Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.

中文翻译：

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“验证”的谱系：在殖民时期和后殖民时期的印度监管主仆关系

在当代印度的许多城市中，警察对家庭佣人的核查已成为标准做法。然而，将家庭佣工置于劳动保护法之下的工作正规化仍在进行中。本文回顾了很长的时间跨度，展示了对仆人的警务是如何通过识别和验证的实践来制度化的。它着眼于 18 世纪后期为家庭佣工出现的更大的监管机制内的登记历史。然而，对仆人的控制在其随后的发展中并不是线性的。注册作为一种控制工具在不断变化的法律规定生态系统中具有不同的含义。在十八世纪后期，它被讨论为直接嵌入主仆监管的逻辑中，这是从英国法律借来的模板。在 19 世纪后期，它越来越多地被视为正式监管手段的代表，尽管这种观点并未被普遍接受。该文章描绘了法律中包容和排斥结构的变化历史，认为对仆人的公开监管是殖民遗产的一种表现，其中仆人的身份与潜在的犯罪行为融合在一起。