Abstract
While academic work has been conducted on the representation of domestic workers in traditional media, very little work has been done on the depiction of domestic work in digital popular culture that emerged since the 2010s. To examine this, we conduct a close reading of the ongoing YouTube series Maid in Heaven (2017), a comedy about two seemingly benign employers and a cunning domestic worker. This representation highlights the deep-rooted anxieties around diminishing feudal control over workers because of postliberalization urban restructuring and its effects on households controlled by working, upper-caste youth. Within the series, we are broadly interested in four themes: (a) humor; (b) feudal maternalism in the urban neoliberal context; (c) spatiality, untouchability, and domestic work; and (d) online othering. In examining the same, this study provides insights into how caste- and class-based segregations are reproduced within digital popular culture.
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Notes
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Braj or Braj Bhasha is widely spoken in western Uttar Pradesh and parts of Haryana and Rajasthan. It is often considered to be a dialect of Hindi and subsumed under “Western Hindi” (which includes Bundelkhandi as well) although there exists scholarly debate on whether it should be considered a language. It developed a great literary tradition through devotional and erotic poetry, and was one of the most popular “dialects” until the nineteenth century (Grierson 1916; Snell 1991).
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The Jajmani System consisted of village economic networks through which lower, laboring castes would produce goods for savarna castes in exchange for grains. Often considered a form of bonded labor.
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Mundayur, N., Jotwani, J., Arora, S. (2024). Figure of the Domestic Worker in “Maid in Heaven”: Study of Digital Untouchability in Contemporary Media. In: Yadav, D., Kadavath, V.K. (eds) The Digital Popular in India . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39435-5_6
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