by Aakriti Mandhwani

In an essay on domestic chores of middle class Indian women, Abigail McGowan writes:

“Being a modern middle class woman in late colonial India appears to have been a lot of work”.

Working across a variety of sources including memoirs, treatises, advertisements and visual ephemera, McGowan’s argument is compelling. Being 'modern' entailed not only the management of the home and children (including running household budgets and accounts) but also keeping in line with latest fashions in education that the modern husband wanted his wife to prescribe to. In this pursuit, middle class women were expected to work round the clock, do more than they were doing before by the way of household management, and give up their naps in the pursuit of domestic and intellectual perfection.

Decades later, the world of post-Independence India did not afford women any more rest.
One of the ways we can see this emphasis is through the sheer number of advertisements directed towards the care of the woman, child and home.


All across Hindi middlebrow, literary and lowbrow magazines we find products and dreams directed towards women. Sometimes, these were marketed towards the hygiene and care of the entire family. In this context, we see a superfluity of products like soap, shampoo, hair, oil, body oil, etc.

Products for the care of children included a wide variety of tonics, supplements, milk supplements, and other food products - from Dalda to Bournvita, everything advertised promised to improve the health of infants and children.

However, advertisements tell one part of the story. Domestic lives of women didn’t just extend to servicing the household and buying objects. Women readers coveted the magazines in which these advertisements ran. From writing the stories to actively debating them in letters, from writing essays about the pleasures of makeup and good posture, the world of these magazines shows that women thought beyond a singular prescriptive feminine ideal.


While the pre-Independence periodicals produced a discourse of women-as-mothers, women-as-servants-of-the-nation and women-as-subjects-of-feeling in Hindi, these magazines sharpen our understanding of women-as- consumers and readers and writers of spirited stories. In an array of Hindi middlebrow magazines, women acted as agentive co-constitutors who, through their correspondences and contributions, inserted their voices and agency.



This led to a variety of articles talking about a range of concerns: such as thinking about makeup and beauty inside and outside the home, condemning religious extremism and linguistic nationalism, as well as judging the literariness of short stories and magazines.


Additionally, magazines featured short stories espousing the fantasy of companionate marriage, essays relating to cooking, cleaning and the running of the household.

An ekanki (one act play) titled “Dhobhi ka Aagman” (“The Washerman’s Coming”) shows the sheer difficulty of doing it all.
Written by a very popular writer, Vimla Luthra, and featured in Sarita’s January 1949 issue, the premise of the story is rather simple: a dhobhi (washerman) lands up home at the exact moment when the family is preparing to go to the cinema.


The wife’s changing emotional responses to the dhobhi shows how she perceives this household chore. Even though the dhobhi’s visit is ill timed and she is stretched thin in the mornings because of multiple household duties, and despite her husband and children crowding her to send the dhobhi away, she cannot find a way to defer this. Early in the play, she also says that she would rather abandon the cinema because it isn’t as if she really goes regularly anyway. She even shouts at her husband when he tells her to do this work “at ease” later:

“When do I ever get rest? You only want that everyone should just circle around you whenever you’re home. There’s a ruckus if one picks up any other work at home”.

The argument between the husband and wife is pertinent - she shrugs him off when he then offers to deal with the dhobhi. Keeping with the (frustrated) repartee between the husband and the wife, he says that he doesn’t understand what his wife wants: she is upset if he doesn’t offer help but also refuses help if offered. If this were a TikTok reel instead of a 1950s episodic domestic dramedy, the wife might offer the husband some advice on mental load.

At the same time, the play’s comedy is not mounted only on the housewife’s frustration but also on the dhobhi’s spectre: he may exist literally to lighten the housewife’s load but is the most disliked (and yet invisible) person in the entire play. This invisibilisation is not carelessly done; Luthra skilfully also shows how servants are intricately linked to the running of the home and its dynamics, and how they perceive their own labour and leisure.

In the tussle between the dhobhi, housewife, her husband and many children of varying ages, also feature some harried domestic servants who are directed to clean shoes, fix bicycles and fetch tangas by many family members all at the same time. When the family finally leaves for the cinema, two servants can finally relax. They decide to spend the time gossiping and playing cards. Even if the housewife was tired of her husband, children and chores, she managed to go to the cinema after all.

While middlebrow magazines like Sarita emphasised this domestic union (with all its incumbent burdens), many lowbrow genre magazines across the board marked the complications even more intricately.

“Pārū,” written by (now lost to literary histories) Kamla Phadke for the March 1952 issue of Maya, is one such example. It is a comic story about a domestic crisis that erupts around a cook.



When the narrator-protagonist places a prominent advertisement for a cook in the local newspaper, her friend mocks her—most cooks will not respond simply because they cannot read.

Both women belong to modern nuclear families: the narrator lives with her husband alone. Phadke’s narrator’s privilege is checked for the time being, so to speak, but that does not stop her from making more ill-intentioned errors.

The narrator finally finds a young and beautiful cook called Paru. She also finds that Paru cannot cook well at all but is extremely desirable to the opposite sex - her husband and his friends like Paru. She notes that the husband’s friends start visiting the narrator’s home more often than previously only to flirt with Paru. In a semi-comical mode, the narrator describes her helplessness; since she cannot serve the guests bad food, she takes to cooking herself while Paru gets all the credit. The narrator is in a double bind, jealous of the attention that Paru gets but, at the same time, unable to dismiss her, precisely because people will gossip that she let go a good cook out of jealousy. Although the narrator is seemingly modern and independent, she cares equally about her reputation as a competent homemaker. Ironically, as the narrator herself tells us, she also works at a nonprofit organization for the upliftment of women. Many things are happening here – the hypocrisy of the modern middle class woman is on full display. Modernity entails the hiring of domestic workers and cooks, who serve as an extension of the woman running the household. The woman is oppressed by these chores and oppresses other service providers. The narrator’s solution for getting rid of Paru is an example of this– she orchestrates a relationship between Paru and a suitor to inveigle a marriage, because Paru’s marital status would render her incapable of employment and, therefore, attention.

Domestic life (and the mysteries it held) was also the subject of nayi kahani/new story, a big modernist moment in Hindi writing in the 1950s and 60s.
Mohan Rakesh’s story “Seemayein” (“Boundaries”), published in Sarita’s June 1949 issue, focuses on questions of selfhood that are inextricably tied to the female protagonist’s insecurities around physical beauty. It narrates the story of Uma who, having passed her examinations four years ago has since only been waiting to get married. She leaves to attend a wedding and feels inexplicably excited about being observed by a man there. While her life at home has been reduced to endless waiting for a certain something others call marriage, she finds true awakening in her desire, of a man’s desire of her.

This essay highlights the many ways in which women encountered their domestic lives in post-Independence magazines – reflected in them as objects of enquiry, happiness and despair. At the same time, these magazines were very much part of these domestic spheres – women readers eagerly fashioned themselves as readers and writers, as editors and critics. There was no “one” domestic ideal that bound them all.

Perhaps the recurring thread that ran through was McGowan’s provocation we began the essay with – being a modern middle class reader in post- Independence North India did seem like a lot of work.

Aakriti Mandhwani is Associate Professor of English at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. She is the author of Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (UMass, Speaking Tiger, 2024).

By Nipuna Varman

In today’s world, technology has come a long way; while households lag in such development, they still have incorporated certain advancements. The emergence of modern appliances has promised convenience, efficiency, and time-saving benefits. However, amid the gleaming stainless steel and sleek designs, one must wonder if such advancements help solve the issue of gendered unpaid domestic work.


In the book The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (1975), Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa briefly stated that even the most well-equipped kitchens at the time reflected outdated 19th-century technology. Their overarching argument is that the technological advancements inside the household do not reflect the advancement outside of it.

Let us look at some vintage advertisements for modern household equipment and explore their intricacies.

*Mental load is the invisible and often unacknowledged work of planning, organizing, and managing household tasks and responsibilities. It involves doing the actual chores and remembering, anticipating, and coordinating them. For example, mental load may include making grocery lists, scheduling doctor appointments, or arranging childcare.

There is no debate that technological advancements inside the household increase efficiency and reduce costs. But technology, by bringing in efficiency also creates an illusion of ease which may turn housework even more invisible.

How Indian Courts Put a Price on Women's Unpaid Work

When Maya Devi, a 25-year-old mother and domestic worker, died in a motor accident, her family faced a difficult question: how do you put a monetary value on the work of someone who wasn't formally employed? This challenge has played out in Indian courts for decades as families seek compensation for deceased homemakers.

For years, insurance companies argued that homemakers had no income and therefore deserved minimal compensation. But Indian courts gradually began recognizing that unpaid domestic work—cooking, cleaning, childcare, and emotional support—has real economic value that families lose when a homemaker dies.
This "wages for housework" approach has led to substantially higher compensation awards. Courts now routinely award hundreds of thousands of rupees to families, recognizing unpaid domestic work as valuable labor deserving of legal protection.

However, the system isn't perfect. Compensation often depends on problematic assumptions—that women's primary value lies in motherhood and marriage, that older women contribute less, and that a woman's worth is tied to her husband's income.

While this legal recognition represents progress in valuing women's contributions, it also raises important questions about how society views women's roles and whether this approach truly empowers women or reinforces traditional gender expectations.

By Nipuna Varman

"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.” - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

In our society, marriage is often portrayed as a union of love and affection between two individuals. It is romanticized as the foundation of a lifelong partnership and the beginning of a new chapter filled with shared dreams and aspirations. While these notions hold true to a certain extent, it is essential to recognize that marriage is not solely a romantic avenue but also an economic institution.


Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker argued that marriage was based on the principle of division of labour. However, this division is often based on the bargaining power the parties to a marriage possess.

Indian cinema, over the years, has been an excellent canvas, portraying the subtle, implicit, and sometimes overt negotiations within marriage.

This slideshow considers the 'economics of marriage' while exploring how different films across decades have portrayed women's struggles with financial independence, domestic roles, and respect within marriage, showing both the evolution and persistence of these themes in Indian cinema. .


The assets created within a family result from the work done in and outside it. Therefore, the institution of marriage assumes a role that extends beyond romantic inclinations, transcending into economic collaboration.

It operates as a union that amalgamates affection and financial resources, eliciting a division of labour hinged upon the intricate interplay of bargaining powers.

The marital unit becomes an arena where the unquantifiable aspects of love and companionship converge with the tangible forces of financial cooperation.

References

[1] Cooperation, Inequality, and the Family, Amartya Sen.

[2] Why Malayalam breakout film ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’ is ‘the story of most Indian women’, Scroll.in

[3] The Great Indian Kitchen: Serving an unsavoury tale of sexism in home, BBC

[4] The Great Indian Kitchen review: Powerful film on patriarchy and men-governed traditions, Hindustan Times

[5] Labour law and feminist method, Joanne Conaghan.

[6] Feminism and Labour Law: Contesting the Terrain, Joanne Conaghan.