Becoming Visible: Travel Documents and Travelling Ayahs in the British Empire

Abstract

This article explores the lives of Indian travelling ayahs (nannies and servants), who are usually hard to find in the historical records of the imperial state, using travel documents, such as ships’ manifests, passage slips, passage permissions and most significantly passports. Passports have recently been studied as sites of colonial and anti-colonial politics. This article puts passports and other travel documents to a different use, exploring the way they expose fleeting voices and choices in personal representation (in those documents) which reveal elements of the identities, experiences and agency of these colonised subjects. The central argument of this article is that, whilst travel documents, particularly passports were hegemonic documents, created as means of surveillance which enabled discrimination between coloniser and colonised, they also compelled colonial administrators to recognise and even humanise certain subaltern subjects, whose individual identities had often been erased in other documents. In an archival context wherein written and visual records left by travelling ayahs are scarce, this article thus also highlights the value of surviving passports for historians in re-visioning the histories of subaltern subjects.