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Gender
and Class: Women in Indian Industry, 1920-1990
Samita
Sen
The
study of industrialisation and industrial labour has a
long history in India.
Scholars began to research different aspects of
these questions very soon after the inception of modern
industry in the mid-nineteenth century.
After Independence in 1947, a considerable body of
‘working-class’ histories developed.
These endeavours were dominated by concerns of
modernisation, national politics and working class
consciousness. Little attention was paid to questions of
gender. The
common (often stated) assumption was (and still is) that
the low proportion of women workers in the modern
industrial sector rendered them irrelevant to stories of
‘class’. The
few women who did work in industry, mining or plantations
were subsumed within the general definition of class.
A more knotty question – that of the role of
women in male industrial workers’ households who worked
in agriculture or petty commodity production or trade or
retail ‑has not been raised at all.
Were the men workers members of a working class in
their individual capacity or as heads of ‘working class
families’? How do we characterise the work of wives,
mothers, daughters and sisters of male industrial workers?
These questions have not been given any
consideration in the prolix debates about class around
which Indian labour history has so far revolved.
Question
of women’s work, their role in traditional or modern
manufacturing has also had relatively little attention
from practitioners of women’s studies.
In economics and sociological literature, poor
women are almost always of rural and peasant groups.
There has arisen, however, in the last two decades,
a new interest in women’s work leading to a corpus of
information about contemporary developments. Much of this
information remains sparse and scattered and unconnected
to long term historical trends.
This latter problem is likely to persist as long as
gender issues continue to be neglected in historical
investigations of labour, a neglect that is compounded by
scholars of women’s history. The historian in search of
women’s ‘voices’ has been limited, necessarily, to
middle class literate women who left some impress of their
own in the form of autobiographies, novels, essays and a
prolific didactic literature. The poor and working women,
invariably unlettered, did not leave their own and
authored traces in historical records.
As a result, women’s historians, persuaded by
arguments of ‘lack of evidence’, have marginalised
issues of work and workers.
Poor and working women have fallen between the two
stools of labour and women’s history -- further silenced
and divested of historical agency.
And
yet, were these ‘subaltern’ women absent from elite
discourses? Quite the contrary.
From the late nineteenth century and upto the
1930s, a variety of elite discourses focussed obsessively
on poor urban women, their work, their visibility, their
sexual and marital behaviour, their childbearing and
mothering practices.
While the poor and working women did not write
about themselves, they were most copiously and assiduously
written about by officials, employers, reformers and
philanthropists, journalists, publicists and labour
activists. If
we cannot hear the women’s own voices, we hear a
veritable clamour of other voices, some sympathetic and
some censorious, which sought to speak for and about them.
The ‘problem’ then is not ‘lack’ of
evidence, but as in the case of many other historical
investigations, that of the nature, the volume and the
often unexpected provenance of the evidence.
There is sufficient evidence, certainly, to suggest
that women were a critical segment of the industrial
labour force at its inception.
Janet Harvey Kelman who wrote one of the earliest
and most remarkable accounts of Indian labour associated
women with the ‘tragedy’ that surrounded the ‘first
efforts to introduce modern mill industry into India’.
In 1818, she writes, a group of ‘Lancashire
girls’ were brought to Bengal to ‘introduce factory
methods of work’ at the old Bowreah mill in Hooghly.
‘Heavy, white-washed tombs in the rank grass of a
small cemetery near the mill compound still keep in
remembrance the swift death to which many of them fell
victims’.
This
tragedy notwithstanding, cotton textile industry in
Western India and the jute industry of Bengal grew apace
and by the end of the nineteenth century drew out British
reformists, the Manchester and Dundee lobbies on the need
to regulate factory conditions.
Mary Carpenter, celebrated educationist and prison
reforms campaigner, on her return from a tour of India,
argued for urgent legislative intervention on behalf of
women and children workers, at that stage more than a
fourth of the total textile factory workforce.
The first Factories Act came in 1881, at the teeth
of the mill-owners’ opposition.
From this period and upto the outbreak of the first
world war, state and public interest in labour conditions
remained focused on women and children.
The long and laboured controversies among the
employers, reformers (both British and Indian), the
provincial governments, the Government of India and that
of Britain produced a rich literature on women’s working
conditions and on social and gender division of labour in
that period. Alongside,
industrial employers, concerned about labour supply in a
period of rapid expansion, generated a veritable archive
on labour. The
planters -- of Assam tea-gardens and the overseas colonies
-- were heavily dependent on the state for labour
recruitment and control.
And they were among the few ‘modern’ sector
employers who had special need for women -- for both
reproductive and productive purposes.
Their practices and policies were the key points
around which questions of women’s work were discussed
and elaborated.
In
all these areas, the concern was with the woman in her
capacity as a worker.
At this stage, legislation sought to regulate the
condition of women actually engaged in factory work -- the
hours of work, periods of rest, the prohibition of night
work and/or the handling of machinery. These laws were for
workers who were ‘special’ because they were women.
And they were special in three ways: first, they
also had to perform their reproductive roles as wives and
mothers; second, their physical weakness limited the kind
of work suitable for them; and third, they were unable to
uphold their own interests and thus needed the
‘protection’ of the state.
Even those who opposed protective legislation
usually agreed that women workers had ‘special’
characteristics. For instance, jute mill-owners agreed
that women should not work long hours but argued that due
to the multiple shift system they did not do so anyway and
therefore legislation was not necessary.
They agreed that women workers had an important
familial role to play, but pointed out that their earnings
were crucial to household survival.
The men workers, however, were considered not only
as not having the same ‘needs’ as women but also as
free and able to negotiate mutually beneficial working
conditions with employers.
In
this early period, those directly concerned with
controversies over labour -- employers and the state --
were the most prolific recorders of labour issues.
A few concerned Indian and British reformers wrote
a few accounts accounts, the most remarkable being those
of Dwarkanath Ganguly and Ramkumar Vidyaratna on labour in
tea plantations of Assam.
It in the latter that we find glimpses of the kind
of concern over women’s labour that was to hold centre-stage
after the First World War.
The exigencies of women’s sexual and reproductive
roles were in conflict, these writings seem to suggest,
with their recruitment as wage labour .
They dwelt on two major consequences of women’s
migration: first, the depredation of the family from which
the women were recruited and second, the unsuitability of
plantation employment for women given, especially, their
vulnerability to sexual violence by European plantation
bosses.
The
1920s witnessed the proliferation of a different kind of
writing about working women.
While the state and employers continued to produce
material about their women workers, a group of
professionals -- academics and doctors, especially -- also
focused on these women as a social ‘problem’.
Kelman’s book (1923) was followed by G.M.
Broughton’s (an Inspectress of Factories) (1924),
several by Margaret Read (1927, 1931 and 1934), and one by
C.M. Matheson (1930).
These were women writers focusing on the concerns
of women workers. R.K. Das wrote a long and
well-researched essay on women workers in 1931.
Other general studies of labour contained long
sections on women -- P.S. Lokanathan (1929), S.G.
Panandikar (1933), B. Shiva Rao (1939) and Radhakamal
Mukherjee (1947). Three
European women doctors -- Drs. Francis Barnes, Dagmar
Curjel and Margaret Balfour -- did extensive research on
fertility and mortality among working and working class
women and published several tracts between 1923 and 1935.
These
writings reflect a distinct shift in the nature of public
concern about and state regulation of factory labour.
It was no longer accepted that the state should
protect the ‘weaker’ sections of the workforce while
adult male labour dealt with the ‘market’ without any
external interference.
Faith in the paramountcy of free trade over the
labour market waned and the newly instituted International
Labour Organisation initiated long-term efforts to create
a minimum standard for labour conditions and undertake its
monitoring across the globe.
There were two clear differences from the earlier
period. First,
there was a move to equalise women’s and men’s working
conditions by adopting similar checks of hours of work and
welfare measures that were, at least ostensibly, gender
neutral. Second,
a set of reforms continued to address women in specific
terms but in their reproductive capacity.
Factory women were increasingly regarded not as
workers with particular problems calling for separate
remedies but as special kinds of mothers and wives -- ones
who also worked. Alongside
debates about whether they should work or not were
questions about the adverse impact of work on housewifery,
child bearing and rearing.
These were directed towards isolating, and if
possible remedying, the specific problems of working wives
and mothers. This
shift was in consonance with the growing state discourse
about the ‘family’ and the public focus on alarming
rates of maternal and infant mortality in India.
Various professional and social discourses
converged in the 1920s and 30s on motherhood -- both as a
problem and as a solution.
Working class women were included in these concerns
to the devaluation of their work roles.
Eventually, industrial employers used working class
motherhood as both a practical and an ideological
instrument to reduce the (female) workforce during the
depression of the 1930s.
In the Bengal jute industry, for instance, the
proportion of women declined by about 2 per cent between
1930 and 1940. A
steeper decline was set in motion in the coal industry
when women were banned from underground work in 1928.
In plantations, they retained their share (about
half to start with) much longer because of the perceived
‘feminine’ skill involved in low-paid plucking jobs.
But elsewhere in India too (Bombay and Ahmedabad)
women suffered job losses.
Similar
attacks on women’s jobs became more pronounced in a new
round of ‘rationalisation’ undertaken in industry in
the 1950s. According
to the figures published in the Annual Reports of the
Indian Jute Mills Association, there was a 5 per cent
decline in the proportion of women in the jute workforce
between 1950 and 1955, another 4.5 per cent decline
between 1955 and 1960.
By 1971, women who had been almost a fourth of the
jute workforce were decimated to a bare 2 per cent of the
workforce. The
decline of female labour in industries coincided with the
improvement of wages and working conditions. In the jute
industry, for instance, the real wages increased most
rapidly from the mid-1960s to be almost doubled by the end
of the 1980s.
From
the 1940s, academic writing on labour began to concentrate
on the twin aspects of modernisation-industrialisation
problem and on the issue of progressive class
consciousness as evinced through the rapid unionisation of
labour. The
earlier prominence given to women workers as a special
category eroded with the decline in their proportion
within the workforce.
The greatly diminished visibility of women workers
bolstered growing ideological commitment to the notion of
a cohesive and solidaristic working class.
Radhakamal Mukherjee’s pioneering book, The
Indian Working Class
(1947) included a chapter on ‘Women and Child
Labour’, discussions of the adverse effect of exclusion
of women from underground work in mines, the implication
of ‘family budgets’ and the relevance of a national
minimum wage for women and children.
Subsequently, however, the history of the
‘working class’ became increasingly equated with that
of strikes and unionisation.
The little of academic and professional writing
which still chose to focus on women, for instance the
studies conducted by M. N. Rao and H.C. Ganguly (1950-51),
retained the earlier emphasis on sexuality and motherhood.
Women
workers, thus, were being marginalised on multiple fronts:
in actual exclusion from rapidly improving organised
sector employment, from the political space that unionised
labour aspired to and eventually occupied and even from
more general public and ‘social’ concerns of the
earlier decades. Overall,
we see a diminution of women’s identity as workers. This
paper will address a few facets of this process.
First, the ‘organisation’ of industry and
labour is directly related to the decline in women’s
employment. On
the one hand, employers became less interested in women as
the progress of welfare legislation reduced their cost
advantage. On
the other, the nature of the legislation helped to bring
their reproductive roles into prominence and created a
climate of public opinion against women’s employment in
industry. Employers
could then target women for retrenchment as a means of
‘rationalising’ the workforce. Second, as the process
of organisation created a relatively more secure enclave
of employment approaching a ‘family wage’, working
class family strategy changed.
In working class households where many members
previously worked in industry, the trend turned towards a
single male breadwinner. But this was a tiny enclave and
the proportion of families who secured a foothold in this
sector was on the decline. In the less advantaged
agricultural and/or the ‘unorganised’ sectors, the
participation of women and children remained steady and
often increased during downturns in the economy when the
‘security’ of the ‘organised’ sector failed. Such
adjustments within the family economy were made possible
by the continuing authority of male heads of households
who were able to command the deployment of women’s
labour in consonance with ‘family needs’. The male
workers over ‘their’ women’s productive/reproductive
activities came to be reflected in trade union policies.
The unions were also participants in the emerging
public and state emphasis on women’s reproductive roles.
The significance of such a convergence lay in the
development of national-level federated trade unions by
political parties, which contributed to the process of
‘organisation’ of registered industries.
Labour, thus ‘organised’ earned not an
inconsiderable voice in labour conditions.
This voice, when just emerging in the 1930s,
accepted female retrenchment as a necessary strategy in
the face of spiraling male employment.
From the 1950s, the unions played an active role in
eliminating existing women and hindering women’s
recruitment. Such
policies were only in part due to the prejudices of the
middle class leadership, reflecting, much more
importantly, the adult male workers’ status aspirations
and desire for maintaining family authority.
The
paper is arranged in three sections.
The first section discusses the increasing concern
with women’s familial roles from the 1920s, the second
examines women’s role in labour protests to show how
their roles were represented and how their modes of action
were sidelined by the growth of unionisation.
The long term consequences of these two phenomena
is the focus of the third and final section. This section
draws on the recent research, as mentioned earlier, on
contemporary trends in women’s employment in
manufacturing.
Migration,
Morality and Motherhood
In
1888, Ramkumar Vidyaratna’s Kulikahini
[Sketches from Cooly Life] was published.
It was a fictional recreation of experiences
gathered while touring Assam tea plantations.
The major thrust of this series of stories was the
highly exploitative labour regime in the tea plantations.
Questions of gender and labour were, however,
inextricably linked in the delineation of the central
character, Adarmani, a woman tea-garden worker.
The story begins with attempts by a garden manager
to recruit peasant women from north India.
He instructs his chief agent, an arkathi,
to employ female recruiters.
They
must say, ‘We were in Assam... there was much comfort
there.... You too must come with us and you will soon be
as prosperous. As
it is you are losing weight working day and night at
domestic chores without food, without clothes, without a
single bangle on your arms.
To top it all you receive the husband’s curses
and punches. You
women are fools to endure all this.’ (pp.
6-7)
The
author then goes on to depict how two women recruiters,
Ramuna and Jhamuna, successfully recruits Adarmani, the
wife of a poor peasant, and her two daughters.
The recruiters found Adar in a particularly
vulnerable state. Her
husband had gone away with their son in search of work
becuase the rent was in arrears and interest had to be
paid to the moneylender.
The recruiters chose this moment to ‘entice’
Adar. They
adopted the two-pronged startegy recommended by the
manager. First,
they held out attractions of rich clothes, ornaments and a
good life. This
was then contrasted with the misery and drudgery of
Adar’s present existence as a mere ‘wife’.
One of the women said persuasively,’Your husband
thinks that a little rice and a coarse cloth is enough to
keep you tied to him for life.
And kicks and punches are all the ornaments you
need.’ She
also explicitly construed Adar’s decision to migrate to
the tea plantation as a revocation of male authority,
‘Would your husband have let you go if he knew?’
Ramkumar Vidyaratna wishes to make the point that ‘a
little rice and a cloth’ accompanied by the husband’s
kicks and punches were indeed a better option for Adar
than her inevitable fate in the teagardens.
In succumbing to the recruiters’ wiles, Adar was
not only revoking male authority but was inviting its
terrible consequences: hard work, poor pay and sexual
exploitation in the gardens.
He laid out in graphic detail the conditions which
led women to repudiate their home and husbands to go to
distant Assam. There
was economic hardship, physical strain, battering and
above all male control and subjugation.
He repeated these arguments when Ramuna persuaded a
wavering Adarmani to take the final step towards Assam.
The author’s imaginative reconstruction of
Adar’s hardships in the village and at home as expressed
through Ramuna’s rather phony dialogues is laden with a
heavy and obvious irony.
His foreknowledge that conditions in Assam were in
every aspect worse than Adar’s present difficulties were
meant to be read into Ramuna’s diatribe against
‘men’ (husbands): ‘Men in general are terrible....
They die of envy when they hear that you will be able to
earn Rs. 5 or 6, that you will able to live like a
queen’.
There is a tension in the many long passages in
this vein: on the one hand, the author quite evidently
presumes that a kind of a declaration of war against the
husband would, credibly, appeal to Adar; on the other, he
condemns Adar’s susceptibility as ill-informed,
ill-judged and illegitimate.
Adar’s
story underlines and exemplifies women’s transition from
traditional (male) familial authority to the new sites of
colonial production where women were vulnerable to
heightened labour and sexual exploitation.
Over time, the urban world appeared like a cauldron
of vice, crime and disease while by contrast the rural
world gained idyllic characteristics in increasingly
nostalgic re-telling.
The sharpening contrast drawn between rural/urban
and peasant/worker had pronounced gender overtones and
poor urban woman became its concentrated focus.
From
the 1920s, the condition of women in the factories and the
mill towns began to provoke a variety of discussions.
Kelman explains,
In
spite of the ignorance that prevails widely with regard
to the conditions of women’s labour in India, a real
public interest has been aroused.
This has been evident for a long time, but it has
become much more conscious since the publication of the
Convention of the Washington Conference and the
consequent discussions with regard to the extent to
which these can be applied to Indian conditions.
Outstanding instances of Welfare Work, Medical
research and the rising of Trade Union Organization have
each helped to spread the interest.
The
Washington Convention (1919) provided for compulsory
maternity leave and benefit for women industrial workers.
The Government of India pleaded that such a law was
unworkable in India and was requested by ILO to furnish
information about the condition of women workers.
This prompted, for the first time, special and
directed drives to generate knowledge about women workers
in industries. Three
women, G.M. Broughton, Dr. Francis Barnes and Dr. Dagmar
Curjel were designated to enquire into ‘conditions
before and after childbirth’ of women workers in the
North-west, Bombay cotton textile industry and the Bengal
industries. Ironically,
these initiatives, prompted by the well-meaning effort to
bring to Indian working women the benefits of maternity
leave with compensation, nevertheless provided some of the
most abiding and powerful negative images of Indian women
workers. Broughton’s
report has not been traced. Doubtless some of her findings
are recorded in her book mentioned earlier. Barnes in a
small report gave a detailed description of the unhygienic
and overcrowded conditions in which poor urban women gave
birth. This
and her finding that ninety per cent working class
children were fed opium have assumed the proportions of
legend. Dagmar
Curjel left a report of several hundred pages including
her filled-in questionnaires.
Her papers have become a major source of
information about Bengal’s working women.
Her
report was the first comprehensive statement, most
oft-quoted, about the questionable and ‘non-family’
character of jute mill women.
Imported
labour usually brings it womenfolk with them into jute and
cotton mills but in the majority of cases are not the
wives of the men with whom they live.
It is not possible for a women worker to live or in
many cases work without male protection.... and
practically all such Bengalee women found in the mills are
degraded women or prostitutes.
Curjel’s
report also contained formidable evidence on appalling
working conditions and a clear recommendation for a
blanket application of maternity benefit legislation, but
what was picked up and widely quoted was the alarming
picture of female promiscuity and a breakdown of the
family she had drawn.
It was from her report that the ‘non-family’
character of urban Indian labour was discovered and the
image of the women ‘who were not the wives’ of the men
with whom they lived was passed on to posterity.
Indeed
these were not far from Ramkumar Vidyaratna’s concerns
about peasant women being lured into immoral conditions of
waged work. In
the urban situation, however, there was a further
‘objective’ ballast to such characterisations: the low
sex ratio in the mills and in the urban population.
The fact that fewer women migrated to the urban
areas became both the cause and the consequence of poor
urban women’s degradation. Janet Kelman gave perhaps the
least morally laden descriptions of the phenomenon:
The
most serious problems connected with the effect of labour
conditions on moral standards arise from this division of
families. The
breaking-up of home in a country where family life bulks
so largely in the civilization cannot but bring evil
results with it. There
are different moral standards in India from those
acknowledged in Europe.
A woman may be a wife though she is not the only
one, but the relations between men and women that are
brought about by the influx into the cities of immense
numbers of men are not in accordance with Indian standards
of morality....
By
the 1940s, however, such arguments, by force of
repetition, had acquired more power.
Radhakamal Mukherjee said,
a
serious disparity between the proportions of sexes is
responsible for prostitution and spread of venereal
diseases.... Such disparity is the largest in the mining
towns but all industrial towns show the preponderance of
single male workers who have left their families
behind....
It
was believed that social sanctions against women’s
mobility and visibility were effective deterrents to
family migration. Men, who migrated to the city to
supplement their household income, would not risk their
status which influenced their foothold in the village by
bringing their wives to the city.
Dagmar Engels, in her study of women in Bengal,
refered to these arguments.
Migrants
did not bring their wife and family with them to the mill
areas because of traditional Indian cultural values.
Men from Bihar and UP said that they would lose
their status in the village if they dared to bring their
wives to mill areas in Calcutta.
Abdul
Hakim told the Royal Commission in 1930, ‘People of my
district do not bring family to industrial areas... if I
brought my family people would laugh at me.’
Over decades, this statement has been widely quoted
to ‘prove’ that respectable women did not migrate to
the cities and therefore, by extension, that those who did
migrate were prone to promiscuity.
To quote once again from Radhakamal Mukherjee’s
masterly descriptions:
The
‘single’ man comes back to the village tainted and
diseased, while the women workers lose their self-respect
and virtue and are looked down by the village population.
In the thousand slums of the Indian industrial
centres, manhood is, unquestionably, brutalized, womanhood
dishonoured and childhood poisoned at its very source.
The village social code is repelled at this and
discourages workers from bringing their wives with them
into the industrial centre.
Such
arguments leave unexplained why better-paid workers
(including those from Hakim’s district), especially the
sardars, often brought their wives with them.
The
oral evidence collected by various labour commissions
provides a different picture.
It appears that women who suffered impoverishment
through inadequacy or loss of male earnings by desertion
or barrenness or widowhood opted for migration since
economic opportunities in the village were reduced.
The same applied to women who wished to physically
escape oppressive fathers and husbands.
Such women figured prominently in the female
workforce. Except
one, all the women interviewed by the commission of 1891
were widows who held that all their colleagues were widows
too and that widowhood alone drove Bengali women into mill
work.
Even in the 1930s, the situation had not changed
greatly. Narsama
Kurmi came to work in the jute mill because ‘after the
death of her husband the witness found that she could not
earn a living in her native place, and her brothers were
not willing to receive her back into the family on account
of the extra work it would give them to keep her’.
She had no children, she came to Calcutta alone and
secured work in Howrah Jute Mill.
Others like Bochu Nilkantha came to Serampore with
his mother when his father died.
Noor Mohammed’s mother ‘compelled him to join
the mill’ when his father died.
Mangari came to Titagarh with her husband who
‘died of cholera’ and she subsequently found work in
the preparing department of the mill.
Her ‘widowed mother’ worked in the same
department. Mangari’s
sister was ‘a barren lady’ who worked in the same
mill.
Many
of these women came to the city alone and set up house
with one of the many ‘single’ men who worked in the
mills; and some came to the mill towns ‘with men who
were not their husbands’.
Since many of these women migrated outside the
family context, they were construed as aberrant.
They became objects of elite derision and came to
personify the breakdown of morality in the city’s
overcrowded tenements.
The working class neighbourhoods became associated
with the collapse of caste and gender hierarchies.
The Bengali women, especially, were often described
as prostitutes. Doubtless,
some migrants sought refuge in the impersonality of urban
life after transgressing kin or caste rules in the
village. In
elite descriptions, these men and women acquired a
particularly prominent profile.
G.M. Broughton, the Lady Inspector of Factories,
explained
[A]
man may be outcasted in the village, on account of having
married a woman of lower caste than himself or he has
given his daughter in marriage in this way.
Or again he may have broken either advertantly or
inadevrtantly, any of the other caste observances rigidly
enforced in his village.
In order to escape the social ostracism which is
the inevitable consequence... the man has to leave.
In a factory or mine he will be able to mingle with
men and women of various castes and creeds who will not
look askance at him.
S.G.
Panandikar also elaborated the notion that the city was a
hospitable refuge for those fleeing traditional social
sanctions in the villages.
[I]n
the village standards of behaviour and morals are laid
down by social and religious customs and are enforced by
the village communities through their panchayats.... If a
villager violates any of these standards he is not allowed
to get water from the well, none gives him employment or
sells him even the necessaries of life.... [W]hen he
migrates to the town he discovers the absence of similar
standards in the industrial community... even if some
groups in the community have brought their standards with
them they have no power to enforce them.... A substantial
portion of the recruits consists of the reckless and
adventurous elements of the village and they rebel against
the customary standards and assert their own will.
The
evidence from official documents and independent
researchers suggests that it were the ‘single women’
and some male migrants in ‘entaglements with local
women’ who settled most readily in the mill towns.
These women could not return to their villages,
according to Dagmar Curjel.
These women were more completely ‘proletarianised’ and
their ‘rural link’ irrevocably broken.
There were also workers from the bottom of the
social scale -- the Muchis and the Chamars -- who took
more readily to permanent settlements around the mills.
The women of these castes were more readily
de-linked from their villages: ‘[a] large proportion of
their women came to stay’.
R.N. Gilchrist, the Labour Officer of the
Government of Bengal, observed that second generation
immigrants working in the jute mills were born in the mill
lines or in the neighbourhoods.
They rarely returned to their native village.
They were the ‘illegitimate children of jute men
and women workers... and a large number of these women and
children, who are born of the [temporary] unions, never
leave the areas where they work’.
In
the 1920s and 30s, argues Radha Kumar, the concept of the
woman as mother gained ascendance. And the focus was on
‘the working class woman as mother of the second
generation proletarian’. She argues, in the context of
the Bombay textile industry, ‘the family assumed vital
importance for administrators, planners and employers’.
This importance is evident in the periodic family budget
surveys, investigations into maternal and infant welfare.
The preoccupation with the ‘non-family’ character of
jute mill labour would then seem another expression of the
‘search for a family’ being undertaken in Bombay.
Kumar argues that the 1920s saw parallel efforts at
‘rationalising’ the labour process as well as the
process of reproduction, i.e., the family.
R.S. Chandavarkar is sceptical of the possibility
of either mill owners or the colonial state being
concerned about the ‘family’ or even about
‘motherhood’.
It is highly plausible, however, that the discourse on
‘motherhood’ came at a convenient juncture for
mill-owners who were seeking ways of ‘rationalising’
(read downsizing) the workforce.
The concern with motherhood not only gave them a
morally justifiable argument but also allowed them to
operate within an ideological space that male workers and
trade union leaders shared.
In
Bengal, moralistic perceptions about working women were
invoked by mill owners to postpone maternity benefit
legislation for two decades. In the late 1920s, mills in
Calcutta started their own voluntary schemes, partly as a
means of staving off stiffer legal provision and partly in
order to ensure closer control and supervision of women
workers. When in the wake of the Royal Commission
(1930-31) maternity benefit legislation became inevitable,
Dr. Margaret Balfour confirmed the mill-owners’ argument
that the main need of the hour was not statutory maternity
leave with compensation but ‘welfare work’. Drawing on
Curjel’s earlier statement, Balfour argued that because
the men did not bring their own wives with them many of
them... form temporary alliances with other women, whom
after a time they may desert leaving the women to support
any children that may be born. The women... may be said to
fall into three classes.
There are the wives of male workers, some of whom
work in the mills and of whom do not. There are the widows
or women apart from their husbands led by necessity to
seek for work and these are too often forced or persuaded
into temporary alliances. Lastly, there are the
prostitutes. It is the middle class who are struggling to
support themselves honestly for whom great sympathy must
be felt.... Welfare work among women would probably do
more than anything else to improve the moral conditions.
Neither
Curjel nor Balfour were unsympathetic.
They repeatedly emphasised the need for maternity
benefit legislation.
But their characterisation of women workers helped
the employers to argue against legislation.
An employers’ association, the Bengal Mahajan
Sabha, laid the failure of maternity benefit schemes on
women workers themselves: ‘The peculiar type of female
labour in the jute mills... does not conduce to the
creation of schemes which presuppose normal family
life’. Another, the Narayanganj Chamber of Commerce,
argued that the ‘type of labour’ did not need
maternity benefit since ‘normal family life was
notoriously absent’. And also that, ‘child
motherhood’, ‘indiscriminate procreation’ and
‘unmarried’ motherhood were ‘conditions that
exist’ and had to be taken into account in framing
legislation.
While
these arguments did not hold back maternity benefit
legislation indefinitely, by the time it was passed in
Bengal in 1939, the connection between working women and
sexual immorality had assumed enormous proportions in
public imagination. It
fed, on the one hand, the working class family’s desire
to withdraw women from industrial employment when male
wages improved; and, on the other hand, facilitated the
employers’ strategy of eliminating women from the
workforce. The
proportions of women had embarked on its declining trend
already by 1939, but from the 1950s, managers, trade
unionists and policy-makers shared the conviction that it
was legislation that ‘caused’ this decline.
It
is significant to note that the proportions of women
workers in the total factory population dropped at a fast
rate immediately after the Bengal Maternity Benefit Act,
1939, was put on the Statute Book and again when the
provision for maintenance of a creche by the employer was
incorporated... Women labour were previously employed and
are still employed mostly for the reason that they are
chepaer than their male counterpart.
Progressive labour legislation... has made women
labour costlier these days.
Hence the general attitude of the factory
management regarding employment of women is to ‘do away
with the women labour with a view to avoid in future
expenses on special welfare benefits for women’.
Such
categorical statements notwithstanding, most careful
enquiry fails to establish a direct relationship between
passing of benefit, ‘protective’ or other
‘welfare’ legislation and the decline in women
workers. Rather,
it appears that such decline coincided with
‘rationalisation’ drives. It could be argued that
these legislation were deployed as justification by
employers in periods of labour squeeze rather than
constituting the actual cause for retrenching women
workers.
Women
and working class politics
The
factories, mills and mines, which undertook the first
large-scale retrenchment of women in the 1930s, were also
to be the nucleus of the ‘formal’ sector covered by
state regulation. These comprised the ‘organised’
sector not only because they were subjected to record and
registration, but because, by the 1960s, their labour grew
to be almost fully unionised with considerable bargaining
strength vis-a-vis employers and the state.
Historical accounts of this strongly assertive
labour force has provided the obvious ground for
demonstrating the ‘making’ of the Indian working
class. Most historians have seen these developments as the
flowering of ‘working class consciousness’. The
underlying assumption is that these processes ‑
unionisation and successful collective bargaining– are
gender neutral. Evidence suggests quite the contrary. The
story of class formation is rendered gender neutral
through a concentrated focus on successfully organised
workers. The story is construed on a circular logic in
which the gender identity of workers is left unmarked:
(men) workers have worked in factories; factory workers
have been unionised; and unionised workers have
self-consciously asserted themselves as working class.
Yet, if it were male workers who constituted the
‘working class’, then, of course, one primary axis
along which the ‘working class’ developed was gender.
It were male workers who were successfully
‘organised’, unionised and brought within the purview
of regulated wages and working conditions.
These men strengthened their stranglehold over
prized jobs in the organised sector through various
exclusionary strategies. The process of organisation
went hand in hand with masculinisation.
Indeed, it could be argued, women’s marginalisation was
imbricated in the nature and development of organised
working class politics.
It
is not as though women were absent altogether from the
formal sector. Indian factory workers were only predominantly
male. In the early 1920s, women were about 15-20 per cent
of the workforce in textile mills, nearly half and more
than half of the workforces of mines and plantations.
Their proportions began to decline from the 1930s. Even in
the 1930s, women were not invariably ‘docile’ or
compliant workers. They
also forged solidarities, sometimes with men workers and
sometimes against them, and they undertook collective
action, sometimes separately and sometimes in alliance
with male-dominated trade unions. How then did women
become so irrelevant to the increasingly powerful
male-dominated unions within a period of about thirty
years?
There
is a history, though not much told, of women workers’
protests. There are also a variety of tense and uneasy
representations of their militancy, both in contemporary
and historical accounts. The researcher has to read them,
as the cliche goes, ‘against the grain’, in order to
see how women workers, as active historical agents,
negotiated their gender and class identities.
The problem, in this case, is that the evidence
points in opposite directions. In much of contemporary
writing and from oral evidence, we get two diametrically
different images. On
the one hand, women are described as ‘loyal’ workers,
docile and manageable; on the other, in fragments and
glimpses, frequent enough to attract attention, we come
across the image of violent, aggressive and assertive
women who took leading role in confrontations with the
management and even the police. Both these images have to
be considered in some detail in the specific context of
their representation.
By
and large, contemporary official and union records of
working class political activities do not mention women at
all. Descriptions
of meetings, demonstrations, strikes, or even violent
crowds, rarely contain specific reference to women or to
individuals as women.
Public meetings, in which women participated, were
habitually described as if they were composed entirely of
men, unless women were extremely prominent and therefore
attracted attention. Strikes too were described without
mention of women, though they must have been part of them.
The term ‘men’ was presumed to include women, while
other terms like ‘hands’ or ‘workers’ or even more
commonly used notations like ‘mob’ or ‘crowd’
bypassed the question altogether.
Addresses in leaflets, for instance, presumed an
entirely male readership. Appeals to solidarity were
addressed to the fraternity of workers.
Trade unions imagined the working class as a
homogeneous and solidaristic male population, an
imagination inscribed in their very language.
Women, when they were considered at all, were often
expected to play a negative role in the labour movement.
The
negative expectation from women found further
amplification in both employers’ and unions’
stereotyping women as ‘docile’ and manageable workers.
In such a discourse, women’s militancy was
usually displaced by victimhood. Thus they were portrayed
as ‘victims’, in turns, of managerial, or state, or
union violence. In
all these cases, the attempt was to tap the mobilising
potential of the ‘woman wronged’.
Frequent references to atrocities by managers or
the police were an easy and quick way to gain public
sympathy and strengthen resistance.
Equally, managers talked about male workers
inflicting violence on otherwise tractable and compliant
women workers to delegitimise union activities. The
‘woman as victim’ was a powerful image because it
personalised political resistance and often successfully
harnessed public outrage and working class anger in
support of strikes. But
these portrayals were also double-edged in that they
contributed to the passive and powerless image of women.
Women’s agency in moments of protest could be and
often was reduced to ‑or even erased by
‑effete images of sexual violation or suffering
motherhood. Thus
even when women initiated strikes, newspaper and official
reportage focused, not on their grievances and demands,
but on the brutalities perpetrated on them.
In writing about women, the image of the victim and
martyr came more readily to the scribe.
In such reports, the fate of victimhood loomed
larger than the act of protest.
Let us take an instance from Bengal: the Ludlow
Mill strike of 1928 came in two phases.
In the first stage, all the workers had gone on
strike demanding the dismissal of two oppressive jamadars
and asking for a wage raise.
While the men were out in a meeting, management
agents came into the mill lines and persuaded the women to
join work on a verbal agreement to meet their demands.
The strike was broken.
When the mill management did not fulfil its
promise, the women, unilaterally, went on strike.
Before the men and the union had mobilised, the
management, in a pre-emptive action, arrested some of the
ring-leaders including six Telegu-speaking women of the
preparing department.
A large contingent of women marched to the local thana
to demand their release.
The police attacked the women and a fracas ensued.
In reporting this incident, all the leading
newspapers highlighted a single incident when a young
child was separated from the mother who had carried the
child at the demonstration.
Ananda Bazar Patrika screamed the headline, ‘The
Infant torn from Mother’s Arms’ and went on to say,
‘after this, the other women workers were beaten up
ruthlessly. They
were pulled by their hair and dragged up.... One
60-year-old woman was beaten to unconsciousness... a
one-year-old baby was torn from his mother’s breast and
flung to the ground.’ (11 and 13 June 1928)
The case became so emotive that the District
Magistrate, Gurusaday Dutta, went to investigate the case.
The
imaging of women as victims of managerial violence became
more effective when linked with the metaphor of sexual
violation. This
is not to argue that women workers were not subjected to
sexual molestation, as indeed the earlier description did
not intend to underplay managerial and police brutalities.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that
violence was frequently used against women.
But, particular incidents of such violence could
acquire heightened political significance in different
contexts. The
marking out men in authority like managers, supervisors,
the police or even durwans
and sardars as
sexual predators afforded a potent and personalised symbol
of exploitation. Accusations of sexual abuse against
European managers and supervisors provided the basis for
collective action, sometimes by women themselves, and
often with the help and support of male workers.
In
protesting against sexual abuse, women often invoked the
notion of honour (izzat)
which had enormous appeal for the working community.
Invoking potential anger against sexual abuse to
muster working class solidarity, however, meant that women
workers were acting in their capacity as workers to
reinscribe their gender oppression.
The notion of honour, embedded in a cultural
discourse that privileged above all women’s chastity and
‘purity’, was a particularly male conception. Therein
lay its power to tap men’s emotions and attract their
support. Thus,
women workers sought to negotiate the contradiction within
which they were situated vis-a-vis managers and
working-class men. The
gains were obvious -- the support of fellow workers in
their protests against sexual abuse.
However, they were drawing on a notion of honour in
which they were a mere vehicle for assertion of male
status and power. Women were incapable of agency in this
discourse, which depicted them as passive and powerless.
Such a notion of honour invoked, inevitably, the
‘protection’ of male workers against threatening
managers and their agents.
But
that such ‘protection’ was a fragile refuge and that
honour like many other instruments was double-edged were
proved repeatedly. The
male notion of honour was constructed, typically, in the
context of the family.
But it was susceptible to extension from the
corporate family to a wider community. And in the latter
context, women became the sites on which communities
traded insults, ‘honour’ assuming a highly symbolic
and codified meaning in battles between workingmen.
Thus, women did often invoke ‘honour’ as a mode
of resistance, but this same notion could be deployed by
men workers with women as the passive sites on which
imageries of ‘protection’ and ‘violation’ were
played out. Notably,
the ‘community’ on which women’s ‘honour’ was
inscribed was never static.
When women successfully invoked honour to rally
support to their cause, this community was co-terminus
with class. But
it was not always so.
The construction of community and the encapsulation
of its honour could be defined by language, religion or
habitat. The
boundaries of community, shifting continually across the
interstices of these definitions were drawn and redrawn in
moments of crisis and protest.
At times, ‘honour’ of women was subsumed within
the community and grist to the mill of communal conflicts
and rivalries. The
emphases on societal constructions of women’s honour
that were essentially male reinforced the passive and
powerless image of the working-class woman.
The role of the victim was extended, from
subjection to state and managerial brutality in moments of
class conflict to a comprehensive vulnerability within and
outside shifting categories of community.
The
extreme vulnerability and oppressive situation of the
working class woman can not be overstated.
Nevertheless, they acquired the reputation being
excessively violent, aggressive and capable of leadership,
collective action as well as individual intiative.
We find mention of such women from the beginning of
the history of industrialisation, but they acquired a
special edge and prominence in the 1920s.
Kelman said of the Bombay cotton mill women,
They
have... great
power of co-operative action along lines that already
appeal to them and can combine effectively.
This can be gathered from the frequency with which
it is said that the women women must be humoured of their
husbands are to be retained as workers in the mills.
She
cites a case where women workers collected the money and
hung a clock in their room.
They refused to let the management pay for it or
have anything to do with it.
They may have feared that the management would
tamper with the time.
The attempt to reduce wages and workers in winding
and reeling, which were women’s departments, led, in the
twenties and thirties, to a series of strikes spearheaded
by women.
In
March 1926, women colour winders in the Rachel Sassoon
Mill went on strike against being made to use
cheese-winding machines and remained out for five days.
On 2 January 1928, women winders of the Jacob
Sassoon Mill refused to work because the notice posted
outside said that from 1 February their wage rates were to
be reduced in order to bring them down to standard rates.
About 250 women stayed away from work.
In the afternoon of 2 January, the spinners joined
them. Next
morning, all the workers went on strike.
This sparked off the general strike of 1928.
In reporting the strike, the Labour Gazette sought
to distinguish between the women’s grievance and the
causes of the general strike. The women’s original
dispute was about the reduction of wages in the winding
department but its extension to other mills, said the
Gazette, was due to opposition to the Indian Textile
Tariff Board’s recommended system of working.
On the one hand, women’s specific initiative is
recorded, but subtly undermined by association with
narrower interests vis-a-vis a more generalised
‘class’ issue. But
these strikes confirm the especially adverse impact of
rationalisation on women’s departments as well as
women’s ability to begin and sustain collective action
on ‘economic’ issues.
In fact, as the crisis deepened, many mills had to
close down and others rapidly reduced workers in winding
and reeling. Between
August 1932 and 1933 there were twelve strikes by women
against reduction in wages and retrenchment.
Women workers went on strike on 9 February 1935 in
Jacob Sassoon Mill demanding an increase in wages and the
dismissal of the winding master, who, they said, was
harassing them. It
lasted two days and they resumed work
‘unconditionally’.
A week later they went on strike against the
introduction of a nine hours’ day starting at 7.30 a.m.
While this accelerated frequency of strikes stemmed
from a heightened sense of grievance, their greater
effectiveness and sustainability was due to their ability
to unionise. Between
late 1930 and 1932, unions intervened in all strikes by
women. The
Girni Kamgar Union and the Bombay Textile Labour Union
realised the potential of women’s collective action.
The Sassoon Alliance silk mill strike by women in
1932 was sustained over 5 months because the union played
an active part in setting up a strike fund and
distributing rations.
Women
in cotton textile industry in Bombay thus took collective
initiative when the ‘women’s departments’ were
threatened and they often won the support of the major
textile workers’ union.
But women workers in other industrial centres did
not share this experience.
The jute mill women suffered more than most male
workers in the limited mechanisation planned and executed
in the mid-thirties.
In 1941, in the Anglo-India (Middle) Jute Mill,
Jagaddal, 118 women were retrenched from the preparing
department. Ninety-three
roll formers and feeder-banks had been introduced between
the breaker and the finisher cards and first drawings.
Women did the feeding and they were all dismissed.
These jobs were now associated with complex
machinery and higher productivity and regarded as more
skilled and better paid.
The manager employed 18 men in the place of the
women: services of men are required’ because ‘heavier
loads’ needed to be carried.
The net result of the changeover, succinctly
expressed by the IJMA, was the retrenchment of 125 women
and the employment of 22 men.
The
indifference to (and indeed complicity with) women’s
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