Female Employers and their Maids in New Delhi: ‘This is Our Culture’

Abstract

The domestic labour market in India reflects how various classes of women manage their daily lives, whether as employers of domestic workers or as employees. The cultural underpinnings of various intersecting relationships implicated in this scenario have remained underresearched in India. Based on a qualitative study in a specific neighbourhood of New Delhi, this article shows that certain cultural strategies pursued by female employers explain their differential behaviour towards specific groups of maids. Observing that these female employers in Delhi prefer Nepali maids over native Indians, even if the latter are willing to work for lower wages, we set out to analyse why and how these employers evaluate immigrant Nepali maids as sharing ‘our’ culture, while native Indians are classified as the cultural ‘other’.