Article

From ‘Plantation Journal of South Asian Development

13(2) 1–22
Workers’ to Naukrānī: © 2018 Sage Publications India
Private Limited
The Changing Labour SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
Discourses of Migrant DOI: 10.1177/0973174118785269
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/sad
Domestic Workers

Supurna Banerjee1

Abstract
The tea plantations of Dooars in West Bengal are founded on a gendered
division of labour. The recent economic crisis faced by the tea plantations
brought long-established labour practices into question. Mounting expenses and
closures led to rising migration of plantation workers to distant urban areas
in North and South India, in search of alternative employment. Many of these
women found employment as domestic workers and care workers in Delhi and
Gurgaon. Drawing on the in-depth narratives of these migrant domestic workers,
this article explores self-perceptions and representations of work and brings to
the forefront the ongoing process of skill acquisition on the one hand and its
constant invisibilization on the other. This reproduces paid domestic and care
work not only as women’s natural labour but as low skilled and low status work
that is particularly suitable for migrant women. The women’s own perceptions
help problematize and nuance otherwise monolithic understandings of labour in
general and domestic labour in particular.

Keywords
Gendered labour, skills, in-country migration, domestic work, childcare

Introduction
Discourses of skill and historical association with social identities do not just
determine the economic rewards from a job but also construct that form of labour
as valued or devalued. Skill is neither an absolute category defined through its

1
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

Corresponding author:
Supurna Banerjee, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, 27/D, DD Block, Sector-I, Salt Lake,
Kolkata, West Bengal 700064, India.
E-mail: banerjee.supurna@gmail.com
2 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

relation with technology nor an objective economic fact (Sen, 1999). Skill may
instead be gauged as an ideology that works through its association with social
categories such as men/women, upper/lower caste and Hindu/Muslim.
Consequently, some jobs are labelled skilled, not because they inherently require
particular training but because they are done by men; other jobs are classified as
unskilled merely because they are done by women (Sen, 1999). This article builds
on Sen’s notion of skill as a social construct to illustrate how this shapes catego-
ries and hierarchies of work.
Specifically, I examine two interrelated processes of the gendering of labour.
The first is located in dual paradoxes which work simultaneously—the ongoing
process of skill acquisition and the performance of emotional labour through
learning, teaching and practising on the one hand and the simultaneous invisibi-
lizing of these skills through naturalizing women’s work, on the other. Allied to
this is the second set of processes which seeks to reproduce paid domestic work
and childcare not only as women’s natural labour but also low skilled and low
status work that is especially suitable for migrant women. These processes of
invisibilizing skill and naturalizing labour justify difficult working conditions,
low pay and the persistently low status of the jobs. They also explain the basis
on which classifications of labour into the categories of interest can be under-
stood. By focusing on women who were migrants from another region and from
tea plantations, and therefore another sector of employment, I am able to revisit
and disentangle the very understandings surrounding paid domestic work and
childcare. In the context of employment migration and labour market segmenta-
tion, this article contributes to scholarly debates on gendered labour by inter-
rogating conceptual binaries such as skilled/unskilled work, dignity/stigma and
paid work/housework.
Drawing on the narratives of these migrant women, I argue that workers’ self-
perceptions can be understood with reference not just to the concrete aspects of
production and wage but also to more diffused ideas of their recognition as work-
ers. Focusing on the complexities of labour involved in paid domestic work, the
women’s perception of their jobs as paid domestic workers brings out multiple
contradictions inherent in the categorization of their labour: the notions of house-
work as an extension of the natural feminine vis-à-vis the necessity of learning
inherent in adapting to middle-class domesticity; the dignity of workers as mazdūr
(worker) in the plantations vis-à-vis the stigma of being a naukrānī (domestic
servant) and the diffuseness of the workspace in the intimate sphere of the house-
hold. Childcare, whilst important in itself, is used to highlight the contrasting
implications of apparently similar forms of intimate labour. Building on ideas of
expertise, trust and affect, the childcarers’ discharge of duties bring in a different
set of values as core to their labour. This shapes their perception of childcare as a
service rather than unpaid, devalued labour. At the same time, the understanding
of both paid domestic work and childcare map on, in interesting ways, to the
women’s notions of the gendered self and labour.
The remainder of the article is organized as follows. The next section presents
the ethnographic context and methodology. The third section outlines the women’s
experiences as tea plantation workers prior to their acquiring of domestic worker
Banerjee 3

identities. Life as a domestic worker and childminder feature thereafter. The fourth
section examines the labour practices in paid domestic work and care work
through the lens of naturalized labour and skill. The fifth section deals with
notions of stigma and dignity of labour in the perception of these migrant workers.
The article will conclude with a discussion on how categories of labour are
constructed in the final section.

Ethnographic Context and Methodology

Ethnographic Context
The tea plantations of Dooars relied extensively on migrant labour from the
Chota Nagpur Plateau (who are called Adivasis1) and on Nepali migrants
(Chatterjee, 2003; Pradhan, 1991). Brought in by the colonial planters, these
migrant workers were settled in the plantations where they continued to live for
generations. Through generations, the plantation workers had laboured under
conditions of poverty with very low wages and exploitative conditions of work.
After a peak in production and profit in 1998, the period from 1999 onwards
saw a crisis in the Dooars tea plantations (and the Indian tea industry in gen-
eral), which reached its nadir around 2003–2004 and lasted to the end of the
decade (Banerjee, 2017; Dasgupta, 1992). With the fall in the market demand of
tea, many of the smaller plantations became unviable and had to shut down. The
larger plantations, on the other hand, curtailed their functioning through labour-
displacing measures such as retrenchment, withdrawal of all forms of benefits
and complete resistance to negotiations by labour unions (Banerjee, 2017).
Malnutrition, outbreaks of diseases and starvation deaths followed in closed and
crisis-ridden plantations alike. Migration from the plantations in search of alter-
native livelihoods had already started in the early 2000s, mainly because of
aspirations for social mobility, children’s education and growing consumerism.
But with basic sustenance under threat, the rate of migration picked up from
2008 onwards.
In the initial phase, the migrants were overwhelmingly male, but with the
deepening of the crisis, women also started migrating. Whether men or women,
migrants usually did not travel with their families, although they might have
travelled in groups of friends and relatives of the same sex. Typically, either the
husband or the wife migrated while the other remained behind to manage the
household and often continued working in the plantations or in some odd jobs
in the nearby townships. In unusual instances when both husband and wife
migrated, both partners were employed and the children, if any, were left in the
plantations in the care of grandparents or other relatives. While some found
work in the nearby towns, most moved in search of jobs further away to Delhi
National Capital Region (NCR), Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kerala and
sometimes to Dubai and Kuwait. For men and women alike, the migration was
intended to be temporary. None of the people I spoke to talked of planning to
relocate to the destination cities permanently. The wages were better, but the
4 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

jobs were contractual and working conditions were bad. Most of the workers
spoke of feelings of belonging in the plantations, homesickness and difficulty in
adjusting to the food habits as central to their decisions about returning. The
workers also expressed hopes that the plantation would reopen and they could
get back their previous jobs.
The migration of labour from the Dooars tea plantations was markedly
economic, irrespective of whether it was the man or the woman who migrated.
Gendered preconceptions about men’s and women’s economic roles have tended
to result in perceptions of labour migration as exclusively male (De Los Reyes,
2001, p. 276; McDowell, 2013). In recent decades, however, the academic debates
have been dominated by the feminization of migration. Scholars like Sharpe
(2001) argue that the twentieth century has been a turning point for female
migration, with women now accounting for half of global migrants. Others like
Wadhawan (2013) maintain that the recent years have rather seen the recognition
of the presence of these large number women among global migrants. There has,
then, been an increased emphasis on women migrants and their experiences.
Migration processes for men and women are, however, distinct and need separate
analytical treatment.
The kinds of jobs the migrant women attain, the labour practices surrounding
them and women’s first-hand reflections of their work offer insight into gendered
labour. The continued existence of a gendered division of labour and a gender-
segregated labour market at both the place of origin and destination is key in
framing the scope and composition of migrant female labour. The gendering of
labour is not determined by the extent of women’s paid employment. Rather, the
kinds of jobs available to women and the complex social relations that mediate
and structure this labour frame gendered labour (Ray, 2016, p. 60). Gender stereo-
typing persists with migration, even if the specifics through which it operates
might have changed: it shapes job distribution within the accepted versions of
masculinity and femininity (McDowell, 2013, p. 10), and maps onto a division of
labour, skill and a hierarchy. As will be delineated in this article, the terms on
which migrant women are integrated in the urban labour market relegate them to
the lowest occupational categories using the currencies of gender segregation,
class differentiation and migrant status (De Los Reyes, 2001).
Many of the migrant women from the Dooars plantations found work as paid
domestic workers in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida or the NCR region. A smaller
number became care workers. Here, I use care work very specifically to connote
paid service for taking care of small children or the elderly, although my respond-
ents were limited to childcarers. The article deals with these two categories of
migrant labour. Among my respondents, there was no overlap between these
categories as women were recruited specifically as general domestic workers or
as childcarers. In only two instances had women shifted from working as domestic
workers to childcarers in different households.
The women used existing social networks to migrate to Delhi and NCR, most
of them going in groups on the recommendation of their relatives or friends who
were already working in Delhi. Many such relatives actually ran placement agen-
cies for recruiting migrant workers and provided boarding and lodging for the first
Banerjee 5

few weeks until they were employed. Whilst the new migrants had to pay certain
fees, most emphasized that existing social networks enabled them to minimize
this initial expenditure. Other women were assisted with recruitment and given
accommodation until then by relatives or friends already working in Delhi.
Among my respondents, only two women were actively recruited by agents from
the plantations. They paid between `6,000–`10,000 to these agencies and were
bound to work for a specified period of time.

Methodology
The study draws on fieldwork conducted in various stages between 2010 and
2015. The first stage was ethnography conducted from 2010 to 2013 in two tea
plantations called Daahlia and Kaalka when the women were working in the plan-
tations. Whilst these two plantations were the focus of my ethnography, the exten-
sive periods of time spent there also brought me into contact with women from
other plantations in the clusters where Kaalka and Daahlia were located. The out-
reach of my interviewing was thus much wider. The bulk of this article is, how-
ever, based on the life histories2 of 20 women employed as domestic workers and
9 childcarers.
Daahlia is located near Birpara and Kaalka near Alipurduar. Daahlia belongs to
a large company owning many tea plantations in the North Bengal belt. It was a
prosperous plantation that remained open and produced even through the 2000–
2010 crisis period. Facing crisis from 2014, it was closed for one year and reo-
pened with curtailed operations. Kaalka remained closed from 2000 to 2010, but
had resumed operations despite facing periodic closures and a backlog in clearing
workers’ dues. At the time of the study, Daahlia had 1,850 permanent workers,
while Kaalka had 1,303 workers.3 In addition, temporary workers were employed
during the peak season. My respondents were Adivasi and Nepali women workers
from the plantations, mainly from the lower castes. Most were Hindus, but there
were also some Christians and Buddhists. The names of the plantations and my
respondents have been anonymized to maintain confidentiality.
The plantations covered by the study were either crisis-ridden or closed by the
second round of interviews in 2015. Although my focus was on migrant domestic
workers, my research did not involve travelling to migration destinations: I spoke
to the women when they returned to the plantations for short visits. Therefore, the
exploration here is on the workers’ perspectives and does not capture employer
viewpoints. All the migrant women were live-ins in what seemed to be middle-
class and upper-middle class homes, and they preferred this arrangement as it
enabled them to save on rent and food expenses. The employers were a mix
between employed women and not currently employed women. In the case of
childcarers, some employers were stay-at-home mothers, although most were
employed. The migrant women’s prior employment offers a prism through which
the women themselves analyse and make sense of their present labour situation.
The lens of migration offers sharp insights into the complexities of the discourses
governing labour practices.
6 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

Labour in Plantation Shaping later Experiences

Previous experiences in the labour market are crucial in shaping women’s initial
bargaining position and provide a reference point for the changes that occur whilst
acquiring skills and experience (McDowell, 2013, pp. 21–22). Chambers (2017)
emphasizes the need to attend to continuities experienced by the migrants as
opposed to an exclusive focus of ruptures and changes. Through focusing on the
fluid space between the material and the imagined, he argues for the possibilities
of understanding migration as an experience of relative continuity instead of over-
emphasizing the breach and discontinuities migration spells for the individual,
communities and hierarchies (Chambers, 2017, p. 23).
Women formed the bulk of the plantations’ workforce in poorly paid plucking,
pruning and other garden maintenance tasks that were considered unskilled or
low-skilled and low prestige. The male workforce, in contrast, was chiefly
employed in the tea factories in better paid and prestigious work that was labelled
as skilled. The gender division of labour links back to certain commonly under-
stood and accepted gender discourses. The perception of these tasks as gendered
was not arbitrary as the following quote illustrates.

SB: Why is it that it is usually women who do the job of plucking?

Madeeha: Women are more patient and this job requires patience. Also look at our
fingers, they are softer so they do not damage the bushes and we can pluck better.
SB: But if every woman can do this, then why can I not pluck properly?
M (laughs): You have to practise [abhyās karnā] more. You come from the city and you
are not used to this. We have seen our mothers do this from birth and learnt from them.
(Banerjee, 2017, p. 126)

This quote illustrates how, in characterizing their labour, there is an over-emphasis

on the natural and physiological and the practice and training embedded in social-
ization (which is what brings it into fruition) is downplayed (Elson & Pearson,
1981; Kabeer, 1999). Being already constituted with fixed gender attributes, the
workers are automatically mapped onto particular jobs. Women’s supposedly
innate dexterity, patience and care have been used to naturalize plucking as a
gendered task, a process which has been internalized by the women themselves,
their employers, supervisors and the entire workforce. The entrenchment of this as
devalued labour is reinforced through other practices too. The only other people
assigned to plucking were old or infirm men, who were considered unsuitable for
any other type of job. The clear message was that plucking was beneath the dignity
of able-bodied male workers (Banerjee, 2017). Other tasks in the garden were
naturalized and gendered on the basis of similar discourses that derived from the
unquestioned assumption of physiological and behavioural differences between
men and women that made women ‘naturally’ suited for particular tasks (Banerjee,
2017). Having a strong economic rationale at its core, this enabled the cheapening
of the production process.
Banerjee 7

Labour as ‘Natural’: Downplaying Skill

and Feminizing Natural
Requiring low capital input, linguistic or professional skill, paid domestic work is
often considered particularly suitable for newly migrant women (Raghuram,
1999, p. 209; Rajan & Joseph, 2016) and is rapidly becoming one of the chief
sources of employment for female casual workers (Introduction, in this special
issue; Neetha, 2004). Domestic worker is an umbrella category that includes
housemaid/servant, cook, gardener, gatekeeper/chowkidār/watchman, governess/
babysitter/ayah and others (Neetha, 2009, p. 490). To this, another category atten-
dant for the elderly needs to be added (Livingston, Manela, & Katona, 1996). I
refer here to housemaids/servants as domestic workers, and they are the lowest
paid. Here and elsewhere (Qayum & Ray, 2003; Sen & Sengupta, 2016), we see
that housemaids were often also assigned the duties of cooking (instead of hiring
the services of a separate cook) in addition to their house maintenance role.

Domestic Work: An Extension of Housework?

Until recently, research on domestic work had conceptualized it as a form of
reproductive labour, but the popularization and widening use of the term care
work has resulted in a re-categorization of domestic work from reproductive
labour into care work (Sen & Sengupta, 2016). Whilst accepting this broad
nomenclature, I foreground domestic work and childcare as two related but
distinct arenas in this article. Waged domestic work consists of household main-
tenance tasks, while childcare as a form of care work has at its centre a combina-
tion of emotional and physical labour. Despite the change in academic terminology,
we can see the persistence of the notion of social reproductive work in the low
wages and lack of prestige accorded to domestic work.
Among my respondents, the domestic workers usually earned about `8,000 per
month and childcarers about `10,000–`12,000. For comparison, permanent work-
ers employed as pluckers in the plantations earned `105 per day, or about `3,150
per month, from April 2012, with a day’s wage deducted for every day of absence.4
Moreover, as live-ins, they also received food and a place to stay in their employ-
er’s home. Nevertheless, domestic work as a form of labour was devalued by the
women themselves both because of the terms of service and as a form of labour:
Leela and Sanjana’s narratives shed light on this.

I work in the kothī (house). It is the usual work of cooking, cleaning and washing
dishes. Initially, cooking was difficult as I did not understand their Punjabi taste, but
soon I learnt. After that what is there? This housework I have done for forty years since
my marriage and never considered it ‘work’. Of course, doing it in another’s house is
different.
What is there in this work? It is easy work (asān kām hī to hain). Even in my own house
I had to do all these house tasks and then go for work (yeh sab karke kām mein jātī thī).
8 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

As a woman, all of us can do it, I can do it, you can do it. It’s not like the work in the
garden or in the factory that you have to practise. So in that sense, it is not difficult and
the pay is good, but I don’t like it. Looking after your own home is one thing; you have
your family there. But Supurna, however nice the family is to you in the kothī, finally
you are their servant (naukrānī).

Leela’s evaluation of her work brings out an important contradiction in the

understanding of ‘work’ itself. Whilst she talks of having to learn to make Punjabi
food, her emphasis is not so much on learning as on labelling the work as natural
labour. Moore (1988, p. 108) observes how food processing almost inevitably
becomes an area where many migrant women find employment, drawing on
notions of women’s natural capacity to perform these tasks. For the migrant
women, then, the details of the discourses governing their labour practices might
have changed, but the natural skill argument is reformulated. Sanjana views
plantation employment as formal ‘work’. By regarding paid domestic work not
as ‘work’ but as housework, something considered a regular part of a woman’s
day, she not only devalues her present job but negates the labour that was required
to perform her own housework. The different household maintenance tasks are
considered to derive from traits inherent in femininity. Consequently, even when
it is a paid service, it remains undervalued both in economic terms and in terms
of job prestige (Sen & Sengupta, 2016, p. 101). Later in her interview, Sanjana
talked of the long hours of work, the difficulty of having a different cuisine day
in and day out, the rationing of food and her tiredness when washing utensils
after a whole day’s work. But these facets remain invisible under the rubric of
‘natural’ feminine labour which was central to the women’s understanding of
paid domestic work.
The women’s claim that paid domestic labour simply replicated their own
housework, however, is fraught with contradictions. Paradoxically, they
acknowledged that the domesticity required of them in their middle-class or
upper-class employer’s house entailed a very different performance from how
they had managed their own households as Shaalu does in the following (Sen &
Sengupta, 2016).

The mistress is very particular about the vessels to be used and washing them. Some
can’t be washed with net, some can’t be scrubbed. It is like a whole system. For us, we
don’t have so much time and also we don’t know so much. We wash all our utensils
together with the same thing. But no, the mistress is very ‘tip-top’ about these.

In relation to their life in the plantation, their daily routine had to be adjusted to
the constraints of time and resources. But the tasks and the standards of domestic
work expected in the employers’ homes were very different and required a certain
amount of learning by those paid to perform these tasks. Shaalu cooked every day
with steel utensils in her own kitchen, but was now required to learn not only how
to use different kinds of vessels but also the different procedures to clean them.
The women could perform their paid labour adequately only by the effective
learning of the specific ways in which these tasks (which might at first glance
look very similar) were to be performed.
Banerjee 9

Additionally, most of the houses where these women worked used various
gadgets. Domestic workers had to acquire some technological skills, what Sen
and Sengupta (2016) term on-the-job skills, in using washing machines, dish-
washers, microwaves, sometimes even electric cookers and ovens. Most of these
women did not have access to such machines in their own homes, so learning to
use them entailed the acquisition of skills. These are skills acquired informally.
Within the plantation, the distinction between technical and natural mapped onto
the division between skilled and unskilled. Not one of my respondents, however,
recognized the use of domestic equipment as a skilled task. Rather, as items aimed
at making housework more efficient, the women subsumed them into the rubric of
reproductive labour. In a curious reversal, some women like Shalini even claimed
it was an inferior form of housework.

All these expensive machines are actually not good for anything. You put in dirty
clothes and they come out only half clean. At home (in the plantations), you have seen
how we keep our clothes clean through hand washing them. It is the vigour and careful-
ness with which you clean the clothes that shows. A machine can never do the equal
task of hand washing.

The use of implements connoted laziness and incomplete work rather than
efficiency, an example of women valorizing their own manual labour by negating
the effectiveness of fancy implements in comparison with honest physical labour
expressed through tāqat (vigour) and imāndārī (sincerity). Moreover, by devalu-
ing domestic gadgets, the women further diminished their present employment in
homes which required the use of such items. Instead of upgrading paid domestic
work to skilled work, then, the use of machines made it even more devalued to the
workers. It is also possible that being intimidated by such gadgets, the women
constructed a discourse to undermine the gadgets’ effectiveness compared to work
they did manually.
The process of naturalizing domestic labour points to several paradoxes inher-
ent in internalizing gendered labour. Many of these women were the principal
wage earners. Living in the employers’ house, they could save most of their salary
and send remittances back home. In contrast to unpaid housework, their paid
domestic work was more self-evidently instrumental in sustaining their families
in the plantations. Second, although the employers saw domestic work as a deval-
ued form of labour, they did not necessarily regard it as natural for a woman from
a semi-rural poor household to know how to perform tasks in a middle-class house
in exactly the right way. The women’s references to being supervised by the
mistress in the discharge of their tasks point in this direction. Further, the women’s
performance of paid domestic work in these middle- and upper-class homes was,
by their own admission, not an exact replication of the performance of domestic-
ity in their own houses. The challenge of meeting the employer’s expectations and
demands, carrying out a certain standard of service in quite a new environment, as
well as the trials of being (usually) a first-time single female migrant were all
likely to unsettle the ‘naturalness’ of their work. But the devaluing of paid domes-
tic work does not necessarily arise from its skill requirements. Rather, paid
domestic work draws its naturalization discourse chiefly from women’s roles as
10 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

housewives, mothers and wives. Executing these tasks in another’s home also
disrupted and undermined the performance of their familial roles. At the same
time, the performance of household tasks normally done in one’s own house, the
supervision by the mistress reinforced their servitude and the different character
of the workplace alienated them from a sense of being a worker. This inhibition of
the development of the worker identity is furthered by a sense of isolation as
much as by the sense that they are not working.
Being associated with ‘natural’ femininity, the women did not think house-
work entailed any formal requirement of skills. But the construction and recogni-
tion of skill is not based on random individual experiences (Banerjee, 2017).
Rather historically, skill has been constructed socially. Skill definitions operating
in the labour market emerged primarily in reference to male craftsmanship
(Meagher, 1997) and the entire notion of skill has been developed and legiti-
mized through a male lens. Employers, the market and the workers themselves
regard paid domestic work as akin to the ‘natural’ and ‘feminine’ housework
performed by women in their own homes, thereby denying and rendering invis-
ible the social and domestic skills acquired by the women through gender role
socialization perfected through years of practice, experience, skill and innova-
tion. While having a low status, the women still sought to ensure that it can be
distinguished from labour forms such as sex work (see Majumdar in this special
issue). Subscribing to this discourse can be an effort to make their jobs more
socially acceptable through emphasizing these jobs as ‘natural’ extensions of
their familial roles which have at least some semblance of value. Paid domestic
work becomes established as a ‘typical female post-industrial proletarian occu-
pation: part-time, quite poorly paid and with limited opportunity for skill devel-
opment and career advancement’ (Meagher, 1997, p. 17). I shall now scrutinize
where care work fits into this discourse.

Childcare as a Form of Employment: Labour of Love and Trust?

Significantly, fewer women found employment as care workers than as domestic
workers. They were older, usually in their mid-40s. Age played a specific role in
care work. In domestic work, age was not associated with experience. For care
workers, however, age seemed to be clearly equated with experience and per-
ceived motherly roles. Age might denote that the women will be stable employees
whose children have grown up and that they have prior experience with childcare
at least in their family setting. Most care workers told me that their employers had
themselves confirmed this preference for age. Beyond that, the respondents could
not readily identify other criteria which might be relevant to their recruitment,
although a recommendation from care workers or domestic workers employed by
people in the employers’ social network was probably important.
Childcare has been commonly conceptualized as nurturance and reproductive
labour (Duffy, 2005). Williams (2001, p. 1461) argues that the terminology of
‘care’ renders care as feminine, with the implication that where there is care there
is no work. This re-inscribes ‘natural feminine’ domesticity in unhelpful ways.
Banerjee 11

Distancing oneself from such natural mapping requires the reclassification of care
as work. For Hochschild (1998), care activities involve unique practices, skills
and ways of thinking with a strong emphasis on relationality, whether within the
family or as paid service. This enables one to foreground as ‘work’ those aspects
of care work which are often rendered invisible and inherent. Erickson (2005)
distinguishes emotion work engaged in by women from other forms of house-
work. Comforting, encouraging, loving and facilitating interaction have hardly
been equated with housework. Emotion work, however, might not be just the
spontaneous expression of love, but the performance of a socially constructed and
gender-appropriate role (Erickson, 2005, pp. 337–338).
For the effective performance of care work, this emotional labour based around
expectations of trust was an essential component of the childcarer’s job. This
element of emotional labour embedded in childcare also defined the workers’
terms of labour. As a mother of three and grandmother of two, Lakkhi was not
new to the art of caring for a baby. She contrasted her own experience with what
was (in her perception) the inexperience of the mother of the child, who was tech-
nically her employer. This enabled Lakkhi to negotiate a position of importance
and respect in her employer’s household.

Lakkhi: The family I worked for were very nice. The little boy was their first child.
He was two and a half months old when I joined. The mother was very inexperienced.
I had to teach her everything. I have two grandchildren by now … They (employers)
respected me a lot, called me ‘aunty’, always offered to take me out wherever they
went, brought food for me if they went to the restaurant. When I returned (to Dooars),
they were very sad.
SB: Did you have to do any form of training or anything?
Lakkhi: Training! For looking after one tiny baby! I had my training 35 years ago
when Sunny (eldest son) was born. (laughs) No, rather I taught the mother. She was
very young, even younger than you. Did not know anything. Could not even hold the
baby properly!

Here, we find an interesting juxtaposition of the natural qualities argument with a

skill argument. Childcarers differ crucially in this respect from paid domestic
workers. First, the women employed in childcare were better paid than those
employed for performing household maintenance. Childcare was recognized as a
specialized job and was built largely on negotiations around trust. Lakkhi and
women like her did not receive any professional training in childcare. Rather,
their supposedly natural capacities and in-born mothering instincts honed by long
years of practice enabled them to care for the baby effectively. Lakkhi, however,
had to teach the mother even to hold her baby, thus negating the notion of in-born
mothering instinct. In Lakkhi’s perception, her experience and trustworthy nature
enabled her to be more adept at handling the baby than her employer. The unstruc-
tured ‘training’ Lakkhi imparted to her employer in the intimate sphere of the
household, much like she herself would have received when she had her eldest
son, does not command recognition as skill training but is rendered invisible and
subsumed into natural feminine qualities.
12 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

Yet, whilst childcare is recognized as a specialized job, we need to probe what

caring for young children really implied. Their own parenting norms in the planta-
tions would have been very different from what their employers expected of them.
Conversations with the women suggested that their role in care work was primar-
ily physically tending to the babies, feeding, bathing and putting them to sleep.
This did not entail other broader responsibilities related to stimulation such as
reading to children, offering moral education and instilling discipline in them as
in evident in Grover’s article (this special issue). Interestingly, in all cases, the
child’s mother or grandmother was also present in the household and continued to
play a supervisory role, albeit subtly. Malini tended to the child, but the employers
were always around as she points out,

My whole day would be spent in looking after the child. His meals of mashed food had
to be prepared and he had to be fed at regular intervals. There was also bathing him and
making sure that he slept in the afternoon. At night, however, his mother took over. Of
course, she was always present, but the work had to be done by me. Sometimes she
would check the temperature of the milk, but other than that it was all me.

As with domestic work, childcarers tended to compare their experiences of child

rearing within their own families with their paid care work. Yet, a middle-class
urban household combined with the demands of city life required a very different
type of child-rearing from that expected in a poor tea plantation worker’s home.
Similarly, the women had to learn and negotiate different techniques for nurturing
small children, as explained further by Malini.

For us, poor women, working women, where is all that time? The mistress is very par-
ticular about boiling the milk to a particular temperature. It has to be checked with a
thermometer. Earlier she had to do it, but now I can do this myself. When my son was
small, I would just boil the milk and give it to him.

Malini could not read but had to learn to master a thermometer, even if just memo-
rizing the appropriate mark. The women regarded other aspects of urban middle-
class parenting as restrictive. Children in the tea plantations spent much of their time
playing with their peers without explicit adult supervision. The mother (or in many
cases other woman in the house) dealt with feeding, cleaning and putting them to
sleep. The women used to this somewhat hands-off parenting were faced with a
more involved parenting in their employers’ homes (see Grover, this volume). Thus,
the women painted the lives of their own children as carefree, and that of those they
were paid to look after as largely structured. Even Lakkhi, who was more adept at
handling the baby than the inexperienced mother, had to accept certain ideas about
caring from the mother, such as monitoring what toys the baby played with, the
soaps to be used on the baby’s skin, no salt in food, etc. The women did not always
accept these as meaningful or useful practices and often equated them with being
fussy. But as a part of their job they adapted to these expectations.
Childcare sits uneasily as both a product of naturalized emotional labour and a
valued service. The women’s experience (held to be commensurate with age)
Banerjee 13

translated into expertise, but an expertise that derived from the natural feminine
tendency for nurturing rather than from learning. The women did not have a uni-
form view of the new techniques, practices and notions of childcare that they had
to adopt in their employer’s house and indeed of construction of natural labour.
For instance, Deepa (who was relatively young and been with the same family for
seven years) considered that her stint of childcare in urban middle-class house-
holds had given her more expertise for this job:

I know not only how the poor people of the plantations rear their children but can also
spot the problems in this. If I now go to the new household for this same job, I will be
much better equipped because now I know what kind of childcare is expected in the
genteel households.

She recognized that negotiating with different childcare values and equipping her-
self with middle-class childcare practices had armed her with a certain skill.
Others, such as Malini or Lakkhi, dismissed these practices as superfluous, ‘the
whim of one who has too much time in her hand’. They projected agency here by
undermining the middle-class childcare practices and seemed to privilege their
own knowledge and practices of child-rearing over that of their employers.
Along with the questions of skill inherent in domestic work and childcare are
the related questions of stigma, dignity and humiliation which are crucial for con-
structing the worker’s terms of employment.

Dignity of Labour?

Domestic Work
The women’s status as live-in domestic workers rather than live-outs has
implications for their control over time and movements, and therefore their sense
of dignity. While women often prefer to be live-out (or part-time) workers to retain
some control over their lives, for migrant women this is rarely a choice. This live-in
condition corresponds closely with feelings of servitude and is a key in devaluing
women’s self-perceptions as we will see here. Workers and the wider plantation
populace perceived paid domestic work as stigmatized. Rita, a young unmarried
woman who was working in Gurgaon since 2008 draws attention to this.

SB: Why did you not go to Sikkim? Your father (a recruiting agent) said that he had
found jobs for many there.
Rita: No, no. My father, sister and I decided against it. We have many relatives in
Sikkim. If I work there in a house as a servant, they will get to know and talk about it.
And when they will come to Daahlia, they will also discuss this with other people. It
does not feel nice, no? My father thus said, ‘Go faraway, go to Delhi, there even if you
have to clean others’ toilet, eat their left-over food, no one will know.’ I also thought
going there was the best way to avoid this shame.
14 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

Rita allied her employment within not just a hierarchy but also servility. She high-
lighted aspects of labour, such as cleaning toilets, that evoke pollution and the
humiliation associated with such chores. This sense of humiliation was further
entrenched by instances of insult and misconduct by the employer. Ray and
Qayum (2010, p. 86) hold that the condition of unfreedom (and servility) was
established by the necessity to submit to the employer’s inflexibility about work-
ing conditions and schedules. Further instances of degradation included rude
behaviour, stinginess with food and maintaining physical distinction with regard
to the use of toilets, utensils, etc., as indicated by Leela.

Sometimes she (the mistress) spoke to me very rudely. They have no regard for age ….
There was also strict rationing of food. They locked the fridge and did not allow me
more than two chapāttī (a kind of flatbread) and one vegetable dish. I might be earning
much less here (in the plantations), but no one told me how much to eat.

The interlinkage of service and servitude is central to its stigmatized quality. This
alienated these women from their worker identity by creating a dichotomy
between servitude and labour. This became more acute by the isolated nature of
the home as workspace. In the plantations, the women were on the bottom rung of
a hierarchy with the management/owner (the direct employer) at the top. Being
spoken to rudely, shouted at and accused of ineptness was a routine part of their
workday. Yet working alongside other women and finding their own ways to
negotiate these situations often made such censures seem impersonal.
In the intimate space of the employers’ household, though, censure and insults
no longer seemed impersonal but rather reiterated the terms of servility within
which the employment was framed. On the plantations, these women were mis-
tresses in their own houses with considerable autonomy over performance of
household functions, as Leela’s case indicates. The women did not regard work-
ing from dawn to dusk on household chores (in addition to their plantation work)
as ‘work’. Having some control over their housework within their own home gave
it value. Doing similar work in another’s house, by contrast, made them servants.
They did not associate hard labour with this work. Rather it was indignity and
insult that highlighted a sense of powerlessness. Sen (2015) speaks of surveillance
and control characterizing the governance of domestic work. Such forms of con-
trol and exclusion served to deprive the women of pride in this work. For the
workers, the curious liminality of the employer’s house—somewhere between
workspace and private space—further diffused the quality of their employment.
Shalini’s explanation brings out this contrast powerfully.

In the plantation, you have seen how we had our own status (auqāt). The manager and
the babus (garden-staff) could never get away with being rude to us. When we said we
will not pick any doubli (overtime) if the assistant manager does not mend his ways,
he had to relent. What choice did he have? We were so many and our plucking in
the season time was central to their profit. However, badly off we were, whatever the
management tried to do to us, they had to weigh the costs carefully. We had a certain
gurūr (prestige). But here the entire scenario is different. You are on your own and the
employers’ behaviour time and again reminds you how you are a naukrānī, nothing
more. Even if they kick you here, you have to lie down and accept it.
Banerjee 15

In contrasting the two types of work, Shalini romanticizes the former. But isolated
from a collectivity, the domestic workers’ sense of humiliation is much more
acute and personal. For the live-in workers, always in the same place as their
employers, the question of servitude seems more intrinsic to their terms of labour
(Ray & Qayum, 2010; Sen & Sengupta, 2016).
Rebukes in the plantations were related to disciplining the worker’s labouring
body. In the more personal workspace of the household, the disciplining mecha-
nisms touched the women’s sense of personhood more closely. Being reprimanded
about cleanliness or facing food rationing seemed to blur the boundary between
the public and the personal. In spite of its difficulties, the women also recognized
that their labour was crucial to the plantations (Banerjee, 2017). Often realizing
the worth of their labour in maintaining the employer’s household economy, the
domestic workers could construct some sort of reciprocal dependency, but they
also were aware that this was curtailed by the easy replaceability of their labour
by any other woman. Labelling housework as natural feminine labour echoes the
economic debate about housework as unproductive labour and hence ‘non-work’.
The women’s recognition of their low bargaining power made the question of
humiliation and helplessness more acute. Their reiterations of ‘working in other’s
house’, ‘shame’, etc., suggest that these women distinguished between them-
selves as ‘worker’ (mazdūr), based on their previous status employed in the plan-
tation, and as ‘servant’ (naukrānī), employed in another’s house. Central to this is
the sense of lack of control that they felt in doing similar housework but in very
different conditions under the constant supervision of the employer. This made it
a very different experience and devalued it further. And this framed the stigma and
humiliation they associated with their work. The situation was, however, very dif-
ferent for the childcarers.

Childcare
In stark contrast to domestic work, childcare is considered a valued form of
service not just by the workers but also by migrants and the plantation populace.
As explicated by Deepa, childcare is built on core expectations of affect, trust and
emotional bonding which bind the worker to her ward and the employer.

Deepa talks about how, while she misses her nieces, she cannot take vacations to visit
them, as her employer’s children will miss her terribly. They seem to be more depend-
ent on her than their own mother. She is the one who tends them, feeds them and cares
for them. This not only gives Deepa a sense of pride and worth but also a sense of being
indispensable.

Childcarers were not just ‘servants to keep the house clean’. Rather the recogni-
tion of their specific personhood made this work more valued. This could also be
a means of legitimizing their work, a kind of psychological justification. This
sense of being irreplaceable contrasts starkly with the domestic workers’ sense of
being easily substituted. Care work largely demanded physical tending of the
child, but the women could not divorce that from emotional labour. Emotional
16 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

labour is an intrinsic part of the service economy that highlights relational rather
than task-based aspects of a job. The labours of care work are undifferentiated
from and/or embedded in relationships and affective ties (Zadoroznyj, 2009).
Emotional labour may entail an array of relational tasks which involve suppress-
ing or inducing one’s emotions (Toerien & Kitzinger, 2007). My respondents
often channelized their homesickness for their own children or grandchildren onto
the child whom they were employed to care for to generate reciprocal feelings of
love and attachment. The employer should not feel that the carer is ‘working’. Her
performance should appear to be akin to familial labour. Yet the skill required in
mimicking familial ties of affect is not recognized either by the employer or the
worker herself but made invisible under the rubric of relationality (Tancred,
1995). The everydayness of this performance masks both the skills and the notion
of labour, thus obfuscating the distinction between work and non-work.
Martin-Matthews (2007) notes how employers negotiate their relationships
with paid carers, often struggling to view them through familial lenses in order to
see them as quasi-familial. Conversations with my respondents, on the contrary,
suggest that they themselves expect to perform emotional labour through replicat-
ing a fictive kin relationship, even when their employers do not. These complexi-
ties central to the interpretation of care work are also due to the ambiguity of
the domestic workplace. Zadoroznyj (2009, p. 269) argues that childcarers enter
private spaces to deliver public care, in the process transgressing symbolic and
spatial boundaries between the public and the private.
Childcare embedded in the private domain of affect is considered valued
service because of its location in a particular moral economy. The childcarer’s
work is not just a paid contract: there is also an invisible moral contract based
on notions of appropriate reciprocity, trust and affect. Many (Nare, 2011) have
identified how presenting labour relations as fictive kin relationships is often a
strategy used by employers to increase their employee’s workload. This invisi-
bilization of the exploitation under such performed affective relationships is
undeniable, but both sides use it to maximize their advantages. The women who
worked as childcarers regarded the performance of affect as a very important
component of their expert discharge of their work. The notion of moral econ-
omy thus enhances our understanding of how childcare escapes sentiments of
servitude and thus stigma inherent in paid domestic work by using emotions as
a core of the exchange.

Categorizing Labour: Naukrī, Mazdūrī, Kām and Naukrānī

Let us turn to the workers’ categorizations of their work. Comparing the women’s
employment in private homes and their erstwhile roles in the plantation illumi-
nates that jobs are not gender-neutral and workers embody the socially perceived
characteristics of masculinity and femininity that constitute them (McDowell &
Sharp, 1997, pp. 311–312). The classifications of work in the Indian context, as
naukrī, mazdūrī and kām are not just linguistic puzzles but incorporate particular
hierarchical understandings of different types of labour.
Banerjee 17

Naukrī, similar in meaning to the Bengali word chākri, implies service without
shame. It is regular and permanent work usually with a monthly salary and legal
guarantees against arbitrary termination (Parry, 2013a). The person is employed
on the basis of their knowledge and skill, and works in a formal office space
which is usually secular and public (Mukherjee, 2015). Naukrī as white-collar
work is a category of non-physical work. Mazdūrī implies physical labour for a
wage. It is blue-collar work and a mazdūr is a quintessentially modern industrial
proletarian. Although usually much lower paid than naukrī, mazdūrī does not con-
note any sense of stigma. Kām as a category of work is much more diffuse. Simply
translated it means work. Parry (2013a) uses kām in a similar way to how the
women here use mazdūrī and distinguish it from naukrī. To the women, kām is
relatively formalized (though not formal) labour in a defined workspace. In some
ways, it is akin to casual work and as Parry (2013a, p. 43) says, connotes ijjat
(honour), unlike the women’s paid domestic work.
This brings us to the category of naukrānī. Whilst originating from the term
naukrī, the naukrānī’s service has very different implications. A naukrānī is a
domestic servant in someone else’s home. The devaluation of paid domestic work
by the workers themselves is reflected in the consistent binary they draw between
a mazdūr and a naukrānī. Their erstwhile unskilled job of plucking offered women
the label of ‘worker’ performing mazdūrī (labour). As paid domestic workers,
however, the presumption that performing domesticity arises from naturally gen-
dered capacities denies women the status and identity of ‘worker’. Rather they
were servants or naukrānī, a crucial distinction for their own and their employers’
conceptions of their terms of service. The question, then, is what determines these
categorizations of labour and its associated implications.
The distinction between mazdūr and naukrānī is not based on objective condi-
tions alone but also the subjective perceptions of those involved in the labour
relation. Since the categorizations are inexact, we must move beyond the direct
issue of livelihood to examine aspects of identity formation on the job. Sen’s
(1975) exposition highlights several important aspects of perceptions formed
around jobs, particularly three crucial aspects—the income, whereby the work
provides earnings for the worker; production through which the employment
yields an output; and recognition that gives the worker the recognition of being
engaged in something worthwhile (or at least recognition as a worker). The value
accorded to work varies depending on the person from whose perspective the
work is evaluated (Sen, 1975, pp. 3–5). Sometimes, the recognition that assigns
different status to different types of labour builds on the first two more tangible
elements of the work. Nevertheless, by themselves, these cannot explain why a
naukrānī who earns more than a mazdūr is a devalued form of labour.
Here, the recognition aspect becomes central and is also closely linked to pro-
ductivity. Sen (1975) points out how individual productivity in family labour is
difficult to ascertain since each person’s labour cannot be calculated separately.
Seeing women’s earnings as merely supplementary devalues their crucially sig-
nificant economic contribution to the maintenance of family well-being and main-
tains their subordinate position in the family (Sen & Sengupta, 2016, p. 133). In
this process, housework is not recognized as productive and becomes naturalized
18 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

as unpaid reproductive labour. The non-recognition of housework as labour is

then transplanted onto paid domestic work. Women internalize this persistent con-
ceptual separation and devalue the work of the naukrānī vis-à-vis mazdūrī. Their
previous experience of having been engaged in ‘productive’ labour in the planta-
tions constructs domestic work as immaterial and insignificant labour, a percep-
tion they share with their employers.
In part, the failure to recognize reproductive labour even when it is commodi-
fied is due to its continued association with women (Ray, 2016, p. 61). The differ-
ence lies not in recognition of employment per se but in the type of employment.
The naturalization of these tasks map onto institutionalized family structures and
division of responsibilities in the home which are often internalized by the women.
Perceptions of ‘skill’ become the index through which recognition is (or is not)
accorded. It should be noted, though, that self-recognition of skill is not unchang-
ing and many of these women also spoke about their plantation job in terms of a
naturalized discourse. The binary between skill and natural, then, could be con-
textual and often of longue durée.
Parry (2013a) suggests that the differential recognition accorded to naukrī and
mazdūrī can be directly related to the difference between tenured permanent work
and untenured casual employment. He argues that this is not simply a distinction
between manual and non-manual labour but a more socially salient marker of
class boundary (Parry, 2013a, p. 44). This might have some relevance for under-
standing how the women classified their employment: as mazdūr they were per-
manent workers in the plantation with tenure and labour rights, but as naukrānī
they were casual workers without security of tenure and could lose their jobs at
the employer’s will, despite the higher wages.
Conversations with my respondents, however, suggested that the distinction
did not arise only from the formal terms of service. Parry (2013b) outlines the
rewards associated with the job as foundational to the distinction between
naukrī and other forms of employment, but paid domestic work and the naukrānī
introduce complexity into this neat categorization. The lack of control over
one’s own labour, work routines and work practices leads to lack of autonomy.
This is the key to comprehending the discrepancy between ‘work’ and ‘servi-
tude’. Performing household tasks in one’s own home was central to the women’s
roles as mothers, wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, in other words the produc-
tion of the domestic self. Women’s sense of ownership of this performance was
undermined when they performed similar tasks in another’s house for a wage.
Moreover, the lack of clear routines which the women had so far associated with
their paid employment in the plantations was missing in paid domestic work.
This hampered their self-identification as workers. As plantation workers, the
women had definite work timings and were not bound by the rules of servitude.
Even allowing for their own domestic tasks, they still enjoyed some autonomy
and discretion in their everyday routine. By contrast, the ‘working day’ was
particularly problematic for live-in domestic workers always at the beck and
call of the employer and with ill-defined rest periods that could easily be varied
on the employer’s command. Thus, the domestic workers often felt that they
had no control over any part of their day, which led to a loss of a sense both of
Banerjee 19

personhood and of a worker identity. The precarity of being a naukrānī, then,

emerged from the very characteristics of the job itself.
This leads to the question of designated workspace, which seemed to be impor-
tant to the women. Here, the binaries of domestic/non-work and non-domestic/
work need to be problematized. Domestic work is located at a precise point of
intersection of work and domesticity, within the specific interplay of gender and
class as experienced by the workers (Sen & Sengupta, 2016). But being subsumed
under the ideology of natural domesticity renders invisible the heavy manual
labour under exploitative conditions of paid domestic work and thus frames it
outside mazdūrī. With a history of being integral to a formal enterprise as mazdūr,
the loss of their identity as mazdūr or the worker results in a negation of paid
domestic work as mazdūrī or even kām. Along with the devaluation of the work,
their internalizing of the identity of the naukrānī as central to their mazdūrī estab-
lishes their servitude as intrinsic to the work.
Although childcare is often included within similar types of labour, it had
markedly different implications in this context. Unlike cooking, cleaning and
other household maintenance tasks, the workers did not consider that caring for
another’s child was a performance of their domesticity. But nor did they con-
sider themselves mazdūr. Most childcarers saw paid childcare as a form of
labour where they put their experience to use for another. Their performance of
quasi-familial roles as an essential part of their labour constructed it as akin to
service. For the childcarers themselves as well as others, it attained the label
kām, despite the non-material, emotional labour attached to it. Moreover, the
women considered training new mothers was intrinsic to their work, which
added further value to it. The women felt their services were irreplaceable and
essential for the employers’ smooth running of their middle-class life.
Nevertheless, it was not considered a form of labour superior to that in the plan-
tations. The employer’s home was seen as a more precarious space than the
plantations where the mazdūrī was more secure labour. In their immediate situ-
ation, however, it was the plantations’ failure to provide this security which led
them to pursue these jobs.

Conclusion
This article has mapped how gender discourses shape both the industrial process
and how work itself is then defined and experienced by the women workers. Ray
(2000) argues that workers’ identities are constructed through the characteristics
of their work. The work and worker are constructed by and construct gendered
identities. By internalizing notions of gendered labour, the workers do not
acknowledge the skills involved in their work in the plantations and label these as
their natural gendered capabilities. But the women’s migration experiences,
specifically the altered terms of their employment, led to some questioning and
reconceptualizing of the norms of labour that had characterized their understand-
ing hitherto. Here, we see two naturalization discourses—one where the women
believed in physiological capacities honed by practice to develop skills (plucking)
20 Journal of South Asian Development 13(2)

and the other where they constructed particular tasks performed by women as
intrinsic to their natural and appropriate gender roles.
Retrospectively, most of the migrant women recognized the specialization
involved in the plucking work they did in the plantations, a recognition that is in
‘contrast’ to their present job rather than in ‘relation’ to it. Moreover, an aspect of
this contrast, which often passed unnoticed, was that the women in the plantations
working together in a group had a much stronger fall back position. This is central
to how the two labour markets situate the women and the women experience their
employment. The liminality of the employers’ household as the workplace, the
subsuming of paid domestic work with the performance of their own domesticity,
and the notions of shame and stigma created in the domestic workers a sense of
alienation from their labour. A combination of economic and social processes
effected a connection between women’s work and devalued labour. By contrast,
care workers’ comparison of their ‘natural’ feminine mothering tendencies and
expertise enabled them to negotiate a position of importance in employers’ house-
holds. Their work was labelled as specialized, even if not skilled. The care–work
relationship has trust and affect at its core. Studying the emerging and contested
domain of labour discourses against the backdrop of these migrant women’s previous
experiences allows an insight into gendered labour and the fragmentations and
disjunctures within it.

Acknowledgements
I express my heartfelt gratitude to the editors Professor Patricia Jeffery, Dr Shalini Grover
and Dr Thomas Chambers for painstakingly looking through the article and their insightful
comments and feedback. The feedback from the anonymous reviewers too was instrumen-
tal in revising the article. I also thank Professor Jonathan Parry for pointing me towards his
insightful work. The helpful discussion of the article by the discussant Dr Priya Deshingkar
and other comments in the ICSSR conference ‘Redefining Labour Roles in a Globalizing
India’ organized in Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) were also useful in revising the
article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. There were multiple tribes in the Chota Nagpur Plateau region who were recruited
as labourers to the plantations. Once in the plantations they came to be known as a
homogenous group, Adivasis, a term which is used even today by them as well as by
other sections of the population to identify them and also differentiate them from the
Nepali workers. Adivasi is a Hindi term meaning original inhabitants of a given place.
Banerjee 21

2. See Gardner (2002, pp. 27–34) for more detailed discussion.

3. As many of the workers who had migrated continued to have their names in the worker
roll, it was impossible to ascertain the number of migrant workers.
4. The rates of pay were same for the same work irrespective of who performed it but
women were employed in the lower paid garden jobs while the men were employed
either as factory workers or supervisors and received higher pay.

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