Indian Ayahs in British Imperial Visual Art: Race, Class and Empire

Female domestic labor has remained largely invisible in British Empire history, throughout the colonial period in India (mid-1700s to the mid-1900s). Yet, the Indian ayah was a hyper-visible figure in British imperial visual culture. Ayahs appeared in a diverse range of images – from European oil-portraits to South Asian manuscript paintings commissioned by the British, to illustrations in children’s books, and later photographs and postcards.

This visual essay is a curation of some of these colonial representations of Indian ayahs.

The Indian Ayah in European oil-portraits : depiction of race and power hierarchies

In the portrayal of ayahs, praised as “faithful and affectionate”, European artists used certain artistic conventions that were common at the time for depicting black or brown colonial subjects. Despite the visual idealization of the Indian ayah, this essay argues that British imperial visual representations ultimately upheld the hierarchies of race, class, and empire.

British painter William Wood immortalized “Joanna de Silva, a native of Bengal, the faithful and affectionate Nurse of the Children of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Deare” in a beautiful oil portrait (1792).

Wood had never been to Bengal. It turns out that Joanna de Silva had sailed to Britain taking care of the Deare children after their father’s death in 1790, in the Third Anglo-Mysore War, fought by the East India Company against Tipu Sultan.^{[1]Adam Eaker, “An ‘Effaced Itinerary’: Joanna de Silva by William Wood” , The Metropolitan Museum Journal, Vol. 58, (2023), forthcoming; Swapna Banerjee, “She Travelled: The Portrait of Joanna de Silva, the Indian Ayah at the MET”, https://ayahsandamahs.com. For more on traveling Indian Ayahs and Chinese Amahs, see “Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Journeys” , an Australian Research Council funded project, led by Victoria Haskins, Swapna Banerjee, and Claire Lowrie.}

Joanna de Silva’s name, hairstyle, jewellery, and clothing suggest that she hailed from the Indo-Portuguese community. In fact, the word Ayah – used for South Asian nannies in British imperial households – is a loanword from Portuguese to English. Some of the earliest ayahs, like Joanna de Silva, were Catholic women of mixed Indo-Portuguese descent. Hindu, Muslim, or converted-Christian ayahs of South Asian origin soon replaced the Indo-Portuguese ones – possibly due to British Protestant anxieties towards Catholics, or practical reasons of availability.

Indian ayahs remained anonymous despite their frequent depictions in British visual representations.

This makes the inscription of Joanna de Silva’s identity on the top-right of her portrait quite exceptional. A standalone oil portrait of an ayah was also highly unusual in the late-1700s and indeed throughout the 1800s. The Indian ayahs mostly appeared in their care-giving role to British children and British women within family portraits (during the East India Company’s time).^{[2]Suzanne Conway, “Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-Indian children, c.1750-1947”, in Robinson & Sleight (eds.) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 41-58}

Joshua Reynolds, the famous British artist, created two of the earliest oil-portrayals of Indian ayahs.

Reynolds was himself a shareholder in the East India Company, although he had never been to India. In 1759, Edward Cruttenden, a director of the East India Company, commissioned Reynolds to paint his three Indian children with their Indian ayah, who had accompanied them to Britain after they lost their mother in the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta.

In 1765, Reynolds painted another ayah in a portrait of either George Clive’s family or Tysoe Hancock’s family. This ayah had also sailed to Britain with her employers. 

In European family portraits, the servants were typically erased or painted in the margins – so that they would not be confused with family members, or upset class hierarchies. ^{[3]Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999).} Reynolds, however, depicted both ayahs conspicuously at the center of the canvas. Far from threatening class hierarchies, Indian ayahs in British family portraits became “Oriental ornamentation”, and served the same purpose as other colonial commodities such as Chinese porcelain, Persian carpets, or Burmese teak, in emphasizing the British family’s imperial identity, affluence, and taste for the “exotic”. You will notice, that the Cruttenden daughters, and the wife and daughter in the Clive/Hancock painting, confidently meet the gaze of the viewer. However, both paintings depict the ayahs with downcast eyes to indicate their servility. In the Clive/Hancock portrait, the ayah’s depiction in a kneeling-down position, indicates her subservience to the British family.

In the 1780s, the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings commissioned the famous European painter Johan Zoffany to paint himself and his wife Marianne (who was leaving for Britain) along with her ayah on the grounds of their Alipore mansion.

British imperial family portraits were usually commissioned just before or just after the family’s return home to Britain, suggesting that the ayah’s presence served as a nostalgic memorabilia of British imperial life.

The ayah wears a fine muslin shawl, golden-nagra shoes, and strands of pearls similar to Mrs. Hastings’, whose bonnet she holds. Although it is unlikely that ayahs possessed or wore expensive jewelry while working, the Clive/Hancock ayah and Joanna de Silva all wear elaborate gold ornaments on their hair, neck and arms. At a time when East India Company administrators like Clive and Hastings attracted criticism for their corruption and exploitation in India, the bodies of Indian ayahs decked in pearl and gold ornaments became canvases for their employers to showcase their benevolence and paternalism towards colonial subjects. 

Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of the newly-instituted Calcutta Supreme Court, and a friend of Hastings, also commissioned Zoffany to paint a conversation piece of his family in India

In the portrait, a band of strolling musicians entertain Lady Impey, seated on a European-style chair. In contrast to her Britishness, two bare-foot sari-clad bejeweled Indian ayahs sit on the floor, taking care of the youngest Impey child.  

The bodies of Indian ayahs became a foil to highlight the whiteness and racial purity of British women and children in the age of British moral shame about inter-racial relations and mixed-race children in the empire. ^{[4]Satyasikha Chakraborty, “From Bibis to Ayahs: Sexual Labour, Domestic Labor, and the Moral Politics of Empire”, in Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma (eds.) Servants’ Pasts, Vol.II (Orient Blackswan, 2019), 41-72.} The brownness of the Clive/Hancock family’s ayah, as well as Mrs. Hasting’s ayah, emphasized the whiteness and race/class purity of the British memsahib.

Artists also constructed race and class hierarchies in British family portraits through chiaroscuro techniques.

The painter Thomas Hickey was specially adept in making light stream in from an unknown source to illuminate the whiteness and implied race/class purity of the British child, while the dark ayah was deliberately placed in the shadows to obscure and further racialize her body.

While the identity of the subjects of Hickey’s second portrait (Young boy and his Ayah) is unknown, the first portrait was commissioned by Stephen Sullivan, one of the Directors of the Company. It shows his son Lawrence playing with his silk-sari-clad Indian ayah. Sullivan and Hadley (the patron of the Seton painting – see below), were leaving India for Britain in 1785 and wanted to carry with them sentimental mementos of their families, cared-for by Indian ayahs.

Other painters such as John Thomas Seton and Sarah Baxter followed the European convention of making servants blend with the background and tropical foliage in order to highlight the British subjects

Baxter’s painting is interesting as she was one of the rare female painters of the time, and she painted her own son with his ayah and bearer. 

Race was materially inscribed in British imperial paintings through the use of “Indian yellow” – a pigment produced through colonial South Asian labor – to paint the yellowish-brown skin of ayahs and other South Asians. ^{[5]Jordanna Bailkin, “Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette”, Journal of Material Culture, 10, no. 2, 2005, 197-214..}

Race and class hierarchies were also produced in British imperial family portraits through the deliberate positioning of Indian ayahs lower than the British subjects.

We see this in Hickey’s painting of the christening party of a British child in Madras, where the ayah kneels down so that her head appears lower than even the child’s.

Similarly, in George Duncan Beechey’s painting of a British woman and her children, the Indian ayah in a red-bordered-white-sari stands below the stairs, so that she appears as a diminutive figure, behind and below the children she looks after.

Paintings of ayahs with British families thus visually reinforced colonial power hierarchies. The ayah’s subservient position highlighted the superiority and status of British imperial subjects, including children. 

During the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the ayah’s love and loyalty became legendary in British imperial imagination.

In 1858, Joseph Paton produced a commemorative painting, depicting an Indian ayah hiding with a group of distressed British women and children, while a group of Indian rebel-sepoys burst into their hideout.

The implication of sexual assault on the British women by Indian men caused such an outrage that Paton eventually replaced the Indian sepoys with valiant Scottish Highlanders coming to rescue the women.

In another 1858 painting by Abraham Solomon, we see a faithful Indian ayah carrying an English child and escaping with the British residents from Mutiny-hit Lucknow.

Neither Paton nor Solomon had ever been to India. Yet they contributed to the visual construction of the trope of the faithful Indian ayah who identified more with the British family rather than her own community at this moment of violence. Despite glorifying the ayah’s fidelity, Solomon racialized the dark ayah by strategically placing her in the tree’s shadow while moonbeams illuminate the British women and children, highlighting their whiteness. 

The ‘Indian ayah – British child’ dyad came to be greatly sentimentalised in the post-1857 decades.

Several artists painted young British children lovingly nestled in the laps of their Indian ayahs. In 1865, Alexander Grant, the Inspector of Schools in Madras, commissioned an oil painting of his infant son on the lap of his ayah:

In 1866, George Reid commissioned a portrait of his daughter Edith in the arms of an Indian ayah who had accompanied them to New Zealand. While Edith returns the viewer’s gaze, the ayah looks away.

In 1879, Emma Fullerton painted an ayah carrying a British child while another child sleeps behind her. Unlike the bucolic setting of the 1865 and 1866 paintings, Fullerton’s painting is set inside the ayah’s hut (with wicker stools, clay and brass pots).

A discretely positioned gun stands against the left wall hinting at an 1857-setting. The ayah has hidden the British children from the rebels; perhaps a reflection of Fullerton’s own childhood in India. The ayah’s affection for British children in these paintings naturalized her inherently caring disposition. Again, the Ayah’s downcast or averted eyes visually indicate her subservience to the British family, even as the love of the brown ayah for the white child was sentimentalized. 

In the late-colonial period, the ayah became a stock character in British children’s fictions set in India.

The typical plot of these fictional stories centered around devoted ayahs risking their lives to save British children (lost in the jungles) from ferocious tropical beasts. Colorful illustrations in these books strengthened the stereotype of the faithful ayah for young British readers, even those who had never been to the empire. In Edith and her Ayah, for instance, the ayah is ready to give up her life for Edith when a Bengal tiger attacks.

Similarly, in The Jungle Baby, the ayah picks up the British boy and runs to safety when a poisonous snake comes to the garden. Playing on British fantasies of the “Orient”, the “tropics”, and the “faithful ayah”, The Jungle Baby opens as follows: “There was once a little baby boy called Bab-ba, he had bright blue eyes and golden curls, and he had Ayah for his nurse. She had been with Bab-ba ever since he was quite a tiny baby in long robes, and she was very fond of him. Her name was Jeejee-walla, but they just called her Ayah.”

Not only European painters, but South Asian painters were also deployed to paint British imperial domestic life with ayahs.

Back in the 1780s, the Impeys, who had commissioned Zoffany to paint their family in Calcutta, had also commissioned the Patna-painter Shaikh Zain-ud-din to paint the Impey children tended by five Indian ayahs inside the imperial nursery.

Artists trained in Mughal-style paintings (previously called miniatures) were losing patronage in the regional courts with the ascendancy of the East India Company, and looked for commissions from Company officers, creating a hybrid art-style (Company kalam) combining Mughal and Rajput influence with Western perspectives to suit their British clientele.

In 1846, John Spencer Login, Resident surgeon in Lucknow, and later the guardian of Duleep Singh of Punjab, commissioned an Awadhi artist to paint his three children in the nursery with their Indian ayah and their Indian playmate, perhaps the ayah’s child?

Not all imperial Britons could afford to commission paintings of their own families and servants. Indian painters, meanwhile, produced sets of paintings on mica or paper, depicting Indian servants working in British households, particularly the ayah holding a British child.

These affordable, hybrid stylized paintings had ethnographic and exotic value for British collectors even though their artistic value was doubtful. It allowed them to take back souvenirs of Indian servants painted by Indian artists themselves. 

In the late-colonial period, photographs and postcards perpetuated the visual template of race, class, and gender set by the early-colonial oil portraits of ayahs.

These postcards reproduced the racialization, idealization, maternalization, and exoticization of ayahs from earlier oil portraits. Only wealthy British families could commission family portraits and photographs. But mass-produced postcards provided a cheap means to ordinary British people to collect images of the Indian ayah and experience imperial pride and racial belonging in the heyday of the British Empire. The ayahs in postcards also stood as representatives of Indian women for Britons who had never been to India. 

Hand-painted Photographic Postcards

The arrival of photography in the late-1800s provided a new medium for the visual representation of ayahs. Instead of commissioning paintings, British families in India now commissioned studio-photographs of their children tended to by ayahs.

Deemed as more “authentic” than paintings, photographs of British families with their Indian ayahs were in fact, highly “staged”. Hand-tinting the black and white photos (often by local painters) allowed them to be imbued with the Imperialist and Orientalist expectations of British clients.

These hand-tinted photos of ayahs were sometimes turned into postcards, although some of these women also posed in other roles, suggesting they were not ayahs at all, but professional photographic models.

Illustrated Postcards of Ayahs

In the “Golden Age of Postcards” in the early 1900s, postcard publishers commissioned illustrations of ayahs to British artists as well as Indian artists (such as M.V. Dhurandhar – see below). ^{”Satyasikha}

Illustrated Postcards of Ayahs, early 1900s

Illustrated Postcards of Ayahs, early 1900s

Despite the hypervisibility of the ayah in British imperial visual culture from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s, these images tell us little to nothing about the lives and experiences of Indian ayahs as they toiled in the British imperial home.

Historians have unearthed painful stories of ayahs facing abuse and abandonment by British employers, from legal archives.^{[7]Victoria Haskins, “Mrs. Browne and the Bengalis: An Early Transcolonial Story of Domestic Service, 1816-1821”, Asian Studies (ICAS 12), June 2022, Vol.1, 216-224; Satyasikha Chakraborty, “’Nurses of our Ocean Highways’: The Precarious Metropolitan Lives of Colonial South Asian Ayahs”, Journal of Women’s History (Summer 2020), no.2, 37-64; Olivia Robinson,“Travelling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Global Networks and Mobilization of Agency,” History Workshop Journal, no. 86 (2018): 44-66.} The visual archive of ayahs completely erases those life-stories. These visuals however tell us a lot about British cultural attitudes towards colonial subjects, particularly colonial women who provided domestic labor. They demonstrate how British employers and painters imposed Eurocentric and Orientalist stereotypes upon Indian ayahs. The early colonial oil portraits of ayahs, set a visual template of race, class, and gender, further perpetuated by photographs and postcards in the late-colonial period. Despite the visual veneration of the ayah and romanticization of the ayah-child bond, the images, as this essay shows, served as tools of empire. The sentimental images of ayahs ultimately upheld British colonial hierarchies and naturalized the care-labor of brown women for white families.