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Travelling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Global Networks and Mobilization of Agency

Between 1890 and the 1930s, thousands of ayahs and amahs were recorded on passenger lists for ship arrivals into Britain from South and East Asian ports. Described as ‘a very useful class of people who wait on ladies and take charge of children during the sea voyage’, ayahs either accompanied their permanent employers during trips to Britain or were hired exclusively for the journey. Despite a growing literature on female servants in India, accounts of ayah experiences beyond its borders are minimal. What little scholarship does exist is written from a Britain-centric perspective, focusing on their poor treatment whilst in London at the hands of unscrupulous employers and an indifferent government, framing them as victims of a colonial system and undermining any agency held by the servants themselves. By analysing the journey made by South Asian women engaged as shipboard nannies from their own perspective, this paper challenges the image of the ayah as passive, vulnerable and childlike, a representation taken by contemporary observers and modern-day scholars alike to be the whole story. In her exploration of shipboard periodicals, Joanna de Schmidt positions ship passengers as ‘evidently actors in the globalization processes of the nineteenth century’. Although technically paying passengers, ayahs, as constructed ‘others’, were peripherally positioned as neither passengers nor crew, yet through serving these global families, I argue, ayahs were also actors in globalization. Beyond passively mirroring the mobility of their employers, ayahs experienced and took advantage of ‘the rapid transformations in transport and communication structures that linked distant parts of the world’. Their experiences expose an unexplored global network of working women of colour, linking processes of globalization to intimacies of the domestic. The first part of this paper examines shifts in how the ayahs were positioned across different sites of ‘home’ by the dominant colonial culture. It speaks to the body of research centred on Ann Laura Stoler’s work exploring intimate frontiers of empire, with the domestic home being ‘a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied’. In this context, servants marked not only the ‘physical boundaries of the house and