In my search in the Abhilekh Patal, the digital portal of the National Archives of India, I came across a telegram that depicts the passport application of an ayah in 1905. Nestled in the records of the Department of Commerce and Industry, the document describes an enquiry from the travel agency Thomas Cook and SonContinue reading “An Ayah and her Denied Passport”
Author Archives: swapnabanerjee03
She Travelled: The Portrait of Joanna de Silva, the Indian Ayah at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
My encounter with Joanna de Silva, a nursemaid from eighteenth-century Bengal, India, was rather serendipitous! I came to know of the portrait of Joanna through a research network of scholars and enthusiasts committed to unravel the history of Indian ayahs and Chinese amahs, the native nursemaids in the service of European employers in colonial India.[1]Continue reading “She Travelled: The Portrait of Joanna de Silva, the Indian Ayah at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York”
Locating Ayahs in Transit: A Passage to Australia and other Parts of the World
As a social historian whose work focuses on domestic laborers in colonial India, I intend to unravel the story of Indian female domestic workers who travelled to Australia, directly or via England, and to other British colonies in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Today in India’s imagination, Australia chiefly looms large as a majorContinue reading “Locating Ayahs in Transit: A Passage to Australia and other Parts of the World”
Ayahs and Amahs 