Panel No. 18

Panel Title: Empires, Nationalisms and the Containment of Labour in South Asia: Historical and Contemporary Issues

Convenor: Ravi Ahuja, Dept of History, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany
Co-convenor: Benjamin Zachariah, Dept of History, Sheffield University, UK

   Wednesday 7 July, 8–12 & 13–17

Panel Abstract: This panel seeks to look at interrelated processes of state and class formation that conditioned the lives of working people in the wider contexts of global capitalism and its changing national and imperial political structures, colonial and neo-colonial. We welcome contributions regarding the colonial or the postcolonial period, formal or informal empires, anti-imperialist as well as loyalist varieties of nationalism. We would like to focus on labour as a political issue and on the politics of labour (labour policy, social legislation, economic policy affecting labour, ideological constructions of labour as a social category, strategies of various political currents to harness and control labour, labour movements etc).
Several critical historical and contemporary issues could be addressed in connection with these concerns, e.g. the emergence of a colonial labour policy and its ramifications for post-colonial India, a critical assessment of the relationship between various streams of Indian nationalism and the rising labour movement between the 1920s and 1950s, economic policy in colonial and postcolonial India and its consequences for labour, the creation of a divide between "formal" and "informal" labour and the political exploitation of this divide, the fragmentation and marginalisation of the Indian trade union movement in the context of "liberalisation", the political implications of the closure of public sector units and of de-industrialisation in general, and the link between the rise of the Hindu right and "globalisation". The discursive context of varying claims to political legitimacy framed in terms of the needs of working people might also be addressed within this framework. The post-colonial state sought to give itself the image of a "benign state"; the colonial state before it tried to present itself as the protector of labour. In this context, it would be important to map out the continuities or changes in the political conceptualisation of labour across the historical boundary of 1947.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

Paper Giver 1: Nitin Sinha, Doctoral student, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK

Paper 1 Title: Railway Labourers and the Politics of Strikes in Colonial Bihar, 1918-22

Paper Abstract: The period, 1918 to 1922 in general has been regarded as a period of multiple strands in the history of nationalism and colonialism, though the multiplicity always is quite obscured in the standard accounts of these ideologies and explanatory models. Particularly, this is more the case with the standard nationalist/marxist accounts, which tend either to subsume or at least accommodate the various popular protests that took place within this period in their unitary and unidirectional flow of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism or as manifesting the teleological growth of the working class consciousness. Thus, these accounts also incorporate the fresh spate of labour strikes within their fold as a sign of growing popularisation of the feeling of nationalism first, and second the self evolution of the colonial subjects in their struggle against colonialism. The Marxist strand poses the growing numbers of strikes as indicative of, if not the complete realisation of the class consciousness then of its progressive growth through the working of trade unions. Interestingly, the colonial contemporary reflections also shared the premise by accepting that the popular protests were mainly the works of ‘outsiders’ and ‘instigators’.
This paper, which is the study of the railway labour strikes in Bihar tries to open up the field for some alternative explanations. The focus is mainly on the East India and Bengal Nagpur Railways that crossed through the central and southern part of the undivided Bihar respectively.
Through the study of the narratives of the strikes, the paper will attempt to look at few dimensions that were largely defining the nature of the relationship between the workers and the colonial officials on the one hand and between workers and the elites at multiple tiers on the other. The paper tries to make the distinction between the ‘ethics’ of the strike, which is reflective of the overarching ideological framework of the nationalist-marxist accounts and the ‘politics’ of the strike which has much to do with the ground realities and every day making and the reconfigurations of the codes of power that defined the relationships between, not only the workers and their masters as two opposed categories but also within their own constituencies. This ought not be regarded as one binary replacing the other, or an addition to the existing binary schemas as overlappings were always there, but as a strategic deployment of the terms to remain aware to the nuances of the labour movements. Thus, issues of racialism and the codes of disciplining the labour force that not only was limited to the production aspect but also extended to their body (as a site of discipline, for example, the regulation of time workers were supposed to invest in lavatory while on work) will be taken up. It will be argued that the constitution, representation and perception of these disciplinary codes were all sedimented through multiple practices. The important section is devoted to the strike activities and the threat perception that colonial state had, particularly because of the rumours of the strikes. Through all these, it appears that the authority of the colonial officials was not all pervasive and overwhelming. The hesitation to use the force to quell the strikes at many instances points to its constraints. The state was also operating in a limited space, where at the level of the discourse it tried to hegemonize its authority but was constrained at the practical level.
Since, the period coincides with what has been defined in standard accounts as ‘the first phase of mass movements’ and also with the simultaneous growth of the trade union organisations, the paper will also look into the modes of mobilization to unravel the relationships between them. In all these, the interesting role played by the sadhus and fakirs in mobilizing the workers has been emphasised. Thanked by Gandhi for attending the 1920 Nagpur session of Congress, these sadhus did conform, as Gandhi asked them, to the official programmatic of swadeshi and satyagraha. But they equally were vocal against the cow killings and some indeed preached violent non-cooperation and race-hatred. Even the messages of boycott were framed in the signs of communitarian values, like ‘foreign clothes were saturated with the fat of cow and swines and as such no Muslim or a true Hindu can wear them at the time of prayers, puja, etc.’. The thrust will be then to present the multiple strands of nationalist mobilizations, which were not unattached with the mainstream agenda, but yet, represent the constraints of mainstream nationalist programmatic.

Paper Giver 2: Ravi Ahuja, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Paper 2 Title: Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900-1960

Paper Abstract: South Asian steamship labour accounted by 1938 for about a quarter of the British merchant marine’s workforce. Hundreds of thousands of these so-called ‘lascars’ migrated from various regions of the subcontinent over large distances seeking employment in the two ports of recruitment for steam ships, Bombay and Calcutta. Maritime labour networks (i.e. networks that were often based on shared ethnicity and utilized for conflicting purposes by both employers and employees) extended from remote villages to India’s two major harbours and beyond to other colonial ports and to the centres of metropolitan capitalism. These networks could also be appropriated for purposes of international migration: they could enable ‘lascars’ (who received only about one quarter of the wages of ‘white’ ratings) to get access to better paid occupations in metropolitan countries. Scholars have started to look at the communities of ‘deserted’ Indian seamen that sprang up in various British cities. What is remarkable, however, is that these communities remained rather small: Until the 1950s the number of all Indians living in Britain was, it has been estimated, not higher than 8,000.
The fact that Indian maritime labourers came to be a circulating rather than an emigrant workforce reflects the dialectics of integration and exclusion that characterised the formation of the transterritorial maritime labour market and its institutions. Institutions that were instrumental for attracting Indian land-dwellers to transcontinental steamship work were also crucial in the creation of restrictions to the movement of this potentially highly mobile workforce. These restrictions were imposed at several levels: First, of course, by way of anti-immigration policies of various countries, secondly, by means of specific labour legislation for ‘lascars’ and thirdly, through the structure of maritime labour networks itself. The paper discusses the pattern of institutional restrictions on the mobility of South Asian seamen under British imperialism and argues that (apart from being paid much lower wages) one of the major attractions of South Asian lascars for British employers was their more limited freedom of movement as compared to European seamen. Ironically, the end of colonial rule and the partition of India created new restrictions on the mobility of South Asian seamen, since major recruitment areas like Sylhet and northern Punjab were now separated from Bombay and Calcutta by international borders. Paradoxically, these new restrictions contributed to the transformation of some maritime networks of circulation into networks of transnational migration.

Paper Giver 3: Hira Singh, Department of Sociology, York University, Canada

Paper 3 Title: Politics of Immigrant Farm Labour in British Columbia (Canada): Agency of the State and Workers’ Resistance

Paper Abstract: The paper deals with the political dimensions of farm labour in British Columbia (Canada) in a historical perspective. Since 1905, East Indian immigrants have been the mainstay of farm labour in the agricultural hinterlands of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia (Canada). The introduction of East Indian labour to the farms of British Columbia has its origin in a multilayered political (and economic) process on a global scale involving the British colonial state in India, the Canadian state, the Imperial state in England and its expansionist wars in South Africa. Against this historical background, the paper deals mainly with the direct and indirect intervention by the Canadian state on behalf of the agribusiness. Furthermore, it deals with the relations between the farmers and farmworkers mediated by class, race, and nationality. Finally, it discusses the complex processes of continuous resistance and struggle by the immigrants to overcome their marginalization in terms of class, race, and citizenship. The dual role of ethnicity in immigrants’ resistance is analyzed. The paper is based on a combination of evidence collected through ethnographic fieldwork with the farmworkers in British Columbia and the secondary material from the various sources.

Paper Giver 4: Benjamin Zachariah, Department of History, University of Sheffield, UK

Paper 4 Title: The ‘Masses’ and the Making of the Myth of the Benign State in India

Paper Abstract: The centrality of the anti-imperialist struggle and the alliance sought between Indian capitalists and Indian nationalism of various descriptions (not always successfully) often led to a deferral of questions of labour rights, wages and welfare – both before and after independence. This happened simultaneously with attempts of sections of the nationalist movement, then organised on a coalitional basis, to mobilise labour behind the national movement. The nationalist leadership and the postcolonial state it controlled thereafter claimed to represent labour and at the same time demanded discipline from the labour force for 'national' goals.
The central myth that made this possible was that the post-independence Indian state was, or would be, a benign one, or at least a lesser evil. In recent years, now that the state has shed its pretensions to social concern with the onset of liberalisation (which were of course in many cases just pretensions) and state power is in the hands of forces and persons who can no longer be described as benign by any stretch of imagination, this myth has given rise to certain anomalies and can be properly questioned.
This paper is an attempt to examine aspects of the genealogy of the myth of the benign state in the debates surrounding a future, possible India that would come into being at the end of colonial rule. In particular, it seeks to understand the conditions (political, economic, discursive) in which the ‘masses’ were instrumentalised by the custodians of the national state, and the custodians of that state presented themselves as intermediaries between the exploiters (capitalists, landlords) and the exploited (workers, peasants).

Paper Giver 5: Nandini Gooptu, St Antony’s College and Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, UK

Paper 5 Title: Economic liberalisation, labour and politics: Calcutta jute mill workers in the 1980s and 90s

Paper Abstract: It is well-known that economic reforms in India in recent decades have been accompanied by a move towards flexible use of labour and a ‘casualisation’ or‘informalisation’ of labour. An emerging body of literature suggests that labour market restructuring of this kind might variously undermine class-based mobilisation, fuel identity politics and single issue oriented agitations, or contribute to violence and ethnic or sectarian conflict, and ‘criminalisation’ of politics. This papers asks how unemployment and increasing economic vulnerability reshape political subjectivities of urban industrial workers and examines the impact of this on wider urban politics. With a case study of Calcutta jute mill areas, the paper uncovers how workers’ political ideas about public morality and responsibility, or about justice, rights, citizenship, the state and democracy are transformed in the context of economic liberalisation, and how such emerging ideas then mediate political behaviour. The aim is to assess how urban labour market changes and related social and ideological developments in the locality affect wider democratic and party politics, and urban political conflict.

Paper Giver 6: Saroj Giri, Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, India

Paper 6 Title: Global movement, local struggle: Workers in the World Social Forum in India

Paper Abstract: Subjectivity by its very nature is never given apriori and closed. It is open and fluid even as at any point in time there are stable fields or frames of reference. This means that the particularity of what constitutes subjectivity is a changing phenomenon: thus the subject in the Indian context who fought against colonialism is not the same as today’s subject taken over by say the Hindu right. In this context what is the new subjectivity brought about by the World Social Forum and related social movements. The general point to be remembered however is not just that at different points the given subject acts differently, given the different place and time, but also that what it means to be a subject itself changes, depending on what the subject does. The subject is not just an empty universal with any particular since it possesses definite powers and tendencies (so universal is not given but not arbitrary either).
What did the holding of the World Social Forum(WSF) in India signify in terms of the subjective self-perception of its Indian participants? That is, how does network-based supposedly non-hierarchical movements represented by the WSF impact on notions of subjectivity among people from traditional societies that are still steeped in precapitalist hierarchies and feudal loyalties?
In particular my paper explores how workers in trade unions based on hierarchical semi-feudal set-ups and top-down bureaucracy came to terms with their participation in the WSF which was supposed to be an open space, with no visible leadership and no common strategy and plan of action.
I take up workers from the trade union movement in Mumbai. The unions I take up are affiliated to the left political parties in India and can safely be taken to represent what is called traditional left movement. However during the WSF for the first time in India both traditional and new social movements came together to organise and participate in the WSF process. Thus while neoliberal globalisation is creating major shifts in the subject’s relationship to institutions, the anti-globalisation movement’s global character also inaugurates shifts in actors’ institutional affiliations and subjective self-perception.
On the basis of fieldwork among workers in Mumbai who took part in the WSF, I examine the influence of network-based anti-globalisation movement on the subjectivity of workers who have always viewed their struggle in terms of a localised perspective. However the issue is not just between the local and the global but also between the internal organisational forms of trade unions and those of the anti-globalisation movement.
Thus while the anti-globalisation movement is going global and trying to renegotiate its terms with the national framework, the same is not true of the nation-state whose hold on power at the local level is stronger than ever before. Thus the feeling among large majority of the people of being connected up with the larger global movement often provides the state to carry on its own task smoothly than ever before. This in a way heralds a new reconfiguration of the processes for the reproduction of state power in the light of the anti-globalisation movement.
This has definite repercussions on the trade union workers who participated in the WSF in India. For while on the one hand they are having to concede to neoliberal measures at their workplace and their neighbourhoods, they are made to believe that they are part of a larger and world-wide movement against these same measures. What transpired from my fieldwork is therefore something like global empowerment coupled with local disempowerment. It is this which transfigures the new subject in developing societies. The new subjects in the WSF process in India were found to be enmeshed in precapitalist, state backed feudal power structures even as they were supposedly part of a global network-based civil society movement essentially constituted by the Northerners and Southerners from the cosmopolitan educated elite.