ABSTRACT
Colliery women had clearly struggled to carve out a place for themselves, smashing the stereotype of the submissive, oppressed Asian woman. In the case of women in the coalminers' struggles, there is no such documentation to critique. There have been no attempts to document the struggles of the coalminers, so there is no published, documented history of struggle to place women in, or to challenge. There are few written documents about the colliery workers of India, in spite of the number of workers employed and the importance of the industry. The organized struggles of the coalminers have received scant attention, and none at all has been paid to women's struggles within it. Women workers told us that village women were subjected to much worse harassment than they were by the outsiders or rangdars as they were known: the Biharis used to harass women who came from the villages to sell vegetables in the bazaar.
