Introduction

Renewed attention is being paid to migration in the context of an economically globalizing world. Although several scholars have remarked that globalization is mainly an effect of the mobility of capital and is not of labour (since mobility of labour, especially international, remains restricted), the quantum of both international and internal migration is sufficiently large for a need to analyse its causes and effects. Certain forms of labour mobility, especially of female domestic workers, have shown a large increase. Eastern European, Hispanic, Philippine, Sri Lankan and Indian women are prominent among these international migrants. In fact, in Sri Lanka, female out-migration has outstripped male migration (Kottegoda, 2003).

While international migration has been the focus of much research, comparable internal migration for domestic work in India merits scholarly attention. Such migration has raised new questions about the gendered nature of the migration process; the new forms of labour mobility, the interconnections of migration with productive and reproductive uses of women's labour and the social consequences of migration for women and their families. It has also raised contentious issues, such as trafficking being disguised as migration (Jeffreys, 2003) or the ambiguities of treating labour and marriage migration as distinct phenomena when in fact they are intertwined. Traditional issues of skill, wages, protection and exploitation of migrants continue to be areas of concern.

This expanding scale of female migration has led to a broadening of migration studies from the earlier “push and pull” theories to include issues of agency, identity, community and the experience of migration itself. The focus on the household and not merely on the migrating individual is part of this new approach, for example, in the work of Patricia Pessar (1999), who argues that migration needs to be seen as a social process. Although macro-structural changes unleash migration pressures, she argues it is families and social networks that respond to these pressures and decide who migrates and when. De Haan (1999 and De Haan and Rogaly, 2000) has argued that migration is a central element in the livelihoods of many households, and its widespread prevalence should make us view it as a norm rather than an outlier occurrence. Emphasizing that migration takes place within specific social and cultural contexts, De Haan (2000) remarks “Household composition, gendered ideologies and social contact networks determine who migrates, and who can profit from opportunities arising elsewhere.” Networks that migrants use embody both social and symbolic capital and are especially important for migrants who lack financial and educational capital. The outcomes of migration are varied and determined by specific forms and the conditions under which such migration takes place. The concepts of structure, agency and strategy developed by Bourdieu (1977) can be profitably deployed to deconstruct the migration process, accounting for the political economy of sending and receiving areas, the dynamic of household strategies and the agency of the individual migrant. Such an approach underlies this paper.

This paper situates and analyses the experience of poor rural women who have migrated to the urban metropolis of Delhi . Field research in two settings in Delhi, a slum (Lal Gumbad), and an urban village (Katwaria Sarai) shows that almost all poor female migrants seek employment and contribute substantially to household welfare. While migrant women are to be found in several sectors of the informal and formal economy – construction labour (in which Rajasthani migrants predominate), home based work, rag-picking, nursing, beauty parlours, factory labour, etc. – a large majority has been pulled into the domestic labour sector.

Field research data are utilized to explore the dynamics of change associated with the phenomenon of the increased demand, and resulting supply, of women for domestic work. In this paper, I document the continuing shift away from the earlier predominance of male domestic servants towards female domestic servants. Second, and more importantly, such a shift leads to a chain of unintended consequences which leads to a change in the manner in which women now perceive themselves – as bread winners rather than as housewives and/or as merely reproductive labour. This perceptual change may be leading to an actual change in the status of women; the question remains whether the increased economic independence gained by women through paid work is able to challenge, as Kabeer (2000) phrases it, “the seamless patriarchal discipline of family, community and capitalist work relations.” The results of the field research suggest that transformations are certainly taking place and that a burgeoning revolution in the roles of women, even amongst poor migrants, is underway.

Section 2 of the paper surveys the theories, literature, and the presumed determinants of migration. Section 3 concentrates on the increased demand and supply of females for domestic work. Section 4 discusses the experience of migrant female domestic workers. Section 5 undertakes an examination of the big picture consequences of increased female migration and increased female independence,and the manner in which gender relations and female identities are being transformed, and the likely effects on future empowerment of women. Section 6 sums up the findings of the research.

Section 2: Migration

Earlier studies of migration treated female migration in India as secondary and entirely dependent upon male migration. A great deal of evidence from case studies, however, suggests that women's migration, earlier attributed merely to mobility at marriage, is now increasingly for employment purposes. In the Indian context, Andrea Singh (1984) and Ursula Sharma (1986) were the first to critique the manner in which male migration is considered as ‘economic' while female migration, consequent on marriage or family moves, is considered to be social. In a very convincing argument Sharma points out that even if the immediate and obvious reason for women moving might be domestic, it does not mean that the move does not have important economic consequences. Many women join their migrant husbands only if there are significant opportunities for their own employment. The earnings of migrant women cannot be regarded as marginal or supplementary – in the case of many poor households, they are in fact the mainstay. This conclusion is reiterated by Leela Kasturi's work (1990) among Tamil migrants to Delhi which showed that female workforce participation rates, in comparison to those of males, went up after migration.

Single women move

A significant number of single women migrating on their own for purposes of both social and economic improvement brings an added importance to questions of agency and mobility. Meera, a twenty-two-year-old high school graduate, left her home in Nainital to come to Delhi to work in a beauty parlour. She lives with her married sister and her decision to migrate for better employment prospects was very much her own. Her widowed mother did not object. She sent some of her earnings home to help her family. Sonu, a twenty-three-year-old from Darjeeling, migrated to Delhi seven years ago. Her cousin sister encouraged her to get trained in the beauty business in Darjeeling (where the training is cheaper) and then found her a job in Delhi . She lived with her cousin, pitching in with the rent. Although she found the work boring, the lack of education or skills for any other kind of work kept her in the job.

The stories of migration of single women appear to have a shared byline. They come to visit relatives in a major town or city and are attracted by the possibilities of work and independence. Either they do not return to their homes, finding jobs through relatives, or they go back to gain some skills and then head back to the city. Such instances of migration by single women spell a change in the parent's world view as well. Allowing a woman to move before marriage, pursue a career, live independently, and the acceptance of a monetary contribution from her to the natal household, reflect a change towards similar expectations as from sons, at least before marriage. Where the demand for dowries makes marriage expensive for parents, women are encouraged to earn their own dowries. Families often delay a girl's marriage or her move to her conjugal home in order to take advantage of her labour contribution to the natal household. In India, where patriarchal culture has traditionally constructed women as non-workers, monetary income and its empowerment consequences for women may be set to challenge such a conception.

Married women move

Women working in the tea gardens of the Eastern state of Assam demonstrate instances of married women migrating on their own (again in response to a demand for their labour). Often such women need to leave their husbands and children behind. The household shares in the decision to allow the women to migrate, being well aware of the greater issues of personal and cultural security faced by women who migrate alone. The gains from their earnings offset the possible social opprobrium that the family may face.

Movement for marriage

Studies from India and China reveal an increase in what Veena Thadani and Michael Todaro (1984) call marital migration – migration for better marital prospects. Examples of women from the poorer states of Assam and Bengal moving to the prosperous areas of Haryana and Punjab fall into this category, revealing a linkage between poverty, marriage migration and the low sex ratio in India's Northern states. Sending daughters to far away marital homes has been analysed as a household strategy to escape dowry, achieve marriage for the daughter and smooth consumption for the remaining members of the household (Kaur, 2004). Similarly, Fan and Huang (1998) reveal extensive marital migration by rural Chinese women. Delia Davin (2003) states that marriage migration in China accounts for between a quarter and a third of all female migration and for over half the female migration from poorer provinces.

Although the poverty of families of women who move provides a broad economic context for their migration, a substantial number of women are moving simply to be able to work. Their employment in their native areas may be constrained by caste and status rules prohibiting work of certain kinds and by social restrictions on mobility. The greater economic and social independence that is possible away from one's own social milieu is an important factor in the desire to move (Mukhopadhyay and Sudarshan, 2003, Kasturi; 1990; Kaur, 2001 a&b).

Section 3: Female migrants in the domestic labour sector

Modern development has involved an expansion of the services sector. This sector has been a relatively easy entry point for unskilled, especially female, workers.¹  This might be an important reason for the increase in female labor force participation rates in India from 19 percent in 1981 to about 26% in 2001 – still low in absolute terms, but high in terms of the change or the increase. Most of this change has occurred in the urban areas, thus made the increase in female urban jobs that much larger. Several studies have pointed to the increasing presence of women, especially migrant women in India 's informal economy. Singh (1984), states that migrant women in urban areas have significantly higher work-force participation rates than non-migrant women.

This is especially true of the domestic labour sector where an important shift in demand from male to female labour is taking place. This shift is reflected in a study by the Institute of Social Sciences (1991) which showed that 20% of the total women migrants to Delhi are employed as domestic maids. Ravi Srivastava (2003), in an overview of migration trends in India, points to a newer trend in which girls from the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa are being brought through private recruiting agencies and Christian voluntary organizations to be employed as maids in Delhi households. Leela Kasturi in her study of migrant Tamil domestic workers living in a resettlement colony in Delhi found that “the families had migrated in response to female economic opportunities in domestic service (Schenk-Sandbergen, 1995). Andrea Singh (1984) notes important differences between the north and the south: migration in the north was dominated by males while there was a comparatively larger share of female economic migrants from the southern states. These regional differences were attributed to the higher social position of women in the south.

These differences, however, may be narrowing with greater participation in migration by women of all regions. Several complex factors account for greater female migration – newly developing markets for women's work, education, skill development, a greater desire for improving one's own and one's children's standard of living and the loosening of parental and societal control over women. Social capital, in the form of community and family networks, however, remains important in facilitating such movement.

Who will take care of the children? And the old?

Arvind M. Shah's study (1996) on the Indian household explained the large number of joint households in urban areas as resulting from the twin needs of care of the young and the old. Older relatives need a place to stay and younger working couples need child care. Three generations living together make up these joint households. While this to some extent takes care of specific household chores, with the old pitching in with cooking or child care, additional help may still be required. In the absence of an older relative or relatives, however, working women with children need full time help. Additionally, a second part-time maid may be hired for the other domestic chores. Middle class women with school going children need part-time help for specific chores. If the older members of a joint household are frail or suffer from ill-health, help may be hired for their special needs. Such help is most often provided by a domestic worker rather than a trained nurse.

Affluent families in which the women do not work outside or inside the house may still employ several domestic workers. Household help can be a significant symbol of status – having and keeping good help is considered a marker of status and wise management on the part of the householder. The importance of domestic help is underlined by the fact that it is one of the most frequent topics of discussion among woman in urban households. But increasingly, a more utilitarian reason lies behind the obsession and competition for good domestic help. A woman's own career is jeopardized if she has no household help.

Men, Women and Domestic Labour: The Changing Scenario

There is a reinforcing symmetry of work: increasing labor force participation of women belonging to middle class households means increased demand for household labor. Work means absence from home which means an increased demand for a “replacement.” Most often, a male worker is unable to perform all the tasks that a woman takes care of in the home. Hence she has to be replaced by other women who take on the female chores, especially child care.

Traditionally, household help, such as cooks and drivers in a northern city like Delhi was generally male, the proverbial Ramu drawn from the hills of Uttar Pradesh or Himachal Pradesh. If his family migrated with the employee, they would not be employed by the “master” but would render additional help when needed. Generally provided quarters at the employers place, the couple would educate their children in a nearby government school. Many such migrants spent their entire working lives in the household of the employer. This scenario of the male domestic ‘servant' is transforming with fewer men preferring to remain tied to a family in a master-servant relationship. The demand has changed also. Previously the male domestic servant was there to help the woman of the house with household chores-child care remained under female (the mother's) care. Now, with the woman also of the house, the demand is for another female to take care of the household chores; hence, significantly greater demand for females for the occupation of domestic help.

Nature of work in the domestic labour sector

The four main domestic chores that need to be taken care of are child care, cooking, cleaning of the house and washing of clothes. These tasks are often combined in one person's work. The employer can hire either part-time or full-time household help depending on her needs and income. The distinction between part-time and full-time help is meaningful only from the employer's end; for the worker both categories of work are full-time.Thus, part-timers work in several households in a day while full time workers reside with the family or spend their whole day at the residence of a single employer. Part time workers live in their own quarters, either self-owned or on rent. Full-time workers may be hired with or without food even if they live on the premises. If hired with food, they are also given clothing and toiletries. Those hired without food get a higher wage and cook their own food in their quarters.

The nature of domestic work is such that it can be filled on a part-time basis. Since men prefer or can obtain jobs on a full-time basis, part-time domestic work has become almost exclusively female. Men generally do not work in several homes at a time and prefer the status of a “cook” as opposed to an all purpose household help. If a household employs a full time male cook, the other chores, including the washing of dishes are performed by a woman. Besides the gender hierarchy, a skill-based hierarchy also operates. Women with some education, better cooking or child care skills are able to get well-paid jobs while those whose work is considered purely unskilled and substitutable get the lower end jobs. Most female workers who do sweeping, swabbing, washing utensils and clothes fall into the latter category. Newer migrants are always at the bottom of the ladder.

A summary of the important demand and supply factors affecting the feminization of domestic work is as follows. On the supply side, there are seven inter-related factors: a) the unskilled nature of most household work, as it requires no particular training; b) the lower educational and skill attainment of female rural migrants, a group increasingly occupying domestic help jobs; c) the fact that female migrants are ready to work for lower wages; d) and do so because they are willing to trade lower wages for stability and a roof over their heads, especially if they have children to support; e) women are more amenable to work in these ‘lower' status jobs; e) male domestic workers preference for semi-skilled or skilled jobs such as driving, security guards, etc.; f) as men vacate various categories of unskilled work, women and other poorer migrants move to occupy these spaces and jobs; g) an increase in violent incidents (robbery, assault and murder) involving male household employees leading to a preference for female employees.

On the demand side, the following ten factors dominate: a) An increase in the FLPR (female labour force participation rate), especially in urban areas. The market for outside hired help, both full and part time has expanded enormously with women from all classes joining productive work outside the household. b) Jobs which entail office hours (full or even part time) take the woman away from the home for a large part of the day. As more women go to work, their need for someone else to tend to some or all of the domestic chores increases. c) Many more urban women are working both ‘outside the house' and working ‘out of the house' (own account workers). d) Household help is needed for several chores such as cooking, cleaning, washing, the care of children e) Sufficient numbers of old parents and dependents continue to stay with their grown children until their death and household help is often hired specifically to look after old parents or in-laws when the woman of the house is working – this too was traditionally considered to be her role and duty. f) Single working men and women also depend on domestic help for household chores. g) The cultural framing of gender roles – most household chores are considered to be the woman's domain and responsibility. h) Security of female and younger male children is another reason why more women than men are being preferred for domestic work especially where the worker is needed to stay in or spend the major portion of the day at the employer's residence in the latter's absence. i) The limited emancipation of women in India has not led husbands to share household chores with working wives. Nor have technological improvements curtailed household work to the same extent as in the West. Hence domestic chores remain time bound, time consuming and framed by cultural demands. j) Due to the availability of cheap labour, the labour of wives and mothers is not shared by men but replaced with that of other women.

Domestic work force: statistical evidence

National Sample Survey (NSS) data for 1983 and 1999 reveal some significant shifts. In order to substantiate the hypothesis that when overall work force participation of women goes up, the demand for female domestic labour goes up. I look at two groups of workers (as classified in the NSS data). Group 1 consists of maid and other housekeeping services (includes ayahs –child minders, nurse maids, domestic servants, maid and related housekeeping services) and Group 2 consists of all occupations excluding Group 1.

The data for all of India shows that in 1983 female and male workforce in the second group stood at 16.6 and 55.4 million respectively. By 1999, it went up to 24.9 and 93.9 million respectively. While this is a normal increase for both sexes, the domestic service employment category shows an increasing feminization with an increase from 1.2 million in 1983 to 2 million in 1999; during this same period, the number of males working as domestic help stayed stagnant at 0.3 million. The share of Group 1 males in overall employment shows a declining trend (0.18 in 1983 and 0.12 in 1999) while female workers maintained their share (2.1 in both 1983 and 1999). The number of female domestic servants increased by 10 percentage points from a previously high base of 79 percent to a near universal figure of 89 percent. In other words, today, 9 out of every 10 domestic workers are female.

The data for Delhi, the metropolitan capital, is even more significant and important because the migration into urban metro areas is high. The number of males in domestic service show only a marginal increase – from 0.028 to 0.3 million. The number of female domestic workers more than doubled – from 0.019 million in 1983 to 0.047 million in 1999. Although not documented exhaustively, there is a close connection between female migration and work in the domestic labour sector.

Section 4: Experience of migrant domestic workers

This section explores the migration trajectories of several part-time domestic workers to explore issues of agency, socio-economic dimensions of the move and the transformative effects of migration and entry into paid employment. These trajectories show how power equations in the households of working migrant women are renegotiated, although the outcomes are not always favourable to them.

Sushma, Namita, Shakuntala, Gulab and Meera are domestic workers and female migrant workers in the city of Delhi . Sushma and Namita, originally from Hooghly district in Bengal, migrated to Eta district in Eastern Uttar Pradesh through marriage. Shankuntala is from Uttar Pradesh while Gulab and Meera have migrated from Bihar . Although they have spent a sufficient period of time in the city, mainly in one location, they see themselves as having migrated from and “belonging” to their places of origin. They retain ties with their marital as well as natal villages. For some, the move to Delhi involved a double migration – first from their natal homes to their conjugal rural homes and then from rural homes to the city of Delhi .

Women give various reasons for their move. Some of the most common ones are: not being able to make ends meet in the village, the desire for upward mobility, positive experience of other migrants (relatives, friends, co-villagers), indebtedness, an existing tradition of out-migration of at least one son in landowning families (small land holdings cannot support all sons), and scandal. Most women of Lal Gumbad and Katwaria Sarai have migrated with their husbands or followed them once the husband has gained a foothold in the city, especially in terms of a place of residence.

Lal Gumbad, a small slum, adjoins the affluent neighbourhoods of Panchshila Park and Sadhana Enclave in Southern New Delhi ; Katwaria Sarai, an urban village, adjoins the Indian Institute of Technology, also in South Delhi . The two locations are different in that the slum was originally set up as a camp for construction labour for the Panchshila Park colony. It is over forty years old and has been regularized (given legal status by the government). Over a period of time it has greatly expanded in terms of the number of households. The original inhabitants were migrant labour from the Western and Northern states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar . It includes a few households of migrants from Haryana (a state adjoining Delhi ) and some homes are owned by the original holders of the village land before it was bought over by the colony association. At present, the population of the slum has become more heterogeneous both in terms of class and community, with migrants from various other states renting space from the original migrants. The slum is broadly organized along ethnic lines with Rajasthani, Bihari and Uttar Pradesh migrants occupying distinct but contiguous sections of the inhabited area. Except for the Rajasthani women, most migrant women residing here are domestic workers in adjoining colonies. Most of them own their own jhuggi (slum dwelling) in the settlement. Newcomers rent space from the older residents until they manage to buy a jhuggi from someone who might be moving out. The slum has a flourishing rental market, with residents adding rooms above their dwellings for rent.

The urban village of Katwaria Sarai is one of three such villages bordering the Indian Institute of Technology (the other two are Ber Sarai and Jia Sarai). The residential land in these villages is mainly owned by the original inhabitants whose agricultural lands were bought over by the government to house the institute. Most of the original inhabitants survive by renting out their premises. The prime location of the village next to a major Engineering Institute has pushed up land values enormously. As a result, many of the original owners have turned their single storied homes into multi-storied ‘rooming' houses. Each floor has several rooms with a common toilet and bathroom. Most of these rooms are occupied by migrants employed in the city. The occupants range from salaried employees to those working in the informal sector. Like most other villages, the section occupied by Harijans (former untouchables) is set apart from the main village. The village has several commercial enterprises including those catering to the daily needs of its residents. Several migrant women residing here work as domestic labour in Katwaria Sarai and for campus households.

The above locations, like most other slums and urban villages in India, have a concentration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. The men work as masons, electricians, carpenters, drivers, load carriers, hawkers, shop assistants and in the hotel and entertainment industry while the women are mostly domestic workers.

Remuneration in the jobs of males varies from daily wage basis to weekly or monthly basis. However, rarely is there any security in informal sector employment. The insecure nature of men's work and a strong desire to earn money creates a need for women to work. Educating children, acquiring more consumption goods or simply making ends meet, in the case of the very poor, are imperatives. Migrants to urban areas are not necessarily among the poorest – even though those employed in the lowest echelons of the urban economy – garbage collectors and rag-pickers, construction labourers or load carriers may indeed lead very poor and insecure lives. Migration (whether seasonal or long-term) is often a livelihood diversification strategy practiced by several sectors of rural society.

Whether migration to the city is a positive or negative experience for the migrant depends on his/her success in finding employment and residence. For women who are able to find steady employment, the move is a positive one, and so for several reasons. Moving away from the village frees them of the constraints of the local social structure. In the village, women of several caste and status categories face great constraints in accessing paid employment. To begin with, work may not be available and if it is available, her caste status may prevent her from undertaking it. Patriarchal gender constructs can be so strong as to disallow men to send out their women to work. Poor families can face starvation or near-starvation if the male bread-earner falls sick or dies. If a migrant wife is working in the city, the fact of her working or the nature of the work, is often hidden from the society back home.

Leela Kasturi's study (1990) of female Tamil migrants reveals the importance of socio-cultural factors in effecting migration. The two caste groups she studied, Pallans and Devangas explained why they moved all the way to Delhi for domestic service instead of moving to an urban area in their own state where too such opportunities would have been available. The Pallans revealed that since they were untouchables they would not have been hired for domestic work in Tamil Nadu; the Devangas said that they were not willing to lose status in their own region by doing low status work.

The anonymity of the city and residence in nuclear families frees women in several ways. The hold of caste and village hierarchies and norms weakens; patriarchy too can be challenged. Sushma, for example, felt cloistered in the village atmosphere. As a Bengali married to an Uttar Pradesh man, the purdah (veiling) custom and strict patriarchal norms of behaviour felt confining to her. Her in-laws controlled the expenditure and her mother-in-law barely allowed her to have a decent meal. She had earlier spent time in the city when her mother-in-law worked in several homes as domestic help. The mother-in-law did not allow her to take on similar work and instead she and her husband earned a living as vegetable vendors. The family moved back to the village once the mother-in-law became old and fell sick. After she died, Sushma moved back to the city. The decision to move back was largely hers. She feared that if she remained in the village the children would not be educated and would become idlers. An additional reason was the lack of paid work in the village. The custom of secluding the women prevented her from seeking work. Although the couple owned a small piece of land, they could only eke out a subsistence living. Moving to the city opened up prospects of work for both, a better education for the children and an opportunity to earn money to fulfill dreams of a better life. In addition, the social interaction that work afforded made for greater personal satisfaction.

Gulab, a poor Brahmin woman from Bihar works as domestic help in several homes of an affluent neighborhood. In her own village, she was prohibited from seeking paid work because of her high caste status. Poverty and indebtedness drove her away from the village. For a Brahmin, cleaning dishes, sweeping and swabbing in other's houses is demeaning, unclean and polluting. Yet, due to poverty, and the easy availability of domestic work, Gulab has chosen domestic work as a means to relieve her poverty and take care of debts incurred during her daughter's marriage. She has to arrange for the gauna (ceremonial send off to the in-laws home) for which she needs a lakh (hundred thousand) of rupees. Back in her village she has told people that she works in a bindi (the ceremonial red dot indicating married status) factory. Making bindis is considered to be auspicious work which is not demeaning and will not compromise the reputation and purity of even a Brahmin. In the city, her sons study in school and work part time to earn an extra income. She is rumored to be living with a pandit (priest) while her own husband is back in the village.

While for Sushma and Gulab, migration is a net positive experience which keeps them in the city, Namita and her husband have had frequent problems since they migrated. Their children are out of school, with no work prospects. In the past year, Namita ran the household by progressively selling off her gold ornaments. The extra income she earned by arranging marriages of men from her husband's village with women of her own and neighboring villages in West Bengal was consumed quickly. She and her husband are now contemplating a return to the village where they have some land and a kacha (mud) house. Their financial situation was aggravated by the illnesses of the husband and one of her sons. The migration of couples like Namita and her husband can be viewed as long duration cycles where families move back and forth between the village and the city depending on their financial, work and health status.

Redefining roles: attaining economic stability and controlling household expenditure

Living in nuclear households (Sushma) or female-headed households (Gulab), the women decide how the finances are allocated, at least the portion of the income they earn. Sushma proudly announces that the children are always well fed – they often get treats from her and she maintains an account at the local grocer who supplies the children with small items in her absence. With the money she has saved and with the help of a loan, she has built a small pucca (brick) house in the village which cost her Rs. 20,000. The family does not feel that they have left their village home for good, hence the investments which bring about an improvement in local status as well. In Delhi, she is proud of the few gold ornaments and a box bed that she has acquired through her own savings. A refrigerator bought on installment completes her upward mobility within her own peer group. Although her parents and siblings in her natal village in Bengal are extremely poor, her father being a daily wage labourer, none of her earnings go to them. With three children to support she feels she is unable to help out her natal family. Sushma's control over her own earnings has gives her a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis her husband and his family, an issue discussed later.

Work in the informal sector: poverty and insecurity

The insecurity in the lives of migrant women in domestic labour comes from the informal nature of their work. Work conditions are arduous, especially for those who take up jobs in numerous households. There are no rules as to vacation, overtime or bonuses. Each employee negotiates these with the employer. The market value of the work varies depending on the income levels in the neighborhood. Within the neighborhood, most workers are well-acquainted with prevailing rates and attempt their best to negotiate an acceptable deal for themselves. Work can be terminated by employer or employee if there is dissatisfaction at either end.

A perpetual source of risk is illness in the family. A major illness can set the household back in various ways. The woman may lose her employment if she is absent from work for too many days; more often than not, money is borrowed from family, friends and employers to tide over such crises. Major illness of a breadwinner can result in a family operating at subsistence sinking further into poverty. Given the poor condition of sanitation in most slums and urban villages, poor women and their families are exposed to frequent illnesses, which cut into their tight budgets. Social obligations in one's place of residence and in the native village also require substantial financial expenditure. Expenditure on dowry items and on ceremonies related to birth, marriage and death, which often exceeds a family's annual income is a further cause for indebtedness.

Cooperation and Competition for work: the Jajmani model

Aspects of the traditional Jajmani system² are replicated in domestic work both by patrons and by clients. Women enter into vertical relationships with their patrons and horizontal ones with other domestic workers. Besides the cash payment they receive for their work, workers also receive gifts on auspicious occasions in the employer's household and annually at Diwali and at other important festivals. Reciprocally, they may be required to put in extra effort on some occasions at the patron's home. As in Jajmani, women zealously guard their households and do not allow other workers to infringe on their turf. For the patron too, terminating a worker is not easy. When Shakuntala was replaced by her employer with Sushma who was a better worker, the former harassed the latter for days, accusing her of “stealing my children's bread” and of “cutting my stomach to fill her own.” Sushma, being a good worker had built up a steady clientele and was in a position to help others find work. This she did for those related to her and for new migrants from her own marital village.

Women who lived and worked in the same neighborhood while helping one another in times of necessity also evaluated each other's standards of living and behaviour. Expenditure that is unaffordable or outside one's means is commented upon negatively. For example, Namita's buying a colour television set when her husband was out of work and the children out of school, was considered inexcusable. Borrowing from neighbors and relatives is extremely common and almost everyone needs to borrow often. The loans, however, must be paid back, to ensure that one is able to borrow again.

If women take up work that takes them away from the house and the children, who takes care of their children? The neglect of children is frequently a bone of contention in households of working women. Husbands find this a stick to beat their working wives with and to regain power within the relationship. Given conventional gender role socialization it is considered the woman's duty to take care of the children. If the children go astray due to lack of supervision the blame is laid on the woman. Domestic workers try to fit their own housework, domestic lives (family duties), socializing, leisure and their children's care and schooling into their own work routines. Sometimes they enter several reciprocal arrangements for child care with friends and neighbors. A parallel solution is to bring a younger female from the village to tend to one's own children. Group child-minding is organized in the neighborhood for a small fee. The fact that slums and urban villages are face to face societies makes it easier to accomplish such arrangements. The social organization of slums and urban villages is somewhat similar to village neighborhoods – people connected with each other through links of kinship/friendship/village/region inhabit adjoining spaces. Thus doors are often left unlocked and children tend to themselves; neighbours baby sit children while mothers are at work, and local grocers give goods without demanding immediate payment.

Slums and urban villages where most female domestic workers reside display a large element of the rural way of life. Part of the social network of migrants is transported to the urban habitat since they have come as part of a chain of migrants. Further, due to the low level of physical and infrastructural development in these areas, the poor find it more economical to replicate a rural lifestyle than to switch instantly to an urban one. Yet, unlike the village, the modes of the city eventually intrude forcefully into slum areas. This is so especially in relation to accessing infrastructural services. The need to prove legal residence drives the poor to acquire proofs of citizenship such as ration cards, voter identity cards, bills for water and electricity, in the process politicizing their every day existence far more than in the village.

Section 5: Transformation of gender relations and female identities in the context of migration: the habitus of the rural migrant in an urban destination

The 'habitus' of the woman migrant is composed of a complex mental map that encompasses the imperatives of her rural as well as urban life. Livelihood strategies dictate that the economies of the rural home and the urban residence are both kept in motion. The female migrant does not disengage completely from the values and responsibilities of her rural life and at the same time is deeply influenced by the structure of urban life in which her presence is embedded. The move to the city is thus an ambiguous experience for female migrants. That the urban social structure allows for greater exercise of women's agency and entering paid work especially opens up choices of consumption, values, behaviour, is undeniable. Despite the considerable control that many of these women gain over their material lives, deeply embedded patriarchal values often remain unchallenged. The lack of opportunities for upward mobility in their occupations or for skill enhancement and the need to conform to cultural norms keeps women subordinate to men.

Yet, gender relations and roles are frequently transformed in the context of migration. In domestic work, a major issue that women face is protecting their sexual integrity. Women face suspicion from husbands and may face harassment from male employers. Namita, for example, quit work for an entire year because her husband constantly accused her of having relations with her employers. To teach him a lesson, she decided to stay at home. Eventually she had to go back to work because the husband fell ill and was not making enough money to support her and her three children. With her sister-in-law's help she managed to find work in a few houses and is now better off. Her not going to work can be seen as an act of assertion; a challenge she would have been unable to mount in the village where she was dependent on the husband for basic sustenance. Sushma's husband too taunts her and suspects her fidelity but does not dare to ask her to quit work knowing that she brings an equal or greater contribution to the household. Both Namita and Sushma pay attention to their personal grooming and believe in being well turned out when they leave for work. They spend money at festivals and look forward to festive occasions that give them a break from an uninterrupted working life. For such personal and family expenditure they do not take permission from their husbands.

As Naila Kabeer (2000) argues in her book on Bangladeshi garment workers, paid employment may be a necessary condition for challenging intra-household hierarchies, however, it is not sufficient to tilt the balance of power. New found independence is filtered through values that women have already been socialized into. Men's power over women is reflected in their ability to control the latter's mobility, sexuality and reproduction. Sushma's clash with her husband occurred over adopting birth control measures. She has two sons and a daughter. She wants to undergo a tubectomy rather than constantly worry about getting pregnant in case she forgets to take the birth control pills. Her husband refuses to let her do so for two reasons. He argues that if his brothers' wives in the village can bear five or six children, why does she have a problem in doing the same? His frame of reference remains the village society and his family back home. Secondly, he fears that she will have to be absent from work and not be able to take care chores at home for several weeks. A deeper reason is that in the village, Sushma's physical mobility and social interaction with others was easily controlled by village social norms. In the city, her husband is unable to keep her confined indoors. A fear of loss of control over her mobility and her sexuality leaves her fertility as the remaining arena for control. Sushma also poses a threat to his self-esteem. Being a hard worker, she is well liked and makes a decent monthly income. The challenge to the husband's role as a bread winner and his subsequent insecurity is manifested in his drinking bouts and ill treatment of her. Fed up with the ill-treatment, she is often ready to leave him and lead life on her own. Sushma's case shows that growing violence towards women who are beginning to close the gender gap will increasingly be a problem that society has to contend with. While women's roles and capabilities change rapidly, men are slower to adjust to the need to share tasks and allow women greater freedom in decision making and in their personal lives.

Women often become the primary earners in such households. Leela Kasturi's study (1990) of Tamil domestic workers in Delhi showed that “women were equal if not the primary earners and men often remained unemployed, depending on the income of their womenfolk.” She argues that in fact it was the men who were ‘associational' migrants and not the women. Her research revealed that the women had in fact migrated in response to female economic opportunities in domestic service. Similarly, women in the two fieldwork locations feel assured that they will have work even if they return after an absence of several months, while the men find it harder going to get work consistently. Yet, women's wages remain comparatively lower than those of men.

Although life in the city has its ups and downs, few if any return to the village permanently. Men are more likely to go back and also likely to pay more frequent visits especially if they have property or a home in the village. Thus men regularly return during harvests and for land related litigation. Women who have established working lives in the city and have “tasted” independence, do not wish to return to village life. Although social ties are kept alive and often strengthened by marrying children, especially daughters, the women rarely return to the village. Even though their work lives in the city are hard, work on the land is seen as worse drudgery.

A significant difference in perception of village and city life is made by the consumption styles possible in the city. For many of these women, upward mobility for their children is a distinct possibility. The better education facilities available in cities are a major draw and several women in the slum have engaged private tuition to supplement the education provided by the government school. The variety in food, entertainment and expenditure on consumption goods such as LPG for cooking, air coolers, radios and televisions also play their part in the attractiveness of city package. With their own earnings in hand, women are able to spend money on themselves.

Section 6: Conclusion

A country's economic development is often associated with an increase in the labor force participation rate of women. Indian development is no exception. When more women work, and especially when such an increase occurs among urban middle class households, a chain of demand is set up, starting from the elementary and necessary demand for taking care of the household, the children, and the aged. The filling of this demand necessitates the hiring of labor, and as it turns out, women are preferred for the job. And rural migrant women offer relatively cheap labor. Migration becomes both a male and female phenomenon; migration for work brings about change in how women perceive themselves as empowered entities, bringing a reality check to household male female relationships. The paper documents, and evaluates this chain of events, with emphasis placed on the changing social and gender relationships embedded in the increase of female workers.

There is considerable evidence from qualitative studies that India is following other South and Southeast Asian countries in independent female migration for work. Women from diverse parts of the country are to be found as domestic workers in all the major cities. Paid employment for women who earlier worked only on the farm or at home helps them cope with family and personal poverty besides providing an avenue for upward mobility. Thus, it has an individual as well as class effect. Personal transformation is associated with the choice to work while steady work allows her to stabilize her household economy and achieve a measure of upward mobility which in the next generation could translate into class mobility. The perspective of the migrant woman consists of her own and her children's future within the rural-urban “habitus” consisting of institutions and values pertaining to both. Negotiating this complex interface while being resident in the city, necessitates several strategies, overt and covert. Evidence from several studies in South Asia reveals that women's autonomy in intra-household decision making resulting from paid income allows them to challenge several patriarchal structures and relationships. Forces which make for greater gender equality however encounter resistance from traditional constructions of gender, a short term effect of which is a likely increase in levels of domestic violence. As women take on new roles and responsibilities and seek recognition and independence, they stand to face several kinds of gender related violence. The trajectories of several rural women migrants to Delhi reveal that migration and its effects, as mediated by the city, remains complex and migration outcomes are uneven, both in terms of material success and in renegotiating power equations within the family and society.

Endnotes

1. Studies on Asian urbanization have highlighted the large services sector and pointed to a high percentage of the youthful labour force being employed in it. Most of this service employment is in the informal sector and a disproportionate share is the preserve of women (Fawcett et al, 1984).

2. The jajmani system is a traditional patron-client relationship binding upper castes and service castes in Indian villages; thus a landlord would be the patron of a washer man or a barber; there are economic and social dimensions to the relationship which is binding on both. Neither patron nor client can easily get out of the relationship.

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