Lives and sustenance of migrant Indian women in Indenture and COVID-19

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, several indentured laborers and their descendants were exposed to political, social, and cultural shifts and instabilities that perpetuated over the decades. Simultaneously, in the pandemic era of COVID-19 and the colonial period, women workers had to overcome numerous hurdles, as they migrated without proper sustenance. The main objective of this study was to examine the working conditions, physical and psychological conditions, and sustenance of contracted laborers, especially migrant women, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them are inequality in the labor markets, domestic workloads and workspaces, sexual abuse, mobility crises, child abuse, xenophobic attitudes, and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). By adopting a qualitative approach and critical examination, it is observed that the vulnerabilities of low-skilled women, the exploitation of migrant labor, as a matrix of identities, behaviors and power relationships are discernible in capitalist expansion, and the disparities that they induce while taking into account how the market mimics the prevalent sexual division of labor.