Abstract
This article explores the hierarchical organization of gendered and laboring bodies in domestic spaces in urban Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic. While unemployment plagued various economic sectors arising from pandemic-related lockdowns and restrictions, demand for domestic labor remained consistent, albeit with new restrictions and enhanced surveillance of domestic workers. Based on a four-month study involving interviews and household surveys, this article examines how safety protocols and employment conditions and interactions provide insight into changing power relations within Bangladeshi households. The article identifies a dynamic interplay between servitude and separateness, with domestic workers subtly asserting their separateness to express their individuality and resistance to the arbitrary deployment of safety protocols imposed by employers. The pandemic underscored domestic workers’ resilience through preserving a sense of self within these intimate yet unequal spaces.
1 Introduction
Jannatul Mawa’s photographic collection Close/Distance (Mawa, 2023) expresses an ironic realism. Women domestic workers of various Bangladeshi households are photographed sitting on chairs, sofas, and settees alongside the women who employ them. The photographs depict them and the room arrangements just as Mawa likely found them, but the irony inheres in the fact that these domestic workers would usually not be found sitting on the furniture. They may not be allowed or feel too inhibited to do so with ease. The irony is redoubled in that they are likely the ones who clean the furniture and have a greater intimacy with them than their owners. The title of the collection Close/Distance makes overt reference to the fact that employers and employees occupy separate worlds while cohabiting in constrained household spaces within a rapidly urbanizing Bangladesh.
The most gripping element in the photographs is that they all bristle with the power and authority that it took for the domestic workers to be bidden to dress and sit on sofas and settees to be photographed. Perhaps it speaks to the power of the employers or the photographer to command them but either way, the domestic workers are fixed and made visible in a manner not of their own choosing. The photographs eloquently communicate how domestic space is organized and inhabited within Bangladeshi households.
This article takes inspiration from Mawa’s diagnostic photographs and explores the hierarchical organization of bodies in domestic spaces in urban Bangladesh within the context of the coronavirus pandemic. For empirical data, we draw on a four-month-long study conducted in July–October 2020, consisting of biweekly household surveys alternating with interviews with four domestic workers (Nargis, Rasheda, Seema, Shahana) and their employers in Dhaka. While Mawa’s photographic arrangements provide a vantage on domestic realities, in our instance it is the safety protocols and physical rearrangements forced by the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown that provide insight into the power relations that prevail between workers and their employers within Bangladeshi households. We found that relations that were already unequal grew even more so as employers projected their ungrounded fears of the virus upon the bodies of their domestic help, imposing restrictions upon their behavior. Yet, interestingly, the demand for this kind of labor overshadowed the fears, ensuring employment when all other forms of livelihood came to a halt within the wider economy, and employers unexpectedly showed themselves to be attentive to and responsible for their employees’ needs. These moments show a multidimensional relationship between employers and employees, where separateness and togetherness manifest in different areas and in different ways.
On the one hand, the arbitrariness of restrictions, employment, and care suggests to us that there has yet to develop a shared understanding between employers and employees of what constitutes fair working conditions. This finding is consistent with larger studies on Bangladesh that show little progress in social protection and services for workers even though the Government of Bangladesh adopted the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy in 2015. The studies claim that such changes may only be forthcoming if Bangladesh brings domestic workers within the purview of its 2013 Labour Law and ratifies relevant International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions (Ashraf et al. 2019; Rahim and Islam, 2018).
On the other hand, we did not observe the heightening of caste differences reported to be on the rise within the context of the pandemic in neighboring India (Satyogi, 2021), nor the racialized impacts of the pandemic observed in the United States (Canham, 2021). Instead, we saw fluctuating interdependencies and relations between employees and employers indicating a more class-based set of dynamics occasionally offset by crosscutting gender alliances. This insight is borne out by the fact that the virus itself came to be class-coded in the country, being widely understood as an urban and elite phenomenon. Thus in this article we look more closely at the nuances of relations between workers and their employees, tracking the changing characterization of the virus over the first year of the pandemic in Bangladesh while showing how the class coding of the virus rendered employers more vulnerable and dependent on their employees than usual, creating the conditions of possibility for domestic workers to assert themselves in small ways.
Our article aims to contribute to the growing study of domestic and care workers as part of informal and formal economies both in the countries of their origins and in transnational contexts (England, 2017; Siddiqi and Ashraf, 2017; Rao, 2011). Our specific contribution is to an understanding of the phenomenological life worlds of workers (Trawick, 1990; Gamburd, 2000). In particular, we see ourselves in conversation with Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum’s Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (Ray and Qayum, 2009) in which they argue that labels such as domestic worker are problematic within the context of India, and South Asia more generally, because they rely upon a presumption of domestic labor as work. This presumption sneaks in notions of contractual relations, however informal and unregulated. They contend that the term “servitude” better communicates both the deep-seated structural inequalities that produce the conditions for people being forced to provide service to others, and the expectations of subordination and bodily deference that accompany such service. We feel that the relations that we observed are closer to the servitude of which Ray and Qayum speak, than say the garment factory laboring described by Dina Siddiqi and Hasan Ashraf for Bangladesh (Siddiqi and Ashraf, 2022). Therefore, we deliberately deploy the category of “servant” or “maid,” as often as we use the “domestic worker” to remind our readers of this wider context.
At the same time our evidence suggests that servants worked hard to retain a distance from their employers in a multiplicity of ways such that their identities and lives were not fully collapsible with those on whom they relied financially. This distance or what we call “separateness” was evident in tiny ways in Mawa’s photographs, in an errant look of irritation on the faces of the maids or in their bodies turned inwards refusing to give themselves over to the full gaze of the camera. While we do not have sufficient data to suggest how materially significant this separateness was for domestic workers or whether it constituted a “weapon of the weak” (Scott, 1985), we felt it important to flag it throughout the article as a way to show how power relations are not always one-directional. Our particular interest is in showing how servitude and separateness exist together, however uncomfortably, within the context of domestic work in Bangladesh and how crises, such as the pandemic, serve as occasions to test these conditions and relations, to even find them wanting and in need of renegotiation.
2 Methodology
2.1 Objectives
This research was conducted as part of the Hopkins Anthropology Research of Life Under Covid project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The research was led by Principal Investigator (PI) Dr. Naveeda Khan, with co-Principal Investigators (co-PI s) Anishta Khan and Namira Shameem, who were sheltering in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 lockdown. The study focused on understanding how domestic workers in urban households in Dhaka, Bangladesh, navigated the constraints of the pandemic, with two key research objectives:
To study life under lockdown, that is, how people undertook household activities and how class and gender attitudes expressed themselves during that period.
To explore the capacities and limitations of conducting long-distance research during the pandemic.
Given the pandemic constraints, the research was carried out through remote methods, using phone calls to conduct the surveys and interviews with interlocutors and Zoom to discuss findings as a team. Due to the limited ability to access a broader population, the two co-PI s opted to focus on individuals they could easily access or had existing relationships with, specifically family members and the domestic workers employed by these households.
2.2 Ethical Considerations
The research was conducted with strict adherence to ethical standards, particularly concerning informed consent and power dynamics. Each of the domestic workers involved was informed about the nature of the research and given the choice to participate without any obligation at every occasion. We acknowledged the potential power imbalance between researchers and interlocutors, and emphasized that employees were under no pressure or contractual obligations as employees to comply and answer questions. They were assured that their work commitments would be a valid reason to decline participation at any point.
While we drew on previous relationships with the interlocutors, we also fostered individual relationships as researcher and interlocutor, ensuring that trust and privacy were built separately for the purposes of the study. This helped us maintain professional boundaries as researchers while upholding the participants’ privacy and autonomy at every stage of the research.
2.3 Research Methods
We used a survey research instrument developed by a larger project of Life Under Covid as the primary tool for data collection. Surveys were conducted every two weeks over a four-month period. In between survey rounds, we held discussions with the PI to review the findings, hone in on survey questions, and supplement the survey data with detailed interviews. These interviews were open-ended, allowing us to explore specific questions that emerged from the survey data.
The data collected was primarily qualitative, consisting of detailed field notes and interview transcripts. Although the sample size was small – four domestic workers – the richness of the qualitative data provided significant insights into their lived experiences. Given the small sample of four surveys and four interviews per domestic worker, we chose not to rely heavily on the survey data for extrapolation but instead based our analysis on the qualitative interviews. This approach aligns with the anthropological understanding that even a small number of life stories can reveal larger social patterns (Maggio, 2014).
We looked at relevant visual images from Jannatul Mawa’s book, discussed in the Introduction, for their attention and relevance to our findings. And we examined television channel reporting of Jamuna TV and Ekattor TV news channels for working class and rural attitudes towards COVID, which are discussed in the final subsection of Findings. These channels were chosen for their wide coverage of the country and popularity. Research on the landscape and conditions of domestic work and workers in Bangladesh informed our attention and questions for the photographs and news reportage.
3 The Context of Domestic Work in Bangladesh
Bangladesh is estimated to have around 1.3 million domestic workers, according to the Bangladesh Labour Force Survey in 2017 (Hasan, 2021).1 While servants are recognized as workers through the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy, they do not benefit from the protections of the Labour Act 2013 (Ministry of Labour and Employment, 2015). The enduring informality of domestic work and the lack of data are aggravated by the fact that such laboring takes place behind closed doors. Yet the demand for domestic help is commensurate to the demands of the formal economy outside the home. In recent years, middle class women’s growing participation in the labor force has led to the rising demands of domestic work (ILO, 2010). Domestic work substitutes the unpaid labor previously performed by women in the house. However, a 2017 ILO study found that while there are gradual shifts towards the recognition of domestic labor, servitude persists due to deeply ingrained social hierarchies and employer perceptions of domestic workers as inherently subordinate (ILO, 2017). As such, domestic work is often undocumented, informal, and undervalued (ILO, 2010).
Domestic work in Bangladesh encompasses a wide range of tasks, including cooking, cleaning, childcare, and food shopping (Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies (BILS), 2009; BILS, 2015; Khair, 2004; ILO, 2006). Workers live full-time within designated quarters in their employers’ homes (live-in) or work part-time across multiple households (live-out) (Jensen, 2007). Live-in workers tend to be more reliant upon the compassion and consideration of their employers, while live-out workers have more flexibility in switching employers (Ashraf et al., 2019). Ward et al. (2004) note that low-income Bangladeshi women transition between various forms of employment, including home-based microenterprises, garment factory work, and overseas work. While this article focuses solely on domestic work, the broader experiences of these women often shape the narratives shared by our interlocutors.
A 2019 study by the ILO examined the experiences of 500 live-in and live- out domestic workers in Bangladesh, revealing that most domestic workers come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are recruited informally through relatives, employers, or parents (Ashraf et al., 2019). The study found that approximately 20% of live-in and 25% of live-out workers receive a monthly salary of around BDT 5,600 (USD 66), far below the living wage of BDT 25,497 (USD 235) as estimated by the Global Living Wage Coalition (2023). While 69.2% of live-in workers receive their wages directly, the remainder report that their salaries are received or saved by their parents, relatives, or employers. Moreover, 16.9% of live-in and 33.6% of live-out workers reported experiencing food deprivation in the workplace. Many domestic workers, especially live-in maids, lack the agency to change employers after committing to a household and face strict surveillance. This is particularly true of younger workers, who are often restricted from making independent decisions (Jensen, 2014).
The study by Ashraf et al. (2019) further revealed that less than one-tenth of domestic workers feel a sense of closeness to their employers, with only 11.2% of live-in and 4.8% of live-out workers reporting such feelings. While factors such as poverty, wages, food insecurity, personal agency, freedom of movement, and the ability to leave jobs inform our study, our interest is to center the voices of domestic workers themselves. By doing so, we aim not only to confirm the data provided by various studies but also to explore how domestic workers navigate and negotiate within these constrained circumstances – if, indeed, they can.
4 Maids and Households
4.1 The Arrangement of Space and Bodies
In an unexpected moment of vulnerability, on a mild summer afternoon during the pandemic, Nargis confided in me (Anishta), saying, “Apu, amar atka atka lagtese,” (I feel suffocated).2 Nargis, a bright-eyed and snarky 16-year-old, had been working as a live-in maid at my parents’ house for five years. We often joked around, having never established formal boundaries. Yet it was a rare occasion that she would share a complaint with me. After all, I was her employer’s daughter.
Nargis’ work as a live-in maid made her completely homebound. After overcoming her homesickness in the initial months of her job, Nargis shared proudly that she preferred staying cocooned in our apartment than dealing with the busy streets of Dhaka or the lack of privacy in her village. However, the pandemic changed things as my family and I set up ad-hoc workstations around the apartment. My parents were working exclusively from home, and my sister and I had returned from abroad. The apartment, which previously was mostly occupied by Nargis and our cook, Romela bua, became “much busier.” Nargis explained, “it felt like the house was a little too full. There were more people to take care of. I made three beds every morning and every night. I washed twice the number of clothes. I fixed tea multiple times a day. I set lunch for everyone, sometimes at different times when times allowed for it.”
Domestic workers in Bangladesh, majority of whom are girls or women, face spatial constraints in their employers’ homes due to hierarchical and patriarchal structures (Satyogi, 2021; Gamburd, 2000; Jensen, 2014). Nargis was more hedged within the kitchen – a room meant solely for work and not leisure, due to the apartment being fuller. The fact that the apartment was not a place of free movement for Nargis or the other servants only became visible during the pandemic. In my absence, Nargis and Romela bua largely used my bedroom as a place of rest. The two would watch the evening news and Hindi serials on an old television, or Nargis would read the newspaper or the Qurʾan by the balcony. At night, they would spread out their bedding on the floor. However, when I returned home, the room categorically reverted to being mine without further negotiation. Nargis now asked for my permission to enter, whether to watch television or hang clothes on the drying rack in the balcony. Additionally, I noticed that she never entered a room when my father was in it, a distinct gendered impulse.
During the pandemic, the shift in Nargis’ life arose out of a change in both the use of space and of the expansion of duties. While her physical space for rest and personal activities became restricted, her workload expanded significantly, with a heightened expectation to serve more people at all hours of the day. How her time was to be allocated and where she was permitted to be within the house was largely dictated by her employers, often in an implicit manner so that she had to pay more attention to external cues and signs and modulate her labor accordingly – and, thus, undertake more emotional labor. Moreover, this reconfiguration of her roles and space occurred without explicit or formal discussion, assuming her consent to these shifting expectations.
Rasheda and Shahana, both in their thirties and working as chhuta buas or live-out maids for multiple households, were accustomed to the practice of seeking permission or knocking before entering any rooms, “since the children might be studying or they might be doing something privately,” Rasheda told me (Namira), adding that this did not hinder her work or comfort. Domestic workers often occupy liminal roles within the households but are deeply embedded in the private recesses of their employers’ lives, such as washing their underwear and taking out their condoms in the trash (Satyogi, 2021). It became clear from Rashida bua’s words that there are yet further spaces and activities that are private and from which servants are excluded.
Shahana had to seek permission to enter all rooms in the houses where she worked, including my own (Namira). She had been explicitly instructed not to enter certain rooms. The reason, she articulated, is that “there is distrust, and if not that, then just plain discomfort when entering someone else’s space.” I understand from her words that her employers did not trust her around their valuables or found her presence intrusive in spaces they considered their inner sanctums. Shahana shared Nargis’ hesitation about entering rooms where men were present.
The pandemic brought a new sense of home-boundedness, particularly for live-in domestic workers in Bangladesh. Home spaces became sites of increased surveillance against contagion, with domestic workers being the primary objects of this surveillance. Shahana had to take precautions like washing herself and wearing a mask upon entering her employers’ homes, as those coming from outside were seen as potential virus-carriers.
Early in the pandemic, Rasheda recalled having to shower upon entering one of her employer’s houses, washing her clothes and sun-drying them before starting her work. “After finishing my chores, I would have to shower again before leaving.” If she informed her other employers about having showered at a previous home, they would understand and give her some leeway but “Shadhinota ar nai,” she told me, meaning she could no longer enjoy the same liberties of coming and going at her own convenience as she had before the pandemic.
Seema, who was in her late 20s or early 30s, regularly went into her employer’s home to do menial tasks like clean dishes, sweep floors, and cut vegetables. Waseq, Seema’s 34-year-old employer who lived with his parents, decided that the best approach to mitigate the threat of contagion was to avoid sharing space at all. When Seema swept the floors of the common spaces in their tight Mirpur apartment, Waseq retreated to his bedroom and shut his door. When she came in to sweep the floors of his room, he went to the roof or on a walk, consistently distrustful of how Seema was “maintaining herself” when away from their home and frustrated at her for cutting corners on the mask protocols they had set up for her. “She says she can’t work with a mask. I got heated about that, I said ‘C’mon now’. It’s all household work, I could do this shit. Everybody’s dependent on maids here ‘cause of the culture. But me and dad both said we didn’t need her,” Waseq shared. His critique of how Seema is “maintaining herself” taps into gendered expectations around women’s bodies and labor, particularly within the context of domestic labor, often at the expense of the worker’s own comfort or autonomy.
Sometimes the fear of contagion went both ways. Rasheda said that she was afraid to be in her employers’ space, just as they were around her. “Now I feel scared to enter any of their spaces, and they feel afraid as well whenever I cough or sneeze.” But in other instances, it became clear that undertaking the pandemic-related protocols imposed by employers was entirely performative to placate the employers; these protocols were abandoned at will as in the instance of Seema above. One day, I (Namira) observed Shahana scrubbing the floor while I sat at my desk. At one point, Shahana pulled down the mask from her face and sat back on the floor. Her eyes closed as she exhaled deeply. When she noticed me, she nervously smiled and explained “Maskey shash newa jaye na, dom bondho lage” (One can’t breathe through a mask, I feel suffocated).
There are several important pandemic-related observations to relate here. People feared potential contagion-bearing bodies coming in from outside, specifically their live-out servants. However, they preferred to get this help than go without, as noted exasperatedly by Waseq. The fear was mitigated, and a sense of security temporarily re-established by creating and enforcing new protocols upon servants, requiring repeated bathing, washing of hands, and the wearing of masks. While the fear of contagion could go both ways, with servants fearing contraction of the virus from their employers, most often servants acted as if these enhanced protocols were more to placate their employers than meaningful in terms of enhancing security. Masking became a point of tension between employers and employees, with enforcing masking during the entirety of housework becoming a means of establishing authority and power over one’s subordinates (see below in section “Changing representations of COVID-19”). This aspect of protocols being less about securing bodies from the virus and more about asserting power was made most evident by Nargis, who was a live-in servant with little interaction with the outside world but was continuously required by Anishta’s father to wash her hands. She expressed her frustrations to me (Anishta): “Uff, etobar haath dhuite hobe? Apnera koren. Amakeo korte hobe keno?” (Ugh, why do I have to wash my hands so many times? You all do it. Why do I have to do it as well?)
4.2 Food Sharing
“They used to give me a little bit of everything they cooked – chicken, beef, fish, vegetables, rice, whatever they had,” Shahana told me with gratitude towards her young employers. “Madam nijeo bere dito ar amakeo bolto nije jototuk lagee niye jeytey,” she added, saying she was free to take home as much as needed for her family. In her own home, “I would usually cook rice with either shutki (dried fish) on one day, or fresh fish on others. I rarely purchase chicken or beef because it is so expensive.” Shahana’s madams would round out her meals, in contrast to the “ek bhaat, ek torkari” (one dish) meal she cooked at home. Food sharing is a very important way by which social relations, both hierarchical and lateral, are forged and maintained within the South Asian context (Appadurai, 1981). Guided by Appadurai’s study of food politics in the context of India, we ask, what did actions involving food say and do within the pandemic context in Dhaka?
Shahana lived in a single bedroom household in Uttara, a northern suburb of Dhaka. She shared this room with her husband and two children, one of the 13 tin-walled rooms built alongside the railway tracks. During rainy seasons, the water level would rise and sometimes flood her paths, but other than these she had no major complaints about her place.3 Around July 2020, frequent rains had caused the narrow alleys and gullies to flood, and water had seeped into Shahana’s room, destroying the makeshift clay stove on the floor. Feeling helpless, Shahana had shared her situation with her employer.
Working as a part-time domestic help meant that Shahana had to spend the lunch hours working at her employers. A pre-existing negotiation gave her the option of having lunch at her employer’s once her work was over or take her share of the food home. Shahana usually chose to do the latter so that she could share her food with her family. Upon hearing that Shahana’s room was flooded, and she was unable to cook at home, her employer decided that Shahana should take enough to feed her family of four for both lunch and dinner every day until the water subsided.
Food sharing operated at several levels at once in Shahana’s case. She was close to her female employer and her employer’s help was seen as an act of care. There was also a cultural norm at work that Muslims should share food with one another. At the same time, there was also a whiff of charity to the help as Muslims are enjoined to give charity both in the form of zakat (formal almsgiving) and sadaqa (individual charity). While Shahana deeply appreciated the help, she also knew that she had to express culturally coded gratitude in receiving the food (Bensaid et al., 2013). Sometimes the food sharing was done charitably, while at others, it took on a more transactional form. On days when Shahana had to do some extra cleaning because guests would be coming over, she took home more food than usual. When Shahana’s employer found out she no longer worked at other houses during the lockdown, Shahana was asked to work longer hours and was paid overtime in exchange for the food. For the employers, giving away leftover food helped them avoid wasting food while undertaking a charitable deed.
Not all our four interlocutors felt the same level of gratitude. At one of the households she worked in, Rasheda was allowed to eat whichever dish she had cooked for the day while she was there, whether that was fish or chicken curry or both. But she knew to only take what was sufficient to sustain herself, never more. She said, “Ekhon jototuk khaiye jibito thakum er beshi toh newa jaye na” (It is not possible to take any more than is necessary to keep me alive right now). Her words are ambiguous as they do not indicate whether she feels that she cannot take more from her employers based on her sense of their generosity or lack thereof, or whether she is articulating a principle for her, that she takes only as much as she feels is her due, which speaks to her effort to maintain correct labor and boundaries to avoid entanglements with her employers.
4.3 Changing Representations of COVID-19
COVID was initially presented and had retained its reputation as being a rich man’s and city folk disease (Das, 2020; Bengali et al., 2020). This sentiment was widespread across Bangladesh, as evidenced by television reporting clips during the lockdown. “Graame kono corona morona nai. Egula shob gujob. Shohore jara thake eta tader jonno” (We do not have corona this or that in the villages. These are all rumors. These are for the folks living in cities and towns), proclaimed a man who lived and worked in a nearby village, jeering and dismissing corona-related warnings, when interviewed by a television anchor about his understanding of the virus (Jamuna TV, 2020). Another said, “Corona shobdoi ta toh bujhi na” (I don’t even understand what the word corona means) and another drew parallels between the virus and non-communicative diseases: “Diabetes ar corona. Egula, inshallah, amader theke onek dure” (Diabetes and corona. These, God willing, are far from us) (Jamuna TV, 2020).
In another story filmed for Ekattor TV (2021), a local news channel, the reporters’ tone expressed their perplexity about the irregular and infrequent mask-wearing among many lower income Dhaka residents, despite regular harassment from law enforcement and the visibility of ambulances frequently leaving and entering hospitals with sick or dead bodies. The reporters found that residents had their own peculiar reasons for abandoning masks: the heat is stifling; trust in God is enough protection; one cannot wear a mask when they are taking a smoke break. Class distinctions prevailed, as one man, his mask edging under his nose, shared, “Amader goriber loke toh corona dekhi na. Amra gorib asi, Allah-I amader bhalo rakse” (We don’t see corona among us poor people. We are poor, and so Allah is keeping us safe). When the reporter followed up by asking how corona can differentiate between the rich and the poor, the man chuckled and responded, “Sheta bhagge jaane, Allah jaane” (Fate knows that, Allah knows that).
At the onset of the pandemic, affluent and middle-class urban Bangladeshis were visibly fearful of the virus. When I (Anishta) first spoke to Waseq in June 2020, he was on a walk to “take a breather from all the chaos at home.” His neighborhood, Mirpur, was the first major “red zone” in Dhaka – neighborhoods identified by the government for having high infection and death rates. While we were speaking on the phone, he returned home to find Seema cleaning his room without a mask on. He hastily excused himself from the call. Through the phone, I traced his disappearing voice as he attempted to rationalize and then argue with his maid about the protocols they had spoken of: limit contact with people, wear a mask while at work, wash hands frequently. I could hear Waseq’s voice rising, and his frustration spilling out.
During another call, a month and a half later, I asked Waseq about that time he had caught the bua cleaning without a mask.4 The rules of Waseq’s household were that Seema, the live-out maid, had to wear a mask inside, but they, Waseq and his parents, the inhabitants of the space, did not. Yet Waseq’s mother worked in the administration section of a busy COVID-19 testing and laboratory. Waseq had begun to spend time, albeit in limited capacity, with friends. His father went to the market daily to get groceries, to “keep himself busy these days.” I wondered how Waseq made sense of these obvious differences between their labor and their expectations of Seema.
“Six months into the pandemic, I began to trust her (Seema),” Waseq says. “The turning point was when I thought, ‘F*** COVID!’ It was hardheadedness. I quickly went from being compliant to being complacent. That’s what kind of shifted my outlook on her.” In September 2020, when Waseq’s friend’s aunt passed away from COVID complications, he attended her funeral and sat next to the aunt’s husband, who had been staying with her in the hospital. Though he was masked for the processions, he shared a meal sitting around a table and interacting with the others. A week later, almost all the attendees of the funeral tested positive for coronavirus, many of whom had to be shifted to hospitals for symptom management. “It was just me and a handful of others who walked out of it asymptomatic I guess, because there was no way we didn’t get COVID,” Waseq shared, “and it kind of opened my eyes that COVID is something we will live with.” He visited his friend who was infected with the virus in the hospital, although still dressed in PPE, he added. He began to meet up with his friends, some of whom he knew were not being careful about COVID precautions. He began to enter more congested spaces like markets and hookah lounges.
“About the same time, when I became complacent, I stopped bothering [Seema] about washing her hands, and so on.” The two began to engage in some pleasantries, sharing the space in the apartment without breaking into shouting matches. He appreciated that she was actively trying to make his life more comfortable – she would bring him tea, his food, and ask after his work. This interaction underscores the gendered power relations within the employer-employee dynamic, wherein the male employer’s authority is not only exercised through labor expectations but also through the imposition and shifts in COVID protocols, with Seema being responsible for maintaining the gendered expectations of care and compliance within the private sphere. “When I realized nothing was missing from the house, it gave me more confidence in her,” Waseq shared his worry when his family first hired Seema, thinking she might steal cash laying around, family valuables or trinkets, or his electronics.
Waseq’s father, too, became less anxious about the virus, and thus, less preoccupied with Seema’s labor in the apartment. In Waseq’s words, “‘Amra coronar cheye shokti shali’ (We are stronger than corona) became the mentality shared by father and son. Even my father loosened up on the protocols he put in place for everyone in our apartment saying, ‘What’s the worst that can happen if I eat at a restaurant one day?’” In other words, Waseq and his family went from being fearful to being not quite complacent: they continued to take some precautions such as wearing PPE, but became more accepting of the virus as part of their world.
For the domestic workers in our study, COVID was neither an object of runaway fears nor a lived experience. Towards the beginning of the pandemic, Shahana was unaware that Uttara, the neighborhood where she lived and worked, had the second highest number of COVID cases and was on the list of red zones. COVID as a disease was not of any particular concern to her. During one of those earlier calls, she told me (Namira), “I have faith in Allah, if He keeps us well, then we will be.” As the early weeks passed by, Shahana grew optimistic. She did not hear many people talk about COVID anymore, “There is no corona,” she told me (Namira) with conviction. Her children began to step out for a few hours a day to play on the streets. Her husband too resumed his work, impeded only by rain, and brought home a decent amount, Tk. 500, each time.
Shahana’s sentiments were shared among many others across Bangladesh. Near the end of 2020, when Nargis visited her village for two weeks, she reported back that none of the city’s anxieties were present back in her hometown. People said to her, “Haha, you’re funny! Of course, no one wears masks here, there is no COVID.”5 Instead of being perceived as an illness, COVID manifested as an invisible external force affecting Nargis and her family’s everyday life in terms of their efforts to get by, as what we might call a stressor of extant insecurities (Leichenko and Silva, 2014). In the early days, during our first structured interview, Nargis recalled that for many people she knew – including her father, her cousin working in a city factory, her sister – life was disrupted by a loss in employment or an indefinite pause in schooling. She told me (Anishta), “You should know that mostly those suffering are those who are poor, and those living in rural areas,” but not from the disease, rather by how the rich were responding to it with erratic reactions and frequent lockdowns.
5 Conclusion
The article has sought to unveil the intricate dynamics within Bangladeshi households during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the demand for domestic labor, amid economic downturns, coexisted with erratic health safety measures and heightened work expectations. Projecting fears of the virus onto their employees, employers expected them to do more in every instance, specifically purify themselves upon entering households, uphold safety measures, and take on additional labor with increased numbers sheltering within the households and for longer periods of the working day. The COVID-19 pandemic also reminded of and reinscribed preexisting sociocultural dynamics, such as the distrust of domestic workers and the perception of them as intrusive.
At the same time, there were expansions of mutuality through employers providing additional provisions, such as food and healthcare in cases of need. Moreover, the increased dependencies on, or responsibility towards, domestic help, exemplified by Waseq’s mother’s unwavering commitment to employing Seema, reveal a shifting landscape of household roles, as more and more middle-class and upper-class women seek work outside, needing servants to cover their work at homes. The home, traditionally a sanctuary of familiarity and comfort, and privacy for those who lived and worked there, was redrawn by the unseen boundaries of distrust, excessive surveillance, and stratified labor roles. Yet these were inconsistently applied as it became more and more unclear who was the contaminating body, the servant who was homebound or the wandering employer, and whose body more vulnerable to the virus, the poor who lived in congested neighborhoods or the rich because they indulged in the fantasy of being above it.
Notably, the article identifies a dynamic interplay between servitude and separateness, with domestic workers subtly asserting their separateness to express their individuality and resistance to the arbitrary deployment of safety protocols. Therefore, while the pandemic amplified reliance on servants, it also underscored the domestic workers’ resilience in preserving a sense of self identity within these intimate yet unequal spaces. In the domestic terrain we observe the accentuation of authority and care. Intriguingly, even amidst the burgeoning interdependencies and close quarters, the domestic workers asserted their agency by maintaining a conscious separateness, reminiscent of Mawa’s photographic representations. Nargis, despite her respect for the family, rejected what I (Anishta) considered authoritative truth about safety protocols like handwashing and mask-wearing, questioning their imposition on her: “Apnera koren. Amakeo korte hobe keno?” (You all do it. Why do I have to do it as well?) In the absence of an authority figure imposing safety protocols, Seema and Shahana chose to work without masks, a subtle defiance of authority in their search for comfort. Rasheda exercised caution in her food intake, wary of her employer’s scrutiny and possible judgment or control of her.
These sporadic instances of asserting individuality amid long laborious days are testament to their resistance to complete subjugation. They signify the persistence of what Guha (1997) refers to as “dominance without hegemony,” a symbolic defiance that withstands the test of prolonged intimacy and the penetrating gaze of authority. In this article, we aimed to shed light on the minutiae of everyday domestic spaces, much like the elusive details captured in Mawa’s photographs. Our intention was to focus on those fleeting, often overlooked moments that resist easy patterning, over-theorizing, or categorization. By placing a microscopic lens on these spaces amid the pandemic, we draw attention to the small acts that illuminate the complexity of domestic labor. Scaling up this inquiry would be crucial for understanding broader patterns in the domestic work landscape and informing future policies. The pandemic escalated the reliance on servants while increasing their job insecurity and dependence on their employers. At the same time, it showcased their resilience in maintaining a sense of self in these intimate yet unequal spaces.
Acknowledgements
The researchers would like to thank Nargis, Seema, Shahana, and Rasheda for sharing their experiences and thoughts with us and trusting us to represent them fairly. We hope we have upheld their trust and that this research contributes in a small way towards informing policies to improve the lives of people in Bangladesh.
Funding
This research was conducted as part of a larger multi-country study on the implications of COVID-19-related policies on household decision-making and the economic recovery of households post-lockdown. The study was funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID COVID-19 grant awarded to Professors Veena Das and Clara Han in 2020.
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The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and International Labour Organisation statistics cited in this article are the most recent data available. Yet they are all pre-pandemic data, whereas our study occurred during the pandemic in 2020. The PPRC-BIGD Rapid Response Panel Research initiative tracks the economic conditions in Bangladesh during the pandemic. For more information see Rahman et al. (2022).
In this text, we provide our names “Anishta” or “Namira” to signify the addressee of the speaker in each instance. “Apu,” the affectionate term for “sister,” is employed to convey the relational dynamics between the speaker and the recipient. It reflects a nuanced interplay of closeness, likely influenced by underlying power dynamics.
Urban slum housing, which are high density areas, is often prone to flooding and waterlogging due to poor drainage systems, as well as to massive damage in the event of fires, windstorms or earthquakes due to poor urban planning (Ahmed, 2014).
I am not sure why I used the word “caught.” The phrase that comes to mind is getting “caught in the act.” Certainly, by the rules of the household, Seema had done something wrong. This harkens back to one of the earliest themes introduced in this article – that of surveillance governance and those we surveilled during the pandemic lockdown.
This stereotype was shared across class categories. My father, Nargis’ employer, once said offhand that Nargis has less to worry about than we do, that the poor have stronger immune systems, since they work outdoors all day and night. While those stereotypes did not change the protocols he put in place for everyone in our apartment, what caused his loosening of vigilance change in household governance was starkly similar to Waseq’s case: “What’s the worst that can happen if I eat at a restaurant one day?”.
