The Agrarian Origins of the Knitwear Industrial Cluster in Tiruppur, India (original) (raw)
Related papers
T-shirts and Tumblers: caste, politics and industrial work in Tiruppur's textile belt, Tamilnadu
2014
Neoliberal economic policies are not new to India. While 1991 no doubt marked what Nayar calls a 'paradigm shift' from the state to the market (Nayar 2001: 129), processes of economic liberalisation were already introduced-albeit in a stealth-like and patchy manner-from the 1970s onwards (Nayar 2001). Over the last decades, therefore, neoliberal policies have facilitated the development of urban, industrial regions across India, of which the Tiruppur garment cluster in Tamil Nadu, South India, is a typical one. Yet, in a less direct manner, such policies have also brought about far-going transformations in rural society, which to date have been poorly documented, let alone conceptualised. 1 This research was funded by an ESRC-DFID Research Award (RES 167 25 0296) and is based on 12 months of field research in Tamil Nadu, conducted between August 2008 and July 2009. The research would not have been possible with the assistance of our research assistants-most especially Gayathri, Arul and Muthu. The paper has benefitted from comments by Chris Fuller, Judith Heyer, David Mosse, Christian Struempell, and Patrick Neveling as well as participants at the Neoliberal Crises in Post-Reform India conference, Halle, September 2009. transition would take place in all places and all contexts to the same extent, it was certainly the main form of change that he identified. However, even substantialization remains necessarily incomplete for Dumont as it 'cannot amount to a fundamental transformation of the whole system' (Fuller 1996: 12) because change remains confined to the politico-economic domain, which is itself encompassed by a religious ideology that remains untouched (Dumont 1970: 228). This last claim, however, has not stood up against empirical scrutiny. Several of the ethnographic contributions to Caste Today (1996), for example, clearly illustrated that the ideological and religious underpinnings of caste have largely waned, and that ideas of purity and pollution have lost much-if not all-of their legitimacy (Fuller 1996; Deliège 1996; Mayer 1996). Much of the literature on urban India in particular argues that while caste differences remain present, it is class position, culture and lifestyle that constitute the new idioms through which difference and separation are expressed and shaped (Donner 2008; Fernandes 2006; Liechty 2003). Against Dumont, therefore, there appears to be almost total agreement about the erosion of the ideology of purity and pollution as the basis of caste, at least as far as non-Dalit groups are concerned. However, when it comes to interactions between caste Hindus and Dalits, ideas of pollution and practices of untouchability have not completely vanished (Gorringe and Rafanell 2007; Mosse 1994; Still 2009). This leaves us with the obvious questions of what happened to caste, and indeed to substantialization?
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(2): 325-338., 2013
This article asks how labour markets are changing in the context of wider transformations in the rural economy. Drawing on evidence from two villages in southern India, which are both close to, and deeply affected by, a major textile industry cluster, the article examines local labour markets, arguing that labour market segmentation is not simply caste-based. While some Dalits from one village have gained access to jobs in export markets, the same group of Dalits from another village have not. Furthermore, different groups of Dalits have had very different experiences of accessing jobs in urban areas, and the article shows that barriers to entry are located more in the rural social economy than in the urban industry. It is argued that villages only a few miles apart have very different local labour markets because they are uniquely and variously embedded in local institutions that interact with economic transformations in contingent ways. The article shows that having an industry on your doorstep means very different things for different people.
SOCIOLOGY OF LABOUR AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN NORTH EAST INDIA
This paper highlights how weaving as occupation is associated with various lineage groups of Manipur and also emphasises how hierarchy and differentiation is linked with it. Social stratification in India tends to concentrate exclusively on the caste system. This paper argues that although weaving in Manipur, one of the North Eastern states of India is generally a traditional craft practiced by mostly each and every household, there is a 'caste-like' system of social stratification developed and operated within the structure of Manipuri society. It tries to explore another model of 'Hindu' social stratification, which may not be explicitly explained by those concepts and theories propounded on the basis of caste system prevalent in other parts of India.
Colonial Knowledge Economy: Handloom Weavers in Early Twentieth-Century United Provinces, India
International Review of Social History, 2022
In existing historiography, the modernity discourse presents modern knowledge as being more economically efficient and technologically advanced compared to traditional skills. This theoretical lens has introduced a hierarchy of production and restructured the meaning of work and division of labour within the profession of weaving. Historically, the contexts of both the modern textile industry and traditional handloom weaving were interrelated in terms of technology and skills, but they have become increasingly segregated over the last two centuries. This article suggests an apparent distinction between “modernization” as a historical process and “modernity” as a condition. Analysis of the policies and prejudices of the colonial state explains the dynamics between producers, products, and techniques in the handloom textile sector of the United Provinces during the early twentieth century, as well as the impact of government policies, nationalist ideas, and global processes on the sec...
T-shirts and Tumblers: caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48(1): 103-131. , 2014
This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly differentiated and unpredictable effects neoliberalisation has on the lives of villagers who have become directly or indirectly engulfed by its processes, paying particular attention to the uneven impacts on local landscapes of capitalist production and on rural relations of caste and dependency. The article examines rural transformations through the contrasting experiences of Dalits in two villages that became connected to the Tiruppur industry. While in one village, Dalits gained access to the urban industry, in the other, they remained disconnected from urban garment jobs due to persistent relations of debt bondage and unfree labour. It is argued that processes of industrial neoliberalisation do not lead to linear transformations in caste relations and social inequalities. Rather, the relevance and meaning of caste are transformed in uneven, and often even contrasting ways, depending on how particular localities are integrated into wider institutional regimes of power and rule. Processes of neoliberalisation unleash powerful encounters between old structures of power and new regimes of rule, and generate new configurations that defy prediction and expectation.
India's industrial labour: Heirs to the original factory proletariat?
Critique of Anthropology, 1999
The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour is a major event. It poses an important challenge to Indian scholarship; and offers a chance to revisit some traditions of social theory, history and politics. Apart from providing a varied window on India's industrial labour today, it argues that fashionable Western social theories should be reassessed in the light of a resurgent Asia. Working class history is booming in India. In the 1990s, the hope was that deregulated Indian capitalism would reinvigorate the world economy. These authors are not optimistic on that account or for any speedy improvement in the lives of most Indian industrial workers. Parry’s introduction and Breman’s summing up provide coherent bookends to case studies by anthropologists, sociologists and historians. ******** I break here with the habit of juxtaposing case studies with well-worn theories of labour history. Instead, I compare this material with 19th century Lancashire, the cradle of the industrial revolution where Marx and Engels envisaged a revolutionary future for the factory proletariat. Their contrast between the factory proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie as classes was invalid then and has not fared well since. Lancashire’s migrant workers sustained a significant informal economy and flourishing self-organized associations. Their core institutions were the chapel, union and cooperative; each united collective and individual interests. An alliance of Lancashire’s mill owners and workers underpinned the national success of the Liberal Party in the decades before the First World War. In 1900 Lancashire had 3mn people (a third of them born in Ireland) out of England & Wales' 12 mn.
2010
This briefing explores the effects of the garment export industry in Tamil Nadu, south India, on the livelihoods of people living in the region, whether working for the industry or not. It describes both direct and indirect impacts through a tightening of the labour market. It considers how caste and gender shape people's access to different employment opportunities, as well as wage differentials. Whilst recognising the positive effects that the industry has had on employment and income in the region, the briefing calls for