ABSTRACT
This chapter compares different ways in which domestic servants in India and England used the courts, and the way their cases were differently represented in the Indian colonial and the British press respectively. The Apprentices and Servants Act of 1851 made no mention of physical abuse in its provisions; it merely endorsed a servant's dependent status by making employers legally obliged to supply 'necessary Food, Clothing, or Lodging' to servants under the age of eighteen. Carolyn Steedman's work on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggests that servants readily went before a magistrate to claim redress from their employers when they felt it necessary. The opinion expressed in The Pioneer newspaper that 'cuffs and stripes, and all kinds of corporeal maltreatment are recognised in India by Indians as well as Europeans, as more in accordance with the natural fitness of things than such phenomena would be thought in Europe' was not a unique one amongst Anglo-Indians.
