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‘Useful’ and ‘Earning’ Citizens? Gender, state, and the market in post-colonial Delhi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2019

ANJALI BHARDWAJ DATTA
ANJALI BHARDWAJ DATTA*
Affiliation:
Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1924 - 1955
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to acknowledge the support of Gates-Cambridge Trust and the Leverhulme Trust in funding this research. Special thanks to Professor Joya Chatterji, Dr Norbert Peabody, Dr Aditya Balasubramanian, Dr Eleanor Newbigin, Professor William Gould, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Comparative Histories of Asia Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

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