Date: 23.10.2025 13:13-14:45

Venue: Elise-Richter-Saal, Main Building, Universitätsring 1

Speaker: Nitin Varma

Abstract:

Including domestic workers within the ambit of labour laws and labour codes (of newly formed constitutions) is a broader global process adhering to distinct temporalities. A strand of historical literature documenting the struggles of domestic workers for legal inclusion from the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly focusing on the Americas (including Brazil, the United States and Mexico), has demonstrated the challenging and tortuous nature of this process, with the labour category often proving to be resistant to such inclusion. This gets tied to another strand of historiography, which interrogates how such inclusions/exclusions are fundamentally linked to the idea of being a citizen and the rights of citizenship. In many cases, domestic workers have historically been excluded from full citizenship rights, both in legal and symbolic terms. Legal frameworks that either ignore domestic work or treat it as exceptional have reinforced this exclusion, denying workers access to protections afforded to other labour sectors. Consequently, the struggle for labour inclusion also gets tied to the struggle for recognition, dignity, and full participation in the civic and political life of the nation. However, historiographical interest regarding the inclusion of domestic workers within the labour category and the specific implications for the practice of citizenship are notably absent in the context of South Asia for this period. The recognition of such exclusions and the efforts to address them are often perceived as phenomena that emerged much later, particularly in the 1990s.

Shifting our attention to the immediate postcolonial period (late 1940s-1950s) the presentation with delve into the interplay of temporalities i.e. distinct visions of time and progress animating the actors. The postcolonial state operated within a developmentalist temporality: a linear trajectory of modernisation via Five-Year Plans, as the metric of progress. Domestic workers were deferred, their inclusion a distant horizon, subsumed by the state’s long-term architectural role. National unions embodied an incremental temporality: rights accrued through cyclical negotiation—strikes, settlements, protective labour law—building on past struggles to fortify organised labour. Domestic workers, dispersed and informal, were incompatible with this framework, their timeline misaligned.

I would particularly focus on domestic workers, through their unions and legislative demands, inhabited a temporality of urgency and imagination, a concept resonant with scholarship that frames social movements as future-oriented projects. Their history of subjugation and postcolonial neglect demanded immediate redress, yet their actions transcended reaction. This was not incrementalism but a radical reimagining, clashing with the state’s deferral and unions’ gradualism. Their temporality, urgent yet forward-looking, positioned them as agents of alternative futures, constrained by the political exigencies of their time.