Waiting on Empire A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia.

Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, Arunima Datta illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment.

In doing so, Datta re-imagines the experience of waiting. Waiting is a recurrent human experience, yet it is often marginalized. It takes a particular form within complex bureaucratized societies in which the marginalized inevitably wait upon those with power over them. Those who wait are often discounted as passive, inactive victims. This book shows that, in spite of their precarious position, the travelling ayahs of the British empire were far from this stereotype.

Arunima Datta, Assistant Professor of History, Idaho State University

Arunima Datta is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Idaho State University. She is the author of Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (2021), which received the Sara A. Whaley Award from the National Women's Studies Association as well as the Gita Chaudhuri Award from the Western Association of Women Historians. She serves as an associate editor of Gender & History, Britain and the World, and also as the Associate Review Editor of the American Historical Review. Her works have appeared in scholarly journals, public history journals and magazines, and on BBC4.