“‘Couldn’t we call it something else?’: the Indian Army’s sahayak system and categorizing military labour,” by Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies Taveeshi Singh, was published recently in the journal Critical Military Studies, from Taylor & Francis online. It will also be included in a forthcoming special issue on military labor in Asia.
Singh said the sahayak system is named after the Hindi word meaning ‘assistant’ or ‘helper,’ and was formerly the colonial batman or orderly system. It recently became a site of national controversy when “enlisted soldiers charged the army with exploitation for being coerced into performing domestic chores in officers’ households,” she said.
In her article, Singh argues that “military practices like the sahayak system show soldiering cannot be neatly classified into universal categories of ‘work,’ ‘labour,’ or ‘service,’ but instead occupy their interstices.”
She built on analytical approaches within the anthropology of work and feminist studies labor to trace the shifting meanings of these categories across scholarly and media debates, colonial propaganda materials, and ethnographic encounters. In doing so, she showed that the “categories are not fixed but actively negotiated through boundary-making practices by the subjects who inhabit them and the institutions that invest in and seek to manage them.”
Singh also highlighted how language can become “a site of contestation over how military labour is defined, valued, and made visible.”
“These dynamics,” she concluded, “emerge as particularly urgent in the current political climate, where resurgent nationalism in India depends, on one hand, upon romanticized portrayals of soldiering and, on the other, upon the active repression of dissent amongst soldiers protesting their working conditions.”
Posted February 17, 2026
