The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonisers and the colonised. At our Online Talk #AyahsAbroad, historian Dr Arunima Datta focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration - South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia. Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, she illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalised on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment. 

About the speaker

Dr Arunima Datta is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of North Texas. She serves as an associate editor of Britain and the World, and as the Associate Review Editor of the American Historical Review and a co-editor of the Gender in History series of  Manchester University Press. Her works have appeared in several scholarly journals, public history journals and magazines, presented at several archives and museums and on BBC4. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (2021). Her earlier work on the history of travelling ayahs in Britain has also won the Carol Gold Award and honourable mention for the Walter D Love Prize. Her latest book, Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.