Most British families in India employed ayahs to care for children and attend to the memsahib. This thesis centralises the experiences of Indian travelling ayahs – a historically overlooked group who accompanied families on journeys to and from India – from 1870 till 1947. By examining how gender, class, and race shaped their experiences, this study offers novel insights into these itinerant female workers. It argues that ayahs occupied a liminal space that carried across all phases of their employment, marked primarily through the demarcation of physical space.
Memsahibs used “othering” practices to highlight distinctions both between ayahs and their white counterparts, however, these efforts were not always fully effective, creating a hybrid space for ayahs to navigate. The thesis shows how the social and spatial hierarchies that shaped ayahs’ treatment in India were replicated on the voyage, in the metropole, and their return. Within these boundaries, ayahs not only occupied assigned spaces but also created ones where they felt belonging.
This thesis links the experiences of travelling ayahs to discussions on empire, female domestic labour, itinerant work, transnational mobility, migration, and colonial perceptions of the gendered “other”, shedding light on the broader political dynamics of belonging within the British Empire. It does so by examining how the ayahs’ liminal status influenced their employment conditions across these domains through notions of citizenship as well as socio-spatial practices that were used to include and exclude. This thesis explores the ways ayahs situated themselves through each stage of their employment journey and managed their approaches to (non-)belonging within British colonial society. By doing so, it aims to bridge the gap between their vital work and their limited visibility in historical accounts.
