This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging ‘ideal’ servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.

中文翻译：

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家庭焦虑，顽固的亲密关系：殖民地印度印地语印刷文化中的仆人代表

本文通过研究二十世纪初印度北部各种印地语印刷文学中的仆人代表制，来介绍家庭工人与其雇主之间的权力关系的社会历史，包括教辅手册，流行杂志，改良主义者的著作和漫画。 。通过探索代表性表述中的可能性，它探索了在印地语印刷领域如何围绕仆人和雇主展开有争议的论述。这篇文章将仆人的刻画与阶级，阶级和宗教动态的变化联系在一起，其中的印刷品与物质环境相交，从而塑造了仆人和雇主之间的等级关系。在想象“理想”的仆人时，北印度语也充斥着他们的负面伴侣和对情妇和仆人之间的人际交往的焦虑，这是从当时的生活和阶级社会关系中得到的。达利特人的主张越来越强，印度教徒与穆斯林之间的对抗日益加剧，这种烙印在占统治地位的种姓和阶级对下属种姓和穆斯林仆人的刻画上留下了印记。在仆人-雇主关系中，白话跨越了距离/欲望和恨/爱的这些领域。