Her old Ayah: the transcolonial significance of the Indian domestic worker in India and Australia

The historical representation of white women in India and Australia bears a striking similarity: on the one hand, we find the 'memsahib' and, on the other, the 'missus', with both of them designated by their role not only of wife and mother to white men, but as mistress to native workers. In the case of the former, this designation as mistress is paramount, for, in the nostalgic construction of the British Raj, perhaps no one figure looms quite so large as the cherished ayah or lady's maid. This paper is a rumination on the significance of this image of the Indian domestic worker in imagined women's relationships of (Anglophone) colonialism. Sparked by the recollections of my Australian born great-grandmother, Joan Kingsley-Strack, reflecting on the life of her Anglo-Indian grandmother, Maggie Hobbes (and in her case the term 'Anglo-Indian' is fittingly ambiguous), my discussion tentatively traces the constitution of an ideology of white colonial womanhood, through the systems of circulation of cultural ideas and attitudes that emerged in Anglophone colonialism. In a transcolonial culture, the figure of the ayah was significant, in a way that the very banality of the women's work she performed tends to obscure.