Abstract
Contrary to popular notions of “Indian women” representing weak and tradition-bound vulnerable victims of patriarchy is the image of a female mineworker sweating in Indian collieries. It is an image that is hidden from the direct gaze of social scientists looking for “labor” or the “working class” in the mines. Conventional Western stereotypes of labor and industrial relations are characterized by hard management, wage and capital and the archetypal proletariat,1 the coal miner also tends to dominate and hides from view women in nontraditional roles such as those in mining. When women and the mines are indeed written about, women are seen as members of mining communities and their roles as miners’ wives tend to shadow the various productive roles they played and still play in and around the mines.2
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Notes
Campbell, Alan B. and Reid, Fred. The Independent Collier in Scotland,’ Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered, ed. Royden, Harrison, Sussex (England: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 54–74. Harrison’s 1978 book on the tensions an “independent collier” as archetypal proletariat faces between existences as “honorable men or degraded slaves”.
Eriko Furumura, “The Heritage that the organization of Miner’s Wives Left in Their Community: Especially about ‘Tanpukyou.’” Paper presented to the “International Mining History Conference,” Akabira, Hokkaido, Japan, September 2003. Kathy Robinson, “Love and Sex in an Indonesian Mining Town,” in Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, ed., Krishna Sen and Maila Stevens (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Also see Gibson-Graham’s work on how women’s organizations in Australian coal mining towns gained legitimacy by supporting men’s struggles. J.K. Gibson-Graham, “‘Stuffed if I Know!’: Reflections on Post-modern Feminist Social Research,” Gender, Place and Culture 1, no. 2 (1994): 205–224.
Amarjit Kour, “Labour Dynamics in Plantations and Mining: An Historical Perspective” in Changing labour Relations in South East Asia ed. Rebecca Elmhirst and Ratna Saptari (London: Curzon, 2001). Kayoko Yoshida and Reiko Miyauchi, “Invisible Labour: Comparative Oral History of Women in Coal Mining Communities of Hokkaido, Japan, and Montana, USA, 1890–1940.” Paper presented to the “International Mining History Conference,” Akabira, Hokkaido, Japan, September 2003.
For example, the phonological feature unvoiced-voiced, the antonyms long-short, the grammatical relations singular-plural and active-passive. In such binary oppositions (contrasts) the poles also represent asymmetry such that one pole may be more special or specialized, more focused or constrained, less general and more complex than the other. In such cases, the specialized element is said to be marked and the more general one unmarked. The first discussion of markedness in modern linguistics originated in 1930s in the writings of the Prague school of structural phenologists Nicolai S. Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. For more details on the development of markedness in linguistics, see R. Asher, and J. Simpson (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994).
P. Hage, “Marking Theory and Kinship Analysis: Cross-Cultural and Historical Applications,” Anthropological Theory 1, no. 2 (June 2001): 197–211 (15).
I am aware that the concept of colonial discourse is a highly complex one and a contested terrain. In this chapter, I use the term in the sense of a domain in which social practices and institutions pertaining to the colonial enterprise — such as the collieries—created marked identities for women and men. For a deeper analysis, see Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (NY and London: Methuen, 1998); or Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Malavika Karlekar, “Kadambini and Bhadralok: Early Debates over Women’s Education in Bengal,” Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Women’s Studies 21 (1986): WS 25–31; Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Himani Bannerji, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism. (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2001), 4.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Mining and Urbanization in the Raniganj Coalbelt (Calcutta: The World Press, 2002); Sunil Kumar Munsi, Geography of Transportation in Eastern India under the British Raj. CSSSC Monograph 1 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co, 1980).
Harasankar Bhattacharyya, Zamindars and Patnidars: A Study of Subinfeudation under the Burdwan Raj (Burdwan: Burdwan University Publication Unit, 1985).
Detmar Rothermund and D.C. Wadhwa (eds.), Zamindars, Mines and Peasants: Studies in the History of an Indian Coalfield and Its Rural Hinterland (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1978).
K.C. Mahindra, Indian Coalfields Committee Report (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1946).
S.M. Kumarmangalam, Coal industry in India: Nationalisation and Tasks Ahead (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co., 1973).
Ranajit Guha, (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Various Volumes (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982–1997).
Caste has been famously described by Risley as the smallest endogamous group of people in Indian society. H.H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Volumes I & II (Calcutta: Firma KLM (P) Ltd., 1998) [original edition 1891]. Beteille has given the simplest definition of caste as “a system of enduring groups whose mutual relations are governed by certain broad principles.” Andre Beteille, Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Louis Dumont declared the uniqueness of caste-bound Indians as “Homo Hierarchicus.” (L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966].) This has been severely criticized by Dipankar Gupta, “Continuous Hierarchies and Discreet Castes.” Economic and Political Weekly XIX nos. 46–48 (1984): 1955–1958, 2003–2005, 2049–2053. Though “caste” is predominantly a Hindu phenomenon, similar groupings are also found among Muslims and Christians in India. The caste division of Indian society is in the realm of “cultural” relations, and Marx’s formulation of caste for class is opposed to this cultural interpretation. Bayly dates the making of modern day caste to the eighteenth century and colonial intervention, which increased the stake that Indians had in their “traditional” caste order. See Susan Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India: Caste, Society and Politics from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
The government of India sees the presence of “lower caste” called the Scheduled Castes population as a criterion of backwardness in a region. However, Rudd has recently shown that in some rural areas of Bengal, being of a “lower caste” attributes greater political empowerment. See Arild Engelsen Rudd, “The Indian Hierarchy: Culture, Ideology and Consciousness in Bengali Village Politics.” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (1999): 689–732. Mukherjee noted that today caste is denoted more and more as identification within the class-stratum its constituents belong to. See Ramakrishna Mukherjee, “Caste in Itself, Caste and Class, or Caste in Class.” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 27 (1999): 1759–1761.
Barbara Joshi, ed., Untouchables! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement (London: Zed Books, 1986).
Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
J.C.K. Paterson, Bengal District Gazetteers: Burdwan (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1910).
Rakhi Ray Chaudhury, Gender and Labour in India: The Kamins of Eastern Coalmines, 1900–1940 (Calcutta: Minerva, 1996).
Pabitrabhaskar Sinha, Development of the Mineral Industries of Bihar-Muzaffarpur (Calcutta: Calcutta Book House, 1975).
R. Guha, Bengal District Records: Burdwan (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1955).
Margaret Read, The Indian Peasant Uprooted (London: 1931).
For more discussions on the cultural rootedness of industrial labor force in Bengal. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989) and Arjan de Haan and Samita Sen, A Case for Labour History: The Jute Industry in Eastern India (Calcutta: KP Bagchi & Company, 1999).
See, e.g., Yameema Mitha, Nigat Said Khan, Masood Anwar, and Asmaa Javed Pal, Patterns of Eemale Employment in Mining and Construction Industries (Islamabad: Ministry of Women Development, Government of Pakistan, 1988).
Amrita Basu, Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women’s Activism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Jhabvala first showed how retrenched women workers from cotton mills of Ahmedabad in west India were pushed into lower-paying and insecure jobs. (Renana Jhabvala, “From the Mill to the Streets: A Study of Retrenchment of Women from Ahmedabad Textile Mills,” Manushi 26, no. 2 [1985]: 2–5.) Banerjee (Inventing Subjects) noted the lack of political protection of women workers by unions in the unorganized sector. Basu (Two Faces) demonstrated that in the textile industry in South India, gender segregation is most marked in the mills where regulation and trade union activity is more evident. Fernandes showed how the politics of gender, class, and culture produces notions about the spheres of work of women and men. (Leela Fernandes, “Beyond Public Spaces and Private Spheres: The Politics of Gender, Family and Community in the Calcutta Jute Mills,” Feminist Studies 23, no. 3.)
Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Shahbano,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed., Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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© 2006 Jaclyn J. Gier and Laurie Mercier
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Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2006). Kamins Building the Empire: Class, Caste, and Gender Interface in Indian Collieries. In: Gier, J.J., Mercier, L. (eds) Mining Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_5
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