‘Couldn’t we call it something else?’: the Indian Army’s <i>sahayak</i> system and categorizing military labour
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Indian Army’s sahayak system, named after the Hindi word meaning ‘assistant’ or ‘helper’, formerly the colonial batman or orderly system, recently became a site of national controversy. Enlisted soldiers charged the army with exploitation for being coerced into performing domestic chores in officers’ households. I argue 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. Building on analytical approaches within the anthropology of work and feminist studies labour, the article traces the shifting meanings of these categories across scholarly and media debates, colonial propaganda materials, and ethnographic encounters. It shows these 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. The analysis of media debates and ethnographic insights is grounded in colonial historiography to illustrate how ideologies of ‘work’ and ‘service’ were shaped and contested within earlier institutional regimes through ‘status lines’ drawn between combatants and followers, and how contemporary boundary-making around the sahayak system echoes these tensions. Additionally, it demonstrates how language itself becomes a site of contestation over how military labour is defined, valued, and made visible. These dynamics 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 active repression of dissent amongst soldiers protesting their working conditions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it