While prior research has explored how marginalized caste workers cope with caste-based indignities, less is known about the interactive processes through which caste is relationally negotiated at work. Addressing this gap, I investigate how women domestic workers engage in relational work to navigate caste-based oppression and the outcomes such efforts produce. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews in Lucknow, India, my analysis identifies three relational work tactics—establishing trustworthiness, performing deferential appeasement, and eliciting empathy, that enable workers to manage caste-inflected workplace dynamics. These tactics, however, yield ambivalent outcomes of conditional acceptance, revocable concessions, and transient compassion. To conceptualize the simultaneous negotiation and reproduction of caste structures, I advance the concept of relational ambivalence, which demonstrates the agency of marginalized workers operating within entrenched social hierarchies.
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