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

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.