This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, human life for mineworkers in the Jharia coalfields in eastern India, in the early decades of the twentieth century, had some ‘unsought for’ results. These results included the vulnerability of women excluded from certain categories of work, school-dropout children and above all absence of a reproductive support system. Industrialists as well as the industrial workforce slowly braced themselves to devise the means for satisfying reproduction requirements of the principal component of the workforce. The resultant reproduction regime, representing a shift to industrial paternalism, took effect within the matrix of mineworkers’ new reproduction politics, the competition between different categories of mineworkers, and their access to social and political power. On family and women questions, the familist discourse became the site of contestation between various ideas and practices that represented different responses to the need to reconstitute the reproduction regime in the industrial space.
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