Dirt,foreignness,and surveillance: The shifting relations of domestic work in Pakistan

Abstract

This article uses the site of a residential community within a gated university complex to examine a new urban wage model of domestic labor in Punjab, Pakistan. In a socio-historical context where employer–employee relations have traditionally been shaped by asymmetric reciprocal relations and kinship bonds based on class, caste, and gender hierarchies, the rise of a depersonalized wage system exposes women domestic workers to new insecurities and vulnerabilities. The findings from this ethnographic study show how notions of dirt and foreignness are employed symbolically and militarized surveillance employed in concrete terms to control worker bodies and enforce the wage model. This is enabled by spatial segregation between the intimate, feminized residential space and the private masculinized outer space encircling it within the walled complex. The women workers are, thus, caught between pre-capitalist forms of coercion and a market-based wage model. The study broadens existing scholarship on domestic work by examining domestic labor arrangements through the lens of a place-specific shifting of social and economic relations.

Introduction

Mary Douglas’ (1966) contention in Purity and Danger that dirt is ‘matter out of place’ (p. 36) explains a key element of employer–employee relations in paid domestic work, that has to do with the blurring of boundaries between bodies that clean other people’s dirt and the dirt itself. The dominant trope that the domestic worker’s body is ‘dirty’ comes not just from her proximity to human excrement and filth (Pinho, 2015) but also from the fact that while the employer depends on the worker’s labor, she recognizes and barely tolerates the foreignness of the latter’s presence in the intimate realm of her home. To use Douglas’ (1966) analogy, foreignness ‘pollutes’ and threatens the social order.

Feminist explorations have produced a rich transnational narrative on paid domestic work, exposing the home as a politically contested space. Domestic work is characterized by informal contracts, an intimate but complex workplace where bonds between employers and employees are conditioned by the worker’s servility and disposability (Anderson, 2000; Chowdhury, 2016; Lugones and Rosezelle, 1995: 141). But while there are many similarities in domestic work across geographies, domestic labor arrangements are also highly contextual and best understood when fully situated within broader social and economic relations. In this article, we use the site of a gated community that is part of a private university complex in urban Punjab, Pakistan to examine a new hybridized model of domestic labor relations. The model combines ‘pre-capitalist paternalism’ with ‘modern market forces’ robbing the worker of her ‘traditional (job) security and standard of life’ while making her endure ‘extra-economic forms of coercion’ (Gough, 1977: 13). In the gated community, vulnerabilities are further heightened by the spatial segregation of feminized and masculinized spaces. The segmentation controls women’s bodies while enforcing the new wage model through conceptions of foreignness and dirt. In a space interspersed by old and new forms of control, worker bodies become sites of incorporated history or ‘bodily hexis’ (Bourdieu, 1984).

The article broadens existing scholarship on domestic work by showing how the rise of a new model of domestic labor relations and the forms of control that sustain it need to be understood through the lens of shifting social and economic relations of gender, class, and caste. It does so by engaging with the literature on legacy relations in South Asia, particularly Punjab, the Pakistani province where this study is located. Here, a traditional system of biraderi or kinship established stratified rural relations to segregate the upper castes from the ‘untouchable’ low castes who serviced their households and agricultural lands but with whom cultural values dictated a great deal of mutual obligation, tying both groups together for generations (Ahmad, 1977; Alavi, 1972; Lyon, 2004). The disruption of the older system of asymmetric reciprocal relations and kinship bonds, as a result of changing agrarian structures and urbanization, has led to a foreignness and disposability that is much more exploitative and alienating for the women who work in urban spaces, such as the exclusive community this study describes.

The research ethnographically analyzes the circulation of women workers in the inner intimate circle of the apartments and the outer bounds of its walled space. The movement is highly gendered and rests upon class- and caste-based power relations. Inside the homes, employers enforce a wage model combining elements of rural kinship-based landlord–servant relations with new forms of depersonalized labor arrangements. The outer space is managed by an administration aggressively intent upon the campus’ aestheticization. It is militarized by the presence of armed security guards, fortified walls, and a heavily garrisoned entry and exit. The heightened concern for perfection on one hand, and the masculinized forms of control on the other hand, have meant that fear becomes the tool that manicures the campus. The feeblest forms of resistance are quashed to keep workers ‘in place’.

Given that dirt and cleanliness are categories that connote social status, in both intimate and non-intimate spaces within the complex, the worker’s proximity to filth is used to construct a disposable, untouchable caste (Barbosa, 2007). The contrived esthetic order of the elite space constructs worker identities in terms of a necessary foreignness, in order to continue consuming their labor while maintaining her at the margins. The feminized and masculinized power relations in the inner and outer circles reinforce each other, which becomes key to controlling worker bodies for the sake of preserving the enclave’s social, economic, and political order.

The literature on domestic work has dealt extensively with the theme of foreign labor, either as a function of the workers’ migrant status (Anderson, 2000; Chang, 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002) or as a vector of race or ethnic difference (Cock, 1989; Glenn, 2010). Within this scholarship is a sub-literature that explores the trans-historical and transcultural theme of dirt and disposability, including Anderson’s (2000) study of the degrading conditions of domestic work for Europe’s migrant workers, Chang’s (2000) exploration of the culturally ingrained fear that migrant women workers pose a threat to the purity of the white race in America and the dominance of its mainstream culture, and Saldana-Tejeda’s (2011) analysis of how domestic worker abuse is linked to historical concerns around purity and contamination in Mexico. I contribute to this global conversation by linking domestic work relations to the historical transformation of wage relations, and the policing and preserving of the socioeconomic order of the gated community, in symbolic terms through notions of dirt and foreignness and in concrete terms through militarization.

In the next two sections, I review the changing labor relations of domestic service and how they are based on gender, class, and caste hierarchies in Punjab; how domestic work relations are built globally around notions of purity and pollution; and why a gated community is an ideal setting for exploring how boundaries are constructed and sustained across gender, class, caste, and race. Following this, I discuss methods, positionality, and the ethico-politics of the study. In the next three sections I detail (a) domestic labor arrangements inside the apartment homes of the gated community and how employers assemble worker identities as the foreign other, (b) the forms of control female employers employ to manage worker ‘deviance’, and (c) the processes involved in socializing women workers and their family members to give up their bodily capital under a masculinized, militarized surveillance regime (Bourdieu, 1978).

Punjab’s changing relations of servitude

Rural economic relations in South Asia have traditionally been enforced through the jajmani system which determined the division of labor between castes and clans and moved the economy along through reciprocal exchanges (Eglar, 1964). In Punjab, this was the foundation of the biraderi or kinship system (Alavi, 1972; Javid, 2012). The biraderi hereditarily linked clans so that upper caste families would be served by the same low-caste families for generations. The low castes were, therefore, easily exploited, for they lacked both status and the economic capacity to sustain themselves without the landed (Javid, 2012). But while rural life depended on and continues to on the authority and patronage of the landowning class, and kinship-based social relations are defined by landownership status, traditions such as vartan bhanji, that is, the ritual of gift exchange have constituted an unwritten code that not only binds families and communities together socially but also sustains economic relationships between landlords, sharecroppers, and servants (Alavi, 1972; Eglar, 1964; Javid, 2012).

Lyon (2004) reports that rural Punjab still depends on mutually recognized obligations between employers and employees, with house servants enjoying the highest degree of patronage. The best employer gives and expects loyalty, though he may still be a poor salary payer (Lyon, 2004). Relations between landlords and employees are both social and economic; therefore, nearly impossible to break. The employer will tolerate shoddy work, the social ties of the biraderi preventing him or her from firing a lazy or irksome employee. The worker in turn will work near continuous hours in her low-paid position, knowing that there is no social or economic mobility that comes with the occupation (Lyon, 2004).

Lubricating this patron–client relationship is an extensive system of in-kind payments (Lyon, 2004). Landlords are socially expected to assume responsibility for meeting the wedding and funeral expenses of house servants and helping out in any emergencies that their families may experience. But food, contends Lyon (2004), is the most important component of in-kind payments, the closer the relationship, the more food the landlord is expected to share. The fact that patronage ties are defined by something as basic as food is, however, a testament to the severe economic divide between the landed and the landless. Ahmad (1977) argues that this has worsened with land fragmentation and agricultural transformation which shifted labor-intensive farming to capitalistic production and waged labor. Alavi (1988) contends that this transformation also took away poor women’s economic freedom and mobility, for before the farms mechanized, it was the women who picked cotton and were paid in kind a portion of the crop they picked, which they traded in the marketplace for goods designed for their own or their children’s consumption. However small this freedom was, Alavi (1988) insists the women prized it and without it, many were forced to migrate to the city, ending up as domestic workers.

In the city, employers and servants also share bonds of asymmetrical power (Chaney and García Castro, 1989). Helplessness here too is a symbol of prestige and status, for most middle- and upper-class identities are grounded in an inability to complete base chores such as toilet cleaning (Pinho, 2015). Both parties to the domestic work arrangement are acutely aware of their mutual interdependence but have different accounts of their respective interdependencies (Narayan, 1995). The female employer depends on her worker to help her meet the patriarchal demands of homemaking, which leads to a kind of ‘practical love’ (Lugones and Rosezelle, 1995: 141). It is not unusual for domestic workers, especially those that have been with their employers for long periods of time to be told that they are part of the family. But is this urban ‘fictive kinship’ (Adams, 2000) the same as the rural ‘idiom of kinship’ between landlords and servants that Lyon (2004) describes? Chowdhury (2016) argues that in order to remain part of the family, the domestic worker must constantly demonstrate subservient loyalty, through which her own class and gendered identities are formed. The question is, does such loyalty win the worker a permanent place in the employer’s household or does the absence of biraderi bonds lead to a more disposable servanthood? Mutuality and reciprocal exchange is a critical part of the economic and social order of rural life, as exemplified by vartan bhanji (Alavi, 1972; Eglar, 1964). In the city, this article will show, such reciprocities are lost, opening the worker up to new insecurities and vulnerabilities.

Dirt, distance, and disposability

The body of the worker is identified in the transnational literature on domestic work as rough, disposable, polluted, and, therefore, less human (Anderson, 2000; Barbosa, 2007; Pinho, 2015; Sharma, 2016). Across geographies, domestic work appears to be marked by systematic cultural representations, physically and symbolically separating workers from the families that hire them, painting them with a permanent foreignness to ensure as hands-off an exchange as possible within the intimate setting of the home (Anderson, 2000; Chaney and García Castro, 1989; Chang, 2000; Saldana-Tejeda, 2011).

In South Asia, being low caste means to be associated with certain types of low-status and low-paid jobs and having to live in segregated housing (Jodhka and Shah, 2010). This is based on notions of purity and pollution. Jodhka and Shah (2010) contend that while untouchability in India is related to the Hindu caste system, segregation and notions of taboo are present even in Muslim Pakistan and that this is related to the cultural politics of the biraderi system. In either case, the ‘untouchable’ low-caste subject’s entire existence is defined in terms of her ‘proper place’ with respect to those in power (Narayan, 1995; Sharma, 2016). The low-caste/-class women who clean their employers’ homes come to represent dirt, disease, and danger – not just because of their occupations but also because of their social standing which relegate them to these segregated tasks (Sharma, 2016). Everyday practices of untouchability, such as keeping separate utensils for workers and not allowing access to employer toilets and other spaces are strategic markers of social hierarchies (Ray and Qayum, 2009; Sharma, 2016). Food distinctions in particular, argues Saldana-Tejeda (2011), are a powerful mechanism to mark gender, class, and racial difference.

Employers in modern urban spaces across geographies justify segregation in the name of privacy, hygiene, and pollution (Sharma, 2016). These boundaries crop up as a response to the intimate interaction between two distant classes that inhabit different social and physical spaces. In her study of domesticity in Bolvia, Gill (1994) details how workplace interactions compel domestic workers to absorb the meaning of gender, class, and ethnic subordination, forcing them to internalize their social positions, or as Anderson (2000) puts it, to understand that the work requires them to sell their personhood, to submit to various forms of abuse, and to become ‘socially dead’ (p. 121).

Chang (2000) similarly argues that domestic work relations are shaped by the migrant worker’s disposability. She is kept at the fringes of society to provide services necessary to economic production and social reproduction but not given the rights the native population takes for granted. Glenn (2010: 42) also contends that racialized gendered servitude is an important element of society’s coercive hold over subaltern women. Her contention that the social purity movement of the 1870s which involved ‘efforts to control racial, ethnic and low-class others’ in the United States coincided with its transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized society, corroborates the discussion in the previous section of the impact on poor rural women of broader shifts in the economic and social relations of Punjab.

Surveillance and control are central concerns for gated communities. These walled fortresses of prestige (Dinzey-Flores, 2013) grant exclusive rights of privilege to residents but classify all others as outsiders (Hook and Vrdoljak, 2002). In commodifying the urban culture of fear and insecurity, gates securitize space while rationalizing inequalities, through a process of militarization and masculinization (Blakely and Snyder, 1997; Davis, 1992). Gated communities are characterized by private police squads securing exclusive spaces in modernizing metropolises across the globe (Barkan and Cohn, 2005; D’Alessio et al., 2005). The surveillance regime aims at sustaining otherness while preserving power differentials. Militarized masculinity takes on a new meaning when the low other is a woman, for as Carson (1990) argues, women have historically been the targets of society’s coercive control in order to protect men from women’s inherent tendencies toward lewdness, lack of sobriety, and self-control. The female servant’s body in particular is feared just as much as it is needed (Saldana-Tejeda, 2011).

Gating can only offer incomplete boundedness though, for the continued maintenance, and aestheticization of the community depends on bringing ‘undesirables’ into the fold of the community as maids, nannies, and other service workers (Duarte, 2012; Dunker, 2015; Raposo, 2006). Cultural politics and the esthetics of identity and difference have to be employed to manage the tension between distance and proximity (Henningsen et al., 2009). For instance, the circulation of workers is monitored through a renewal system of badges and proof of good conduct (Chase, 2008). Thus, it is in gated communities that we can fully appreciate how bodies are socialized to move in particular ways, depending on their socio-historical contexts (Bourdieu, 2000).

Methods, data, and positionality

The apartment community I study consists of seven housing blocks, constituting 90 apartment homes. The apartments are rented out to faculty members of a private university and are part of the university’s main campus. The community is tightly knit, for residents are both colleagues and neighbors. Each apartment employs at least one but at times two or three women to clean, cook, and provide childcare. Most families also employ drivers, who are all male, but unlike domestic workers, they do not perform any duties inside the homes and are not the subject of this research, for they are not part of the intimate sphere of the domestic. Their presence, however, nuances the women’s lived experience inside the gated community.

I chose this location because of its isolation. The relations between employers and workers were more complex as compared to the ‘open market’ outside the walled community, and at the same time, easier to document and conceptualize. More importantly, as an insider and female member of the community, I was able to negotiate access to intimate domestic spaces, which would have been difficult for an outsider.

I collected data through participant observations followed by in-depth interviews. At the beginning of the study and before each interview, I shared its broad objectives with all participants, including workers and employers. The first step was to conduct participant observations. My position during this time was both of a researcher and a resident. Because of my insider status, I was able to socialize freely with both employees and employers. I conducted observations inside my own apartment, my neighbors’ apartments, the stairs leading up to the apartments inside each block, the spaces surrounding the apartment blocks, and the children’s playground. It was in the relative privacy of the stairs and the playground that I was able to conduct most of my informal conversations with the workers. This informal socialization was a rich source of data (Fetterman, 2009: 41). I used this opportunity to inform them about the objectives of the study, build trust, and share my findings. This was especially important, given the power differential between myself (as an upper-middle class, educated woman) and my participants (most of whom were poor and barely literate). I took detailed field notes to record my observations and interactions.

While the participant observations continued throughout the study, I selected nine domestic workers for detailed interviewing. These formal, unstructured interviews were necessary to further explore worker experiences. I selected the participants to maximize exposure based on theoretically significant categories, such as the nature of work, whether they were live-in or part-time workers, and the years they had worked in the community. Of the nine domestic workers, three were interviewed when they were no longer working at the apartment community while the rest were interviewed during their employment in the community. Of the latter, three were interviewed by my research associates, to ascertain if additional information was available to community outsiders, and the rest by myself. To understand employer perspective, I also interviewed five employers – only one of whom was a faculty member, the rest were faculty spouses. Each interview was conducted with informed consent and recorded whenever allowed. Interviews were conducted in Urdu and transcribed in English, since I am fluent in the language. Interview transcripts and field notes were then coded, and salient themes were identified.

Power, positionality, and the ethico-politics of the study

My access to the site and research subjects has come from my participation in the community as a resident. While this presented an advantage not available to a non-participating member of the community, it brings up dilemmas related to power that make it essential for me to provide a self-reflexive account of the fieldwork (Adkins, 2004).

In addition to my position of authority as a researcher over my respondents, I had a shared identity with other residents, given my class, education, employment, and residential status. This made it relatively easy to engage with employers and to have them open up to me but presented both a barrier and a dilemma when it came to the workers. Given the heavily skewed power relations between employers and employees in the community and the fact that I had employed a part-time domestic worker, I debated the appropriateness of conducting this ethnography.

The idea for it came to me soon after I began renting an apartment in the community. I had relocated temporarily from the United States, where I spent most of my adult life as a middle-class woman who did her own cleaning, cooking, and childcare. The extreme inequalities between employers and employees and the way these shaped the everyday narratives and conditions of work for the workers was a large part of the culture shock I experienced during the relocation, and it was this shock that initially persuaded me to take up this project. As I passed through the ordeal of ‘undecidability’, I had to choose whether to leave this account unwritten or act through writing, for I am conscious that any form of representing the ‘other’ on my part runs the risk of exploitation (Derrida, 1988; Rhodes, 2009). In the end, my decision to write came down to the urgency I felt to representing the silenced voices of the workers and my own responsibility as a witness to the exploitative conditions in a community walled off to others (Adkins, 2004; Ferdinand et al., 2007).

While I could never set aside my own privilege during the research process, I did make attempts to mitigate the dilemmas that obviously arose from my position. The first was that I consciously suspended my judgment while conducting the observations and interviews. I made it clear to my respondents that I would use their voices and stay true to their life stories. I used their stories to also critique my own presence and behavior within the community and my domestic space. The interviews with workers gave me a heightened consciousness about matters I may not otherwise have paid attention to, such as the employer tendency to assign additional tasks not specified under the original informal verbal contract. This made for some awkward social moments, such as when a visiting neighbor protested that I should not be getting up to make tea when my domestic worker was in the apartment. Things became stiff when I explained that making tea was not her job.

During the analysis and writing, I tried to keep my own voice in the background and frequently shared my findings with the participants. This not only built trust but also allowed them to question my theories, offer their own explanations, and, thus, produce a more nuanced account of their life stories. For instance, they made me see that the power play within the intimate spaces of the apartment community was incomplete unless viewed against the surveillance regime of the larger gated complex.

As the study advanced, I inevitably experienced ethnographer guilt for using the exploitative conditions I was a witness to for my own academic purposes (DeLuca and Maddox, 2016). Not only was I complicit to this exploitation but there was a ‘great gulf’ between the women workers I was attempting to represent and my modern ‘bourgeois’ self (Hooks, 1990; Skeggs, 2004). One way I responded to this was by designing a course where I asked my students to conduct auto-ethnographies as consumers of domestic service and oral histories of domestic workers across the country. This was partially an effort to create more self-reflexivity about the invisible work done by domestic workers. The data from the students’ larger study on the conditions of paid domestic work was presented at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s (HRCP) annual convention along with a set of policy recommendations. We presented the same findings at a faculty research seminar on campus to raise awareness about the issues the students had uncovered.

The same presentation that was well received at the HRCP caused a commotion in the faculty seminar. While some appreciated it, others felt it was biased against employers, for it did not account for the dishonesty and exploitative behavior of workers, and a third opinion was, ‘but someone has to do this dirty work’. One faculty member spoke out during the seminar and then complained to me privately afterwards about what he felt was the study’s slant against employers. He subsequently fired his domestic worker – an assertive but polite young woman, who had attended the HRCP seminar – for he felt that her behavior had changed since her association with the study. Given these potentially harmful ramifications, I have anonymized and disguised every worker and employer featured below, removing details that I felt would enable identification. The exception to this rule are those blacklisted workers who wanted their story to be known.

The study and the reaction at the faculty seminar deepened my concern for my own position as resident, employer, and ethnographer. As a feminist researcher, I had to be attentive and accountable to how I occupied power (Skeggs, 2004). The research made plain to me my own complicity in the exploitative relations of intimate work that I detail below, to the extent that writing was no longer a sufficiently ‘ethico-political’ act (Derrida, 1988: 116; Rhodes, 2009). In addition to ‘foregrounding the participants’ own accounts of exploitation’, I began to explore ‘sites of possibilities to leverage social and policy change’ and have since been involved with a civil society coalition that is pushing for domestic worker legislation at the provincial level (Bloom and Sawin, 2009).

Domestic labor arrangements and intimate boundaries

Domestic workers in the city are primarily migrants from rural Punjab. Barely educated and living in deep poverty, these women are grouped in the labor force survey’s ‘unskilled’ category. In venturing out to seek wage employment, they face the threat of verbal and physical abuse in the streets they navigate by foot or public transport (Asdar, 2012). The prevalence of urban crime, such as car theft, cellphone, and jewelry snatching at gun point, means that the streets are not safe even for the elite. There is also the ever present threat of a terrorist attack. The community I study gates itself against urban crime and violence. Gating conditions the negotiation for space by domestic workers not just within the apartments they service but also the open spaces encircling them. The safer confines of the community are, therefore, a coveted commodity for both residents and workers. Once inside the gates, the women can move about without having to worry about catcalls, being followed or groped.

Live-in domestic workers, particularly the chosen few that are allotted a quarter, have the added advantage of rent-free accommodation. Rental rates for a single room can easily go up to Rs. 5000 (US$50) per month, approximately half of a full-time worker’s monthly salary. The quarters though are built as storage rooms for the residents and are not equipped with bathrooms, kitchens, or even a sink. Most employers use them to meet their storage needs, leaving only a portion of the space for their workers. Barbosa (2007) and Pinho (2015) provide similar accounts of cramped, hidden from view, employee quarters in Brazil. Only three of the seven apartment blocks have quarters attached to the apartments, the rest have rooftop storage rooms that are meant to be shared storage space between residents. As per community housing rules, workers are not allowed to occupy these spaces but some continue to do so with their employers’ approval while others stay in their employers’ apartments.

Women workers cook, clean, and perform nanny duties. Live-in workers work 7 days a week, while non-live-in workers work 6 days a week. Many women hire girls as young as nine or ten to take care of their children. The younger the employee, the lower the pay. Cleaning is sometimes done by teenaged girls, but cooking is a semi-skilled task, and only adult women are hired for it. Cleaning, in one form or the other, is part of the job for nearly every domestic worker in the community.

There is an unspoken hierarchy among the tasks, with cleaning relegated to the bottom, given its constant proximity to dirt and human excrement. Fatima, a single woman in her twenties works as a cleaner for two employers. She says she cannot make her daily prayers in her work clothes, for she believes her work makes them paleet (a state of ritual impurity). Employers expect bathrooms, kitchens, and floors to be cleaned 6 days a week. But to the workers, cleaning toilets is the least tolerable part of their daily chores. They use the Urdu word zalaalat (disgrace) to describe their feelings toward a task that is socially demeaning and degrading (Anderson, 2000).

Most employers, the majority of whom are highly educated middle- to upper-class women, dismiss worker bodies as tireless and invincible (Pinho, 2015), appearing unconcerned about the toxic effects of the cleaning products they ask their workers to use. Roohi, an 18-year-old woman, described how she was instructed to use a powerful acid-laced cleaner to clean the toilet, without gloves or other protective gear. Roohi’s employer suggested she clean with her eyes closed, to avoid the acid’s fumes. Roohi said she silently wondered, ‘how am I supposed to clean with my eyes shut?’

Cleaning work often extends to non-cleaning work and vice versa, new chores can come up on a daily basis, for employees are servants on informal contracts and not workers. This is similar to Lyon’s (2004) account of landlords who expect household servants to take on additional chores when guests come to stay or when new situations arise. Mona, who has worked in multiple homes since she was a child, explains, ‘Your employer can ask you to do anything and you cannot say “no”. If your employer tells you to stay late or to come on your day-off because she has invited people over for dinner, you cannot refuse’. And while some pay their workers to get a rickshaw or ask their drivers to drop them off after they have finished their late evening shift, others assume no responsibility to protect the women from the violence lurking in the city after dark. The workers’ disposability is conditioned by the fact that beyond the high security walls is an army of unemployed women and men, waiting to be allowed in at the price of their personhood (Anderson, 2000).

Employers expect unquestioning compliance, ever watchful for signs of resistance. Within the apartments, workers have to obey the female employer who asserts her ownership of their bodies, especially if they are provided with a living quarter. Just as it is usual for house servants to work near continuous hours in the landlord’s home (Lyon, 2004); here also, workers must not complain of fatigue or having to occupy the floor so as not to ‘pollute’ the employer’s furniture.

But unlike in the village where food constitutes an important element of the patron–client relationship between landlords and their low-caste servants (Lyon, 2004), here employers assume no responsibility to feed their female workers despite the fact that the drivers – who are all male – are served lunch and tea daily. When food is shared with the women, it is culturally acceptable, in fact a given that they will eat day(s) old leftovers for food is an important marker for bodily boundaries (Saldana-Tejeda, 2011). Mona states that she was forced to eat stale bread every day that her employer would store in the freezer for her. She quit working for her over this, which upset her employer who according to Mona punished her by telling the neighbors that Mona was fired for being a thief, to prevent her from getting a new job in the community. This corroborates Gill’s (1994) research in Bolivia, where she argues employers routinely accuse workers of stealing in order to discipline or threaten them.

And just as Barbosa (2007), Saldana-Tejeda (2011), Sharma (2016), and others report that employers’ private spaces are off-limits for household workers, we also found that intimate spaces, especially bathrooms, were off limits for the women except to clean them, corroborating Jodhka and Shah’s (2010) contention that notions of low-class/-caste taboo are just as prevalent among Muslims in Pakistan as they are in Hindu India. Homes around the country have small service toilets in the back of the house for household employees. This community also has unisex toilets for its workers, located behind the apartment blocks so as not to interfere with the esthetics of the residences (DeCasanova, 2013). In the apartments, each bathroom is fitted with a sink, a flush toilet, and a separate shower area. The worker bathrooms do not have a sink or separate shower area and have a squat instead of a flush toilet. Most apartments have three bathrooms, but there is one bathroom per apartment block for all the workers that serve the block. Hot water is available throughout the year in every apartment, but worker bathrooms do not have this facility. Even in the winter when the temperature can reach near freezing, workers have to either take cold showers or warm water in large pots from their employers’ kitchens and carry them down to their toilets.

Live-in workers use these toilets for their laundry and dish washing as well. The standards for purity and pollution that residents maintain for themselves clearly do not apply when it comes to their employees (Barbosa, 2007). The workers’ laundry must be hung out to dry across a clothes line pegged behind the apartment blocks, in full view of passersby, for privacy also is an exclusive privilege for the residents only. Despite the stark inequalities, some employers begrudge the fact that workers have to use the facilities at all. A female faculty member argued,

I don’t think there is a need for any servant to live on campus. We work hard for the privilege of living here, but these servants get everything – residence, food, clothes, electricity, water – for free. And then they turn the place into a mohalla (communal space).

Inside the apartments, live-in workers make do with whatever space is allotted to them. Samina, who lives and works in her employer’s home as cook and housekeeper, does not have a designated area to rest or sleep in, she can be given any room that happens to be unoccupied when she has to sleep. Her clothes and personal items are stored in a kitchen cabinet. Others share their employers’ children’s bedrooms and do not have any personal space of their own. Rehana and her three sisters once used to occupy a single quarter, first with her aunt and her adult children, who also worked in the community, and then separately in a rooftop storage room. But residents complained that there were too many people of a single family living together. These residents, who were not the family’s employers, were able to force the sisters out of the quarter by repeatedly complaining to the administration, indicating that foreignness is constantly in negotiation with the shifting subjectivities of the ‘native’ population (Henningsen et al., 2009).

Employers complain that managing domestic workers is an exhausting task. One lamented that telling her cook what to prepare for dinner was the toughest part of her day. When asked to rate her chores, Mona described cooking as the most difficult. During the summer months when temperatures can go up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, she stands for hours cooking the family’s meals. The kitchen door is kept closed so the heat from the kitchen does not escape to the rest of the home, which is air-conditioned. It gets so hot in the kitchen that she says she can hardly breathe. A frequent employer complaint is having to ‘follow them around, making sure they clean properly and do not leave the corners dirty or steal something you left lying around’.

The workers, on the other hand, talk about their daily routine matter-of-factly. Shireen, a mother of three boys, is a live-in domestic worker who works from 6 am to 9 pm every day and does not get any time with her own boys. Bina who until recently had been working as a nanny, said she used to work from 9 am to midnight every day, leaving her six children at home. She would cook her family’s meals when she got home from work.

The verbal contract does not include any annual leaves. Employers get annoyed when workers take ‘unscheduled’ days off and insist that the reasons given for these absences are usually concocted. Many complain that their workers feign illnesses. Those with live-in workers have the hardest time managing without them, for family members are not used to doing basic chores, such as getting themselves a glass of water. Razia, a woman in her thirties who no longer works in the community, describes how she would be asked to interrupt her work to fetch a glass of water for her employers and be forced to stand and wait until they finished drinking. This is reminiscent of Anderson’s (2000) contention that employers command not just the worker’s labor but also her personhood.

Employers, just like Lyon’s (2004) account of rural Punjab’s landlords, firmly believe in their benevolence toward their workers. Narratives laced simultaneously with pity and revulsion are commonplace, such as, ‘If they didn’t have this job they wouldn’t be able to eat, for what skills do they have?’ and ‘If we didn’t help them with the school fees for their children they wouldn’t send their children to school, they don’t know the value of a proper education’. Discarded clothes, shoes, household items, and leftover food are regularly passed on to the worker and as an extra-economic form of coercion if she does something that displeases the employer, she is reminded about all that her employer does for her. When employees ask for a raise, they are told these in-kind payments should also be considered as wages.

(En)countering resistance in a feminized space

The domestic worker in Pakistani culture is feared for her inherent tendency to steal – not all domestic workers are thieves, but if given the chance, most will be tempted to swipe. Such expectations have given birth to humiliating rituals such as employers keeping copies of their workers’ state-issued IDs, security guards checking domestic workers’ bags at check-posts to make sure they do not possess stolen items, and in the gated community a letter signed by the employer is required if a worker is to carry a secondhand household item home.

Zarina, a 15-year old, had worked for Saima for 3 years. Saima said she and her children were so fond of Zarina that she hired a private tutor so Zarina could continue with her education while working. All this came to an end the day Zarina was found with a cellphone that had been reported as stolen. Saima accused Zarina of the theft but Zarina vehemently denied it. Saima fired Zarina on her neighbor’s advice who told her, ‘you must fire Zarina and make an example out of her so that the girls who work for the rest of us don’t dare to do what she has done’.

Zahida too had become ‘a member of the family’ after working for 4 years as a nanny for her employer’s two children. In addition to her salary, Zahida’s employer regularly loaned her money to help her family in the village but did not allow her to take on an additional cleaning job to supplement her income. She was told she lived in the family’s quarter and was only allowed to work for them. Zahida then decided to take on sewing jobs for other residents, but was forbidden to do this as well. Zahida did not immediately turn down offers to tailor other women’s clothes. Her employer found this out when she entered her quarter one day and found expensive clothes lying around her sewing machine. Zahida was fired soon afterwards, by secretly expressing opinions and desires that were in contrast to her employer’s Zahida was held responsible for ending the ‘idiom of kinship’ (Anderson, 2000; Lyon, 2004).

Reshma, a single mother, left her baby behind in her village to join the community as a live-in worker. As part of her surveillance routine, her employer checked Reshma’s phone every day. She soon began suspecting her of illicit relations and confronted Reshma. Reshma, who had yet to internalize her social position as a servant, told her employer that this was none of her business (Gill, 1994). Her employer reminded her that she was living in her home but to the employer’s annoyance Reshma began emptying her phone’s call history before reporting for work every morning. Reshma was fired because her employer said she could not trust her any longer. Chase (2008) argues that worker trust is gained through a complex cultural infusion of servility and intimacy, but these incidents demonstrate that for this to work, the worker must be willing to play ‘socially dead’ (Anderson, 2000: 121). It is also clear that the job security which is a feature of low-caste occupations in rural Punjab is missing from the new urban model of domestic wage relations.

A masculinized, militarized surveillance regime

In the city, women’s experience of public space is governed by khof (fear) (Asdar, 2012). Mona describes her village as a place where she can walk about freely, everyone knows her family and no one dares give her a lewd look or throw a rock at her, which are everyday encounters for her in the city. When women like Mona venture out of their homes, they cover their bodies with a burqa, a traditional black flowing robe, and a face veil to protect themselves from the public gaze. Once inside the confines of the campus, these coverings come off, and only a shawl is used to loosely cover the head. This security is a privilege for which the women are willing to forgo higher wages in large bungalows outside but their terms of entry in the walled space are mediated by employers and campus administrators. Each worker is issued a campus card that includes her employer’s name and she can only enter the community upon showing this card. When her service is terminated, her entry is instantly canceled.

The administration takes great pains to have the campus running like a well-oiled machine and this includes the residential complex. The meticulously managed infrastructure and always freshly cut patches of green are meant for an elite audience only. The workers are not allowed to pick up even the fallen fruit from any of the fruit trees on campus. Workers cannot be seen sitting together in groups, for this would take away from the facility’s spatial esthetics. But while the drivers are provided a separate room, where they can rest, chat, or play cards during their downtime, there is no designated space for the women. When the women arrive in the morning, they sit on the stairs leading up to the apartments, hidden from sight as they wait for their employers to wake up and let them into their homes. They do this to avoid both the disciplinary practices of surveillance and the incongruity of their presence in the masculinized space outside, as their bodies become socialized to conform to the gendered and classist norms of the community (Barkan and Cohn, 2005; Bourdieu, 1978).

For female live-in workers, the open spaces become even more hostile after dark. Rehana describes how she and her sisters would be stopped by the campus administrator if they were seen together in the evenings, asked for their campus IDs, employers’ names and purpose for loitering. They felt especially humiliated when a male resident questioned them about a male cousin who chaperoned them on their visits outside the campus. Such forms of surveillance are similar to migrant worker experiences of being kept in place through constant reminders of their temporary status in the country (Chang, 2000).

The spatial segregation also makes women susceptible to sexual harassment. An employer described how a driver teased her domestic worker with lewd suggestions when emerging from the bathroom she was waiting outside to use. Another family’s driver reportedly asked an underage girl working in the community for sexual favors in exchange for money and gifts, in one of the rooftop storage rooms. This was discovered when the girl became pregnant and the administration changed its policy regarding male workers, asking them to leave campus by nightfall. Apartment residents, however, have continued to flout these rules, including the family whose driver allegedly impregnated the minor girl, corroborating Gill’s (1994) contention that employers ignore workers’ cries for help against sexual abuse.

The masculinity of the space is accentuated by its militarization. Armed security guards are placed not just at the campus entrance and exit but also on the rooftops. Militarization increases the hostility women workers experience in these spaces. Ruhi describes how one of her employers asked her to stay in her rooftop storage room but she lived in fear of the late night raids by the administration after she was awoken by the security guards for questioning a few times. The rules it seems are meant to be broken, but only with the tacit agreement of the campus administrators, for Ruhi was able to live in peace on the rooftop after her employer’s husband had a talk with the chief administrator.

The children of workers can only play in the playground and the green spaces in between the apartment blocks when invited by the residents’ children. Some residents do not allow their children to play with them while others do. When a live-in domestic worker, Saulat’s son turned 13, residents became anxious about his associating with their children. They asked their children to avoid him for ‘he may be a carrier of disease or prone to a life of crime like his father’. In doing so, they were able to extend their social hierarchies into the open spaces they felt only they had a right to occupy (Barbosa, 2007; Sharma, 2016), corroborating Saldana-Tejeda’s (2011) contention that employer constructed boundaries disempower not just the workers themselves but also their families and communities.

Blacklisting workers is another manifestation of the interplay between purity and danger (Douglas, 1966). A blacklisted worker can never re-enter the campus community. A period of 6-months into this study, Shaheen, who lived with her family in her employer’s quarter, was implicated in a theft allegedly committed by another domestic worker outside the community in a police report that she insists was fabricated. Her employer admitted Shaheen had never stolen from her but complied with the administration’s decision to evict her. Shaheen was asked to take her family away to her sister’s home on the pretext that her employer was going away on vacation. Once they were beyond the walled space, their belongings were sent over, and they were informed that they had been blacklisted. Shaheen accuses the administration and her employer for not having the moral courage to face her, why else, she said, would they have to resort to tricking her to leave? She believes it was her run-ins with the campus administrator that led to her eviction, who she says did not appreciate her brazen confidence in standing up to him.

Shaheen’s educated daughter, who worked in the community as a tutor, was allowed to return to her employer at the latter’s insistence though she was told by the administrator that she should keep out of his sight. In other words, while he had to give in to her employer’s demands to allow her entry, he made sure she understood that her body was an illegal presence in the masculinized, militarized space under his direct control.

Conclusion

With the transformation of traditional agrarian structures into more capitalistic forms of production, the kinship ties of old have weakened in the Pakistani Punjab and poor women have had to migrate to the cities in search of work, with most ending up as domestic workers. Traditionally employed as household servants or sharecroppers by the village landlord, these low-caste/-class women are used to being relegated to low-paid, low-status jobs that offer little in terms of social and occupational mobility. At the same time, in the villages, the familial bonds between high-caste and low-caste families provided them with security in the form of stable employment, a steady supply of food and assistance during family emergencies through reciprocal exchanges, and the landlord’s patronage (Alavi, 1972; Eglar, 1964; Lyon, 2004).

In contrast, domestic worker arrangements in the city, as exemplified by this case study, are marked by extreme job insecurity, food deprivation and no concept of reciprocal exchange. The social pressure on employers that ensures their patronage of workers in the village is missing in the city, where there is no biraderi to protect low-caste/-class workers. Nevertheless, the case study shows that in the city, employers continue to employ ‘pre capitalistic’ forms of exploitation that marked landlord–servant relationships (Gough, 1977). For instance, like rural landlords, urban employers also dismiss their workers’ demand for higher wages by pointing out that they are given hand-me-downs and leftover food which should be considered extra-economic compensation.

In the gated community, the new wage model is enforced through feminized and masculinized forms of surveillance and control. Female employers invoke narratives of pollution, disease, and fear to construct boundaries around their women workers, and campus administrators use militarized means to aid the consumption of the workers’ labor while subordinating their ‘foreign’ bodies to the community’s sense of elite privilege and social order (Bourdieu, 1984). The seemingly endless pool of women waiting to secure jobs in exclusive communities such as the one I analyze enhances the worker’s disposability. Thus, in the absence of trade unions which could have ensured minimum level of wages and labor rights, these depersonalized relations are worse than the asymmetric but more secure relationship based rural service system, governed as it was by biraderi rules that both employers and employees would respect and uphold.

The fact that the community under study is situated within a university complex, does not affect the private domestic labor arrangements of its faculty residents per se but the walled, urban complex does work to sever all social ties that used to bind workers and employers together under the older hierarchical system of socioeconomic relations in rural Punjab. The heavily fortified walls provide a concrete and militarized form of coercive control, accentuating the symbolic boundaries employers construct in their intimate spaces through narratives of dirt and foreignness.

While this article explored a small and uniquely placed community, its findings have broader implications, for the practices and narratives it exposes emanate from the ‘cultures of servitude’ prevalent in the country, region, and beyond as detailed by the review of the global literature on domestic work. The specific contribution of the article is that it situates domestic labor arrangements and the boundaries constructed to monitor and police worker bodies within a socio-historic context of shifting social and economic service relations in the Pakistani Punjab.