The question of labour and its invisibility has been an important concern for feminist scholarship in India. However, housework and the gendered division of labour have yet to garner enough attention, even though paid domestic has been extensively researched in the past two decades. What eludes the question the housework in the Indian context? It is either in the absence of domestic workers or in the context of Motor Vehicles Act (MVA) related compensation that housework and its valuation come up. Scholars have attributed this arbitrary treatment of housework to the composition of feminist circles, particularly the urban middle class that can outsource the most arduous parts of housework. This feature, which is peculiar to the Indian middle classes, came to a halt during the pandemic, and suddenly the labour of the housewife became hyper-visible. The paper explores this brief but critical period of the lockdown in upper-middle-class homes and the reconfiguration of domestic labour.
Based on the larger public discourse and personal narratives of middle-class women, the paper highlights what aspects of housework get highlighted as ‘burdensome’. The pandemic offers a window to understand the politics of division of labour and the very definition of what came to be understood as ‘housework’ in the absence of domestic workers. I argue that the axis of purity /pollution is central to the notion of ‘respectability’ of a task and who performs then. Thus, what emerges is a hierarchy between various chores and the allocation of these chores.
