ARUNIMA Datta - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by ARUNIMA Datta

The international journal of occupational and environmental medicine, Jul 1, 2016

Indian tea industry workers are exposed to various exposures at their workplace. To investigate t... more Indian tea industry workers are exposed to various exposures at their workplace. To investigate the respiratory health of Indian tea industry workers. We administered a respiratory questionnaire to and measured lung function in workers of 34 tea gardens and 46 tea factories. We used correlation matrices to test the association between their respiratory symptoms and lung functions. The garden workers complained of shortness of breath 3 times higher than the factory workers. However, nasal allergy was more predominant among the factory workers compared to garden workers (69.6% vs 41.2%, p=0.02). The factory workers had higher total (median 107.3% vs 92.9%, p=0.05, as measured by R at 5 Hz) and peripheral airway resistance (143.8% vs 61.1%, p=0.005, as measured by R at 5-20 Hz) than the garden workers. Respiratory symptoms were inversely associated with airway obstruction as measured by the ratio between forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) and forced vital capacity (FVC) and po...

Journal of Historical Geography

Abstract The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement for both colonizers and coloniz... more Abstract The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement for both colonizers and colonized across the world. This study focuses on Indian traveling ayahs (female servants and nannies) who traveled between India and Britain, but often underwent periods of destitution in Britain before returning to India. Using case studies of destitute ayahs, this essay investigates how the British state, British persons and British institutions responded to the destitution of imperial subjects from overseas in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study examines the social, legal and economic power dynamics underlying these responses, revealing a combination of confrontation and collaboration between migrant colonized subjects and those engaging with them in responding to contradictory imperial polices. The article highlights the agency of a neglected group of women who, in asserting their contribution to the Empire and their rights as imperial subjects, refused to accept a second-class form of Britishness.

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2020

This paper examines the everyday history of one of the groups of auxiliary workers in industrial ... more This paper examines the everyday history of one of the groups of auxiliary workers in industrial towns of Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing primarily from journal and newspaper records, this paper examines the work of knocker ups and the ways in which they became intimately tied to the lives of industries and primary industry workers. The paper then focuses on how knocker ups became highly influential in industrial towns through the multifarious jobs they performed – sometimes knowingly and sometimes less consciously. In so doing, this paper challenges the prevailing notion that auxiliaries merely served their primary clients by waking them up, and re-visualizes the position of knocker ups in industrial towns not as mere auxiliaries but as crucial contributors to social, political and economic life as well as partners in law enforcement in a broad variety of circumstances. The findings suggest a need to revise long-standing views of labour in industrial ...

Fleeting Agencies, 2020

Fleeting Agencies disrupts the male-dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migr... more Fleeting Agencies disrupts the male-dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migration and showing how South Asian women labour migrants engaged with the process of migration, interacted with other migrants and negotiated colonial laws. This is the first study of Indian coolie women in British Malaya to date. In exploring the politicization of labour migration trends and gender relations in the colonial plantation society in British Malaya, the author foregrounds how the migrant Indian 'coolie' women manipulated colonial legal and administrative perceptions of Indian women; their gender-prescriptive roles, relations within patriarchal marriage institutions, and even the emerging Indian national independence movement in India and Malaya. All this, to ensure their survival, escape from unfavourable relations and situations, and improve their lives. The book also introduces the concept of situational or fleeting agency, which contributes to further a nuanced und...

Women's History Review, 2018

In 1899 the Straits Chinese physician and community leader Lim Boon Keng made the case that femal... more In 1899 the Straits Chinese physician and community leader Lim Boon Keng made the case that female education was beneficial to the community as a whole: 'Keep your women in a low, ignorant and servile state, and in time you will become a low, ignorant and servile people-male and female!' (p. 69).(1) Thus, female education was essential to the success of the Chinese community and the Chinese community was essential to the success of the colony. Given the supposed 'civilizing mission' of the British Empire, we could assume that the education of colonial subjects, and especially women, would have been a priority for the colonial authorities. At the same time, it would make sense that the hard-working, entrepreneurial and charitable Chinese community would gladly support the education of Chinese girls in order to further cement the community's vital role in colonial society. However, Karen M. Teoh's detailed investigation into female education amongst the Chinese community in British Malaya and Singapore demonstrates that the realities were much more complicated. Teoh shows us that Chinese female education was a battleground for, and contributing factor to, tensions around gender roles, decolonisation, and Chinese and Southeast Asian nationalism over a period of significant change and upheaval. The stories of the educated ethnic Chinese women provide a unique and original snapshot of how individuals interacted with these broader processes of political, social and economic change.

Asian Journal of Social Science, 2016

Women's History Review, 2016

ABSTRACT Cases settled by colonial courts in British Malaya often revolved around issues of gende... more ABSTRACT Cases settled by colonial courts in British Malaya often revolved around issues of gender, class, race and colonial law. This article uses official and non-official archival records to explore the realities hidden behind the gender stereotypes conveyed in accounts given by colonial authorities and Indian nationalists of immorality and domestic violence. It makes a detailed investigation of alleged offences committed by husbands or partners of ‘deviant’ women, and illustrates factors influencing the attitudes of colonial courts, newspapers, members of the coolie community and Indian nationalists towards such incidents. Coolie women lived under oppressive conditions arising from colonial rule, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal control. In seeking to escape unsuitable marriages or oppressive relationships, women exhibited fleeting signs of agency, but neither colonial administrators nor nationalist leaders acknowledged the agency of women. The image of coolie women as passive victims allowed colonial administrators to present themselves as protectors of social order, and nationalist leaders to accuse colonial administrations of failing to preserve the social and moral welfare of their subjects. Illustrating the importance of gender in the political struggle between colonialism and nationalism, this article suggests the need for a sensitive understanding of how subjugated individuals, especially coolie women, reacted to such socio-political situations. In so doing, the article provides a nuanced and complex interpretation of social control as well as agency of subjugated individuals in colonial plantation contexts.

Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2015

The Rani of Jhansi Regiment (RJR) is scarcely visible in the social memory of the Japanese occupa... more The Rani of Jhansi Regiment (RJR) is scarcely visible in the social memory of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia and the activities of Subhash Chandra Bose on behalf of the Indian nationalist movement. The few memoirs that do exist were written by elite and well-educated RJR veterans, and they celebrate a sense of unity among Indians from various background who supported Bose's efforts, including soldiers who came to the RJR from working class backgrounds in Malaya and Singapore. Using recollections from witnesses to and participants in the Indian nationalist movement in Japanese-occupied Malaya and Singapore, this article challenges the elite view by exploring alternative perceptions of Bose's activities. Illustrating the importance of gender and socioeconomic boundaries in Bose's nationalist movement, this article argues that differences in class and caste estranged subaltern Indian women during the Occupation.

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both colonisers and... more The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both colonisers and colonised. This article focuses on the experiences of travelling ayahs (servants and nannies) who travelled with colonial families both within and outside the British Empire. This study expands on the previous literature to focus on the experiences of ayahs in Britain and the rest of Europe under unusually difficult situations of waiting brought about by events at both global and individual levels: at the global level, the outbreak of the world wars and at the individual level, the actions of irresponsible employers who abandoned their ayahs in foreign countries. In so doing, the article contributes to a nuanced understanding of how the ayahs navigated waiting as gendered subjects, and simultaneously, how they actively attempted to craft their repatriation in the context of the highly gendered expectations attached to women of South Asian descent on the move.