Women’s Work in War and Famine
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-03-30

The role of working women in transnational wartime economy during the Second World War, with Urvi Khaitan.

Hidden beneath traditional historical narratives of colonial India in the early 1940s are the profound effects of war and famine on women. Low-caste and indigenous (Adivasi) women disproportionately bore the effects of galloping inflation and the burden of starvation. With a colonial state that failed them, they actively looked for ways to survive and, in doing so, became part of an immense global supply chain supporting the Allied Second World War effort.

Based on archival material including government and Communist Party records, newspapers, photographs, and film, this talk first traces the story of colonial India’s women beneath the surface – over 77,000 women miners who played a pivotal role in solving an Allied coal crisis while battling famine, inflation, and an increasingly coercive labour regime. Mining women became part of a transnational discourse on Indian female labour of a kind that had never existed before. The talk goes on to look at the women who were abandoned or sold by their families in the wake of the Bengal Famine of 1943 and found themselves in the Labour Corps, where they worked as manual labourers for the military by day and as sex workers by night. These working women, key actors in a transnational wartime economy, were at the frontline in a battle for survival.

 Urvi Khaitan is a doctoral student in economic and social history at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in gender, labour, and empire in 20th-century South Asia, and her doctoral work focuses on women in the South Asian wartime economy of the Second World War. Her article on the Indian women coal-miners who proved pivotal to the Allied war effort appeared in War & Society in August 2020 and is based on her MPhil dissertation, which was awarded the Feinstein Prize in 2019.