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Waiting for these women did not mean sitting in stasis, but instead encompassed a range of activities, including developing social networks; entrepreneurial activities; secking lodging, passage, and employment; and using appeals to both emotion and the law to seek aid and to advocate for their rights. Traveling ayahs were familiar figures in the British imperial world, appearing in illustrations of British Indian life, as characters in children's books, and in the many newspaper advertisements for their services published in Britain and India. A twelve-year-old ayah named Suzanne took control of her options when she chose to remain at the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, where she had created a sense of community, rather than return immediately to Burma and her family.
Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain, by Arunima Datta; pp. xxiii + 291. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, $45.00.
Arunima Datta's Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain tells the stories of the travelling ayahs (servants and nurses) hired to accompany British families on sea voyages between India and Britain from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Tasked with looking after children aboard ships along with managing the families" domestic arrangements, these women made the sometimes monthslong passage bearable for their employers. In return, many were left in Britain without promised wages or return passage to India, waiting for new offers of employment to return to India and be reunited with homeland and family. Datta reveals the action, negotiation, and agency hidden by the seemingly passive concept of "waiting." Waiting for these women did not mean sitting in stasis, but instead encompassed a range of activities, including developing social networks; entrepreneurial activities; secking lodging, passage, and employment; and using appeals to both emotion and the law to seek aid and to advocate for their rights.
Traveling ayahs were familiar figures in the British imperial world, appearing in illustrations of British Indian life, as characters in children's books, and in the many newspaper advertisements for their services published in Britain and India. They have been less evident in histories of colonized migration, which have tended to focus on the stories of the elite or exceptional. This book joins scholarship (some of it Datta's own) recovering histories of colonized migration and subaltern agencies, as well as the history of emotions and the imbricated worlds of domestic work and imperial administration. It is also a book shaped by the imperial archive and one that finds creative ways to manage its limitations.
The first part of Waiting on Empire uncovers the experiences of traveling ayahs as they looked after children aboard ships, negotiated employment with varying degrees of success, and waited to return to India, all the while advocating for themselves to sometimes uncaring employers and an indifferent imperial administration. Under ideal circumstances, ayahs would have wages, a return ticket, and an offer of employment waiting on arrival in Britain, negotiated by the family they served. But employers could abuse this system, refusing to pay wages, failing to arrange return passage, or simply disappearing as soon as their children and luggage had been offloaded. The imperial administration had no policy explicitly protecting traveling ayahs. Instead, women who had been abandoned or taken advantage of had to patch together return passage and employment on their own, a process that required connections and a place to stay. The Ayahs' Home in East London served as a lodging house and employment agency for women left without other recourse in Britain. Here, traveling ayahs could, for a fee, do the active work of waiting.
Some of that work involved using the power of emotional appeal. Datta charts the emotional registers ayahs used to make their claims for aid, relying on affective appeals that were universally legible (sorrow, love, loss) and those that were particularly resonant with Victorian audiences (motherhood, home). This emotional agency helped traveling ayahs muster support and exert pressure on imperial administrators. One traveling ayah abandoned by her employer convinced the East India Company to fund her passage home by standing outside their offices holding a sign saying she missed her "poor baby," successfully using the language of maternal love to advocate for help (qtd. in Datta 69). Other types of agency are evident as well. Martha Tirky spent three years requesting, then obtaining, travel funds from the governments of both Britain and Germany, which she used for her own ends. A twelve-year-old ayah named Suzanne took control of her options when she chose to remain at the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, where she had created a sense of community, rather than return immediately to Burma and her family. And Caroline Periera combined her role as a traveling ayah with an export business, transporting Indian goods and jewelry for profit into Britain while waiting for her return passage. Many traveling ayahs made the trip dozens of times, developing word-of-mouth reputations among British Indian families. These repeat journeys amounted to many years of a traveling ayah's life, often spent waiting for the next job and the next journey, and raising the question of what waiting might have involved when taking place in India rather than Britain.
The second half of the book consists of profiles of ayahs who made the journey between India and Britain in the years between 1932 and 1940, drawn from the information in their passports and supplemented by ships" manifests. This section represents a significant work of archival recovery, providing histories of 124 women whose names and stories would otherwise never have appeared in a published text. It also provides something of a corrective to what has come before, as the more detailed histories that inform the first half of the book are of necessity those of traveling ayahs for whom something went wrong, leading to their inclusion in the official records of the British empire. Like the archives from which they are derived, these profiles can be both compelling and frustrating. The frustration stems from the limitations of the records available; the information recorded in passports can tell us about a woman"s religion, marital history, or the countries to which she traveled, but little about her experiences. This is left to the photographs that accompany the profiles and to acts of historical imagination on the part of readers. The stylistic conventions of identity photographs required the women to stare directly at the camera, creating the feeling of deep connection with the past and with individual women about whom we can know only a little through their archival traces. Like much of the imperial archive, these documents were generated by the informational requirements and demands of a disciplinary state. Included here, they provide the nearest possibility of reaching out and finding a human connection with the women navigating empire. Waiting on Empire is also amply illustrated with additional archival photos and images. This, along with the profiles of the ayahs, makes it an ideal text for the classroom. It is to Datta's credit, and that of Oxford University Press, that the book contains such a rich trove of images depicting the lives and circumstances of these women.
ALEXANDRA LINDGREN-GIBSON
University of Mississippi
10.2979/vic.00304
Copyright Indiana University Press 2025