'Pet ke waaste': Rights, resistance and the East Indian Railway Strike, 1922 (original) (raw)
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Economic and Political Weekly , 1990
on the question of who should speak for the working class. This study of the strike seeks to show why the dialec tic of leaders and the led' need not be the dialectic that the historian of the working class should accept THE process of retrieval of instances of popular initiative and rebellion in colonial India appears to be in retreat. The subaltern studies project, initiated with a view to mine that "autonomous domain' of popular politics, 1 has recently revealed a far more diffuse and distinctly non-ideological approach to Indian history. 2 This historiographical shift, unwittingly perhaps, occurs at tike same time as the momentous events of 1989-90 in eastern Europe which are widely read as the 'triumph of capitalism' and as discrediting the Marxist perspective altogether. The historiographical implications of these events in turn cannot be overstated. As Fred Halliday has recently suggested, if the Ideological simplifications' of this 'triumph' as well as the resurgent challenges of nationalism, clericalism, etc, are to be met, the critique of capitalist political economy must be sustained at all levels. 3 The recovery of instances of popular initiative must continue, not in order to lengthen lists of selfknowing, politically canny subalterns' by the historian's self effacement 4 or to provide 'models for imitation' but as an acceptance of the political responsibility of oppositional intellectuals to re-present the disruptions and fissures in the hegemonic processes that envelop the peasants and workers of colonial and post-colonial India. This responsibility lies in navigating between the twin tendencies , of valourising subaltern praxis as rebellion, and of being satisfied with a critique of dominant ideologies, in the counterhegemonic journey.
The World of workers' Politics
Modern Asian Studies , 2008
This paper uses a study of strikes of railway workers in Bihar and Bengal from 1918 to 1922 to set out and examine the complexities of workers' politics. Three broad themes related with workers' politics, viz. racial ideology, actual ‘event’ of striking and the related activities of workers, and techniques of mobilization have been covered in this paper. In each of these cases, it has been argued that rigid categories like racialism or nationalism are of little help in unravelling the complexities of workers' choices and their politics. Their politics were more flexible than what meets the eye, and their choices were created through dialogue, if not determined by the various factors surrounding them. However such choices were also being limited by the larger context provided by the ideologies and institutions of racialism, nationalism, and colonialism.
International Review of Social History, 2015
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
"Workers' Way": Moments of Labor in Late 1940s Calcutta
International Labour and Working Class History, 2023
The postwar situation in Calcutta was part of the picture of seething anticolonial popular and labor discontent in the Indian subcontinent; this was perhaps the most radical, the most potent, period for the subalterns in the country. However, this complex historical moment with varied, competing, shifting, overlapping tendencies has been reduced and flattened in the historiography. It is as if the twin events of partition and independence were inevitable. City workers, especially the port workers, emerged as a visible and powerful presence in the anticolonial movement. By reconstructing the arena of collective action—focusing on the context, the modalities, and the social content of the major strikes involving port labor or “moments” of radicalism, this article seeks to recover the role of workers in decolonization. It will show how workers contested and outstepped the politics of nationalist leadership(s) and communalism in significant ways multiple times, placing a politics of labor rights and entitlements, of struggles against exploitation and poverty on the postcolonial agenda. The article argues that a “workers’ way,” an alternative even if hazily defined pathway of decolonization, in which new citizens would not be divided on religious lines, was concretized and became a part of the political imagination of the time. The port strike of 1947, a swing-back from the deadliest episode of communal riots, in a matter of months, signifies the extreme fluidity of the political situation in the late 1940s, which is unsurprisingly missed in the conventional historiography. The article finally highlights the limits of postwar radicalism: the “historic” port workers’ strike was ultimately channelized as a legal industrial dispute by the communist leadership of port workers’ union. With their key demand of parity of wages and allowances with government employees, port workers staked their claim to labor institutions offered by the postcolonial state, which was to cordon large sections of them as a privileged layer from rest of the laboring classes in the city.
Contribution of Indian leaders in Kenyan Trade Union Movement
isara solutions, 2018
The construction of the Kenya- Uganda railway track was the main reason of migration of Indians in Kenya. They mostly settled in various parts of Kenyan territory which is now known as modern Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. After WW2 they became involved in various occupations fields and this railway track laid the foundation of cultural and economical life of both countries. Through this cultural exchange Indians became more interested to engage in Kenyan mainstream politics. They were playing a significant role in the Kenyan nation-building process. The Indian origins were actively participating in Kenya politics from the colonial period to till Independence. As a Diaspora community they sacrificed their own comforts to bring Independence for Kenya, they constantly engaged in Kenya politics to success the liberation movement and freed to country from colonialism. The study intends to explain how Indians became important sources in Kenyan politics and how the Kenyan government appreciated them after independence. The study also explains the two most protagonist leaders in Kenyan mainstream politics and their contributions for their country. The trade union movement was taken place in Kenya to save the workers’ rights from the Imperialist government and their exploitative policies. In this movement, the contribution of Makhan Singh and Pio Gama Pinto as an Indian origin were unforgettable and they shaped the movement and brought the freedom for Kenya. Through this study, I describe the past relation of India and Kenya, contributions of Indian origins like Makhan Singh and Pio Gama Pinto as a trade unionist and nationalist leaders, the birth of trade union movement and how Kenyan government appreciated both two leaders in post-independence
Violence as a tactic of social protest in postcolonial india
European Journal of Sociology, 2019
In March 1974, trade union leader and Chairman of the Socialist Party of India, George Fernandes, formed a new independent trade union of railway workers and then led a massive nation-wide strike lasting about a month. Two years later— March 1976—Fernandes was arrested as the principal accused in the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy Case, a plot to bomb strategic targets in New Delhi in resistance to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. How did George Fernandes’ political work change over these two years—from engaging in traditional trade union movement tactics during the Railway Workers’ Strike in 1974 to being the ringleader of a plan to bomb strategic targets in resistance to the postcolonial state? Why would an activist who advocated non-violent social movement tactics change strategies and end up leading a movement that primarily uses violent tactics? I argue that in its violent repression of the Railway Workers’ Strike and its illegal imprisonment of the strike’s leaders, Indira Gandhi’s administration demonstrated to Fernandes and other opposition party leaders that there was no room for a peaceful solution to the ever increasing social conflict of early 1970s India. Therefore, when Gandhi instated herself as dictator, longstanding advocates of satyagraha believed that symbolic violence against the state was the tactic most likely to lead to the restoration of democracy in India.
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The history of Kenya is not complete without the history of trade unions, which made it clear that Kenya was a class-divided country — a fact that colonialism and imperialism wanted to hide by creating an impression of a race-divided country. The trade union movement, led by Makhan Singh, Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai and others, showed the clear division between the interests of the working class and those of the foreign corporations and white settlers under capitalism. The trade union movement showed that the interests of workers and peasants could only be safeguarded by an active struggle in the political as well as in the economic front. Focusing on only one of these was not likely to succeed in national or class fields. Thus, the trade union movement carried on its political struggle into the Mau Mau movement as well as in other aspects of national struggles while retaining the industrial struggles as its main front. The article traces briefly the history of trade unions based on books by Makhan Singh and other writers.