Care Work as a Quiet Activism in Wartime Punjab: Exploring Pedagogies of Endurance
By: Dr. Gurpreet Kaur
War often means bloodshed, fear, trauma, loss of faith, and futility. In the shadow of war, one cannot just think of the need of protecting oneself, by any means, but also scenes of sensitivity and humanity. It is in such scenario that silent and selfless care work often unfolds. It’s not a grand gesture but a quiet and persistent act, of and for survival.
I am reminded of the Indo-Pak conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, resulting into the war in 1971. Punjab, a region celebrated for being India’s Land of Rivers, rich in courage, vitality, and culture, witnessed a quiet resistance during wartime, women’s care work, largely absent from official histories, a gesture of humanity to nurture life amid chaos, uncertainty, displacement and loss. Some women, took to feeding families, people, young and old, who had lost members, tending and sheltering not only to their affected neighbours, physically as well as emotionally, but also strangers.
“Smt. Nirmal Kaur: A Woman who lived a life of Courage and Resilience amid chaos”
All this comes through to me from my nani (maternal grandmother), Nirmal Kaur, who resided in a small village near the Sutlej River during the Indo-Pak war. She was a young mother of four, who became an anchor for her neighbourhood. Many families’ men were either lost or missing, and in the name of curfew, roads were patrolled by soldiers. Some women, my nani being one of them, arranged informal channels of mutual aid. They shared all basic things available, food, milk, clothes, and firewood. They took care of children and gave medicine to the sick. My grandmother offered her neighbours shelter for weeks, when their home was destroyed during an attack. Her courtyard with big boundary walls, looked like a communal refuge. Really, no one called it activism then. But it was activism itself. It was when, during the Indo-Pak conflicts in April 2025, we had to go through the same blackouts which Nani had once narrated to us, she told us with wet eyes.
My nani, who knew how to stitch, repaired torn clothes; another age mate of nani, boiled neem leaves to be given to those with fever. They even whispered prayers as lullabies to the sleeping infants, providing comfort and reassurance. This backyard of nani attempted to escape the outside world of war, which demanded pain, destruction, isolation, silence, and death. Rather, these women made collective efforts to connect and repair, remembered nani.
It was not that my nani was spared from grief. She lost her brother to a border skirmish. Another neighbour’s son never came back home after a military raid. But genuinely, this concern and care amid war, was the only hope for some. Women who could read and write, wrote letters for the illiterate, interpreted information that came through from radios, the only modern source of information in those days. They also taught children under banyan trees when schools remained closed. These acts preserved humanity along with knowledge, dignity, and hope.
Nani told us with passion, how in the evenings, after that phase was over, stories were shared, of partition, suffering, loss, migration, and resilience. These stories became pedagogies of endurance. They were lessons for the coming generations about ethical coexistence, managing and survival through scarcity, how to make pain bearable collectively, and protect one another. Her experience of care work during the war was not just physical but epistemic.
It is said that when you genuinely want to do something, the whole environment comes to support you. In the similar way, she narrated, the landscape, the mother nature offered to care, neem and other trees offered antiseptic leaves. Houses made of mud helped to absorb intense heat. While coming to fetch water from wells, women gathered for exchange of updates and advice.
She told about one incident that stands out in her memory: one night when the villagers were warned of an upcoming air raid. All families were forced to huddle together in underground grain storage pits, used as bunkers. When no one had the courage to move, my grandmother, delivered a pot of warm milk with turmeric powder to those injured during the unrest. She checked on children, sharing whispers of comfort. She proved to be a lifeline in that moment, and not just a caregiver. Now when I reflect to her stories, I feel that her care was a kind of resistance and activism, refusing humanity’s surrender in front of war.
Today, when there are frequent climate change events, and intensified geopolitical conflicts, these narratives of wartime care and concern inspire urgent lessons. We have to agree that resistance is not always audible, and that mutual support is not charity but a form of justice, a quality that makes humans different from other creations. And of course, stories told by our ancestors and grandparents are not for escape, but to be used as strategies to cope with the emerging crises.
I remember my nani’s wartime experience of care work, not to romanticize suffering but to honour the labour that she put in to support life when all other systems failed. She was not just a caregiver but a good manager, a strategist, a healer, and a quiet activist of her own kind, during the war time.
Author Bio: Dr. Gurpreet Kaur is an accomplished educationist, author, poet, and editor with over twenty years of teaching experience. She serves as an Assistant Professor of English and Head at Sri Guru Teg Bahadur Khalsa College, affiliated with Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Dr. Kaur has authored 16 books and published 70 papers in national and international journals. She has presented at over 56 conferences and actively participates on editorial boards. She is actively contributing to sensitizing towards climate change and importance of moral ethics through her writings like, edited books, poems, blogs, collection of short stories, etc. Additionally, she is an award-winning social worker.