The Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

中文翻译：

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“有用”和“赚钱”的公民？后殖民时代德里的性别、国家和市场

印度政府将旁遮普邦的分裂视为“国家灾难”，对难民妇女的培训被认为是恢复社会格局的必要条件；然而，它为难民妇女提供的帮助建立在其对适合她们的工作类型的明确假设和偏见：为妇女提供刺绣、缝合、剪裁和编织方面的培训，因为这些与女性和家庭有关- 基于技能。本文将揭示国家康复企业主要是男性化的焦点。国家将女性难民视为次要收入者和壁炉、家庭和亲属的监护人；它没有看到他们在后殖民印度的国家建设中发挥了决定性的作用。在没有国家支持政策的情况下，难民妇女被迫从事小买卖等非正式工作，家政服务和劳动。这篇文章表明，难民妇女在进入劳动力市场时就处于不利地位。它追溯了德里女性非正式的历史。在此过程中，它调查了 20 世纪德里城市空间的女性化和商业化。它敦促妇女以不止一种方式腾出空间：确定零散的生计、生产小规模资本主义和创造非正规市场。