Heptanesian Archives

Jan Breman, Karin Kapadia, Jonathan Parry, eds., The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (Contributions to Indian Sociology, Occassional Studies 9). New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 1999

Marking both a renewal of interest in labour studies and an important disciplinary shift, the publication of this anthology is a significant event. Introduced by Jonathan Parry, the fourteen essays by sociologists, anthropologists and historians in the volume include two “book-ends” — introductory and concluding reviews of the respective literatures on the “organised” and “informal” sectors of the industrial economy in India, both by Jan Breman. These chart the shifts in labour studies from the narrow emphasis on the tiny formal sector of the economy — about workers’ “commitment” to the industrial setting, measures of productivity, the social profile of formal sector workers, and trade union strategies — to the much larger and unwieldy “informal” sector of the economy, incredibly neglected by research scholars. While questioning this dualism in the study of economic activity in India, Breman raises questions about the formation and coherence of the working-class or proletariat as an identity and analytical category, the diversity of forms of wage labour and industrial production — from home-based to small workshops to large factories — and the multiplicity of workers’ identities in both formal and informal occupations.

The essays are as follows. Dilip Simeon offers a history of the coal industry in Jharia, South Bihar, and the changing relations of capital, labour and state in the context of working class and tribal movements. Chistropher Pinney locates a pessimistic discourse on industrial modernity as “Kaliyug” for the managers of a large plant in Nagda, Madhya Pradesh, while for the local workers — the subject of these constructions of rural rusticity and traditionalism — there is a less nostalgic feeling towards the exploitation from which the factory has liberated them. Jonathan Parry examines the Bhilai Steel Plant and takes issue with E.P. Thompson’s thesis on the transformation brought about by industrial work discipline, arguing this effaces the variability of rhythms of industrial production.

Two pieces explore memory and the construction of the past. Douglas Haynes, in a piece on the textile industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, discusses the idioms of industrial relations and their inflection by languages of morality, caste and kinship, in different ways deployed by both employers and workers to articulate contemporary concerns. Chitra Joshi, writing on the crisis-striken textile mills of Kanpur — today mostly closed — explores the narratives of industrial decline of a decimated workforce with a memory of the labour militancy in the 1930s.

Raj Chandavarkar, in a rich meditation on labour historiography — with material on the Bombay textile strikes of 1928–9 — offers a critique of mechantistic narratives of industrialisation and proletarian consciousness, and their insufficient treatment of the contingencies in the formation of class identity. Samita Sen, in a history of the Calcutta jute mill industry, foregrounds the position of women in the urban industrial workforce, documenting how their labour and lives were marginalised and domesticated by colonial capitalism and patriarchy.

Several pieces directly address the “informal” sector. One of the weaker contributions is Arjan de Haan’s piece on evolution of the badli, or substitute, labour system in the Calcutta jute industry, in which he unconvincingly argues that the badli system, labour recruitment, and migration patterns need to be seen as an aspect of workers’ agency, their “choices” and “values”, rather than as a business strategy to retain a flexible and exploited labour force. Peter Knorriga maps the unstable industrial relations in the small-scale, mostly home-based production units in the Agra footwear industry.

Karin Kapadia contests traditional arguments about class formation in her study of the synthetic diamond industry in rural Tamilnadu, arguing that workers’ identities are mediated, and the “flexibility” of the globalising labour market maintained, through gender discourses and practices. Miranda Engelshoven analyses the formation of the urban Saurashtra Patel community through the the production relations of the diamond industry in Surat, and discusses obstacles to workers’ organisation. Geert de Neve analyses the practice of tying labour to maintain a stable workforce in powerloom industry in Tamil Nadu, and how what was once an employers’ strategy of bondage has become a reciprocal relation for workers in search of a better livelihood.

The revival of interest in labour studies in India — distinct from the post-Independence intellectual and policy interest in labour — comes both at a time when the foundational categories of the disciplines concerned with the study of labour are being contested, as well as in a political conjuncture when working-class radicalism is at a low ebb and capital at its most expansive. The contributions to this exceptional volume confront the conceptual challenges faced in the study of the historical and contemporary working landscape in India, and offer exciting new possibilities for research by all social scientists.

Originally published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, Fall 2001.

The fate of Bombay’s textile mill industry, its working class, and the valuable swathes of land its mills occupy in the centre of the city, is a fin-de-siècle echo of a familiar urban theme. Claims on land and space have been the narrative thread of the most celebrated and most notorious chapters in the urban history of Bombay. These range from the legendary reclamations that linked up several marshy outposts and settlements to compose the island city in the eighteenth century, to the extension of the railways which promoted suburban development, to the land-grabbing and builders’ mafias of contemporary Mumbai.

The historic mills of the city are industrial dinosaurs dotted around the city landscape, whose textile production has been eclipsed in efficiency and profitability by the sweatshop labour employed in powerloom towns like Bhiwandi and Malegaon. The uncompromising militancy of the great textile strike in the early eighties convinced the city millowners that dealing with unions was unnecessary when production could be maintained in powerloom units in the urban hinterland — small-scale workshops that prevent the organisation of workers, which evade protective labour legislation, and which run on black money, stolen electricity and powerful political patronage.

By the late eighties, the lands of the mill compounds became more valuable for the millowners than the cloth these mills produce, and the workers whose livelihoods they have sustained for several generations. Thus In 1991, the fate of the mills began to be spelled out with the new Development Control (DC) Rules for the city, framed  by Sharad Pawar’s Government, permitting the sale of a portion of the mill lands, ostensibly to channel the funds into the revival of the industry. This reinvestment never in fact occurred, the money earned from the lease and sale of the lands was instead siphoned off by the millowners, and the mills closed and their premises redeveloped into high-rises, office spaces, discotheques, restaurants and bowling alleys. Parallel to this ruthless gentrification, mill workers saw their wages withheld, the gates of their mills arbitrarily shut, and the signing away of their rights by the sole recognised union for the textile industry, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS), whose underworld patronage is well-known.

Since 1991, cases filed in the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in New Delhi, requesting permission to sell surplus mill lands have swelled. Management cited the “sickness” of the mills, when the real reason lay in the skyrocketing real estate values and the chance to relocate production, profiteer from land scams and tax breaks granted by the BIFR, while they closed the units, and sold the machinery and workers for scrap. At the peak of the property boom several years ago, the value of the mill lands reached somewhere around Rs 5000 crores. And though the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance which came to power in 1995 promised to halt the sale of mill lands, restart production and provide jobs, they proved even more enthusiastic partners to the millowners’ profiteering.

With a further revision of the DC Rules on the cards, the new Congress-NCP Government has shown a determination to solve this festering issue and expedite the sale of mill and other reserved industrial lands, 23% of the land of the island city. The mills and working-class chawls of central Mumbai, crushed between the congested business district and the expanding suburbs, have in the past decade come under the combined pressure of the spiralling real estate market, the powerful lobby of builders and politicians, and the burgeoning middle-classes, starved of space. In the past decade, a battery of chattering economists, architects, society journalists and corporate promoters have advanced plans for the redevelopment of the “dead” mills into movie and design studios, five-star hotels, office spaces for multinational and corporate firms, and posh restaurants.

The casualty of these blinkered developments — satisfying the consumption of the few, not production for the many — has been Mumbai’s once-proud working-class, the mill-workers who spearheaded the trade union movement in India, and who today continue to hold out for their salaries and jobs. Historically, they have lent their strength to the calls for swadeshi and azadi, and their culture nestles in the heart of Bombay’s growth into a vibrant industrial city, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Barely twenty years ago, the working population of “Girangaon” — the “village of mills”, a web of industrial units, chawls, markets and maidans which spreads across central Bombay — numbered 2.5 lakhs.

This has now dwindled to less than 50 thousand, and the displaced numbers have not been reabsorbed into the city’s organised workforce. Banished into a life of casual and insecure employment, some have died of trauma or starvation, others have taken to selling vegetables or working as security guards in the gleaming skyscrapers and offices coming up in the old mills. Most notably, it is estimated that much of the underworld’s ranks are composed of former mill-workers and their unemployed sons. Though unrecognised unions like the non-party Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) have made significant gains in reopening seven mills since 1989, since Independence the Bombay mill workers have been straitjacketed to the representation of the recognised union. The current president of the RMMS, Sachin Aher, is the nephew of the notorious gangster-politician Arun Gawli.

In these days when the prevailing orthodoxy tells us that state intervention in economic processes is to be avoided, one should think for a moment what this surrender to “market forces” means for our social fabric and overall urban design. With the removal of restrictions on land use that accompanied the 1991 DC Rules, land-grabbing has proliferated, the nexus between corrupt civic and state authorities, builders, and gangsters increased, as has the unregulated expansion horizontally and skywards of new hutments and high-rises.

This privatised city presents a strangely postmodern vista. Advertising agencies, restaurants and bowling alleys, software companies and art galleries are sprouting in the former stronghold of working-class culture and the birthplace of India’s industrial modernity. While these new offices shelter beneath the towering mill chimneys that now jostle with skyscrapers for command of Bombay’s skyline, there is a dark irony not lost on many Mumbaikars. Least of all to the security guard who now tends to the gates of this newly discovered elite paradise.

Originally published in the People’s Reporter, Mumbai, July 2000