Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Struggle and Survival of the Kamins: Gender, Labour and Politics Within the Jharia Colliery

Struggle and Survival of the Kamins: Gender, Labour and Politics Within the Jharia Colliery

Sinha, Jyoti

Hardcover

LaborGeneral Gender StudiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 303222988X
ISBN13: 9783032229885
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Sep 3 2026
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.18
Height: 0.89 Width: 6.22 Depth: 8.32
Language: English

This book offers a deeply grounded ethnographic account of the women coal workers in Jharia--known locally as Kamins--whose labor sustains one of India's most hazardous extractive frontiers. Moving beyond narratives of victimhood or romanticized resilience, the study situates their lives within the historical evolution of India's coal economy, from colonial expansion and post-independence nationalization to contemporary regimes of subcontracting, informalization, and ecological degradation. It reveals how women's apparent disappearance from formal mining work is not a simple retreat but the outcome of institutional reclassification, managerial practices, and gendered-caste hierarchies that reorganize labor, risk, and recognition in the coal industry. The Kamins' experiences illuminate how extraction is governed through everyday bureaucratic and political mechanisms that are deeply shaped by the intersection of gender, caste, and class, structuring who is seen as a legitimate worker, whose injuries are acknowledged, and whose labor remains invisible. Foregrounding these layered exclusions, the book demonstrates that mining ecologies are not only environmental but also social and institutional terrains where toxicity, precarity, and dispossession are unevenly distributed.

Also from

Sinha, Jyoti

View All

Also in

General Gender Studies

View All