WOMEN AND THE WORKPLACE: THE INVISIBLE HELP

By Patricia Uberoi, India Today, March 30

The Indian women's success in board rooms and power corridors rests on the unacknowledged labours of the working class woman

Among the many silver, golden and centennial jubilees that mark our calendar this year, there is one golden jubilee that seems to have escaped public attention. This year happens to be the 50th anniversary of Guru Dutt's beer-and-skittles romantic comedy, Mr & Mrs 55. A misogynistic satire on "modern marriage", Mr & Mrs 55 stars Dutt in a battered felt hat as Preetam, a poor cartoonist, and the gorgeous Madhubala as the spoilt heiress Anita. Anita has been left a huge fortune by her father on condition that she gets married within a year. This poses a problem for her guardian, the overbearing aunt Sita Devi (played by Lalita Pawar), a man-hating feminist who has been a tireless crusader on behalf of the newly passed Divorce Law (actually, the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955). Sita Devi does not want Anita to forfeit her fortune nor does she want her to settle down to the servitude which she believes is the fate of the Hindu wife. Her solution is to hire the penniless cartoonist to marry Anita on the understanding that he will divorce her immediately (a detail apparently borrowed from a Bette Davis-Cary Grant Hollywood movie).

Sita Devi's machinations are foiled since Preetam and Anita have already met and are attracted to each other. It takes several twists and turns of the plot before Preetam can woo the petulant heiress and reverse the woman-on-top asymmetry of their initial situation. Finally, declaring that a woman's happiness lies in marriage and not in the false freedom promised by feminists, Anita escapes from her aunt's custody to be reunited with Preetam and stay the divorce proceedings. It is no wonder that feminists have panned Mr & Mrs 55, notwithstanding its fun sequences, and denounced the caricature of Sita Devi as a dyed-in-the-wool feminist.

In 1955, it seems, the choices were starkly posed. You could choose marriage and family, or end up a strident harridan like Sita Devi, bent on turning all men into "slaves". Popular movies still play around with this formula, of course, but the prevailing mood in public discourses is the one beloved of international development agencies-the win-win formula.

Nowadays, across the board, from the professions to politics and from the arts to business, the feminine paragons of our times are taking charge of their lives, competing with men in the public sphere, succeeding in their jobs, rescripting their family lives, nurturing their children, running elegant homes and maybe doing a little social service on the side.

Backstage a heavy price may have to be paid for this all-round success and public visibility, even though women often go to great lengths to state that their achievements in the public domain are definitely not at the cost of their roles as wives and mothers. Women's magazines latch onto this anxiety to offer practical advice on how to win on all fronts. The consensus is twofold. First, public success is a matter of will and determination to compete with men on their own ground, and against all odds. The obverse of this is the rather demoralising conclusion that there must be something wrong with you if you can't do it all with panache. Second is the assumption that the key to a successful woman is a reformed husband and a new conjugal equation.

No doubt most successful women have shown a great will to succeed and many have done so with the support of partners. But this is a derivative formula. My observation of many successful Indian women suggests that their success is relatively guiltlessly achieved not merely through sympathetic partners, but particularly through the support of other women-mothers and mothers-in-law who encourage them, shoulder the burden of housekeeping and keep the home fires burning.

But it is not the end of the matter. There are other women too-the maids and nannies who take over the running of the household, relieving the mothers and mothers-in-law of the more heavy-duty tasks. The successful women I know often appreciate the support of their relatives, but no one seems willing to acknowledge that the freedom of their own class of women is built upon the labours of women of another class. Even Indian sociologists have not seen domestic service as a respectable topic for social research, though it is a ubiquitous feature and connected with patterns of uneven development, both nationally and internationally. The "trade" in housemaids is critical to the economies of Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and even to certain regions of India like Jharkhand.

It is even more surprising that feminist scholars in India have not foregrounded the institution of domestic service as an important feminist concern. Elsewhere, at least in the 1980s, feminist social historians had taken up the extreme case of domestic service-the institution of the wet nurse. The wet nurse is a lactating woman who, perhaps neglecting her own child, nurses the infant of her employer. There is a feminist history of the wet nurse still to be retrieved and written for south Asia. The closest we have got is Mahasweta Devi's story "The Breast Giver", of a poor woman who nurses many children for her employers, before dying, impoverished, of breast cancer.

That is an extreme case, no doubt, and with new standards of hygiene and the availability of formula milk, it may appear that the labour of the wet nurse belongs to the past. But as successful women exchange notes on the "servant problem" as they meet in the corridors of power, it does no harm in reflecting for a moment on what it might have cost those other women, as wives and mothers, to enable the achievements of India's new generation of women at the top, the women who are now so conspicuously taking charge.

One is yet to see a book dedicated to "Nanny but for whom...".

The writer is professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi