Men Diggers and Women Carriers: Gendered Work on Famine Public Works in Colonial North India

Abstract

The history of labour on public works construction is usually presented as a masculine experience, either because the workforce studied is mostly male, or because the labour of women remains unrecorded. Does the history of labour and wage on public works undergo change if we account for women labourers? This article examines this question in the context of famine public works in the second half of nineteenth-century India. State employment on public works was part of a famine relief programme and women, largely from agricultural labouring and small peasant families, worked on the construction of roads, railways, canals, and tanks. The article traces the development of task-gender association on famine public works both as a norm and in practice. Further, it analyses the evidence on negotiations made by women labourers themselves with the existing gendered notions of work and wage. This study contributes to the historiography of labour in a colonial context in two ways: first, it adds to the existing corpus on forms of labour extraction for construction work; and, second, it explores the question of women's work and remuneration outside factories, mills, and mines.