COVID-19 in India. Mistress’ mango box and maid’s wages (a nethnographic experiment from self-isolation)

Abstract

The article is part of a study of the position and role of domestic servants in South Asia and deals with the middle class practice established in modern India of using paid helpers to provide for household sustainability. Due to cheapness of such services and absence of the regulations and contracts between employer and employee, the relationship between masters and servants, despite their mutual dependence, remains largely unsettled. This aspect is recorded by the example of a specific situation in Pune (Maharashtra, India), which developed in the initial period (March-June 2020) of the lockdown announced to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the restrictions imposed, representatives of the middle class inhabiting a particular urban area were forced to care for their own basic necessities without support of their domestic helpers. Such an unforeseen turn caused the non-payment or partial payment of wages to the servants who lost their jobs, which put their existence on the brink of disaster, and at the same time invited their masters to heated discussions regarding practical and ethical foundations of their own well-being on social networks. Modern methods of collecting scientific data, in particular by recourse to digital communications, facilitated access to the chats of cooperative and literary communities and accumulation of the live voices of their participants through the participant observation methodology within the framework of netnography.