Working Lives and Worker Militancy ― The Politics of Labour in Colonial India

In contemporary India, work for wages has expanded substantially as a mode of subsistence while labor, at the same time, has suffered a dramatic depreciation as a political force and as a target of state policy. The six essays in this volume reconstruct this now marginalized political history of an 'age of labor' from various angles, using previously inaccessible police records, rare autobiographical documents, and other neglected material. They examine how political conflict, militancy, and trade union activism were rooted in the everyday lives of construction workers and artisans, of 'untouchable' tanners and sweepers, of seafarers, railway staff, and factory laborers, throughout the late colonial period. They analyze how transformed politics of caste intersected with the late colonial upsurge of labor politics. They reassess the complex relationships of nationalist mobilizations and labor movements, of elite politicians and an emergent group of 'organic' worker-intellectuals and proletarian militants. They provide meticulous reconstructions of how incidents of labor protest unfolded in India's varied industrial spaces. They argue, in sum, for a reappraisal of Indian labor history as an eventful political history. The volume is rounded off by the political memoirs of Bashir Ahmed Bakhtiar tracing his metamorphosis from militant worker to trade union leader. The memoirs are made available in English for the first time.

Ravi Ahuja is professor of modern Indian history at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Gottingen. He works on various problems of social history, including labor, urbanism, infrastructure, and war.