Caregiving at the Centre of Empire and the Contemporary World Order, 1930-2023
Exploring the vast and blurred domains of paid and unpaid caregiving, from 1930-2023 in South Asia and beyond.
Caregiving at the Centre of Empire and the Contemporary World Order, 1930-2023
05 Feb 2026, 12:00 – 13:00
The seminar will facilitate a discussion around Shalini Grover's book (soon in print with Cambridge University Press), that foregrounds the domains of paid and unpaid caregiving, from, 1930-2023, in South Asia and well beyond.
This long durée invites fresh appraisals of empire’s caregiving workforces and contemporary labour markets initiating several interventions and provocations in conversation with disciplinary traditions. In terms of method, she establishes a new social history–decade by decade, offering constructive directions for ‘writing caregiving back into history,’ grounded in ethnographic case studies from the circuits of empire and beyond.
Equally, in terms of definitions, she formulates caregiving as ‘polyvocal’, extending the political economy boundaries beyond everyday social reproduction activities of nurturing and life-making worlds to the realm of South Asian British histories, World War II, empire’s travelling servants, anti-colonial movements, mass migrations and how subaltern labours impacted momentous political turmoil.
The book is a bottom-up anthropological humanitarian project of how caregiving shaped empire and continues to shape the contemporary world.
This event will be particularly useful to researchers, policymakers, and teachers.
Related links
Image
Permission courtesy of Shalini Grover.
Dr Shalini Grover
Assistant Professorial Fellow and Visiting Fellow
London School of Economics; International Inequalities Institute
From 2007-2016, she was Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth Delhi. Her 2011 monograph (‘Marriage, Love, Caste, and Kinship Support’) features as a new international revised edition by Routledge (2018).
Her book, ‘Caregiving at the Centre of Empire,’ will soon be in print with Cambridge University Press, including a second book ‘Divorce Portals’ with Rutgers University Press, USA.
Further information
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