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Situating
the Renewal: Reflections on Labour Studies in India
*Dr.
Prabhu P. Mohapatra
(*
Prabhu P. Mohapatra is Visiting Faculty with the
Integrated Labour History Research Programme, V. V. Giri
National Labour Institute.)
This
essay attempts to reflect on the revival of interest in
labour and working class in several social science
disciplines in India. That this renewal has emerged
precisely when the foundational categories of the
disciplines connected with labour are being vigorously
questioned is the least paradoxical aspect of this
revival. At the outset, I must mention the recent
formation of the Association of Indian Labour Historians,
a professional body of historians committed to
intensifying, collating and propagating research on all
aspects of the historical formation and growth of the
working classes in India. Apart from that, there has been
a flurry of recent publications and conferences and
seminars in the last two years, which are indicative of
the modest growth and, perhaps, convergence of interest in
labour in the various social sciences disciplines in
India.1 I shall, in this essay, try to situate the renewa]
of labour studies in the context of the contemporary
transformation of the labouring landscape in India. In
doing so, I will compare the present scenario in labour
studies with the immediate post-independence upsurge of
intellectual and policy interest in labour in India. What
bearing does the contemporary situation have on the
renewal of labour studies? The relation between societal
changes and disciplinary transformations or intellectual
history is hardly straightforward or unidirectional. At
the least, it is refracted through theoretical frames that
decide the importance of themes and the salience of
questions. I will argue that, for the contemporary renewal
of labour studies to sustain itself, it is necessary to
understand the dominant optic that has directed its gaze
to emphasise and render visible certain phenomena while at
the same time marginalising and occluding others. Finally,
I will discuss a set of essays by sociologists and
historians that were specially presented at an
International Conference on Indian Labour in December 1997
(soon to be published as a special issue of the journal
C0ntributi0n£ t0 Indian S0ci010gy>) to discern the way
in which recent researches on labour have problematised
and moved away from this dominant theoretical optic.
The
revival of interest in labour studies in India and
particularly in labour history is, in some ways, in marked
contrast to the situation in the industrially advanced
countries, where a considerable anxiety is evident
regarding the future course of disciplines connected with
labour studies.2 In these countries, the sharp decline of
the blue collar working class, the rapid rise of flexible
labour arrangements under neo-liberal dispensations, the
visible decline of organised labour movements and the
dismantling of the former socialist system in east Europe
seems to have thrown into disarray academic pursuits
related to labour. Academic interest in labour studies has
been declining too, in large measure, due to the rapid
rise to prominence of post modernism in social sciences
and the coeval crisis of Marxism [K^atznelson 1994, Sewell
1993, Joyce 1995]
Several
recent changes in the landscape of labour in contemporary
India provide the context for this renewal of interest in
labour. I shall briefly sketch these. First is the
numerical preponderance of wage earners. It is now quite
clear that wage-earning households constitute the majority
of households in the country and wage earners have emerged
as the largest social group, replacing the peasantry in
the course of the last decade. Proletarianisation seems to
have increased significantly, a trend shared in common
with other Asian countries. Yet, this process is not
without significant reversals. In several key areas of the
industrial sector there, is visible evidence of 'deindustrialisation',
as in the case of the cotton textiles of Bombay, Ahmedabad
and Kanpur where worker retrenchments now number in lakhs.
In addition, there has been continuous downsizing in
several private and public sector industries under the
impact of liberalisation and globalisation, compounded by
a deepening recessionary trend in industry in general. On
the other hand new forms of work and labour processes
associated with information technology have made their
presence felt. A steady, if unspectacular, trend is
noticeable too in the increasing participation of women in
the labour force, gradually modifying its gender profile.
These contemporary social transformations of labour appear
not to be directly connected to the phenomenal political
changes, which have occurred over the last two decades.
Organised labour's political clout is today, perhaps, at
its weakest point ever in the history of independent
India. The 1980's saw the last significant upsurge of
labour militancy. Labour based political mobilisation has
been conspicuously absent, even as community and caste
based mobilisation, the so-called identity politics, has
emerged to command the political arena.
However,
the most significant change in the landscape of labour is
the relatively recent rise to prominence of the concept of
informal sector. Since its introduction in the 1970s and
its popularisation, especially through the FLO and the
World Bank, the category has come to dominate recent
discussions on labour. Initially associated with that
sector of the urban economy characterised by self
employment and petty trading, it is now used to describe
that vast sector of the economy, designated in official
statistics as the "unorganised" sector, which is
composed of innumerable small-scale industrial and
agrarian enterprises lying almost entirely outside the
ambit of labour regulations. Labour in the informal sector
includes, apart from regular workers in these small
enterprises, casual and temporary workers of all kinds in
construction and other such industries, vast numbers of
migrant labourers in seasonal industries in urban and
rural areas, home based workers, artisanal workers,
domestic servants, and other service sector workers. On
present, rough, estimates, these unprotected workers
constitute about 90 percent of the twenty eight-crore
workforce in the country. Significantly, the bulk of the
informal sector labour works in agriculture and in rural
areas, though, even here, there is an increasing tendency
towards non-farm employment. [Visaria and Basant 1994]
The
almost complete absence of labour rights and state
protection, the multiplicity of small employers and the
prevalence of abysmally low wages distinguish workers in
this informal economy. It appears that the trend towards
accentuated proletarianisation and wage earning in the
last two decades has been marked by the "informalisation
and casualisation" of the labour force. [Breman 1995,
Deshpande and Deshpande 1998] hi other words, the vast
increase in the numerical strength of wage earners has
taken place largely in the most insecure and lowest paid
sector, outside the purview of state regulation and
resistant to labour unionisation.
Two
Paradigms and the Industrial Transition Optic:
The
nature of the current renewal of labour studies will be
evident once we compare it with the context in which the
first wave of study of labour originated in India. Studies
of labour and the working classes became prominent in the
first decade after independence, primarily in the context
of the planned economic development. Industrialisation was
to be the preferred route for economic growth and
modernisation. In so far as labour was recognised as a
crucial "factor of production", its deployment,
bargaining practices and conflict behaviour became objects
of methodical scrutiny. Industrialisation and modernisation,
then, were the twin interrelated processes that were
expected to transform traditional institutions of Indian
society and realise economic growth. This was emphasised
in the nationalist leadership's agenda, reflected in
Nehru's vision of modern industry as "churches and
mosques" of modern India and in his Report to the
Avadi session of the All India Congress Committee.
"The alternative to industrialisation is to remain a
backward, underdeveloped, poverty stricken and weak
country. We can not even retain our freedom without
industrial growth...." [Nehru 1955,cited in Myers
1958, p7].
I
will discuss here two competing paradigms which dominated
the labour studies in sociology /social anthropology and
history since the 1950s namely modernisation and Marxist
paradigms. Despite important and fundamental differences
between these two paradigms there was apparent similarity
in the way in which they visualised the formation of the
industrial factory labour and its action and behaviour
through an optic of transition.
The
intellectual agenda for labour studies was shaped by two
large-scale research programmes instituted under the
influence of the "modernisation" theorists in
the west. The first was the Inter University Research
Programme on Industrialisation, set up with the aid of
Ford Foundation in 1954 and the second was the Social
Implications of Industrialisation Programme set up under
the auspices of the UNESCO. [Kerr et. al. 1960, Moore and
Hoselitz 1963] Both the programmes were large collaborative
exercises, involving social scientists of industrially
underdeveloped countries, to carry out country-level
research focusing on the social changes consequent on
industrialisation. These research programmes had a lasting
impact on the research agenda of Indian labour studies in
the first two decades after independence. Many of the
studies on labour shared or contested the terms set by the
underlying perspectives, but, in essence, did not quite
change the framework itself. In view of its importance, I
will, briefly, sketch the salient features of the
theoretical perspective, which I shall term the industrial
transition optic. I prefer the use of a visual metaphor to
describe it since, I believe, the research agenda that
emerged in consequence determined the focus on industrial
labour, more narrowly factory labour, and magnified
selective aspects of the formation of this specific social
group and its behaviour, while ignoring the dynamic of the
much larger domain of the wage earning phenomena.
According to its formulaic assumptions, the non-factory
wage element was no more than a residual trace ineluctably
in transition to industrial proletarianisation. In the
process, the initial and culminating points of the
transition were stereotyped and reified, so that the
prevailing physiognomy and orientation of the labour force
was invariably measured in terms of its deviance from a
putative norm and appropriately designated in accord with
the respective stage of development.
It
is not without significance that the dominant motif of
industrial transition was drawn from the historiography of
the industrial revolution in the west, primarily from the
experience of England. Both the aforesaid programmes held
that economic development and social change of the
advanced and underdeveloped countries could be analysed
under an unified research framework, the underlying
assumption being that industrialisation in the
underdeveloped countries would produce essentially similar
results as in the advanced countries. The newly
industrialising countries were thought to be in a stage
that was similar to the early stage of industrialisation
in the advanced countries. While admitting significant
national variations, industrialisation was assumed to be
an inexorable process, marked by a set of universal
characteristics that characterised the "actual course
of transition from traditional society towards
industrialism ...an abstraction, a limit approached
through historical industrialisation".
The
main theoretical paradigm of these research programmes
consisted of four features of this transition process that
affected the formation and development of a labour force:
-
a
demographic transition from the traditional sector
to the modern, or a migration from village to the
city, from the field to the factory.
-
a
transition in institutional relations in
recruitment, deployment and regulation of the
workforce from the personalised, informal, and
primordial attachments characteristic of
"traditional" social relations to
impersonal, rational bureaucratic and contractual
relations specific to the modem factory system.
-
a
transition in attitude, consciousness and behaviour
of the workers, from ascriptive, primordial
attachments, kinship and joint family loyalty,
hierarchical and particularistic behavioural norms
to achievement, primary loyalty to nuclear family,
formal equality and universalism. A major corollary
of this transition in consciousness was the degree
of commitment of workers to 10 the industrial way of
life.3 This was the Labour Commitment hypothesis.
The labour commitment thesis posited that workers in
the early stages of the industrialistion process
were uncommitted to industrialism reflected in the
rural and kinship nexus they maintained ,a mature
industrialism required full commitment of workers
reflected in their internalisation of work norms and
discipline and complete severance of ties with land.
Lack of commitment of labour was thought to be a
serious though not insurmountable barrier to
industrialisation. [Kerr etal 1962, pp 170-174 also
Moore and Feldman, 1960, p4]
-
a
transition in protest behaviour. Since
industrialisation disrupted traditional society, it
was assumed that the protest behaviour of the
workers would reflect this disruption. The nature of
their protest bore an inverse relationship to the
degree of commitment to industrialism. Uncommitted
workers protested with their feet (absenteeism) or
violence, wild cat strikes and spontaneous
demonstrations. Partially committed workers used
strikes and mass withdrawal of labour power, while
fully committed workers resorted to grievance
redressal. The long-term decline of strikes and the
full integration of workers into the collective
bargaining system were envisaged, such an outcome
being consonant with a mature, fully committed
industrial labour force. 11
Let
me note here three implicit aspects of the industrial
transition optic. Industrialisation was equated with
factory production, industrial production was equated with
large-scale machine based manufacture, and the industrial
worker was equated with the factory worker.4 It was not as
if the vast mass of wageworkers other than factory labour
was not visible. They were simply thought to be located in
either traditional, residual or disintegrating sectors -
an inevitable part of the transitional phase but devoid of
any independent internal dynamic. In 1951, total factory
employment was 2.5 million and the total industrial labour
force in large-scale industries, including the railways,
plantations and mining was estimated at 7 million. The
industrial labour force constituted only 5 percent of the
total workforce in the country and no more than 22 percent
of the total workforce in non-agricultural employment
(32.37 million). Factory employment proper was only 7
percent of the total non-agricultural workforce. How could
so small a proportion of labour force of India be a
crucial area for investigation and analysis?
The
answer lay in its potential for growth and for political
organisation of workers. Myers wrote in 1958: Here is
where economic expansion .occurs; it is the growth part of
the economy... Furthermore, here is where discontents and
dissatisfaction arising from industrialisation tend to be
centred. The rural 12 agricultural labour force, and even
much of the non-agricultural group are scattered and
diffuse; the urban industrial labour force is concentrated
and easier to organise. Trade Union activity, the focus of
the protest against the consequences of industrialisation
for the urban workers, is centred on the industrial labour
force, and especially on key industries such as coal,
transportation, docks, textiles, and engineering
...[Myers 1958 p9].
By
consensus, the industrial worker was assumed to be a male,
as is evident from the title of a significant work of the
period, Industrialisation and the Industrial man. The
impact of industrialisation on family forms was noted en
passant and was related to the progressive commitment of
the industrial labour. But neither the gender composition
of the workforce nor the differential gender experience of
industrialisation was thought to be of any significance.
Even
though the industrial transition was conceived of as a
temporal transition, in reality it was entirely devoid of
any actual historical temporality, being in essence an
ideal type transition, in which merely the abstract time
of the stagewise evolution of industrialisation, namely
the early, middle and mature forms of industrial society,
was implicit. Philips Abrams 1971 (pp 18-32) had noted
this tendency in sociology.
Logically
ordered contrasts between structural types have been
treated, quite naively for the most part, as though
they effectively indicated chronologically ordered
transitions ... The function of the sociologists past ...
has not been to provide a frame of reference for empirical
studies of the mechanics of transition but instead to
furnish a rationale for side stepping such tedious
historical chores.
It
was thus easy to equate contemporary underdeveloped
societies, like that of India, with the early industrial
period of the western countries. By purging real concrete
temporality from the concept of industrial transition,
modernisation theorists denied covalence to contemporary
societies.
Sociological
and social anthropological research on industrial labour
in India inherited the problematic of the industrial
transition optic. It must be admitted that the industrial
transition optic found greater favour with what is known
as industrial relations studies than in mainstream
sociology. Mainstream sociology in India remained largely
unconcerned with the labour question, focused as it was on
caste, kinship and the village. In this context, why urban
sociology too remained rather stunted during this period,
several notable exceptions notwithstanding, 14 is a
question of some relevance. Mainstream anthropology
similarly remained focused on the study of tribal social
systems, very rarely taking into account the long-standing
history of the participation of tribal populations in wage
earning activities, migrations and industrial employment,
including in large enterprises like plantations mines and
factories.
Several
studies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s set out to test
the hypotheses generated by the two research programmes. [Sheth
1968, Kanappan 1970, Sharma 1968, 1974, Vald 1968,
Ornatti
1951, Myers 1958, Lambert 1963, Morris 1955]. Typical of
such studies was the focus on the factory as the unit of
analysis, usually excluding the residential and social
clusters, in which the workers lived, and often quite
divorced from the political and social milieu in which the
factory operated. The research questions usually focused
on the following aspects:
-
the
extent to which the workers were committed to
industrialism, various indices being chosen to test
the advance of workers along the gradient of
increasing industrial commitment, e.g. extent of
workers rural articulations, absenteeism, attitudes
towards workplace etc.
-
the
nature of the institutional relations of recruitment
and workplace to establish the degree of
personalisation or impersonalisation. 15
-
nature
of protest most typically reflected in organised trade
union activities and strike behaviour.
The
questionnaire-based survey was the preferred research
method adopted the ethnographic method of interviews and
participant observation was seldom employed.
The
bulk of the sociological research on Indian labour
remained trapped in the optic of industrial transition.
Elements of the optic, namely the thesis of lack of
commitment of labour in the Indian context, were
challenged by several authors . Morris found, for instance,
no evidence of lack of commitment among workers in Bombay
and Jamshedpur. The instability of the workforce in the
former setting was attributed to managemnt strategies
rather than to workers attraction for rural life. N.R
Sheth found that the workers in a Gujarat factory
performed their industrial role with the expected
rationality of a commited labour force. Their traditional
ritual nexus hardly affected their industrial performance.
Lambert, in his Pune factory study, found most of their
workers "over committed" rather than lacking in
their commitment to the industrial way of life, even
though their commitment was largely because they carried
notions of jajjmani and attachment to a particular
occupation with them. Charles Myers found Indian workers
only "partially" committed. In contrast Subbiah
Kannappan in a belated defence of the commit The 16 ment
thesis saw workers behaviour in their protest, absenteeism
rates etc. to be marked by low commitment in the early
period of Indian industrialisation, gradually changing by
the 1970s towards fuller commitment. [Kanappan 1970]
While
the labour commitment thesis was thus found to be of
dubious value in the Indian labour situation the problem
was that its lack of verification did not in any sense
challenge the transition optic which underlay it. Thus,
when Surendra Munshi flogged the commitment thesis in 1977
for the last time, he concluded that it was the structure
of imperial policy under colonial rule and the employers
policy "independent of the will of the workers,
(which) set the material limits, presuppositions, and
conditions within which the class originated, enter into
determinate relations and failed to grow adequately
(emphasis added) [Munshi 1977 M-85, As indices of such
inadequate development, Munshi, like several authors,
pointed to the fundamental difference in the formation,
functions and consciousness levels of the working class
in developed and underdeveloped countries [p. M86]. Thus,
unwittingly, Munshi reinstated the industrial transition
optic by which the development of working class formation
in any particular context was measured as conforming to or
deviating from the ideal path of the advanced industrial
country. [See also Saberwal 1977 for a similar argument]
17
Marxist
Paradigm and the Transition Optic:
The
sociological study of industrial labour in India, steeped
in the modernisation perspective, had to contend with the
competing Marxist paradigm that sought to explain the
problem of working class formation consequent on
industrialisation. There were two striking differences
between the rival paradigms. Marxist theory saw the
problem of industrialisation in India as a specific form
in which the capitalist mode of production manifested
itself in an essentially agricultural and pre-capitalist
milieu. In contrast to the modernisation theorists, who
emphasised the ultimate harmony of interest between the
managers and the managed in the industrialisation process,
Marxists stressed the irreconcilable internal
contradiction between labour and capital and between the
process of proletarianisation and the process of capital
accumulation as regulating the dynamic of
industrialisation. Second, and this is crucial, the
Marxist paradigm posited a fundamental difference in the
experience of industrialisation between the advanced
capitalist countries and the colonial countries. The
industrialisation process in the latter was shallow,
partial and disarticulated due to the colohial environment
in which modern industry was introduced. The process of
proletarianisation was similarly disarticulated from
industrial growth. The "de industrialised craftsmen
were not immediately absorbed in modern industries but
were pushed back to the steady 18 villages. This partial
nature of industrialisation had a profound effect on the
working class formation. Thus, M. N Roy wrote:
The
normal course of industrial development was obstructed in
India. Industry did not grow through the successive phases
of handicraft, manufacture, small factory, mechanofacture
and then mass production. So the Indian worker has not
been trained in industry. He lacks the proletarian
tradition [Roy 1971, pi 13].
The
Marxist paradigm, as is evident, stressed the particular
historical origins of industrialisation as the moulding
circumstance that shaped the subsequent development of
working class formation. Not surprisingly, while the
sociology of industrial labour was dominated by "modernisation
theorists", working class history was predominantly
inspired by variants of Marxism.
Beginning
in the 1970s (there were a few earlier Marxist histories
of sections of the working class) several studies focused
on aspects of working class formation, working class
politics and trade union histories. It is not without
significance that historical studies of workers emerged
about time when the modernisation theory inspired
sociological and industrial relations research agenda had
exhausted it and was yielding progressively diminishing
returns. Since then there has been a 19 trickle of
historical research, largely confined to large-scale
industries (cotton textiles, jute, steel, mines, railways,
and plantations). Several research projects, which were
taken up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, have borne
fruit in the shape of monographs, in the last decade. This
is not the place to analyse either the full range of
issues taken up by historians of neither the Indian
working class nor the surprising gaps in their research.
What I intend to do here is to sketch the capitalist
industrialisation optic which undergirded their account of
working class formation. In many ways it bore marked
resemblance to the theme of transition in the
modernisation research agenda and this should not surprise
us. As I will argue, this resemblance derived from a
common reading of the industrial revolution, more
specifically the historical experience of England.5
Briefly
two sets of transitions are envisaged in the Marxist
historical studies on Indian labour- the structural and
cultural transitions respectively. The structural
transition involved a transformation of the mode of
production from the pre-capitalist (feudal according to
some) to the capitalist, and the corresponding change in
the structure of the labour force from being predominantly
agricultural to the industrial form i.e. from being
primarily peasants to being industrial workers. The
cultural transition was conceived of, primarily, as a
transformation of community consciousness to
class-consciousness. 20 A theory of the correspondence of
the structure of society (mode of production, extent and
type of capitalist penetration, technological composition,
scale of enterprise etc.) with the level of consciousness
underlay most accounts. Second, the model of development
of class consciousness was that of classical western
working class- i.e. a teleological transition from
peasant/rural/ craft consciousness to trade union
consciousness, finally attaining the highest form,
revolutionary class consciousness. The indices of
consciousness were very often seen to be reflected in the
level of organisation and militancy of the workers, hi
other words, they were focused on situations of overt
conflict (strikes, work stoppages etc.).
Early
historical studies of labour in India followed this model
exactly and concentrated on the progress of working class
formation and the increase in their organisational power
as reflected in the establishment of trade unions and the
emergence of militant strike activities. [Sen 1975, Karnik
1967] Yet, the situation of the working class in India
seemed always to escape the teleological framework of such
studies. The first problem that confronted this framework
was to account for the persistence of particular forms of
workers' consciousness in the shape of caste, religion,
region etc. which the supposedly universalist class
consciousness seemed unable to transcend or seemed
surmount only occasionally. In this situation,
class-consciousness seemed to have been indefinitely
deferred. It was always "emergent",
"elementary", "embryonic" or
"incipient", gestating in a morass of
primordialism. The second, related problem was that the
" pure working class" the bearer of
revolutionary consciousness seemed never to materialise
fully, surrounded and linked as it always was with several
forms of labour that were only partially proletarianised
or not at all. Much theoretical and investigative energy
went into identifying the obstructions to the development
of or distortions in a full-blown class-consciousness.
The reasons for these deviations were sought in the realm
of structures (economic and political) and, by extension,
in the realm of culture. Thus, the continued rural linkage
of the worker, the coexistence of multiple modes of
production within the same social formation, the
segmentation of the labour market, etc, supposedly
accounted for the persistence of pre-modern mentalities
and hampered the emergence of a proper proletarian culture
[Sen 1975, Mitra 1981, Dasgupta 1979, Behl 1995,
Chakraborty 1989].
Dipesh
Chakrabarty's important work on Bengal jute workers
grappled with the problem posed by the adoption of a
"emancipatory narrative of transition" in
Marxist historiography of Indian labour. He critiqued the
assumption, commonly held, that capitalist
industrialisation everywhere was experienced in 22 the
same manner by workers, the only difference being the
structural variations in the nature of industrialisation.
He argued that, unlike the workers of England, who were
born into a fully formed "hegemonic bourgeois
culture" and inherited notions of citizenship and of
formal equality, the Indian working class was born in the
crucible of "pre-capitalist" culture, marked by
hierarchy and pervasive distinctions of birth, religion,
caste and region which overrode his identity as
worker."...the class identity of the worker could
never be distilled out of the pre-capitalist identities
that arose from the relationships he had been born
into" (p218). These pre-capitalist values held by the
workers were reinforced in the mode of recruitment and
employment, reflected in their relationship with the
sirdar and the trade union organisers, and was expressed
in their protests and, most prominently, in the frequent
conflicts between workers on the basis of religion and
region. Chakrabarty criticised the tendency among
historians to explain away the deep rooted pre-capitalist
community or primordial consciousness of workers by
reducing it to structural factors. [Bagchi 1985, Dasgupta
1979 and see Chakrabarty 1988] Instead, he suggested that
workers' behaviour and consciousness can only be
understood by referring it to the 'inner logic of
culture-the signifying systems the different communities
use to make sense of their lives" [Chakrabarty 1988].
Chakrabarty's
work is significant for the ways in which it contested the
primacy accorded to structural explanations of working
class formation in India and starkly posed the question of
culture as the "the great unthought" of Marxist
historiography. However, in spite of challenging the
teleology inherent in much of Marxist labour history, his
work ultimately reinstated the capitalist industrial
transition optic in at least three important ways. His
account of "pre-capitalist" culture remained a
non-contradictory system of signs and values incapable of
transformation by workers own practices. In the end,
worker practices could only reproduce these "values
and norms" irrespective of the context in which such
practices were performed. This immense stasis in the
'internal logic" of workers' culture escaped concrete
temporality and could only be dissolved through external
pressures. As I have argued, the reification of
traditional culture was an important feature of the
transition optic. Apart from reification of 'community
consciousness", the ihitial state of transition, he
also stereotypes the universalism inherent in the idea of
class-consciousness such that only a particular set of
values and ideas of 'bourgeois hegemonic" culture
(i.e. individualism, formal equality etc) could be
productive of such a consciousness. Finally, in the mirror
image of the arguments of historians who explained the
retarded development of the Indian working class by
recourse to the difference introduced by the nature of
industrialisation under minority in most industrialising
countries till the beginning of the 24 colonialism, now
Chakrabarty introduced the irreducible cultural difference
between the West and India. The problem posed by the
transition ultimately remained intact in Chakrabarty's
formulation because the actual historical development of
the working class could only be measured against the ideal
type of capitalist industrial transition. And, as I have
argued, this does not solve the problem of failed
prediction inherent in the idea of a normal development. A
major stream of historiography of Indian labour has thus
remained trapped in what Margaret Somers has called an
"epistemology of absence" or, to it put simply,
why the working class in India did not act or behave as
expected- the alibis being sought sometimes in structure
and now in culture [Somers 1996]. I have argued that the
industrial transition optic that undergirded both the
modernisation sociology and the Marxist history of Indian
labour was founded on a particular reading of the
industrial revolution and was based on the western
industrial experience, particularly the English
experience. Recent historical investigations have
substantially altered the "Big Bang" theory of
industrial revolution. Not only was the industrial
revolution a complex and multifaceted growth process (now
estimated to be much slower than the take off rates of
Walt Rostow) with several crosscurrents. Its main
protagonists, the workers were extremely heterogeneous,
with factory labour constituting a 25 twentieth century.
[Cameron 1985, Cannadine 1984]. It is now agreed that in
most industrialised countries, domestic modes of work,
outwork, and small workshops expanded rather than being
swept away by the emergence of factory system, at least
till the end of the 19th century. [Samuel 1977, Cotterau
1986, Aminzade 1984, Sabel and Zeitlin 1985] The lead
sector fixation in industrialisation studies had
persistently neglected the dynamics of labour relations,
workers' behaviour and consciousness of the vast majority
of the workers in these "informal sector"
industries. Persistent rural links, "primordial"
attachments, recruitment systems based on kin and
patronage, widespread use of intermediaries, and
segmentation of labour markets along ethnic and racial
lines, marked labour relations and were intrinsic aspects
of proletarian class formation in the industrialised
countries. Divisions among workers along racial and ethnic
lines are now receiving attention from historians [Roediger
1991, 1994]. No longer are these features considered the
special preserve of the peripheral countries, including
India. Similarly, work by feminist historians have
questioned earlier accounts of working class history that
focussed exclusively on the collective action in the
public sphere, in which very often women's role was
marginalised . They have proposed alternative rendering of
the experience of industrialisation that focussed
simultaneously on the hidden sphere of reproduction in the
family and broadly not in any way mean the adoption of
relativism and abandonment 26 on the way in which
relations between sexes were shaped. [Rose 1992, Clark
1994].
Class
formation theory itself has undergone drastic changes. Ira
Katznelson has, in an influential essay, sought to purge
the teleological presumptions of the classical theory of
class formation, in which consciousness and collective
action erupts naturally from the class structure. Instead,
he argued that class is conceived of at four levels,
structure, labour market, dispositions and collective
action. Variations at all these levels are interconnected,
though not in a determinate manner. This allows for
comparative analysis of different outcome at all four
levels across nations. [Katznelson 1986]
Structure,
culture and politics are not mutually exclusive domains in
which working class action and behaviour can be
understood. The lacunae of the theoretical optic which has
a built in notion of normal trajectory of transition in
all these three domains has in many ways shaped research
questions of much of sociological and historical studies
on labour. I have argued that the main problem with this
has becn the evacuation of concrete temporality from the
process of working class formation. Recent studies on
labour have steadily moved away from the teleological
constriction imposed by this transition optic. I want to
clarify here that the movement away from this theoretical
stance does 27 of the notion of change. On the contrary,
transformation of relations between and within these
domains remains the most important research issues for
historians and sociologists. By focussing on working class
practices, as the site where such transformations can be
best understood, recent researches have tried to break new
ground. What, then, has happened to the transition optic?
I will take as examples some of the essays presented at
the International Conference on Indian Labour held in
December 1997 in Amsterdam, and see how various authors
have dealt with the transition theme [Parry 1997].
There
are at least three areas in which the transition optic has
been problematised and worked out in these essays. The
first relates to the site of working class consciousness
in politics and in collective memory and representations.
The second area is the experience of industrial rhythms of
work and finally in the exploration of contrary forms of
workers' resistance at the workplace and everyday life.
The
problems inherent in the transition optic have been
explored fruitfully in Raj Chandavarkar's essay on Bombay
mill workers. [See also Chandavarkar 1985, 1994] Eschewing
the familiar route of structural and cultural determinism
to explain working class action and behaviour,
Chandavarkar places it squarely in reflected in the way
the authors work out the complex relation 28 the political
arena. Arguing that class-consciousness could only be
expressed in the realm where labour, capital and the state
intersected, it can be understood as strictly contingent
on the political conjuncture. This allows him to change
the explanation from the persistent fragmentation of the
working class by "primordial identities" to the
spectacular display of class unity by workers in
particular political conjuncture, e.g. 1920-1930s in
Bombay, and also its eventual dissolution. By making class
consciousness and class identity a politically contingent
phenomenon his work escapes the structure Vs culture bind
that has plagued the debate on working class history in
India. It allows for other collective identities of
workers (caste, religion and kinship) to be similarly
intelligible in their political expressions and to compete
and co exist - albeit "uneasily"- with class
identities.6
The
historical contingency of class-consciousness and its
political expressions are important dimensions of research
that provide an alternative to the ahistorical transition
optic. Yet the problem in such a perspective lies in
explaining expressions of class during periods of relative
quiescence (is it latent or absent?) and the inadequate
attention paid to the relationship between the cultural
formation of class and its political expression. There is
a danger here of structural and cultural determination
being replaced by the purely "political "
workers 29 explanation of class consciousness or class
unity. Since working class consciousness is discernible
only in their political practice, there is a danger too of
implicit tautological reasoning. Narrow identification of
working class consciousness primarily in the political
terrain determined by state and capital leaves out other
crucial sites where such consciousness is forged and
transformed, namely at the workplace and the quotidian
life of workers.7
The
social constitution of class and the industrial transition
is problematised in historians, Douglas Haynes and Chitra
Joshi's essays by taking recourse to workers
representation of the past. Joshi contrasts the euphoria
of the 1937 strike among Kanpur workers and the remarkable
unity developed by Kanpur mill workers with the loss of
working class identity in a situation of large-scale
retrenchment and job loss in the 1990s. Their bleak
present colours their memory of past work relations and
strike action. Here we have apparently a transition in
reverse. Among Surat and Bhiwandi powerlooms and jari
workers, Haynes finds a variety of ways in which workers
represented the past work relations and the
transformations of these in the present. Common to them
all was a deeply personal sense in which the transition
was judged and the way in which the past was used to
critique their present conditions. Both these essays
establish quite clearly the deeply narrativised nature of
the industrial transition and the 30 agency in
constructing the conceptual lens through which this
transition is made sense of and experienced.
Jonathan
Parry and Christopher Pinney problematise the industrial
transition in their essays by focussing on paradoxical
reversal of the optic and differential manner in which the
transition from rural to industrial rhythm of work and
peasant to worker status was conceptualised by the
workers, the managers and the villagers on the fringe of
large industrial establishments of modern India. Managers
idealise the rural while demonising the rural mentality of
workers at the same time. The Industrial transition
emerges here as an idealised employer's norm etched in
factory murals and standing orders. Agricultural workers
see in the factory a means of escape from the humiliating
ordeal and uncertainty of rural life while the upper caste
employers of these workers construct industrialism as
destroyer of social norms. Parry's essay focuses on the
experience of industrial workplace and contrasts the
intermittent work schedules in the Coke Ovens and Steel
Melting Shops of Bhilai Steel plant and the opportunity it
offers for informal workgroup socialisation with the
continues and arduous work process in agriculture. However
such reversals of and the contrasting visions of
industrialisation may reveal the lingering presence of the
industrial transition optic rather than a definite
theoretical move away from it. This is 31 between worker
resistance and capitalist industrialisation. Is
absenteeism at work to be seen as an employers
construction of rural mentality of workers or as a
collective strategy of resistance crafted by the workers
in specific circumstances? Parry views shirking at work
from a perspective of an ideal industrial workplace
discipline whose absence then explains in part the relaxed
rhythms of work. Pinney's essay suggests an uncritical
acceptance of industrial discipline among workers. A
closer scrutiny of power relations in workplace practices
might have shown up a more complex attitude among workers
that both accepts and subverts industrial discipline. [See
Joshi 1992]
Workers
resistance need not be viewed as either completely
internalising or totally resisting capitalist industrial
discipline -these polar states are as I have emphasised
emerge from the optic of industrial transition. The essays
by sociologists Gert De Neeve, Miranda Engelshoeven and
Karin Kapadia deal with the transformation of work
relations and the workers resistance in informal sector
industries. DeNeeve's essay is particularly insightful
about the ways in which workers in powerloom industries
have utilised the advance system (initiated by an upstart
employer group to attract skilled labour) to ensure a
modicum of job security in a highly volatile labour market
as also to gain some control over work rhythms. That they
do so from a highly of increased supervision led to the
collapse of the system. 32 unequal position of power is
indicative of the possibility of workers resistance in
altering and shaping work relations even in the absence of
organised opposition. Though individually crafted their
wide prevalence suggests a presence of collective
strategies of resistance, which are limited and shaped by
power relations but set in motion molecular
transformations of these same relations. These strategies
are neglected in focussing solely on situations of overt
conflict. Kawada finds at least three sets of
transformations in her study of work and gender relations
in gem cutting industry, a technological and institutional
change from Rangoon Diamond to American Diamond, from
bondage of male labourers to bondage of female labour, and
finally a drastic alteration in the gender and skill
composition of the workforce. Transformation of work
relations or resistance to it does not reflect a unilinear
transition but rather are intercut by gender and caste
differences. Thus successful resistance of male workers to
oppressive bondage results in the incorporation of their
wives into the same relations, caste idioms provide means
for tying down labour as also the language through which
workers lay claims on the employers. Engels hoeven in her
study of Surat Diamond workers finds a change in the terms
of work relations as employer's shift from a system of
advances to distribution of good roughs as a means of
controlling labour. The workers resistance to immobilise
and control their work rhythms through advances occasioned
this change. The cost to employers in terms Engelshoeven
finds that diamond workers who are of the same caste as
the employers avoid open confrontation and represent their
relationship with the employers as harmonious. Caste links
with employers, she argues could explain the absence of
overt conflict in the industry. Even though they focus of
workers practices, all the three papers seek to explain
the absence of overt conflict and lack of organisation
among workers. Is it that there is a lingering doubt that
these practices of informal resistance are in some senses
not the real thing and that organised trade unionism
represents the ideal form to which it should aspire, and
caste, religion and employer practices form insurmountable
barriers to the attainment of that goal? Engelshoeven's
data shows clearly that the system of advances collapsed
without any organised attempt to subvert it, Kapadia's
rangoon diamond workers were able to withdraw from bondage
without any overt resistance to the system. Once the logic
and strategies of workers practices are reconstituted and
viewed outside the "normal transition optic" it
is possible to understand how workers adapt to situations
and also instances when such practices could bring about
reversals in employer strategies.
To
return to the problem I set out at the beginning of this
essay - the relation between contemporary scenario of
labour and the renewal of labour studies reflected in the
essays in this volume, -workplace, neighbourhoods and
public sphere are all sites for 34 in the first place
there is quite clearly a concern with broadening the
category of labour forms. It is no longer adequate both
for theoretical and empirical reasons to narrowly focus on
one section of the industrial wage labour - the factory
proletariat to the exclusion of other labour forms, hi
fact as is clear in the researches discussed above,
insights drawn from individual collective practices of
workers in the 'informal sector " could be fruitfully
applied to understand the logic of workers behaviour and
actions in the large industries ."The crucial issue
here is how do we bring together a variety of forms of
labour together under one frame work? Does wage earning
itself provide sufficient and necessary ground for this
theoretically unified approach? Or more important still is
it at all necessary to have a unified frame work? A
concern with the ideal transition has led to this search
for a single criterion of definition of labour, and
attribution of a singular interest and a concomitant level
of culture and consciousness to the workers and the
working class. Viewed from outside the transition optic
pluriform labour and also the multiplicity of worker
practices and identities become theoretically
intelligible. Heterogeneity of labour forms then becomes
not an impediment but infact the very condition for a
richer and theoretically fruitful analysis.
Secondly
there is evident in the recent researches a greater
concern with understanding worker practices at several
levels 35 forging of individual and collective strategies
of resistance and contestation of identities of workers.
In this regard a signal achievement of some of the recent
research has been to draw attention to the workplace
relations which inspite of theoretical lip service paid to
it in the dominant paradigms has remained "the great
unworked" of labour studies. (See specially Jonathan
Parry's essay). But several key areas in workers lives
requires much greater attention than has been accorded
here for example gender identity and family forms of
workers need to be explored more fully as also the kinship
and caste networks of workers.
Finally
it is clear that once the unilinear and Ideological
transition optic is problematised it becomes possible to
integrate the contemporary and the historical accounts of
labour. This entails interdisciplinary cooperation.
Interestingly one finds that sociologists grapple with the
problem of accounting for historical transformation of
labour relations in the informal sector industries they
studied. Historians on the other hand either explicitly or
implicitly have examined past account of labour relations
in the light of the contemporary. It seems to me that the
magnitude of contemporary transformation, its
contradictory nature has in some sense spurred the
interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange of research
methods- in fact it has made it an urgent necessity. The
36 temporal dimensions of this change and the pace of
transformation has made historical understanding crucial
for mapping out not just the substantial content of this
change but also the forms in which it appears. At the same
time the historical study of past forms of labour, and the
notion of change itself will have to be re-examined in the
light of the contemporary.
NOTES
1.
Several recent publications in the field of labour history
testify to this trend see for e.g. Chakrabarty 1989,
Chandavarkar 1994, 1998, Dasgupta 1994, Nair 1998, Simeon
1995, Behl 1995, Robb (ed) 1994, Joshi 1995. Also several
recent essays in the journal Indian Economic and Social
History Review and Economic and Political Weekly. In
sociology and anthropology the trend is weaker though see
fireman's important book (1995) as also Holmstorm (1984).
2.
See the special issues on the state of Labour History:
"The End of Labour History?" International
Review of Social History (Supplement December 1993);
"What Next for Labour and Working Class
History?" International Labour and Working Class
History, No 46 (1994).
3.
Labour Commitment thesis was widely used to describe
behaviour of workers in the process of industrialisation.
First enumerated in Kerr et. al. 1955. It was key thesis
in several studies done in the 1960s. The degree of labour
commitment was measured by level of rural linkage,
absenteeism and other behaviour of the workers (See Myers
et al).
4.
"Industrialisation is defined as one aspect of
economic development: the development of the factory
system of production. So defined, 37 industrialisation is
more limited in scope than the growth of manufacturing
industry per se. Our concern is with the acts and norms
required for effective factory labour." (Feldman and
Moore and Feldman (1960) pi4.)
5.
The similarity between the modernisation and Marxist
narrative of transition has been stressed often enough
(see Chandavarkar 1985) some times without noting their
fundamental difference. Dipesh Chakraborty (1989) argued
that Marxist perspective shared with liberalism the
narrative of transition tracing their common root to the
Enlightenment.
6.
Dilip Simeon's densely narrativised study of workers
strikes in Steel and mining industry of South Bihar in the
1920s and 30s is perhaps the best example of the thick
description of the political conjuncture in which workers
action and consciousness could be understood. Simeon
demonstrates the complex interplay of class, ethnic and
national identities of the workers and its deployment in
colonial state, managerial and worker strategies during
heightened conflict situations. (Simeon 1995)
7.
Chandavarkar , though pioneered the study of working class
neighbourhood as crucial to tbe understanding of working
class action (Chandavarkar 1981).
8.
See for instance Bhattacharya (1999) for an argument that
the category "labouring poor" might be
analytically more relevant for historical analysis in the
Indian and third world context rather than the category of
"industrial proletariat". See also Marcel van
der Linden and Shahid Amin (1997) for a theoretical
attempt to understand processes of proletarianisation in
which pure form of wage labour (unfree labour, unpaid
family labour) remains imbricated in various non wage
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