“Knock twice, not three times. If someone banged your door hard, wouldn’t you get cross?” asks Preeti, a woman in her early twenties with a bachelor’s degree in political science – which may come in useful when preparing the group of women she now instructs on the art of being a superior maid. “Madam gets cross too. Knock on the door lightly like this, and ask for permission to come in.”

Suddenly there is a loud bang on the door, which startles Preeti. The kudawala has come to pick up the garbage; he asks for it in a sullen tone with little apparent care for how his knocking is received. Much giggling ensues among the women.

The knocking class is taking place in a suburb of Gurgaon (this north Indian city was recently officially renamed Gurugram, but few people use that name) in a small house rented by The Maids’ Company – a firm set up, like so many others, to try and earn a profit from the demand for help.

For the most part, the newly enriched in India are not bursting with compassion and generosity for others

It hopes to do so in a more ethical way, however. In return for wages pegged to the local minimum wage, a rarity for maids, the company tries to take the “rough edges” off the young Bengali and Bihari migrant women it recruits, thus reducing the amount of time “Madam” will have to spend showing someone how the home of an upwardly mobile family works.

Lovely and her friend Renu are two teenagers who arrive in the middle of the knocking class. They immediately stand out from the other maids, who are mostly older and married. Both look rather like memsahibs, or the children of memsahibs, themselves.

The other women at The Maids’ Company wear their oiled hair tied tightly back, with red sindoor in their partings to signal their married status, and are dressed in slightly frumpy, loose-fitting salwar kameez or saris with loud prints. Lovely and Renu wear their hair long and loose, like the madams do, and have carefully tailored outfits.

Lovely’s younger sister already works as a nanny for The Maids’ Company, and it was Lovely’s idea to bring her friend Renu here – as well as to change her own job, since her long-time madam is being obstinate over a raise. “They’ll spend 5,000 rupees on themselves at a club in one night,” she vents to me later, “but if we ask for 2,000 rupees more, it’s too much money.”

Renu is a student; she wants to work until she saves enough for her tuition fees, which increased soon after she started college. She is married, though there is no sindoor in her brown hair, and clearly has mixed feelings about being here. As the interviewer presses her about what sort of work she’s willing to take on, her reluctance becomes more apparent.

“When the baby is sleeping, what will you do?” asks the interviewer, a woman in her late thirties. “I’ll do odd-jobs around the house,” says Renu.

“What odd jobs will you do? Will you knead atta for rotis? For 12 hours, you won’t only be doing childcare, especially if the child goes to school for three or four hours. And tell me what you won’t do.”

“Sweeping and mopping,” Renu responds swiftly.

“For sure, there will be a cook and cleaning woman. But suppose she goes on holiday. Would you do the sweeping then?”

Renu mulls this over, looking increasingly grave. “I guess I could do that. But I won’t do toilets.”

Victims of violence

A job as a servant in India, even at the lower end of the salary range, can provide a very real opportunity of extracting a family from the ranks of the millions of extremely poor. It can also be a portal into near-enslavement.

Nowhere is this more true than in Delhi, the city-state with a per capita income three times the national average. With luck and the right networks, a woman here might circulate in a micro-economy populated by foreign-returned Indians and expats, or affluent and progressive local families – in whose homes she can sometimes earn as much as 30,000 rupees (£360) a month, plus room and board.

Overtime and other perks could bring these earnings close to that of a nurse at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) or a professor at Delhi University. Such a job would allow her, before she retired, to own a home of her own, educate her children, and help them become firmly white-collar.

The relations most Indians have with their servants grew out of the feudal rights of rural landlords. Photograph: Pallavi Gaur/Aleph Book Company

An unluckier woman – or, more likely, a young teen – might be recruited by an aunt, brother-in-law or other relative close enough to win the confidence of her parents, but not so close that they would be genuinely concerned about her fate once they had collected the fee for finding her.

Once in the city, they would probably leave her in the hands of a broker – barely an acquaintance – who in turn would place her in a home whose address might never be passed on to her parents. She might not see her village again until her family, alarmed that she had not returned for festival after festival (or sent money), borrow the train fare from friends and neighbours and come to the city to look for her.

This sequence of events happens often enough that a small group of non-profit organisations, founded over the past 15 years, focuses largely on reuniting parents with girls taken to the city to be maids. Cut off from the outside world, many of these young women have become victims of violence, ranging from beating to sexual assault in the homes in which they work.

Disturbingly, it is also women – freed to have careers outside the home by the help they have hired – who are increasingly alleged to be the perpetrators of this violence, appearing as villains in newspaper stories about abused maids.

In one, a public school teacher was jailed for beating her maid to death. In another, a thin and wizened teenage maid was found with her ears so swollen that doctors diagnosed it as a boxer’s injury. In a third, a trauma nurse at AIIMS was accused of giving her maid a black eye.

Occasionally – much, much more rarely – the transgressions go in the other direction. A lone, elderly man or woman will be murdered by a newly hired servant; a family is tied up, beaten and robbed by the newly hired, unvetted help dispatched by a maid broker.

Or, the most common of these “reverse” transgressions: upon a death, a much-trusted and loved old servant will unexpectedly come forward with a will the family knows nothing about, bearing the unmistakable, if shaky, scrawl of the now-deceased family member. In some cases, the maid may tell authorities she was the deceased’s “all but in name” wife.

These dramas often remain hidden until they end up on the front pages of newspapers or in courtrooms, reminding us that despite the promise of its clean, carefully kept, dust-free interiors, the home is no refuge from the rage and conflict of the street.

The new masters

For the most part, the newly empowered and newly enriched in India are not bursting with compassion and generosity for others. And this should be no surprise. When government and law have little to tell you about how to treat the people you find yourself in a position of power over, then you may allow yourself to be guided by what you have seen done before, and what you still see others around you doing.

The relations most Indians have with their servants grew out of the feudal rights of rural landlords over people who owed them service in return for being tenant farmers or because of their caste group. As such, they are dotted with signposts that signal the superiority of the employers over the people who work for them.

Police in a New Delhi suburb stand guard after locals attacked the housing colony in July, alleging mistreatment of a housemaid. Photograph: Sunil Ghosh/Getty Images

The gulf between what we say we believe in, as members of the country’s elite, and how we actually live is so immense that it doesn’t even merit being called hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires at least some awareness of the great distance between one’s actions and one’s claims.

Nowhere is this distance so visible – and yet we seem blind to it – as when we are at home. Across Delhi, for example, as many of us became wealthy enough to redevelop modest homes into much larger ones, we did not increase the amount of space we were willing to give to live-in help.

Today's domestic workers no longer consider themselves far beneath the people they work for

Instead, the help’s quarters often shrank and made way for sprawling marble bathrooms, walk-in closets and gigantic living rooms, where the people who rent or buy these new apartments discuss with their friends – who live in similar kinds of houses – how India can lift herself out of poverty.

Meanwhile, the servants live on the roof in a boiling tin shack measuring 60 square feet. Adults like to joke about the difficulties their toddlers face in grasping the concept of sharing, but most grown-ups clearly haven’t mastered it either.

Such jarring contrasts between word and deed are everywhere. In homes built with public funds for the government employees of a nation whose constitution commits to fostering equality and fighting caste discrimination, the bathrooms have separate doors through which the toilet cleaner is expected to enter. Across the capital, you will find homes frequently have “service lanes” – back alleys – to be used by the help so they don’t appear at, and sully, the front door.

People who claim to be free of caste bias don’t allow women who clean bathrooms to cook for them, citing hygiene. And left-leaning professors at elite Delhi universities, who usually lament the effects of privatisation and unfettered capitalism on the Indian workforce, suddenly highlight the importance of paying the “market rate” when they think a friend is paying her maid too much.

The new masters – the new rich, and newly empowered women – are drawing on the long history of how masters treat servants in India. So why do we feel as if something has changed, as if relations are more prickly, more prone to erupt into conflict than they were in the past?

When Indian social relations were more static, they may have conveyed an appearance of greater peace and social harmony – even if this placidity was one of brutal oppression of one group by another, and the acceptance of this oppression. In contrast, a society in motion, which offers the chance for reinvention and advancement, can look disturbingly disordered.

A growing proportion of the people who are in domestic service come from all different points of the class and income scale – sometimes much closer to the lower ranks of their “1% employers” than to the bottom ranks of the 99%. These workers no longer consider themselves far beneath the people they work for – and sometimes refer to their newly middle-class employers with open contempt.

“These people have 25,000 or 30,000 rupees a month, that’s all,” says one domestic worker at a rights group meeting in West Delhi, of her employers. Another, at the same meeting, sniffs, “At home my employer hangs around in an old, torn petticoat. If she doesn’t have anything better to wear herself, then what will she give to you?”

People imagine the class struggle to be something that takes place outdoors, in streets, with masses of workers waving placards and storming the factory gates. But when the battles comprise women against men, women against other women, and servants against masters, then it is the home, not the streets, that becomes the front line.

These conflicts, which come to a head in the Indian capital and other buzzing, growing cities like it, don’t begin there, however. Their seeds are planted thousands of miles away, when a family in a farming village or relief camp turns its gaze towards the distant capital, in the hope of something better.