Chapter 2 traces the growing sentimentalization of the Indian ayah in nineteenth-century British imagination. Mrs. Sherwood’s relationship with her Indian maidservants is explored through her voluminous missionary writings, which reveal the role of Christianity in shaping mistress–maid relations in the British Empire. The chapter then explores why, during moments of colonial violence, such as the 1806 Vellore Mutiny and particularly the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the Indian ayah’s fidelity to the white family became so important in British imperial imagination. In British visual and literary culture, particularly in missionary literature, the Indian ayah’s loyalty morally legitimized British colonial rule during the turbulence of Indian rebellions and later Indian anti-colonial nationalism. The period of growing sentimentalization of the ayah, however, was also a period of growing legal precarity for ayahs, with the relaxation of older legal paternalism and the disappearance of earlier gendered legal sympathy towards ayahs. Exploring cases of individual ayahs from legal archives, this chapter argues that the cultural veneration of the ayah’s fidelity concealed the vulnerability of real-life ayahs.