Kamins Building the Empire: Class, Caste and Gender Interface in Indian Collieries

Abstract

Coal mining in modern India expanded during the British raj and proved to be one area where indigenous women took up productive roles in the labour process. The conventional images of ‘Indian women’ do not fit in the way women have performed the non-traditional roles in the mines since the mid-nineteenth century till about the time of independence.

Analyses of how Indian society in eastern India adopted and resisted modernity under colonialism have stressed the active roles of urban men and the separation of the ‘private and public spheres’, and women ‘learning’ the mores of modern society under the benevolent colonial patronage. Studies have also posited a somewhat passive role for women in Indian society, a typification that can be subjected to the critique that feminist scholars have mounted against the failure to accord agency to women. My own research in the collieries of eastern India region using interdisciplinary methodologies reveal a more complex gendered division of labour than what has been described for India.

In this paper I explore the differentiation of women and men’s roles in the collieries by using marking theory. Marking theory from Jakobsonian linguistics for characterising these different, but overlapping roles for women and men is used as the theoretical framework to explore different gender roles. The paper concludes by reassessing the place of women and men in the Indian collieries, emphasising the great complexity of gendered roles in mining and migrant settlement contexts. The paper deals with the fact that women of particular castes and ethnic groupings joined mining work as against class groupings that attempt to interpret labour in the mines. Thus, the Indian collieries provide ideal examples of a threefold interface of class, caste and gender that is explored by this paper using historical data, official statistics and interviews with women workers.

Keywords: Mining, Gender, women, India, Coal, History