Struggle and Survival of the Kamins

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. Rather than presenting the coalfields as an isolated site of exploitation, the book situates Jharia within broader national and global energy regimes, showing how the demand for cheap coal is sustained through institutionalized invisibility and differential exposure to harm. By centering the knowledge, strategies, and political insights of the Kamins, the study rethinks labor politics in extractive economies and offers a critical account of how survival itself becomes a mode of analysis and resistance. This book will be of interest to researchers in gender studies, sociology of labor, feminist political economy, feminist ecology, and development studies.