In British colonial imagination, the Indian ayah was idealized as an inherently nurturing, maternal figure, selflessly devoted to British women and children. The ayah archetype was not just a comforting construct, but morally legitimized British colonialism. Legal and medical archives, however, provide stories of individual ayahs facing financial and sexual abuse, caste-loss anxieties, and abandonment, which are occluded in the highly sentimentalized British literary and visual archives. The cultural veneration of the ayah, the Introduction argues, erased the vulnerabilities of real-life colonial caregivers. The Introduction situates the history of colonial care work in the historiography of domestic labor in South Asia, Britain, and colonial empires more broadly. It emphasizes the importance of bringing together the gendered domestic histories of race and caste, which historians typically study separately. The Introduction furthermore explains how the book draws theoretical and methodological inspiration from South Asian postcolonial subaltern studies and African American black feminist intersectionality to decolonize the history of domestic labor in the British Empire.