In textile and jute industries, sardars were labour contractors and their status depended on how many labour hands they brought to the industry.
Among jute workers only weavers were not employed on every day basis, as their work required much more time to learn than other workers.
By 1971 women, who had been almost a fourth of the jute workforce, were decimated to a bare 2 per cent of the workforce.
The mechanism of strikes in the jute mills often appeared unconventional to managers and the colonial state.
The wages of jute mill workers provided them with bare subsistence.
They therefore chose instead to remain in old and clearly stagnating businesses, such as jute and coal, which required less capital.
In many jute mills, patterns of women's employment have held over a century.
Her report was the first comprehensive statement, most oft-quoted, about the questionable and 'non-family' character of jute mill women.