Joshi India Labour

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

History Compass 6/2 (2008): 439–454, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00503.x

Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities

Chitra Joshi*University of Delhi

AbstractThis article looks at the shifts in Indian labour historiography through a focus oncertain key themes: community, politics, gender and law. For more than a decade,historians of labour in India and outside have critiqued teleological frameworkswithin which working class formation was conceptualized. The article examinesthe ways in which these critiques have complicated received ideas of class,community and working class politics. In addressing issues of gender, writings onlabour are moving beyond earlier masculinist frames to look at the production ofgendered identities. Recent writings on law and legislation point in new directionsand unsettle old binaries of formal/informal, free/unfree labour.

The renewal of writings on Indian labour over the past decade has beenmarked by an unsettling of old frameworks, a questioning of earliercertainties and a pushing of old boundaries. Many of the issues concerningIndian labour history reflect wider concerns being articulated at a globallevel. There is a need however to examine how historians in differentlocations re-figure and re-work ideas and assumptions underlining globaltrends in labour history. In this article I trace the broad historiographicalshifts in the writing of Indian labour history and try to engage withcertain key themes – notions of community, politics, gender and freedom– that recur in discussions around labour.

The spate of sociological and historical literature on labour in thepost-independence decades in India of the 1950s and 1960s was framedwithin certain liberal assumptions. A study of labour formed part of alarger interest in the problems of industrialization and modernization in‘backward’ countries. Did the persistence of traditional institutions andcultural peculiarities help or hinder the process of modernization? Did thegrowth of factory industry create a ‘committed’ industrial labour force?These were some of the questions which bothered ‘modernisation’ theoristsof this period.

Among the leading works in this genre was Morris David Morris’sstudy of textile labour in the Bombay mills.1 Morris argued forcefully

440 Histories of Indian Labour

© 2008 The Author History Compass 6/2 (2008): 439–454, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00503.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

against Weberian frameworks which saw caste and other social institutionsas a hindrance to industrialization. He tried to demonstrate how tradi-tional institutions like caste did not constrain the creation of an industrialworkforce. Workers travelled to the city from different regions andworked in factories for long periods. These and other indicators wereused by Morris to show that factory industry was creating the basis for a‘committed’ industrial workforce.

Marxist historians writing in the late seventies and early eighties sharedcertain modernist assumptions. Like liberal theorists, Marxist social historianssaw factory industry as a harbinger of change, transforming and creatingthe basis for the emergence of an industrial proletariat. The persistenceof ‘pre-modern’ characteristics, the weakness of class organization andsolidarity were in Marxist writings attributed to the constraints toindustrialization and economic change under colonialism.2

Till the 1980s a rich tradition of cultural and social history of labourin India was curiously missing. Ironically it was only when labour historywas in crisis and decline in the West that new realms in the field openedup in India. Although the sharp cultural turn of Dipesh Chakrabarty wasnever quite replicated in the writings on labour in India, his interventionas I discuss below, was critical. Since the 1990s earlier categorical frame-works are being questioned in different ways. Not only is there a moveaway from the ‘determinist’ frames within which culture was perceivedearlier, but the meanings of politics and labour history itself have widened.

Questions of Community

In modernist frameworks, liberal and Marxist, community identities weretransitional in workers’ lives. The persistence of ties of community,religion and region were signs of an incomplete modernity. There wereclearly differences within liberal frameworks. For some like Morris,modern technology had a transformative potential: it dissolved traditionalinstitutions and created new ones. They argued that workers from diversecaste backgrounds were taking up factory jobs. Within the factory normsof purity and pollution did not act as a barrier to the distribution ofworkers between different departments. Other modernization theoristssaw countries like India as exceptions within a universal narrative ofindustrialization. In India social institutions acted as a constraint andmodernization remained partial.3 There was no attempt however in thesewritings to understand the implications of community ties in the lives ofworkers.

Questions concerning the relationship between ethnic and racial iden-tities and working class formation have always been deeply problematic forlabour historians.4 Historians writing on labour in India have tried tograpple with these issues in different ways. From the late 1970s onwardsthere were a series of writings that examined the social composition of


Histories of Indian Labour 441

the workforce, the regional and community background of the workers.5

They looked at the significance of community ties in the urban industrialcontext in terms of the nature of the labour market, jobber networks andrecruitment practices of managements. Caste and community identitieswere seen in these writings as part of the pre-industrial background ofworkers. The ways in which these identities were re-figured and trans-formed in the urban context were not probed. Others, writing withinorthodox Marxist frames, traced linear narratives of a class coming intobeing and denied the significance of caste and community ties altogether.They saw conflicts between religious communities as distorted expressionsof class conflict. In Sukomal Sen’s history of the Working Class of India,workers engaged in a continuous movement to organize and resist capital,appear untainted by ‘divisive’ loyalties of religion and caste.6 Marxisthistorians like Ranajit Das Gupta were more sensitive to issues of culture.He probed into the social composition of the workforce and looked atconflicts over religious issues. Yet he shared an implicit faith in a teleologyof industrialization and working class formation. Instances of urban uprisinglike the Talla riot of 1897 in Calcutta, involving large numbers of juteworkers, are seen by Das Gupta primarily as expressions of the accumulatedgrievances of the city poor.7 The continued significance of religious andcommunity ties in the lives of workers is ascribed by him to the thwartedeconomic development under colonialism.

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Rethinking Labour History marked a major inter-vention in the writing of labour history in India.8 He questioned reductiveconnections between cultural processes and economic change and emphasizedthe need to understand culture on its own terms and not througheconomic and political determinants external to it. Chakrabarty does notsee ‘primordial’ ties as residual but intrinsic to the ‘pre-bourgeois’ cultureof jute workers. To see community identities only in terms of the logicof the labour market, Chakrabarty argues, would be to imbue workerswith a ‘bourgeois’ economic rationality. Workers coming to factories wereHindus, Muslims, Biharis, Oriyas and so on. The city and the factoryintensified the workers’ sense of belonging to an ethnic community. InChakrabarty’s framework the participation of workers in actions based onwider solidarities cutting across religious and caste divides appears episodic– it has no lasting significance.9

Chakrabarty’s understanding of questions of culture and community isdeeply problematic. He critiques frames which reduce culture to economicdeterminants yet he reifies culture by seeing identities in terms of fixedcultural meanings. Although he sets out to capture the contrariness of workers’lives, their existence in class and non-class ways, he privileges one kindidentity over another. Statements like: ‘The jute workers . . . acted out ofan understanding that was prebourgeois in its elements’ or ‘the elements ofsolidarity that went into the making of “strikes” were not all that differentfrom those that made up a case of racial or religious conflict’ recur in his



discussion of ‘Class and Community’.10 Identities in Chakrabarty’snarrative are thus constructed on the basis of certain exclusions: theassertion of ‘community’ ties in the case of jute workers implies an exclu-sion of class identity. He critiques the idea of a totalizing idea of class,only to validate the idea of community as a closed and bounded totality.

A range of writings since the 1980s have tried to critically engage withissues of culture and community from a different perspectives. In oppositionto Chakrabarty’s framework which sees culture and community ties aspre-given, Raj Chandavarkar, Nandini Gooptu and others look at theways in which community identities are continuously reworked in theurban context.11 The internal contours of these identities were not pre-given;they were redrawn in a variety of ways. Chandavarkar examines how theworking of the labour market, the need for housing and credit restructuredrelationships creating new bonds of region and community betweenmigrants in the city. The neighbourhood, the street and spaces of leisurelike the gymnasium are crucial sites where community identities arereaffirmed, widened and transformed. Patronage networks in the neigh-bourhood – the nexus between local leaders, dealers in property andcredit are important in forging new ties legitimated through the languageof caste, region and religion.

Ties made in these ways are not fixed. There are changes, ruptures,interconnections. The changes may involve a blurring of some identitiesand a reassertion of others. The public celebration of festivals in the cityand mobilisation around religious movements had contradictory implications.They created new solidarities at the same time, accentuated cleavageswithin religious communities. Gooptu shows how tanzeem movements incities in North India created rifts between the lower class, artisanalleadership of these movements and upper class Muslims. Similarly, newunities were created among diverse groups of lower castes in cities throughthe organisation of festivals, processions and religious movements. Iden-tification with Hindu religious movements gave lower caste groups likeKhatiks, Koris and Ahirs a new unity and respectability. But tensionsbetween the norms demanded by upper caste patrons of these celebrationsand lower caste popular practice made such unities fragile.12 In Kanpurfor instance untouchables workers in the city asserted new forms ofopposition to Brahmanical norms. Some tried to reach out to workers byreading caste in class terms. In pamphlets reaching out to workers inKanpur in the 1920s, all Chamars (untouchable leather workers) arerepresented as workers and workers as Chamars.13 In the Kolar gold fieldsJanaki Nair’s work shows how assertions of community by Adi-Dravidas– traditionally considered outcastes – in the mines involved both anappropriation from upper caste practices and contestation. Adi Dravidascontested Brahmanical distinctions between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ yet inmovements for upward mobility amongst them many of these distinctionswere also reaffirmed.14



What Constitutes Politics?

How do writings on labour in India deal with the question of politics?Conventional histories of labour focussed on the formal institutionalpolitics of trade unions. They catalogued the history of the trade unionmovement and labour organisation.15 The beginnings of organisation wereseen as marking the emergence of a politically conscious working class.What followed was often a linear story of the progress of labour organ-isation and its politics. The concern in these accounts was with the highpolitics of organizations, parties and leaders. The study of leadership herebecame synonymous with the study of the working class as a whole.Implicit in such a framework was an unproblematic relationship betweenworkers, leaders and labour organizations. The history of the workers’movement in pre-independence India is subsumed within a larger storyof a struggle against colonialism. There was no attempt to probe into thecontradictory strands which conflicted with this larger narrative ofnationalism, into the different meanings of politics to workers.

Others moving away from institutional histories of labour redefinednotions of politics in different ways. As opposed to conventional Marxistaccounts in which labour organisation and politics has a teleological logic,Chakrabarty emphasized on the enduring structure of politics. In hisaccount, trade unions are embedded in a pre-bourgeois, hierarchicalculture. Trade unions among jute workers do not function according toany democratic norms. They functioned virtually like fiefdoms of leaderswith their networks of patronage. Workers’ struggles were sporadic andephemeral, often involving acts of physical violence – acts of retributionagainst individual perpetrators of tyranny.16 To Chakrabarty, the elementsof solidarity that went into the making of strikes are no different fromthose that made up religious conflicts. Each could in fact be transformedinto what was seemingly its other – a strike could turn into a religiousriot or conversely a religious conflict could lead to a strike.17

Chakrabarty’s work moved away from conventional histories of tradeunion movements. Instead of looking at the continuous unfolding andgrowth of the movement, he pointed to breaks and ruptures. Heargued against the idea of an incremental growth of political experience.Protests did not leave any necessary traces. They were not inscribed inworkers memory. Instead of looking at the continuous time of protests,Chakrabarty looked at the structural time of their expression. In hisaccount political outbursts at different points of time shared certainfeatures. They did not show a linear development. There were similaritiesin political forms over time. The babu–coolie (trade union leader/worker) relationship which characterized political organizations of workersin 1905 remains essentially the same in the 1930s. The processes throughwhich these forms were reproduced and reappropriated over time werenot problematised.



Some of these issues are explored in other studies on Bombay andNorth India since the 1980s. Raj Chandavarkar’s study of Bombayfocussed on the neighbourhood as an important site of worker politics.Emphasizing the links between the workplace and neighbourhood, heargued how union leaders had to straddle across both spaces and draw onpatronage networks of dadas (neighbourhood bosses) and their chelas(followers) in order to mobilize support.18 Within the factory, workersappear as atomized beings struggling to preserve their sectional economicinterests.19 Chandavarkar locates the sectionalized politics of the workplacein terms of the peculiarities of the labour market: the tendency ofemployers to always keep a labour surplus to deal with violent fluctuationsin demand. In day to day relationships of the workplace thus, workersappear to have little agency: strategies of labour deployment condition thenature of politics. Unities of class between workers are seen as contingenton particular political conjunctures: forged one moment, they coulddisappear in another.

Parallel with this trend, however, are a whole range of writings sincethe nineties that move away from old linear narratives of working classmovement, yet reaffirm the need to look at class action and class identity.Dilip Simeon’s thickly descriptive account of labour politics in the ChotaNagpur area looks at the conflicting currents of nationalist politics and thedynamics of the local context, the pressures of a militant radicalism frombelow often forcing managements to negotiate.20 Janaki Nair’s study oflabour in Mysore similarly examines the contradictory pressures whichwent into the making of nationalist politics. Worker militancy from belowforced the Congress leadership to take up worker issues more activelyin Bangalore. However in the Kolar gold fields, the caste issue – theproblems of mobilizing workers from a predominantly tribal Adi-dravidabackground – complicated the relationship between the Congress andlabour. Underlying both Simeon and Nair’s accounts are certain sharedassumptions about working class politics: both emphasize the significanceof workers’ actions and pressures from below in shaping the course ofinstitutional politics.21 The hierarchies within which parties and tradeunions were organised were overturned and re-worked in moments ofworking class upsurge.22 Periods of worker militancy described in thesewritings, were not of episodic significance, they were moments whenworkers inscribed their presence in the public arena in the 1920s and1930s.

A shift away from earlier teleological frames has also involved a re-conceptualization of notions of politics. Recent writings look at theways in which politics is articulated not just through formal institutionalstructures or through actions in the public arena but in informal andinvisible ways. Everyday spaces in the factory and the home are chargedwith political meaning.23 Nair, Simeon, Joshi and others suggest howthe workspace was a contested terrain, an arena where norms were



negotiated and re-defined. Small acts of subversion of norms were alsoacts through which workers asserted their notions of dignity.24 In recenttimes, with the decline of factory industries and a growing retreat oflabour from the formal sphere a study of such everyday forms is acquiringa new validity. Work on the powerloom workers in South India anddiamond workshops in Surat for instance shows how the system ofadvances (baki) introduced by employers to secure a stable supply oflabour was used by skilled workers to bargain for better terms andconditions.25

Beyond Masculinist Frames?

Over the last decade labour historians in India have been questioningthe male-centric assumptions within which labour history was written.Recent writings reflect an attempt to engage more seriously with questionsof women’s work, family, sexuality and gender.

An issue important in discussions on women’s work in the West andin India is the marginalization of women from industry. In the Europeandebate this was tied up with the debate on the rise of the ‘malebreadwinner’. With the exclusion of working class women from thelabour force in the industrialized West, by the late nineteenth century,it was argued, the male head became the sole provider for the family.While the initial debate on the ‘breadwinner’ issue was around economicexplanations; by the eighties the terrain shifted, and ideological expla-nations focusing on changing notions of domesticity and ideologies ofmasculinity became more important.26 Although an engagement withthese issues was quite marginal in India a similar shift in focus fromeconomic to ideological issues can be seen.27 Samita Sen’s study onwomen in the Bengal jute mills emphasizes how ideologies of domes-ticity and seclusion are important to understanding processes throughwhich a gendered workforce was created. She argues that managersdrew on the discourse of domesticity to legitimize the exclusion ofwomen from the workforce. For working class families seclusion ofwomen came to be associated with respectability and a higher socialstatus.28

Arguments about the hegemonic power of ideas of seclusion can beproblematic. Within this framework women excluded from the labourforce seem to retreat inwards into seclusion and domesticity. The innerdomain is seen as a space of compliance and subordination, a place wherewomen played out feminine roles of mothers, wives and homemakers.The negotiations and contestations which permeate the everyday life ofwomen within the home are not central to such a framework.29

An important issue to which Sen draws attention is the significance ofwomen’s work within the rural economy. She points to the connectionsbetween male migration and intensification of women’s work in the



rural economy.30 Their contribution was important in sowing, weeding,reaping, winnowing – almost all operations apart from ploughing. Thecontribution of women within the family was critical for providing thelinks connecting the working class household in the city with the village.The male migrant’s connection with land was not contingent on theirown participation in agricultural activities, but on the involvement oftheir wives and family members. To move beyond the masculinistassumptions within which most discussions on labour have been framed,Sen’s arguments could be pushed further. What happens to working classhouseholds in lean periods when opportunities for work for women inthe village shrink? What is the impact of declining rural incomes ofwomen on the urban households dependent on the rural connection?Alternative histories would need to decentre the existing focus and lookat the economic trajectory of working class households in terms of therhythms of women’s rural work.

Studies on women and work over the last decade have taken placewhen traditional large scale industries – bastions of a male working class– are in decline and there is a mushrooming of cottage and home basedindustries. For many working class families regular subsistence comesfrom women’s work at home. Writings on contemporary labour dealwith a range of women’s activities in small household and industrialunits.31 The increasing employment of women sparked off a debate onthe question of ‘feminization’ of the labour force. Critics of the fem-inization thesis point to the decline in women’s employment after aninitial surge up to the mid-nineties.32 Statistical indicators of women’soccupations, however, are always problematic. To the extent that thereis a decline it is linked to an overall declining trend in employment andis not specific to women.

In order to understand the implications of these changes we needprobe deeper into the ways in which work and loss of work impactedon the production of gendered identities, male and female?33 Theclosure of industries implies more than an economic loss: it also signifiesa marginalisation of the male working class from the public sphere. This,as recent writings suggest, has meant an erosion of political traditionsassociated with a working class presence in industrial cities and a crisisof male identities.34 The spaces of solidarity and sociability outside – thestreet, the teashop, the factory-gate or the gymnasium – were alsoimportant to the construction of notions of masculinity.35 In maleself-perceptions, a collapse of the outside world is associated with adiminished patriarchal presence and a sense of emasculation at home.How do these changes in the worlds of male workers impact on thelives of women? The domestic and the outside were contested spaceswhere norms of gender and sexuality were both re-affirmed re-defined.How did transgressions of norms in the urban context redefinewomen’s lives?36



Law, Labour and the Question of Freedom

In India as elsewhere earlier teleological frameworks which associatedcapitalist industrialization with a movement from forms of unfree labourto free labour have been critiqued for the last two decades.37 The debateson slavery and abolition showed how ‘freedom’ in the West was in facttied up with a history of various forms of ‘unfree’ labour in the colonies.38

In recent years, this critique has gone further and earlier certainties aboutideas of freedom and contract in Europe in the nineteenth century arebeing critiqued. Steinfeld’s work powerfully demonstrates how relationsbetween employers and workers in the ‘modern’ factory in Britain con-tinued to operate outside formal languages of contract: penal sanctionsand various coercive forms characterized labour relations in Britain intothe late nineteenth century.39

Labour historians writing on India have been trying engage withissues relating to law and labour in recent years. Through a study oflabour legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Andersonargues that notions of contract never really acquired a legal basis inIndia. Citing the case of the Breach of Contract Act of 1859, he arguesthat laws regulating employment contracts in India gave punitive powersto employers but no reciprocal rights to employees against a violationof terms of contract.40 Even with its abolition after 1925 variousforms of informal coercion continued to characterize the labour market.Arguing along similar lines, Ravi Ahuja points to the coercive characterof labour laws in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Madras. ThePolice Regulations in Madras were patterned after the vagrancy laws inEngland. However the Madras regulations incorporated only the penalprovisions of the British acts and not the protective and welfare measureswhich were so important to systems of labour control in eighteenth-century Britain.41

The assumption that ideal notions of contract and ‘free labour’ wereprevalent in nineteenth-century Europe is problematic. As writings overthe last two decades suggest, even in the West binaries of ‘free’ and‘unfree’ are being critiqued. Yet the work on law and legislation opensup new lines of inquiry that labour historians need to grapple with.42 Ahistory of labour legislation is important for the insights it provides intothe making of workers into legal subjects. There is a need in fact to pushthese explorations further, and inquire more closely into the terms regulatingemployment relationships. How were changes negotiated within theserelationships? If coercion was characteristic what were the limits to it?

The lines between the formal and regulated and the unregulated werenot always rigid. Recent writings suggest that the ‘unregulated’ was notwhat remained outside law or residual but was created by legislation.43

Formalisation, legalisation in fact validated a privatisation of regulation: inother words the law created spaces where the capitalist could exercise



unfettered private power. Informalisation is thus not characterised by anabsence of regulations but by a privatization of regulations.

Possible Futures?

Recent historiographical shifts have complicated received ideas aboutworking class history. The premises on which labour history was writtenearlier are been widely critiqued. The need to move beyond earliermodernist frames is almost universally recognized. These frames were tiedup with teleological notions about industrialization and the emergence ofa ‘modern’ industrial working class which are today widely critiqued.44

In Marxist accounts, teleologies of class were linked up with visions ofsocialism and faith in the emancipatory potential of the working classmovements.

Despite the collapse of old frameworks over the last decade, there hasbeen a resurgence in writings about labour. The global surge in thewriting of labour history almost appears like an attempt to give a voiceto classes that are being effaced from the public realm. Within the globaland the local, old exclusions and old boundaries which defined the subjectof labour history in the past are breaking down. The disappearance of the‘traditional’ working class has also provided a context wherein labourhistorians are being forced to pose new questions and look at old issuesfrom new perspectives. What happens to notions of class in this changedcontext? If the premises on which earlier ideas rested are no longertenable, how do we validate a conception of ‘class’? A displacement ofpurist notions of class by a search for ethnic and religious identities,however, does not resolve the conceptual dilemmas for labour history.The assertion of any one kind of identity to the exclusion of others posesproblems. There is a need to capture the fluidity of identities throughcategories which are open-ended and not closed and impermeable. Thepredicaments and problems of labour history in India mirror some of theseglobal anxieties and quests.

Short Biography

Chitra Joshi has been actively engaged in writing and researching onIndian labour history. Joshi’s book, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and itsForgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; London: Anthem,2005) takes the present context of globalization and decline of large-scaleindustry as its entry point into the worlds of labour in the late nineteenthand twentieth centuries and examines how cultural pasts were activelyreconstituted through worker practices. Other publications include anessay on ‘Deindustrialisation and the Crisis of Male Identities’, InternationalReview of Social History, 2002 and ‘Notes on The Breadwinner Debate:Gender and Household Strategies in Working Class Families’, Studies in



History, 2002. Currently Joshi is working on the history of roads andlabour on the roads in nineteenth-century India. Chitra Joshi completedher post-graduate studies and her doctorate from Jawaharlal NehruUniversity, New Delhi. She has been teaching history at IndraprasthaCollege, University of Delhi for many years, before which she was afellow at the Centre for Contemporary History, Nehru MemorialMuseum and Library, New Delhi.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Indraprastha College – History Department, 31 Shamnath Marg,Delhi 110054, India. E-mail: [email protected].

1 M. D. Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India: A Study of the Bombay CottonMills 1854–1947 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1965).2 R. D. Gupta, ‘Factory Labor in Eastern India: Sources of Supply: Some Preliminary Findings’,Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13/3 (1976): 277–328. Some of his earlier writingsare also included in a later publication, Labour and Working Class in Eastern India: Studies inColonial History (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Company, 1994).3 See for instance, Charles A. Myers, Labor Problems in the Industrialization of India (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 43–5.4 The discomfort in dealing with questions of religion and community among workers is similarto the kind of discomfort with race in the West. On ‘Marxism and the White Problem’ in theUS for instance, see D. R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the AmericanWorking Class (London: Verso, 1999), 6–13; see also F. Cooper, ‘Back to Work: Categories,Boundaries and Connections in the Study of Labour’, in P. Alexander and R. Halpern (eds.),Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (London:Macmillan, 2000), 213–35.5 C. Joshi, ‘Kanpur Textile Labour: Some Structural Features of Formative Years’, Economic andPolitical Weekly, 16/44–6 (November 1981); R. K. Newman, ‘Social Factors on the Recruitmentof Bombay Millhands’, in K. N. Chaudhari and C. J. Dewey (eds.), Economy and Society: Essaysin Indian Economic and Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 277–95; C. P.Simmons, ‘Recruiting and Organising an Industrial Labour Force in Colonial India: the Caseof the Coal Mining Industry 1880–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13/4(1976): 455–85.6 The entire discussion of the general strike of 1929 of the Bombay workers for instance, hasno reference to a serious communal clash in February 1929. S. Sen, Working Class of India:History of Emergence and Movement 1830–1970 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 1977), 232–78.7 The Talla riot of 1897 over the demolition of a Muslim sacred space which involved workersin the jute mills of Calcutta for instance is seen primarily as a ‘spontaneous outburst’ expressingthe ‘latent hostility’ of the migrant population against Europeans and against exploiters. R. D.Gupta, ‘Poverty and Protest: A Study of Calcutta’s Industrial Workers and Labouring Poor,1879–1899’, Labour and Working Class, 363–78.8 D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989).9 Ibid., 186–218; see also D. Chakrabarty, ‘Class Consciousness and the Indian Working Class:Dilemmas of Marxist Historiography’, in P. C. W. Gutkind (ed.), Third World Workers: ComparativeInternational Labour Studies (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 21–31.10 Chakrabarty, Rethinking, 212, 218.11 R. Chandavarkar, ‘Worker’s Politics in the Mill Districts in Bombay between the Wars’,Modern Asian Studies, 15/3 (1981): 603–47; see also Chandavarkar, The Origins of IndustrialCapitalism: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168–238; N. Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in EarlyTwentieth Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).



12 Gooptu, Politics of the Urban Poor, 185–243.13 C. Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black,2003), 245–56.14 Adi-Dravidas demanded their right to access water taps used by caste Hindus, yet theupwardly mobile among them tried to adopt ‘clean’ upper caste practices like giving up theeating of beef. J. Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (NewDelhi: Sage Publications, 1998), 101–6. On assertions of tribal (adivasi) identities in the ChotaNagpur mines and steel works see D. Simeon, The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism:Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur 1928–39 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 330–3.15 See for instance, V. B. Karnik, Indian Trade Unions: A Survey (Bombay: Popular Prakashan,1978); Karnik, Strikes in India (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1967); A. S. Mathur and J. S. Mathur,Trade Union Movement In India (Allahabad: Chaitanya Publications, 1957); Sen, Working Class ofIndia.16 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, 155–85.17 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, 21818 Chandavarkar, ‘Worker Politics in the Mill Districts’, 605–21.19 Chandavarkar, Origins, 16–17, 429–31. The idea of workers choosing, selecting their strategyof negotiation to ‘exploit’ political parties to ‘to serve their ends’ also runs through Basu’sdiscussion of jute workers’ politics. See for instance, S. Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capitaland Workers’ Resistance in Bengal 1890–1937 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 282.20 Rich in details of strike action and small acts of solidarity for instance in 1928, workersrefused to carry the corpse of an old Muslim woman because her son was a blackleg. Simeon,Politics of Labour, 61; On the assertions of class politics see 322–45.21 Nair, Miners and Millhands, 276, 285–6, 297–304. See also, S. B. Upadhyaya, Existence, Identityand Mobilization: The Cotton Millworkers of Bombay 1890 –1919 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004),170–273.22 On this see also Joshi, Lost Worlds, 217–36.23 Writings which decentre the political and look at the informal ‘hidden transcripts’ of labourhave been important in the world of non-Indian labour history for decades: the writings of A.Ludtke, J. C. Scott, H. Medick to name a few. For a survey see A. Ludtke, The History ofEveryday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995).24 Nair points to petty thefts of mine property despite attempts at close surveillance by owners.Miners and Millhands, 45–53; see also 72–6; Simeon, Politics of Labour, 144, 154–5, 343–5.25 G. de Neve, The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy (NewDelhi: Social Science Press, 2005), 169–203; Miranda Engelshoven, ‘Diamonds and Patels:A Report on the Diamond Industry of Surat’, in J. B. Parry, J. Breman and K. Kapadia (eds.),The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), 353–78.26 See for instance, C. Creighton, ‘The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal’,Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38/2 (1996): 145–62; A. Jannsens, ‘The Rise andDecline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate’, International Review ofSocial History, 42, Supp. (1997): 1–23. On the economic argument see for instance, V. Beechey,‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production’, Capital and Class, 3 (1977):45–65; For an elaboration of Victorian notions of domesticity see C. Hall, ‘The Early Formationof Victorian Domestic Ideology’, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism andHistory (Oxford, 1988). See also W. Seccombe, ‘Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of theMale Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth Century Britain’, Social History, 11/1 (1986):53–76.27 R. Kumar, ‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry 1919–39’,Indian Economic and Social History Review, 8/10 (1983): 81–110; M. Mukherjee, ‘Impact ofModernization on Women’s Occupations: A Case Study of Rice Husking Industry of Bengal’,Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20/1 (1983): 27–45; N. Banerjee, ‘Working Womenin Colonial Bengal: Modernization and Marginalization’, in S. Vaid and K. Sangari (eds.),Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali, 1989), 269–301.28 S. Sen, Women and Labour in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),21–53, 89–141; see also, S. Sen, ‘Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal’,International Review of Social History, 42 (1997): 65–86.



29 For an engaging discussion on the ways in which women try to exercise agency in their dayto day their lives see Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangaladeshi Women and Labour MarketDecisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000), 82–141; See also C. Joshi, ‘Notes on theBreadwinner Debate: Gender and Household Strategies in Working-Class Families’, Studies inHistory, 28/2 (2002): 261–74.30 Sen points to increasing involvement of women in the rural economy in Saran district –which supplied the largest number of migrants to Calcutta. Sen, Women and Labour, 54–88.31 N. Neetha, ‘Flexible Production, Feminisation and Disorganisation: Evidence from TiruppurKnitwear Industry’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37/21 (2002): 2045–52.32 Jayati Ghosh, ‘Informalization and Women’s Workforce Participation: A Consideration ofRecent Trends in Asia’, April 28, 2004, http://www.macroscan.org, accessed March 20, 2007;Samita Sen, Gender and Class: Women in Indian Industry, 1920–90 (Noida: VV Giri NationalLabour Institute, 2001), 34–50; N. Shah, S. Ghotoskar, N. Gandhi and A. Chachhi, ‘StructuralAdjustment, Feminisation of Labour Force and Organizational Struggles’, Economic and PoliticalWeekly, 29/18 (2004): 39–48.33 For a discussion see, K. Rittich, ‘Feminization and Contingency: Regulating the Stakes ofWork for Women’, in J. Conaghan, R. M. Fischl, K. Klare (eds.), Labour Law in an Era ofGlobalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 117–36.34 C. Joshi, ‘Deindustrialization and the Crisis of Male Identities’, International Review of SocialHistory, 47 (2002): 159–75. See for instance, J. Breman, The Making and Unmaking of anIndustrial Working Class (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 201–31.35 See for instance, S. Willott and C. Griffin, ‘Men Masculinity and the Challenge of Long-Term Unemployment’, in M. M. an Ghaill (ed.) Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations andthe Cultural Arenas (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), 77–92; P. Willis, ‘Shop-FloorCulture, Masculinity and the Wage Form’, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds.),Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson and Co. 1979), 185–98.Recent scholarship on India has been trying to engage with some of these issues for instance,S. Ramaswamy, ‘Masculinity, Respect and the Tragic: Themes of Proletarian Humor inContemporary Industrial Delhi Paper presented at International Conference on ‘TowardsGlobal Labour History: New Comparisons’, 10–12 November 2005.36 Radha Kumar provides some interesting insights into the ways in which women asserted theirideas about sexuality and marriage in her essay on, ‘Sex and Punishment among Mill-Workersin Early – Twentieth century Bombay’, in M. Anderson and S. Guha (eds.), Changing Conceptsof Rights and Justice in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 179–97; see alsoSen, Women and Labour, 177–212.37 For a close study of questions of bondage and freedom in relation to rural labour in colonialIndia see Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Emerging Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat,India (New Delhi: Manohar 1979); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitudein Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).38 S. Drescher, ‘Free Labor vs. Slave Labor: The British and Caribbean Cases’, in S. I. Engerman(ed.), Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1999), 50–86; T. Brass and M. v. d. Linden, Free and Unfree Labour: the Debate Continues (Berne:Peter Lang European Academic Publishers, 1997).39 R. J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001), William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).40 M. Anderson, ‘India, 1858–1930: The Illusion of Free Labor’, in Masters, Servants, andMagistrates in Britain and the Empire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,2004), 422–54.41 R. Ahuja, ‘The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth Century Madras’,International Review of Social History, 44 (1999): 159–95.42 I. J. Kerr, ‘Labour Control and Labour Legislation in Colonial India: A Tale of TwoMid-Nineteenth Century Acts’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 27/1 (2004): 7–25.43 Act VI of 1865 gave planters additional penal powers to discipline labour – power to arrestabsconding labourers. P. P. Mohapatra, ‘Regulated Informality: Legal Constructions of LabourRelations in Colonial India 1814–1926’, in S. Bhattacharya and J. Lucassen (eds.), Workers inthe Informal Sector: Studies in Labour History 1800–2000 (New Delhi: Macmillan 2005). See also,

http://www.macroscan.org



B. H. White and N. Gooptu, ‘Mapping India’s World of Unorganized Labour’, in L. Panitchand C. Leys (eds.), Socialist Register 2001 (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 89–118.44 Raphael Samuels, Pat Hudson and others show how industrialization in Europe was basedon the intensive exploitation of labour and technology. Factory production and factory labourremained marginal to industrialization till the late nineteenth century. R. Samuels, ‘Workshopof the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain’ History Workshop,3 (1977): 6–72; P. Hudson, ‘Proto-Industrialization: The Case of the West Riding Wool TextileIndustry in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries’, History Workshop, 12 (1981): 34–61. Seealso, P. Kriedte, H. Medick and J. Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before Industrialisation: RuralIndustry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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Documents

Joshi India Labour