Domesticity in Precarity

Abstract Histories of child removal have primarily focused on settler colonies, rather than other kinds of colonies. In British India, the separation of children from the Sansi population—a socially marginalized, low-caste, and itinerant group that was designated under colonial law as a “criminal tribe”—has not yet received the attention of historians. The story of Sansi child removal suggests that precarity can be both disruptive andproductive of domesticity, and furthermore, that precarity is often an ordinary part of domestic life. Methodologically, this article proposes the framework of “domesticity in precarity.” Histories of domesticity need to hold together the structural constraints on domestic life with the efforts of people to make many and varied relationships and households in conditions of precarity. Above all, interrogating the relationship between domesticity and precarity widens our view of the relationships and spaces that historically constituted the “domestic.”