Working Lives and Worker Militancy. The Politics of Labour in Colonial India. Ed. by Ravi Ahuja. Tulika Books, New Delhi 2013 xvi, 328 pp. Ill. Maps. Rs 695.00 (original) (raw)

2015, International Review of Social History

Many obituaries of the ''working class'' have been written (for which the International Labour and Working Class History journal has provided a hospitable home): as a political subject, on whom many revolutionary hopes were mistakenly pinned; as a unified economic category, whose foundational exclusions were exposed; or as a site of a more ambiguous ''consciousness'' than class alone. Such notices were met with fierce, and sometimes, one must admit, moralistic, reassertions of the continued importance of class as an analytical category, and as a political force. Though such obituaries have been far less evident in India, there has no doubt been a discernible shift, and narrowing interest in questions of labour and class consciousness, whether in the political or academic domain. This is in contrast to an earlier moment. Reflecting in part the surge in working-class action between the wars, and the importance of the left in the immediate post-independence period, as editor Ravi Ahuja notes, there was an attention to labour in public life and the academy ''out of all proportion to the consistently small share of factory workers in India's workforce'' (p. x). Early Indian labour historians were focused on outlining the ''objective'' conditions of labour's existence (recruitment strategies, organic composition, etc.); the highest achievement of the working class was its participation in strategies of resistance, usually strikes. Within this framework, attention was paid to ideological thrusts, whether of nationalism or communism, and institutional forms, such as trade unions and the law, which shaped not only the spaces within which the working class articulated its demands, but defined and determined the conditions of possibility of its success. As Chitra Joshi's survey of historiographical trends tells us, these early studies were driven by the teleologies of modernization. 1 Since the 1980s, historians have produced more nuanced and sensitive readings of working-class action (particularly dealing with spectacular moments of participation in communal riots in north and east India), and of working-class life and culture. Studies on the latter tried to extend beyond the workplace to the neighbourhood-beyond the articulations of a middle-class leadership to the more ambiguous powers (and services) of the dada (a neighbourhood boss both paternalistic and threatening), and beyond the purely economistic worlds of workers to richer patterns of culture and everyday life. At first sight, the present volume thus appears to be a return to older concerns: the joint invocation of ''lives'' and ''militancy'' in the title seems to indicate an interest in combining and reviving earlier interests. Indeed, there is a strong focus on the strike, and more generally resistance, on labour militancy in late colonial India, read here as the sign of the ''political''. This could consist of working-class unrest in the two crucial years of invasive plague measures in Bombay (1896-1898): Aditya Sarkar argues that this allows us to detect the ''the generalized withdrawals of labour or at least the threat of such withdrawals'' (p. 24, emphasis added) here interpreted as amounting to ''general strike''. 2 A more particular focus on better-known moments of heightened working-class politics