This is an important study of domestic workers and their employers in Kolkata and within the Bengali community in New York. The study views the home as a site where relations of class, gender and caste/race are produced and reproduced via domestic labor practices. As Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum clearly demonstrate, domestic servitude confuses and complicates the conceptual divide between family and work, custom and contract, affection and duty, precisely because the hierarchy and emotional registers of “home and family” coexist and compete with “workplace and contract.” This book conceives of the relations within the household as a microcosm of the rules and comportment of societies, with the institution of domestic servitude providing a powerful lens through which to view social constitution and reconstitution over time (p. 2). The authors link this study, not only to cultural studies of Bengal and India, but to a number of studies of...

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