In Bangladesh, there is no minimum wage for those in domestic service, nor weekly holidays, nor working hours per day. And there is no public discourse around this issue.
I approached urban, middle-class women and told them that I wanted to take their portraits together with their housemaid, seated on the drawing-room sofa. I wanted to break the ‘spatial’ taboo in urban middle-class homes, which is basically a class taboo. Although the mistress and the housemaid inhabit the same domestic space, their social and economic privileges and their ideological worth are poles apart. I wanted to explore the possibility of creating bonds of intimacy among women who are unequal according to dominant norms – norms which we ourselves internalize.
