International Labor and Working-Class, Inc., Cambridge University Press International Labor and Working-Class History

International Labor and Working-Class, Inc.
"Without His Consent?": Marriage and Women's Migration in Colonial India

Author(s): Samita Sen
Source: International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 65, Agriculture and Working-
Class Formation (Spring, 2004), pp. 77-104
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-
Class, Inc.
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"Without His Consent?": Marriage
and Women's Migration in Colonial India
Samita Sen
Calcutta University
Abstract
An examination of the diverse patterns of women's migration challenges abiding stereo
types of Indian history the urban worker as a male "peasant-proletariat" and women as
inhabiting a timeless rural past When men opted for circulation between town and coun
try, wives and children undertook the actual labor of cultivation for the survival of "peas
ant-proletariat" households Men retained their status as heads of the family and, even
though absent for long periods, their proprietary interests in the village Yet towards the
end of the nineteenth century, many unhappy, deserted, and barren wives, widows, and
other women were able to escape to the burgeoning cities of Calcutta and Bombay and
the coal mines, where they experienced new processes of social and economic margmal
zation
Much attention has been given to women's migration to overseas colonies and the
Assam teagardens Such migration has been seen as doubly negative, not only harnessing
women to the exploitative contract regimes, but also subjecting them to sexual violation
A general assumption is that women were deceived, decoyed and even "kidnapped," since
there was no possibility of "voluntary" migration by women Such a view of women's re
cruitment was produced by a variety of interests opposed to women's, especially married
women's, migration, and eventually influenced the colonial state to legally prohibit, in
1901, women's "voluntary" migration to Assam plantations This provision was an explicit
endorsement of male claims on women's labor withm the family
Since the inception of colonial rule in the eighteenth century, the image of the
Indian worker has oscillated between the immobile peasant and the incessantly
migratory urban worker. The Indian Industrial Commission of 1918 expressed
this duality in the oxymoron "peasant-proletariat " In using this term to describe
industrial workers, the Commission bequeathed a conceptual legacy that has
continued to haunt Indian labor historiography Historians of labor have focused
on the "peasant-ness," the rural connection, of the urban industrial worker to
address a range of political questions related to "consciousness" and the mak
ing of a working class.1 Imagined almost invariably as men, these peasant-pro
letarians migrated alone or with other male kin from villages to industrial cen
ters to earn maintenance wages, access wider networks of credit, and provide
cash for rent and interest payments in the village Periodically they returned
from the city as a result of unemployment, sickness, fatigue, or the pull of social
and emotional associations with the village home. Thus migrant men were not
one-time permanent migrants to the industrial center; rather they were "peas
ant-proletarians," circulating between town and country. By implication, then,
International Labor and Working-Class History

No 65, Spring 2004, pp 77-104
2004 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc
78 ILWCH, 65, Spring 2004
wives and children were left behind in the village to eke out subsistence from
rural resources, since remittances from the city were sparse and sporadic Peas
ant women were considered not only immobile but also "invisible" as a result of
cultural norms of purdah, which required their segregation and seclusion Over
laid with associations of public and private spheres, the city appeared m these
accounts as a male space, while the village and its women acquired idyllic char
acteristics in repeated nostalgic retellings 2
Recent historical research suggests that the term peasant-proletariat has
obscured the fundamental gender implications of Indian class formation In fact,
as several scholars indicate, women and children, who remained in the village,
provided the actual labor of cultivation in "peasant-proletariat" households
The men retained their status as heads of the family and, even though absent for
long periods, their proprietary interests in the village By focusing on the urban
worker and "his" encounter with industrial capitalism, the workings of the
"peasant" half of the household has been either ignored or subsumed in stones
of class formation 3 Moreover, by relegating them to the background of class for
mation, earlier studies reduced women to static figures, perennially responsible
for subsistence and reproduction and for providing a rural buffer against the un
certainties of the urban labor market Men lived a dynamic industrial present,
women inhabited a sort of timeless rural past
While these revisionist historians have reclaimed rural women from the
dustbins of Indian labor history, their studies beg a third, equally important,
question were women really immobile9 Focusing on Assam tea plantations in
northeast India, this paper argues that they were not It asserts that women did
migrate for work, though not at the same rates as men, and that they were in
great demand away from their homes for both productive and reproductive pur
poses However, rather than becoming more mobile over time as a result of the
commercialization of agriculture, women became less mobile
The historiography on plantation labor in India has tended to ignore the
specificity of women workers' experiences of migration, even though in numbers
they nearly equaled men on tea plantations This may be because the literature
on "industrial plantation" labor has focused on "unfreedom" as its central char
acteristic, while for women, as this paper will show, migration to mines, mills,
and plantations was often a means to escape abusive husbands and the fetters of
family Wage labor for migrant women was too exploitive and restrictive to be
romanticized as a source of liberty, but migration often meant something differ
ent for women than it did for men, and its history merits exploration
Nineteenth-century rural women were pulled in two directions On one
side were their families who asserted a prior claim to women's labor and sexu
ality and whose demand for women's unpaid labor grew as the colonial state in
creased the tax burden on the rural poor Family members' claims on women's
labor were seconded by local landowning elites, the emerging mining industry,
and by local state functionaries, who saw family labor as the staple of north In
dian peasant economy On the other side were plantation interests in India and
abroad who advocated women's individual freedom to undertake migration
Marriage and Women's Migration in Colonial India 79
decisions on their own behalf Interestingly, colonial officials pulled in both di

rections at mid-century colonial authorities demanded that overseas planters
increase the number of women they recruited, so overseas male migrants would
disdain the prostitutes who so scandalized middle-class opinion Yet they were
later horrified at the destabilizing consequences of female migration, and thus
by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they tended to support
families' legal claims that women's migration was by definition involuntary be
cause young and married women were incapable of consenting to recruiters'
offers
This paper will examine various patterns of women's migration withm and
from northern India The first section surveys forms of women's migration that
did not challenge family control, but were often part of the household's strategy
of flexible deployment of women's labor within the rural economy The second
section focuses on forms of migration in which women participated both as
members of family units and as "single" migrants, as in migration to industrial
and mining settlements The third section briefly surveys women's recruitment
for overseas indentured emigration, while the fourth discusses the case of
women's migration to the Assam tea plantations, which evoked the most en
during images of coercive recruitment of women and provoked a sustained con
troversy over women's ability to "consent" to labor contracts In 1901 the Gov
ernment of India achieved legislative resolution through a new act that required
the consent of guardians in recruitment of women This Act signified, on the one
hand, an implicit acceptance of the importance of women's labor to the family
economy in the rural sector, and, on the other, an explicit endorsement of male
claims on women's labor within the family The family thus became a crucial
force in the deproletananization of women Men-husbands, fathers and other
"guardians"-now could exert legal as well as extra-legal powers to deny
women entry into plantations, the only nineteenth-century industry with a high
demand for female workers
In the Indian countryside, women were never just "peasants " Most women
in small and marginal peasant households were engaged in a wide range of ac
tivities, including not only the actual work of cultivation or supervision but also
petty commodity production, gathering and foraging, food processing, retail,
and even waged work 4 Because the range of tasks they undertook required pub
lic appearances, purdah norms were negotiated in a variety of ways to allow cir
culation of women when household strategies so dictated Clearly, rural women
were neither invisible nor immobile
In the nineteenth century, the colonial state's revenue policy made women's
labor even more critical to poor rural households Faced with spiraling rent and
revenue demands, heads of poor households passed some of the burden on to
women and children And as the state's new legal-juridical processes confirmed
and entrenched male ownership of land and capital, gender inequity within
households sharpened
Moreover, since family labor was crucial to the state's economic calcula
tions, state officials were committed to shoring up family authority, enhancing
the power of the paterfamilias, and reinforcing female and juvenile dependen
cy.5 Men were able to use their enhanced familial authority to access wage labor
in new sites of capitalist production, while women and children were relegated
to the less-rewarding subsistence and reproductive sphere From the 1860s, the
unpaid component of women's and children's labor increased steeply, while its
paid component declined.6 Thus, paradoxically, even as women's work became
more critical to household economies and to the state, women were less likely
to receive wages for it.
Marriage was the key to bringing women more firmly under familial con
trol In the nineteenth century marriage was virtually universal. In 1911, only
about 2 percent of the female population above the age of fifteen and 0 8 per
cent above the age of twenty were unmarried, and a significant proportion of this
category comprised prostitutes who only claimed to be unmarried, according to
the Census Commissioner. The "genuine spinster" was very rare in Indian soci
ety. Thus the woman worker in India-whether in the family farm or in the la
bor market-was typically a wife and mother.7
At the same time, women were increasingly denied the right to escape un
happy marriages, which gave husbands more control over their wives' produc
tive and reproductive labor. Likewise, families resisted women's migration and
incorporation into wage labor, deploying women's labor within the rural econo
my and including women in family migration only when rural resources were
completely exhausted. Yet although there was no group of young unmarried
women from whom migrant workers could be drawn (as m Ireland, for instance),
women did migrate, sometimes over long distances.
Marriage and Migration

In northern India, nearly every rural woman migrated once in her life: during
marriage The long-established custom of village exogamy has been explained
as a patriarchal instrument, which allowed the conjugal family to exercise
greater control over a young bride by physically separating her permanently
from natal kin The Natal family transferred all rights and interests in the woman
to the conjugal family. Since the average age of marriage in most of northern In
dia was extremely low-it was still about seven to eleven years as late as the
1950s-the ritual and celebration of marriage was shot with the haunting sor
row of a young girl's permanent departure from her parental home.8 A rich
genre of folk songs, especially women's songs, revolves round this theme Most
north Indian women experienced this traumatic separation first as a bride and
again as a mother from her daughter
Yet the pervasive image of a final parting has obscured the circulation of
married women between marital and conjugal families The nature of such cir
culation varied enormously across class, caste and region Women returned to
their natal home for their first childbirth and during annual festivals. In some
cases, the circulation of married women and variations o purdah rules allowed
a flexible deployment of women's labor. Doranne Jacobson has argued that in
certain areas of central India, custom dictated frequent visits of the new bride to
her natal home
Feminine skills can be shared by at least two households in a region where women
are relatively scarce For any family a kinswoman's assistance may be important
at a time of crisis or at a busy period in the agricultural cycle A woman observes
no purdah in her Natal home and thus can be more productive there in her hus
band's home A daughter is able to work both inside and outside the house at sow
mg, harvesting and other tasks whereas propriety demands that a young wife, par
ticularly those of high caste, work only withm the house and courtyard 9
In other words, purdah rules did not prevent married women's work in the fields
when the occasion demanded When they worked at harvesting or transplant
ing, however, they were expected to be appropriately veiled to avoid elder male
in-laws 10 Women may also have worked m groups separate from the men and
in different areas of the field Maratha peasant women took part in agricultural
operations with their faces covered u Such negotiation of purdah rules extend
ed to seasonal migration for agricultural wage labor
Indeed, individual female migration over short distance often outstripped
male migration, especially in rural-rural circulation where women figured in
large numbers m casual and inter-district movements Only some of this migra
tion can be attributed to marriage 12 Even in the early twentieth century, tem
porary and seasonal migration for agricultural labor accounted for a large num
ber of immigrants in rural districts In Saran, a district of northern Bihar, half the
total immigrants were casual immigrants "and the majority of these are women,"
recorded the District Gazetteer in 1930 n Women from laboring families usual
ly took part in such casual and seasonal migration during peak agricultural sea
sons, traveling alone or in groups, to participate in transplanting or weeding
work for wages or to visit their natal villages for harvesting operations Such de
ployment of women's labor was part of the household's survival strategy and
women's seasonal migration neither revoked nor challenged family authority
Rather, a pattern of periodic migration of women became integral to the labor
strategy of small and marginal peasant families Thus the dominant values of
seclusion and segregation did not preclude poor women's participation in field
and other visible work, even when it involved traveling long distances
Women's Role in Tamily Migration
Women were also part of permanent migration, sometimes undertaken in fami

ly groups and sometimes as an escape from family Indeed, colonial officers con
sidered the number of women present in migration groups an index of its per
manency There was a great deal of family migration in northern India in the
nineteenth century Groups of rural poor moved to the Sunderbans of south Ben
gal to clear new settlements "It would appear from the proportion of women
amongst them that many immigrants to Sunderbans are beginning to settle down
permanently," wrote L S S O'Malley in the Bengal District Gazetteer L4 Similar

ly, migration from Darbhanga to Bhagalpur was thought to be permanent be
cause "wives also go," whereas migration to the eastern part of the province was
characterized as "temporary" on the grounds that "womenfolk are left behind "15
Women were involved to varying degrees in four types of large-scale labor
mobilization withm northern India from the mid-nineteenth century First, there
was the mostly male circular migration from Bihar and United Provinces (UP)
(equivalent to the present Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal) to emerging textile
factories and casual urban employment, most importantly in Bombay and Cal
cutta Second, there was the development of mining, especially coalmining, in
the Ramgaj-Jhana belt of Bengal and Bihar, which required large inputs of la
bor The mines mobilized labor from local sources involving short-distance mi
gration or relocation within the new mining settlements Third, we have the
emergence of "coolie export" from the same areas to overseas colonies, which
began in the 1830s with the abolition of slavery and which gathered momentum
towards the end of the century The fourth major development was the growth
of tea plantations in Assam and northern Bengal The Assam plantations suf
fered chrome labor shortages and employed recruiters to source labor from Ben
gal, Bihar, UP, Central Provinces, and Onssa Of these, the first two streams of
migration, to urban and industrial centers and mining villages, were informal,
largely casual, and unregulated While the mining companies made some effort
to induce migration, the textile factories operated in a surplus labor market cre
ated by large-scale rural-urban migration The "coolie export" and Assam mi
gration were highly organized, involving elaborate recruitment mechanisms,
and regulated by the colonial state In each of these varied patterns of migration,
the issue of women's participation became linked to questions of family integri
ty and control As opportunities for mobility and wage work widened, the need
for men to retain control over women's labor and mobility withm the ambit of
the family economy grew more urgent The extent to which women could access
new migration opportunities critically influenced patterns of labor-force forma
tion We will look at the first three types of migration in brief before moving on
to examine the case of Assam tea plantations in some detail
Invisible Migration Women Workers in Urban Industries
The northern hinterland, Bihar, and the United Provinces provided labor to two
urban centers from the mid-nmeteenth century Calcutta and Bombay Calcut
ta was the center of jute trade and industry as well as a port-city with a variety
of casual and service employment, while Bombay emerged in the same period
as the center of the cotton textile industry, also a major port-city, and the com
mercial and financial hub of India In 1921, Calcutta received about 300,000 mi
grants, chiefly from Bihar and UP,16 while Bombay received about 750,000 mi
grants from various provinces of India 17 Though the typical jute and cotton
worker was the single male migrant, circulating between the city and the coun
try, these industries also employed women In Bombay and Calcutta (and sur
rounding mill towns), women comprised about thirty to forty percent of the
adult population 18 At the peak, one in four workers in the Bombay mills and
one in five in the Calcutta mills were female Most of these women were also mi
grants, only a small proportion of labor was drawn from local sources Some of
these women were part of families that had been pushed citiward by the com
plete exhaustion of rural resources, droughts, famines, or landlessness 19 But not
all Indeed, solitary women migrants not only migrated to cities for work, they
came to typify the female industrial worker
The low participation of women in rural-urban migration has been vari
ously explained Nirmala Banerjee argues that employment and housing condi
tions in textile industries were a deterrent for rural women, who had fewer op
portunities for productive work m the city20 In Ranajit Dasgupta's explanation,
women's immobility appears to be part of a capitalist strategy predicated upon
women and children performing a "subsidising" function in the village 21 While
these demand factors may have played a role in discouraging women's migra
tion, mill owners' strategies were based on a ready supply of male labor Their
policies were a response to the low sex ratio in migration rather than its cause
Why were women less mobile to start with9 "Culture" is the usual answer to this
question Until recently, scholars argued that social sanctions against women's
mobility and visibility were effective deterrents to family migration Men, who
migrated to the city to supplement their household income, would not risk their
foothold in the village by bringing their wives to the city "Migrants did not bring
their wife and family because of traditional Indian cultural values" argues
Dagmar Engels, in her study of women in Bengal, "Men from Bihar and UP said
that they would lose their status in the village if they dared to bring their wives
to mill areas in Calcutta "22 Abdul Hakim told the Royal Commission in 1930,
"People of my district do not bring family to industrial areas if I brought my
family people would laugh at me " Over decades, this statement has been wide
ly quoted to "prove" that respectable women did not migrate to the cities and
therefore, by extension, that those who did migrate were prone to promiscuity
According to Arjan de Haan, such considerations influenced migrants from
northern India, while those from the south migrated with wives and children and
encouraged women's employment in factories and other wage-earning activi
ties 23 These "cultural" arguments leave unexplained why better-paid workers
(including those from Hakim's district), especially the Sardars, often brought
their wives with them 24
The oral evidence collected by various labor commissions points in a dif
ferent direction It appears that women who suffered impoverishment through
inadequacy or loss of male earnings by desertion or barrenness or widowhood
were the ones to opt for urban migration and factory work The decline of their
traditional occupations m the rural economy forced women who were denied
family resources to seek employment opportunities in the city 25 The same ap
plied to women who wished to physically escape oppressive fathers and hus
bands These are the women who figured prominently m the female workforce
Except one, all the women interviewed by the commission of 1891 were widows
who held that widowhood alone drove them into millwork 26 Even in the 1930s
the situation had not changed greatly For example, Narsama Kurmi came to
work in the jute mill because "after the death of her husband the witness found
that she could not earn a living in her native place, and her brothers were not
willing to receive her back into the family on account of the extra work it would
give them to keep her " She had no children, and came to Calcutta alone, se
curing work in the Howrah Jute Mill Mangan came to Titagarh with her hus
band who "died of cholera" and subsequently found work in the preparing de
partment of the mill Her "widowed mother" worked in the same department
Mangan's sister was "a barren lady" who also worked in the mill 27
Some came to the mill towns to escape oppressive marriages and others set
up house with one of the many "single" men who worked in the mills There
were also workers from the bottom of the social scale, the Muchis and the
Chamars, who took more readily to permanent settlements around the mills
The women of these castes were more readily delinked from their villages "A
large proportion of their women came to stay," R N Gilchrist, the Labour Offi
cer of the Government of Bengal, observed Since many of these women mi
grated outside the family context, they were construed as aberrant They became
objects of elite derision and came to personify the breakdown of morality in the
city's overcrowded tenements The working-class neighborhoods became asso
ciated with the collapse of caste and gender hierarchies Bengali women, espe
cially, were often described as prostitutes 28
Women who did migrate to the city and enter factory employment were
denigrated by their very marginahty The first comprehensive statement of their
situation was by Dr Dagmar Curjel, appointed by the Government of India to
investigate the possibility of applying the 1919 Maternity Benefit Convention of
the International Labor Organization Her report was to become the most oft
quoted piece of evidence about the "non-family" character of jute mill workers
"Imported labour usually brings its womenfolk with them into jute and cotton
mills but in the majority of cases are not the wives of the men with whom they
live," she wrote "It is not possible for a women worker to live or in many cases
work without male protection," she concluded from her conversations with male
and female workers as well as managerial and clerical staff, "practically all
Bengalee women found in the mills are degraded women or prostitutes "29 Cur
jel's report also contained evidence of appalling working conditions and a rec
ommendation for maternity benefit legislation However, what was picked up
and widely used were images of female promiscuity and the breakdown of the
family It was from her report that the stereotype of women "who were not the
wives" of the men with whom they lived was passed on to posterity By the 1940s,
such arguments, by force of repetition, had acquired great power Radhakamal
Mukherjee, author of the first major study of the "working class" in India, found
that "all industrial towns show the preponderance of single male workers who
have left their families behind" and argued on that basis that "a serious dispar
ity between the proportions of sexes" was responsible "for prostitution and
spread of venereal diseases "30
The "single" man comes back to the village tainted and diseased, while the women
workers lose their self-respect and virtue and are looked down on by the village
population In the thousand slums of the Indian industrial centers, manhood is, un
questionably, brutalized, womanhood dishonored, and childhood poisoned at its
very source The village social code is repelled at this and discourages workers
from bringing their wives with them into the industrial centre 31
The evidence from official documents and independent researchers suggests

that it was the "single women" who could not return to their villages, and some
male migrants in "entanglements with local women" who settled most readily in
the mill towns 32 They were more completely "proletanamzed" and their "rur
al link" irrevocably broken
Second-generation immigrants who were born in housing provided by the
mills or in adjacent neighborhoods rarely returned to their native villages They
were the "illegitimate children of jute men and women workers and a large
number of these women and children, who are born of the [temporary] unions,
never leave the areas where they work "33 In the 1920s and 1930s, when labor
welfare measures were being debated, employers quoted the "non-family" char
acter of jute labor as a disqualification for these workers 34 In Bombay, ratio
nalization of the cotton textile industry was accompanied by efforts at "ratio
nalizing" the working-class family, by imposing new definitions and creating the
foundation for a "family wage" after Independence 35
Excluding Women Workers Labor in the Coal Mines
While urban industrial labor was organized on the basis of individual wage
earners, mining was done by groups or "gangs," which were often described as
"family units " However, although mining work was in fact characterized by the
participation of men, women, and children with established gender and gen
erational divisions of labor, these units of labor were not necessarily "family
units "36
Women's coalmining labor was concentrated in the Ramganj-Jhana belt of
Bengal and Bihar, which produced ninety percent of India's total coal produc
tion, and employed upward of 200,000 workers in 1921 37 The high point of
women's employment was reached in 1920, when they formed about 37 5 per
cent of the total workforce in coal mines The bulk of labor in these areas was
drawn from the immediate hinterland, involving weekend commuting or short
term circular migration Recruiters concentrated on whole gangs ranging from
five to fifty persons rather than individual workers The preferred method of re
cruitment was the purchase of zamindan (land-holding) rights of nearby villages
The companies then established indebted peasants as service tenants on their
lands and forced them to provide labor in the mines in lieu of rent 38 Almost sev
enty percent of the workforce came from the lowest rungs of north India's caste
hierarchy classified by British colonial officers as "aboriginals" or "semi-abong
mals" (Bauns, Bhuiyans, Kurmis, Ghatwals, and Tuns) and the "depressed"
castes (Chamars, Doms, Dosadh, and Mushahars) 39 Women from these castes
played critical roles in household production or service activities, a practice that
was carried over to mining industry Until the 1930s, coal procurement was un
dertaken in pairs and gangs with women and children included in these work
groups Men dug and cut coal, while women and children did the carrying Their
wages were usually part of a composite gang or group wage While this labor
arrangement was mistakenly regarded as a "family" mode of working, the evi
dence from the Royal Commission of Labour (1930-31) shows that nearly half
the women migrating to coalfields were single Thirty percent of the women
working in so-called "family units" were not formally attached to the men They
may have been from the same village, but had migrated on their own or were
widows "Their relationship with the males in the work gang was based on car
rying coal for them," writes Dagmar Engels Some ten percent of the women had
established informal liaisons with the men of their "family units" but on the
whole forty percent of mining women were not in formal marital relationships
and had taken the risk of migrating on their own 40
The misnomer of "family units" carried a high cost for mining women when,
in 1929, they were prohibited from underground work The mmmg companies
realized the advantage of enforcing the prohibition on women's underground
work once they began mechanizing small operations m haulage, screening, and
loading, which earlier had employed large numbers of women 41 But since the
majority of these women were in fact "single," they were not just earning "sup
plementary" family income as reformers had assumed As the prohibition began
to be more strictly enforced beginning in 1937, sixty percent of adult women in
mmmg centers became unemployed
As women's role m industries and mines became more marginal, these in
dustries became the core of the "formal" sector in Independent India So male
workers enjoyed increasing state regulation and organized themselves m feder
ated trade unions Having expelled self-supporting women from the workforce,
an increasingly assertive and self-confident working class was able to claim and
win demands for "family wage," reconstituting the working-class family as a sin
gle, male breadwinner with a domesticated wife and dependent children Such as
sumptions were often badly misplaced given the preponderance of widows and
women who were the heads of their households and the difficulties of enforcing
men's obligations to the "family " Nevertheless, the valorization of the domesti
cated wife and mother-an ideology shared by employers, workers and official
dom-facilitated the exclusion of women and children from the "formal" sector
Recruiting Women for Overseas Migration
Gender relations in the plantations followed a different trajectory For one, plan
tation labor was organized by contract from the very beginning and was, there
fore, under intense state scrutiny and regulation throughout the entire colonial
period Second, women were greatly in demand in plantations for specific tasks
constructed as femmme, and planters were willing to go to great lengths to re
cruit women, singly or as part of families Third, women's share in the workforce
endured political and economic restructuring Unlike in industries and mines,
they were not reconstituted as dependent and domesticated wives But the plan
tations' attempts to recruit women from the north Indian countryside, resettle
them in new locations, and reconstitute them as wage earners provoked fierce
resistance from many quarters The debates over women's migration began in
the 1830s with recruitment drives for indentured women workers by Agents for
overseas plantations, particularly for the West Indies The issue escalated in the
1870s and 1880s, when the Assam tea plantations began their massive recruit
ment operations
Export of indentured Indian workers to Australian and Caribbean colonies
began in the 1830s in the wake of the abolition of slavery Migration to the over
seas colonies involved long-distance travel and long-term contracts or "inden
ture" for periods ranging between one and five years or longer Nevertheless,
single male migration rather than family migration became the mainstay of
"coolie export " The first batch contained some 100 women to 6000 men, sig
naling just how interested the planters in the receiving colonies were in
women 42 They wanted direct labor and considered men more suitable than
women for heavier workloads Despite the high costs of recruitment and trans
portation, export from India seemed a more cost-effective way to replace labor
than a self-reproducing workforce involving family migration In the immediate
short-term at least the migration and maintenance of dependents like wives and
children involved extra expenses Even if the women were put to work, there
would be the inevitable "financial disabilities due to the financial risks of child
bearing and rearing "43
The export of Indian labor was controversial from the beginning, so much
so that the Government of India was forced to suspend shipment of labor in
1839 Indentured emigration was reintroduced in 1842 under a more elaborate
regulatory regime Among the many criticisms leveled against the export of In
dian workers, one was the plight of the family left behind by male emigrants
Many of the men left wives and children for long periods of indenture, some nev
er to return Those opposed to "coolie export" argued that these families were
stranded, left to face destitution and pauperization The Government of Bengal
countered that male migration was common m north Bihar and eastern UP with
an established custom of service employment in jobs where they worked as se
poys, bearers, and other casual positions In 1840-41, the Protector of Emigrants
undertook to question forty-eight returning emigrants who, it was reported, "re
posed perfect confidence" that their wives and children were cared for in their
absence by extended family 44 If the problems of single male overseas migration
were presumed solved by the existence of extended families at the Indian end,
the complete absence of "family" in the male world of Indian workers in the re
ceiving colonies became a cause for grave concern Colonial authorities in the
receiving countries reported increasing "social instability," sexual promiscuity,
high crime rates, and an epidemic of "wife-murder " These complaints gained
the ear of the Home Government m Britain Meanwhile, emigration increased
dramatically with 51,247 workers sailing from Calcutta between 1858 and I860.45
In 1868, after several abortive policy initiatives, the Government of India statu
torily fixed a minimum of forty women to every hundred men (except to Mauri
tius which was allowed thirty-three women for every hundred men) per ship
ment.46 But the British Government was not entirely satisfied by these measures.
The long-term solution lay in a settled community of Indian workmen in the
colonies, and the British government held that this could only be achieved
through "family" migration. In 1875, Lord Salisbury advocated settlement and
colonization rather than temporary labor engagements. He argued for "the
emigration of a sufficient proportion of women of an honest and decent class."47
By the late nineteenth century, Caribbean planters too began to exhibit more in
terest in women immigrants. The possibility of the cessation of labor exports
drove home the advantages of settling Indian labor. In the meanwhile, the sug
ar crisis began to bite and the planters began cost-cutting measures. Lower
wages and shorter indentures failed to solve their problem. They began to ex
plore cane farming in small family holdings, with women doing most of the reg
ular fieldwork, producing cane and undertaking subsistence production, while
men worked in the estates and provided additional labor on the farms during
harvests and in their spare time. This led to a further depression of wages, a
ready reserve of labor, and an alternative source of cheap cane. The planters
were now ready to encourage "family" migration and when necessary pay a pre
mium for women recruits.48 Neither legislation nor incentives brought forth
women willing to migrate under contracts in the quantities desired by Emigra
tion Agents. There were not enough family migrants, and single women of the
"honest and decent class" desired by Salisbury seemed even more difficult to ob
tain. Soon after introducing the quota system, the Government of Bengal was
forced to open a special file entitled "Short Shipment of Females" to accommo
date the numerous applications from agents for permission to sail without the
requisite proportion of women. The shortage in one shipment was supposed to
be met in the next, but the disparity mounted while Agents bitterly complained
of the difficulty of meeting quota requirements.49 Enquiries into the system of
emigration in the Northwestern provinces, Oudh and Bihar, revealed that, "ad
mitting that the proportion of forty women to one-hundred men was by no
means excessive . . . this proportion could not be readily obtained except at the
expense of serious abuses."50
Colonial recruitment agents and their subcontractors resorted to fraud, de
ception, and coercive tactics to recruit women. In some cases this was "tanta
mount to kidnapping." The Agents offered a simple solution. The Agent for
Surinam argued "that practically the only abuse in connection with emigration
occurs in the recruitment of women" and that the "class of women being fre
quently sent to colonies . . . are worse than useless."51 The Government, the
Agents believed, should relax the quota system. The Government of India, how
ever, was under considerable pressure from London and the colonies to provide
more women emigrants and a "better class of women." Colonial officials be
lieved that a large influx of "prostitutes" and "lax women" exacerbated social
disorder in the colonies. Agents pleaded that these were the only women avail
able for migration. Salisbury tried to persuade the Government of India to pro
tect the "habits of morality and decency of the Indian population of some of the
Colonies" which was endangered "by the scarcity of honest women and want of
family life" by promoting emigration of women "free from social prejudices"
and "of agricultural and labouring classes."52
The collective weight of these representations prompted the government
to investigate the issue of women's emigration. Major Pitcher and Mr. Grierson
supervised the enquiries and made their recommendations, the surplus women
in one shipment should count towards the supply of the next, separate accom
modation and medical examination should be provided under the supervision of
female personnel, and licensed women recruiters should be employed for re
cruitment of women. But the two mam recommendations were the most con
troversial. Against the tenor of official opinion that allegations of "kidnapping"
be thoroughly investigated and recruiters punished, they suggested "that the sys
tem of enquiry through the police after missing relatives should be stopped; the
single women should be either detained at the depot for week or ten days, or the
enquiry should be made through the Civil Executive Agency "53 Their sympa
thy lay with women emigrants rather than with the families making the en
quiries They were not convinced that "kidnapping" was a serious problem since
women were recruited not against their will but against that of their families.
They argued, therefore, that the only way to facilitate emigration of "re
spectable" women was to "generally concede women more liberty of indepen
dent action than is allowed them at present "54 In this, Pitcher and Grierson rep
resented a minority opinion in official circles While they and the Emigration
Agents sought to uphold the woman's right to sell her labor and enter emigra
tion contracts, most local officials were alarmed by the threat such women's mi
gration posed to family authority.55 These controversies, initiated by Emigration
Agents, reached formidable proportions by the 1870s, exacerbated by large
scale recruitment of women by Assam tea planters
Resisting Recruitment Women's Migration to the Assam Tea Plantations
The East India Company's network of international trade in the early nineteenth
century depended heavily on tea. When the Company lost the China monopoly,
they began to explore possibilities of growing tea in Assam. By 1838, Assam tea
had made a hit in the London market. A boom in 1859 set off a scramble for land
and saplings m the Brahmaputra valley By the 1870s, there were some 900 gar
dens and 500,000 workers.56 At the onset of the boom in 1859, planters realized
that they would have to import labor and that transporting workers to the re
mote gardens would be expensive. The Government responded to their con
cerns with the Workmen's Breach of Contract Act (XIII) of 1859, which pro
vided for penal contracts and a dracoman labor regime. The planters were
granted the power of "private arrest" and the authority to hunt down "ab
sconding" workers and deliver punitive sentences.57
To "settle" labor, planters encouraged family migration and recruited from

communities where such migration in family units was more established, notably
the Adivasis58 of south Bihar, Bengal, Orissa, and the Central Provinces. But
there were also a high proportion of single male and female migrants. To en
courage procreation, "single" migrants, both men and women, were forced into
the infamous "depot marriages." Planters adopted a pro-natal policy, providing
basic maternity benefits and special bonuses for live child births. These policies
presumed the presence of large numbers of women on the plantations. The pre
occupation with "family" and procreation did not lead the planters in the direc
tion of creating a group of dependent "domestic" women. Instead, they chose to
engage mothers and children in the highly intensive labor of plucking leaves.
Such work was considered "suitable" for women because of its similarity with
agricultural tasks women undertook in their areas of origin. The routine and
repetitive nature of the task conformed to traditional constructions of feminine
skill. Such use of cheap female and child labor grew to be crucial to the industry
since labor-saving technology or mechanization did not progress till the mid
twentieth century.
The twin needs of cheap female and child labor combined with the im
perative of creating a stable labor force through generational reproduction
produced a high demand for women migrants in the Assam tea industry. It was
not easy to meet this demand. Within the first decade of its operation, Assam
recruitment and plantation employment had acquired widespread notoriety in
the major recruitment areas, as word spread about long-term punitive con
tracts, low wages, poor living conditions and extremely high mortality. Assam
only attracted those who wished to escape from home or hide. Moreover, be
cause mines, industries and informal urban employment increasingly offered
prospective migrants alternative options, Assam was the destination of last
choice.59
These problems were magnified in the case of women. The task of recruit
ing women fell upon professional contractors, who emerged in response to the
premium planters paid for labor, which rose to between Rs.120 and Rs.150 per
worker, an extraordinarily high amount in the late nineteenth century.60 Such
premiums were feasible because the contract system allowed managers to re
cover their investment many times over. The labor regime in the gardens and the
recruitment system, thus, mutually reinforced each other. The professional re
cruiters employed networks of different levels of subcontractors, including large
numbers of women who were meant to identify and persuade potential women
migrants. The high levels of profit encouraged irregularities, fraud and decep
tion and, eventually, criminalization. The unscrupulous and brutal practices
adopted by the recruiters heightened the opprobrium of Assam migration.
In case of women's recruitment, fraud and coercion was not the only issue.
Assam employment offered long-term migration, even permanent relocation,
which, in the case of married women and men, involved either "family" migra
tion or separation and disintegration of the family. The overwhelming majority
of women of migration age were already married. Family survival strategies did
not, indeed could not, include married women's migration to Assam for an in
definite period Women's migration to Assam, except as part of a family unit,
posed an intractable problem from the very beginning When married women
went to Assam on their own or with their children, they did so in defiance of fam
ily authority, either without the knowledge of the husbands (and the conjugal
family) or in the teeth of their opposition Recruiting agents targeted dissatis
fied women, including married women, and offered them an escape from op
pressive family situations Male heads of households were alarmed at the ease
with which women could disappear in Assam, abrogating their families' claims
on them
The demand to protect the family economy by curtailing opportunities for
women to be mobile struck a sympathetic chord with the local government m
Chhotnagpur, a major recruiting district Not only were immediate revenue in
terests at stake, the local government also faced pressure from local landowning
elites to contain the depredation on their labor reservoir and the unsettling of
small and marginal peasant families caused by migrating women Moreover,
competitors for labor in the region, primarily the North Bengal tea planters and
the coal industry, attacked the special privileges enjoyed by Assam recruiters
They too focused on "immoral" and "illegitimate" women's recruitment as a ma
jor plank in their campaign against Assam migration In the 1860s and early
1870s, the Government of Bengal, faced with the problem of high mortality dur
ing the journey to Assam, gave some credence to the representations of Chot
nagpur officials Greater surveillance of recruitment and transportation of work
ers was introduced in the Transport of Native Labourers Act of 1863 In the next
decade, three legislative initiatives were taken m 1868,1870, and 1873 to widen
the regulative framework In 1874, however, Government of Bengal lost juris
diction when Assam was reconstituted as a Chief Commissioner's province The
tea planters, the chief commercial lobby in the new province, were now better
able to influence policy Till the end of the nineteenth century, the Government
of India was pulled between the tea planters who demanded the abolition of all
restraint on recruitment, a demand that was consonant with the state's commit
ment to "free" labor, and the district government of Chotnagpur, with occasional
backing of the provincial government of Bengal, representing the interests of the
"family" as well as of local landed interests and competing plantation and min
ing interests Between 1880 and 1900 the tea lobby prevailed, but growing op
position to "free" recruitment led in 1901 to a new regulatory regime with more
stringent restrictions on women's recruitment 61
From the 1870s, the opposition to Assam recruitment tended to focus on
the issue of women's recruitment as the symbol of the most threatening and op
pressive aspects of the Assam labor system Gender became the primary site on
which different and contradictory interests came into play The tea lobby argued,
even as Grierson and Pitcher did in the context of overseas labor recruitment,
that women, even married women, had to be allowed greater freedom in mi
gration decisions Against charges of fraud and coercion, they counterposed vol
untary migration by women, highlighting the oppressive features of their famil
ial and social situation. Plantation work was depicted as an opportunity for
"free" wage earning. Their opponents relied on a double argument. First, they
questioned women's "freedom" to escape the family, drawing poignant portraits
of abandoned homesteads and neglected children. Second, they underlined the
sexual anarchy involved in women's repudiation of marriage, the vulnerability
of women who undertook migration without the protection of husbands or male
guardians. These debates turned crucially on juridical interpretations of "con
sent," whether women had the right to consent to migration, to labor contracts
or whether the rights of the male heads of families preempted and circumvent
ed such rights. The issue of the family's prior claim to women's labor and sexu
ality lay behind these debates.
Unexpectedly, the Act of 1863 generated controversy over women as sub
jects in civil law. Among other requirements, the Act mandated that magistrates
register intending emigrants in the recruitment area and that they ensured an un
derstanding of the terms and conditions of the contract These provisions con
fronted subordinate judicial officers with a legal dilemma. They could not en
sure the emigrants' understanding of the contract without considering his or her
capacity to enter into the agreement. The legislation on labor contracts did not
address the question of capacity. A later Act defined "Emigration" as "the de
parture of any native of India of the age of sixteen years or upwards," thereby
excluding minors from the purview of emigration laws and regulations.62 Yet
there were legal grounds, both civil and criminal, to challenge the capacity of
women and minors to enter into long-term labor contracts. These legal questions
began to surface when husbands and fathers charged recruiters with enticement
and abduction of wives and children. The issue gathered momentum as local
British officials in recruitment districts found themselves increasingly in sympa
thy with irate husbands or fathers.
If women and minors did not have the capacity to enter into labor contracts,
emigration assisted by middlemen and "without consent" of parent/husband/
guardian was by definition "tantamount to kidnapping." If, like minors, women,
especially adult married women, were to be denied volition in contract, they
were also denied volition in the decision to emigrate. If the woman's consent to
make a labor contract was to be deferred to male kin, consent had to be denied
her altogether. In such cases women could not be charged with desertion, but
their recruiter could be charged with kidnapping. As the scale of recruitment in
creased, local competitors turned a spotlight on the supposedly illegal activities
of Assam recruiters.
From 1871 to 1900, no less than a three-quarter of a million workers mi
grated to the Assam gardens chiefly from the Province of Bengal (including Bi
har and Orissa), the Central and United Provinces. These areas accounted for
nearly half the total migrants in the 1880s and 90s.63 By the early 1870s, "kid
napping in Chotnagpur" emerged as a major issue. The district government was
besieged with opposition to women's recruitment. There was an outcry against
the "scandal" and "abuse" of recruiters "kidnapping" women (with or without
their own consent) from the "shelter" (and control) of the family and against
planters who were accused of rape, molestation and coercing male and female
workers into illicit "marriages "
In 1872-73, a series of lawsuits against recruitment of young men and young
(mostly married) women revolved around the precise meaning and definition of
"kidnapping," which assumed a lack of or inability to consent But in the case of
adult women could consent be disregarded altogether7 In one case, for exam
ple, Jaggo Mahto, a recruiting agent, was charged with the kidnapping Madhav
Gorain (eighteen years), Choonee Bownne (seventeen years) and Mittur Napit
(sixteen years) The Magistrate concluded that though the recruiter had used
"great deceit to induce the young people to leave their homes and par
ents " since these young men and women accompanied Mahato of their own
accord, " the offence of kidnapping had not been established " In another
case, Pershad Bhaggat was charged with the enticement of Gheerdharee Bhooy
an, a girl aged eleven or twelve years, an orphan adopted into the family of her
uncle Bhaggat took her away by promising to keep her, but whether he intend
ed to sell her to the depot or employ her as a prostitute is not clear from the le
gal record The case was dismissed because it was established that the girl "left
of her own accord" on being beaten by her mistress, her aunt-by-marriage 64 In
both these cases, there were grounds against the accused deception in the first
case, and intention in the second But the two accused recruiters were acquitted
on the basis of "consent "
This reading was unacceptable to the Judicial Commissioner Referring to
the case of Gheerdharee Bhooyan, he argued that an eleven-year-old girl, a mi
nor, did not have the power of "consent" to emigrate or contract for labor The
Commissioner thus rejected the earlier dismissal of the case on the ground that
the aunt had the "same force of guardianship as natural parents" and Bhaggat,
in taking the girl away without the consent of her guardian, was guilty of "kid
napping "65
In the case of minors, an argument for statutory "kidnapping" was feasible
But in cases of adult women, the grounds for denying consent were less clear
Magistrates, responsible for registration of emigrants, were of the opinion that
the emigration of married women, adult or minor, without the husband's con
sent was unacceptable, and ought to be illegal Other officers agreed that mar
ried women should not be granted the power of consent to "leave" their home
and family "The Magistrate," said one officer "should be prohibited from reg
istering as coolies wives who have husbands living without first obtaining the
sanction of the husbands "66 On what grounds was an adult married woman to
be denied the power of "consent" to make a labor contract9 One Magistrate
forced to acquit a wife who ran away with another man for Assam put his finger
on the nub such emigration, he said, was "contrary to law and morality "67
The critical question was whether married women's migiation could be
"voluntary" at all, and if it was, whether such a choice was acceptable Most of
ficers felt that there could be no "voluntary" migration by married women First,
they argued, wives were usually "deceived" about the conditions of the contract,
second, these women could not be given the right to abandon their husband and
children; and third, Assam migration involved a revocation of marriage and the
exercise of alternative sexual choices.68 One Magistrate roundly condemned
"the frequent practice of cooly recruiters inveigling away married women from
their husbands and children which latter are in some cases of such tender age as
to be exposed to great risk of dying from being deprived of their mother's milk
and care." "The inducement held out at the time," he continued, "are presents
of ornaments and clothes and the glowing accounts the recruiters give of the ease
and luxury the women will enjoy in the tea districts, which contrasted by them
with the hard fare and work to be done at home, often succeeds in inducing them
to leave their families."69
However, there was no ready legal instrument to "prohibit" registration of
married women. "As the law stands now," the Commissioner noted, "it is not a
penal offence for a coolies recruiter to entice away a married woman over six
teen years of age, merely to send her as a coolie to the tea districts." Laws on
emigration and labor had no provision on capacity, certainly no separate provi
sion for married women. A registering officer noted the legal difficulty of deal
ing with women's voluntary migration, writing that since the "women being re
cruited ostensibly to emigrate as coolies" were "willing to go, the law does not
warrant the interference of the Magistrate to prevent them."70 The alternative
was to use the laws on marriage to prevent women from entering labor contracts
or undertake long-distance migration without consent of the husband.
The colonial state's policy of elevating the paterfamilias and enhancing con
trol over wives and children led to a series of judicial interventions beginning in
the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, the state drew back from "social
reform" legislation on grounds of non-interference in indigenous religious, fa
milial and social matters, accepting the Brahminic notion of sacramental mar
riage as applicable to all Hindus. On the other, it quietly sanctioned a more re
pressive marriage regime in its courtrooms and through criminal law, which was
less constrained by "custom." The result was to deny "Hindu" women of lower
castes, the "semi-Aboriginals" and the Adivasis their customary rights of di
vorce and remarriage. The state attempted to impose on women of these com
munities the Brahminic notion of lifelong female monogamy. Among laboring
communities, women's obligations within marriage had been leavened by the
possibility of divorce and separation. The denial of customary divorce meant, in
effect, an attempt to force women to submit to exploitative marriages. Two oth
er processes enhanced the control over women within marriage: first, women's
economic options dwindled as a result of the decline in their traditional occu
pations; and second, men were invested with absolute property rights, especial
ly in land and other capital assets. When emerging opportunities of migration
offered a new escape route to unhappy wives, the already established linkage
between marriage and labor was, once again, invoked.71
The restrictive provisions regarding marriage were given teeth in 1860
when the Indian Penal Code introduced a chapter on "Offences Against Mar
riage" including bigamy, abduction and enticement. The code framed the of
fence of "enticement" specifically within the context of a growing trade in pros
titution and defined the offence as "inveigling away" a married woman for "im
moral purposes "72 Some officers felt that recruiters could be automatically
charged with "enticement" in case of married women "The result of such emi
gration," one such officer argued, "is that the women thus leaving their hus
bands, go into keeping with other men, and the act of enlistment, though not il
legal at the time, eventually becomes tantamount to inducing a married woman
to leave her husband for an immoral purpose, which the recruiter knows full well
will be the result "73
Others were not so sure One judicial officer refused to accept the idea of
prior knowledge of the recruiter A recruiter of married women, he argued,
"could hardly be supposed to know that a wife was likely to be seduced to illic
it intercourse, though there would be every probability of such a result if she
went without her husband "74 If recruiters were to be charged with "entice
ment," emigration to Assam would be have to be established as an "immoral
purpose " Most officers agreed that so it was for most married women, but it was
impossible to establish this legally 75
In Chotnagpur, revenue and judicial officials agreed that a new law or reg
ulation was needed to prevent married women from migrating to Assam under
contract "To protect husbands from the wiles of the coolie recruiter," the Com
missioner urged, "there should be some such order regarding the recruitment
of married women "76 The easiest solution within the framework of the Act of
1873, he suggested, would be to insert a clause "m the recruiters' licenses, pro
hibiting their enlisting married women without the consent of their husbands "77
Yet when a new Act was finally framed in 1882, the Commissioner's rec
ommendations were rejected due to the protests of the tea lobby Instead, the
new act introduced "free" emigration, which meant migrants no longer had to
register Sir John Edgar underscored the chief drawbacks of "free" emigration
"opportunities have been given to married woman to elope from their husbands
without leaving to the latter any reasonable hope of being able to trace them "7S
The Commissioner of the Chotnagpur Division, C C Stevens, agreed that
"abuses that could not be prevented in the case of supervised emigration are
more likely to occur" when there was no control or check Recruiters worked
for profit and were not averse to "decoying away ignorant and helpless women
and children "79 Stevens concluded that the only solution was to ensure that in
tending emigrants understood the nature of the contract while they still had the
chance to withdraw from it 80 The problem was not merely one of minors and
women being "unable to withdraw" in time "Free" migration reduced the op
portunity to challenge women's and minor children's recruitment The absence
of registration became a crucial handicap to those who sought to restrain run
away wives and children
Local officers agreed that the issue was not merely one of protecting re
cruits from being "cajoled," "enticed," "abducted" or "kidnapped" by profes
sional contractors, but, more importantly, upholding the claims of the family ob
jecting to such recruitment The professional recruiters' crime was not merely
against the women and children they recruited but "against marriage" (the hus
band) or against the parents/guardians The interests and claims of the "family"
were thus counterpoised against a consensual contract between recruit and re
cruiter Kaye, the Assistant Superintendent of Police (1884) cautioned, for ex
ample, that if "young people desire to leave home without or against the con
sent of their parents and guardians, they will find means to do so " But, he
pointed out, "so-called 'free emigration' was a system of unlicensed recruit
ing exempt from all supervision" which "immensely facilitates" desertion by
women and children 81 As Edgar had argued from the very beginning, the ab
sence of registration (and, therefore, records) gave "married women" the op
portunity "to elope from their husbands "
"Free" migration meant that the family-husbands and fathers-had no
means of tracing their wives and children, no "reasonable hope" of locating or
recovering them "Free" emigration thus allowed women, even married moth
ers, to disappear without a trace Searches for missing relatives usually led to
dead ends In 1883, Mr Risley reported three successes out of fifty-eight cases
reported Three years later, Baker reported five successes out of sixty-nine
searches 82 Even if the missing relative could be located, pursuing a case and
bringing the offender to justice was a remote contingency83 Local officers de
manded the abolition of "free emigration" and some system that would allow
families to trace runaway (or actually abducted) family members
The Commissioner, too, was disturbed by the ease with which young
women (and sometimes men) could disappear in the gardens of Assam 84 As
Kaye had noted, young people found ways of getting away when they wanted
But the consequences for young women were often quite drastic Bimola Kan
duni of Jholda (married and eleven years old) was persuaded to enter her house
by an unlicensed female recruiter, drugged, and carried off towards Ramganj A
few days later her family recovered her The sequel was, nevertheless, tragic The
female kidnapper was a prostitute, and since the girl had remained a day and a
night in her house, and had subsequently gone off in her company, she was cast
out by her family, and, Baker commented, "will probably end by becoming a
prostitute herself "85
The difficulty of acceding "voluntary" migration in the case of young
women was complicated by the predominance of girls in their teens, the major
target of recruiters A random survey of the cases reported suggests that the bulk
of the enticed or abducted "married women" were actually minors between
eleven and fourteen years of age Citing four such cases, Baker emphasized the
need to take into account the greater vulnerability of such girls who were sus
ceptible to gross deceit and supposedly unaware of the consequences of their de
cisions All four cases involved young married women of about thirteen or four
teen years age, victims of fraud Sukarmom and Madhi were decoyed from their
houses on the pretence that they were to become the mistresses of rich natives
at Bolarampore and Puruha The recruiter was smartly dressed and "made a
show of wealth and liberality" and "took them away giving out that they were
his wife and sister-in-law " At the depot, however, they raised a shout, and the
police later returned the girls to their houses Nuna Ram Thakur persuaded
Chinta and Karuna to leave their husbands and go to Assam. They were re
moved from their village at night and taken to Sitarampur in covered carts Their
families lost all trace of them.86
This case was typical. Stevens argued that the lack of supervision of unli
censed depots was a major factor behind the "disappearance" of relatives These
recruits were "carefully kept in depots to which strangers cannot gain admit
tance and they are hurried away quickly." He could not remain complacent
about these "[g]irls and women and young boys" who "take false names" and
emigrating under the "free" system "leave no trace behind."87
In the 1880s, a protonationahst "Native Press" turned the spotlight on As
sam recruitment with particular emphasis on the sexual exploitation of planta
tion women that acquired legendary proportions. Writings in The Bengalee and
the Sanjivani by Dwarkanath Ganguly and Ramkumar Vidyaratna, who toured
some Assam gardens, focused on the many tragedies of women workers who
came to epitomize the horrors of the gardens. In such writings the violation of
"Indian" coolie women by European planters and managers became a potent
symbol of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Dwarkanath Ganguly believed, as
did many British officers, that "recruitment" of married women was "tanta
mount to inducing a married woman to leave her husband for an immoral pur
pose."88 He and Ramkumar Vidyaratna, pioneering labor reformers, were able
to articulate concerns of class, gender, and race in a complex interrelationship
that was to become paradigmatic of a "nationalist" discourse on labor89
Published in 1888, Ramkumar Vidyaratna's Kuhkahini (Sketches from
Cooly Life) provided a fictional representation of workers' exploitation in the
Assam tea plantations. Questions of gender and labor were inextricably linked
in the delineation of the central character, Adarmam, a woman teagarden work
er The story begins with a garden manager scheming to recruit peasant women
from north India. He instructs his chief agent, an arkathi, to employ female re
cruiters
They must say, "We were m Assam there was much comfort there You too
must come with us and you will soon be as prosperous As it is you are losing weight
working day and night at domestic chores without food, without clothes, without
a single bangle on your arms To top it all you suffer the husband's curses and
punches You women are fools to endure all this "90
The author then goes on to depict how two recruiters, Ramuna and Jhamuna,
follow these instructions to successfully recruit Adarmam, the wife of a poor
peasant, and her two daughters. The recruiters found Adar in a particularly vul
nerable state. Her husband had gone away with their son in search of work be
cause the rent and the moneylender's interests were in arrears. The recruiters
chose this moment to "entice" Adar. They adopted the two-pronged strategy
recommended by the manager. First, they held out attractions of rich clothes, or
naments, and a good life. This was then contrasted with the misery and drudgery
of Adar's present existence as a mere "wife." One of the women said persua
sively, "Your husband thinks that a little rice and a coarse cloth is enough to keep
you tied to him for life And kicks and punches are all the ornaments you need "
She also explicitly construed Adar's decision to migrate to the tea plantation as
a revocation of male authority "Would your husband have let you go if he
knew9"91 Ramkumar Vidyaratna wishes to make the point that "a little rice and
a cloth" accompanied by the husband's kicks and punches were indeed a better
option for Adar than her inevitable fate in the teagardens
In succumbing to the recruiters' wiles, Adar was not only revoking male au
thority but was inviting its terrible consequences hard work, poor pay, and sex
ual exploitation in the gardens He laid out in graphic detail the conditions lead
ing women to repudiate their home and husbands to go to distant Assam There
was economic hardship, physical strain, battering, and above all male control
and subjugation He repeated these arguments through Ramuna who persuad
ed a wavering Adarmam to take the final step towards Assam The author's
imaginative reconstruction of Adar's hardships in the village and at home as ex
pressed in Ramuna's rather phony dialogue is laden with a heavy and obvious
irony His foreknowledge that conditions m Assam were in every aspect worse
than Adar's piesent difficulties were meant to be read into Ramuna's diatribe
against "men" (husbands) "Men in general are terrible They die of envy
when they hear that you will be able to earn Rs 5 or 6, that you will able to live
like a queen "92 There is a tension m the many long passages written in this vein,
the author quite evidently presumes that a kind of a declaration of war against
the husband would, credibly, appeal to Adar, yet he condemns Adar's suscepti
bility as ill-informed, ill-judged, and illegitimate
Adar's story underlines and exemplifies women's transition from tradition
al (male) familial authority to the new sites of colonial production where women
were vulnerable to heightened labor and sexual exploitation These convictions
gave greater edge to opponents of women's "free" emigration The Government
of India, despite its support of the tea lobby, could not summarily dismiss these
issues In the absence of suitable legal instruments to deal with cases of women's
enticement and/or elopement, disaggregating different categories of crimes
committed by recruiters was proving far too difficult On the one hand, the ex
isting criminal law could not be applied to "willing" migration of women and
children On the other hand, if there was no "willing" migration, if the capacity
of consent to migrate was denied women and children, then all recruiting with
out the consent of husband or parent or guaidian became by definition "entice
ment," "abduction," and "kidnapping" under various sections of the Indian Pe
nal Code The consent of the individual woman/minor and that of the family
were collapsed in legal characterization of recruitment crimes
In the end, the Government of India was forced to agree that in the case of
minors and women, one's "own free will" to migrate could not be admitted In
the hunting-ground of Assam recruiters, women were subject to family author
ity, their labor was owned by the family to be deployed for household subsis
tence In general, the colonial state facilitated this process, the pressure of tea
interests had to be denied m the larger interests of revenue and stability Sir John
Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, initiated a searching en

quiry into criminal cases involving emigrants, especially women and minors, in
all the recruiting districts of Bengal to impress upon the Imperial government
the urgent need to protect the family "from the wiles of the cooly recruiter "93
A new law or regulation was the result
The 1901 Assam Labour and Emigration Act brought new restrictions on
"free" emigration, including a section dealing separately with women's emigra
tion The Lt Governor of Bengal argued that "it should be made a penal offence
to recruit a married woman without the consent of her husband or father
in the district in which the recruiters carry on their operations "94 In 1901,
these provisions were enacted within the Emigration Act on the grounds that "a
married woman may be said to have entered into a contract with her husband,
which precludes her from engaging in services to another party for a term of
years without his consent "95 The issue of voluntary migration of a married
woman was settled against her and she was denied the capacity or right of "con
sent" m a labor contract
Conclusion
The issue of women's migration must be located withm major social and eco
nomic processes in northern India in the nineteenth century In this period, the
region experienced movement of labor on a massive scale, perhaps the largest
ever Migration, both internal and overseas, resulted from the conjunction of ex
panding opportunities of wage employment in new sites of capitalist production
and indebtedness in the countryside following from colonial revenue policies,
commercialization of agriculture and spiralmg rent demands Rural impover
ishment had two major gender dimensions First, women's traditional occupa
tions, like spinning, preparing food, and processing fuel declined as a result of
deindustnahzation and reduced access to common resources Second, settle
ment policies of the colonial state conferred absolute property rights to male
heads of household in land and homestead at the cost of other customary claims
Indeed, the survival of the small and marginal peasant family, squeezed by
heightened rent and revenue demand, depended on extracting more and more
unpaid labor from wives and children As a result, the paid component of
women's (and children's) work declined Even as their labor obligations in
creased m the nineteenth century, wives, daughters, and widowed female kin be
came even more subject to the arbitrary authonty of male guardians More than
ever, rural women's subsistence, indeed their survival, became contingent on ful
filling familial roles and obligation
Given the importance of the small peasant economy in their revenue cal
culations, the colonial state attempted to further this process by enhancing the
authority of the male head of the family over dependent wives, female km, and
children A series of judicial, legislative, and administrative measures were un
dertaken, which provided the paterfamilias greater control over the labor and
mobility of other family members This involved, primarily, a redefinition of
marriage laws and customs. Among the poor laboring communities of northern
India, composed of intermediate and low castes at the margins of Brahminical
society, marriage included specific laboring obligations. At the same time, wives
enjoyed the right of divorce and second (or subsequent) marriage, providing op
portunities of exit from especially exploitative marriages. Colonial legislation,
despite its stated deference to "custom," chose to extend elite practices at the
cost of laboring women's traditional rights of divorce and remarriage. The com
bined pressure of increasing economic dependence on family resources and a
more draconian marriage regime helped to contain women within the family and
facilitated the extraction of their labor.
Yet families were tightening their control over women and young people
just as distant employers' labor demands increased dramatically. Women were
thus pulled in different directions, sometimes moving with their families and
sometimes in an effort to escape them. Women migrated seasonally for poorly
paid agricultural work but also in some areas for construction, brickmaking and
other work. The few women who found their way to urban employment were
mostly marginal members of their family. So, unlike male migrants who had a
rural buffer to fall back on, women who migrated to cities found themselves
worse off than their male coworkers and stigmatized for breaching the male do
main of wage work.
Despite men's control over women's seasonal migrations, husbands and fa
thers did not always control women's movements. Single, married, and widowed
women journeyed to mines and plantations overseas and in India without the
express consent of the men who reputedly controlled them. Conflict arose in the
1860s when overseas and tea plantation employers, driven by state policy and by
the productive and reproductive uses of female labor, directed their elaborate
and expensive recruitment machinery towards the enlistment of women. Their
aggressive campaign for women's recruitment included the whole range from se
duction to abduction, provoking resistance from different quarters. Local elites,
endorsing familial claims on women, persuaded local governments to take on
two powerful interest groups, the agents of overseas plantations, and the Assam
tea planters. The ensuing controversy highlighted the contesting claims on
women's labor, couched in the language of women's right to "consent" to labor
contracts vis-a-vis the sanctity of marriage and family authority. Women's own
motivations in consenting to migration may never be known, as fraud and mis
representation must undoubtedly have played a part in persuading them to risk
hazardous journeys to and back-breaking labor in the plantations. But there can
be no doubt that narrowing economic opportunities in the countryside and the
closing of escape routes from oppressive marriages had reduced their options
drastically. The opportunity for plantation work might, in these circumstances,
have been a new-and perhaps the only-avenue of escaping from oppressive
families or exercising alternative economic and sexual choices.
The controversy over women's recruitment, which raged between 1860 and
1900, highlights the play of contradictory interests within various agencies of
colonial administration. The Assam provincial government, committed to the
tea lobby, pressed the Government of India to grant women "greater freedom"
in migration decisions. The Imperial Government solicited similar measures on
behalf of labor "receiving colonies" to improve the sex ratio among indentured
Indian workers. Ranged against women's "greater freedom" were district offi
cials of Chotnagpur, backed by the Government of Bengal. Recruitment of
women was also condemned by traditional local elites, whose own interests as
rent-receivers and employers of labor were involved, and the new urban elite
growing increasingly critical of European domination of commerce and indus
try in the region. For opponents of women's migration, "consent" was impossi
ble because it was based on misinformation and misrepresentation by recruiting
agents, because migration widened women's sexual choices and revoked the
sacrament of marriage, and because women's "consent" to migration and a la
bor contract violated the family's prior claim to their labor and sexuality.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the Government of India supported the tea lobby
and promoted "free migration," which sought to circumvent the regulative
framework developed in the 1860s and 1870s. In the end, however, the govern
ment could not ignore the combination of interests ranged against women's mi
gration. The Act of 1901 sought to reestablish regulation of plantation migration
and in particular women's recruitment. Women's consent was deferred to the
family. In the next two decades, the issue of "family consent" remained a con
stant source of controversy in women's recruitment. Legislation did not always
prove effective in deterring women migrants. Nevertheless, an important prin
ciple had been put in place. In law, marriage was now deemed a contract that
precluded women's entering into any contract for labor without the consent of
husbands or male guardians.
The Act of 1901 was a clear step towards the juridical deproletarianization
of women. Marriage was construed as a juridical barrier to women's "free" en
try into certain segments of the wage labor market. Thus, in the case of women,
the experience of deproletarianization as well as of proletarianization, was dual
and distinctive. Women were proletarianized both as members of peasant/arti
san households as well as through establishment of individual male proprietary
rights. Such women, economically or juridically separated from the means of
production and subsistence, were not constituted as free subjects in relation to
the labor market. Those who did enter plantation employment were deprole
tarianized, along with male workers, restricted by penal contracts from with
drawing their labor. Others were not only denied entry into wage labor, but also
constrained into largely unpaid work as members of peasant, artisan or laboring
families. These distinctive trajectories defy rigid categories of class and linear
models of class formation, indicating instead the need to consider variable and
dynamic patterns of change. In any case, the nature and extent of capitalist trans
formation in the Indian countryside, especially in the colonial period, remains
an open question. The specificities of women's experience not only unsettle the
explanatory value of the "peasant-proletariat" thesis in understanding working
class formation, but also challenge the validity of applying received models of
class formation.
NOTES
1 Some historians have argued that the rural connection of industrial workers hindered
class formation Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the "precapitalist" character of Indian la
bor prevented the formation of a working class, Rethinking Working-Class History Bengal
1890-1940 (Princeton, 1989), Raj Chandavarkar argues that the rural buffer could heighten la
bor militancy, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India Business Strategies and the Work
ing Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, (Cambridge, UK, 1994), Amariya Sen has pointed out the
importance of maintaining female presence in the countryside in order to maintain the stake in
joint and/or ancestral property, Employment, Technology and Development (Oxford, 1985),
Arjan de Haan focuses on the ritual, social and emotional contents of urban-rural relationships,
Unsettled Settlers Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta (Calcutta, 1996)
2 Most writings in the 1920s and 1930s reflected such a view For more detailed discussion
see Samita Sen, "Gender and Class Women in Indian Industry, 1920-1990," National Labour
Institute Research Studies Series No 016, 2001 For additional detail on the relationship be
tween the urban and rural households see Ranajit Dasgupta, "Migrant Workers, Rural Con
nections and Capitalism The Calcutta Jute Industrial Labour, 1890s to 1940s," Indian Institute
of Management, Calcutta, Working Paper Series, April 1987, Mimeograph
3 I have elaborated these issues in "Beyond the 'Working Class', Women's Role in Indi
an Industrialisation," South Asia 22 2 (1999) 95-117
4 For more details of the nature and range of activities of women left behind in the vil
lages, see Dasgupta, "Migrant Workers" and also Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colo
nial India The Bengal Jute Industry, 1890-1940 (Cambridge, 1999), Chapter 2
5 Recasting Women Essays in Colonial History, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds
(New Delhi, 1989), especially the Introduction Also see Michael Anderson, "Work Construed
Ideological Origins of Labour Law in British India to 1918" in Dalit Movements and the Mean
ing of Labour in India, ed Peter Robb (Oxford, 1993), 87-120
6 Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital Rural Bengal Since 1770, New Cam
bridge History of India, III-2 (Cambridge, 1993) 66-111
7 Census of India, 1911, Bengal, 342, Nirmala Banerjee, Indian Women in a Changing In
dustrial Scenario (New Delhi, 1991)
8 Social and Economic Status of Women Workers in India Labour Bureau, Ministry of
Labour, Government of India, 1953
9 D Jacobson, "Purdah and the Hindu Family" in Separate Worlds Studies in Purdah in
South Asia, H Papanek and G Minault, eds (Delhi, 1982), 81-109
10 Ibid, 94
11 Rosalind O'Hanlon, For the Honour of my Sister Countrywomen Tarabai Shinde and
the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Oxford, 1994), Introduction
12 A Menefee Singh, "Rural-to-Urban Migration of Women in India Patterns and Im
plications" m Women in the Cities of Asia Migration and Urban Adaptation, J T Fawcett et al,
eds (Boulder, Co, 1984)
13 A P Middleton, Bihat and Orissa District Gazetteer, Saran (Patna, 1930), 32
14 L S S O'Malley, Bengal Distict Gazetteets, Midnapore (Calcutta, 1911), 33
15 Ibid , Darbhanga (Calcutta 1907), 26
16 Haraprasad Chattopadhyay, Internal Migration A Case Study of Bengal (Calcutta,
1987), 422
17 Chandavarkar The Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 128
18 Census of India, 1921, 5, 2
19 For more details on gendered pattern of migration to Bombay, see Chandavarkar, The
Origins of Industrial Capitalism For the Calcutta jute industry, see Sen, Women and Labour in
Late Colonial India
20 Nirmala Banerjee "Working Women in Colonial Bengal Modernization and Margin
ahzation" in Recasting Women, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds (New Delhi, 1989)
269-301
21 Dasgupta, "Migrant Workers "
22 D A E Engels, Beyond Purdah? Women In Bengal, 1890-1939 (Oxford, 1996) 209
23 Arjan de Haan, "The Jute industry and Its Workers Changes in Stratification in east
ern India" in Bengal Communities, Development and States, Sekhai Bandopadhyay, Abhijit
Dasgupta, and Willem van Schendel, eds (New Delhi, 1994) 255-295
24 Report of Dr Dagmar Curjel on the conditions of Employment of women before and

after childbirth, 1923, unpublished West Bengal State Archives (henceforth WBSA), Calcut
ta, Commerce Department, Commerce Branch, April 1923, B77 (henceforth Curjel Report),
Main Report
25 Banerjee, "Working Women in Colonial Bengal "
26 Indian Factory Commission, Government of India (Calcutta, 1891)
27 Report of the Royal Commission of Labour in India, Government of India, (London,
1931), 5, 2
28 G M Broughton, Labour in Indian Industries (Oxford, 1924)
29 Curjel Report, Main Report, 1-2
30 Radhakamal Mukherjee, Indian Working Class (Bombay, 1945), 261-262
31 Ibid, 262-63
32 Curjel Report, Main Report
33 R N Gilchrist, Labour and Land Government of Bengal (Calcutta, 1931), 10
34 Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India
35 Radha Kumar, "Family and Factory Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry,
1919-1939" in Women in Colonial India, Essays on Survival, Work and the State, Indian Eco
nomic and Social History Review, J Knshnamurty, ed (Oxford, 1989)
36 Dilip Simeon stated that eighty percent of the women worked with husbands or male
relatives Dilip Simeon, The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism Workers, Unions and
the State in Chota Nagpur, 1928-1939 (New Delhi, 1995), 24
37 Ibid See also Banerjee, "Working Women in Colonial Bengal," 275
38 Engels, Beyond Purdah9, 209
39 Census of India, 1921, 7,1, 12
40 Engels, Beyond Purdah?, 211
41 Simeon, The Politics of Labour, 24
42 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830
1920, (Oxford, 1974)
43 Rhoda Reddock, "Freedom Denied Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad
and Tobago, 1845-1917," Economic and Political Weekly, 20 43 (1985)
44 D McFarlen, Memoranda of 48 Examinations of Mauritius Labourers returned to Ben
gal in the "Graham" Government of India (Calcutta, 1841)
45 Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 100, for additional detail on trends see 273
46 Ibid, 90
47 Lord Salisbury to Governor-General of India in Council, 24 March 1875, Report of the
Indian Jute Manufacturers Association, (Calcutta, 1899)
48 Reddock, "Freedom Denied " Also see Madhavi Kale, "'Capital Spectacles in British
Frames' Capital, Empire and Indian Indentured Migration to the British Caribbean," Inter
national Review of Social History 41 (1996) (special supplement "Peripheral" Labour9 Stud
ies in the History of Partial Proletarianisation)
49 Report on the Emigration from the Port of Calcutta to British and Foreign Colonies,
1875-1880
50 Bihar State Archives, General Department, Emigration Branch, May 1885, 6-8
51 Bihar State Archives, General Department Emigration Branch, March 1885
52 Lord Salisbury to Governor-General of India in Council, 24 March 1875, Report of the
Indian Manufacturers Association (Calcutta, 1899)
53 Bihar State Archives, General Department, Emigration Branch, May 1885, 6-8
54 Ibid
55 This section draws on a previous published article Samita Sen, "Unsettling the House
hold Act VI (of 1901) and the regulation of women migrants in colonial Bengal," Internation
al Review of Social History 41 (1996)
56 The Report of the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, Government of India (Calcut
ta, 1906) [henceforth Assam Report 1906]
57 Samita Sen, "Questions of Consent Women's recruitment for Assam Tea Gardens,
1859-1900," Studies in History, l8 2 (2002), "Offences Against Marriage Negotiating Custom
in Colonial Bengal" in A Question of Silence7 The Sexual Economies of Modern India, Janaki
Nair and Mary John, eds (New Delhi, 1999)
58 The literal meaning is "original inhabitants " The British referred to them as "Abo
riginals" or "Tnbals " In the Indian Constitutions most of these communities are included un
der the category "Scheduled Tribes " The term " Adivasi" emerged out of self assertion move
ments
59 Assam Report, 1906
60 Ibid
61 See Sen, "Questions of Consent "
62 Inland Emigration Act (of the Government of India), Act I of 1882, Chapter 1, Sec
tion 3 E A Gait, The Assam Emigration Manual (Calcutta, 1893), 13
63 Assam Report, 1906
64 WBSA Judicial Department, Police Branch, August 1873, A95-98
65 Ibid
66 Ibid
67 Ibid
68 I have discussed these issues in greater detail in "Unsettling the Household "
69 WBSA, Judicial Department, Police Branch, August 1873, A95-98
70 Ibid
71 The manipulation of customary law towards a more repressive marriage regime has
been discussed m Sen, "Offences Against Marriage "
72 Ibid
73 WBSA Judicial Department, Police Branch, August 1873, A95-98
74 Ibid
75 Ibid
76 Ibid
77 Ibid
78 Sir John Edgar as Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal had put together a
collection of papers on Assam tea in 1873 By 1882 he had become the Chief Secretary to the
Government of Bengal Sir Edgar's Report to the Government No 479 Cr, 3 November 1882
WBSA, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, August 1893, A65-66, paragraph 7
79 From C C Stevens, Commissioner of the Chota Nagpur Division to the Chief Secre
tary to the GOB, 28 February 1888 WBSA, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, August
1893, A65-66
80 Ibid
81 Quoted m Report from Mr E N Baker, Offg Deputy Commissioner, Manbaum, 1887
WBSA Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, August 1893, A65-66 (Henceforth Baker Re
port)
82 Ibid
83 Ibid
tary to the GOB, 28 February 1888 WBSA Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, August 1893,
A65-66
85 Baker Report
86 Ibid
tary to the GOB, 28 February 1888 WBSA Judicial Department, Judicial Branch August 1893,
A65-66
88 The Bengalee, XXVIII 4, 22 January 1887, reproduced in Dwarkanath Ganguly, Slav
ery in British Dominion, Snkumar Kunda, ed , K L Chattopadhyay comp (Calcutta, 1972)
89 I have discussed these issues m several earlier papers See "Honour and Resistance
Gender, Community and Class in Bengal, 1920-40" m Bengal Communities, Development and
States, Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Abhijit Dasgupta, and Willem van Schendel, eds (New Delhi,
1994) and "Unsettling the Household "
90 Ramkumar Vidyaratna, Kuhkahini [Sketches from Cooly Life], (Calcutta, 1888) 6-7
91 Ibid 30
92 Ibid
93 Sir John Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Commissioner of
the Patna Division, 30 November 1889 WBSA, General Department, Emigration Branch, Jan
uary 1890, A139-140
94 Ibid
95 WBSA General Department, Emigration Branch, July 1904, A6-15

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International Labor and Working-Class, Inc.

"Without His Consent?": Marriage and Women's Migration in Colonial India

International Labor and Working-Class, Inc., Cambridge University Press are

International Labor and Working-Class History

decisions on their own behalf Interestingly, colonial officials pulled in both di

Marriage and Migration

Women's Role in Tamily Migration

Women were also part of permanent migration, sometimes undertaken in fami

permanently," wrote L S S O'Malley in the Bengal District Gazetteer L4 Similar

Invisible Migration Women Workers in Urban Industries

The evidence from official documents and independent researchers suggests

Excluding Women Workers Labor in the Coal Mines

Recruiting Women for Overseas Migration

Resisting Recruitment Women's Migration to the Assam Tea Plantations

To "settle" labor, planters encouraged family migration and recruited from

Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, initiated a searching en

24 Report of Dr Dagmar Curjel on the conditions of Employment of women before and

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