Saffron Servitude and Kipling’s Unbearable Burden

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One of the many standard narratives populating accounts of the desi experience in the US is the difficulty in explaining the vast numbers of ‘servants’ performing a vast litany of semi-skilled labor in homes all over south asia. In the context of the American D.Y.I mentality (definitely eroded by our service economy), it seems incredibly strange to employ somebody for the purpose of cooking or taking one’s children to school–an unjustified expense when one has the time and the means of transportation to complete the task. NPR correspondent Eric Weiner entered this discussion as a result of being posted in Delhi and summarized his interactions with his ‘servant,’ “Kailash” in the New York Times. Cultural relativists, as critics of the post-modern regime in the humanities are wont to remark, do a disservice to academia when they uncritically accept what they see as a ‘cultural practice’ on the grounds of it simply belonging to a culture different from the observer’s own:

A few days later, the servant loped upstairs and reported for duty. He was skinny, alarmingly so, with mahogany skin and sharp features. His name was Kailash, and he was 11 years old. This was a cultural difference that I was not prepared to accept.

Weiner clumsily avoids the relativist’s folly by boldly going where perhaps a million other travel writers have gone, “It’s strange to me and feels wrong, so I can’t accept it.” But, like many before him, Weiner must eventually capitulate:

I started downstairs to confront the landlord, but then hesitated. I rationalized that if this boy, an orphan from a neighboring state, didn’t work for me, he would work for someone else, and who knows how that person would treat him? Washing my hands of Kailash seemed like a cop-out, or so I told myself.

It was at this point that I remembered a similar strain of teeth-gnashing from a writer of yesteryear:

Take up the White Man’s burden– Ye dare not stoop to less– Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness;

“What?,” you say. “Weiner was assigned the post–he had no choice about what cultural practices he could accommodate.” These things are true, however, it does seem as if Weiner saw this story as following a predetermined path:

I always imagined that our relationship would follow a linear, screenplay trajectory. Orphaned Indian boy has fateful meeting with bighearted American; boy struggles to overcome disadvantaged youth; boy finally perseveres and is eternally grateful for bighearted American’s help.

Kipling was less sanguine about the chances for progression along this storyline–the native, in his opinion, was sure to wreck the grand venture just as it became almost tangible:

And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.

Weiner, too, finds his narrative halted in the middle stage–the part where the native finds his own bootstraps and puts his back into the pulling, for him, is curiously absent:

But more than a decade after I left India, Kailash and I were stuck in the second act…. …Thanks to my quarterly wire transfers, Kailash lives in a tiny apartment in Delhi that is too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer.

Kipling too felt the native’s hopelessness and ascribes this failure to appreciate such genuine and altruistic assistance to the native’s ‘nature’:

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Kailash, ungrateful rakshasa-child nature notwithstanding, apparently proves Kipling to be right–the native will live forever on the good graces of others while complaining all the while and perhaps directing vile non-violent protest at the benevolent others:

Take up the White Man’s burden– And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard– The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:– “Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?”

Weiner corroborates but supplies what may he think of as an original caveat:

I have raised his expectations, a dangerous thing in a country of more than a billion restive souls.

The tea room is too lofty a goal for the young man–how dare Weiner introduce the hope of a more profitable line of work into Kailash’s life! Why, left unattended by Vestern journalists, a boy like Kailash might grow up to be a proper street-sweeper some day!

I find the author’s tone unsettling–as if Kailash did not possess the wherewithal to realize that he had everything to gain and that a life of beatings over poorly made chapatis was not optimal. Intentions in this case, as usual, are good but what is the cost of thinking in this manner–that it takes a western journalist’s benevolent intervention to salvage the life prospects of a disadvantaged Indian child and that this kind of assistance will ultimately lead to welfare-grubbing,sepia-toned, outstretched hands?

The “White Man’s Burden” beckons though, with a Nostradamus-like confidence in forecasting the alleged incompetence of the subject native. Weiner cannot deviate from the storyline–his is a Quixotic tilt at cultural windmills that stifle economic advancement by conditioning the native to depending on foreign largesse:

“O.K., Kailash,” I said, looking at the handsome 23-year-old who has replaced the scrawny boy of years ago. “As you wish.”

or as Kipling put it:

Take up the White Man’s burden– Ye dare not stoop to less– Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen feebles Shall weigh your gods and you.

24 thoughts on “Saffron Servitude and Kipling’s Unbearable Burden”

  1. Biggest disadvantage of living in the West is the need to iron one’s own clothes. God I hate it.

  2. FWIW, I think Hilaire Belloc out-creeps Kipling, with his chilling:

    Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not

  3. I was hoping someone would blog this NYT piece. Ironically, Weiner never seemed all that “bighearted,” despite his willingness to describe himself that way.

    The tea room is too lofty a goal for the young man—how dare Weiner introduce the hope of a more profitable line of work into Kailash’s life!

    Actually, Kailash refuses Weiner’s attempt to get him a job at the tea room, which makes Weiner angry:

    A while ago, he turned down a job I arranged for him serving tea at a packaging company — a job he would have accepted before he met me. (from Weiner’s article)

    That, to me, was the biggest sign of Weiner’s presumption: not his attitudes towards hiring a servant boy (or having a servant boy foisted upon him), but that he assumed that Kailash was no good for anything but servitude and thus decided that becoming a chaiwallah would be the best upward mobility he could give him (like Henry Higgins assuming Eliza will be happy to work in the flower shop, since all she’s known is pavement selling).

    Meanwhile Kailash makes his own path, w/o Weiner’s influence or help. Thank goodness.

  5. I thought this article was actually pretty honest, though it made me squirm. Weiner’s approach to his servant, while extremely naive, is very similar to that of liberal Indians, who try to overcome their guilt about hiring someone to do their dirty work on the cheap by getting all fired up with noblesse oblige, sending the kid to school part-time, paying their domestic help a pension, and so on (which I don’t think is a bad thing, in the circumstances, just not something you should feel all Mother Teresa about) and then feel betrayed if the person they’ve “helped” is not grateful enough, or steals, or whatever. Of course the situation creates a kind of mai-baap dependency, that’s how the employer-domestic help relationship works in India, and I daresay in other similar markets.

    The only thing I wish Weiner (and other firangs I know who hire help in the third world) would acknowledge is that everyone is being rational here, and hardnosed, and there’s little room for idealistic sugarcoating or pretending that the use of underage domestic help is about “culture” rather than just plain supply, demand and desperation. You hire someone to clean your house in India and not in the US because your relative wage is higher in India, and you are rationally benefiting from that, full stop. If you have a problem with the system, as many of my relatives do, go to one of the many new domestic hiring agencies who will send you someone pre-screened and fix a fair salary and give the employee protections and insurance.

    I particularly dislike people (and again, am thinking of some expats I know) who, presumably in an effort to come to terms with their own guilty-liberal hiring of dark-skinned people to do their dirty work, insist on not just paying three times the going rate (which is fine, and noble) but talking loudly about it and feeling morally superior about it and guilting everyone else around them, including locals, for “exploiting” folks by not doing the same thing. Sometimes they’ll insist on only hiring single mothers, or refugees too, for more virtue points. As if it is not fundamentally exploitative (even if a fact of life) to hire someone to clean your dirt at one-tenth of your own hourly rate – and as if you’ve never bought cheap meals or cheap products made out of your sights with even worse exploitation (let’s not even get into the fact that household help folks who manage to tap the lucrative guilty-firang market are also at an advantage, for basically random reasons of networking, over others in their labour pool). I wish people would come to terms with that fact and if they feel guilty about the situation, just clean up their own houses, or if they don’t, just pay someone a fair, living wage and not get all morally postur-y about it.

  6. Of course the situation creates a kind of mai-baap dependency, that’s how the employer-domestic help relationship works in India, and I daresay in other similar markets.
    I particularly dislike people (and again, am thinking of some expats I know) who, presumably in an effort to come to terms with their own guilty-liberal hiring of dark-skinned people to do their dirty work

    The domestic help in India is often lighter skinned than their mai-baap employers.

    Anyway, if it makes anyone feel any better, my Latin American friends say the domestic help scene in their countries is similar to the one in India. Even I was shocked to hear that.

  8. The only thing I wish Weiner (and other firangs I know who hire help in the third world) would acknowledge is that everyone is being rational here, and hardnosed, and there’s little room for idealistic sugarcoating or pretending that the use of underage domestic help is about “culture” rather than just plain supply, demand and desperation

    I have noticed a difference between the way Indian citizens and firangs in India treat their hired help. I guess that would be the “culture” factor, in addition to the supply, demand and desperation.

  9. While Weiner manages to sketch the relationship he has with Kailash, the relationship between Kailash and the rest of the world is completely missing: how did he develop the skills he has, like fixing temperamental fax machines, or the knowledge that Win XP is better than 2000? Maybe he was perfectly justified in turning down a tea-serving gig.

    That, I think, is what turns this into a navel-gazing piece about the unbearable lightness of being white as opposed to anything meaningful about Kailash. The piece could have at least been called “My Servant and Me,” since the author and his angst feature so prominently.

    Also:

    My Indian friends have watched from the sidelines, skeptical of my efforts to “save” Kailash. “You’re thinking like an American,” they say, as if it were a mental illness. “Kailash is from a lower class, a lower caste. He can only go so far. Face the facts.”

    Dude needs some new Indian friends.

  10. Mai-Baap – I tend to agree that the firangs and even desis overseas that I’ve known are more egalitarian and fair towards their household employees when they have them than most folks at home. And yes, it’s much more an assumption or fact of desi culture that the moment you can hire someone to do your household work, you will. I can agree that that’s somewhat cultural. But I’ve seen plenty of expats both in India and the Middle East who slip very easily into reliance on household help, and even start to get princess-y the way we desis can get about doing our own housework, so that leads me to believe it’s more about opportunity than about culture. I’ve also known people in the US who were on either side of the household help spectrum (Manhattanites who all had Latina maids, and friends whose moms had cleaned houses for a living) and some of the things that have always bothered me about the servant-dependence in India aren’t exactly absent in these contexts either (a propos, there was a great online debate recently – Slate? – among feminists like Ehrenreich and new postfems like Caitlin Flanagan on the question of hiring nannies from the third world in the US that covered similar ground). Hence the discomfort with seeing this as predominantly an Indian cultural issue.

    In the north/west/east India contexts I’m familiar with, there tends to be a noticeable distinction in skin colour between employers and employees, but I’m sure that varies.

  11. Dude needs some new Indian friends.

    Unfortunately that’s how many, if not most, middle-class and upper-caste Indians feel.

  12. My Indian friends have watched from the sidelines, skeptical of my efforts to “save” Kailash. “You’re thinking like an American,” they say, as if it were a mental illness. “Kailash is from a lower class, a lower caste. He can only go so far. Face the facts.”
    Unfortunately that’s how many, if not most, middle-class and upper-caste Indians feel.

    And unfortunately for alot of domestic help in India, they are right. Without enough money you cannot gain access to good higher educational oppurtunities and hence more rewarding careers.

  13. Of course the situation creates a kind of mai-baap dependency, that’s how the employer-domestic help relationship works in India, and I daresay in other similar markets.

    This was observed elsewhere;

    The same thing was expressed about employees. Firing does not seem to be a culturally accepted option. My analysis was that employees in India, at least in this type of setting, consider themselves “clients” of the employer, whom they see as a “patron,” much in the way a peasant would see himself in relation to a zamindar. This means that the relationship is rarely related to performance, nor can it really be terminated because of performance-related issues. Bhavananda used to steamroller through these unspoken traditions, and ultimately with fear he generated great effectiveness. Swami Veda, on the other hand, may have adopted the patron role, as many others like him do. Whether it is necessarily bad is another matter.

    From http://jagadanandadas.blogspot.com/2008/01/sunday-excursion.html

  14. On the question of mobility for someone like Kailash, it’s not so unthinkable – every bai in Bombay sends her kid to a private school the moment she can save up enough for the fees, and wants her children to not have to do the work she does. People do move up in a generation or two. Check out this WSJ article from a couple of months ago which, while probably a touch optimistic, talks about the retail job opportunities now available for working-class kids who grew up in the slums.

  15. I found it exhausting and irritating to read, so thank you for deconstructing it, Nayagan.

  17. 16 · jyotsanaKim can be seen as the retelling of the Krishna legend. Hah, interesting comment. Northrop Frye would be proud.

  18. I am not sure if the essay, merely, is up to the science of criticism developed by Frye. Jerry Rao of course is well read. But I am not sure if he thought he penning criticism or drawing comparisons. Kipling as all of us know spoke Hindi fluently all his life, and started speaking in English late in childhood, because as some say, he would simply not reply to anything said in English.

  19. I really enjoyed this, as well as your previous, post. To reply to a few comments and not the article specifically, I think it is true a lot of older or first generation Indian individuals, esp those who have immigrated recently and happen to be from a “higher” caste may say things like the author’s friends however I have not anecdotally seen it to be common in the 2nd generation or even people my parents age who have learned that America is not a place of caste…although it is a place of class.

    As far as paying people more, it seems to be on a sliding scale. Everyone has a bai and maybe she is supporting a drunk husband or living in an extended family situation that requires extra financial assistance. Whatever the situation one should pay what they can, but as SP says, lets not pretend we haven’t tried to pay as little as possible for products or services elsewhere. I think the most jarring part of the experience is the extreme deference of domestic help to the “client”.

    Lastly, as far as this being a continuing situation leading to patronage, again anecdotally, one side of my family has had the same “driver”/ guy who runs every random errand ever for my entire life. I have never met his wife or kids and to be honest I hope I never do…not within the confines of my family’s home because I’d like to assume that his kids will have a better life. That all his work and running of random errands and being treated as just a kid to be told what to do will pay off for the next generation. The majority of the world’s wealth is generational, drastic movement in one’s lifetime is quite difficult. I’d at least like to see it in two.

  20. How about a white woman’s burden?

    I feel a strong solidarity with women everywhere, and a deep concern for women’s issues, wherever I go.

    Do we have to check out humanity in at customs once we land at Indira Gandhi International airport?

    Unless the whole world, regardless of gender, color or nationality, decides to do something to HELP each other, guess what is going to happen?

    More of this

  22. Nayagan : My apologies for this quibble … (from the Mac on-line dictionary)

    litany |ˈlitn-ē| noun ( pl. -nies) a series of petitions for use in church services or processions, usually recited by the clergy and responded to in a recurring formula by the people. • a tedious recital or repetitive series : a litany of complaints. ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French letanie, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek litaneia ‘prayer,’ from litē ‘supplication.’

  23. Great article and commentary; I think the article was honest though I can see the opposing point of view.

    Perhaps reform of servitude rather than outright (and impractical abolishment). I remember the practice of child servants in Islamabad. To be fair our chattering classes were more enlightened, they wouldn’t hire them, but it was the middle classes who did.

    It has to be a shift in attitude; domestic help is a great boon but perhaps training and apprenticeships is what’s needed. A nudge in the right direction, I remember that the idea of an “Academy for Servants”, which would increase their market value.

    Like most things in South Asia; I think reform is going to be the way forward not drastic changes (which our collective inefficient govts. can’t do). We need a strong civil and unified South Asia; chattering classes unite!