Intimate Labour, Gendered Violence, and Exploitation among Live-in Home Care Workers in Kerala, India

Abstract

Paid live-in eldercare in private households in India has expanded, yet the sector remains weakly regulated and offers few enforceable rights. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Kerala with live-in caregivers, care recipients, and nursing agency owners, this article examines how intimate care is governed within private homes and why harm remains difficult to address. Gendered morality, caste hierarchy, and agency-managed silence set the terms of work. Agency manuals instruct workers to ‘love the patient like kin’ and to ‘be emotionally neutral’, which turns affection and patience into conditions of employment and channels disputes back to the agency. Since care is often framed as an extension of family duty rather than formal employment, incidents rarely enter criminal processes and are often overlooked within routine labour oversight. Caregivers respond through quiet resistance, from confronting discriminatory clients and concealing caste identity to setting limits and seeking transfers. However, change remains incremental without collective organisation. By tracing how emotion, caste, and agency mediation intersect in Kerala’s home care sector, the article demonstrates that treating this labour as kin-like duty blurs accountability, weakens protections, and reinforces unequal conditions in live-in home care.