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 India 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 sorrow of a young girl's permanent departure from her parental home.⁸

Yet the pervasive image of a final parting has obscured the circulation of married women between marital and conjugal families. The nature of such circulation 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 of 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:

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 transplanting, however, they were expected to be appropriately veiled to avoid elder male in-laws.¹⁰

Indeed, individual female migration over short distance often outstripped male migration, especially in rural-rural circulation where women figured in large numbers in casual and inter-district movements. Only some of this migration can be attributed to marriage.¹²

Women's Role in Family Migration

Women were also part of permanent migration, sometimes undertaken in family groups and sometimes as an escape from family. Indeed, colonial officers considered the number of women present in migration groups an index of its permanency. 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 Bengal 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.¹⁴

Women were involved to varying degrees in four types of large-scale labor mobilization within 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 Calcutta. Second, there was the development of mining, especially coalmining, in the Ranigaj-Jharia belt of Bengal and Bihar, which required large inputs of labor. The mines mobilized labor from local sources involving short-distance migration 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 suffered chronic labor shortages and employed recruiters to source labor from Bengal, Bihar, UP, Central Provinces, and Orissa. 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 created by large-scale rural-urban migration. The “coolie export” and Assam migration 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 integrity and control. As opportunities for mobility and wage work widened, the need for men to retain control over women's labor and mobility within 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 formation. 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-nineteenth century: Calcutta and Bombay. Calcutta 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 commercial and financial hub of India. In 1921, Calcutta received about 300,000 migrants, chiefly from Bihar and UP,¹⁶

The low participation of women in rural-urban migration has been variously explained. Nirmala Banerjee argues that employment and housing conditions in textile industries were a deterrent for rural women, who had fewer opportunities for productive work in the city.²⁰

The oral evidence collected by various labor commissions points in a different 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 in the rural economy forced women who were denied family resources to seek employment opportunities in the city.²⁵

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 Officer of the Government of Bengal, observed. Since many of these women migrated 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 associated with the collapse of caste and gender hierarchies. Bengali women, especially, were often described as prostitutes.²⁸

Women who did migrate to the city and enter factory employment were denigrated by their very marginality. 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

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

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

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 generational divisions of labor, these units of labor were not necessarily “family units.”³⁶

Women's coalmining labor was concentrated in the Raniganj-Jharia belt of Bengal and Bihar, which produced ninety percent of India's total coal production, and employed upward of 200,000 workers in 1921.³⁷

The misnomer of “family units” carried a high cost for mining women when, in 1929, they were prohibited from underground work. The mining companies realized the advantage of enforcing the prohibition on women's underground work once they began mechanizing small operations in haulage, screening, and loading, which earlier had employed large numbers of women.⁴¹

As women's role in industries and mines became more marginal, these industries became the core of the “formal” sector in Independent India. So male workers enjoyed increasing state regulation and organized themselves in federated 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 single, male breadwinner with a domesticated wife and dependent children. Such assumptions 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 domesticated wife and mother—an ideology shared by employers, workers and officialdom—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, plantation labor was organized by contract from the very beginning and was, therefore, under intense state scrutiny and regulation throughout the entire colonial period. Second, women were greatly in demand in plantations for specific tasks constructed as feminine, and planters were willing to go to great lengths to recruit 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 plantations' 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 recruitment 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 overseas colonies involved long-distance travel and long-term contracts or “indenture” 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, signaling just how interested the planters in the receiving colonies were in women.⁴²

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 Indian 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 never 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 in north Bihar and eastern UP with an established custom of service employment in jobs where they worked as sepoys, bearers, and other casual positions. In 1840–41, the Protector of Emigrants undertook to question forty-eight returning emigrants who, it was reported, “reposed perfect confidence” that their wives and children were cared for in their absence by extended family.⁴⁴

Colonial recruitment agents and their subcontractors resorted to fraud, deception, and coercive tactics to recruit women. In some cases this was “tantamount 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 frequently sent to colonies . . . are worse than useless.”⁵¹

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 accommodation and medical examination should be provided under the supervision of female personnel; and licensed women recruiters should be employed for recruitment of women. But the two main recommendations were the most controversial. Against the tenor of official opinion that allegations of “kidnapping” be thoroughly investigated and recruiters punished, they suggested “that the system 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

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 in the Brahmaputra valley. By the 1870s, there were some 900 gardens and 500,000 workers.⁵⁶

To “settle” labor, planters encouraged family migration and recruited from communities where such migration in family units was more established, notably the Adivasis⁵⁸

The twin needs of cheap female and child labor combined with the imperative 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 contracts, low wages, poor living conditions and extremely high mortality. Assam only attracted those who wished to escape from home or hide. Moreover, because 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 recruiting 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

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” migration 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 indefinite 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 family authority, either without the knowledge of the husbands (and the conjugal family) or in the teeth of their opposition. Recruiting agents targeted dissatisfied women, including married women, and offered them an escape from oppressive 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 in Chhotnagpur, a major recruiting district. Not only were immediate revenue interests 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 major plank in their campaign against Assam migration. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the Government of Bengal, faced with the problem of high mortality during the journey to Assam, gave some credence to the representations of Chotnagpur officials. Greater surveillance of recruitment and transportation of workers was introduced in the Transport of Native Labourers Act of 1863. In the next decade, three legislative initiatives were taken in 1868, 1870, and 1873 to widen the regulative framework. In 1874, however, Government of Bengal lost jurisdiction 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 commitment 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 mining interests. Between 1880 and 1900 the tea lobby prevailed, but growing opposition 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 oppressive 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 migration decisions. Against charges of fraud and coercion, they counterposed voluntary migration by women, highlighting the oppressive features of their familial 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 “consent,” whether women had the right to consent to migration, to labor contracts or whether the rights of the male heads of families preempted and circumvented such rights. The issue of the family's prior claim to women's labor and sexuality lay behind these debates.

Unexpectedly, the Act of 1863 generated controversy over women as subjects in civil law. Among other requirements, the Act mandated that magistrates register intending emigrants in the recruitment area and that they ensured an understanding of the terms and conditions of the contract. These provisions confronted subordinate judicial officers with a legal dilemma. They could not ensure 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 departure 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

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 increased, 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 migrated to the Assam gardens chiefly from the Province of Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa), the Central and United Provinces. These areas accounted for nearly half the total migrants in the 1880s and 90s.⁶³

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 altogether? In one case, for example, Jaggo Mahto, a recruiting agent, was charged with the kidnapping Madhav Gorain (eighteen years), Choonee Bowrine (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 parents . . .” 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 Bhooyan, 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 intended to sell her to the depot or employ her as a prostitute is not clear from the legal 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

This reading was unacceptable to the Judicial Commissioner. Referring to the case of Gheerdharee Bhooyan, he argued that an eleven-year-old girl, a minor, 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 “kidnapping.”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 consent was unacceptable, and ought to be illegal. Other officers agreed that married women should not be granted the power of consent to “leave” their home and family. “The Magistrate,” said one officer “should be prohibited from registering as coolies wives who have husbands living without first obtaining the sanction of the husbands.”⁶⁶

The critical question was whether married women's migration could be “voluntary” at all, and if it was, whether such a choice was acceptable. Most officers 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

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 sixteen 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 provision for married women. A registering officer noted the legal difficulty of dealing with women's voluntary migration, writing that since the “women being recruited ostensibly to emigrate as coolies” were “willing to go, the law does not warrant the interference of the Magistrate to prevent them.”⁷⁰

The colonial state's policy of elevating the paterfamilias and enhancing control 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, familial and social matters, accepting the Brahminic notion of sacramental marriage as applicable to all Hindus. On the other, it quietly sanctioned a more repressive 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 divorce and remarriage. The state attempted to impose on women of these communities 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 other processes enhanced the control over women within marriage: first, women's economic options dwindled as a result of the decline in their traditional occupations; and second, men were invested with absolute property rights, especially 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 Marriage” including bigamy, abduction and enticement. The code framed the offence of “enticement” specifically within the context of a growing trade in prostitution and defined the offence as “inveigling away” a married woman for “immoral purposes.”⁷²

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 illicit intercourse, though there would be every probability of such a result if she went without her husband.”⁷⁴

In Chotnagpur, revenue and judicial officials agreed that a new law or regulation was needed to prevent married women from migrating to Assam under contract. “To protect husbands from the wiles of the coolie recruiter,” the Commissioner urged, “there should be some such order . . . regarding the recruitment of married women.”⁷⁶

Yet when a new Act was finally framed in 1882, the Commissioner's recommendations 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.”⁷⁸

Local officers agreed that the issue was not merely one of protecting recruits from being “cajoled,” “enticed,” “abducted” or “kidnapped” by professional contractors, but, more importantly, upholding the claims of the family objecting to such recruitment. The professional recruiters' crime was not merely against the women and children they recruited but “against marriage” (the husband) or against the parents/guardians. The interests and claims of the “family” were thus counterpoised against a consensual contract between recruit and recruiter. Kaye, the Assistant Superintendent of Police (1884) cautioned, for example, that if “young people desire to leave home without or against the consent 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 recruiting exempt from all supervision” which “immensely facilitates” desertion by women and children.⁸¹

“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 mothers, 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

The Commissioner, too, was disturbed by the ease with which young women (and sometimes men) could disappear in the gardens of Assam.⁸⁴

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 susceptible to gross deceit and supposedly unaware of the consequences of their decisions. All four cases involved young married women of about thirteen or fourteen years age, victims of fraud. Sukarmoni and Madhi were decoyed from their houses on the pretence that they were to become the mistresses of rich natives at Bolarampore and Purulia. 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 removed 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 unlicensed depots was a major factor behind the “disappearance” of relatives. These recruits were “carefully kept in depots to which strangers cannot gain admittance 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 protonationalist “Native Press” turned the spotlight on Assam recruitment with particular emphasis on the sexual exploitation of plantation 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 “tantamount to inducing a married woman to leave her husband for an immoral purpose.”⁸⁸

Published in 1888, Ramkumar Vidyaratna's Kulikahini (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, Adarmani, a woman teagarden worker. 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 recruiters:

The author then goes on to depict how two recruiters, Ramuna and Jhamuna, follow these instructions to successfully recruit Adarmani, the wife of a poor peasant, and her two daughters. The recruiters found Adar in a particularly vulnerable state. Her husband had gone away with their son in search of work because 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, ornaments, 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 persuasively, “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 knew?”⁹¹

In succumbing to the recruiters' wiles, Adar was not only revoking male authority but was inviting its terrible consequences: hard work, poor pay, and sexual exploitation in the gardens. He laid out in graphic detail the conditions leading 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 persuaded a wavering Adarmani to take the final step towards Assam. The author's imaginative reconstruction of Adar's hardships in the village and at home as expressed in Ramuna's rather phony dialogue is laden with a heavy and obvious irony. His foreknowledge that conditions in Assam were in every aspect worse than Adar's present 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

Adar's story underlines and exemplifies women's transition from traditional (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 existing 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 without the consent of husband or parent or guardian became by definition “enticement,” “abduction,” and “kidnapping” under various sections of the Indian Penal 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 authority; their labor was owned by the family to be deployed for household subsistence. In general, the colonial state facilitated this process; the pressure of tea interests had to be denied in the larger interests of revenue and stability. Sir John Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, initiated a searching enquiry 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

The 1901 Assam Labour and Emigration Act brought new restrictions on “free” emigration, including a section dealing separately with women's emigration. 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

Conclusion

The issue of women's migration must be located within major social and economic 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 expanding opportunities of wage employment in new sites of capitalist production and indebtedness in the countryside following from colonial revenue policies, commercialization of agriculture and spiraling rent demands. Rural impoverishment had two major gender dimensions. First, women's traditional occupations, like spinning, preparing food, and processing fuel declined as a result of deindustrialization and reduced access to common resources. Second, settlement 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 increased in the nineteenth century, wives, daughters, and widowed female kin became even more subject to the arbitrary authority of male guardians. More than ever, rural women's subsistence, indeed their survival, became contingent on fulfilling familial roles and obligation.

Given the importance of the small peasant economy in their revenue calculations, the colonial state attempted to further this process by enhancing the authority of the male head of the family over dependent wives, female kin, and children. A series of judicial, legislative, and administrative measures were undertaken, 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 opportunities 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 combined 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 domain of wage work.

Despite men's control over women's seasonal migrations, husbands and fathers 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 seduction 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 misrepresentation 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 officials 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 industry in the region. For opponents of women's migration, “consent” was impossible 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 labor 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 government could not ignore the combination of interests ranged against women's migration. 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 constant source of controversy in women's recruitment. Legislation did not always prove effective in deterring women migrants. Nevertheless, an important principle 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” entry 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/artisan 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 deproletarianized, along with male workers, restricted by penal contracts from withdrawing 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 transformation 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.