses of subaltern lives.
As Gagen et al. have shown, the ways information is organized within the
archives reveal the power dynamics underlying the practice of archiving as much
through the information and voices that it leaves out as through those that it
25 D. Timothy and J. Guelke, ‘Introduction’, in D. Timothy and J. Guelke (eds), Geography and
Genealogy: Locating Personal Pasts (Burlington: Routledge, 2008), 1–22; H. Lorimer, ‘Caught in the
Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork’, in Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography,
ed. D. DeLyser, S. Atiken, M. Crang, S. Herbert, and L. McDowell (London: Sage, 2009), 248–73.
26 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Jake Hodder,
Michael Heffernan, and Stephen Legg, ‘The Archival Geographies of Twentieth-­
Century
Internationalism: Nation, Empire and Race’, Journal of Historical Geography 71 (2021): 1–11.
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12
Waiting on Empire
records.27 Following their lead, this study situates the presences in the archives in
the context of absences. In the cases of subaltern imperial subjects, such as
travelling ayahs, the silences often speak loudest, revealing the internal anxieties,
contradictions and fears that the presence of colonized British subjects in the
metropolis forced into the consciousness of imperial administrators. Carolyn
Steedman in her ground-­breaking work about the physicality and realities of
archives, described ‘archive fever’ as an overwhelming experience that ‘comes on
at night, long after the archive has shut for the day’. It begins ‘in the bed of a cheap
hotel, where the historian cannot get to sleep’. In the course of my research for this
book, I came to understand and experience Steedman’s sleepless nights, haunted
by the myriad voices of the dead and lost, who press their concerns on a historian’s
mind.28 Even after a full day of research at the archives, I felt lost and incomplete
not knowing what had happened to some of the women whose files I had
unearthed, but which had proved to be incomplete, damaged, or, worse, lost. In
an attempt to embody some element of these women’s experience, I walked the
streets of London from the dockyards to the site of the Hackney Ayahs’ Home on
multiple occasions. I felt a responsibility attached to working with these records:
to do these women justice, to convey the complex realities of their lives and the
society in which they waited, lived, loved, and strove for better times. Individual
stories about individual women thus have a central place in this book, even if
these stories are often short and inconclusive. Yet together these stories can
provide us with real insights into the social history of waiting in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries as experienced by colonized and transient women
workers.
Each chapter in the book focuses on a specific experience of waiting and
explores the ways that they were interconnected. Following this Introduction,
Chapter 1, ‘Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire’, frames the
book for readers by providing background knowledge of travelling ayahs, how
and why they were recruited, and their importance to the British Empire. The
chapter explains the concerns and considerations that underlay the selection of
caregivers who travelled with European women and children and demonstrates
the central place of travelling ayahs in the regular traffic between Britain and
Asian colonies which was essential to the Empire’s administration. It highlights
key differences between the experience of travelling ayahs and of ayahs who
worked in their home regions in India. Using the archival records discussed
above, the chapter explores how travelling ayahs figured within the broader traffic
of people moving between colonies and the metropole; discusses the life, work,
27 E. Gagen, H. Lorimer, and A. Vasudevan (eds), Practicing the Archive: Reflections on Methods
and Practice in Historical Geography (London: Historical Geography Research Group, Royal
Geographical Society, Institute of British Geographers, 2007).
28 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 87. Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17.
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Introduction
13
and challenges faced by travelling ayahs whilst onboard ship; and in the process
highlights the particular place of travelling ayahs in the imperial British
imagination. Finally, it notes the ways that travelling ayahs exerted agency in
negotiating for what they considered rightful compensation and deserved benefits
and how they consciously struggled, sometimes individually, sometimes in
alliance with others, to ensure that their interests were addressed by employers. In
so doing, this chapter also considers the ways in which travelling ayahs used
broader gendered understandings of health, morality, and vulnerability within
the context of imperial labour migration networks to influence employers and
gain acceptance of what they regarded as their rights.
Chapter 2, ‘Waiting in the Heart of Empire’, examines the experiences of
travelling ayahs on arrival in Britain, paying particular attention to the cases that
appear in the archives due to the abandonment of ayahs by irresponsible
employers. The chapter explores the relations between travelling ayahs and their
employers as well as the difficult interactions with imperial administrators that
travelling ayahs encountered when they found themselves in vulnerable
situations. Whilst focusing on how the Empire managed the traffic of the
travelling ayahs between India and Britain, the chapter also reveals the contractual
expectations that travelling ayahs had of their employers, what happened to
travelling ayahs once they disembarked at a port in Britain, and how travelling
ayahs made their way back to India. In the process of exploring these questions,
the chapter unveils the ways the power dynamics of colonial capitalism and the
contradictory migration policies of the Empire imposed periods of waiting
ranging from weeks to years on travelling ayahs in Britain.
Chapter 3, ‘Creative Resilience in Crisis’, focuses on the various kinds of
creative agency that travelling ayahs exhibited whilst waiting. Most importantly,
the chapter introduces emotion as a lens through which to examine the
archives, thus allowing travelling ayahs to become visible as human beings who
demonstrated agency in precarious situations of waiting. The chapter focuses on
various cases wherein travelling ayahs used emotions explicitly revolving around
home, family, and motherhood to negotiate access to social and administrative
aid in their attempts to find a way home to India. It demonstrates the busy-­ness of
travelling ayahs in waiting, as they engaged in planning, emotional appeals, and
carefully crafted actions in order to achieve their goals and end their period of
waiting.
In Chapter 4, entitled ‘Capitalizing on Waiting’, the study moves on to look at
the ways some travelling ayahs, often those more experienced in the trade, used
periods of waiting creatively to improve their situation in material or symbolic
ways, by increasing their wealth or status. In particular, it focuses on those
travelling ayahs who capitalized on entrepreneurial and other socio-­cultural
opportunities that waiting in the imperial metropolis offered them. This chapter
reminds us that the travelling ayahs were not slaves, traded into servitude, but
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14
Waiting on Empire
were women who had chosen to enter the extraordinary profession of travelling
ayah: a profession that placed them in a unique social situation. Travelling ayahs
were part of both British and Indian societies. In some ways, they were marginal
to both, yet they constituted a vital link between the two. Crucially, at least some
women entered this profession in the hope and expectation of bettering
themselves in ways that may not have been available to them had they stayed at
home. The cases discussed in this chapter become particularly interesting and
inspiring because they help us to understand how waiting, which was an
unavoidable and potentially threatening part of their professional experience,
could be turned into a space of opportunity for the realization of their aspirations.
In such cases, travelling ayahs interrupted the colonial gaze with their own
colonized gaze on the metropole, where they saw opportunities that they could
exploit for their advantage. This is not to suggest that travelling ayahs were the
ideal entrepreneurs of recent neoliberal ideology: they remained marginalized
and racialized subalterns and their schemes were often confronted with challenges
from the hegemonic power of an Empire that saw them as inferior subjects as a
result of both their skin colour and gender. Yet the evidence that emerges from
the archives suggests that, whilst they may sometimes have been discouraged,
they were never deterred from pursuing their own goals.
Travelling ayahs were not the only ones actively engaging with their waiting in
Britain. Chapter 5, ‘Travelling Ayahs and Ayahs’ Homes’, turns the readers’
attention to ayahs’ homes: the institutions which emerged in Britain in response
to the needs of travelling ayahs as they waited in the imperial heartland to secure
employment that would enable them to return to India. The chapter shows how
this space of waiting became a site of activity not only for travelling ayahs but also
for British people who engaged with them in the name of humanitarianism,
Christianity, and profit. In colonial discourses, private social welfare often played
a significant role in the Empire’s ‘civilizing mission’. The politics of providing such
welfare within a capitalist society required the definition of who was and who was
not legitimately needy and thus qualified to receive welfare. Consequently, welfare
was never monolithic, but was motivated by a variety of religious or socio-­
political agendas including capitalist enterprise itself. This chapter thus also
explores how the operators of ayahs’ homes furthered their various agendas by
providing for the needs of travelling ayahs and how travelling ayahs themselves
engaged with these institutions.
In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Travellers’ Tales’, the book turns to explore the
experiences of travelling ayahs during the two world wars, which disrupted travel
and made waiting not only uncertain but often extremely dangerous. It also
examines the experiences of travelling ayahs who found themselves waiting or
abandoned in various countries in continental Europe, noting the ways that those
experiences differed from those of travelling ayahs waiting in Britain.
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Introduction
15
The concluding chapter sums up the arguments developed in the preceding
chapters, presents answers to the questions regarding waiting posed in the
Introduction, and discusses the implications of these answers for the study of
migrants. Emphasizing the travelling ayahs’ self-­determination, survival strategies,
and active engagement with the process of waiting, the chapter draws attention to
the insights available to us from studying the travelling ayahs’ relationship with
the Empire and their upper-­class employers and shows how these insights are
relevant to historicizing the present-­day experiences of migrant domestic and
care workers. It also brings the lives of travelling ayahs into a larger framework,
noting that women’s transnational labour has been neglected within the histories
of Britain, South Asia, and the British Empire, an absence which this book seeks
to go some way to fill.
Finally, the book includes a discussion entitled ‘Profiles of Travelling Ayahs’,
which records brief narratives of all 124 travelling ayahs for whom I was able to
access information through the India Office Record’s duplicate passport series
and Ancestry records. Whilst some of them were discussed in the chapters of the
book, the majority of them could not be accommodated. The ‘Profiles’ seek to do
justice to their history and presence in the archives by making these hidden lives
visible. I hope this part of the book might be of value to history students and
teachers who want to invite primary sources of this kind into their classes but
may not have ready access to the archives. And I also hope they may allow me to
sleep peacefully, feeling that I have done my duty towards those women with
whom I spent so much time in the archives and on the streets of London.
With the release of the TV series ‘Downton Abbey’ in 2010, and the movie
‘Victoria and Abdul’ in 2017, there was considerable media and public reflection
on the lack of diversity within media depictions of the servant population in
Victorian and Edwardian England. Although ‘Victoria and Abdul’ challenged
such partial portrayals, their predominance in media portrayals of the era
continues. The publication of this book in the contemporary context draws
attention to the imperial roots of ‘multicultural’ Britain. In the context of ongoing
campaigns in the UK to decolonize the curriculum, this research seeks to
contribute to re-­envisaging South Asian contributions to British society, as well as
to the British Empire, and reveal both the unequal treatment female Indian
migrants received in Britain and the ways they posed dilemmas for the Empire by
challenging such treatment. Waiting on Empire thus speaks to the ongoing South
Asian predicament in Britain in relation to the enduring influence of colonialism
and continued struggles for social and political equality.
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1
Becoming Travelling Ayahs and
Supporting the Empire
Historical and Contextual Background
Once the British Empire became firmly established in India, there was a marked
increase in travel between Britain and India by British colonial families. Such
colonial mobilities frequently also translated to employment and mobility of
‘native’ colonized people through the hiring of travelling ayahs who would travel
with their (mostly but not exclusively British) employers to make the latter’s
journey tolerable if not comfortable. As discussed in the Introduction, histories of
Indian ayahs have overwhelmingly focused upon those serving colonial families
locally in British India.1 Travelling ayahs are an under-­researched but fascinating
segment of the profession.
This chapter provides a historical and contextual background crucial for
understanding the place of travelling ayahs in the British Empire and their ex­peri­
ences with the Empire. It begins with an investigation into archival records
including ships’ manifests, passage permission seeking correspondences, government proceedings and passports to understand how travelling ayahs figured
within the broader traffic of people moving between colonies and the metropole.
Thereafter it explores travelling ayahs’ demographic backgrounds, revealing who
travelling ayahs were. It goes on to examine the processes through which travelling ayahs were recruited, offering a glimpse into the qualities that employers
sought in these mobile servants. These two sections together offer an
understanding of the ‘making’ of a travelling ayah. The following section then
explores the life and work of travelling ayahs while onboard ship and in the process, highlights some key differences and similarities between the experience of
1 Indrani Sen, ‘Colonial Domesticities, Contentious Interactions: Ayahs, Wet-­
Nurses and
Memsahibs in Colonial India’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 16.3 (2009): 299–328; Ishita Sinha Roy,
‘Nation, Native, Narrative: The Fetish and Imagined Community in India’, unpublished PhD thesis,
University of Southern California, 1999; Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late
Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Joyce Grossman, ‘Ayahs, Dhayes, and Bearers:
Mary Sherwood’s Indian Experience and Constructions of Subordinated Others’, South Atlantic
Review 66.2 (2001): 14–44; S. Conway, ‘Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-­Indian Children’, in Children,
Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. S. Robinson and S. Sleight (Basingstoke: Springer, 2016);
Swapna Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics: Articulating Middle-­Class Identity in Colonial Bengal
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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Waiting on Empire
travelling ayahs and that of ayahs employed locally in India. The chapter wraps up
with a brief discussion of the ways that travelling ayahs were simultaneously
included and excluded aboard British passenger ships as well as in British
imaginations.
Travelling ayahs were not the only Indian domestic servants who served
European families while on the move or after they returned to Britain. Some
families also travelled with young native ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ as companions to their
children and as cheap domestic servants, whilst others chose adult male servants.2
However, the figure of the travelling ayah became the most visible and publicized
of these Indian domestic workers. Even a cursory glance at passenger announcements, advertisements, and articles in newspapers in both India and Britain show
that travelling ayahs were discussed far more frequently than male or child ser­
vants. This may have been primarily due to the intimate nature of the ‘care’ services they rendered to ‘vulnerable’ colonial travellers—­women and children.
Travelling Ayahs as Part of the Traffic of Empire
Following the establishment of East India Company rule in India, Europeans
began settling in India for long periods—­a trend that continued under the British
Raj established in 1858. This led to frequent travel by colonial staff and their fam­
ilies between Britain and British India. Such journeys were not comfortable and
typically lasted up to seven months prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in
1869. The opening of the canal, in combination with the replacement of sail by
steam, reduced the travel time to two to three weeks. However, even with the
significant reduction in travel time, sea travel remained challenging for families
and the employment of travelling-­helps provided some comfort to passengers.
Consequently, most families who could afford to engage travelling ayahs would
eagerly do so.3
One of the earliest references to travelling ayahs in surviving and accessible
archival records appears in an East India Company correspondence file dated
2 Examples of such cases can be easily found in: British Library, India Office Records (henceforth
BL, IOR) L/PJ/11/8/1968; BL IOR L/PJ/6/1023, file 2801; The National Archives, UK (henceforth
TNA), BT 26, P30, I77, and many others. In 1763, Joshua Reynolds painted a portrait of Edward
Cruttenden’s children, the Lieutenant-­Governor of Fort William. In the portrait the children were
painted with their Indian girl ayah from Bengal, who Cruttenden had sent back to England with his
children. See Joshua Reynolds, The Children of Edward Holden Cruttenden and Ayah (1759). The
original painting is currently housed in Museum of Arts of Sao Paulo.
3 Britain was not the only place to which ayahs travelled. British families posted to other parts of
Europe also employed Indian travelling ayahs to travel with them. There were also few Chinese nurses
or maidservants known as amahs who travelled with colonial families. In this study, I focus entirely on
Indian travelling ayahs.
In my research I found just a few cases of Indian families employing a travelling ayah. This suggests
that whilst such relationships were possible, they were probably not common.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
19
March 1730, which is stored within India Office Records. The file consists of a
shipping notice to the East India Company office from a shipping company stating
that a native servant, Jonana from Bengal, who had arrived in England in
February 1730 while attending to Mr Mandeville’s children, was ready to travel
back to India. The letter also mentioned that Jonana would pay for her passage
back to Bengal and was scheduled to leave on the ship Asiatic.4 The name Jonana
warrants some discussion here. While her name is anglicized, the fact that she is
described as a Black woman servant and that she was returning to Bengal reveals
that she was most likely either an Anglo-­Indian native of India or a native of India
who had converted to Christianity and therefore anglicized her name.5 Another
important point to note here is that while these women were performing the same
jobs during the eighteenth century as a travelling ayah in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the term ‘ayah’ was not yet in common use and was rarely
used in shipping records or related files during this period. Instead, they were
simply recorded as ‘native servants’ or ‘black servants’ attending to women and
children onboard. The terms ‘ayah’ and ‘travelling ayah’ become visible in records
from the mid-­nineteenth century onwards.
While Jonana paid her own passage back to India after serving a family on
their voyage to England, the records imply that many employers paid the return
passages for their travelling ayahs. For example, a 1743 letter from William
Lindsay to the East India Office in London requested permission for passage of a
travelling ayah, Isobell Lamingo, to Bengal, India. Lindsay had sent the letter on
behalf of his client, Mr George Grays, who had been a surgeon in India and had
returned home to Britain in 1742, accompanied by Isobell. In the letter, Isobell is
described as a native nurse from Bengal who was hired specifically to take care of
Grays’s child during the voyage. The letter further explained that Mr Grays had
arranged and paid for Isobell’s passage back to India and that the purpose of the
letter was to notify the East India Company office of the intended passage and
seek their permission for Isobell’s travel.6 In the absence of passports and visas
during this period, these permission letters were required as proof of eligibility
for travel both in and out of Britain, especially for non-­British nationals. In such
records, which were created as instruments of state surveillance, travelling ayahs
who might otherwise remain historically invisible are brought into view, even
though only partially.
4 BL, IOR E/1/203, letter 2 March 1730.
This was the earliest mention of a travelling ayah or maid mentioned in the archives. However,
there is no way of being absolutely sure whether there were others before this—­primarily because of
the silences in the archives and the way the individuals were recorded therein.
5 It is also crucial to note the linguistic and geo-­political shifts over time in usage of the term ‘black’.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and sometimes later, ‘black’ was used to describe any
person of colour. This could include people of African, South Asian, and Southeast Asian heritage
amongst others.
6 BL, IOR E/1/32 ff 71–72V, letter 35, 4 February 1743. In most cases, these permissions were
merely for record keeping of the incoming and outgoing passengers.
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While these cases involve passages from Britain to India, similar letters of
permission were required when embarking from India to Britain. Some of these
are accessible in the Indian archives, although they are few and far between. For
instance, in 1835, Mr Dyer wrote to Fort William administrative office requesting
a passage approval letter for his travelling ayah, Ameerun, onboard the ship
St. Lyco, enroute to Britain.7 Similarly in 1843, Mr and Mrs Campbell sought
passage permission for their travelling ayah, Kerameen, who was to proceed with
them to England onboard Plantagency.8 Although arrangements for return
passages to India differed (e.g., Joanna paid her own way whilst Isobell’s return
passage was paid by her employer), the initial passage was always paid for by the
employer.
The traffic of travelling ayahs between India and Britain became increasingly
noticeable in archival records from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards.
The majority of passenger ships outbound from India to Britain in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries had travelling ayahs onboard. Figure 3 shows a
sample of ayah traffic during this period. While not all travelling ayahs’ passages
were accurately recorded and not all records survived, the sampling of a few years
available in various archives and various kinds of records allows a rough estimate
of the scale of the traffic across time. Newspaper articles and passenger notices
during the 1800s and early 1900s make it clear that several travelling ayahs
crossed the oceans more than once. For instance, the travelling ayah Mrs Antony
70
NUMBER OF AYAHS
60
50
40
30
20
10
1835
1837
1839
1840
1843
1844
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1919
1920
1921
1922
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
0
YEARS
Fig. 3 Traffic of travelling ayahs between India and Britain (1835–1940)
Note: Not all data from all years is available, but these numbers reflect numbers in the records I could
access between archives in UK and India. It is not clear from the figures why some years have lower
numbers than the others. This could be related to changing political or economic conditions or it
could be that records from some years were less well preserved than others.
Source: Compiled from passport records, ship manifests, permission slips, and passage notices
7 West Bengal State Archives (henceforth WBSA), general proceedings, 12 January 1835, no. 28.
8 WBSA, general proceedings, 27 November 1843, no. 99.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
21
Pareira, in an interview with a journalist, claimed that by 1922 she had made at
least fifty-­four trips between India and Britain.9 On each of these voyages she
would have covered between 7,000–10,000 kilometres—­depending on the port of
embarkation, port of disembarkation and months of the year in which the
journey was made.10
By the late nineteenth century, travelling ayahs were becoming archivally
vis­ible outside administrative records. A newspaper article from 1882 noted that
on a P&O passenger ship, it was common to see a ‘swarthy ayah’ playing with her
charges whilst ensuring that they didn’t cause chaos and distraction for crew
members and passengers.11 Alongside newspaper articles, the presence of travelling ayahs onboard ships was documented in sketches, artwork, and personal
photographs. For instance, in Figure 4, a travelling ayah is depicted onboard a
ship bound for Britain, managing her charge whilst Christmas dinner is served at
sea. The travelling ayah is the central figure in the image. Similarly, Figure 5
depicts an artist’s impression of a travelling ayah entertaining an infant onboard
ship. The title of the sketch ‘A Study in Black and White in the Bay of Bengal’,
most likely refers to the travelling ayah and her charge, respectively. Figure 6
shows how a travelling ayah worked hard to keep her charge entertained throughout
the long and strenuous journey. Finally, there also remain personal photographs
in the archives like that of infant Sandie Marie Sands (nee Sandie Marie Drew)
and her travelling ayah onboard S.S. Ludhiana in 1904.12 While no further record
of the travelling ayah is found in the archives, the fact that Sandie kept this image
in her personal album till she passed in 1969 in London hints towards some
attachment to the travelling ayah.13
Compiling data from various ship’s manifests, newspaper shipping notices, and
immigration records we can also see which ports in India and Britain were most
used by travelling ayahs. Figure 7 and Figure 8 show heat maps of the ports from
which travelling ayahs embarked and disembarked. Figure 7 reveals that Calcutta
was the most popular port of embarkation for travelling ayahs departing from
India, followed by Madras and Bombay. Figure 8 reveals that travelling ayahs and
their employers most frequently disembarked in London, followed by
Southampton and Plymouth.
9 London City Mission (henceforth LCM), A. C. Marshall, ‘Human Birds of Passage’, London City
Mission Magazine, August 1922, 104–6.
10 Travel during certain periods of the year took longer due to the weather conditions.
11 BNA, Pall Mall Gazette, 9 October 1882.
12 Unfortunately, Ancestry was not able to provide me permissions for this image and consequently
I could not include it here. (See https://www.ancestry.co.uk/mediaui-­viewer/tree/48552816/person/
12905352629/media/cb35be65-­62c9-­4e3e-­bef4-­ed659e0b6349?_phsrc=sMn264&_phstart=success
Source&_ga=2.268938225.1682038144.1660660398-­925215064.1660660390.)
13 Ancestry photos and ship passage records for Sannie Drew. The image with her ayah was found in her
album. (See https://www.ancestry.co.uk/family-­tree/person/tree/48552816/person/12905352629/facts.)
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Fig. 4 Children’s Christmas dinner at sea by Godefroy Durand (1889)
Source: Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
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23
Fig. 5 Looking after a British baby, Victorian, nineteenth-­century sketch by
Duncan 1890
Source: Private collection, Getty Images
‘Figuring’ Travelling Ayahs
Unlike other migrant workers shipped across the Empire, such as indentured
labourers or ‘coolies’, travelling ayahs were not sought from particular regions or
castes.14 Travelling ayahs were recruited from all over India: Lahore, Karachi,
Bombay, Madras, Gujarat, Bengal, Kerala, and other places. The castes of travelling ayahs also varied, unlike those of ayahs who served colonial families in India,
who Alison Blunt has shown, ‘frequently came from the sweeper caste and were
often married to the sweeper working within British households’.15 There were
travelling ayahs who reported in their travel documents that they belonged to
Ayer and Zamindar castes. For instance, Mrs Ammonie Chinnen Ayer, identified
herself as an Ayer—­a Tamil Brahmin caste.16 Similarly, Mst Zainab Bibi, identified her class and caste as Zamindari (landowning caste).17 However, what was
their economic situation despite their higher caste and whether the women
14 Gaiutra Bahadur, ‘Coolie Women Are in Demand Here’, Virginia Quarterly Review 87.2 (2011):
49–61; Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya
(New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Brij V. Lal, Kunti’s Cry: On a Journey through
Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012).
15 Alison Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24.4 (1999): 421–40.
16 BL, IOR L/PJ/11/7/201.
17 BL, IOR L/PJ/11/7/2512.
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Fig. 6 English girl and her Indian nanny or ayah, sailing to England, watch pet parrot
and monkey, Victorian, 1880s, nineteenth century
Source: Digital Vision Vectors, Getty Images
agreed to be a travelling ayah for their passion to travel or in dire financial need,
we can never know. Travelling ayahs varied in their religion too. Christians and
Hindus were the most common religions recorded but there were also travelling
ayahs from other faiths (see Figure 9).
The permission slips and ships passage records before the late nineteenth
century include little detail. Particularly the ship manifests anonymized the
travelling ayahs’ names and made them distinguishable only based on age.
However, sometimes the ages were not recorded and in such cases the travelling
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
Karachi
.47%
Bombay
26%
25
Calcutta
41%
Madras
32.4%
Fig. 7 Ports from which travelling ayahs most commonly embarked in India
(1876–1940)
Source: Data compiled from ship manifests, immigration records, and newspaper shipping notices
which offered details about ports
ayahs became unrecognizable or identifiable in the records. Moreover, with no
passport requirements during this period demographic information is difficult to
come by.18 From 1920 onwards, passports were required and these included more
detailed information which, combined with ships’ passage records, allows the
identification of some demographic trends amongst travelling ayahs: 38% of
travelling ayahs were aged between 30 and 39 years; 40- to 49-­year-­old women
formed about 30%; whilst 23% were aged 20 to 29 (see Figure 10). Most travelling
ayahs, then, were aged between 20 and 49 with the largest group being in their
thirties.
While travelling ayahs belonged to various marital groups: married, widowed,
or single (see Figure 11 a and b),19 a sweeping majority of 95%, irrespective of
their marital status, had no children. Only 3% of travelling ayahs had children
who were left behind while they travelled (see Figure 12).20 Therefore, childlessness
18 For detailed discussion on demographic information as available from passports see the Profiles
section in this book.
19 Two separate figures because the details in the two separate sources of data were not comparable
in terms of the groups. While passports specifically mentioned single, married, and widows as marital
status, the ship manifests only had two categories: single and married; and there is no way of knowing
if the single category accounted for spinsters and widows or only spinsters.
20 For determining marital status, I exclusively relied on passports as they provide reliable archival
data. While ship passage records also recorded single/married status, there is no way of knowing if the
‘single’ category meant the ayah was travelling alone or was being categorized as maritally single or a
widow. The lack of standard practices in recording demographic details of travelling ayahs played a
role in making them archivally ‘invisible’.
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Liverpool
3.8%
London
64.7%
Southampton
22.4%
Plymouth
12.7%
.8%
Tillbury
Fig. 8 Ports where travelling ayahs most commonly disembarked in Britain
(1876–1940)
Source: Data compiled from ships’ manifests, immigration records, and newspaper shipping notices
which offered details about ports
.8%
.14%
21%
46%
32%
Christians
Hindus
Not available
Muslims
Other
Fig. 9 Religion of travelling ayahs
Source: Compiled from travelling ayahs’ passports from 1920–40 (no other passage records provide
information about their religion)
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
.67%
.33%
23.3%
.83%
7%
60–69 years old
50–59 years old
40–49 years old
30–39 years old
20–29 years old
10–19 years old
0–9 years old
27
38.5%
29.9%
Fig. 10 Age groups of travelling ayahs
Source: compiled from ship manifests and passports (1871–1940)
emerges as a shared or common characteristic amongst the majority of travelling
ayahs. This demographic profile may be because childless women were more likely
to seek overseas employment, perhaps as a way to negotiate a tem­poral escape
from the gendered burdens of being a widow or a spinster in a society that did not
necessarily favour ‘single’ women. It could also be because employers preferred to
hire women who did not have any other ‘mothering’ duties or attachments to
home, or it could be due to a combination of both dynamics. Irrespective of their
motherhood and marital status, almost all surviving records of travelling ayahs
reveal that they travelled alone; those who were wives or mothers left their family
in India while they travelled overseas.21
In regard to religion, 46%, by far the largest group, were Christians, making
Christians massively over-­represented in relation to their presence in the population; 32% were Hindus and 21% Muslims (see Figure 9). The reasons for the over-­
representation of Christians cannot be ascertained from the available records, but
there are a number of possible factors. It may be that travelling ayahs of Christian
faith felt more comfortable crossing the kala pani without the fear of losing caste.22
It is possible that European families preferred to entrust their children to Christian
women rather than Indians of other religions. It is also possible that the close
contact between travelling ayahs and Europeans exposed travelling ayahs to
Christianity and that they saw either spiritual or material benefits in conversion.
21 The motherhood status of 2% of travelling ayahs was unavailable in the records. For more discussion of travelling ayahs who left behind children and husbands, see Chapter 3.
22 Kala pani translates literally as ‘black water’ and refers to the Hindu proscription on crossing
seas to foreign lands which is understood to lead to a loss of purity.
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21%
52%
27%
Married
Widow
Single
14.4%
27.4%
58.2%
Married
NA
Single
Fig. 11 Marital status of travelling ayahs
Source: (a) Compiled from passports (1920–40); (b) Compiled from ships’ manifests (1871–1940)
Nevertheless, the fact that there were significant numbers of Hindu and Muslim
travelling ayahs suggest that neither religion nor caste anxiety were de­cisive factors in determining who entered the profession.
While the above discussion shows some common identities amongst travelling
ayahs, some strikingly uncommon identities also appear in the archival records.
Some records show that ‘child ayahs’ could be recruited as young as 4 or 5 years of
age. A record from 1892 reveals that Mrs Colgrave travelled with her child and
infant along with a ‘child ayah’ of 4 years of age from Bombay to London.23
Similarly, in 1900 a travelling child ayah, Mariammah, was brought to Britain by
23 TNA, BT 26, P30, I77.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
29
2%
3%
Without children
With children
No data available
Fig. 12 Motherhood status of travelling ayahs
Source: Compiled from passports (1920–40); only passports recorded this kind of data
her employers, in the capacity of a ‘child servant’.24 In 1937, another case of a
child travelling ayah appears in the archives, wherein a child travelling ayah
named Suzanne was brought to Britain by her employers but was eventually dismissed and sent to the Ayahs’ Home.25 While little information on the origins or
use of child travelling ayahs is available, it seems likely that they were employed as
playmates for the employers’ children onboard ship and may have been employed
as servants as they grew older.
There were also male travelling ayahs whose identities become visible mostly
in ship manifests (see Table 1). While this is clearly a remarkably interesting find,
due to the focus of this project being female travelling ayahs and the source of
male travelling ayahs being limited to these few ship manifests I am unable to
explore more on the male travelling ayahs at this moment.
To sum up, travelling ayahs were usually aged between 20 and 50, with most
being in their thirties; they came from a broad range of religious and caste backgrounds but Christians were significantly over-­represented in the profession; further, whilst travelling ayahs could be single, married or widowed, the vast
majority of them were childless.
24 BNA, South Wales Echo, 8 December 1900.
25 LCM, London City Mission Magazine, 1938, 144.
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Table 1 Male travelling ayahs
Name
Employer
Marital Status
Age
From
To
Ship
Travel date
Ayah
Ayah
Ayah
Ayah
Ayah
Mullin’s Ayah
Ayah Mrs David
Chotey Ayah
Mrs Pogson
Mr Lackinstern
Rev. & Mrs Dodson
McPherson
Mrs Smith
Mr & Mrs Mullins
Mr & Mrs David
S. Nazir Alam
Married
Married
Married
Married
Married
Single
NA
Single
34
30
30
42
42
54
NA
NA
Madras
Calcutta
Madras
Calcutta
Calcutta
Bombay
Madras
London
London
London
London
London
London
Plymouth
Plymouth
Bombay
Manora
Dunera
Dunera
Monebassa
Monebassa
China
Manora
P&O Strathaird
April 1892
July 1895
April 1896
April 1897
April 1897
May 1900
March 1905
October 1938
Source: Compiled from ship manifests between 1800 and 1940 (between India and Britain, both ways)
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
31
Becoming a Travelling Ayah
The absence of adequate archival records makes it difficult to suggest definitively
how travelling ayahs were recruited. Nonetheless, it is clear from the available
sources that in some instances, travelling ayahs were initially engaged as domestic
servants in India, and subsequently agreed to travel with their employers, most
frequently when their mistresses travelled alone or with children.26 Sometimes,
women who became travelling ayahs in this ad hoc fashion found the profession
congenial and took employment on other voyages, sometimes remaining constantly mobile for years. For instance, one travelling ayah employed by a local
planter in India moved to Malaya with the family and when the planter’s family
subsequently visited England, the ayah went with them. Eventually, following the
dissolution of the service contract with that family, she continued to work as a
travelling ayah for other families.27 However, there were also women who refused
to serve as ayahs in India but were eager to be employed as travelling ayahs
onboard passenger ships to Britain.28 Again, motives are impossible to discern
from the records, but these could range from money to desire for travel and
adventure, or the opportunity to escape oppressive relationships or social situ­
ations in India.
For travelling ayahs not already employed by families in India, servant brokering agencies and newspaper advertisements played crucial roles in finding
employment opportunities. By the late 1880s, both domestic servant agencies and
individual employers were frequently advertising in local newspapers across
India for travelling ayahs. For instance, in the late 1800s, Geo. W. Wheatley & Co.
in Bombay regularly advertised their brokering services to families travelling to
Britain who required travelling ayahs.29 Their advertisements appeared in local
newspapers, mainly the Times of India and Indian Statesmen. Similar services
were offered and advertised by the Servants’ Agency Office in Karachi.30 In southwest India, during the early 1900s, the Domestic Servants’ Agency in Bombay
frequently advertised its brokering services for travelling families, offering travelling ayahs, servants, cooks, and butlers.31 In east India, Messrs Carlyle and
Company Servants Agency at 27 Waterloo Street offered similar services to
patrons in Bengal Presidency.32 The presence of such servant brokering agencies
across India suggests that there was both a clear demand for travelling ayahs in
26 LCM, London City Mission Magazine, November 1858, 291.
27 BL, IOR L/PJ/6/1957, file 915 (1928); Arkib Negara 1957/0629473 (1913).
28 Catharine Peirira and Minnie Green are two examples of women who regularly worked as travelling ayahs but were reluctant to serve as ayahs when in India. See BL, IOR L/PJ/6/1631/6640 for
Catherine’s case; see BNA, Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 4 September 1892 for Minnie’s case.
29 BNA, Indian Statesmen, 5 February 1872.
30 BNA, Civil and Military Gazette, 14 March 1889.
31 BNA, Civil and Military Gazette, 31 October 1905.
32 BL, IOR PJ/6/1023, file 2801, 1910.
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Waiting on Empire
the subcontinent and a significant number of women seeking employment in
such roles.
British colonial families who could not persuade their domestic ayah to travel
with them and who did not wish to turn to brokering agencies often advertised
personally for a travelling ayah in local newspapers. For instance, in 1907,
Mrs Leslie Jones advertised in the Civil and Military Gazette as follows: ‘Wanted
at Once. A good Child’s AYAH, who will do night work and go to England in
April.’33 Some prospective employers were more detailed in their advertisements,
another advertisement in the Civil & Military Gazette read: ‘WANTED. A good
AYAH for a lady going Home in April next with two children, aged 4 and 1 year,
respectively; must be a good sailor, thoroughly experienced with children and
used to travelling. Apply, stating terms, &c., to ‘M.B’ general Post Office, Lahore.’34
A similar advertisement in the Times of India read: ‘EXPERIENCED AYAH
WANTED for voyage to England in April, must be a good sailor and accustomed
to young children. Apply stating terms to “S” .’35 These somewhat formulaic
ad­vert­ise­ments make it apparent what qualities employers often sought in a travelling ayah. Experience with children, experience in travelling, and being a ‘good
sailor’, understood as meaning able to manage seasickness, were paramount. It
seems clear that families wanted to hire somebody capable of caring for them,
and particularly for their children, in the challenging conditions of a long sea
journey: they did not want to find themselves responsible for a seasick travelling
ayah who was incapable of working.
Brokers and prospective employers were not the only ones making use of
newspapers to advertise for travelling ayahs. Sometimes, travelling ayahs desirous
of serving families themselves took the initiative to advertise their services in
local newspapers. In 1865, a travelling ayah from Calcutta advertised: ‘Calcutta
Ayah wishes to proceed to England in charge of a lady or children. Can be highly
recommended by her present employer.’36 Similarly in 1878, a travelling ayah’s
advertisement in the Times of India read: ‘An experienced ayah is desirous of an
engagement to accompany a Lady and children to England. First Class
References.’37 In the same year another advertisement read: ‘An experienced
Mahomedan Ayah WANTS TO ACCOMPANY a LADY to ENGLAND not later
than next July, she has made several voyages with a family to ENGLAND and can
give certificates and references.’38 These advertisements show that significant
numbers of women had established themselves in the profession of travelling
33 BNA, Civil and Military Gazette, 12 January 1907.
34 BNA, Civil and Military Gazette, 20 January 1890.
35 BNA, Times of India, 24 February 1886.
36 BNA, Times of India, 11 February 1864. The advertisement could be put forward by the travelling ayah herself or she might have requested the help of her employer to do so.
37 BNA, Times of India, 1 November 1878.
38 BNA, Times of India, 2 July 1878.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
33
ayah, that they were actively seeking further such employment and that they
knew what made them desirable candidates in the eyes of prospective employers.
Accordingly, travelling ayahs, sometimes with the help of brokering agencies,
highlighted those traits and characteristics that employers frequently ranked
highly: prior experience, being good with children, being good sailors, ability to
speak English, and quality of references. The agency of these women is apparent
in these adverts: however they may have come into the profession, by accident or
design, it is clear that this is a career that they find rewarding enough to deliberately pursue.
Once recruited, some employers provided their travelling ayahs some funds to
buy clothing appropriate for the long voyage and to the weather in Britain. The
employer was also required to arrange for the travelling ayah’s travel documents,
including tickets, permission slips, and from 1920 onwards passports.39 Over the
period from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the EIC, and then the India
Office in London, required employers to complete various forms of documentation
before the movement of travelling ayahs was approved. Consequently, after
accepting employment by a family, travelling ayahs usually faced a brief period of
waiting before their voyage began.
Negotiating Responsibilities Onboard Ship: The Everyday
Experiences of Travelling Ayahs
Once onboard, travelling ayahs had to constantly juggle a myriad of roles and
responsibilities. Whilst ayahs in colonial households in India had clearly defined
responsibilities, primarily childcare, travelling ayahs were often expected to fill
multiple roles as nanny, cook, laundry-­maid, and caregiver to the entire family.
Essentially, travelling ayahs were expected to make the experience of families
aboard ship equivalent to being in a floating hotel in which all their needs were
met. These increased responsibilities were reflected in significantly better payments for travelling ayahs, which may have attracted women into the profession,
despite the fact that these payments may not always have been commensurate
with the potentially onerous nature of the work. During the early twentieth century, an ayah serving a colonial family in India would earn anywhere between five
to twelve rupees,40 whereas the pay for travelling ayahs usually ranged from one
39 After 1920, primarily because of the outbreak of the World War II and Britain’s need to increase
surveillance on travellers, passports became mandatory for all travellers in and out of Britain and
hence for the first-­time passports were required for travelling ayahs too.
40 R. Riddle, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Press, 1852):
3–5. Note: unfortunately, Riddle does not specify whether this was monthly or weekly rate. However,
it can be estimated that this was a monthly wage for the ayahs in India.
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34
Waiting on Empire
hundred and twenty-­five to one hundred and fifty rupees for two to three weeks
of work during the voyage.41
Once aboard, travelling ayahs were expected to relieve the lady and her family
of all daily chores, from stowing the baggage, bathing children, ensuring the
children get their daily exercise, doing laundry, and preparing meals, to playing
with children on deck, whilst ensuring that over-­adventurous children were kept
out of harm’s way.42 While attending to all such responsibilities, travelling ayahs
were also expected to ensure that the children did not cause any distraction to the
work of the crew and the social lives of other passengers. Although the work of
the travelling ayahs seemed to have been largely taken for granted by their
employers, a number of newspaper articles and op-­eds based on observers’
reports reveal the significance of their roles onboard ship. A newspaper article in
the Madras Weekly Mail in 1902 stated that a P&O steamer without an Ayah
‘would be as distracted as Piccadilly without Policemen’.43 The author, himself a
traveller from Britain to India, focused on the extraordinary service of Mary
ayah, a travelling ayah from Madras who was on her way to Britain while serving
a family with children. The author heaped praise on Mary ayah for keeping order
onboard, keeping the children entertained, and ensuring that they did not harass
crew members and cause disturbance or distraction to their parents and other
passengers. The writer also noted that Mary ayah managed sea-­sickness and
home-­sickness amongst children and adults alike. The account suggests that Mary
ayah and others like her served as nurses, caregivers, and therapists during their
journeys between Britain and the Indian subcontinent. While highlighting the
absolute necessity of a travelling ayah for British travelling families, the author
compared Mary ayah and her brethren to nuns: ‘She does a nun’s work, but being
paid for doing it.’44 This comment shows an ambivalence about the role of travelling ayahs. It was apparent to the author that the demanding character of a travelling ayah’s role required the dedication of a spiritual vocation, yet the relationships
in which travelling ayahs were involved were not charitable but transactional.
Travelling ayahs had no desire to be saints: the demanding nature of their work
was a result of ex­ploit­ation as much as personal commitment.
Large families, which were common at the time, may have posed particular
challenges for travelling ayahs. In 1796, Mr Wronghton and his family hired a
travelling ayah named Domingas Gomes to attend to his seven children—­James,
William, Thomas, Richard, Sophia, Fanny, and Charlotte—­
aboard the ship
Favorite, on passage from India destined for England.45 Like the travelling
41 This was the usual rate between the 1900s and 1930s. See BL, IOR L/PJ/6/1023/2801 and BL,
IOR L/PJ/6/1260/2966.
42 LCM, London City Mission Magazine, August 1922, 104–6; BNA, Homeward Mail, 9 February
1886; BNA, The Sketch, 28 August 1895.
43 BNA, Madras Weekly Mail, 26 June 1902.
44 BNA, Madras Weekly Mail, 26 June 1902.
45 TNA, Home Department, Public Branch, 1796, O.C., 2 May, no. 43.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
35
ayahs Jonana and Isobell discussed above, Domingas Gomes’s name, which is of
Portuguese origin, suggests that she was probably a Christian convert or a member
of the European-­Indian community in India. The case of Domingas Gomes was
not an exception, there are many other cases across various archives—­newspaper
passage notices, passage slips, immigration records and more—­which reveal
travelling ayahs serving large families such as the Wroughtons.
Whilst travelling ayahs most frequently accompanied complete families or
children with at least one adult parent or relative, there were times when the
travelling ayahs took on sole responsibility for British children on passage.
Sometimes, parents chose to send their children back to Britain and were unable
to accompany them, entrusting their welfare and safety entirely to an Indian
travelling ayah.46 The travelling ayahs in such cases thus served as personal child
couriers. In 1837, for instance, Choonee Ayah travelled with Mr F. M. Reid’s
children from Calcutta to London. Similarly, in 1891, Mary Ayah travelled the
same route with her charge, Charles Mathews,47 and in 1893 the Remsburg’s hired
a travelling ayah to accompany their infant from Bombay to London by herself.48
In such cases, travelling ayahs were solely responsible not only for the comfort of
their charges but also for their safety and broader well-­being. Children and
travelling ayahs must have become emotionally close, at least sometimes if not
always,49 particularly when travelling without parents, only to be separated at the
end of the voyage. At the same time, travelling ayahs could be under enormous
pressure in dealing with both children and their employers during the difficult
voyages. Because we do not have access to the voices of travelling ayahs themselves,
it is impossible to know to what extent they found the extra responsibility irksome
or to what extent being able to care for children without having to respond to the
everyday demands of parents was a relief.
The extent to which the demands of both children and adults could take an
overwhelming toll on travelling ayahs became manifest in a tragic incident
onboard the steamship Violette, on passage to Plymouth in 1885, when Mrs Abbott
reprimanded her travelling ayah for being careless toward the children in her
charge. The travelling ayah seized the Abbotts’ eldest daughter and threw
her overboard. Moments later, she threw herself into the sea. Although the ship
was stopped, neither the child nor the travelling ayah could be rescued.50
46 European children were often sent back to Britain for educational or health reasons or for vacation.
Often these children lived with their relatives in Britain until they were returned to India, or their
parents came to Britain.
47 WBSA, general proceedings, 5 April 1837, no. 38; TNA, BT26, P16, I66.
48 TNA, BT 26, P42, I42.
49 There are some ayahs’ pictures in scrapbooks that families kept after returning to Britain and
also the emotional bonds between the children and the travelling ayahs become visible in children’s
literature produced in Britain (discussed in the last section of this chapter).
50 While this case involved a Japanese travelling ayah and not an Indian travelling ayah, it is a telling
example of the taxing labour experiences that the travelling ayahs had onboard. This case was widely
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36
Waiting on Empire
Other travelling ayahs expressed their grievances in less extreme ways. From
time to time, reports appear in the archives which make it evident that travelling
ayahs felt overwhelmed by the work assigned to them and found ways of resisting
and challenging the expectations of their employers. For instance, in 1876, Peerun
Ayah constantly made her dissatisfaction with her onerous workload known to
her employer, Mrs Field, during their voyage from Britain to Calcutta. When they
landed and Peerun Ayah was not paid the wages that she thought were due to her,
she took the case to the local civil court in Calcutta. The case was decided in
favour of the employer, Mrs Field, and it was stated that as Peerun Ayah had ‘misbehaved’ and did not work as her employers expected, she would not be paid her
due.51 Although the case was decided against Peerun Ayah, it shows that she was
prepared to fight for her rights and challenge what she saw as an unacceptable
workload. In another case from 1885, a travelling ayah serving a retired Major
and his family on their way back to Britain from India was reported to have
dragged her feet and refused to work at the pace her employers demanded. The
record states, that the ayah ‘repeatedly refused to work and was guilty of
insolence’.52 While the Major paid her wages, he refused to pay her passage back
to India. This is another case showing that travelling ayahs were not always prepared to accept subordinate status and were sometimes willing to challenge
demands they saw as excessive.
Other than exploitative employers, and less than ideal working conditions,
travelling ayahs also faced the same dangers as other seafarers. Although these
reduced with time and improving technologies, they were never completely
absent and were exacerbated in wartime. In 1892, for example, a ship travelling
from India to Liverpool sank. Amongst the casualties were three travelling ayahs.
However, because of the lack of detail in ship’s manifests, which do not record the
names or other identifying characteristics of the travelling ayahs, identification of
those who drowned is impossible.53 In 1915, Mary Fernandez, a 30-­year-­old ayah
serving Mrs Bird, Mrs McGinn’s Ayah (age and name not listed), and Mrs Mand’s
Ayah (age and name not listed) drowned on their way to Britain when the
S.S. Persia, a P&O passenger liner, was torpedoed and sunk without warning by a
German U-­boat, U-­38; 343 out of a total of 519 passengers died in the incident.54
There were also cases wherein travelling ayahs embarked on the long voyage,
knowing or not knowing, while they were pregnant. There are at least two cases
where travelling ayahs had their children onboard. In 1857, onboard ship Theresa
enroute to London, Meran ayah delivered her son named Muryo on 25 July.55
Similarly, in 1858, onboard ship Blenheim enroute to London, Emma ayah had a
covered in multiple newspapers in Britain. See BNA, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 13 June 1885; BNA,
The Herald, 13 June 1885; BNA, Lancaster Gazette, 10 June 1885, and many more.
51 BL, IOR V27-­142-­21.
52 BL, IOR L/PJ/6/158-­1282.
53 BNA, St. Andrews Citizen, 5 November 1892.
54 TNA, UK BT 99-­3112-­25G.
55 TNA, BT 158, P1.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
37
daughter on 19 September 1858. Emma’s daughter’s name was not registered,
suggesting that the child might have died at birth or was not recorded by the ship
master.56 No further information about either case are available and hence there
is no way of knowing what happened to them thereafter.
Alongside all these challenges, travel onboard could potentially be isolating
and lonely for travelling ayahs. Passenger ship manifests between late 1800s to
1940s show most passenger ships would have at least two to three travelling ayahs
onboard, and sometimes more. For instance, S.S. Golconda, sailing from Calcutta
to London in 1891, had seven travelling ayahs onboard.57 Similarly in 1894,
S.S. Peninsula, sailing from Bombay to London carried five travelling ayahs.58
Travelling ayahs embarking in the same city are likely to have had similar cultural
and linguistic backgrounds, and even if they did not, there was a cultural fa­mil­
iar­ity, and most could communicate at least in some English (as a common
language).59 It is likely, therefore, that they would have been able to create a sense
of community and support one another. The records also reveal, however, that
there were numerous ships between 1891 and 1940 (see Table 2) which only had
one travelling ayah onboard. For first-­time travelling ayahs in particular, with
their closest relationships onboard being with their European employers and the
children for whom they cared, the lack of peer support could have led to isolation
and loneliness. Whether travelling ayahs would have been able to, or would
have wanted to form supportive relationships with others onboard, such as European
servants or lascar seafarers, is simply impossible to know from the terse
­documentation available.
Nonetheless, the dangers of the sea, the stresses of travelling with strangers to
foreign lands, the taxing physical and psychological demands of the job, and the
many uncertainties attached to working as a travelling ayah do not appear to have
reduced the traffic of travelling ayahs between India and Britain. Industrious
travelling ayahs capitalized on the widespread demand for their services and were
able to secure successive positions advertised in newspapers with families travelling
between India and Britain.60 The redoubtable Mrs Antony Pareira, who as noted
56 TNA, BT 158, P2.
57 TNA UK, BT26, P16, I66.
58 TNA UK, BT 26, P58, I57.
59 Some records claim that most travelling ayahs could speak English (to varying degrees). See
BNA, The Sketch, 28 August 1895.
60 Many newspapers carried advertisements from Indian women seeking employment as travelling
ayahs on passage to India and from families looking for ayahs to travel with them to India. Newspapers
wherein such advertisements commonly appeared included the East London Observer, Bradford
Observer, Homeward Mail from India, Hereford Times, Portsmouth Evening News, Mid-­Sussex Times,
The Era, China and the East, Northern Whig (Belfast), Hampshire Independent, Sheffield Independent,
Aberdeen Free Press, Shields Daily Gazette, Belfast Morning News, Cheltenham Looker-­On, Cheltenham
Chronicle, Western Daily Press, Daily Mirror, Western Morning News, Liverpool Echo, Liverpool Daily
Post, Buchan Observer, and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser, showing that ayahs were in demand
throughout the British Isles. Similarly, many newspapers based in India carried advertisements from
Indian women seeking employment as travelling ayahs for passages to Britain. Most frequently these
advertisements were found in the Times of India, Madras Mail, and Bombay Gazette.
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Waiting on Empire
Table 2 Ships with only one travelling ayah onboard
for ships travelling to Britain (1890–1940)
Year
Identity of ayah
(as per ship manifests)
Ship
1891
1891
1891
1891
1891
1891
1892
1892
1892
1893
1893
1893
1893
1894
1894
1894
1894
1894
1895
1895
1895
1896
1896
1896
1897
1897
1898
1899
1899
1900
1900
1900
1902
1903
1906
1907
1907
1907
1908
1908
1909
1910
1910
1911
1913
1914
1919
Mrs Middleton’s Ayah
Mr Beineiy’s Ayah
Mrs Palmer’s Ayah
Wotin Ayah
Simon Ayah
Mr Peppe’s Ayah
One Ayah
Mrs Barter’s Ayah
Marie Ayah
Mrs Vane’s Ayah
Mrs Couller’s Ayah
Ayah
Mrs Uloth’s Ayah
Mrs Llyod’s Ayah
Mary Ayah
Mrs Grova’s Ayah
Mrs Morcou’s Ayah
Mrs Slaughter’s Ayah
Mrs Evan’s Ayah
Ayah
Mrs Hunter’s Ayah
Mrs Weir’s Ayah
Mrs Anderson’s Ayah
Ayah
Mrs Connell’s Ayah
Mrs Thomson’s Ayah
One Ayah
Mrs Stock’s Ayah
Native Ayah
Mrs Mill’s Ayah
Ayah
Native Ayah
One Ayah
Ondatchy Ayah
One Native Ayah
Ane Ayah
Reverend Sandy’s Ayah
Mrs Branden’s Ayah
Mr Gill’s Ayah
Ayah
Jula Kanoo Ayah
One Ayah
Kumariya Ayah
Madras Ayah
Mrs William’s Ayah
Antonia Ayah
Infant George’s Ayah
Parramatta
Valetta
Bengal
Manora
Orizaba
Oceana
Dunera
Manora
Rewa
Chusan
Khedva
Dunera
Ruahine
Goorkha
Golconda
Shannon
Khedive
Umfuli
Ormuz
Peshawar
Parrametta
Bengal
Thames
Rewa
Rewa
Borneo
Rewa
Sumatra
Cheshire
Valetta
Golconda
Lancashire
Mombasa
Cheshire
Golconda
Golconda
City of York
Oceana
City of Calcutta
Massila
Umzumbi
Mombasa
City of Corinth
Caledonia
Trafford Hall
Mashobra
City of London
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
1920
1922
1925
1926
1927
1927
Mr Robt’s Ayah,
accompanying infant
Marianbie Ayah
Lizzie Ayah
Muthama Ayah
E. Hunshila Ayah
Kammi Ayah
39
City of London
Frankenfels
Ranpura
Matiana
City of Simla
California
Source: Compiled from NA, UK BT26, incoming passenger
records from ship manifests
above made over fifty voyages, exemplifies both the resilience of the travelling
ayahs and the determination of many to persevere in the profession.61
Subaltern Journeys: Relied Upon Yet Excluded
Serving the Empire through their labour of care, travelling ayahs navigated the
globe in significant numbers, becoming a common sight on passenger ships
between the Raj and the imperial metropole, as well as in Britain itself, by the
nineteenth century. While the love, loyalty, and responsibility of the travelling
ayahs were appreciated and valourized by many, as exemplified in the newspaper
articles and illustrations discussed above, travelling ayahs were simultaneously
subject to exclusion, neglect, and distrust from employers. Travelling ayahs were
regularly reminded of their class and racial ‘belongings’ through their treatment
and working conditions onboard ships—­especially when they were housed
carelessly on decks and were limited in what they could and couldn’t do on the
‘floating hotels’.62
Despite the intimate reliance of colonial families on travelling ayahs, and their
demanding workloads, travelling ayahs were rarely provided much comfort
onboard ship and their sleeping quarters were physically distanced from those of
their charges and employers. While the employing family travelled on first or
sometimes second-­class tickets, travelling ayahs were almost always given
deck-­class passages.63 On older ships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
there were no proper beds on decks. Consequently, travelling ayahs carried
mattresses onboard which they could roll out only at night, being required to
keep them stowed during daytime. From the 1920s onward, there were noticeable
efforts made on various passenger ships to introduce specific amenities for
native servants travelling onboard. For instance, in 1927, the P&O ship Mongolia
boasted of its ‘Ayahs’ Washplace’ and ‘Ayah Lavatories’ as a new addition to
61 LCM, A. C. Marshall, ‘Nurses of Our Ocean Highways’, The Quiver (1922): 104–6.
62 BNA, Madras Weekly Mail, 26 June 1902.
63 Passenger lists show that ayahs were almost always embarked as deck passengers.
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40
Waiting on Empire
‘east-­going steamers, whose European passengers are frequently accompanied by
native servants’.64 Similar provisions can be found on the plans of the 1925 Ranchi
& Ranpura steamships and the 1924 Cathay steamship, all of which are on display
at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. In 1928, the blueprint for the
Viceroy of India featured a dedicated travelling ayahs’ quarter with double bunk
beds on Deck E, below the space for the ship’s crew (See Fig. 13).65 While these
provisions were undoubtedly an improvement, their introduction highlights the
reality that for over a century previously, travelling ayahs had to share these util­ities
with passengers from other classes. It is likely, therefore, that these provisions
derived from a concern to maintain racial and class segregation as much as a
concern for the welfare of travelling ayahs.
Records from 1900s show that only when travelling ayahs travelled alone with
their charges, without their adult employers, did they travel in first class alongside
the children they cared for to ensure the latter’s safety. For instance, in May 1911
Syadmmah ayah travelled onboard Martaban to Liverpool, with the McIntyre
children: John, Elizabeth, Robert, and Ralph, all between 1 and 12 years of age.
As the only accompanying adult, she travelled in the same class of passage with
them.66 Similarly, in April 1912, when Mrs Croft’s child travelled from Bombay to
London aboard the P&O ship Persia, unaccompanied by her parents or relatives,
the accompanying travelling ayah travelled with the child in the same class of
travel.67
Sometimes racial and class segregation was enforced by shipping lines, regardless of the wishes of employers. For instance, the 1913 onboard rules of a P&O
passenger ship plying between India and Britain via the Suez Canal read ‘servants
and ayahs . . . are permitted to be in their masters’ or mistresses’ cabins only while
performing their duties’.68 In contrast, perusal of passenger lists shows that
European servants were rarely given a deck-­class passage.
More strikingly, no matter how menial their job, European servants were
acknowledged by having their name, and usually their age, recorded in ships’
passage records and were almost always accorded a title (Miss, Mrs, Mr). Travelling
ayahs, on the other hand, rarely had any name, let alone their full name, recorded,
in ship manifests, thus remaining nameless ‘servants’ or ‘ayahs’ on ships’ passage
slips, denied any recognition of their individuality.69 Frequently, the travelling
64 ‘The P&O Str. Mongolia: Newest Addition to the P&O Fleet Now in Shanghai’, North China
Herald, 5 March 1927, 374.
65 Heloise Finch-­Boyer, ‘Lascars through the Colonial Lens: Reconsidering Visual Sources of South
Asian Sailors from the Twentieth Century’, Journal for Maritime Research 16.2 (2014): 259.
66 TNA, BT 26, P468, inward passenger list, 1911.
67 Possibly in the same cabin too. TNA, BT 26, P532, inward passenger list, 1912.
68 ‘Suez Route’, in An Official Guide to Eastern Asia: Transcontinental Connections between Europe
and Asia, vol. 1, 1913, p. xxxviii.
69 Other immigration records like passports and passage slips offer more visibility into the names
and other demographic information of the travelling ayahs.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
41
Fig. 13 Structural plan of a deck on Viceroy of India, 1928 (Ranchi & Ranpura, 1925,
and the Cathay, 1924, had similar architectural plans)
Source: Plans at display National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
ayahs were listed as if they were their employer’s possessions. For example, the
1893 ship’s manifest of S.S. Peshawar recorded its onboard travelling ayahs as:
‘Mrs Cook’s Ayah’, ‘Mrs Payne’s Ayah’. The names of their employers were recorded
but the personhood of the travelling ayahs themselves was not acknowledged.70
Much like the tagging of luggage on today’s passenger flights, travelling ayahs
appear to have been regarded more as objects than as persons by official record-­
keepers. In some cases, travelling ayahs were recorded only in groups without any
other identifying details or even their employer’s names. For instance, in 1921 the
ship’s manifest of City of Benaras carelessly registered ‘3 ayahs’ in the passenger
list and only mentioned that they embarked from Calcutta and were bound for
London. No other details were provided.71 Such careless anonymizing of travelling ayahs was not only disrespectful but could also have had deeply damaging
consequences. In case of accidents or other issues, there would be no way of
knowing which travelling ayah was affected or who to inform. In 1830, Shaikh
70 TNA, BT 26, P43, I13.
71 TNA, BT 26, P698, I104.
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Waiting on Empire
Joomun Hedmutgar, the son of a travelling ayah, Hingun, wrote to the Governor
General in India to enquire the whereabouts of Hingun who had travelled to
Britain with Miss Marcus early in 1827. Based on the fact that the employers did
not know her whereabouts, the government and Shaikh came to the conclusion
that Hingun might have died.72 Did she die on her way back home? Or did she die
whilst in Britain? Or did she change her name and remain in Britain? While there
is no way of knowing for sure, this case exemplifies how anonymity in ship
records could be detrimental especially when relatives of travelling ayahs tried to
look for them or when their relatives needed to be informed on the occurrence of
unfortunate events.
However, there were a few rare exceptions to the trend of treating travelling
ayahs as anonymous commodities. The S.S. Golconda’s manifests of 1891 and
1901 registered the name, marital status, and in 1901 the age of every travelling
ayah onboard (see Table 3).
A caveat is necessary here about the way in which the names of the travelling
ayahs and their employers appear in various archives, like ship manifests,
­passports, and case files in India Office Records. When these records discuss travelling ayahs, they are either anonymized the travelling ayahs or used the travelling
ayahs’ forenames. In the cases where the travelling ayahs’ forenames were used,
their surnames were often silenced or ‘ayah’ was imposed as their surnames. Also,
in a majority of cases, the records do not have a prefix of ‘Miss/Mrs/Ms’ for the
travelling ayahs. However, when the same files discuss the travelling ayahs’
employers, particularly the European people, they always use their surnames with
appropriate prefixes. In the book, I was tempted to address the travelling ayahs’
names with appropriate titles and make an effort to go against the imperial hierarchies of class and race, particularly the practice of infantilizing servants and the
lower classes more generally by referring to them by their forenames as if they
were children. However, I decided against it as I wanted to lay bare how such
hierarchies played out in archives and allow readers to experience the same.
Exclusion and differential treatment of travelling ayah sometimes became
more pronounced once the ships landed in Britain. In the worst cases, which were
also those most visible in the archives, irresponsible employers abandoned travelling ayahs in British ports without wages or return passages to India. Such cases
are the topic of the next chapter.73
Even for travelling ayahs that did not suffer such extreme exploitative treatment could face prejudice and exclusion in Britain, however. The 1864 children’s
story book, Henrietta and the Ayah, explores the visible presence of travelling
ayahs in Britain through the eyes of an English girl, who is instantaneously scared
72 National Archives of India (henceforth NAI), Home Department, Public Branch, OC, 29 June
1830, 70 and 71 C.
73 Several cases of ayahs that had been abandoned are available in the archives—­which becomes
the soul of this book—­and are dealt with more in detail in the following chapters.
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Becoming Travelling Ayahs and Supporting the Empire
43
Table 3 Details of travelling ayahs recorded in the ship’s manifests of
S.S. Golconda, 1891 and 1901
Year
Ship
Ayah’s name
Marital status
Age
1891
1891
1891
1891
1891
1891
1901
1901
1901
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Golconda
Martha Ayah
Catharine Ayah
Mary Ayah
Elizabeth Ayah
Mary Anne Ayah
Rachel Ayah
Lutchoo Ayah
Amy Ayah
Sarah Ayah
Married
Married
Married
Married
Married
Married
Single
Single
Single
Not available
Not available
Not available
Not available
Not available
Not available
26
28
30
Source: Compiled from NAUK BT 26, P16, I66 and BT 26, P183, I4
and disgusted upon seeing a travelling ayah in London and later in her neighbour’s house. In the eyes of the girl, the ayah is a ‘nasty black creature’ who is not
clean and she insists that her parents should ‘send away blacky’.74 In another children’s book Cousin Johnny and his Indian Nurse, Johnny travels alone with his
travelling ayah, Nooren, to his cousin’s house in England, where upon arrival,
Johnny’s cousins treat Nooren with disrespect and disgust. After much coaxing
from Johnny’s uncle and aunt, his cousins began to tolerate Nooren and eventually become attached to her.75 In both stories family members intervene to teach
children that travelling ayahs mean no harm and rather that they protected the
members of the family they served. Indeed, the second story ended on a more
promising note of acceptance. The fact that such stories were being written, however, shows that this was an issue that concerned writers at the time, suggesting
that suspicion, hostility, and intolerance of travelling ayahs was widespread. Such
stories thus reflect the colonial gaze on counterflowing colonized bodies which
were becoming increasingly visible in Britain during the nineteenth century. The
travelling ayahs were thus ironically loved, suspected, and alienated sim­ul­tan­
eous­ly. The stark contrast between portrayals of travelling ayahs as almost saintly
figures of trust onboard ship in the newspaper articles discussed above and as
figures of suspicion, fear, or disgust once landed in Britain in these children’s stories lays bare the paradoxical nature of the colonial gaze: itself a product of the
contradictions between imperial practice and imperial ideology, which made the
Empire dependent upon those it denigrated and marginalized.76
74 Madame De Chatelain, The Story of Henrietta and the Ayah (London: James Hogg and Sons,
1864), 28–9.
75 Cousin Johnny and His Indian Nurse (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1860).
76 Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-­
Victorian Britain (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998); Michael Fisher, Counterflows of
Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
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Waiting on Empire
It is important to note that even though travelling ayahs were subjects of colonial prejudice and exclusion, they were generally viewed in a significantly better
light than male servants and lascars from the Indian subcontinent in Britain.
While travelling ayahs in Britain were sometimes viewed as unkempt or ‘dirty’,
they were rarely demonized and cast as moral threats to British society. Male
servants and lascars, on the other hand, were frequently associated with unruliness and immorality—­
seen as dangerous potential threats to social order.
Historians like Laura Tabili, Mitra Sharafi, and Marika Sherwood have all shown
that London newspapers frequently stereotyped lascars as immoral, women
impregnators, alcoholics, wife-­deserters, and diseased bodies.77 Occasionally, lascars were also seen as threats to local jobs as they could provide a cheap source of
labour. Travelling ayahs were never subject to such deeply hostile stereotyping.
This can be attributed in part to British attitudes around gender, in which subordinate males, particularly if separated from women, such as lascars and male
servants, were seen as threatening in a way that women were not. The fact that
travelling ayahs also received more positive publicity, being portrayed as loyal
and caring, also worked to counter the negative stereotyping that they did suffer.
Ultimately, it could be suggested that the British ruling class could not afford to
create or tolerate a social mindset of distrust against travelling ayahs, given
that their labour of care remained essential to the functioning of imperial
administrations.
This chapter has laid the foundations of understanding the emergence of the
profession of travelling ayahs and the range of responsibilities that they had to
negotiate on their voyages. The following chapter focuses on the ways that contradictions in imperial policies on migration and employment left some travelling
ayahs open to abusive treatment by employers, making their periods of waiting in
Britain spaces of both stress and suffering and of agency and activism in response.
77 Laura Tabili, ‘Keeping Natives under Control: Race Segregation and the Domestic Dimensions
of Empire, 1920–1939’, International Labor and Working-­Class History 44 (1993): 64–78; Marika
Sherwood, ‘Race, Empire and Education: Teaching Racism’, Race and Class 42.3 (2001): 1–28; Mitra
Sharafi, ‘The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda’, Law
and History Review 28.4 (2010): 979–1009; Shompa Lahiri, ‘Contested Relations: The East India
Company and Lascars in London’, in Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance,
Embodiment, ed. H. V. Bowen and Shompa Lahiri (Springer: Basingstoke, 2010).
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