Paper long abstract:

In May 2020, Kent, a leading manufacturer of electrical appliances in India, advertised a new product–a flour kneading and bread making device. The advertisement asked the potential buyers of the appliance, “Are you allowing your maid to knead atta (flour) dough with her hands? Her hands may be infected. Let automation take care of hygiene this time!” Following public protests on the internet for the advertisement’s class and caste insinuations, the company apologized and withdrew the advertisement’s circulation. This time, as the advertisement mentions, is the time of contagion, which attaches a differential burden on women domestic workers in the Indian sub-continent. Their bodies, this paper contends, continue to be sites of caste pollution, often overriding their actual caste or religious statuses, with which intersects the possibility of contagion in the still unfolding pandemic. The ‘unlock’ period has allowed some domestic workers to return to work; this is amid government advisories of greater risk of contagion generally. Drawing on ethnographic work with women domestic workers in the city of Delhi, this paper will delineate how the formalities of ‘social distancing’ and ‘mask wearing’ at work have begun to inflect intimate and personalised labour relationships in a way that entrenches hierarchies enabled by caste practices. This can be evidenced, the paper argues, from a doubling of the idea of contagion—a culturally polluted person rendered even more pestilential because of contagion, but whose service/s are, nonetheless, needed to disinfect the space of the employer’s home. The paper will demonstrate (i) how the pandemic has inflicted additional moral burdens on the workers to protect themselves, and by extension their work spaces, from infection (ii) how they attempt to accomplish this amid declining reciprocities from their respective employers.