Next-gen precarity: gender and informal labor in the Eastern Himalaya

Abstract In the eastern Himalayan region of Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, young women migrate from within and outside the area to work in the expanding retail and service sector. This sector demands very little from them in terms of education, technical skills or financial literacy; the emphasis being on their youth, and supposed socio-cultural and gendered attributes of docility, flexibility and manageability. Simultaneously, technological and infrastructural advancements combined with the influx of cheap fakes of international brands have made borderlands prominent sites of low-end globalization. The informal sector thrives on the back of this rapidly expanding market, the unceasing supply of cheap, flexible and docile labor and the invisibility of laboring bodies and their inherent precarity. However, the informal sector and the attributes that it seeks also create room to maneuver, and negotiate precarity. Focusing on this newly formed but rapidly growing precariat in the eastern Himalayan borderland, and using qualitative data, this paper illustrates (a) how capitalism, through consumption, can create precarious lives and livelihoods (b) the emerging contradictions (empowerment, exploitation) in social and gendered relations as a result of informal employment and (c) the transformation of borderlands into new sites of low-end globalization.