Hyderabad, Aug. 27 -- By Emaan Chimote and Manisha Dhulipala

In Hyderabad, the quiet rhythm of economically privileged life is maintained by an equally quiet workforce-women who clean, cook, and care for the homes of others while remaining absent from most records of formal labour. Domestic work is essential to the functioning of the city, yet workers remain relegated to the informal sector, unrecognised, underpaid, and unprotected. They sustain households, but their own lives are marked by invisibility.

This invisibility is neither incidental nor new. The interlocking hierarchies of caste, gender, and religion have long structured domestic work in India. In Telangana, as elsewhere, it is overwhelmingly women from minority and marginali...