Joshi India Labour

History Compass 6/2 (2008): 439454, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00503.
Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities

Chitra Joshi*
University of Delhi
Abstract
This article looks at the shifts in Indian labour historiography through a focus on certain key themes: community, politics, gender and law. For more than a decade, historians of labour in India and outside have critiqued teleological frameworks within which working class formation was conceptualized. The article examines the ways in which these critiques have complicated received ideas of class, community and working class politics. In addressing issues of gender, writings on labour are moving beyond earlier masculinist frames to look at the production of gendered identities. Recent writings on law and legislation point in new directions and unsettle old binaries of formal/informal, free/unfree labour.
The renewal of writings on Indian labour over the past decade has been marked by an unsettling of old frameworks, a questioning of earlier certainties and a pushing of old boundaries. Many of the issues concerning Indian labour history reflect wider concerns being articulated at a global level. There is a need however to examine how historians in different locations re-figure and re-work ideas and assumptions underlining global trends in labour history. In this article I trace the broad historiographical shifts in the writing of Indian labour history and try to engage with certain 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 the post-independence decades in India of the 1950s and 1960s was framed within certain liberal assumptions. A study of labour formed part of a larger interest in the problems of industrialization and modernization in backward countries. Did the persistence of traditional institutions and cultural peculiarities help or hinder the process of modernization? Did the growth of factory industry create a committed industrial labour force? These were some of the questions which bothered modernisation theorists of this period. Among the leading works in this genre was Morris David Morriss study of textile labour in the Bombay mills.1 Morris argued forcefully
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against Weberian frameworks which saw caste and other social institutions as a hindrance to industrialization. He tried to demonstrate how traditional institutions like caste did not constrain the creation of an industrial workforce. Workers travelled to the city from different regions and worked in factories for long periods. These and other indicators were used 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 shared certain modernist assumptions. Like liberal theorists, Marxist social historians saw factory industry as a harbinger of change, transforming and creating the basis for the emergence of an industrial proletariat. The persistence of pre-modern characteristics, the weakness of class organization and solidarity were in Marxist writings attributed to the constraints to industrialization and economic change under colonialism.2 Till the 1980s a rich tradition of cultural and social history of labour in India was curiously missing. Ironically it was only when labour history was in crisis and decline in the West that new realms in the field opened up in India. Although the sharp cultural turn of Dipesh Chakrabarty was never quite replicated in the writings on labour in India, his intervention as I discuss below, was critical. Since the 1990s earlier categorical frameworks are being questioned in different ways. Not only is there a move away from the determinist frames within which culture was perceived earlier, but the meanings of politics and labour history itself have widened. Questions of Community In modernist frameworks, liberal and Marxist, community identities were transitional in workers lives. The persistence of ties of community, religion and region were signs of an incomplete modernity. There were clearly differences within liberal frameworks. For some like Morris, modern technology had a transformative potential: it dissolved traditional institutions and created new ones. They argued that workers from diverse caste backgrounds were taking up factory jobs. Within the factory norms of purity and pollution did not act as a barrier to the distribution of workers between different departments. Other modernization theorists saw countries like India as exceptions within a universal narrative of industrialization. In India social institutions acted as a constraint and modernization remained partial.3 There was no attempt however in these writings to understand the implications of community ties in the lives of workers. Questions concerning the relationship between ethnic and racial identities and working class formation have always been deeply problematic for labour historians.4 Historians writing on labour in India have tried to grapple with these issues in different ways. From the late 1970s onwards there were a series of writings that examined the social composition of
2008 The Author History Compass 6/2 (2008): 439454, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00503.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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the workforce, the regional and community background of the workers.5 They looked at the significance of community ties in the urban industrial context in terms of the nature of the labour market, jobber networks and recruitment practices of managements. Caste and community identities were seen in these writings as part of the pre-industrial background of workers. The ways in which these identities were re-figured and transformed in the urban context were not probed. Others, writing within orthodox Marxist frames, traced linear narratives of a class coming into being and denied the significance of caste and community ties altogether. They saw conflicts between religious communities as distorted expressions of class conflict. In Sukomal Sens 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 Marxist historians like Ranajit Das Gupta were more sensitive to issues of culture. He probed into the social composition of the workforce and looked at conflicts over religious issues. Yet he shared an implicit faith in a teleology of industrialization and working class formation. Instances of urban uprising like the Talla riot of 1897 in Calcutta, involving large numbers of jute workers, are seen by Das Gupta primarily as expressions of the accumulated grievances of the city poor.7 The continued significance of religious and community ties in the lives of workers is ascribed by him to the thwarted economic development under colonialism. Dipesh Chakrabartys Rethinking Labour History marked a major intervention in the writing of labour history in India.8 He questioned reductive connections between cultural processes and economic change and emphasized the need to understand culture on its own terms and not through economic and political determinants external to it. Chakrabarty does not see primordial ties as residual but intrinsic to the pre-bourgeois culture of jute workers. To see community identities only in terms of the logic of the labour market, Chakrabarty argues, would be to imbue workers with a bourgeois economic rationality. Workers coming to factories were Hindus, Muslims, Biharis, Oriyas and so on. The city and the factory intensified the workers sense of belonging to an ethnic community. In Chakrabartys framework the participation of workers in actions based on wider solidarities cutting across religious and caste divides appears episodic it has no lasting significance.9 Chakrabartys understanding of questions of culture and community is deeply problematic. He critiques frames which reduce culture to economic determinants yet he reifies culture by seeing identities in terms of fixed cultural meanings. Although he sets out to capture the contrariness of workers lives, their existence in class and non-class ways, he privileges one kind identity over another. Statements like: The jute workers . . . acted out of an understanding that was prebourgeois in its elements or the elements of solidarity that went into the making of strikes were not all that different from those that made up a case of racial or religious conflict recur in his
discussion of Class and Community.10 Identities in Chakrabartys narrative are thus constructed on the basis of certain exclusions: the assertion of community ties in the case of jute workers implies an exclusion 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 with issues of culture and community from a different perspectives. In opposition to Chakrabartys framework which sees culture and community ties as pre-given, Raj Chandavarkar, Nandini Gooptu and others look at the ways in which community identities are continuously reworked in the urban context.11 The internal contours of these identities were not pre-given; they were redrawn in a variety of ways. Chandavarkar examines how the working of the labour market, the need for housing and credit restructured relationships creating new bonds of region and community between migrants in the city. The neighbourhood, the street and spaces of leisure like the gymnasium are crucial sites where community identities are reaffirmed, widened and transformed. Patronage networks in the neighbourhood the nexus between local leaders, dealers in property and credit are important in forging new ties legitimated through the language of 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 identities and a reassertion of others. The public celebration of festivals in the city and mobilisation around religious movements had contradictory implications. They created new solidarities at the same time, accentuated cleavages within religious communities. Gooptu shows how tanzeem movements in cities in North India created rifts between the lower class, artisanal leadership of these movements and upper class Muslims. Similarly, new unities were created among diverse groups of lower castes in cities through the organisation of festivals, processions and religious movements. Identification with Hindu religious movements gave lower caste groups like Khatiks, Koris and Ahirs a new unity and respectability. But tensions between the norms demanded by upper caste patrons of these celebrations and lower caste popular practice made such unities fragile.12 In Kanpur for instance untouchables workers in the city asserted new forms of opposition to Brahmanical norms. Some tried to reach out to workers by reading caste in class terms. In pamphlets reaching out to workers in Kanpur in the 1920s, all Chamars (untouchable leather workers) are represented as workers and workers as Chamars.13 In the Kolar gold fields Janaki Nairs work shows how assertions of community by Adi-Dravidas traditionally considered outcastes in the mines involved both an appropriation from upper caste practices and contestation. Adi Dravidas contested Brahmanical distinctions between pure and impure yet in movements for upward mobility amongst them many of these distinctions were also reaffirmed.14
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What Constitutes Politics? How do writings on labour in India deal with the question of politics? Conventional histories of labour focussed on the formal institutional politics of trade unions. They catalogued the history of the trade union movement and labour organisation.15 The beginnings of organisation were seen as marking the emergence of a politically conscious working class. What followed was often a linear story of the progress of labour organisation and its politics. The concern in these accounts was with the high politics of organizations, parties and leaders. The study of leadership here became synonymous with the study of the working class as a whole. Implicit in such a framework was an unproblematic relationship between workers, leaders and labour organizations. The history of the workers movement in pre-independence India is subsumed within a larger story of a struggle against colonialism. There was no attempt to probe into the contradictory strands which conflicted with this larger narrative of nationalism, into the different meanings of politics to workers. Others moving away from institutional histories of labour redefined notions of politics in different ways. As opposed to conventional Marxist accounts in which labour organisation and politics has a teleological logic, Chakrabarty emphasized on the enduring structure of politics. In his account, trade unions are embedded in a pre-bourgeois, hierarchical culture. Trade unions among jute workers do not function according to any democratic norms. They functioned virtually like fiefdoms of leaders with their networks of patronage. Workers struggles were sporadic and ephemeral, often involving acts of physical violence acts of retribution against individual perpetrators of tyranny.16 To Chakrabarty, the elements of solidarity that went into the making of strikes are no different from those that made up religious conflicts. Each could in fact be transformed into what was seemingly its other a strike could turn into a religious riot or conversely a religious conflict could lead to a strike.17 Chakrabartys work moved away from conventional histories of trade union movements. Instead of looking at the continuous unfolding and growth of the movement, he pointed to breaks and ruptures. He argued against the idea of an incremental growth of political experience. Protests did not leave any necessary traces. They were not inscribed in workers memory. Instead of looking at the continuous time of protests, Chakrabarty looked at the structural time of their expression. In his account political outbursts at different points of time shared certain features. They did not show a linear development. There were similarities in political forms over time. The babucoolie (trade union leader/ worker) relationship which characterized political organizations of workers in 1905 remains essentially the same in the 1930s. The processes through which these forms were reproduced and reappropriated over time were not problematised.
Some of these issues are explored in other studies on Bombay and North India since the 1980s. Raj Chandavarkars study of Bombay focussed on the neighbourhood as an important site of worker politics. Emphasizing the links between the workplace and neighbourhood, he argued how union leaders had to straddle across both spaces and draw on patronage networks of dadas (neighbourhood bosses) and their chelas (followers) in order to mobilize support.18 Within the factory, workers appear as atomized beings struggling to preserve their sectional economic interests.19 Chandavarkar locates the sectionalized politics of the workplace in terms of the peculiarities of the labour market: the tendency of employers to always keep a labour surplus to deal with violent fluctuations in demand. In day to day relationships of the workplace thus, workers appear to have little agency: strategies of labour deployment condition the nature of politics. Unities of class between workers are seen as contingent on particular political conjunctures: forged one moment, they could disappear in another. Parallel with this trend, however, are a whole range of writings since the nineties that move away from old linear narratives of working class movement, yet reaffirm the need to look at class action and class identity. Dilip Simeons thickly descriptive account of labour politics in the Chota Nagpur area looks at the conflicting currents of nationalist politics and the dynamics of the local context, the pressures of a militant radicalism from below often forcing managements to negotiate.20 Janaki Nairs study of labour in Mysore similarly examines the contradictory pressures which went into the making of nationalist politics. Worker militancy from below forced the Congress leadership to take up worker issues more actively in Bangalore. However in the Kolar gold fields, the caste issue the problems of mobilizing workers from a predominantly tribal Adi-dravida background complicated the relationship between the Congress and labour. Underlying both Simeon and Nairs accounts are certain shared assumptions about working class politics: both emphasize the significance of workers actions and pressures from below in shaping the course of institutional politics.21 The hierarchies within which parties and trade unions were organised were overturned and re-worked in moments of working class upsurge.22 Periods of worker militancy described in these writings, were not of episodic significance, they were moments when workers inscribed their presence in the public arena in the 1920s and 1930s. A shift away from earlier teleological frames has also involved a reconceptualization of notions of politics. Recent writings look at the ways in which politics is articulated not just through formal institutional structures or through actions in the public arena but in informal and invisible ways. Everyday spaces in the factory and the home are charged with political meaning.23 Nair, Simeon, Joshi and others suggest how the workspace was a contested terrain, an arena where norms were
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negotiated and re-defined. Small acts of subversion of norms were also acts through which workers asserted their notions of dignity.24 In recent times, with the decline of factory industries and a growing retreat of labour from the formal sphere a study of such everyday forms is acquiring a new validity. Work on the powerloom workers in South India and diamond workshops in Surat for instance shows how the system of advances (baki) introduced by employers to secure a stable supply of labour was used by skilled workers to bargain for better terms and conditions.25 Beyond Masculinist Frames? Over the last decade labour historians in India have been questioning the male-centric assumptions within which labour history was written. Recent writings reflect an attempt to engage more seriously with questions of womens work, family, sexuality and gender. An issue important in discussions on womens work in the West and in India is the marginalization of women from industry. In the European debate this was tied up with the debate on the rise of the male breadwinner. With the exclusion of working class women from the labour 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 economic explanations; by the eighties the terrain shifted, and ideological explanations focusing on changing notions of domesticity and ideologies of masculinity became more important.26 Although an engagement with these issues was quite marginal in India a similar shift in focus from economic to ideological issues can be seen.27 Samita Sens study on women in the Bengal jute mills emphasizes how ideologies of domesticity and seclusion are important to understanding processes through which a gendered workforce was created. She argues that managers drew on the discourse of domesticity to legitimize the exclusion of women from the workforce. For working class families seclusion of women came to be associated with respectability and a higher social status.28 Arguments about the hegemonic power of ideas of seclusion can be problematic. Within this framework women excluded from the labour force seem to retreat inwards into seclusion and domesticity. The inner domain is seen as a space of compliance and subordination, a place where women played out feminine roles of mothers, wives and homemakers. The negotiations and contestations which permeate the everyday life of women within the home are not central to such a framework.29 An important issue to which Sen draws attention is the significance of womens work within the rural economy. She points to the connections between male migration and intensification of womens work in the
rural economy.30 Their contribution was important in sowing, weeding, reaping, winnowing almost all operations apart from ploughing. The contribution of women within the family was critical for providing the links connecting the working class household in the city with the village. The male migrants connection with land was not contingent on their own participation in agricultural activities, but on the involvement of their wives and family members. To move beyond the masculinist assumptions within which most discussions on labour have been framed, Sens arguments could be pushed further. What happens to working class households in lean periods when opportunities for work for women in the village shrink? What is the impact of declining rural incomes of women on the urban households dependent on the rural connection? Alternative histories would need to decentre the existing focus and look at the economic trajectory of working class households in terms of the rhythms of womens rural work. Studies on women and work over the last decade have taken place when traditional large scale industries bastions of a male working class are in decline and there is a mushrooming of cottage and home based industries. For many working class families regular subsistence comes from womens work at home. Writings on contemporary labour deal with a range of womens activities in small household and industrial units.31 The increasing employment of women sparked off a debate on the question of feminization of the labour force. Critics of the feminization thesis point to the decline in womens employment after an initial surge up to the mid-nineties.32 Statistical indicators of womens occupations, however, are always problematic. To the extent that there is a decline it is linked to an overall declining trend in employment and is not specific to women. In order to understand the implications of these changes we need probe deeper into the ways in which work and loss of work impacted on the production of gendered identities, male and female?33 The closure of industries implies more than an economic loss: it also signifies a marginalisation of the male working class from the public sphere. This, as recent writings suggest, has meant an erosion of political traditions associated with a working class presence in industrial cities and a crisis of male identities.34 The spaces of solidarity and sociability outside the street, the teashop, the factory-gate or the gymnasium were also important to the construction of notions of masculinity.35 In male self-perceptions, a collapse of the outside world is associated with a diminished patriarchal presence and a sense of emasculation at home. How do these changes in the worlds of male workers impact on the lives of women? The domestic and the outside were contested spaces where norms of gender and sexuality were both re-affirmed re-defined. How did transgressions of norms in the urban context redefine womens lives?36
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Law, Labour and the Question of Freedom In India as elsewhere earlier teleological frameworks which associated capitalist industrialization with a movement from forms of unfree labour to free labour have been critiqued for the last two decades.37 The debates on slavery and abolition showed how freedom in the West was in fact tied 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 about ideas of freedom and contract in Europe in the nineteenth century are being critiqued. Steinfelds work powerfully demonstrates how relations between employers and workers in the modern factory in Britain continued to operate outside formal languages of contract: penal sanctions and various coercive forms characterized labour relations in Britain into the late nineteenth century.39 Labour historians writing on India have been trying engage with issues relating to law and labour in recent years. Through a study of labour legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anderson argues that notions of contract never really acquired a legal basis in India. Citing the case of the Breach of Contract Act of 1859, he argues that laws regulating employment contracts in India gave punitive powers to employers but no reciprocal rights to employees against a violation of terms of contract.40 Even with its abolition after 1925 various forms of informal coercion continued to characterize the labour market. Arguing along similar lines, Ravi Ahuja points to the coercive character of labour laws in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Madras. The Police Regulations in Madras were patterned after the vagrancy laws in England. However the Madras regulations incorporated only the penal provisions of the British acts and not the protective and welfare measures which were so important to systems of labour control in eighteenthcentury Britain.41 The assumption that ideal notions of contract and free labour were prevalent in nineteenth-century Europe is problematic. As writings over the last two decades suggest, even in the West binaries of free and unfree are being critiqued. Yet the work on law and legislation opens up new lines of inquiry that labour historians need to grapple with.42 A history of labour legislation is important for the insights it provides into the making of workers into legal subjects. There is a need in fact to push these explorations further, and inquire more closely into the terms regulating employment relationships. How were changes negotiated within these relationships? If coercion was characteristic what were the limits to it? The lines between the formal and regulated and the unregulated were not always rigid. Recent writings suggest that the unregulated was not what remained outside law or residual but was created by legislation.43 Formalisation, legalisation in fact validated a privatisation of regulation: in other words the law created spaces where the capitalist could exercise
unfettered private power. Informalisation is thus not characterised by an absence of regulations but by a privatization of regulations. Possible Futures? Recent historiographical shifts have complicated received ideas about working class history. The premises on which labour history was written earlier are been widely critiqued. The need to move beyond earlier modernist frames is almost universally recognized. These frames were tied up with teleological notions about industrialization and the emergence of a modern industrial working class which are today widely critiqued.44 In Marxist accounts, teleologies of class were linked up with visions of socialism and faith in the emancipatory potential of the working class movements. Despite the collapse of old frameworks over the last decade, there has been a resurgence in writings about labour. The global surge in the writing of labour history almost appears like an attempt to give a voice to classes that are being effaced from the public realm. Within the global and the local, old exclusions and old boundaries which defined the subject of labour history in the past are breaking down. The disappearance of the traditional working class has also provided a context wherein labour historians are being forced to pose new questions and look at old issues from new perspectives. What happens to notions of class in this changed context? If the premises on which earlier ideas rested are no longer tenable, how do we validate a conception of class? A displacement of purist 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 poses problems. There is a need to capture the fluidity of identities through categories which are open-ended and not closed and impermeable. The predicaments and problems of labour history in India mirror some of these global anxieties and quests. Short Biography Chitra Joshi has been actively engaged in writing and researching on Indian labour history. Joshis book, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; London: Anthem, 2005) takes the present context of globalization and decline of large-scale industry as its entry point into the worlds of labour in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and examines how cultural pasts were actively reconstituted through worker practices. Other publications include an essay on Deindustrialisation and the Crisis of Male Identities, International Review of Social History, 2002 and Notes on The Breadwinner Debate: Gender and Household Strategies in Working Class Families, Studies in
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History, 2002. Currently Joshi is working on the history of roads and labour on the roads in nineteenth-century India. Chitra Joshi completed her post-graduate studies and her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been teaching history at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi for many years, before which she was a fellow at the Centre for Contemporary History, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Notes
* Correspondence address: Indraprastha College History Department, 31 Shamnath Marg, Delhi 110054, India. E-mail: chitrajos@gmail.com. M. D. Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills 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): 277328. Some of his earlier writings are also included in a later publication, Labour and Working Class in Eastern India: Studies in Colonial 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), 435. 4 The discomfort in dealing with questions of religion and community among workers is similar to the kind of discomfort with race in the West. On Marxism and the White Problem in the US for instance, see D. R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999), 613; 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), 21335. 5 C. Joshi, Kanpur Textile Labour: Some Structural Features of Formative Years, Economic and Political Weekly, 16/446 (November 1981); R. K. Newman, Social Factors on the Recruitment of Bombay Millhands, in K. N. Chaudhari and C. J. Dewey (eds.), Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 27795; C. P. Simmons, Recruiting and Organising an Industrial Labour Force in Colonial India: the Case of the Coal Mining Industry 18801939, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13/4 (1976): 45585. 6 The entire discussion of the general strike of 1929 of the Bombay workers for instance, has no 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), 23278. 7 The Talla riot of 1897 over the demolition of a Muslim sacred space which involved workers in the jute mills of Calcutta for instance is seen primarily as a spontaneous outburst expressing the latent hostility of the migrant population against Europeans and against exploiters. R. D. Gupta, Poverty and Protest: A Study of Calcuttas Industrial Workers and Labouring Poor, 18791899, Labour and Working Class, 36378. 8 D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 18901940 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 9 Ibid., 186218; see also D. Chakrabarty, Class Consciousness and the Indian Working Class: Dilemmas of Marxist Historiography, in P. C. W. Gutkind (ed.), Third World Workers: Comparative International Labour Studies (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 2131. 10 Chakrabarty, Rethinking, 212, 218. 11 R. Chandavarkar, Workers Politics in the Mill Districts in Bombay between the Wars, Modern Asian Studies, 15/3 (1981): 603 47; see also Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168238; N. Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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Gooptu, Politics of the Urban Poor, 185243. C. Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 24556. 14 Adi-Dravidas demanded their right to access water taps used by caste Hindus, yet the upwardly mobile among them tried to adopt clean upper caste practices like giving up the eating of beef. J. Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998), 101 6. On assertions of tribal (adivasi) identities in the Chota Nagpur mines and steel works see D. Simeon, The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism: Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur 192839 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 3303. 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 of India. 16 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, 155 85. 17 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, 218 18 Chandavarkar, Worker Politics in the Mill Districts, 60521. 19 Chandavarkar, Origins, 1617, 42931. The idea of workers choosing, selecting their strategy of negotiation to exploit political parties to to serve their ends also runs through Basus discussion of jute workers politics. See for instance, S. Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and 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, workers refused 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, 2856, 297304. See also, S. B. Upadhyaya, Existence, Identity and Mobilization: The Cotton Millworkers of Bombay 1890 1919 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 170273. 22 On this see also Joshi, Lost Worlds, 21736. 23 Writings which decentre the political and look at the informal hidden transcripts of labour have 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 of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 24 Nair points to petty thefts of mine property despite attempts at close surveillance by owners. Miners and Millhands, 4553; see also 726; Simeon, Politics of Labour, 144, 1545, 3435. 25 G. de Neve, The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in Indias Informal Economy (New Delhi: 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), 35378. 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 and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate, International Review of Social History, 42, Supp. (1997): 123. On the economic argument see for instance, V. Beechey, Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production, Capital and Class, 3 (1977): 4565; For an elaboration of Victorian notions of domesticity see C. Hall, The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Oxford, 1988). See also W. Seccombe, Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth Century Britain, Social History, 11/1 (1986): 5376. 27 R. Kumar, Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry 191939, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 8/10 (1983): 81110; M. Mukherjee, Impact of Modernization on Womens Occupations: A Case Study of Rice Husking Industry of Bengal, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20/1 (1983): 27 45; N. Banerjee, Working Women in Colonial Bengal: Modernization and Marginalization, in S. Vaid and K. Sangari (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali, 1989), 269301. 28 S. Sen, Women and Labour in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2153, 89141; see also, S. Sen, Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal, International Review of Social History, 42 (1997): 6586.
13 12
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29 For an engaging discussion on the ways in which women try to exercise agency in their day to day their lives see Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangaladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000), 82141; See also C. Joshi, Notes on the Breadwinner Debate: Gender and Household Strategies in Working-Class Families, Studies in History, 28/2 (2002): 26174. 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 Tiruppur Knitwear Industry, Economic and Political Weekly, 37/21 (2002): 204552. 32 Jayati Ghosh, Informalization and Womens Workforce Participation: A Consideration of Recent Trends in Asia, April 28, 2004, http://www.macroscan.org, accessed March 20, 2007; Samita Sen, Gender and Class: Women in Indian Industry, 192090 (Noida: VV Giri National Labour Institute, 2001), 3450; N. Shah, S. Ghotoskar, N. Gandhi and A. Chachhi, Structural Adjustment, Feminisation of Labour Force and Organizational Struggles, Economic and Political Weekly, 29/18 (2004): 39 48. 33 For a discussion see, K. Rittich, Feminization and Contingency: Regulating the Stakes of Work for Women, in J. Conaghan, R. M. Fischl, K. Klare (eds.), Labour Law in an Era of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11736. 34 C. Joshi, Deindustrialization and the Crisis of Male Identities, International Review of Social History, 47 (2002): 15975. See for instance, J. Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 20131. 35 See for instance, S. Willott and C. Griffin, Men Masculinity and the Challenge of LongTerm Unemployment, in M. M. an Ghaill (ed.) Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and the Cultural Arenas (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), 7792; P. Willis, Shop-Floor Culture, 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), 18598. 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 in Contemporary Industrial Delhi Paper presented at International Conference on Towards Global Labour History: New Comparisons, 10 12 November 2005. 36 Radha Kumar provides some interesting insights into the ways in which women asserted their ideas about sexuality and marriage in her essay on, Sex and Punishment among Mill-Workers in Early Twentieth century Bombay, in M. Anderson and S. Guha (eds.), Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 179 97; see also Sen, Women and Labour, 177212. 37 For a close study of questions of bondage and freedom in relation to rural labour in colonial India see Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Emerging Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (New Delhi: Manohar 1979); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in 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), 5086; 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, 18581930: The Illusion of Free Labor, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 42254. 41 R. Ahuja, The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth Century Madras, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999): 15995. 42 I. J. Kerr, Labour Control and Labour Legislation in Colonial India: A Tale of Two Mid-Nineteenth Century Acts, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 27/1 (2004): 725. 43 Act VI of 1865 gave planters additional penal powers to discipline labour power to arrest absconding labourers. P. P. Mohapatra, Regulated Informality: Legal Constructions of Labour Relations in Colonial India 1814 1926, in S. Bhattacharya and J. Lucassen (eds.), Workers in the Informal Sector: Studies in Labour History 1800 2000 (New Delhi: Macmillan 2005). See also,

B. H. White and N. Gooptu, Mapping Indias World of Unorganized Labour, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds.), Socialist Register 2001 (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 89118. 44 Raphael Samuels, Pat Hudson and others show how industrialization in Europe was based on the intensive exploitation of labour and technology. Factory production and factory labour remained marginal to industrialization till the late nineteenth century. R. Samuels, Workshop of 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 Textile Industry in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries, History Workshop, 12 (1981): 34 61. See also, P. Kriedte, H. Medick and J. Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before Industrialisation: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
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History Compass 6/2 (2008): 439454, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00503.

Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities

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Histories of Indian Labour

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