 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the British Library South Asia Seminar Series, which is part of our research and digitization project called Two Centuries of Indian Print. We are very happy to have amongst us today, Uri Khaitan, who's going to speak on women's work in war and famine. Uri is a doctoral student in economic and social history at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in gender, labour and empire in 20th century South Asia. And her doctoral work focuses on women in the South Asian wartime economy of the Second World War. Her article on the Indian women coal miners, who proved pivotal to the Allied war effort, appeared in war and society in August 2020, and is based on her Enfield dissertation, which was awarded the Feinstein Prize in 2019. We are also very happy to have amongst us Dr. Dya Gupta, who's going to chair the event. Dya is past and present fellow race, ethnicity and equality in history at the Royal Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Research. Dya is writing her first book based on her doctoral research, completed at the Department of English, King's College London, where she studied Indian experiences and literature of Second World War. In her book, which is forthcoming from First and Oxford University Press, alongside colonial photographs, she analyzes letters, memorials, political philosophy and literary texts in English and Indian languages to reveal the intensity and influence of Indian war emotions. About the structure of our event today, Urvi is going to present her talk for around 30 to 45 minutes. Then we have a discussion between her and Dya, after which we open it up for audience Q&A. If you want to put in your questions during the talk, please use the chat box and I will be taking them in order. So without much further ado, I invite Urvi to present her talk today on women's work in war and famine. Over to you Urvi. Hello everyone, I'm really pleased to be here. So thanks very much for having me, Dr. Priyanka Basu and the British Library South Asia seminar series. I'm also very grateful to Dr. Dya Gupta for agreeing to chair today. And everyone listening in, thank you for joining us this evening. I am just going to share my screen, which I hope you can see. Now, last year marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. Yet commemorative activity was relatively muted in India. In Indian public memory, nationalist movements, independence and partition dominate the story of the 1940s. Yet the events of 1947 did not occur in this vacuum. They followed closely on the heels of massive socio-economic upheaval in eastern India caused by war and famine. Now the 1940s are arguably the most dramatic and pivotal decade in modern Indian history. But only recently historians have begun looking beyond the independence movements and elite-level politics. Studies of the 1940s, for example, don't really touch on labour history at all. Among those South Asian studies that focus particularly on World War II in India, Indivarkant Ekar and Srinath Raghavan talk about the enhanced flow of resources within and out of the Indian subcontinent. Yasmin Khan's People's History of the Raj during World War II described a reshaping of the Indian subcontinent that had an enormous impact on society and the economy. With war came massive inflation and crisis after crisis hit eastern India in particular. In a matter of three years, cyclone, tidal wave, famine and disease were accompanied by a growing Japanese threat at India's eastern borders. How did these huge socio-economic changes in such a short period of time affect ordinary people, particularly those groups that lead the most vulnerable and precarious lives. So lower caste and indigenous or Adivasi people. Now in this talk, I attempt to explore the gendered dimensions of these shifts with a focus on women's work and survival strategies. It's divided into two parts. So I begin with the story of India's women beneath the surface, pictured here. So the 77,000 odd women who worked in coal mines battling inflation and famine. Then I present a gendered understanding of displacement caused by the Bengal famine of 1943, drawing on quantitative data. With that background, I then look at women's work in the labour corps, a contingent of women who played a key role in supporting the Allied military effort. Right. So let's get started with women beneath the surface. So a few years ago, this photograph from the Jharia coal fields in Bihar won an Instagram award. And looking at this photo of women clad in saris and salwar kameezes carrying heavily laden baskets of coal up extremely steep slopes. I couldn't help but notice the resemblance to this photo taken at the same set of coal fields, but 90 years earlier. This photograph was part of a series commissioned by the Chief Inspector of Mines in India as part of a campaign to show how fundamentally unsuitable coal mining work was for Indian women. This campaign led to perhaps the most significant protective labour legislation ever enacted by the colonial state in India, which had huge exclusionary consequences. The prohibition on women's work underground, which was first enforced in 1937 in what I call the first prohibition. It was then lifted in 1943 during the Second World War and reimposed in 1946 in what I call the second prohibition. So I draw on a number of archives, including government reports, parliamentary papers, newspapers, political archives. But for this part of my talk, I draw most prominently on the British Library, India office records. Now the coal mines in India were based in remote parts of Bengal and Bihar. So the great parts in that map over there. The labour force was primarily made up of agriculturalists who mined only seasonally, which meant that there was a perpetual shortage of labour. A majority of these workers were Adivasi, that is a term used for South Asian indigenous peoples who were problematically framed as aboriginal by the colonial government, more on that in a minute, as well as low caste workers. Now 40% of the women who are working in mines were unmarried and because coal mining wages were the lowest across Indian industries, women just as much as men were breadwinners. Their work in coal mines was largely seen as unskilled and they worked both underground and on the surface in a variety of roles. There was a premise of sexual division of labour between a male coal cutter and a female loader who loaded the cut coal on a basket and carried it up a steep uphill slope of about five miles. Often these weights were as much as 80 pounds. But there were also all women gangs that worked in mines, indicating that women did several other kinds of work as well. In fact, the hard work that they did and the constant risk of sexual harassment in mines comes out in this song, which has been translated by historian Dheeraj Nite. I'll just read out a couple of lines. So it says, beware of the lecherous Sardar, the shorty, keep the door shut, dear wife. A miner wants his wife to be careful of the advances of their manager. He says, open quote, colliery work is so harsh, the shoulders swell in pain, sweating grounds body and soul. Women made up 35 to 50% of the workforce across various different categories of work underground on the surface and in open workings. And you'll notice in this graph here how steep the decline is from about 40% working underground to zero by the time we get to 1938. So miners were paid the lowest wages in India, and women were paid half the male wage for exactly the same kind of work. Now the Indian miner was for the colonial government, representing a class of labor different from other Indian workers. And this was largely because a lot of the laborers were Adivasi. And this led to the construction of an Indian Aboriginal worker other that was used to justify poor wages and even poorer working conditions. So they were called things like undisciplined and indolent and the only class of labor willing to submit themselves to such filthy conditions. The first prohibition on women's work underground arose out of the 1923 Mines Act that prohibited children from working underground. India was one of only three countries at the time, the other two being Japan and Russia that allowed women to be employed underground. Similar legislation had come into place in England in 1842, nearly a century ago. Now, a discursive shift towards seeing women's bodies as needing protection in the early part of the 20th century coincided with the foundation of the International Labor Organization in 1919, and a labor government in Britain in 1924. And this created immense transnational pressures on the Indian colonial government to enact protective legislation. So for parliaments and the press, the mining woman embodied the exaggerated adverse effects of industrial working spaces on women's lives, particularly on their motherhood, their domesticity, and of course their morality. So this photograph here is captioned, women workers leaving a wet coal mine with soaked garments clinging to the skin. And so Thomas Grundy debating in the House of Commons in 1924 said, the idea at this time of women, no matter of what nationality working in mines is a disgusting thing. But this wasn't such an easy question. So mine owners were heavily resistant to any kind of regulation, because they were extremely reliant on any labor they had access to, of which women form the substantial part. Now, this is because most of the miners who worked in these mines were primarily agriculturalists, so they kept moving back and forth between the mines. So women were hired for specific tasks that in the West were mechanized, and they were part paid half the male wages for these tasks as you can see in this graph here the red line representing female loading wages is much lower than male loading wages. Now, without this reserve of crucial, without this reserve of cheaper than usual labor to fall back upon miners would be mine owners would be forced to invest in mechanization. Now the usual argument is that machines make women redundant. So introducing machinery means that they will replace women. However, in the case of coal mining in India, it is the opposite that is true. Cheap female labor allowed mines to resist mechanizing until the first prohibition. I can dive deeper into this in the questions that there is interest. However, pressure to undertake some kind of legislation was inevitable. And so prohibition came into effect gradually from 1929. But because they were so reliant on female labor, an annual percentage reduction of women workers underground took place between 1929 until by 1937 40,000 workers had been excluded. The female workforce in mines went from 60,000 to about 20,000 in a matter of less than 10 years. This was hardly a humanitarian legislation as the colonial government tried to pitch it. Family earnings fell by 30 to 35% in the region, and only 10% of the displaced 40,000 found work. And if they did it was at lower wages. But in 1943, six years later, things are looking very different, because India is at war, along with the rest of the Western world, and a rising flood of vast resources are making their way out of the subcontinent. The Indian government promised the British government in London, 25 million tons of coal in 1943. By December, this number, the about a six million ton shortage was feared. The drifting away of male labor to better paid work in war factories and military military projects had meant there was a huge shortage of labor. And this was having a big impact on India's wartime economy. Jute mills had shut down, other industries had switched to using wood. The manufacture of essential wartime commodities that were being sent to Europe and other theaters of the war had stopped. So military trucks 3.7 howitzer guns and parachute cloth manufacture had been interrupted. And worse than that, railway coal stocks were at dangerously low level, low levels, which meant that the movement of the army was being affected. And as the Japanese threat was growing, this was a very difficult position for the British to be in. So prohibition was lifted barely six years after it came into effect in August 1943. And you can see in the stable here the number of women workers rises by 55,000 in a matter of seven years, going up from 22,000 to over 77,000. The number of underground workers goes from zero to 22,000 in a couple of years. And the share of women workers across all categories of work increases as well. What is most interesting is that the gender wage gap for the first time narrows so much so that female loaders are actually earning more than male loaders at this point, which is something that had never been seen previously. Women helped meet production goals, and the loss of 385,000 tons of coal per month was prevented between August 1943 and February 1946 because of their employment. The truth was that this wasn't just an Indian coal crisis or just a British coal crisis. It was an ally coal crisis. The coal from India was being exported to the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Portuguese island airfields, which were key sites of the war. And what it did was it released pressure on South African coal that could now be used on the European fronts. The Vice-Chancellor tried desperately to import male labor to meet the shortages, but were forced to conclude the imported laborers were not minors, but the women were, and the women had saved the situation. So desperate was the colonial government that women were illegally employed in mines that were less than four feet in height. The only reason they're standing in this photograph is because trenches have been dug to enable them to stand upright. Bear in mind that the colonial government was not only violating its own commitments, but also international labour organization conventions at this point. But this didn't go unnoticed. Women's employment sparked unprecedented outrage among the public in the press and in parliaments across India, Britain and parts of the United States as well. The idea of mothers and wives going beneath the surface to do such masculine work shocked and offended the Indian elite and most of British society. So religious organizations like the Christian Action Fellowship wrote to the India office, as well as a Mrs. Wright from London who said, any Englishman having anything to do with this disgraceful measure lowers the prestige and honour of his country and shows himself unfit for office. Letters went from trade unions, trade councils, unions, religious organizations, concerned individuals, branches of the Labour Party in Britain, to their MPs to Churchill and even from India. So from the All India Women's Conference, the National Council of Women in India and various other groups. The National Council of Women in India sent a telegram to the Queen begging Buckingham Palace to intervene on behalf of Indian women. Now all of these people had missed the point because the lifting of prohibition coincided with the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed between three and five million people who died of starvation, malaria and other diseases brought on by malnutrition. It affected between half and three quarters of the rural poor and the colonial state and humanitarian aid proved completely ineffective. Many women migrated to work in the mines as the famine intensified, hoping for steady access to food. Reality could not be more different. In an article titled Do Hardest Work but Worst Paid, it was reported that as miners began to leave the mines because their wages did not keep pace with the rising cost of food, the government issued instructions that miners were not to be employed in other industries. If they enlisted as miners and absented themselves from work, they forfeited their right to food supplies in the area. So even though there had been a 233% rise in living costs in the period, there was only a 50% increase in wages. Workers ration cards were seized by contractors who sold the food that should have gone to workers on the black market. They were only given their allotted rations if they worked at least five days per week. A single day's absenteeism meant forfeiting their rations. This is at a point when there is no concept of sickness leave or taking a holiday. Girls over 12 were ineligible for rations and they were expected to work at the colliery. A contemporary labour leader described this as conscription through starvation or a mode of serfdom. So many women underground work in the mines was quite literally a matter of life and death and that was not realised by the government and it definitely wasn't realised by the people who criticised that employment. Hunger had always been a leak motif of poorly paid miners' lives. Women consumed far fewer calories than were essential for that kind of heavy and strenuous work. By making the availability of rations conditional on work, the colonial government used a cruel method of disciplining labour through starvation. In Nazi Germany, the shortage of coal had meant that the government tried to adopt practices to increase production. One of the methods involved workers who produced below the average level to have a portion of their rations taken away from them. In British India, workers faced having to forfeit their entire rations for absenteeism. This was disciplined by deprivation. Yet the criticism kept up and in February 1946, it was too hard to justify the continued employment to women underground. So that month, 20,000 women were thrown out of employment in one fell swoop. Only 10% found work and they did so at lower earnings. But here's where it gets a little interesting in terms of trying to recover instances of women's resistance. So between 1946 and 1947, there was a great amount of unrest in the Collieries. And this was calmed by concessions that were clearly aimed at women. These include things like developing crushes, toilets, bathrooms and locker rooms, a housing scheme to build 50,000 houses. And the final concessions that really calmed the unrest in April 1947 involved providing professional and vocational training schemes to minors families that would be run by women. So what I hope this part of the talk has convinced you of is that women minors were critical to the coal mining industry. And they were also pivotal to the larger Second World War effort. And supposedly humanitarian legislation was not based on an understanding of ground realities. These discussions around them in public and official spheres created a discourse on women workers, but they denied them of ownership over their own labor power. Women workers were treated as objects who could be made to appear and disappear with the flick of a legislative wand. And the assigning of identities like wives and mothers denied them personhood. So many of these women looking for ways to survive coal mining offered a way out when there were such few options available to them in the first place. Female deprivation had escalated to such high levels in the wake of the Bengal famine of 1943. The famine was a defining feature of the Indian World War two experience, combined with a shortage of food, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and malaria were decimating the population of Bengal from 1943 onwards. Now curiously, while the image of starving mother and child was ubiquitous in contemporary accounts of the famine, we don't yet have a full women's history of the famine. Generally, women have been conceived of as passive victims who took to prostitution out of crippling hunger, but a unidimensional approach to women's work is problematic. It ignores a longer term history of complex and multi sexual women's labor activity in Bengal in various occupations across agriculture, mining, baddie husking transport trade and many others women as individuals lost access to these livelihoods. And while saying that women took to sex work because of starvation is not incorrect, it is a simplification that does not adequately address the absence of choice in such a labor market. The mechanisms by which that choice was taken away from women have not been analyzed. Now coal mining is an example of a regulated industry where legislation to some extent dictates changes in women's work participation. But what about women's work in informal economies in the unregulated sector, which would have employed the majority of women. So let's first look at some data. I drawn surveys conducted in an independent capacity of which two were among the three used by a Marcus and in his work on the famine and have been looked at repeatedly, but not through a gendered lens. The first is a survey published by Mahalanobis Mukherjee and Ghosh, which covered nearly 16,000 families in 386 villages across Bengal. Now I'm trying to understand what happened to the survivors of the famine. And so I look at displacement caused by the famine in two ways. One through destitution and secondly through economic deterioration by destitution. I mean impoverished mint. And so in this slide I present data disaggregated by age and sex. So there were 108 men for every 100 women in Bengal at the time. But despite this higher this uneven sex ratio, the mortality rate for men was higher than it was for women. And given the preponderance of men in the province, when looking at the data on destitution, it is clear that women were disproportionately displaced by the famine. So the first chart here talks about estimated numbers of destitutes in January 1943. At this point, there were about 750,000 destitutes in all. By May 1944, this number had gone up to over one million. The third chart here shows the change in destitute so the newly destitute at people in the intervening period. Looking at the charts, it's clear that across all age categories, except between five to 15 years, women outnumbered men. In the largest age category that is 15 to 50 for the adult working age category, the number of women destituted was double the number of men. In the intervening period between 1943 and 1944, 97,000 adult females were newly impoverished compared to 45,000 adult males, so nearly double. Now this graph summarizes adult destitution based on their occupation before the famine. In this case, sorry I should have mentioned the red is for female labor and blue is for men. So across all occupations, women were more likely to lose their occupations than men, apart from in non-agricultural labor. If you look at the figures for all agricultural labor, almost double the number of women lost there were destituted compared to men. Now some people were able to escape destitution, but they suffered economic deterioration or a reduction in their income level. So some 700,000 families or 3.8 million people sold their assets and they were downgraded to a lower earning level. The most common kind of degradation was landowners becoming landless laborers by selling their property. Others who worked in trade and crafts were also badly affected by this disintegration of rural industries. Mahalanobis at et al find that the time rate of deterioration was three times greater than in the pre famine period and the rate of destitution was 12 times greater. The famine period they say was thus one of quote violent economic changes and quote and gender emerges as an unmistakably important dynamic in these shifts. So for example, in 1941, 50 year old Narmada Dasi, a Hindu woman, had been well to do with four acres of land in the Sundarbans, a husband and five children. The next year, the cyclone and tidal wave in Kontai and Tamlok took away her husband and four of her children and by July 1943 she was living on the Bali Ganj Railway Station platforms in Calcutta. Many women either lost their families or they were abandoned. Many men emigrated to other provinces looking for work. Other men stayed behind to look after their land while women traveled to the cities out of hunger. Now here I have a table from Taruk Chandra Das's 1943 survey of destitute families in Calcutta. So a number of families had fled to the city of Calcutta in search of food and what this table does is it summarizes the heads of those families. So who were the household heads. Now, I've made a separate chart with the age group 20 to 50 so again like the working adult age group. And in this we see that more women than men were household heads. So women were more likely to lead these destitute units than men. So about 51% of the destitute units were led by women compared to only 24% led by men. The group most likely to be destituted was schedule castes as you can see here. And in this case, 37% of schedule cast units were led by women and only 12% by men. And overall, 67% of the destitute units were led by women. Schedule castes comprised only 5% of Bengal's population according to the 1941 census, yet they constituted nearly half of the destituted families. So they are greatly overrepresented in the data, underscoring the precarity of their lives in pre famine times that was greatly exacerbated during the famine itself. Now to cope with the difficulties they were facing destitute women actively expressed demands for work, such as an 18 year old Muslim woman, Effuljan from Chandpur. The often daughter of a boatman she had been married to a man named Yaqub Ghazi. When the famine hit they had to sell everything but the clothes on their backs. They lost their three year old son to hunger. Yaqub decided to divorce his wife and left her to join the army. And Effuljan began wandering from village to village in search of food until she ended up at a destitute's camp in Camilla. But she wanted to go back home. I am no beggar, she said, and I want to work for my food. I don't like to stay here. Relief kitchens had begun closing down from January 1944. The internal food and socioeconomic crises had been accompanied by a growing global crisis edging closer and closer to the eastern borders of Bengal. A joint British and American operation to recover Burma and conduct raids on Japan was underway and it necessitated the expansion of military bases in eastern India, such as the one pictured here. A veritable army of labourers was needed for this effort. Frida Bedi writes in about January 1944, the drifting tide of the helpless is on Bengal's frontier is not going to the relief kitchens this year. It is finding its way into the ranks of the labour corps run by contractors, which does the 101 odd jobs necessary in the hinterland of the army, building and maintaining roads and clearing the jungle. There is no security of service and in between bouts of work there is starvation for them and worse. Few of the women stick to the work for long weakness and disease drags them back again to the village and death. The number of workers in the labour corps is unknown exactly and some figures suggest that it's 30,000, but that is likely just a conservative estimate when you consider the scale of operations as I will go on to outline. So there were several American and British airfields in Bengal. Those in western Bengal provided crucial basis from where supplies were flown over the Himalayas to China and from where raids were launched against the Japanese. While those in eastern Bengal functioned primarily as basis for the Burma campaigns. Various ports in Bengal province were also important points in global supply chains Calcutta in particular. A film traces the journey of a barrel of petroleum from its starting point in Texas to 14,000 miles to reach Calcutta from where it was taken by air and road to Kunming in China. And here's a screen grab on slide present at nearly every point in the supply chain from Calcutta is the presence of female labour. They can be seen working alongside men at the dock unloading tins that they carried on the heads and transported to warehouses. But they also worked in a variety of other roles in other parts of the province near the airfields. They worked in construction building runways roads and communications buildings and various other infrastructure projects. And the photographs that follow in these slides are drawn from the US Air Force records and various publications and military engineering journals. So here we can see women crushing bricks by hand to repair a road. This is women building a runway. This is also for runway construction. This is them loading broken down stones onto trucks. In fact, things like stone crushing was a very common activity that was given to women. Here are some other photos. This is a building under construction. And now I'm going to play a couple of well about 10 seconds of a US Air Force film for you. What I hope you can see is a line of women in saris without blouses. They're barefoot carrying wicker baskets on their heads. They're walking past B 29 super fortress airplanes. And this is in Karakpur airfield in modern day West Bengal. So the construction of that film and this photograph appear deliberate women carrying baskets on their heads. One of the oldest and apparently primitive modes of transportation, according to observers were juxtaposed against the most modern and advanced airplanes of the time. Lots of people in these engineering journals and army records complained about the slow pace and the low productivity of unskilled primitive or coolie labor. And we talk particularly about the practice of women carrying baskets on their heads. There is a complete lack of any protective clothing or equipment and of course no footwear considering the rubble they were walking working on a photo feature in the 20th bomber commands news publication talks about how women do most of the manual labor and talk about how symbolic this photograph of coolies walking past a super fortress airplane is. But let's take a deep dive into Chittagong, where the women's labor call had taken on an even more coercive form. So highlighted here in the map, the province, part of the province of Bengal, and we're going to be focusing on a part of what is today modern day Bangladesh called Cox's Bazaar. So zoomed into it here in the map. This lies on the borders of modern day Bangladesh and Myanmar. Cox's Bazaar had become a hub for Allied soldiers from Britain, West Africa and the United States, who were participating in the Burma campaigns of the Second World War. Just a quick note on sources for this part of my talk. Indian Communist Party members traveled to this area and conducted several interviews of women workers in the core, as well as observers. Now, while these articles in the reports they wrote were written in a moralizing tone. These sources are among the very few that preserve oral histories of low caste and adivasi women in South Asia, albeit in translation. They're also among the only sources that do so in a voice unmediated by the colonial government. Along with this, I also draw on papers of the all Bengal women's self defense leak of Communist Party relief organization, and these are supplemented by a number of printed primary sources. I would also like to mention that there is a content warning for rape and sexual assault in this part of the talk. So while the women worked in aerodromes in jetty building in road construction, loading and unloading and other kinds of manual labor that was deemed unskilled by day. As Ali Sardar Jafri, a Communist Party activist reports in his article titled in Cox's Bazaar, men become profiteers, women prostitutes and children pimps. The contractors wanted women for the military and the women wanted cash for food. In fact, the simultaneity of manual labor and sex work makes it especially hard to place the labor core women in any conventional categorization of labor. In April 1945, when Jafri visited Cox's Bazaar, he encountered an unnamed teenage girl. Open court, she says. He sold me to a military man for 500. My body costs 500 rupees. When he dies, God will take those 500 rupees from his flesh. Tell me, is God just? Won't he torture my brother in his grave for selling his sister? She was one of potentially thousands of women who had been sold by their families in the wake of the famine. When rural cultivators ran out of property to sell to afford skyrocketing prices of rice, women were next on the market. Many of them ended up in poor cities like Cox's Bazaar as a member of the labor core. There were three main routes by which women entered the core. The first was those who were in extreme economic distress and had lost their livelihoods and families. The second trafficking appears to have been the most common route. The selling of girls had become a markedly common phenomenon. There were agents who were located in particular areas that were charged with supplying the military with girls aged 12 and older. The prices of these girls were between 10 annas to 1 rupee 8 annas, so between 11 pens and 27 pens. And the girls were taken by boat to centers near the coast to be sold. There are reports of boatloads of human cargo being taken across the province. Once sold, women were drafted to various brothels. A memo records this practice is fully recognized and no effort at prevention is made by any person in authority. The saints are the extent to which the colonial government was ready to turn a blind eye to what appears to have become a highly organized trafficking ring. Now the core also comprised a third group of women who were recruited from the local population. And in the case of Cox's Bazaar, a majority of the population was Muslim and comprised an Arakani ethnic group called Morgz. So the labor core was not a homogeneous body of labor, but it cleaved together ethnic and religious groups through the unifying experience of displacement and destitution. Women recruited or sold into the core worked in highly militarized spaces that were prohibited to the ordinary public. And most people remarked on how few men were to be seen in those areas. They were organized into gangs of 10 or 12 under a female supervisor called a Marji or a male supervisor called a Sardar. Wages were irregularly given once every 10 or 15 days and were never more than two rupees. Since they were employed for military work through contractors, informal methods of recruitment, payment and management and the absence of regulation ensured their invisibility in the record and exacerbated the risk of exploitation and the use of discretionary policies. Their hours of manual work were from eight in the morning to five in the evening. And after five, they sat alongside the roads that they had built and repaired, waiting for trucks full of soldiers to stop by. Other women did not need to solicit and were instead sent off to bases in truckloads by their contractors. On top of the already exploitative and punishing nature of work in the core, there was also the ever present risk of rape and sexual assault. So Suleiman, a 10 year old boy reports, open quote, if the women did not go to the soldiers, the soldiers came to the women and forced them, end quote. He told the story of his sister-in-law Zubeda. Open quote, she had gone out to bring water, two white soldiers got her, put her on the truck, raped her on the way and threw her away on the road. She did not agree to sell herself. That is why she was raped. Observers talk about how, quote, everything is costly and Cox is bizarre. Only women are cheap. You can have them anywhere and everywhere. Now one can only speculate as to whether or not women signed any contracts. But the absence of other opportunities likely ensured that even without any contractual obligations, women were bound to the core. They were entirely dependent on the core to survive, even though many actively looked for opportunities to escape. So for example, we have the story of 25 year old Hindu widow Sarila. She had been walking with her seven year old son on the road when a black soldier forcibly carried her off on a truck. Desperate to escape, she sees the opportunity when the dinner gong sounded and the soldiers left for dinner. She found a hole in the truck that she was able to squeeze herself through, but only after taking off her clothes. She walked back home naked all the way because she was too afraid that the white of her saree would show in the dark. When she returned home, she had no choice but to rejoin the core. Majada, a 20 year old woman from Amirabad, was married to a poor peasant who abandoned her during the famine. He returned and envelied with rheumatism and was in no state to work. As kitchens, relief houses and other means of livelihood were no longer available, she was forced to join the core. When she realized, quote, her modesty had to be bartered for her earning, close quote, she left and took some 15 girls along with her. They all saw that they would never go back to the core so long as they were alive. Three months later, Majada was on her deathbed and she confessed that pangs of hunger had driven her once again to the labor core. So while the labor core signaled an extremely coercive labor regime, it also provided many women a way of surviving in a limited labor market with few opportunities. Many of them suffered immense trauma from these experiences. So the girl, the teenage girl who I talked about earlier, who said that she had been sold for 500 rupees had been through a harrowing ordeal. And when Communist Party members found her sitting by the side of the road, she was crying bitterly and shouting abuses. It is hard to imagine she had been sold for 500 rupees when others were being sold for less than a rupee. And her responses were interspersed with several moments of distress, but in them it is a military truck that emerges as a major site of her trauma. Open quote, you can never be sure what will happen in a truck. The interviewer narrates, a truck came full of white soldiers. She looked at them with a shadow. Oh God, why are they coming? Her voice was trembling. Again, my God. Then she collected all her clothes and withdrew within herself like a terrified bird. When the interviewer tried to find out her name, her contractor remarked, she is mad and walked away. The teenager remains unnamed in the article, her identity had been reduced to her madness. But there was a complex range of experiences of life in the core and some women became legends in their own right. So the most powerful woman in Cox's Bazaar was a Muslim woman named Muhammadi. She spent the night with various white sahibs, did not have to do any work and could afford to order everyone about. She was able to invest in makeup and was called Lal Beguni or red aubergine because of her powdered face and colored lips. In fact, soldiers frequently offered women material incentives which they took advantage of to improve their lifestyles and their prospects. But perhaps one of the most interesting cases is that of 22 year old Cheheru. She had lost her family to the famine and epidemics and had to take to the streets, eventually joining the labour corps. Her youth and charm won over the sahibs and she became a maji and then sometime later a small contractor supplying women to the core. Observers say, open quote, now she did not work, her job was to supply women to the labour corps. Thus she sold her own body and made other women sell their chastity. She became a pimp. She became powerful with the support of the sahibs and started wearing high heeled shoes and a wrist watch. She liked to move about with a stick in her hand. She insulted anyone she liked. End quote. She eventually made a lot of money, ended up leaving the core, marrying a man from her village and moving back to her hometown. By July 1945, the labour corps had been shut down but without providing for alternative employment opportunities. For the women who were once again without livelihoods. What happened to the newly displaced women is still unclear. There was no coordinated or centralized relief strategy. In conclusion, none of the distressing outcomes described were inevitable. The labour corps signals an intentionally unregulated wartime labour regime characterized by growing coercion and was aided by the colonial state's willingness to turn a blind eye. The war would be over by August 1945 and the western wall would be too jubilant to notice the costs and havoc it had wreaked in the empire's periphery. In two years, this upheaval would be overshadowed by an even greater one with the partition of Bengal into West Bengal and East Pakistan. This followed closely on the heels of heightened resource extraction and the exploitation of a weak and underfed population. Both coal mines and the labour corps demonstrate an increasingly coercive labour regime, one that disciplined workers through the threat of starvation. The women in the coal mines and the women in the labour corps were economic agents who, operating in highly circumscribed contexts, were actively making decisions about survival, work and the family. They were individual providers of labour power and they were key actors in a global wartime economy with extensive transnational links. Responses to women's work were in general patronizing and moralizing. Women were widely regarded as colonial subjects without agency. However, women in their own right lost their own livelihoods and their own sources of income. They were not simply passive recipients of charity, but they actively looked for strategies to survive and make do. Whether it was through Relief Kitchens or other charitable organizations working in coal mines in manual labour as sex workers or all of these combined, while they bore a disproportionate burden of an increasingly extractive and command-based economy. With a colonial state that had completely failed them, they were women of the front line in a battle for survival. Thank you. Thanks very much, Ulvi. I was absolutely fascinated by your paper. I don't know if, Priyanka, you want to say anything before I start the discussion with Ulvi, at all? No, I was just going to invite you to start. I jumped in with absolutely. Over to you. Brilliant. Okay, so thanks again, Ulvi. I was absolutely fascinated by such a rich and detailed paper of such a little known history. And I was wondering if I could perhaps probe a little further, perhaps link some of the specificities of your work to broader questions about the Second World War and how it's understood today. I was also struck particularly by how moving and sometimes how harrowing this history is that you've been recovering. So let's start with the idea of women's bodies, particularly colonial women's bodies. Here in the West, certainly with the Second World War, women's participation in the war is often seen in a very, in wartime labor, is seen in quite positive ways. It's seen as, you know, women kind of overcoming the spheres of domesticity and kind of coming out into the public sphere. I wonder how you think that your work on colonial women's bodies complicates this positive narrative. Thanks very much for that question there and I think it's a it's a very important one because the category of women just is very monolithic and homogenous and I think it's high time that we destabilize it a little bit. So gains for women were of course restricted to specific locations and even within the Empire's periphery they were restricted to the elite so the upper class and the upper caste, who had access to social mobility and generations of privilege. So for a long time that focus has been on upper class women who represent a minority in my case at least, and actually across the board, and partly because of the limitations of sources, this has continued to be the case. Adiwasi and lower caste women did not have access to literacy, and they really had the luxury to sit and write about their lives. So I think the war in some sense heightens their visibility in the record because of the need for labor. So I think this kind of underscores why we need a more intersectional approach to studying women in wartime, thinking about things like location class caste race along with gender. And so many of the sources that I use for the labor core are women writing about other women so a lot of these Communist Party activists are actually upper class Brahmin Bengali women for instance, who are traveling to Cox's Bazaar to speak to them. So women are upper class metropolitan women who've had access to a university education they can speak English participating in politics, and the women they're writing about could be couldn't be more different from them because they're based in rural areas, they live very precarious lives, they have little to no access to social mobility, and they're disadvantaged in so many ways by the war and famine while upper class women tended to escape those effects. So I think one of the main questions here is who's making those gains and how long term those gains are as well because even in the Western world, so many women who had access to jobs for instance, lost those jobs once the men returned. And just a last note is that, you know, there's so much work in development economics and sociology that's looking at women's work in informal economies, which primarily employs lower caste and Adiwasi women. And none of these work works have any historical grounding yet. And I think this is why we need to push for more innovative ways of recovering histories of marginalized women. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's a great answer. And you know, I was very struck by your phrase you talked about there not being a woman's history or women's history of the famine. And, you know, this happened in 1943. And I wonder why it's taken us so long to really focus on the gendered aspects of war experience. And I mean, firstly, I think it's taken us ages to even recognize that India, undivided India at that time was part of the Second World War. And it feels like with gender and women's experiences, there's a double marginalization. So I wondered if you could speak a little bit to, to why, why is it only now that we're recovering these histories? Yeah, again, yeah, it's a really good question because that kind of recovery of this global nature of the war has been so recent. And what part of it, I think comes out of the Western world, what imperial powers desire to better understand their own histories. And I think one of the main shifts that has happened along with this is that it's a shift in emphasis from the war as event to the war as experience. So really trying to understand how all of these people in the rest of the world really went through the war. And, and I think that really brings up the aspect of colonial women who are paraphernalized because of their gender and their location. And it's important to understand these experiences because those experiences were also extremely heterogeneous. And if we look at say like economic histories of the wars, for a very long time they focus primarily just on, you know, flaws in the Western world and Russia. And I think the South Asian wartime economy is an extremely interesting case study because it really allows us to observe the transnational economic connections of wartime as a fetch to like breaking point. And in particular, of course, their gendered aspects in this case. Well, also because I think the wars themselves are a major part of public memory across the world. And I think that move from the public is really forcing historians and economists and several others to really look at the war difference. And I quickly like that because that move is then not coming purely from within academia it's also from outside. And so I think this is a really fantastic opportunity to start integrating all of these marginalized histories into the mainstream. And think about it more in the South Asian context as well because yes we don't remember the war when we think of the 1940s. Thank you that's great I love the idea of moving from war as event to war as experience, because I think that links so nicely with your idea of women's bodies you know you move from the fact that this was a happening to the fact that people experience through their bodies and the physicality of those bodies. And, and that's what I was struck with when you showed some of those incredible photographs, you know, you, there are real women at such hard work, you know this was really grueling work and you know this is only what was being documented. You know a lot of it was just not even not even being documented. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about you know the sorts of sources that you've looked at and, and where you've had to dig you know was it far and wide to be able to gather together this history. Yeah the important the questions are sources is a really important one because, like I said, you know we're trying to find innovative sources and new places to look for these histories because of course women aren't leaving behind written records in this case. And so I think a lot of it I stumbled on by accident so the coal mining sources for me primarily came from the British Library. In that case, it's a really good example of there being literally thousands of pages of information in a file but the file being unnoticed because nobody's bought for women's work in the archive. A lot of these cases were things that were actually in the public domain as well but just hadn't been studied so for example, the Bengal famine, the data that I've looked at is data that's been used by several people, but it just hasn't been disaggregated by sex. So it's a very like I think maybe trying to look at things in in a different way. Some of the other sources I think were again, simply because thanks to digitization, it's possible to actually put in a keyword like women and work and really trolled through hundreds of thousands of such results and see and that's what I've had the time to do during the pandemic. So a lot of the photographs I found were literally because I spend a lot of time on Google. And through them I managed to access an archive and through through the archives I managed to, you know, find more links to other things. So I think a lot about just trying to look in the usual places but trying different strategies. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me that's and that's very interesting because really I think what you're saying is you're looking in the usual places but you're looking with a particular perspective. So it's the research of bringing that particular perspective to study the war from an entirely different vantage point that's resulting in this new history being uncovered. So thanks so much for that. And I wondered if I could also ask you a bit about the mythologizing that goes with the Second World War in particular. I think especially, you know, with the two world wars in the West, the First World War is always seen as, you know, that was such a pity. But the Second World War is sort of seen as or wasn't that the good war, you know, we fought the Nazis, we defeated the Nazis, it was the war against fascism. And I wondered, you know, it was so kind of revealing the sorts of sources that you spoke about the sorts of harrowing stories that you often uncovered. So how looking at colonial women's experiences complicates this idea of the good war? Yeah, I mean, well, so fundamentally, this project arose as an effort to understand how ordinary people responded to extremely radical changes. So I wasn't expecting to find these uncomfortable stories at all. But I did. And so I think what happens is that this war really tests the empire, which is in its last day anyway. As it's being pushed to its limits, there are very heavy costs that are incurred. And I think it's a question of thinking about what is expendable and what is dispensable for the, you know, in the eyes of the imperial project. And so I think in the case of the mines and the labour corps, we have, we have highly exploitative institutions. But what happens is the distance between, say, the mines and Cox's Bazaar between Delhi and London is a lot. And I don't mean just a physical or geographical difference. It's also just about a lack of like awareness and empathy from the colonial state. And that paradox is something that is pointed out in the case of coal mines, you know, by all of these petitioners. But of course they missed the point entirely as well. So yeah, I think it, yeah, I think it does complicate it. But again, it wasn't something that I expected to find. Well, that's fascinating. So your own research has surprised you as a researcher. That's great. And I wanted sort of as a, as a final point, perhaps I could ask you, so you talked a lot about newspaper reports, you've talked a lot about sort of photographs. You had that very interesting quotation from a song, you obviously have oral interviews that you're looking at. So what sort of sources spoke most to you? You know, what, what really kind of attracted you drew you as a researcher to this? I've never been asked that question before. I think in recently I was most excited by the photographs, because I think it's, you know, as, as you would undoubtedly know, we spent so much time just sitting through piles and piles of paper. And it's, I think looking at the photographs actually gave me an idea of what was happening. It made me very aware of my own privilege. I think on like a very personal level, I think I was able to not even begin to understand, but at least kind of see the difficulties of that kind of work. And I think it also to sharp relief the fact that actually that kind of work continues in India today. So if you look at who's making buildings and who's painting them, a lot of them are female labor dressed in exactly the same way. So I think it opened my eyes in a lot of senses. So the photographs I would say were most important. That's brilliant. And actually you started off with that point, didn't you? You started off by showing us a modern day photograph of women in the coal mines and contrasted it with a wartime photograph, showing us that not much has changed. Thanks so much for that, Uri. I wonder if now I could hand over to Priyanka and she can take on some questions from the audience. Thank you, Uriya. But before I open it up to the audience, I have comments, questions myself because I started working in a similar area. And taking the cue from Uri's last answer about how photographs interest her. I was wondering myself in terms of my research on valid answers, wartime women performers who are being sent to North Africa, South and Southeast Asia to entertain British troops stationed there. And these photographs, they do signify the politics of posing in terms of their visual aspects and also the archival linear arrangement in the way they are presented to posterity. So how far that kind of relates to the actual experience, in my case in the case of dancers, they do talk about the experience of pain and sickness and dancing with a very tired body and travelling in military jeeps and military vehicles with the soldiers. And occasionally referring to that when they talk about those memories and their autobiographies. And again, there's a strong lack there in terms of their experiences of interaction with South Asian, you know, the community, the people during wartime. So have you come across anything or what you think about, you know, this whole idea of posing, visual posing and archival posing. And my other comment is more in the lines of the history of the labour regime after partition. And I was wondering if you had a, if you have looked at this essay by the Bangladeshi writer, Ahmad Safa, who writes about, you know, the mages and young male workers who are being employed and they're lured into the into, you know, work at the Kornu Fuli Mill, the essay is called Kornu Fuli Dhari by the banks of Kornu Fuli. And Leiliuddin's recent essay, Enemy Agents at Work, which talks about the Adamji and Kornu Fuli Mill riots that refers to this essay. And that also talks about young boys and how they are roped into, you know, this labour regime. And I was wondering about what happens to women, women's work and, you know, minors and their status after the war is over, after the country has been partitioned. Thank you for those fantastic questions. I think the first about posing is an incredibly important one. In the case of the coal mines, a lot of those photographs were deliberately constructed, right? So it was the chief inspector saying, I need these photographs taken and, you know, the commissions that take me on those photographs so that he can use them in this campaign to prohibit women from working underground. And they are then published in the annual reports of the chief inspector of mines in India. So there is that arrangement in the archive as well, which is very interesting. On the other photographs that I've used for the, you know, for women's manual labour during the Second World War itself, it's slightly different because of course the construction is careful. So, you know, they have all of these women walking past these big modern airplanes, which is very interesting. But some of the others are literally just showing women at work. And, you know, I found myself wondering, are they aware they're being photographed? Have they been sent to being photographed? What, you know, what is happening? So that is, you know, that's one of those questions that I don't think I will have answers to. But it's a really interesting line to think about. So thank you so much for that. And the second, I've noted down those references, I have not and I will follow up. But what happens to women's work after? So what is extremely interesting is that if you look at like trends on women's labour force participation after the war, so specifically actually just looking at women's work from the 1950s, that labour force participation actually declines. So until the 1930s, we have like a more or less steady female labour force participation. And then there's no data that's collected in the 40s. So it's a blank space. And then from the 50s, you see that it's an immediate dip below the 30s level. And I haven't quite yet found a way to explain that. But I think what's happening is women are clearly leaving regulated work and are working in unregulated industry. And they are the ones who are missing then in these numbers. So that kind of obviously complicates the idea of doing any kind of quantitative analysis of women's work in this in this period. And so until the archives open again, I can answer the questions for what happens in the long term. But yes, there is a problem there. Thank you. Thank you. And I will not take up more time from the audience. So I will start taking the questions. The first one is by the Pashish Hothro. How did the unit price of coal as a representative of average profit perhaps behaved during the period? Yeah, thanks for this question. So this is extremely interesting because it really shows the intersection between capital, primarily like indigenous and British capital, along with the colonial state. And what happens during the war in the initial years, so to say between 1939 and 1942. My owners were cooperating, so British my owners and Indian my owners who usually never saw eye to eye and had different, you know, associations and lab and lobbying groups. For the first time during the war, they actually cooperated to keep the prices of coal high, because they knew that they stood to make a profit out of it. And it was only when this crisis started building so from your late 42 to 43 the colonial government then had to pass wartime ordinances to take over that to an extent. So something that the colonial government does is that it has an it imposes an excess profits duty. So if you know profits exceeded a certain point then my owners would have to pay a certain amount to the colonial state. They would have to place all kinds of ceilings and institute a set on all coal exports leaving India. So all of the sets that was extracted or levied on those exports was then used to provide welfare facilities for workers. So there is like a whole, I guess, taking over of private enterprise by the colonial state because that cold crisis is so major. Finally, there are a couple of questions from Paul Gilliam, and Paul this talk is being recorded and it will be uploaded on YouTube and will be shared so you will be able to listen to it later on. So he says, there's a growing research trend to investigate lived experiences when trying to understand the events etc. Are you involved in the lived experiences of UK education by international students? What other projects are you involved in along these lines? Excellent approach you're taking. Thanks for that. Yeah, I think it's a fantastic shift that there has been a focus to understanding lived experiences. In so many historical cases, we've been unable to recover anything and so I was really excited when I found these sources because for the first time I could actually tell what was going on. I mean, of course, they are problematic in many ways, they've been translated and then published and edited, but they're the closest that we can come to for this period. And I'd really like to extend this project to look at other things but because of the narrow bounds of my ongoing PhD project at the moment, this is what I've restricted myself to. But I'm hoping to look at women's work after the war as well as I mentioned in response to Priyanka's question and as well as try and get involved in more public facing projects more generally, which would be fantastic. Thanks, Irvi. We have a question from Omlan Gupta. Since you've mentioned about looking at the visual imagery, photographs, motion picture and some English writing, did you also look at auditory data, recordings of voices and folk music with and without translation? If so, was there any discrepancy between the visual and auditory reporting? Yeah, again, a very good question. Thank you. So I haven't been able to access any auditory data yet. You know, I'm hoping that there does exist some because I know people like, say, Shantanu Das have recovered recordings from the First World War for the experiences of Indian soldiers. So maybe, you know, there are miracles in the archive waiting to happen and that would be really interesting. In terms of the actual song, folk music was a big part of, say, at least the mining experience because Adivasi had been working in these mines. The mines were situated on their own land that they had been dispossessed from. So there are actually several songs that I found in the secondary literature, not songs that I have kind of seen myself, but a lot of them were in Bengali or in Shaatali and I was able to understand them and translate them myself in some cases. Because this is one of the problems of translation is you can never really get the exact flavor. So for instance, I found one which was really challenging to translate because it talked about like criss-crossing tunnels underneath the coal mine and about how these women were going down and their skin was golden and when they came out of their mines, their skin became darker. So these words are actually quite hard to kind of communicate in English and in the local language, they're so much more evocative. So that was something interesting I found. In continuation to that point, which you about the songs and folk music, a Kobygan singer Kobygan is a verse dwelling song theater tradition found in both sides of the border, West Bengal and Bangladesh. So in Chittagong, a Kobyal Ramesh Shil, who was influenced by the, you know, left of thought, but he was also quite active in the IPTA. He was singing about these major events and many of his songs would document them. I don't know how much is left of his, you know, what are the remnants, but whatever is there, it offers a picture of the kind of subjects he was singing about. That's fascinating. I wonder if I could add, you know, will we have faced many similar situations with my own work because trying to translate something, particularly a poem into from an Indian language into English, just, you know, it's it's it's very difficult to not make it sound dry and and meaning oriented, you lose the beauty of the words. And you lose a lot of the word play and the kind of cultural association that certain words have in the original language so it's definitely a challenge. But I think the fact that you as the researcher can access them and understand them. I think that's great, and that you're bringing in a multilingual approach to your work, in addition to the diversity of your sources is also what we really need. And I've felt for a long time in broadening up our understanding of the Second World War. Yeah, I need to do more of it than nearly not enough and I'm sure that there are so many sources and especially one that has just been mentioned that really need to be looked at as well. Okay, the next question is from on on the book though. Congratulations. Absolutely fantastic talk was a similar narrative in part common to other parts of India during that time. Yes, I mean, that's a good question because I think in some cases, Eastern India, because it is so close to this, you know, Japanese threat on the eastern borders of India, as well as what happens with the famine so many of these are unique to the region. So similar tensions on that scale are not exactly replicated in other parts of India. Overall, there is a rising prices and there is a very high rising prices, but it affects different provinces in different ways because different provinces have different, you know, different hinterlands to draw on and so on. And there are some princely states I think which actually face major food shortages and that's something that I think is quite important to think about as well. So, not on that scale. But yes, there was, there was trouble felt everywhere. The next question is from Kiran Sahota. Once the women were sold, did they come back or what happened to them. So this is something that I would really love to be able to answer. But the thing is, the interviews I have with these women are mostly snapshots of their lives while they were in the labor corps. For a few of them, so like in the case of Cheheru, for instance, I do know what happened because that she's able to like purchase her way out of the car because she's able to earn enough money. So, but in a longer term sense, it's really hard to tell. And this is, you know, one of the problems with say, in other countries, you know, in Britain, for instance, you can track people in the census, but you can't do that. In India, we just don't have the micro data yet that is available to do it. And especially in this case, you know, it is, it's, it's so hard to access any of that kind of record. So yeah, it is unknown. I imagine that they were even further displaced by partition. And so I think what this, what these events really do is set the tone for what seems to be a very turbulent period. And we just haven't been thinking so much about what's happening to ordinary people because of the focus on the national distelling of the 1940s. So yeah, I mean, I think you've hit a really important point there. Yeah, thank you. The next question is from Ankita Srivastav. Thanks, it was a fascinating talk was just wondering if the course of your research in the if in the course of your research, did you come across many sources where the colonial mind owners used the native workers being indolent lazy erratic workers as justification for the abysmal wages and benefits they were given when like you pointed out legislation regulating the same had been passed in England about 50 to 70 years prior. Because I did see that argument coming up again and again when I looked at the jute mill workers in Bengal in the same time period. Yes, absolutely. And that is a really important feature of any kind of discussion on the actual workers themselves they're all called lazy indolent. But what is interesting about the coal mining case at least is that they're seen as even more different than these other Indian workers. So because they're at the vaccine because they concentrated in remote parts of Bengal and the heart in you know what is called the tribal belt. They were seen as being different from Indian workers in the cities. So they were seen that therefore this was used as justification to impose that the worst kind of disciplinary conditions possible. And this is something they then as ascribe those limitations that they supposed limitations that they identified are then attributed to their belonging to these aboriginal quote unquote aboriginal communities. So it's a very problematic way of understanding the above. And yes, that is just how it was administered. I think we'll have one more question from custody, who had raised her hand and I'm sorry I missed it. So I'm sure she'll type in her question. Oh, here she is custody, could you type in your question please in the Q&A box. While we wait for custody I was wondering whether I could respond to one of the points that you mentioned Uri. And that was whether the whether famine like conditions were replicated elsewhere across across the rest of the country. So some of the letters that I've looked at when I've been studying Indian soldiers letters that they received and that they wrote back to family members at home. Some of them mentioned famine like conditions in Travancore in South India. And often there are sort of witnesses writing in the letters saying you know I was at Bombay at the train station and I saw this terrible site of starving women again there's a lot of representation of starving women and children, even in in letters that are not being written from Bengal that are being written from South India, and even West India at that time. That is really, really interesting. And I think I did come across some newspaper articles on what was happening in Travancore. So yeah, I think definitely something to follow up on. I can send you some of those sources once the archives open up again I can send you some of those just for a point of contrast, if you wanted to look at them. Yeah, that would be brilliant. Thank you. Okay, sure. I still don't have a question and it was not the story it was a lot of great. I don't find I might have come. Yes. So it's asking, has there been a corresponding study of comfort women so familiar with the vanquished Japanese that actually took place in East South Asia and South South Asia amongst the Allied soldiers. That is a really good question and you know comfort women have been a big part of a lot of these conversations similar conversations but conducted in the Southeast Asian and Japanese context. There hasn't been a whole lot of work. There is, I think a Yasmin Khan wrote an article on sex in an imperial war zone in the South Asian context which to some extent answers those questions and talks about just the many new avenues that opened up for women and of course the extent of sex work that was well now cause because of the huge increase in population due to the military and the sort of different needs that the government prioritized at that time for these soldiers coming in from abroad. But yes, this is this is something that does need further research. Thanks Irvi. I don't see any more questions. I wanted to ask about the gaps in the archival material that you are facing and how are you, you know, how is it contributing towards your writing of history of women, you know, workers during this time, the war. Yeah, yeah, it is difficult. So, I mean, in some sense, I guess if I think about my work with Cole, a lot of it I had to, I was supposed to draw on discussions that were happening from above. Okay, it wasn't it wasn't necessarily in history from below, because I was looking at legislative changes I was looking at conversations between the people at the top people sitting in London and Delhi. So I didn't have a history from below for Cole and you know that's something that is that I would really like to achieve and I'm not sure what the best way to do it is at the moment without archives opening. Maybe perhaps it is something that requires appeal visit to the minds which is something that I really want to do. And I think. And then with the case of the labor cause the exact opposite, because I have, I have these interviews, but I don't have anything administrative yet from the government. They were so keen on keeping something like this invisible. There was no commission investigating it like there was a commission investigating the miles. So I'm facing different opposite problem for each of my case study so far. And I think that he like speaks to like the quality of the problems of doing research on marginalized women in South Asia, especially in colonial India. I hope that answers your question. Thank you. Thank you. We don't have any more questions coming in but the would you like to comment or ask anything else. I mean I could talk to we about this for forever but I won't I won't I promise I'll stop soon. I, I particularly like to we how you've in in using women's bodies as your lens for analysis. You've managed to link a global war with the Bengal famine so often I found in my work. The Bengal famine is seen as this regional event, a tragic regional event. And the Second World War is seen as this global largely Eurocentric event, you know, so they occupy very different spaces in people's understandings of of war and how it affects not just military lives but civilian lives. And I was, and I'm so pleased that this research is coming forward that makes these sorts of connections. And I wondered if you if you could talk a little bit to that you know you're you're focusing on Eastern India, you're focusing on the Bengal famine and the out the kind of after effects of the Bengal famine. But you're also linking it to something that is very global. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, when I first started out with the project is after I found the story of the coal mining women and I, I had really grand ambitions of wanting to do a pan Indian study. And it was only when I started doing a deep dive and doing archival research that I realized how massive the actual event of the Bengal famine was, you know, very like I'm not just in a regional sense, because it is something that really completely transformed the scene in rural Eastern India as well as the metropolis. So I think part of it it was not something again that I was expecting to find it was something that I ended up seeing and the the transnational connections are extremely clear. It's very easy to paraphralyze and make marginal these stories to be part of the mainstream. And, and I think this this really funds sense should transcend ideally what I'm as well with you know it's not just about the second world war it's also about the first world war it's about the history of conflict and I think the other thing that you bring out so well in your work because conflict can really test people in different ways, irrespective of whether or not they're global conflicts and they have all sorts of ramifications and consequences. So I think. Yeah, this is, this is something that hopefully I, you know I can do justice to in my limited sense but it's also amazing to see so many people doing such incredible work on precisely identifying these links between the local and the national and the international Absolutely. I'm well I'm glad you find some of some of my work helpful. The other sort of final thought I had was, you know, I was very struck again by when you said these were women who were already marginalized that found themselves, you know, completely destitute and then sort out sex work or sort out you know and I think in some ways that that kind of relates to our own time you know we are going through our own crisis we're going through the pandemic, and we sort of see people who are already economically fragile. Are the people who are most affected so in some ways you know these moments of crisis are like flares of light with which we understand the inequalities of society. And I wondered if that's how you you thought about your project. I think, I think the present crisis did really throw that into, you know, into sharper relief because we have like the gig economy is such a major part of how they both function in present day society and so much of what is happening at least in the case of the day before is precisely that. And it is very vulnerable it's very precarious. And I think that kind of precarity which is underscored in these cases is, you know, these aren't these might be all questions but they're questions that continue to bother us today. And, you know, especially in the case of India and the COVID crisis, we've had migrant workers who have been displaced and destituted once again so it is actually in that sense that kind of upheaval and we need to think about how ordinary people are responding to these. So I think yeah that's a really important point that you raised there. We have one last question and this is going to be our final question. This is from Jacob Thomas. How were the marginalized women and their experiences addressed by the organized labor movements and communists. To what extent did they feature in the discussions on labor in comparison to more visible groups like say factory workers. Great question and I think so that last point about factory workers the most of the communist party attention was usually addressed to people working in factories. And as a result what happens is that people in the unorganized sector women and men are then left out of those discussions in many cases in the case of coal mines. There was very little labor unionization so in this period in India, only say about 10% of the mining labor force was unit unionized part of this reason is because the coal mines are geographically remote from big Indian cities so they're far from Calcutta there. You know they're really sort of in the middle of nowhere in that sense. So at that point there was no organization. For the labor core there was no question of unionization because it was informal and as a unit so far it really doesn't seem to have an existence in government records so far I I'm hoping that it does it does appear. So I think what happens then with the labor core is that they are viewed by the communist party through relief efforts. So it's the relief wings of the party that are working on remedying the effects of the bingo famine that then go on to actually conduct research on these things. So it is say the women's self defense league that goes and investigates conditions in Cox's Bazaar. So again it is like a branch of the Communist Party that's going ahead and doing it. Of course the Communist Party was trying very hard at least in the case of the labor core to bring international attention. But if you look at the timeline of things. The activists are only sent in April 1945. The articles are published in July. The war ends in August for the Western world. And so that those attempts through all of this rhetoric through calling attention just don't end up working because in the eyes of the Western world the war is over. Thank you. Thank you so much for that wonderful talk and so insightful, you know, and such ignored aspects of history, especially histories of women and working women. And thank you for staying up so late and joining us from India. I know it's really really late. So thank you for that. Thank you Dya for giving us your time and good luck with your book which is also again an emotive way emotive history writing about you know Indian soldiers experiences. Thank you to the audience for joining us tonight. And for our next talk you can be with us on the 29th of March, again at 530pm. This is by Moe Banerjee from University of Wisconsin Madison, and she'll be speaking on the disinherited Christianity and conversion in Calcutta. And the talk will be chaired by Dr. Deepjani Bhattacharya from Drexel University, Philadelphia. So thank you. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Stay well and stay safe and see you end of the month. Thanks for sharing Priyanka. Bye bye. Thank you so much. Thank you.