Date of Award

8-23-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Social Science

Advisor(s)

Chandra Mohanty

Keywords

Class & Caste;Colonialism;Critical Military & Security Studies;Gender & Labor;Indian Army;South Asia

Abstract

This dissertation explores the politics of gender, labor, national security, and social class in India through an examination of a coercive domestic labor regime in the Indian Army. Previous scholarship has focused on the neoliberal state-sponsored global care chains and immigrant women workers from formerly colonized nations, many in Asia, catering to wealthy ‘civilian’ households in the global North. However, little is known about the roles, relationalities, and infrastructures of servitude, inhabited primarily by racialized men, that endure within the domestic life of postcolonial state institutions long after the retreat of European colonial regimes. I present an intervention by providing a case study of the sahayak system, a system of stratified labor in the world’s second-largest defense force, which employs an estimated forty thousand soldier-servants in officers’ homes across India. Specifically, I spotlight the figure of the sahayak (translated from Hindi as “assistant/helper,” formerly referred to as “batman/orderly”), a combatant soldier in the Indian Army, officially responsible for providing operational support to officers in the field service, but who functions, in a practical sense, as a state-sponsored domestic servant. I argue for analytically attending to the sahayak’s twin work roles as soldier and servant, straddling the liminal spaces between free/unfree, martial/menial, and masculinized/feminized labor, to understand the adaptability of (caste/racial, colonial, militarized) patriarchal social systems in fulfilling their prescribed domestic roles, thus, challenging institutionalized binary labor distinctions between voluntary enlistment and conscription, and combatant and noncombatant, as well as assumptions about the fixedness of men’s dominance and women’s subjugation in heteropatriarchal institutions like the military. Based on a combination of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, I propose a theory of “securitized labor,” which analyzes the sahayak system within the social, political, and historical context of India’s colonial and pre-colonial stratification systems. This analytical lens explains the relationship between social class and security as contingent upon and sustained through the institutionalized capture of subordinated groups’ labor through mechanisms of coercion to benefit the Indian state and its military elites. It highlights how ideologies of labor are encoded and reproduced in nationalist discourses of/about the military and the Indian Army’s sahayak system. Moral constructions of work befitting the combatant status are central to these discourses rooted in gendered, caste, racial, and colonial logics. As the first study to examine the postcolonial Indian Army through a critical ethnographic and feminist lens, Domestic Exertions contributes to three ongoing scholarly dialogues: the emerging critical and feminist scholarship on militarism and the everyday, the growing body of scholarship on the politics of gender and security regimes in contemporary Asia, and anthropological dialogues on work, labor, and value in South Asia. At the heart of the project is the claim for a domestic turn in these fields, compelling attention toward the hidden, everyday labor practices that sustain and reproduce security institutions in the region and beyond. Furthermore, the project addresses broader questions about human security, highlighting the conditions of containment, constraint, and dependency that produce structural violence across the household and geopolitical realms, and soldiers’ struggles for agency within these structures. Ultimately, the research illuminates the ways in which the recent sahayak controversy threatens the historically revered status of the jawan as the symbolic protector of the nation, bringing to the fore moral anxieties about citizenship, masculinity, and India’s postcolonial trajectory.

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Open Access

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