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

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