Domestic workers, class-hegemony, and the Indian state: a sociological perspective on ideology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using class as the key analytical category, I examine domestic workers’ struggle for legal recognition as workers in India since national independence. Drawing from a review of Indian parliamentary debates and discussions on the issue, I explore how the ‘idea’ of paid domestic labour is framed and contested in the legislative discourse of post-colonial India, and how that framing changes over time. Specifically, I use Marxist cultural theory to analyse the ideological trajectory and the fate of the domestic workers’ struggles to gain labour rights. Building on scholars who argue that domestic workers’ exclusion from the sphere of labour rights is due to their weak political organization, I find that domestic workers’ failures to attain rights are the result of ideological manoeuvring by the Indian state and its players in addition to workers’ relatively weak power. In addition to the literature on domestic labour in south Asia, the insights from the article contribute to the scholarship on informal labour and political sociology.