Ayahs in England: The journey from obscurity to a blue plaque

Ayahs' Home, Hackney, 1901. By the early 20th century, the Ayahs’ Home was run by the Christian missionaries in London and became a one-of-its-kind institute for the abandoned ayahs. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

On Thursday a blue plaque was mounted on a nondescript building in Hackney. 26 King Edwards Road, was the address – Ayahs’ Home – where abandoned ayahs primarily from India (and also China and Ceylon) were provided accommodation. For long consigned just about to the footnotes of history, the blue plaque, which commemorates the significance of a building because of its linkage with personalities or events, has now given an impetus to explore and investigate in greater detail the lives of the ayahs.

The journey for the blue plaque began with Farhanah Mamoojee, a resident of Hackney, watching a BBC show in 2018 where an elderly man spoke about how common it was for families sailing from India to England to have an ayah with them. As a child, he himself sailed under the care of an ayah. Neither did the elderly man remember the name of the ayah, nor did the Ayahs’ Home, which was also referred to in the show, show any trace of its extraordinary connection with a marginalised slice of British colonialism.

Mamoojee wanted to set this straight and thus began the quest for a blue plaque. The local Hackney Museum and few other academics interested or already working on the subject came together. One constant source of inspiration was the pioneering book by historian Rozina Visram. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947, published in 1986, provided the foundational work that brought into focus the presence of South Asians in Britain and did much to dispel the notion that it was only from the 1950s that they had settled down in England.

Within the hierarchy of Asians – maharajahs, nawabs, civil servants, lawyers, students, servants – who lived or spent time in Britain, the ayahs were on the wrong side both due to their gender and what scholar Satyasikha Chakraborty calls the class collusion of British and Indian employers. No doubt, the majority of the ayahs were brought by English families sailing to England on holiday or after retirement, but there were also rich Indian families who made use of their services for the daunting ship voyage.

When Visram began her research there were hardly any electronic resources or newspaper archives on websites. But there were enough references to pique her interest in the figure of the ayah. “Warren Hastings came to England with two servants who were returned as they were not working as hard as they were in India. There was the famous Joshua Reynolds painting, and also Julia Mills in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield who returns from India [with a black man and a copper-coloured woman in linen],” remembered Visram as she spoke at the Hackney Museum to an excited audience.

However advertisements in the 18th and 19th century newspapers about services by ayahs which she located on microfilms made her wonder what happened to them. Upon reaching England, many would be abandoned as the families would have no use for them, while some would live with them for varying duration. Advancements in shipping and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced the journey time considerably. The increased traffic and growing bureaucracy meant there would be young families in England too needing an ayah for the journey to resume duties in the sub-continent.

Some lucky enough to get such families would leave for the familiar climes of India, but the less fortunate ones had to deal with bureaucratic indifference and lead lives fashioned by the exaggerated sense of benevolence and piety that the benefactors expected. By the early 20th century, the Ayahs’ Home in Hackney was run by the Christian missionaries in London and became the most well-known and one-of-its-kind institute for the abandoned ayahs. It provided sanctuary and space to them, but the ayahs were also subject to persistent efforts to embrace Christianity. Details about their everyday lives and struggle are difficult to find as they do not seem to have left any accounts. But researchers and scholars are slowly covering the ground to get a wider picture.

Dr Jo Stanley at the University of Hull has put a figure of close to 1,000 ayahs coming to the UK between 1890 and 1960, with traceable records showing 308 who left. Dr Florian Stadtler shared the passport copy of ‘Anthony Ayah’ which points out that she perhaps managed to leave England. The ayahs took over the surnames of the families for whom they worked thus diluting their own identities and also making it difficult for researchers to trace them.

Several of them made multiple journeys over several years as the pay offered was much better. They could also accompany the families to Europe if the need be and in the process pick up elementary French or German, thus increasing their chances of employment.

In the wake of the 1857 uprising, ayahs in India came in for much praise for saving lives of English women and children on personal risks. Although writers like Rudyard Kipling and M.M. Kaye romanticised the ayahs to some extent as they raised English boys as Indians to save them, questions of morality too hovered around them. Interestingly, the ayahs have also been portrayed in some English works as a figure which gets empowered due to the foreign voyage to fight patriarchy in Indian society!

Scattered around in various untapped archives, and due to their own precarious position, the ayahs in contemporary sources are still largely silent and appear subjugated. Apart from local council (municipal) archives and the London City Mission Magazine where the Ayahs’ Home and ayahs themselves appear, they were also captured in paintings giving a glimpse of their tender care and affection.

Now that episodes of drunken parties, and some ayahs petitioning courts are filtering it is high time they come out of the façade of Victorian values. “It is a wrong notion to say that all these Indian women were docile,” reminds Visram. “These women were presented very differently. They are made to look smaller than they were. They could be related to me or to anybody. We should not pigeonhole them in Asian or British history, they are part of a global history,” said Mamoojee.

The suffragettes, codebreakers, Irish women’s army are all getting their due, and perhaps it is only a matter of time that the ayahs too will get theirs. For unlike the suffragettes and codebreakers, the ayahs still exist, just that they have other names too!