‘These are not ordinary women’: Surviving Famine in Second World War India

Abstract

The Bengal Famine had a devastating and deeply gendered impact on everyday people’s lives. Drawing on mixed-methods archival methodology, this paper focuses on the lived experiences of rural Bengali women navigating its exigencies and fighting for survival. For hundreds of thousands of displaced and destitute women, opportunities to engage in waged labour provided vital subsistence income for them and their families. As the threat of starvation constantly loomed over their heads, being mobile and flexible enabled destitute women’s resilience in the face of extreme constraint.

One route was employment in unregulated labour for the Allied war machine in harsh and gruelling working conditions, which operated in parallel with an underground but hypervisible economy of commercial sex. An all-female contingent of at least 30,000 women constituted the ‘Labour Corps’, employed by subcontractors on a casualised basis to build the roads, runways, and military bases that were the backbone of the Allied war effort in Asia. An unknown number of these labouring women were also coerced into prostitution. About 77,000 other women worked above and below ground in coal mines, taking advantage of a recently suspended prohibition on women’s employment underground.

However, there was complete dissonance in how these women’s economic and labour market activity was perceived and constructed by the state, capital, and middle-class society. Working women confronted gendered conceptions that persistently de-valued their labour. Even so, they survived, subsisted, and supported dependents by seeking out waged work despite the manifold constraints placed on their economic agency.