Social Provisions and the Stakes of Empire: Gender, Colonial Punjab, and the First World War

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 1

Abstract

Until recently, histories of the First World War were largely told as histories of Europe. Yet as an empire, Britain relied on its colonies, particularly India, to wage World War I. In colonial Punjab, recruitment for the British Indian Army hinged on the colonial discourse of the martial masculinity of the Punjabi man in a gendered agrarian economy. In this context, I investigate the impact of World War I for women left behind in Punjab. Drawing on previously uncovered archival documents, I argue that social provisions were set up not only to stimulate recruitment but they were informed by and accentuated women’s dependence and reinforced a masculine colonial economy. Based on an analysis of archival documents on social provisions, I show that in the absence of their husbands, the colonial officials maintained a masculine colonial economy by devaluing women’s labor through inadequate social provisions, refusing them land grants as war rewards for their husbands’ service, and relied on other male relatives who could support the widows and only intervened through social provisions if the men refused to support them. Building on and extending the important but divergent scholarship of feminist sociology of welfare and the sociology of empire, I show that the colonial state was able to uphold the masculine economy by relying on the existing structures of gender, labor, and property.

Author

• Umaima Miraj, University of Toronto