The Hidden History of Indian Ayahs in Colonial Britain

How did the idea of writing stories of Indian ayahs during the colonial era occur to you?

It started when I stumbled across a short article about the Ayahs’ Home in Hackney, London. The name itself caught my attention. I had never heard of it before, and it immediately raised questions: who were these ayahs, and what brought them all the way to Britain? That curiosity led me into a much deeper exploration. I found that many Indian women, and in fact many women from various reaches of the empire, were taken across continents to work as nannies in England and many were later abandoned. It was a part of colonial history I had never encountered in textbooks, and it stayed with me until I felt I had to write about it.

How did your background in law influence your approach to writing historical fiction?

If anything, I think being trained as a lawyer sharpened my instincts for research. I’m used to following a trail of information, questioning what’s missing, and making connections between seemingly unrelated facts. That was especially helpful when dealing with a subject that’s so under-documented. Also, law taught me how to construct a narrative from fragmented material, something that’s very relevant in historical fiction, where you often have to build around the gaps. And on a thematic level, I think my legal background made me more sensitive to questions of power, agency, and structural injustice, which are central to Asha’s story.

Can you share more about Asha’s character and her journey towards self-determination?

Asha begins as a young girl in Shimla who’s thrust into adulthood after the loss of her father. Her circumstances compel her to shed her childhood, and find employment rather than return to school. She’s thrust into the world of the mysterious “goras”, the elites who have made Shimla their own.

She doesn’t start out as someone looking to challenge anything, she’s simply trying to survive. Over time, she becomes someone quietly pushing back against the roles she’s been handed. What interested me most was tracing how a person like that begins to form her own sense of self, not in grand, defiant gestures, but in small, often private decisions. Her story is about finding dignity not just in survival, but in becoming someone who can choose, even within constraint. The novel is very much about that slow, sometimes invisible process of self-determination.

How did you balance historical accuracy with creative liberties in your novel?

It was always important to me to stay respectful to the historical context. I did extensive research, reading as much as I could find about British life and society in the hill stations, the history of Shimla, the various passenger ships operated by the P&O Steam Navigation Company, the voyage from Mumbai to England, and of course, all about ayahs and the ayah home. But at the same time, fiction allows you to step into emotional truths that the archive doesn’t always capture. Asha is fictional, but her circumstances are based on real patterns and practices. I didn’t invent the backdrop, but I did create a character who could move through it in a way that felt emotionally real. So the history anchors the novel, but the heart of the story is personal.

There were moments when I was tempted to go further and to explore the lives of those ayahs who never found the Ayahs’ Home. However I ultimately chose not to delve into that issue too deeply in the narrative. Their stories would have required taking far more creative liberties than the other more grounded and historically supported trajectory, and it was also important to keep the narrative focused. Nevertheless, their fate is alluded to briefly in the book, and I hope readers will come away with curiosity about the paths not fully explored.

curious about whose stories get preserved and whose don’t. And I think it helped me approach this book with both empathy and a wider lens.

Did your upbringing in different cities across India influence your perspective on the colonial era?

It didn’t shape how I think about the colonial era directly, but it did deeply influence how I approached another one of the novel’s central themes: the idea of home. My parents came from villages in Bihar and small-town South India, and their lives took across India, then to Germany, the U.S., and then back to India. I myself grew up in various cities across the country, and people often asked me where I was “from.” It was a hard question to answer. Home, for me, wasn’t about which language I spoke or what food I ate. It became something more fluid, something you carry, rather than something you’re rooted in.

That question- what is home, and where does it live when you’ve been displaced- runs through The One Way Ships. Compared to my fortunate and privileged life, Asha’s life explores that question in much more dire circumstances. Asha’s journey isn’t just across physical space, but across identities. Like many migrant women, she has to figure out how to build belonging from the inside out. Writing about her allowed me to explore those questions in a more layered, emotional way.