Sumitra aged 43, a low caste migrant domestic worker, was married off at fourteen to a forty-year old peasant in her village in Maharashtra in western India. She was widowed at the age of twenty. After prolonged negotiation with her husband’s family, who could not afford the financial responsibility of looking after her, she was allowed to keep her husband’s hut, tend to the cattle, and plough a small plot of family land, to raise her two children.

When I met Sumitra doing my fieldwork in a Mumbai slum (in 2012), she remained very nostalgic about her life in the village. Despite her abject poverty, which eventually compelled her to migrate to Mumbai, Sumitra claimed that she had mobility even as a young widow. ‘Times were tough but they were my own,’ she said. Sumitra enjoyed her relative freedom to go the fields, wash her cows at the river, and cook for her children. She would often reminisce about taking her cattle to the grasslands, where they grazed while her children played hide and seek; she did other housework in the fading sunlight, like stitching torn saris under the shade of a tree.

Being illiterate, Sumitra did not know how to read the time from the mechanical clock, or inspect linear months in the numerical calendar. Her ‘work time’ was intimately related to the ebbing in and out of seasons, the movement of the sun, the growth of crops, the harvest and market periods, the mating and birthing of cattle, etcetera. Time was slow, she admitted. She also followed what she described as ‘maternal time’, when the rhythm of life was usually related to playing with her children, caring for them during sickness, or even watching over her sons if they slept hungry (starving children often died in their sleep). And then there was ‘feminine time’ which was associated with her menstrual cycle: when she would have to leave her boys alone in the hut, in order to squat and bleed over a gutter, since she would often run out of rag cloth to roll into makeshift sanitary pads. But she still felt ‘free’ in her motherly love, her bodily cycles, which were later interrupted in the city.

 

Sumitra discussed the more difficult relationships with the flow of time in the village: when the moneylender would come to collect debt and ask for sexual favours when she defaulted. Or even when she listened to the train whistling past her village, and wanted to throw herself on the tracks to end her debt-riddled life. Despite its many freedoms, this rural lifecycle became increasingly unsustainable for Sumitra. Instead of killing herself, she decided to take a long ride over those train tracks to Mumbai.

There were many women in her village who had fled to the city to avoid caste and gender atrocities in the region. She was certain that they would help her find a foothold in the urban care-labour sector. ‘But no one had prepared me for the crazy pace at which time runs in Mumbai households. There is a time for everything: to wake up, get dressed, piss, shit, go to work, go to school, eat lunch, come back from school, go to the park, go to tuitions, eat, take medicines, watch TV, sleep. Rich people are constantly chasing the ticking of a measly, miserable clock. And all the maids like me have to fall in line with this tick-tock, tick-tock. Everyday, our credibility as domestic workers is evaluated on the basis of our relationship with time (samay ke saath tera kya rishta hain re),’ she concluded.

 

This paper analyses the multiple temporal experiences of loss and frustration encountered by female rural-urban workers within the informal labour sector in a commercial city. A significant number of migrant rural women reskill as cooks, cleaners, nannies and nurses within casual urban labour economies, which usually service upper class households in Indian cities.¹ My ethnographic landscape is Mumbai, where over 3,000 rural women arrive daily to escape sexual violence, political conflict, poverty, and large-scale unemployment in the region’s diminishing farming sector. From 1998 onwards, I have conducted intermittent anthropological fieldwork amongst women living in the slums of Mumbai, who seek longterm or seasonal work within the burgeoning care economy in the city. In Marathi, they are known as bais, in Maharastrian households, and in Hindi as naukranis, within families that have migrated from other regions of India.

These non-contractual jobs are considered to be extensions of women’s ‘naturally’ nurturing responsibilities, including childcare, tending to the elderly, cooking and serving food, and keeping households clean and hygienic. However, the time bound nature of these chores, in response to the tight work and leisure schedules in affluent households, are experienced by migrant women as disciplinary and ‘unnatural’, as against the more fluid forms of feminine care among peasant families. Many of the women workers did not own or know how to read a clock or watch, and this lack of time-education was often a source of oppressive surveillance over female domestic staff in the city.

 

Laura Bear, while exploring the anthropology of modern social time, argues that the abstract time reckoning of capitalism acts as a universal measure of labour value, but they also come into conflict with concrete experiences of time. ‘As a result, modern time is characterized by unprecedented doubt about, and conflict in, representations of time. Time thickens with ethical problems, impossible dilemmas, and difficult orchestrations,’² she states. Drawing upon this analysis of labour ethics and temporal dilemmas as a backdrop in the city, in which the dynamics of time is hegemonic and largely masculinist,³ this paper analyses the unpredictable scapes and scopes of women’s work that emerge in the context of studying gendered temporalities.

As dense and normative modern time within effective urban upper class lifestyles expresses itself through chronotypical temporal flows of professional work and leisure, this essay shows how the conflicting, multidimensional rhythms of time embedded in both upper and lower class labour economies clash and disperse in affluent domestic spaces. By layering the narrative structures of time, experienced by Sumitra for example, as a separation between village and city life, this essay highlights the overbearing and infantalizing effects of time-spaces and time practices on marginalized women’s labour.

 

Even though Sumitra had an extremely difficult economic life in the village, which involved sexual humiliation and bodily anxieties, she did not feel the rhythms of time itself as tyrannical and exploitative. By linking women’s time-maps to notions of victimhood and agency, I argue that poor women’s everyday understanding of gendered freedoms within an urban labour economy, remains unresolved, mainly due to mixed epistemologies in the formation of modern time in the city.

I argue further that the passage of real time, and poor women’s evolving capacity to act in response to urban time-maps, can open up broad techniques of low-level resistance against the durational routines of upper class households. For example, I show how some women workers who did eventually adapt to the temporal pace generated by the mechanical clock, continued to feign ignorance about reading time. I argue that denying an education in industrial time enabled migrant women to overcome (what I refer to as) ‘temporal victimologies’, i.e. they could partially liberate themselves of the punitive violence embedded in structural timekeeping.

While the conception of victimhood in this article is etic, I want to underline that my interlocutors referred to their victimological experiences through words such as shikar, which in common parlance means ‘prey’. But in vernacular expressions shikar suggested ‘victimhood’ when articulated in relation to discussions on time (such as samay ka shikar, a victim of time).

I would like to iterate that violence against migrant workers did not always involve physical or sexual attacks in urban households. Many of my research participants felt that local women had better employment deals due to the active presence of labour unions in the city, often affiliated with powerful regional political parties. Migrant women from outside Maharashtra were considered to be more vulnerable, as they were unprotected by unions, subjected (more regularly) to aggravated assault, and at times, they were illegally confined within affluent households.

My research, however, remains focused on regional migrants who had a degree of power in the labour market. But they still encountered the harsh disciplining of care workers over timekeeping: involving authoritarian warnings, repeated scolding, threats of terminating work, daily squabbles over quotidian chores, the abrupt withholding of monthly pay, and even reduced wages until women workers could be coerced into upper class domestic schedules.

 

According to E.P. Thompson,⁴ who argued that industrial capitalism and the modern state was the product of clock time, customary and economic evaluation of working class labour was closely related to the measurement of work against time. The notion of industrial time, measured against the ticking of the mechanical clock, emerged with the colonial administration of labour.⁵ The rise of gigantic mills, warehousing and ancillary industries in the 19th century led to the colloquial naming of Mumbai as the ‘Manchester of India’.⁶ These mills (mainly cotton) had to adhere to an uninterrupted production line to serve the demands of the British Empire’s burgeoning global raw materials market.

This ruthless supply economy required the textile labour force to work in day and night shifts. According to several former mill workers that I encountered during my fieldwork, the system of working in shifts created confusion among rural-urban migrant labourers who wanted to earn an extra living during fallow farming seasons. They did not know how to read mechanical clocks with rotating arms and swinging pendulums. To address workers’ incapacity to understand industrial time, the mill owners started blowing horns to mark work shifts and recreation time among the workers.⁷

 

These industrial sonic environments often proved inadequate, since workers still responded with greater alacrity to conch shells and temple bells, or the Islamic call for prayer, which would indicate devotional times for namaz (among Muslims) and puja (among Hindus). To prevent mill workers from rushing off industrial compounds in search of prayer spaces, mill owners appealed to colonial administrators to build sacred places for Hindus and Muslims within mill areas, even as Christian missionaries competed with local religious establishments to gain a foothold in this new labour market.⁸

Industrial time in Mumbai became an interface between religious, seasonal and linear, mechanical time, with the emergence of a vernacular modernity that embraced a migrant production economy. While Mumbai grew into one of the largest postcolonial, commercial cities in the world, global values of productivity, speed and efficiency became the central organizing facets of professional and domestic spheres, what anthropologists describe as the universal product of ‘magical capitalism’.⁹ However, this fast-paced temporal universe was largely masculine, created by men for men, and to promote male labour and male dominated labour spaces in the city.

 

In my earlier research on women’s migration to the labourers’ slums of Mumbai,¹⁰ I underlined the role played by the closure of cotton mills and the ensuing male unemployment among mill workers, that compelled their wives, mothers and sisters to enter the urban informal labour market (in the 1980s).Over the past few decades, the nature of women’s (temporary and permanent) migration shifted significantly.¹¹ The state government’s continuing disinvestment in rural futures, and its investment in cities and the professional middle classes,¹² not only led to suicides and impoverishment within peasant families, but also increased mass migration into urban centres.

Despite urban development policies that favour the eviction and demolition of workers’ slums, a significant number of women continue to migrate to Mumbai as hard labour. For example, Svati Shah,¹³ in her ethnographic study of women’s migration and sex work in Mumbai, highlights the politics of the street corner/nakaw, where women play a waiting game to score minimum wage work at construction sites. The largest network of women migrants, however, gained employment in care sectors servicing the expanding middle and upper class urban households.

 

The boundaries of women’s employment within these informal labour economies remained flexible. Domestic workers could cook, clean and wash in multiple households, or they could have permanent employment in one household. Similarly, care workers could be employed full-time as nannies in a single household, but often they would be expected to take part in cooking and cleaning activities within the household. Many of my interlocutors turned to sex work, street vending, selling marijuana (when they had access to upper class youth parties), and a range of other illegal activities to supplement their income outside the realm of household labour.

According to Wilks, who developed a ‘mobile ethnography’ of the commuting practices of women domestic workers in Kolkata, the rush to complete tasks, accusations of inefficiency, and stress in punctuality, among women running between many households, not only strained their relationships with their employers, but also impacted the tense demands of time within their marital relationships.¹⁴

Despite, the diversity of informal work within the domestic and care labour sector, the moral emphasis of paid domestic work remained on the maternal and affective nature of ‘caring’ for the household. By 2009, there were approximately 600,000 workers in the domestic labour economy in Mumbai, dominantly female,¹⁵ and the numbers have drastically increased over the past decade.

 

According to Supurna Banerjee,¹⁶ who studied the migration of women into urban care work after the closure of tea plantations in North Bengal, paid domestic work and childcare was considered to be ‘women’s natural labour’ (165), low skilled, low pay, and low status work that is precarious but suitable for migrant women. During the course of my fieldwork in Mumbai, I repeatedly encountered women who discussed their alienation as workers; such as facing sexual harassment and negative stereotyping of women navigating public spaces,¹⁷ and being edged out of select forms of work within the care landscape.¹⁸

For example, older female servants were often discharged from taking care of disabled, male family members, which required strength for heavy lifting. On many occasions, migrant women were turned away from full-time lucrative domestic employment, as elderly upper class men would prefer to be bathed and escorted to the bathroom by male carers.

For the purpose of this essay, I want to interrogate the notion of ‘temporal victimologies’, and show how these accounts of victimhood cannot be disentangled from such experiences of physical and economic marginalization associated with paid housework. Drawing on the narratives of migrant women, I illustrate that workers’ contradictory self-perceptions can be understood with reference not just to the waged value of labour, but also to more sacred perceptions of feminine care¹⁹ etched in relief against strict middle class domestic conventions.

 

One of my central arguments is that the diffuseness of migrant women’s ‘workspace’ in the intimate sphere of the household, and the affective form of labour (such as childcare that builds on expertise of motherhood), increases the perception of temporal oppression among migrant workers. However, migrant women can build strategies to resist the regimentation of their care work as a time bound, devalued discharging of paid duty.

To elaborate on this argument, let me return briefly to Sumitra’s story. Sumitra’s encounter with urban speed began while she waited at the village station for a train to Mumbai. Even though the station master had said that the train was to arrive at five pm, Sumitra had no idea about the turning wheels of the station clock. She kept standing on the platform for long hours. When the train finally arrived, even though Sumitra was well ahead of the queue to board the train, inhabitants of nearby villages clambered over her to find a place. The passengers did not care to alight in such a way that Sumitra and her small boys would not be trampled.

Many years into the future, Sumitra would reflect back on this moment and realize that it was a lesson to negotiate the overcrowded and unruly commuter train service in Mumbai. Once in the train, Sumitra sat in front of the toilet and relied on the kindness of fellow female passengers who gave her food. When she reached Mumbai, other migrant women helped Sumitra find a room, and a poorly paid job as an 8 am to 8 pm maid and nanny in an upper class housing estate in the gentrified southern region of the city. And so she began her journey with the oppressive pressures of industrial time.

‘Arrive on time’, ‘give food to our family on time’, ‘give medicines to my parents-in-law on time’, ‘leave on time’, ‘why don’t you do your work in time?’, ‘keep time for additional cleaning after the party’, ‘can’t you see the clock?’, ‘is this a time to arrive for work?’, ‘why don’t you know how to set an alarm?’, ‘why are you always late?’, ‘can you come early tomorrow?’, ‘when is the last time you had a proper bath? It’s unhygienic’, ‘it’s time to clean the cupboards again’, ‘I also have to be at work on time’, ‘I can’t leave unless you arrive in time’: these were some of the phrases that determined the contours of Sumitra’s work life.

These axioms were accompanied by the tapping of wrist watches, or pointing towards the wall clock, either by employers or supervisors of domestic staff. At times these were followed by loud colloquial abuse of workers with limited time skills (‘bloody uneducated, village women’). Eventually Sumitra was exhausted by the daily critique of the appropriate use of her time, to remain a valued female care worker in the city.

 

Most households offered gifts during festival time (new saris and cooking utensils), as well as informal loans, to help female workers tide over periods of crisis in their families (ranging from medical emergencies to deposits for purchasing land, to school fees for their children). Within the moral economy of the household, these were gendered conventions and exchanges, which helped employers retain trusted domestic hands. But the latter often developed into obligatory relationships, and women workers felt they could not leave their employment without repaying their fiscal debts.

Many women like Sumitra, who had escaped debt relations in the village, encountered new temporal cycles of debt related distrust in urban households, as employers kept an even stricter surveillance on borrowings. These money related terse relationships generated long-term debt traps, and added to the victimological narratives of women.

 

Sumitra, along with some of my long-term research participants in the field, would find ways in which to circumvent this oppression of time. For example, they would offer fake excuses of children’s illness or sudden deaths, which required the support of female kin networks, to evoke empathy from upper class housewives. And then would take long leave from domestic work. In most cases, women workers would map the time schedules of the families and covertly exert their choice of employment. They would take employment in nuclear households, with professional parents and school-going children, which meant that women workers were relatively unsupervised during the day. Many young carers avoided working in households in which female employers had long working hours, as male employers returning home early would sexually harass care workers in the absence of their wives.

Migrant women also resisted working in households with no other helpers. This meant that the blame of delays and errors could not be shared with other domestic staff. Some of my female interlocuters also avoided devout Hindu households, since it involved excessively burdensome routines of daily washing, cleaning and religious purification. Sumitra, who eventually started to work as a maid for multiple families, specifically shunned these households since they would give her pills to delay her menstrual cycle during festival season. Employers wanted Sumitra to cook for guests participating in Hindu rituals, but these religious practices could not be polluted by the presence of menstruating women. Several women workers eventually stopped working with employers who also gave them random allopathic medicines for headaches and stomach cramps (with negative side effects) to maintain efficient service routines.

 

Significantly, large numbers of migrant women delayed acknowledging that they had eventually learnt how to read the mechanical clock. This was an excuse to arrive late or avoid certain time related, unpleasant tasks (such as administering medicine to rude, elderly family members). Some women working as nannies ensured that children under their supervision got attached to them quickly. In that case, the nannies could make their routines a bit flexible. For example, they could persuade a child to sleep an extra hour before going to the playground, so that the nannies could also have an afternoon nap. These nannies relied on the hope that their employers would not sack them; since upper class parents would be more sensitive towards causing a trauma of separation for their young children.

On occasions, the employers would catch onto these temporal games played by migrant workers, and threaten to replace them. Others would punish women workers by lowering their salaries, or by setting a deadline against which they could change their rebellious behaviour. In the long run, many families that had adapted to the cooking, cleaning and care skills of a particular maid, would make concessions for the worker to follow a few independent routines within the household economy.

Through the ethnographic vignettes in this section, I have offered an insight into what I term as ‘temporal victimologies’. The latter refers to narratives of oppression²⁰ related to migrant women workers’ encounters with narrow domestic schedules and fragmentations in the flow of gendered time in the city. I have illustrated how victimological experiences among poor migrant workers can be both moral and temporal, including multiple experiences of resentment and humiliation within middle class households.

Thus, the narrative implications of being victimized is attributed to the root metaphor of encountering ‘time in the city’. I argue that this experience of shaming and oppression is created by the disjuncture of temporal discourses between the upper and lower class, rural and urban domestic economies, that collide through employer-employee relationships within affluent urban households.

 

I also show how migrant women manipulate this contested domain of effective but unskilled urban labour, to resist fully acquiescing to these senses of victimhood. I show women’s capacity for endurance, which Povinelli²¹ describes as the ability to suffer and yet persist, while navigating the domestic care workscape, potentially allowed migrant women narrow pathways towards certain socio-economic securities. However, I show that this journey remained highly contested as women recruits experience new forms of victimization, when pushed back by inconsistent rules that regulate the workings of effective, unskilled service. Overall, the stories of temporal victimization shared amongst migrant women opens up a discussion on the micro-level, gendered agency, adaptations and resistances, through which women negotiate value and economic power within informal labour markets in the city.

 

According to Banerjee, ‘the liminality of the employers’ household as the workplace, the subsuming of paid domestic work with the performance of their own domesticity, and the notions of shame and stigma, created in the domestic workers a sense of alienation from their labour. A combination of economic and social processes effected a connection between women’s work and devalued labour.’²² My essay shows how migrant women actively contributed towards the daily functioning of employers’ households in Mumbai. Care as ‘work’ had the dominant values of trust, maternal instincts and affect at its core. Yet migrant workers discovered that their fluid emotional labour could only be rightfully waged and appreciated if they were boxed into varied regimented routines developed by upper class employers.

Making a case for the study of ‘temporal victimologies’ against the backdrop of modern time,²³ I argue that in addition to social and economic processes, it is vital to interrogate the impact (and loss) of rural temporal time maps on urban labour markets. I contend that migrant women care workers are forced to adapt to a form of paid feminine expertise, demanded by urban employers, which contributes substantially to the growing crisis of gendered labour in commercial cities.

 

Footnotes:

1. R. Ray and S. Qayum, Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009; S. Banerjee, ‘From "Plantation Workers" to Naukrani: The Changing Labour Discourses of Migrant Domestic Workers’, Journal of South Asian Development 13(2), 2018, pp. 164-185.

2. L. Bear, ‘Doubt, Conflict, Mediation: The Anthropology of Modern Time’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(S1), 2014, p. 6.

3. D. Massey, For Space. Sage, London, 2005; N. Munn, ‘The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay’, Annual Review of Anthropology 2(1), 1992, pp. 93-123.

4. E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38, 1967, pp. 56-97.

5. N. Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011.

6. M. Dossal, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai 1660 to Present Times. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010.

7. J. Masselos, ‘Spare Time and Recreation: Changing Behaviour Patterns in Bombay at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 7(1), 1984, pp. 34-57.

8. N. Green, 2011, op. cit.

9. B. Moeran and T. de Waal Malefyt (eds.), Magical Capitalism: Enchantment, Spells, and Occult Practices in Contemporary Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018.

10. A. Sen. Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum. C. Hurst and Co., London, 2007.

11. R.B. Bhagat, ‘Migration, Gender and Right to the City: The Indian Context’, Economic and Political Weekly 52(32), 2017, pp. 35-34.

12. Ibid.

13. Svati Shah, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai. Duke University Press, Durham, 2014.

14. L. Wilks, Running on Time: Domestic Work and Commuting in West Bengal, submitted for PhD in Sociology at The University of Edinburgh, 2018.

15. R. Basu and M.D. Thomas, ‘Exploring Women’s Daily Lives and Participation in the Informal Labour Market in Mumbai, India’, Gender & Development 17(2), 2009, pp. 231-242.

16. S. Banerjee, 2018, op. cit., fn. 1.

17. A. Sen, R. Kaur and E. Zabiliute, ‘(En)countering Sexual Violence in the Indian City’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 27(1), 2019.

18. E. Kofman and P. Raghuram, ‘The Implications of Migration for Gender and Care Regimes in the South’, in K. Hujo and N. Piper (eds.), South-South Migration: Implications for Social Policy and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010.

19. C. Han, Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012.

20. A. Pemberton, E. Mulder, and P.G.M. Aarten, ‘Stories of Injustice: Towards a Narrative Victimology’, European Journal of Criminology 16(4), 2019, pp. 391-412.

21. E.A. Povinelli, ‘The Will to be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance’, South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3), 2012, pp. 453-475.

22. S. Banerjee, 2018, op. cit., p. 183.

23. L. Bear, 2014, op. cit.