Servants' Pasts
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Servants’ Pasts Servants Past Vol 1.indd 1 10/07/2019 16:14:55 New Perspectives in South Asian History The New Perspectives in South Asian History series publishes monographs and other writings on early modern, modern and contemporary history. The volumes in the series cover new ground across a broad spectrum of subjects such as cultural, environmental, medical, military and political history, and the histories of ‘marginalised’ groups. It includes fresh perspectives on more familiar fields as well as interdisciplinary and original work from all parts of South Asia. It welcomes historical contributions from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. Series Editors SANJOY BHATTACHARYA Director, Centre for Global Health Histories, and Professor in the History of Medicine, Department of History, University of York, UK NIELS BRIMNES Associate Professor in History and South Asian Studies, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark NITIN SINHA Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (Leibniz- ZMO), Berlin Editorial Advisory Committee Cristiana Bastos Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal Rajib Dasgupta Professor and Chairperson, Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Gordon Johnson University of Cambridge, UK Amarjit Kaur Emeritus Professor of Economic History, University of New England, Australia Gyanesh Kudaisya Associate Professor, South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore Erez Manela Professor, Department of History, Harvard University, USA Servants Past Vol 1.indd 2 10/07/2019 16:14:55 Servants’ Pasts Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia Vol. I Edited by Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma and Pankaj Jha Servants Past Vol 1.indd 3 10/07/2019 16:14:55 SERVANTS’ PASTS: SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SOUTH ASIA – VOL. I ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LIMITED Registered Office 3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029, Telangana, India e-mail: [email protected] Other Offices Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Patna, Visakhapatnam © Orient Blackswan Private Limited 2019 First Published 2019 Series cover and book design 030978 © Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. 2019 ISBN 978-93-5287-664-8 Typeset in Minion Pro 10/13 by Jojy Philip, New Delhi 110 015 Printed in India at Thomson Press, New Delhi Published by Orient Blackswan Private Limited 3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029, Telangana, India e-mail: [email protected] Servants Past Vol 1_11112019.indd 4 14-Nov-19 5:52:03 PM Contents List of Tables vii List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi Glossary xv Introduction 1 Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma and Pankaj Jha Interjection 1 Lineages of Servitude: Stray Thoughts about Servants in 89 the ‘Ancient’ Past Uma Chakravarti I SERVANTS AND SERVICE: EARLY MODERN 1. Domestic Service in Mughal South Asia: An Intertextual Study 105 Sajjad Alam Rizvi 2. Securing the Naukar: Caste and ‘Domestics’ in the 133 Fifteenth-Century Mithila Pankaj Jha 3. Elite Households and Domestic Servants: Early Modern 153 through Biographical Narratives (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries) Shivangini Tandon Servants Past Vol 1.indd 5 10/07/2019 16:14:55 4. The Invisible Lives of Davris and Badarans: Exploring 175 Affiliations and ‘Friendships’ within the Janani Deorhi in Early Modern Marwar Geetanjali Tyagi 5. Service, Sex and Sentiments: Concubinage in the Early 197 Modern Rajput Household of Marwar Priyanka Khanna Interjection 2 Theorising Service with Honour: Medieval and Early 227 Modern (1300–1700) Responses to Servile Labour Sunil Kumar II SERVANTS AND SERVICE: EARLY COLONIAL 6. Beyond Work: The Social Lives and Relationships of 257 Domestic Servants under Danish Rule in Colonial Bengal, c. 1800–50 Simon Rastén 7. Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-century Surat: 287 Readings from a Colonial Archive Lakshmi Subramanian 8. ‘Servant Problem’ and the ‘Social-Subaltern’ of Early 311 Colonial Calcutta Nitin Sinha Interjection 3 Can Historians Speak? A Few Thoughts and Proposals on a 345 Possible Global History of Domestic Service/Work Raffaella Sarti Bibliography 371 Notes on the Editors and Contributors 407 Index 409 vi CONTENTS Servants Past Vol 1.indd 6 10/07/2019 16:14:55 Tables I1 Terminologies for Relationships of Servitude 48 5.1 Evident Names of the Concubines of Rathor Rulers, 200 c. Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries 6.1 Criminal Court Cases with Accused Domestic Servants 280 I3.1 Global and Regional Estimates of the Number of 363 Domestic Workers in 1995 and 2010, Both Sexes and by Sex I3.2 Global and Regional Estimates of the Number of Domestic 366 Workers in 1995 and 2010, by Sex and Percentage of Female Domestic Workers among Domestic Workers Servants Past Vol 1.indd 7 10/07/2019 16:14:55 Servants Past Vol 1.indd 8 10/07/2019 16:14:55 Figures I1 Stawasy Khan 11 I2 Silver Stick Bearer in a European Household 77 I3 A Hindoo Man of Rank Eating Pawn (Betel Leaf) 78 4.1 Janani Deorhi, Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur 182 4.2 Deorhidars Gehlot Jalo, Goruram, Hiralal and Gujar Nathu 186 are Seen in Service, Guarding the Janani Deorhi 5.1 Maharaja Bakhat Singh Delights in an Outdoor Musical 204 Performance 5.2 Maharaja Jaswant Singh II with Paswan Naini (Seated) 208 and a Davri 5.3 Handprints of the Four Pardayats and a Badaran Who 220 Immolated Themselves upon the Death of Man Singh (d. 1843) 5.4 Copy of the Original Note by Rupjyot to Man Singh 224 8.1 A Monshee (Persian Reader) 327 8.2 Confectioners Shop 335 Servants Past Vol 1.indd 9 10/07/2019 16:14:55 Servants Past Vol 1.indd 10 10/07/2019 16:14:55 Acknowledgements This book is part of a two-volume publication on the history of domestic servants in early modern and modern South Asia. The volumes have emerged out of the research conducted under the European Research Council (ERC)-funded Starting-grant project (DOS 640627, 2015–18). The project has run for three years at two different institutions in Berlin. Nitin Sinha is based at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) and Nitin Varma at IGK, Re:Work, Humboldt University. They were the main researchers on the project. They thank the ERC for funding this project, and the members, both academic and administrative, of their respective host institutions for all the support they have received in successfully running the project. The project was stipulated to cover the period from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. However, it was not easy to compartmentalise the history of domestic service, servitude and servants into neat brackets of historiographical periods. In choosing the above time-scale, the quest was to understand the nitty-gritty of the colonial period but we were also aware of the importance of putting this period in dialogue with what happened before, and what social, political and discursive regimes of master–servant relationship carried into the colonial period from precolonial times. This indeed pressed on us the necessity to take the early modern period very seriously in our efforts to write the history of domestic servants. Our association with Pankaj Jha grew gradually over the last three years: in the beginning from being the ‘temporal cousins’ across the divide of the modern and the early modern with similar interests in questions of social and political formations and historical changes related to social marginals to a firm friend and colleague Servants Past Vol 1.indd 11 10/07/2019 16:14:55 with whom numerous ideas were shared, discussed and rejected. We are thankful to him that he accepted our offer to become part of the editorial team for this volume. The essays in this volume were part of the project’s first conference held at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, 2017, and at the 24th European Conference on South Asian Studies, Warsaw, 2016. Unfortunately, we were not able to include all the papers that were presented but we profusely thank all the contributors who enriched our understanding of the theme, which we hope is reflected in the long introduction to the volume. We also thank colleagues, staff, and friends at CSDS, particularly Ravikant and Dipu Saran, for their keen and active participation during the conference. Those who chaired the sessions and made insightful comments also deserve our gratitude. Finally, we thank Charu Gupta from University of Delhi who took keen interest in academic as well as logistic preparations preceding the conference. Her association lessened our worries. This volume would have got seriously delayed without the much- needed support of three student assistants: Josefine Hoffman, Nico Putz and Jamal Ali Magsi. Ranging from arranging obscure materials to that of preparing the extensive bibliography, their help was indispensable. In a similar vein, we cannot thank enough our student-colleagues who helped us in Delhi: Blessy Abraham, Vinita and Divya Gopalakrishnan. Echoes of thoughts shared and discussed with a wide variety of scholars based in Germany, India and the UK must have made their ways into our own words and formulations. Various ‘itinerant scholars’ at the two Berlin institutes left us with numerous, mostly challenging and piercing, ideas and questions to grapple. We have remained vigilant in acknowledging them at appropriate places throughout the text. Any oversight is purely inadvertent and accidental. In particular, we thank Raffaella Sarti, Samita Sen, Tanika Sarkar, Jana Tschurenev and Vidhya Raveendranathan for closely reading and commenting upon the drafts of the Introduction. Prabhu P. Mohapatra reminded us of the value of oral communication in this digital age. Numerous formal and informal conversations with him over the last three years have sharpened our own position on how we wanted to present the history of the domestic servants. The two volumes, we realise, are only the first but hopefully a meaningful beginning in the xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Servants Past Vol 1.indd 12 10/07/2019 16:14:55 direction of opening a new line of research in South Asian history in future.