Volume 51 supplement 14 (2006)

Summaries

Coolies, Capital and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History

Edited by Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Introduction
This article outlines how research into the history of labour in South Asia has developed over the past century and makes a forceful appeal for studies comparing South Asia with other areas of the Global South. The author argues that there are important homomorphies between colonial social formations of the past and contemporary underdeveloped countries. These and many other areas of congruence suggest that the patterns of development in labour history in the countries of the South need to be studied in a comparative way as a means of developing a broader perspective.

Michael Fisher, Working Across the Seas. Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and In-Between, 1600-1857
The labour history of Indian seamen changed radically with the development of intercontinental sea-routes between India and Europe. Indian seamen (lascars) traditionally worked in maritime labour-gangs recruited and serving under their own headmen (serangs). High mortality rates meant European vessels also required lascars for their return voyage. The English and other northern European joint-stock East India corporations (early seventeenth century onward) thus struggled to recruit and control increasing numbers of lascars. By the mid-nineteenth century, tens of thousands of lascars had sailed to England alone. Yet, spreading British colonialism sought to impose new regulations and capitalist models of labour relations on Indian workers generally. Nonetheless, lascar solidarities, cross-cut by ethnic identities, persisted aboard ship and in Britain. This article extends Indian labour history transnationally to consider sites in colony and metropole where categories of class and race conflicted and Indian maritime workingmen continually renegotiated their roles.

Jan Lucassen, The Brick Makers' Strikes on the Ganges Canal in 1848-1849
The traditional wisdom about labour history, particularly in the orthodox Marxian perception, that collective class-consciousness and action are both linked to the emergence of modern industrialization in Western Europe and North America has had a profound influence on the writings of the labour historians of the colonial world of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article research on the history of brickmakers' strikes between 1848 and 1849, at the site of the Ganges Canal builders during the 1840s and 1850s in northern India, offers a critical appraisal of the supposed link between modern industrialization and collective labour action. The very existence of this rather massive strike contributes to the idea of a tradition of collective resistance in India among workers engaged in large public works. Like in Europe it seems that such a tradition already existed before the building of the railways, in particular among those who built canals and dikes which pushes its history much more back in time.

Ian Kerr, On the Move. Circulating Labour in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India
Circulating workers provided a sizeable portion - estimates run as high as fifty per cent - of the non-agricultural labor force of pre-colonial and colonial India. However, these workers have been little studied by historians. In particular, we have few studies of circulating labor in pre-colonial India, and virtually no connected study of the long-term presence of forms of itinerant labor established in the pre-colonial period and continuously present thereafter. This paper seeks to describe some of the long-term groups of itinerant workers - particularly but not solely those engaged in construction-type work - and to situate them, conceptually and substantively, within a history of Indian labor whose story must begin deep within South Asia's pre-colonial past: a history of labor characterized by important transitions as well as significant continuities.

Ravi Ahuja, Mobility and Containment. The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900-1960
This article looks at the tens of thousands of South Asian seamen who manned European ships in the first half of the twentieth century. Given their profession, these lascars were extremely mobile geographically, but very immobile socially. Throughout this period, they were at the bottom of this hierarchically segmented international maritime labour market. The author shows how British and "British Indian" maritime labour law, the immigration laws of metropolitan countries, and extra-legal structures of exclusion and containment in combination were fairly effectual in controlling the mobility of Indian seamen and in reproducing a segregated pool of poorly paid and legally inferior colonial labour.

Rana P. Behal, Power Structure, Discipline and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations during Colonial Rule
This article shows how, prior to Independence in 1947 and in collaboration with the Indian Tea Association (ITA), the Assam Valley tea planters tried systematically to dominate, discipline, and control workers by a combination of two strategies: immobilizing labour within the plantation complex once the workers' had arrived there, and curbing their contact with the outside world. Both strategies aimed to prevent the formation of collective labour organizations. After first showing how the ITA became an extraordinarily effective pressure group within the colonial state, the author provides a detailed reconstruction of how these strategies were enforced in the day-to-day lives of the coolies.

Prabhu P. Mohapatra, "Following Custom"? Representations of Community among Indian Immigrant Labour in the West Indies: 1880-1920
This article examines the culture and forms of protest among Indian indentured labourers in the West Indies during the last phase of the indentured labour regime (1880-1920). It focuses on four different sets of representations of community identity: the annual Muharram festival, and the public activities of three individuals: two prolific letter writers in the colonial newspapers, and the author of one of the rare literary texts produced by Indians during the period. The author concludes that no singular identity developed among the Indian diaspora, although all forms of identity bore a relation to the local labour regime.

Shankar Ramaswami, Masculinity, Respect, and the Tragic. Themes of Proletarian Humour in Contemporary Industrial Delhi
This paper explores themes of proletarian masculinity (mardaangi) and humor (mazaak) in contemporary Delhi, arising from research amongst male migrant workers in a metalworking export factory in the Okhla Industrial Area. The paper seeks to describe and critique metal workers' vocabularies and practices of joking and horseplay, with particular reference to their homoerotic and heteroerotic imageries, as well as to their subtle auto-critiques. The paper attempts to view mazaak, despite its often vulgar, dualistic, and otherizing imageries, as an assertion of the erosic drive to affirm life, beyond the desire to merely survive, and contra the thanotic will to submit to the life-denying conditions of urban-proletarian existence. The paper probes the capacities and potentialities of certain styles of workers' mazaak, such as satirical and sarcastic humor (vyang), to critique exploitation, oppression, and associated dominant imageries of masculinity and work, and to suggest alternative visions and possibilities for proletarian inter-relations.

Willem van Schendel, Stretching Labour Historiography: Ideas from South Asia
Focusing on Bengal and Northeast India, this article examines eight partly overlapping themes that the author considers to be especially effective in broadening the history of labour in this region. The author points out that in South Asia wage workers in the "organised sector" never formed more than one-tenth of the working population, and in many regions much less. Historians of labour have so far focused disproportionately on the jute factories in colonial Calcutta (Kolkata). The dynamic and persistently finely graded labour relations in agriculture are deserving of greater consideration, as are the amazing variety of gender roles, labour trafficking, the cultures and meanings of labour, and the labour implications of shifting cultivation (jhum) and wet-rice cultivation.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, War on the Shopfloor
This article deals with the institution of jobbers within the larger world of Indian labour history. While jobbers occupy a very crucial place in the Indian labour historiography, the loss of their position and influence, both with the employers and workers, during the last decade of colonial rule and early years of Independence have eluded any serious discussion, The author shows how the outbreak of World War II accentuated, and its conduct and immediate aftermath sustained, the mounting pressures on the jobber system and exposed its weaknesses more fully. These pressures upon the jobber emanated, first, from the more intensive exploitation of labour due to the wartime economy, which made the jobber's traditional task, to reconcile workers to the demands of the mill-owners, almost impossible to sustain. Second, the 1940s witnessed deepening tensions and bitter conflicts at the workplace. And third, the decade was marked by political volatility.