Politics of Precarity

Based on a ethnographic study on women working in the health care industry, the book examines the everyday politics of labour to understand how occupational hierarchies intersect with social identities in a hitherto feminine caste-based occupation. The book traces the emergence and refashioning of the nursing profession , from colonial Bengal to contemporary Kolkata to argue that nursing labour is cleaved along the lines of 'prestigious' and 'dirty' work, which reflect not just skills but also historically and socially produced structural inequalities. Thus certain segments of the profession have witnessed professionalisation, such as trained nurses, and certain segments, such as nursing aides and attendants, continue to struggle with non-recognition of skills and stigmatisation of labour. The book interrogates the politics of distinction and distancing that produces a differentiated workforce, and the various contestations around gender, caste, class, sexualities, among and between ranks of workers who deploy modernity, morality and social norms as strategies to secure marginal gains at the expense of others.