Dhai, Ayah, and Anglo-Indian Mother: Rivalry in the Nursery in Nineteenth-Century British India

In nineteenth-century British India, the Anglo-Indian mother and the female Indian servants hired to help her with nursing and childcare were seen as potential rivals in the nursery. In the late nineteenth century, a divide in the discourse of nursing opened between, on one hand, medical handbooks and domestic guides preferring the Anglo-Indian mother, if healthy, to the dhai (Indian wet nurse) or ayah (Indian nursemaid) as a provider of milk to her infants and, on the other, Anglo-Indian fictional works by Rudyard Kipling and Sara Jeannette Duncan elevating the dhai or ayah above her British counterpart as a source of early maternal sustenance, particularly for sons. In these fictional narratives, the dhai or the bottle-feeding nursemaid is seen as a beneficial figure, whose milk (whether mammary or bottled) supplies to Anglo-Indian sons not only physical robustness but also an intuitive understanding of Indian cultures crucial to their efficacy as future imperial rulers. In these narratives, male Anglo-Indian infants, nourished by Indian milk and endowed by birth with British "blood," possess a quasi-biological hybridity that putatively ensures both an acculturation to native mores and an inborn loyalty to the British Raj that will allow them to serve, in adulthood, as model civil servants or army officers. These fictional works, moreover, reconceive the idea of motherhood: the eclipse of the Anglo-Indian mother, who is dead or simply ineffectual, and the temporary promotion of the dhai or ayah to maternal surrogate and facilitator of continued imperial dominance at a time of rising Indian nationalism.