New jobs, new spatialised patriarchy: creating factory workers in a Himalayan pharmaceutical hub

Abstract

Sikkim, one of the smallest Indian states is now one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical hubs in the country. Pharmaceutical factories are spaces where gender, technology, dependency, profit, and livelihood operate simultaneously. They represent sites of capital accumulation as well as continuous re-calibration of gender and race relationships. Pharmaceutical companies rely on local women from rural and peri-urban areas for assembly-line and other manual labour; work, which exposes them to new spatial and temporal patriarchal norms. Most importantly, these norms are enforced by migrant men who occupy a distinct and often subservient position in the local social matrix. Inside the factories, migrant men have more power and authority over the local population. Beyond the factory walls, local hill-groups assume positions of authority and control the spatial order, while the factory supervisors and technicians are reduced to a somewhat insignificant group of migrant men. Focussing on pharmaceutical factories in Sikkim, the paper will illustrate (i) how industrial labour exposes women to new temporal and spatialised patriarchy; (ii) how human resource frontiers emerge in recently industrialising borderlands; (iii) and how development creates a flux in identities and relationships between local and migrant communities.

Keywords:

• Borderlands
• ethnicity
• gender
• labour
• patriarchy
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all the respondents – factory management and workers, for their time and sharing their stories, officers and staff of different government departments in Sikkim, Krista Lepcha for assistance in the field, Dunchu Lepcha for motivation and support and the anonymous reviewers from Gender, Place and Culture for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Sikkimese citizenship is formulated along the Sikkim Subjects Regulation Act, 1961 and the Sikkim Subject Certificates that establishes the identity of the holder as a bonafide citizen of Sikkim, which confers certain benefits on property ownership, government jobs and welfare (see Eden 2015).

2 Exact numbers are unknown, although factory managers and government officials confirmed that majority of their casual workers were women.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was conducted as a part of the RiSEZAsia project funded by Starting Grant from Aarhus University Research Foundation, Denmark.

Notes on contributors

Mona Chettri

Dr. Mona Chettri is an Australia-India Institute Research Fellow at University of Western Australia. She received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2014. She is the author of Constructing Democracy: Ethnicity and Democracy in the eastern Himalaya (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and has published widely on urbanisation, ethnicity, politics and development in the eastern Himalayan borderland. Her current research focuses on the intersections between gender, labour, urbanisation and infrastructure in the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalaya, India.