On a holiday to India some years ago, the elderly mother of a British friend requested an appointment at the beauty salon of a five star hotel. After her hair set, manicure and pedicure, we dined at one of the hotel’s restaurants before heading home.
None of this attracted comment; it was par for the course, you would have thought, for a visitor from the UK. It was her reaction the next morning when the daily household help appeared that was interesting. For the two hours that the temp washed the dishes, dusted, swept and swabbed, Auntie watched closely. How often did she come? How long did she work? How much did she get paid? Did she have children?
The detailed questioning was revealing. That’s because back in England and before she retired, Auntie herself had been a temp — or what, in the old days, you would have called a charwoman. She, too, had swept, swabbed and scrubbed in a variety of households and institutions. Yet, here she was, Neelam’s British counterpart, enjoying an international holiday and coiffeurs and meals in expensive hotels — luxuries that the Indian maid could neither dream of nor consume in her lifetime. Auntie, on the other hand, had made the transition from working class to middle class; she owned a house and had a well-educated daughter who worked as an executive in a company. Neither wine nor fine-dining were outside her ken. Nor was she an outlier in her society: the reasonably efficient health and education system that Britain provides its citizens (for a nominal fee) makes it feasible for them to move up the income ladder within a lifetime. Indeed, this life-cycle is true for most Western welfare states.
In India, Neelam’s story, too, was unremarkable; she worked as a temp in two other houses, her husband was an electrician and her children went to one of those small-time local private schools in which venality outstripped academic standards but were still considered a better option to the non-functioning government schools. She was unlikely to have the luxury of “retiring”; that would happen when she was too old and feeble to work. Her entire “social security” depended on the whims of the people for whom she worked part-time. Unlike temps abroad, she had no benefits, holidays (most households simply didn’t pay her if she took time out) or allowances. No labour union will fight for her cause if she is ill-treated by her employers. Her life can be replicated for the hundreds of thousands of temps across India. The irony is this: fast-growing rich and middle class India’s existence is largely predicated on people like her. As Patrick French points out in his latest book India: A Portrait (2010), “The most significant cultural difference between a professional family in India comes in the prevalence of servants. Indians have cooks, drivers, bearers, sweepers, gardeners, maids and more maids — and often treat them callously.”
Of course, given the stage of economic development that India is at, this is not unusual. Mr French is British and cannot have forgotten the armies of servants that kept Britain’s upper middle class and rich in comfort. A perceptive book called Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light might refresh his memory; servants were very much part of British household life till the war. The difference, of course, is that the welfare state made it possible for servants to transcend that servitude in a lifetime. In India, policy-makers either bank on faster growth to create that momentum or think of creating a pseudo-welfare state that benefits the corrupt. Either way, the upward mobility of the Neelams of this world will be much slower than her global counterparts.