An Expat Journalist and His Servant

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  02.06.08 | 12:59 PM ET

imageExpat stories about maids and servants who come with a house abroad almost always make me wince. Alternately condescending, clueless and gloating, the stories are often never more than apologist reactions to a complicated cross-cultural issue.

But I warmed up to Eric Weiner’s essay in The New York Times Magazine about his fatherly attachment to Kailash, an 11-year-old orphan who worked as his servant in India.

Yes, the Western paternalism is still here; Weiner himself originally imagined the story playing out this way: “Orphaned Indian boy has fateful meeting with bighearted American; boy finally perserveres and is eternally grateful for bighearted American’s help.”

But Weiner is honest about how his own biases (and continued financial support of Kailash 12 years later) have both helped and jarred a young Indian man from a lower caste trying to live under his own country’s very different rules.

Related on World Hum:
* The Road to Happiness

Photo by babasteve via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Tags: Asia, India

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


4 Comments for An Expat Journalist and His Servant

Julia Ross 02.06.08 | 3:03 PM ET

Joanna, I read this too, and really liked it.

John M. Edwards 02.07.08 | 12:01 AM ET

Hi Joanna:

I know what you mean. Travel tales involving foreign domestic “servants” is a dietary staple that is hard to pull off anymore. Objectifying butlers and maids in a colonialist Weltanschaung oft times ends up with something funnier and more unpolitically correct than the Simpsons.

I haven’t read “Orientalism” yet, by Edward Said, but this issue is supposedly covered ad infinitum. Still I have to laugh when I hear people talking about “ethnic” eateries and such bloopers as, “We’re biased” (whatever that means). I guess it’s safer to walk on eggshells, even here in the US, about how different cultures are perceived.

For example, I still get fliers in the mail asking for money from “The United Negroe College Fund.” Which sounds a little funny to the modern ear. A good copyeditor would probably change the name to “The United African-American College Fund,” except then it would sound like a different organization.

Anyway, Eric Weiner’s essay is a well-meaning attempt at the memsahib mentality.

bharati 02.27.08 | 5:34 PM ET

Only a western person would have the stupidity and temerity to think that other Indians do not help their own “staff”. Just about every family that can, has pushed a servant to a higher economic or educational platform. But then that is not a great white story is it? And what would a story about India be without mentioning caste? Certainly not palatable to the west. The NY Times would never publish it.

stev 04.25.08 | 3:41 PM ET

yes in india, high cast say india is shining they imitate western culture and so on . when somone critisise the about there treatment of lower casts .  they   comeup with   anger. that we seen here.  in north india a cow is more valued than a lower cast human.

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