The Treatment of Baby Haldar
This BBC "news" story gave me the strangest feeling of deja vu until I remembered that Outlook broke the story about six months ago.
"Baby Haldar worked as a maid in a home in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana, before turning her attention to a more creative passion.
Her first book, Aalo Aandhari (Light and Darkness), was published last year in Hindi.
Since then, two editions of the book have been printed."
Good for her. I remember a Jhumpa Lahiri story called 'The Treatment of Bibi Haldar', which attempted to take a compassionate look at the life of a downtrodden domestic servant in India (she's not the only one--from Manil Suri to Rupa Bajwa to Thrity Umrigar, there's a whole subgenre of Life Inside The Servants Quarters writing, most of it struggling hard not to be condescending). It's great to have the subaltern perspective instead of the more readily available Upstairs view of Downstairs life.






