Labour history is a rich field of study with many theoretically and empirically important books and articles exploring various aspects of working classes all over the world. Indian labour history has also carved out its place with the publication of a number of significant studies over the decades. However, despite its efforts to diversify its research base, most studies on Indian labour remained focused on big urban centres such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Jamshedpur, etc., due to better availability of archival and printed documents. The main exception to this disproportionate emphasis on urban labour have been the Assam tea garden workers for whom the colonial archives contain a good number of records. The Bengal jute mill labour has been relatively overrepresented in this focus on urban areas with several accomplished historians exploring multiple dimensions of its existence and actions. In the present study, Anna Sailer delves into this crowded field by investigating labour relations in the workplace of jute industry.
The workplace, along with trade union movement, has been an important field of research in most studies on Indian labour until at least the 1970s. The situation began to change in the 1980s when the Indian labour historians began to realize that the workplace and the trade unions constituted only two dimensions of workers’ existence which was multi-dimensional with neighbourhood, extending to the villages even in distant provinces, forming a very important part of their lives. In fact, many historians saw the neighbourhood intruding majorly even into the workplace. Such historians have also emphasized on the enormous importance of culture and neighbourhood within the overall experience of the worker, including the urban workers and even those working in relatively organized industries. Through such studies, culture became an important aspect of investigation into industrial work and politics which inaugurated the ‘new labour history’. It is this which Anna Sailer endeavours to challenge in the book under review.
The main point of Sailer’s endeavour is her undiluted focus on the workplace. She explores the organization of production consisting of long working hours, multiple-shift system, and work gangs. The supposed ‘habits’ of Indian workers without any ‘true sense of time’ and without any extended attention to machinery, as asserted by the employers, resulted in employment of work gangs, instead of individual workers. These work gangs contained higher number of workers than was needed to run the machineries. This regime of ‘excess labour’ was sought to be compensated by multiple-shift system and long hours of work to sustain ‘a continuous process of production’. This peculiar organization of production, which particularly evolved during the boom of 1890s, proved quite effective as it propelled the Bengal jute industry to the front ranks leaving behind the jute industry of Dundee in the United Kingdom. However, although this catered to the supposed ‘habits’ of Indian workers and also served the interests of the capital, the work gangs and multiple-shift system were not amenable to tighter managerial control.
They were also not fixed in time but products of historical circumstances. Thus, the author points out, during the 1870s this system was used by the employers to maintain a ‘reserve army of labour, in a context of recurring labour shortages’. But during the 1890s, the multiple-shift system represented ‘a qualitatively new development’ in which the managers tried to control deployment of labour in certain crucial departments of jute industry in the name of standardization and rationalization. The process of control intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century and finally the multiple-shift system and work gangs were abolished by the early 1930s. Single-shift system was now imposed in many mills with increasing managerial control over the work process.
This development, the author argues, was at the centre of increasing resistance from the workers resulting in strikes, demonstrations, and ‘intense violence’ against the mills, and managers and overseers. Such militant responses on the part of the workers began since the second decade of the twentieth century and intensified as the process of ‘rationalization’ disrupted the earlier system of workplace organization. Increasingly larger number of workers became involved, directing violence against the mill authorities as well as against the police. The emergence of ‘radical trade unions in the jute belt’, along with their pan-Indian character, also led to workers’ protests being more organized, widespread, and prolonged. According to the author, all actors—the workers, employers, trade union leaders, and the state—were ‘responding to the transformation of the organization of work on the factory floor’. Other grievances such as retrenchment and the lowering of wages paled in comparison to workers’ resentment towards ‘a comprehensive change in the organization of work’. While the workers resisted the growing intensity of managerial authority in the workplace, the employers and managers attempted to assert their control even in the neighbourhoods.
The strong point of the book is its exploration of transformation of production organization at the workplace. The class conflict at the shopfloor was ultimately decided in favour of the employers when they managed to assert control and discontinue decades-old practices of cooperation and sharing of work among the work gangs or groups. Over several decades, the workplace was transformed and a specific work routine under a single-shift system was imposed by the employers on the workers.
The latter strongly resisted the increasing managerial control by undertaking violent strikes across the industry. Although she touches upon the issues of gender and family as well as communal riots, the main endeavour of the author throughout the book is on ‘re-establishing the workplace as a changing terrain for wider questions of labour history’.
It is here that the weak side of this study is revealed. The ‘new labour history’ focusing on the terrain beyond the workplace emerged as a legitimate reaction to the limited explanatory power of workplace-centred histories of the earlier period. By exploring the urban neighbourhood, rural hinterland, the process of migration and adaptation, the issues of gender both in the family and the workplace, the casual and unorganized labour, the wider politics of community and nation, and the ideology of work formulated and promoted by various agencies, the ‘new labour history’ enormously enriched and expanded the scope of labour history. Workplace is an important constituent of the workers’ existence, but it cannot encompass most of their experiences. Exclusive focus on the workplace restricts the workers to an organized and urban setting, and it does not even cover it fully. So, it is imperative to look outside the workplace also for a rounded picture. Labour history will become much poorer if it limits itself solely to workplace narratives.
Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay is Professor of History (retd.), Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi.