Abstract: Much in continuity with the global alarmist optics to demographic maturation and fertility transition, the status and future of elder care as a subject has become part of the academic discourse. In the Indian context, interest in the nebulous social gerontology could be partly attributed to the disruption in the traditional, family-centred care and disintegration of filial contracts. Contiguous to these, distrust in the healthcare system, dwindling care capital, and the limits of technologization and biomedicalization of death is leaving the older people and their filial networks in the urban landscapes to tread the alternative path — doling out care to ayahs to adapt to the care complexities either as a short-term or long-term arrangement. In contemporary India, the term ayah is used to refer to paid care workers hired for childcare and eldercare. They are inducted through ayah-care agencies as well as other informal routes. While home-based, family-centric, intergenerational care is deemed as time-tested and ideal for healthy ageing, ageing well and positive ageing, this emerging ayah-centred care has potential to move the needle. Often pitched against the trained nurses, ayahs are anointed as untrained, incompetent and unskilled for elder care. Contrarily through their experiential, grounded and “lay-knowledge”, ayahs render profound and layered insights on convalescent care, disability care, end-of-life care, dementia care and ambulatory care. They locate loneliness, dependency, mobility dysfunctions, loss of control, fractured intergenerational and interpersonal relations, disruption of selfhood at the cusp of bodily disintegration and loss of intimacy contributing to ambiguous and ambivalent ageing. Rooted in an understanding of well-being, sickness, and healing situated in their local, moral and cultural worlds, the knowledge repository of ayahs is the fulcrum for developing a new-age home-care model for the older people. Combining illness narratives and care narratives in conjunction with ethnographic field observations, this paper aims at strengthening the evidence for reimagined care resources and care actors for urban elders located in low to middle-income countries while straddling the discourse on care as right and care as extraction.
About the speaker: Sayendri Panchadhyayi is an Assistant Professor and Program Head of Sociology in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, RV University, Bangalore. She holds an honorary appointment as an Associate at the Centre for Care, attached to the University of Sheffield and an invited member in its International Partnerships Working Group. She is currently working on her solo-authored book under contract with Routledge, and has publications spanning across Taylor & Francis, Edward Elgar Publishing (Elgar Original Reference Series), Anthropology & Aging, Springer, Penguin India, and (in-preparation) Bristol University Press. She has acted as a reviewer for journals such as Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine (SAGE), Social Change (SAGE), Journal of Women & Aging (Taylor & Francis), Gender, Work & Organization (Wiley), Social & Cultural Geography (Taylor & Francis), Health Science Reports (Wiley), and Journal of Social and Economic Development (Springer).
Her areas of interests include ageing and life course, care, medical anthropology, death and bereavement, and feminist STS.