Is Lying a Coolie's Religion?' The Household Sammys and Marys of Colonial Natal, 1880-1920

This study is a close examination of the lives of Indian domestic servants in the colony of Natal between the years 1880 and 1920 and the relationship they shared with their white masters and mistresses. The article interrogates the intimacies of the settler home and the domestic space as the cocoon for the metamorphosis of these relationships set against the mechanics of indenture and colonial life. A comparative analysis of colonial India and the ways in which master/mistress-servant relationships were navigated, provide a useful framework to illustrate how interactions and experiences in India were often reproduced in Natal. The narratives of domestic servants in colonial Natal illustrate the ways in which racial domination worked through the ambivalences of intimacy and revulsions, desire and aggression; and how domestic service and the intimate space of the household became a locus of subalternity and racialised governance. In the making of effective and affective master/mistress and servant relations, the colonial state imposed a hierarchical domestic order that persisted with verve well into the 20th century.