Post Facto - Life and labour: What does it mean to have servants?

	My Sunday Guardian column this month: At a big Delhi party hosted by an eminent economist and advisor to the government, a grandchild — a little boy — was misbehaving. The gathered guests waited for a parental figure to do the needful. And the needful was apparently done. Said the teller of the story without the slightest glimmer of sarcasm, "— is such a hands-on mum, she immediately called the aayah to haul him off." It's a delicious anecdote — and timely, given the airtime recently devoted to Indians and their domestic help. Most of that discussion, in the wake of the Devyani Khobragade - Sangeeta Richard case, has been about minimum wages and maximum working hours: a crucial subject that could certainly do with more discussion, especially among Indians not disadvantaged by earning too few dollars. In stark contrast to the Khobragade affair was the already almost-forgotten November case involving Jagriti Singh, wife of BSP MP Dhananjay Singh, and her unfortunate domestic help Rakhi Bhadra. Far from high-profile international attention, Bhadra died of prolonged torture in a Lutyens' Delhi bungalow that her employer had turned into a monstrous high-security, total-surveillance prison. Certainly it seems that the idea of basic self-sufficiency — being able to perform the basic tasks needed to live — has less value in South Asia than perhaps in any other part of the world. Great men who even drive their own cars are a rarity, while stories of those who couldn’t perform simple household tasks are told with inordinate fondness:  But while these cases have drawn much-needed attention to the conditions of domestic workers, both circumstances are extraordinary. The media never seems to swing beyond the outrage/defensiveness pendulum enough to actually open up the quieter but larger conversation that we clearly need to have as a society: the complete ordinariness of our dependence on domestic help. Which is where, snarky hilarity apart, my earlier anecdote seems to serve a purpose. Especially in conjunction with some other conversations I happened to have in the same fortnight. At a potluck picnic, it turned out that one friend who'd offered to bake a cake had actually made her mother bake it. I laughed about this to another friend, at which he pointed out that his contribution had also been prepared by the labour of others — in his case, the household kitchen staff. A few days later, a friend announced that she was moving back to India after over a decade in the UK. Her reasons: more jobs, better weather and an easier life — as she put it, "middle class privilege here really does free up time for intellectual labour." It's true: you don't need to be super-rich in India to be able to completely outsource your housekeeping, cleaning and childcare responsibilities.
	But if you pay domestic workers well and treat them fairly, comes the inevitable response, why should it matter whether you look after your own children or cook your own meals or clean your own bathrooms? Certainly it seems that the idea of basic self-sufficiency — being able to perform the basic tasks needed to live — has less value in South Asia than perhaps in any other part of the world. Great men who even drive their own cars are a rarity, while stories of those who couldn't perform simple household tasks are told with inordinate fondness: Satyajit Ray, his wife tells us, couldn't fix a light bulb. VS Naipaul — admittedly a Trinidiadian born and bred, but let's allow for his strongly Hindu upper-caste upbringing here — lived a lifetime in England seemingly without performing any domestic labour, his home and kitchen maintained to his notoriously exacting standards by his 'more Indian than any Indian' wife Pat. Even within the servant-hiring classes, then, men are at the top of the non-labouring hierarchy; mothers and wives can end up as replacements for — or extensions of — the maid. In this context, Gandhi's remarkable emphasis on individual self-sufficiency: washing his own clothes, cleaning his own toilet — sometimes seems to me his most radical legacy. At least in my family, via Gandhian grandparents, it has passed itself down to me in a way that makes battles over bathroom-cleaning turn ideological in the best possible way. Perhaps the only answer to the question of why labour matters is that those who do not perform it as a matter of course see it as beneath their status. And see those who do perform it as beneath themselves. These ideas can often come to a real and symbolic crux in the matter of the toilet. In the 2011 American film The Help, the white women come up with a Home Help Sanitation Initiative that essentially seeks to build separate toilets for black domestic staff because "black people carry different diseases to white people". South Asians who saw that film knew they didn't need to go as far as the American South or the early 1960s to find exactly the same cringeworthy segregationist sentiments. In the last fortnight, these two conversations took place: a friend renting a new apartment in Delhi announced with some surprise that it had two bedrooms, but three bathrooms. Then she corrected herself — it had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a servants' quarter — with its own toilet. Meanwhile, my mother told me about an old friend who'd been feeling overwhelmed by the domestic demands made on her by an ageing mother, an increasingly finicky husband, and a son and daughter-in-law visiting from abroad who've promptly fallen ill. "Doesn't she have live-in help?" I asked my mum. "No, she can only hire a part-time person. Because they'd never let their help use their loos. And there's no servants' bathroom."

The maid’s tale

An op-ed I wrote for today's Indian Express.


The Help may seem like a sentimental movie about another time and place, but it deeply implicates the Indian viewer.
Based on a bestselling 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help — released in four Indian cities last Friday — is among the most talked-about American movies of 2011. Odd as it may sound, one wishes it were among the most talked-about releases in India, too.

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, just before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, The Help centres around a 23-year-old southern white girl who puts together a book on the experiences of the black women who work in her friends’ homes. The conflicts of the segregation-era South may appear very far away from our 21st century urban Indian lives, but it only takes a few minutes of clear-eyed watching to render the distance superfluous. No Indian middle class viewer can possibly see this film without thinking about his or her own relationship with that figure who has largely disappeared from contemporary Western life but still features so crucially in ours — the maid.

The plot runs as follows: Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan returns to her home-town after college, full of writerly dreams. The girls she grew up with are already married, with children, and Skeeter is an awkward, slightly bored presence amidst the charity evenings, bridge and chocolate pie, until she is struck by the idea of looking at this world through the eyes of the black women upon whose labour it is largely founded. It’s also a personal quest: to get to the truth about the disappearance of Constantine, the maid who raised her.

The servant’s significance in the bourgeois child’s life is, of course, undeniable. The German critic Walter Benjamin began his wonderful 'A Berlin Chronicle' thus: “Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city. For although the child grows up at closest quarters to the city, he needs and seeks guides to its wider expanses, and the first of these — for the son of wealthy middle-class parents like me — are sure to have been nursemaids.” For most well-to-do Indian children, as for the white children in the film, the maid is the first guide not just to the city, but to every aspect of life — simply by virtue of being the adult with whom the child spends most time.

But while ostensibly foregrounding the black experience, the narrative produced by Stockett and Tate Taylor — the film’s director, also Stockett’s friend from a late-’70s Jackson childhood — is filtered through the eyes of the sensitive white person, the adult who still remembers with affection the wise old maid who brought her up. This undeniably heart-tugging device — the bond between a (white) child and a (black) maternal figure — allows us to hold on to the convenient old-fashioned idea that love can cut across race. And, in our case, class.

Which, of course, it can. But the child who is still blind to distinctions of race and class is also blind to the harsh hierarchies of the world s/he inhabits. Stockett has herself said in an interview that until she was 20, she didn’t notice that her grandparents’ help had to use a separate outside toilet.

But in a culture like ours, where the deep divisions of class come weighed down by the invisible ballast of entrenched pollution-and-purity beliefs often not even recognised as being about caste, such blindness can last all our lives. Servants are central to the Indian middle-class home — and expected to be invisible within it. Hilly Holbrook’s argument for separate toilets for the help — “everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do” — isn’t something we can laugh at, because we hear versions of it all around us. The separate toilet — not to mention separate utensils, eating in the kitchen, never sitting down except squatting on the floor — is simply assumed to be the way things are, not just by Indian employers but also, tragically often, by the help. The slightest glimmer of a refusal to kowtow to that norm is met with anger, irritation or at the very least, bemusement: we all know the conversation that begins, “Maids these days...”.

Stockett’s Skeeter gives the privileged viewer a comfortable position from which to safely empathise with the disadvantaged other: we’re only too happy to identify with Skeeter, “cause she the kind that speak to the help”. It makes it easier to distance ourselves from the truly evil white people — the ones who make their maids work punishing hours, enforce domestic segregation, refuse loans in the interest of self-help and are quick to levy accusations of theft. But as we watch the pasty-faced Hilly Holbrook satisfyingly given her cinematic comeuppance, we might do well to think how close we really are to her.

Cinemascope: Desi Boyz; The Help

Few surprises amid cliches

DESI BOYZ
Director: Rohit Dhawan
Starring: Akshay Kumar, John Abraham, Deepika Padukone, Chitrangda Singh
***

From the very first scene where a guy from Southall with "parents from Bhatinda" warns a derisive John Abraham that "you brown people" are going to get laid off first, we know that the desi-ness that is at the core of this film does not include second or third-generation South Asian immigrants, to whom the UK is most definitely home. Our protagonists, Nick aka Nikhil (John Abraham) and Jerry aka Jignesh (Akshay Kumar), may spend their entire lives making it big in London, but they will always be Hindustani at heart: i.e. they can be thoughtless and irresponsible and sexist, but you know they're good family-types deep down. They also watch out for brown women who have made the cardinal error of dating goras and teach them the error of their ways. Unlike those terrible white people (who're not family-types, you see), they also do not actually sleep around, even when the Recession (and some good-guys-finish-last logic) forces them to become male escorts for an agency called Desi Boyz, run by – who else? – Sanjay Dutt.

A film with these ingredients could have been insufferable. But debutante Rohit Dhawan (son of David) has managed to create a fast-paced, breezy film that manages to do everything it does in an endearingly goofy sort of way that's often actually funny. John and Akshay bring an irrepressible energy to their antics, there's a cute kid who isn't milked quite as unabashedly for teariness as you might imagine, and I quite enjoyed Anupam Kher's turn as a dapper little retired gynaecologist with a taste for the occasional joint. Deepika Padukone's sore lack of acting talent doesn't show up so glaringly when all she has to do is sulk prettily (in contrast to, say, Aarakshan). Chitrangada Singh, however, is excruciating to watch as the sultry Oxford economics professor (yes, exactly) whose idea of exam preparation is to play strip poker with the older student (Akshay Kumar) whom she has a massive crush on. (But really, it's tough to carry off a role where you have to say things like, "Tab main moti aur bechari thhi, ab main sexy aur powerful hoon" and be taken seriously.)

The film even manages to bung in some gentle criticism of consumerism: a scene ridiculing the fancy marriage with the Valentino gown and exotic honeymoon as the hollow stuff that everybody aspires to. However surface this may seem in a film where the central romance begins and ends with a vision of "house in Hampstead, two kids, two cars and a dog", one can only be surprised that it's there at all.


Mississippi Churning

THE HELP
Director: Tate Taylor
Starring: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain

***1/2

Tate Taylor's corny but heartwarming film is adapted from Kathleen Stockett's bestseller about an early 60s Southern world where black women must work as maids, cleaning the houses, cooking the dinners and bringing up the babies of white women. The white women, meanwhile, spend their early adulthood plotting potential marriages ("Isn't that what all you girls from Old Miss major in: professional husband hunting?" says a rude young suitor in the film) – and the rest of their lives in a whirl of bridge parties and society benefits.

This is a fictional world set exactly a century down from the Civil War era of Gone With the Wind, but Southern belles from the 'better families' are still preoccupied with the all-important task of ensnaring men (and occasionally, the other all-important task of snubbing white trash). The Help has also been accused of reinforcing stereotypes by creating black characters who don't seem to have moved much distance at all from the comforting nurturers of white children that the Mammies of yore were reduced to.

Now, it's true that the stable, strong-minded black maid teaching her young white charges to trust themselves and dishing out helpful advice such as "Fryin' chicken jus' tend to make you feel better about life" is undeniably clichéd, and the film's vision of a cross-colour sisterhood in the face of bigotry may seem simplistically crowd-pleasing. There's also the fact that the black women's words must come filtered through a white protagonist: Eugenia 'Skeeter' Phelan (Emma Stone), a Mississippi girl who comes back from college to her hometown determined to find a story that will turn her into a writer.

But The Help's dramatic premise – the well-intentioned white girl who wants to get the black maids of Jackson, Mississippi, to describe this world from their perspective – is brought to life by some fine acting: Viola Davis as the muted, thoughtful Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as her feisty friend Minnie make the screen sparkle every time they're on, and I also thoroughly enjoyed Jessica Chastain's over-the-top performance as the desperate and confused Celia Foote (unrecognisably different from her Tree of Life avatar). The leitmotif of the film is a campaign for a separate toilet outside the house for "the help". We in India could do worse than watching a film that forces us to think about the notions of 'cleanliness' that form the core of every caste system.