Reading the Margins as Central: Representations of domestic servants in Nazir Ahmed and Ismat Chughtai’s literary works

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper revisits the Urdu literary works of Deputy Nazir Ahmed and Ismat Chughtai to unravel the changing ways in which they depicted the servants and servant-like characters in their description of the north Indian middle-class urban Muslim household in the late 19th and first half of the twentieth century. It argues that fiction writers like Ahmed had a conception of the respectable household that envisaged a strict control over the conduct of the servants with a view to curb their ‘corrupting influence’ on the women and children of the family. Nazir Ahmed’s preoccupation with the reform of the Muslim sharif household in the light of their declining economic and political status shaped his attitude towards domestic servants and lower classes in general. In contrast, writing in the early and mid-twentieth century, Ismat Chughtai and other ‘daughters of reform’ began questioning the politics of the sharif household, much of which was accepted by the previous generation of writers, mostly reformists, as unproblematic. Chughtai used her writing as a site of criticism against a social and political system that she viewed as unjust and exploitative. In her works, domestic servants are essentially presented as an exploited class with a voice of its own. In her stories, domestic servants express their opinions, and by doing so, expose the narrowly conceived worldview of the sharif middle class. Taken together, the two authors separated by nearly three decades, represented contrasting views through the decades of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The paper addresses a neglected field of social-literary history: the presence and place of domestic servants in the politics of constructing new norms for the household and for the nation.