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Labour History and the Question of Culture

Chitra Joshi

(Chitra Joshi is with I. P. College, Delhi University, Delhi.)

Preface

The essay, " Labour History and the Question of Culture ", by Chitra Joshi attempts to understand the shifts in recent decades in the analytical paradigms to examine the question of culture in writings on labour and to enquire the determinants of these temporal deviations. Further, it is attempted to delineate the limits and possibilities of studying working class culture. Through a coherent discussion on the trends in writings on labour in India, the author establishes that till recently, family, gender and other issues concerning the lives of working class were not the central concerns in labour historiography. Notwithstanding this, the author is of the view that, over the last decade and a half, there is a discernable revival in the labour history writings in the country.

The ways in which the recent studies have conceptualised the questions of culture are discussed at length in the essay. The need for tracing the process through which ties of religion and community among workers are reworked and the culture is reconstituted is emphasised. To attempt this, it is suggested that, the labour historians need to explore the everyday lives of the workers, their negotiations with the urban milieu and their modes of self-representation. Also, there is a requirement towards conceptualising the worker identities, which are largely determined by their experience at work, the relationships with structures of authorities and the notions of self and identity forged outside the workplace.

The author also attempts to explain as to how the reorganisation of social space in urban settings and informalisation work lead to a shrinking of social and physical spaces that accommodate class solidarities. The relatively recent concern on gender issues in labour historiography is also discussed in the essay. While concluding the discussion, it is highlighted that there is a growing importance for the labour historians to retrieve the hidden voices and lost worlds of workers, especially in the present context of globalising and liberalising economic regimes that are transforming and suppressing the voices of labour.

The essay forms part of a specially commissioned series, Writing Labour History, initiated under the Integrated Labour History Research Programme (ILHRP), of the V.V.Giri National Labour Institute. This research programme, established in collaboration with the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH), is currently in the process of building an apex repository of labour history documents - Archives of Indian Labour, giving special emphasis on digital storage and retrieval.

I hope that scholars and practitioners working in the area of labour history would find this essay useful.

(Uday Kumar Varma)

Director

I  

The Question of Culture

A focus on culture is not entirely new to writings on labour. Colonial officials in the 19^th and 20^th century and sociological studies on labour in the post independence period tended to dwell on the cultural characteristics of Indian labour. But the nature of these concerns was obviously different from those of the present. Studies since the 1980s are deeply influenced by the wider cultural turn in historical writing. The frameworks within which questions of culture are examined have changed over time. How do we understand these shifts? What marks the changing nature of these concerns? What are the limits and possibilities of studying working class culture?

Colonial writings, official and non-official, tended to essentialize certain characteristics of labour. These became markers of difference, demarcating labouring classes in Asiatic societies from European societies. Characteristic to this literature were images of Indian workers characterized by irregular work rhythms, dilatory work habits. Descriptions about work culture in India were often drawn in the context of debates on legislation regarding working hours. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century managers consistently opposed restrictive legislation, asserting that the ‘dilatory’ work habits of the Indian worker made the hours of work less arduous than they appeared. Abstractions about the absence of an industrial work ethic in India were made in reference to the mythical European worker who was seen as a quintessential embodiment of industrial values.[i] Statements like the following recurred: ‘The Asiatic labourer is incapable of continuous work and however light his task may be, he must have intervals of absolute idleness which are unknown to the vigorous European.’ [ii]  Similar assumptions underlined official assertions about the lack of mechanical sense of the Indian worker. Factory Inspectors and other government officials attributed the large incidence of factory accidents to the fact that: ’The average Indian workmen has little idea of the dangers attendant on machinery.’[iii] Officials giving evidence to the Royal Commission argued how the environment in which the workers lived was ‘unmechanical’ and their traditional garments exposed them to greater risks than normal.[iv] In official and managerial perceptions, Asiatic notions of time and mechanical sense were tied together in one unified logic. Colonial representations also drew causal connections between the irregular rhythms of work and the absence of notions of thrift and saving. Images of the improvidence of the Indian mill worker – lacking any notion of foresight or prudence recur in official and non-official discussions on wages and consumption patterns. This became part of the justificatory logic used by managers and officials to oppose demands for wage increase. Higher wages in their logic meant greater irregularity, as workers tended to stay away once they had earned more than they needed.[v]

Although managerial and official discourse articulated many shared assumptions about labour there were also important differences. Opinion in the Factory Labour Commission of 1908 is quite clearly polarized between managers arguing against and officials supporting legislation to limit hours of work. Official opinion tended to see dilatory rhythms of work in terms of the arduous conditions in factories.[vi] Those like Freemantle were convinced that 'loitering' and shirking were because of the excessively long hours of work and they emphasized the need for factory regulations.[vii]  Yet there were tensions in this discourse: between stereotypical assumptions about the unchanging cultural characteristics of Indian labour and liberal conceptions that industrialization was bringing about changes in the nature of the labour force.[viii] By the 1920s this conflict seems partly resolved in certain writings. Officials giving testimony to the Royal Commission of Labour in 1929 drew contrasts between the past of labour and the present. The Director of Public Health, United Provinces, when queried about the workers' visits to their villages asserted: 'I am informed by millowners in Cawnpore that the habit used to be, when the industrial centre here was first formed and mills began to spring up…The labourers came for a period and went back home.' In the present phase they argued 'an established industrial population' had become a dominant feature. [ix] Implicit in these arguments was the assumption that there was a gradual process of evolution from a non-committed to a committed labour force. These opinions of the Labour Commission were not universally shared and essentialist notions about the characteristics of Indian labour continued to recur in official writings.

Many of these assumptions continued to influence academic writings in the post -independence era. Sociologists and economists studying processes of change were preoccupied with the peculiarities of Indian labour, the difference between India and the West. The cultural characteristics of the working class became important to understanding the reasons for backwardness and identifying constraints to rapid growth in India. Discussions on labour centred on questions of 'instability' / 'stability', 'regularity'/ 'irregularity' commitment'/ lack of 'commitment' of the labour force. If colonial officials and managers caricatured notions of work and time prevalent in India, academic writing of this period did not break out of the terms set by their discourse. The presence or absence of a labour force 'committed' to industrial work was considered essential to industrialization. Various indicators were employed to evaluate the degree of 'commitment' of the labour force. Lack of mobility, attachment to the village, dilatory rhythms of work, were all seen as characteristics reflecting a lack of attachment to an industrial way of life.

It is against this background that we can understand Morris David Morris' arguments on the formation of the Bombay textile labour force. Morris engages in a dialogue with advocates of the labour commitment thesis, critiquing frameworks which see labour as tradition bound and immobile. Through a study of wage figures, Morris tries to demonstrate that there was no real shortage of labour: any problem, he assumes, would be reflected in a rise in wages.  Temporary problems of supply, he argues, were related to the lack of housing facilities for labour. Morris suggests that workers were travelling longer distances, staying and working for longer periods in the city and were drawn from diverse caste backgrounds. He attributes the persistence of caste ties within the mills was related to specific recruitment policies of employers rather than entrenched social attitudes. [x] Morris thus moves away from the supply centric assumptions of the advocates of the labour commitment thesis to a demand centric argument: the nature of demand and employer policies determined the characteristics of the labour force.

But who are the advocates of the commitment thesis against whom Morris directs his critique? Apart from colonial officials and managers there seem in fact few proponents of the classic 'lack of commitment' argument.[xi] By the 1950s, in particular, such arguments were in retreat in academic writing. A series of writings in the 1950s and 1960s tried to prove on the basis of detailed empirical investigations that industrialization was leading to the emergence of a workforce committed to industrial work.[xii] Through specific regional studies, modernization theorists of the time essentially agreed that cultural values were not an impediment to industrialization.[xiii]

Despite the force of the criticism, sociological writings of the sixties, including Morris, did not fundamentally challenge the assumptions they were seeking to question. The assertion that industrialization was dissolving earlier forms of social relations, only reaffirmed the old paradigm. By arguing that traditional social ties, to the extent they existed, did not hinder industrialization, the critics denied the significance of these characteristics in the process of formation of the workforce.

Marxist labour historiography of the seventies and eighties tended to link cultural processes directly and often mechanistically to economic change. Questions of class-consciousness were analyzed in a teleological frame with working-class struggles and organization leading to greater sense of class through a gradual incremental process. In such frames, the continued existence of community ties and community consciousness was almost an aberration to be explained in terms of the economic and social context of colonialism.[xiv] Communal violence and the participation of workers in urban riots were linked up with the nature of the labour market and the large surplus of casual labour.

.These reductive connections between culture and the economy coexisted with another trend critiquing economistic notions of culture. The impact of E.P. Thompson's classic, Making of the English Working Class filtered down to labour historians in India more than a decade after it was published. [xv] Many labour historians in India too were uneasy with the teleological and deterministic assumptions implicit in Marxist social histories. Yet the struggle against the burden of past assumptions was not easy.[xvi] Historians did shift away from conventional trade union histories in which workers as human subjects were absent, to histories that explored the social and cultural worlds of workers.[xvii] But linear notions of class consciousness - suggesting that a mature class consciousness would gradually displace community consciousness - continued to underline the narratives of the labour movement.[xviii]  Determinist assumptions drawing causal connections between economic contexts and cultural characteristics underpinned a lot of writing, especially when historians tackled questions of religion and community.[xix] Besides, culture tended to be compartmentalized: slotted into the space of the community and neighborhood: it did not touch lives in the sphere of production, within the factory, nor did it mediate political spaces.  Family, gender and other issues concerning working class lives were not subjects of serious inquiry.[xx] In writings over the last decade and a half shifts are visible we can possibly see the emergence of a new labour history in India.[xxi] This essay looks at the ways in which recent studies on labour have conceptualized questions of culture.

II  

Neighbourhood and Community

Discussions on community consciousness have oscillated between reductionist arguments that see culture as a reflection of, and structured by, the economy and culturalist frames which reify culture, seeing it as a static given. Dipesh Chakrabarty's Rethinking Working Class History, based on a study of jute workers in Bengal, puts forward a powerful critique of the first kind of framework. In Marxist writings earlier, the continued significance of caste and religious identities in India was explained in terms of the colonial context. Caste and community identities in these writings appeared residual; their existence signified the incomplete process of transition to capitalism in India. Rejecting such explanatory frames, Chakrabarty emphasizes the need to understand the logic of a culture within its own terms and not through political and economic determinants external to it. He explains the persistence of ties of caste and community in terms of a hierarchical and inegalitarian culture in which notions of individual identity were absent. The identity and self-perceptions of jute workers, their notions of honour and shame, Chakrabarty argues, were defined by the community to which they belonged. They were essentially Muslims, Hindus, Bengalis, Oriyas. They were never politically emancipated from religion; not even in moments of confrontation between labour and capital.

Chakrabarty's polemic against reductive readings of culture mark an important intervention within labour historiography. However, he tends to essentialize certain given features within a culture, purging them of other historical mediations. In Chakrabarty’s analysis it is not the time of the factory – the time of modernity and capitalism - which determines working culture in India, but primordial time or pre-capitalist time. In fact it almost appears that culture can only inhabit primordial time, and workers live within the domain of culture only to the extent that the primordial defines their lives. Within his framework there is no space for practice in the producing, reproducing and transforming culture.[xxii] The subjects of his inquiry appear eternally entrapped in culturally given relationships of power; they have no capacity to reconstitute these relations. Democratic traditions, the notions of contract and equality which characterised in the West were absent in India. Unions were like fiefdoms of particular leaders governed by hierarchical norms. This in Chakrabarty's frame is a feature which cuts across time from the Swadeshi movement days of 1905 -06 to the radical trade unionism of the 1930s and 1940s. Strikes and other oppositional forms are episodic and appear almost inconsequential because they are seen as having no lasting impact on structured relationships and pre-given categories. Besides, strikes Chakrabarty asserts, could easily turn into communal riots. The elements of solidarity that went into making strikes were no different from those that entered into religious conflicts. Class identity was always embedded in overarching identities of community and religion. This is a point to which I will return to later.

There were other important studies in the 1980s and 1990s which questioned the notion of culture as pre-given and examined the processes through which it is reconstituted within the urban context. In an essay published in the early 1980s, Raj Chandavarkar examined worker politics and patterns of association in the working class neighbourhood of Girangaon in Bombay.[xxiii] Many of these issues were explored further in his later writings. [xxiv] In reconstructing the working class neighbourhood in Bombay, Raj Chandavarkar emphasized on the changes in social relationships within the urban context. In opposition to those who see the social institutions of the neighbourhood in terms of the inherited values of worker migrants, Chandavarkar explores how the working of the labour market, the need for housing and credit restructured relationships creating new bonds of region and community between migrants in the city. Leisure time activities in the gymnasium and the street and the organisation of religious festivals all helped to forge new forms of sociability. The authority and respect commanded by neighbourhood dadas, Chandavarkar demonstrates was not based on traditional ties of loyalty alone. To acquire legitimacy, they had to enjoy the confidence of the local community, which could humiliate or celebrate individual leaders. Examining the interconnections between the neighbourhood and the workplace Chandavarkar argues how ties formed at the neighbourhood intruded into the workplace and relationships at work widened and created new networks in the neighbourhood. He goes on to suggest how these ties did not always fragment, they could at times create a basis of wider solidarities.

The overall emphasis of Chandavarkar is similar to trends in labour history elsewhere. Today historians are increasingly questioning totalising narratives on class that were dominant earlier.[xxv] His writings suggest that fractures within the labour force, their sectionalism and inner divisions, endure: unities across these lines are conjunctural and momentary. There is, however, a tension within Chandavarkar's narrative between on the one hand his recognition that heterogeneity was not an aberration but an intrinsic characteristic of the working class, and on the other his defensive use of class as merely a 'descriptive category'. Underlying such a usage is the assumption that class in the real sense can exist only if there is greater homogeneity. Chandavarkar seems to reaffirm the assumptions he sets out to criticise.

Certain shared assumptions about labour history seem to underline Chandavarkar's and Chakrabarty's writings. In contrast to radical histories on labour that glorified working class action, politics has a marginal role in their frameworks. Worker protest in Bengal is spasmodic, ephemeral - it has no lasting impact on working class culture. In Bombay, class solidarities are contingent - forged at one moment, they could disappear at another. As opposed to linear conceptions of change in conventional Marxist writings, many recent writings deny possibilities of change and workers any agency in shaping their culture.

Nandini Gooptu's study of the urban poor in North India argues how particular patterns of subordination and exclusion of the 'labouring poor' in the inter-war years created new networks of solidarity and assertions of different forms of religious identity and community.[xxvi] Gooptu elaborates how urban movements -Hindu, Islamic and Shudhra, reshaped and created solidarities which cut across class lines. Yet conflicts between elite notions of order and popular militancy fractured and complicated these unities. Janaki Nair looks at the new forms of sociability and community among workers in the Kolar gold fields and textile mills in Bangalore. Adi Dravidas working in the mines aggressively asserted their notions of dignity against upper caste attempts at censure and ridicule. Religious organisations -Buddhist, Christian and Vaishnava, Saivite -tried to mobilise lower castes around movements for reform and revival. Nair argues that these conflicting allegiances did not lead to situations of hostility and antagonism between different groups. The overlap between caste and class identity and a generalised sense of opposition to upper castes among Adi-Dravida miners Nair suggests, tended to create an attitude of irreverance towards all religions.[xxvii]Although there are differences in their larger arguments, what links these writings together is their emphasis on the processes through which ties of religion and community among workers were reworked and culture is reconstituted.

Arguing along similar lines, I suggest elsewhere that the internal contours of identity were not pre-given; they were continuously remade. The assertion of caste identities in the city meant important realignments and changes.[xxviii] The boundaries and lines of difference between religious communities were drawn through conflicts and confrontations. Caste movements among lower castes widened the limits of interaction between them and brought them together in a relationship of hostility and antagonism with upper castes.

Movements for self-assertion among lower castes seek to create a new identity for Chamars by questioning Brahmanical notions of pure and impure and by valorizing their own work and their skills. Ramcharan Kureel for instance, narrated new myths about the social origins of Chamars, negating and inverting upper caste myths.[xxix] Unlike other lower caste myths which claim dignity by tracing a ritually pure and high caste lineage for themselves, Kureels like Ramcharan assert the dignity of leather work. He invents a past where leatherwork had a different status.[xxx] The term chamar (leather workers) in his representation was transformed into a generic category incorporating all workers. All those working with their hands were Chamars. What bound the two together and erased their difference was the act of labour.

Lines of difference were not fixed. At other times, during communal riots for instance, boundaries between castes were redrawn: Chamars, and upper castes came together against Muslims. Marks of communal violence remained inscribed in the changes in residential patterns, the ghettoization of communities within enclaves.

To see workers embedded in community culture alone however is as reductive as to suggest that their identities were forged in the economics of the production process. Workers had to confront their daily lives at work and outside bearing the marks of multiple identities, a multiplicity that is not captured in the neatness of homogenizing categories. In order to understand the processes through which identities were constituted therefore, we need to explore the everyday lives of the workers, their negotiation with the city and their modes of self- representation. A worker could have different identities, real and imagined, in conflict with each other and it was through such conflicts that a dominant identity could emerge at any point.

III  

Work Culture

The critique of reductionist arguments which saw the capitalist production process generating modern identities of class has moved in two directions: there are those who see workers in the factory as victims of institutions of power and authority, others who emphasize on worker practice and see work norms being shaped through processes of negotiation and conflict. Within the first tendency, there are variations. Narratives like Chakrabarty's see the workplace as a site for the reaffirmation of primordial culture. The figures on factory accidents, the rituals and ceremonies at the workplace, are all read as signs of the workers’ awe of machinery, as evidence of their pre-modern outlook. [xxxi] In other writings it is the business decisions of employers that crucially determine relationships of work and workers appear as passive subjects of disciplinary strategies of the management. [xxxii] As opposed to this a second tendency has become important since the late 1970s and 1980s - a shift from grand narratives on the working class movement to a focus on everyday relationships at the workplace and outside. The insights offered by historians like Ludtke and James Scott have contributed significantly to a richer and complicated understanding of the work relations.[xxxiii] The crucial category of eigensinn used by Ludtke refers to the everyday acts – the jocular horseplay, the physical expressions of camaraderie among workers, the evasions of work norms  - through which workers tried to appropriate time and space and create a private world of desires and fantasies for themselves. In Ludtke’s account of workers’ experiences in Nazi Germany, loafing at the workplace and other expressions of willful action by workers were not acts of resistance to Nazi authority. These were ways in which workers created a distance between themselves and authority structures at the workplace. Everyday practices were not always acts of resistance: they reproduced and affirmed, just as much as they resisted dominant structures of power and authority. Ludtke’s exploration of eigensinn is similar to James Scott’s notion of ‘private transcripts’ Eigensinn coexisted with public silence and made workers complicit in the exercise of Nazi power; just as the private and hidden transcripts of resistance in Scott’s framework, co-exist with public transcripts of submission to norms and codes. [xxxiv]

Recent writings on labour in India have been looking at the workplace as a contested terrain, as an arena were norms were negotiated. Everyday practice was important in reasserting old norms and questioning others. Workers tried to define their pace of work by taking time off from work for a smoke or a chat or a little rest. Breaks from work, which were often justified even by workers themselves in terms of physical necessity - the heat, or the long hours or the need for a smoke -clearly meant more than this. The times they went out to the lavatory or took a rest were also the times when they chatted, gossiped, and exchanged information. These were expressive times when they teased and joked. [xxxv] They were moments of communion with other workers, moments when collective identities of the work place were forged. And managerial attempts at control were often directed at restricting such comraderie between workers, especially during periods of strikes.

Skilled workers, who worked at piece-rates, could exercise a greater control over their workday. It was customary for weavers in most mills to leave before closing time; and tailors to come in well after starting time.[xxxvi] In the wider conflict over the control of work time, skilled workers often countered managerial controls with their own norms.[xxxvii]

Attempts to define the pace of work were not always intended as acts of resistance. Notions of what constitutes a slow and a fast pace of work are culturally grounded. But when such work practices are continuously categorized by managers as violations of norms, or punished as acts of opposition to authority, there is a conscious effort by workers to preserve their own practices, in defiance of imposed norms. An unintended opposition to work norms then becomes an intended act of resistance. Opposition could take the form of a violation of rules or an attack on individuals in authority who violated notions of justice held by workers. This attack can be of various forms. The person in authority can be harassed, or mocked and ridiculed, or humiliated, or physically attacked. In many different ways, authority is questioned, its limits are sought to be re-defined.[xxxviii] 

.

Thus rules and norms of work were continuously negotiated. There were reassertions of old norms and questioning of new ones, silent and hidden acts of resistance as well as spectacular demonstrative ones, redefinition of rules and attacks against persons. All these forms of opposition, intended or unintended, were important in defining the culture of work. Besides, managerial strategy did not only try to transform old habits and impose new norms. It also accommodated existing practices of workers and modified rules. New rules often formalized practices, which existed in an informal way earlier. [xxxix]

The making of work norms in the factory thus involved a process in which managements tried to lay down the broad parameters of acceptable behaviour, but the limits of acceptability were continuously pushed and redefined by worker practice. The unspoken code of the factory took for granted many practices which managements otherwise censured. But the lack of written rules for such codes allowed at times a maneuverability and flexibility. This allowed the space for a struggle between the management and the workers for their own definition of rules. Nair’s work on miners in Mysore and Simeons’s work on the steel and coal work force in the Chota Nagpur and Parry's represent explore some of these issues. [xl]

To what extent were such forms of everyday negotiation possible in work outside large factories? What was the nature of subordination experienced by the large numbers employed in various forms of contract work, those employed in domestic industries or the coolies, carters and innumerable informal workers in cities? The conflicting kinds of evidence available on worker practice, the conflictual processes through which terms of work were negotiated make assertions about the absence of all possibilities of manoevre for the labouring classes working outside large factories somewhat doubtful.[xli] The system of giving baki or advance payment to workers for instance, could have contradictory implications. Employers used it as a mode of labour control but instances of workers using baki as a mode of extracting more favourable terms were common. [xlii]

Experiences at work, the relationship with structures of authority, were important to the shaping of worker identities. Notions of self and identity forged outside the workplace acquired a new meaning within the everyday context of work. Certain categories of workers were commonly associated with militant traditions and were categorized as more rebellious. Weavers, for instance, had a reputation for militancy. Perceptions of skill and assertions of self had an important bearing on the creation of such stereotypes. [xliii] But it was through everyday acts at work - through attempts to preserve dignity and assert notions of independence- that these identities acquired a meaning in workers' lives.

 For many who worked in factories earlier, the relationship between work and notions of dignity are articulated much more sharply in the 1990s in the context of widespread mill closures. In worker narratives today there is a distancing from the travails and hardship of work in the past. In many accounts memories of work are celebrated as enriching and fulfilling.[xliv]

Today male narratives play on images of decay and aging, drawing comparisons between their decrepit bodies and the worn out machines in the factory. Work was physically empowering, non-work created a sense of weariness, a slowing down of body rhythms. In worker narratives of the 1990s there is a distancing from the travails and hardship of work in the past. Factory work is celebrated as enriching and fulfilling. There is a sense of bonding with the machines and the establishments they worked in. Many stated proudly how the looms never stopped in their mills. The tight discipline within which they often had to work in the past is recounted by many with a sense of individual achievement and male pride.[xlv]

While accounts of old workers now amplify memories of work in the past, they tend to repress recollections of strikes, the past history of struggles. Till the early 1980s when the factories were still running, workers took pride in narrating stories of the Lal Kanpur days. Today even those who were witness to the times find it difficult to focus on the experiences of worker militancy. The oral narratives their past are broken - moving between fleeting recollections of a better time  and coming back to the hardships of the present. Some returned to the past only to bring back memories of repression and defeat. In some accounts, time is telescoped, fusing a moment of struggle in the 1950s with stories of police repression and firing on workers in the 1920s.[xlvi]  Heroic moments of solidarity are layered in such accounts with the experience of despair and disunity in the present.

Loss of work means more than an economic loss for them. It means also a diminished patriarchal presence in the household and a loss of respect in the neighbourhood. Workless men struggle to retain their sense of self. Many continue to define their masculinity through drinking and association with male addas.[xlvii]  Masculine self-assertion also takes the form of increased aggression at home. Feelings of emasculation and lost pride are temporarily displaced through a demonstration of physical power over women. Women in many lower-caste households were almost resigned to the idea of drunken men beating them up at night. While not drawing a necessary connection between feelings of emasculation and violence against women, I suggest that the domestic setting becomes a more embattled domain when spaces for affirmation of male selfhood that existed earlier are displaced. Established patterns of male aggression are intensified in a situation where the very identity of the male is under question.

Recent writings also draw connections between the upsurge in communal strife between religious communities in old industrial centres and the decline of traditional large-scale industries. The erosion of spaces around which the culture of work and leisure was built has created a crisis of male identities.  Within this scenario, movements that mobilize around a politics of hatred are gaining ground, tearing apart traditions of working-class solidarity and collectivity built up in the past. For large sections of the marginalized labouring poor identification with fundamentalist militant Hindu and Islamic movements becomes a way of recovering their emasculated selves. [xlviii] The communalization of popular perceptions, the creation of mental structures that sustains the politics of violence.  The reorganisation of social space in industrial cities, the increasing ghettoization of communities, the dispersal and informalisation of work, has meant a shrinking of social and physical spaces which allowed for class solidarities. The erasure of memories of conviviality between communities hardens lines of cleavage.

IV  

Gendering Work

A concern with issues of women and work is relatively recent in labour historiography.[xlix] Samita Sen’s Women and Labour in Colonial India marks an important step in this direction. Studies on jute labour earlier probed the social origins of the workforce without problematizing the question of gender. Sen’s analysis of the gendered pattern of migration to industry provides rich insights into the processes through which the composition of the work-force in Calcutta changed over time.

In discussing the question of marginalization of women Sen's study moves away from a focus on economic strategies to a concern with questions of culture and ideology.[l]  Sen argues how ideas of domesticity that valorized women’s place in the home shaped the formation of working class culture in significant ways.

By the twenties and thirties the proportion of women in jute mills declined. Managers drew on the discourse of domesticity to legitimate the increasing marginalization of women in the workforce. Ideologies of domesticity were appropriated by working class families, who tended to associate seclusion with a higher social status. In working class families in the higher income groups, women tended to withdraw from work – a phenomenon that reaffirmed the correlation of skill with status. Processes of mechanisation and technological change in the 1930s allowed managers to dispense with women workers altogether.  Male dominated unions reinforced strategies that marginalized women from the workplace.

Sen's study shares some of the problems which often underline discussions on gender and labour. It assumes that women excluded from the labour force retreated inwards into seclusion and domesticity.  The inner domain is seen as a space of compliance and subordination, a place where women played out feminine roles of mothers, wives and homemakers. Within this framework, women can play transgressive roles only outside the domestic. What were the ways in which women interrogated structures of authority within their everyday lives at home? It will be important to understand how women renegotiated notions of domesticity and seclusion. Public conformity with norms of seclusion could coexist with private transgressions. Even within the framework of a dominant ideology of domesticity women from lower castes often create their own codes. Public affirmation of dominant codes can coexist with subversion.[li]

In today's context the meanings of domesticity for women are changing. With the closure of factories and shrinking of jobs in the formal sector the domestic is increasingly a site for women's waged work. This involves various kinds of negotiation with the outside, buying of raw materials, supply of finished products. Waged work by women -especially in a situation where male jobs are shrinking- involved new contests over space and identity. In families where women are now the regular earning members and men are intermittently employed, power relationships at home are often fraught. Work and wages especially in the absence of male earners provides women the possibility of struggling against authority structures in the family.

This is not to argue that women’s lives have to be seen in terms of one continuous struggle against patriarchal structures. Defiance went along with conformity, renegotiations and modification along with acceptance, making a little bit of change, a little difference.

V  

Conclusion

Even as scholars predict the end of labour as a subject of historical inquiry, there seems to be a renewal of labour history and an opening up new themes and issues.[lii] Not only have questions of culture, community, family and gender become more important, but the boundaries of labour history have opened up to incorporate 'unorganized' home based workers, casual labourers, self employed artisans and others who existed on the fringes of academic writing.[liii]

Labour history writing has moved beyond the economistic frames for which it was critiqued in the 1980s. Yet there is a need for perspectives on culture which are thickly descriptive and explore spaces hitherto neglected. Existing writings engage with issues of culture and community in the neighbourhood, in the street, without looking inwards into the working class home and family. What was the experience of migration for those making the move? [liv] What were the changes in family relationships?  What were the meanings of work and domesticity in the lives of women? Glimpses of the experience of women in factories come to us more through a discussion of official discourse on maternity legislation and through discussions of middle class reformist notions about working class women as deviant. Is it possible however to overcome these limitations? A historian's understanding of experience is inevitably refracted through discourses about them. Writings by workers themselves may be tainted by middle class discourses. These are problems that cannot find an easy resolution. We can only strive to listen to other stories, other voices.

In today's context in particular when hegemonic globalizing, liberalising regimes are transforming and suppressing voices of labour, when possibilities of earlier forms of protest and movement are declining it becomes more important for historians of labour to retrieve the hidden voices. New possibilities in labour history can open further only by unravelling the small gestures, the little ways in which workers and working class families struggle to retain their notions of self and dignity.

Notes