ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to read A Life Less Ordinary as a critical feminist practice that enables to address the question of self-writing and the persistent historical problem of domestic service from the point of view of the subaltern. Baby Halder a domestic worker comes from the state of West Bengal, which in the past housed the British imperial capital in the city of Calcutta until 1911, and was the first state in India to have an encounter with Western 'modernity'. Baby displayed a commitment to the ideology of 'social feminism' that emerged in the context of the newly educated 'respectable women' of the colonial era. Baby's story can be read as one of unequal developments in India where a vast majority of the female workforce, many of them underage and hence children, work as domestic workers. Initially, the Bill on the Protection of Women Against Sexual Harassment at Workplace, passed on December 17, 2010, did not even include domestic workers.
