Acknowledgments

I am grateful for funding for research from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, the University of California Chancellor's Fellowship, and the Michigan Society of Fellows. Versions of this paper have been presented at the Michigan Society of Fellows, the History Seminar at the University of Natal, and the Association of American Geographers. I have benefited from comments from these audiences, and I am particularly grateful to Keith Breckenridge, Michael Burawoy, Catherine Burns, Fernando Coronil, Maraika DuToit, Gillian Feely-Harnik, Gillian Hart, Gabreille Hecht, Mark Hunter, Maya Jassanoff, Vashna Juggernath, Nita Kumar, Alaina Lemon, Julie Paarl, Monica Prasad, Caroline Skinner, Jeremy Straughn, Rachel Sturman, Padmini Swaminathan, Tom Trautmann, Michael Watts, Marina Welker, Jim White, and three very thoughtful reviewers for CSSH.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect the whole town works like a decentralized factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. What is more, these self-made men hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to ‘toil’: the word ulaippu is distinct from the conventional Tamil word for work. How did Gounder peasant-workers remake the dynamics of work through their toil, to make Tiruppur a powerhouse of global production?

This paper emerges from a larger exploration of the regional historical and geographical processes that have enabled certain subaltern men to accumulate capital in provincial India. Against dominant renditions of Tiruppur as an industrial district on the model of the much-vaunted Third Italy, or of Tiruppur as a success story of unleashed entrepreneurial energies and decentralization in a time of unprecedented economic liberalization and globalization of capital, I argue that work in Tiruppur is forged through a regional configuration of power, meaning, and practice. What is more, Tiruppur's industrial form took formative shape in the late 1970s, before its turn to global production, when Tiruppur was primarily a producer of banians, knitted men's undershirts.¹

In this paper, I concentrate on the relevance of the agrarian question for industry in Tiruppur. I show how Gounder toil draws from a specific agrarian labor regime forged in the 1930s, and how Tiruppur became a specialist town through regional processes of agrarian transition and geographical specialization. I then turn to the ways in which Gounder peasant-workers came to the industrial cluster in Tiruppur and remade practices of work while remaking themselves as a fraternity of decentralized capital. I conclude by suggesting how ex-worker Gounder owners enact their propensities to toil in stitching sections at the heart of the division of labor, where they revive an agrarian past to remake the industrial present. My point is not that the subaltern can accumulate capital. Rather, I am concerned with how certain subalterns remake self and circumstance to harness specific cultural-historic resources to the possibilities of capitalist development. In the process, subaltern knowledge and power become a means for provincializing capital within the uneven development of capitalism.²

Invoking subalternity and provincialization in this way requires that I situate this research in relation to the highly influential Subaltern Studies Collective, and underscore its departure from the traditional concerns of agrarian political economy. As Chakrabarty's (2000) genealogy of Subaltern Studies argues, quite rightly in my view, the divergence between Marxists and postcolonial scholars may in fact be dramatized by polemical rather than intellectual or political commitments. Indeed, Marxist broadsides against postmodernists who valorize the singular fragment parallel postmodernist broadsides against Marxist who adhere to vulgar class reductionism. While I share Chakrabarty's pessimism regarding fruitful synthesis through metropolitan Marxism, I suggest that this does not hold for traditions of Marxism that do not carry metropolitan presumptions of liberal subjectivity and class reductionism. Neither do these latter traditions assume that the singular and fragmentary are necessarily sites of resistance to global capitalism. Gounder self-made men demonstrate how certain subalterns might use singular constructions of inequality and difference to work the system, to accumulate capital and dominate an increasingly fragmented working class. Decentered ethnographies of the capitalist present might better begin with actual interactions of capitalism and subalternity, seeking forms of resistance alongside relations of complicity.

Scholars in the agrarian tradition of Marxist political economy, in particular, have for the past several decades developed anti-essentialist understandings of capitalist change that explore creative uses of the past in ways that may nonetheless be deeply exclusionary.³

Why do Tiruppur's self-made Gounder men pause predictably to hinge their retrospective narratives of success on their toil, and what does this have to do with remaking place, class, and industrial work? In situating these narratives of work on a broader canvas, I focus on two linked agrarian questions that have fundamentally shaped dispersed specialist towns centered on producing specific commodities. First, Gounder farmers forged a particular work politics in the flexible Gounder tóttam, or garden farm, of 1930s commercial agriculture in the area of Coimbatore District. These ways of working and controlling work provided resources that Gounders could draw on in very different contexts. Second, agricultural specialization and regional agro-industrial linkages in Coimbatore District produced a series of specialist towns with Tiruppur at the helm, in a regional mosaic of rural-urban development that set off Coimbatore from the rest of South India. These two aspects of the regional agrarian question—centered on flexibility and specialization, in contemporary terms—also emerged within a distinct political climate. Coimbatore has, until recently, been a stronghold of Congress and Communist Party activism, in contrast to the anti-Brahminism and Tamil linguistic nationalism that swept the rest of Tamilnad and the radical grassroots communism that grew in the neighboring state of Kerala.⁵

production politics in gounder farming, 1890s–1930s

In writing the most important ethnographic source on fin-de-siècle Coimbatore in the late nineteenth century, both for history and colonial rule, Frederick Nicholson was profoundly ambivalent about the “industry” of Coimbatore's ryots, or smallholders with long-term rights to land. While bemoaning their contrast with “French ryots,” Nicholson also notes peasant proprietors investing in wells and helping other laborers access land to become owner-cultivators in their own right. This colonial order of things presumes that Pax Britannica has allowed both Tamil and French ryots to occupy the same spectrum of possibility, in which tyranny can give way to industry. What is remarkable is that by the 1930s and 1940s, Gounder peasant proprietors would become known as a caste whose virtues were precisely in their thrift and industry. Nicholson's normative position, that Gounders might rather emulate French peasants' rational use of space and time, seems to have been borne out in practice. What explains this progressive caste whose conduct appears complicit with the demands of colonial capitalism?

This question must be posed in light of broader geographical transformations in the late nineteenth century, through which several pre-colonial geographies in the Madras Presidency became parts of a colonial periphery while retaining distinct regional trajectories. By the Great Depression, these peripheries could then be seen by historians and political economists as reeling from shared effects of a recently-global economy. In the process of making this differentiated colonial periphery, ethnographic expertise like Nicholson's brought modernization theory into historical consciousness. While colonial experts marked Indians as different, increasingly through the ideology of caste, this historiography also marked in normative gestures how Indian castes should rather be. In this context, Gounder peasants in the frontier country of Coimbatore were being primed as a progressive caste precisely as Madras was becoming part of a global economy. My argument is that this progressive caste did not emerge fully formed from the minds of colonial experts, but was forged as much through changing practices in the fields of rural Coimbatore.⁷

The new popular prejudice of the industrious Gounder was forged in the rural west of the Tamil country through a particular work politics in the early years of commercial agriculture. Until the late nineteenth century, regional agriculture was mainly of food crops destined for local markets, but by the mid-twentieth century Coimbatore had become a bastion of commercial agriculture in the south. By 1931, Coimbatore's agrarian structure was dominated by cultivating owners (40.9 percent) and agricultural laborers (49.3 percent), with relatively small groups of cultivating tenants (7.6 percent) and non-cultivating proprietors (1.9 percent).⁹

The commercialization of land was also well underway by the early twentieth century. The scarcity of labor and the persistence of a land frontier prompted colonial experts like Nicholson to note the ease with which laborers could access land and become owner-cultivators in their own right. Struggles over land pepper the legal records, and the deepening of the land market by the 1930s parallels rural Coimbatore's notoriety for its violent entrepreneurs.¹¹

Gounder farming changed qualitatively with the introduction of American long-staple ‘Cambodia’ cotton in the early twentieth century. As early as 1909, a key institution for crop research and development, the Agricultural University, moved to Coimbatore and became a center for research on varieties of cotton. Areas of Coimbatore subsequently went through a dramatic shift from coarse cereals to Cambodia cotton, and this shift in cropping patterns was most pronounced in Palladam Taluk, in which Tiruppur lay. While Gounder tóttams also grew tobacco and groundnut with success, irrigated Cambodia led the expansion of cash cropping in the 1920s. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Coimbatore increased production of cotton in relation to all cash crops faster than other districts in the south. The region's farmers also intensified tóttam farming rather than cutting costs and wages.¹³

What was key about Gounder tóttams was that they were highly flexible in relation to changing agricultural markets. In part, this flexibility had to do with secure and perennial access to groundwater. During the 1910s and 1920s, farmers in Tiruppur and nearby Dharapuram Taluks lead the district in using state loans for sinking new wells, and in Avinashi and Tiruppur Taluks for repairing existing wells. The Government Department of Industries claimed to have played a key role in boring existing wells, particularly in the late 1920s.¹⁴

The village studies from the 1930s that provide the ethnographic basis for many of Baker's claims, particularly those on familial labor relations in Gounder farms, however, belie such a tidy consensus and reveal instead a more caste- and gender-differentiated reality of work politics.¹⁶

Only men were registered in official sources as “permanent servants,” while their wives and children who were also beholden to work for the landholder were recorded as “casual labor.” Families of tied pannaiyals provided a captive sphere of casual labor for Gounder farmers. These familial workers had neither the security of contractual relations nor customary rights. Between ‘customary’ and ‘free’ labor, in effect, gender and caste mediated the selective proletarianization of labor. Importantly, the Gounder farmer was not an overseer; he worked alongside this differentiated workforce while appropriating the fruit of their shared work. This was a work politics that used caste and gender difference as well as participant supervision to subordinate working class families to the farmer who tilled alongside them.

The intensification of farming through permanent labor seems not to have taken place under the auspices of large farmers, but rather, as land records from 1912 indicate, through middle peasants with an average of about 20 acres. Of deed-holders, 39 percent were such middle peasants holding 64 percent of the land, while 60 percent of deed-holders were small peasants holding on average five acres, or 25 percent of the land. This differentiated agrarian structure favored smallholders, but, following the Depression, class differentiation deepened further through processes of indebtedness.²⁰

Turning to the spatial separation of work and home in Gounder farming, what is curious is that there was no attempt to consolidate fragmented agricultural holdings. Instead, one notes a curious phenomenon in the 1930s of each tóttam farm containing a “dwelling in which the farmer or a permanent laborer lives.”²²

I have sought to argue that there are several emergent characteristics of 1930s production politics that could become elements of a usable past. The key element in agrarian work politics was the Gounder farmer's participant supervisory skill in controlling differentiated labor arrangements: by exploiting workers through familial idioms in the case of fellow Gounder men, through customary caste rights backed by indenture and ritual power in the case of Madaris, and through casual and insecure spot-market relations in the case of women. Finally, these gender- and caste-differentiated labor arrangements and the possibility of class mobility for Gounder male permanent workers may have attenuated conflict in agrarian labor relations, which would help explain the dearth of archival records concerning agrarian labor unrest in Coimbatore.

regional agrarian transition and industrialization

A second crucial aspect of the agrarian question concerns the ways in which specialization in Coimbatore's agrarian capitalism linked agriculture, trade, and manufacturing to create conditions for the emergence of specialist towns, Tiruppur being but the most dramatic case. Industrial development in the region, built on the base of agricultural commercialization and specialized linkages, fed a pattern of urban development that Rukmini (1993), drawing on Bairoch (1988), calls “a thickening of the countryside,” through the transformation of industrial villages rather than of established towns.²⁵

By the late nineteenth century, Tiruppur had emerged as an important railway station on the main line across the width of Madras Presidency, connecting Madras to industrial Coimbatore city and to the plantations of the Nilgiri Hills. With the intensification of cotton farming, Tiruppur became an entrepôt in the cotton trade, and this opened up opportunities for a variety of processing activities. The spread of Cambodia cotton was initially pushed by large textile and cotton interests in Coimbatore District, but production finance for cotton farming came not from urban merchants but from a range of village moneylenders, landlords, rich peasants, and grocers. As a result cotton, in contrast to the groundnut market, remained outside the direct control of mercantile interests.²⁶

The growth of Tiruppur's cotton market in the 1920s spawned institutions and agents to mediate market relations. Commission agents monitored market fluctuations and secured the appropriate time of sale through ties with particular farmers. Ginners converted raw cotton for a commission. In both cases, Gounder farmers retained control over the lint until final sale in Tiruppur. The baroque structure of credit and commodity markets swirling around the cotton commodity chain was swiftly rationalized through the effects of the Great Depression. The liberal credit of the late 1920s had disappeared by the late 1930s; bazaar banks and creditors closed shop, Bombay merchants picked up and left, and in their stead a small group of mercantile interests bought most of the cotton and, in the absence of the range of creditors, credit was entirely in the hands of joint-stock banks. In the post-Depression Madras Presidency, the center of gravity of circuits of capital shifted more strongly to the cities, to urban finance, speculation, and industry. The Depression was a watershed in urbanization both in the pull of industrial, commercial, and urban growth, and in the rise of rural distress and entitlement failure among the rural poor. The state's failure to support rural livelihoods left many in the countryside pauperized and vulnerable to catastrophes, and entitlement failure among the rural poor compelled many to migrate to towns. Farmers who rode out the depression took opportunities to invest idle capital not only in mills but also in cotton ginning, trading, and finance. By the late 1940s, cultivators were selling as much as half of their cotton directly in the market, while Gounder cultivators and ginners sold directly to textile mills. Despite the emergence of other market towns dealing in cotton, Tiruppur remained preeminent in south India, and Gounder farmers were key in keeping it so.²⁹

When agricultural commodity and credit markets collapsed during the Depression, Tiruppur grew spectacularly at rates of 117 percent, much faster than other regional towns or Coimbatore city. Rural distress and incipient urban industry helped make Tiruppur the fastest growing town in the Madras Presidency. By mid-century, Tiruppur began shifting from a cotton entrepôt to a bustling manufacturing town with abundant supplies of cheap labor. To explain the emergence of specialist towns like Tiruppur, Rukmini (1993) analyzes how twin processes of regional specialization and crop concentration shaped the agrarian transition in Coimbatore. Udumalpettai and Palladam Taluks, the former containing Tiruppur, specialized in cotton, while Pollachi Taluks specialized in groundnuts. Agricultural specialization in combination with existing transportation and communications routes helped shape economic development through marketing and processing along the agro-commodity chain. Another key to dispersed rural urbanization lay in the ways in which regional industrialization was a diversified and interlinked process. Coimbatore District experienced sustained urban growth from 1920 to 1970 in a process of intensification across several towns along with extensive urbanization and ancilliarization from the main centers. The crucial period connecting processes of agrarian and industrial change was the 1920s and 1930s, the same period in which a new production politics was forged in Gounder farms. The missing ingredient in the analysis of Tiruppur's phenomenal urban growth is precisely how the internal changes in Gounder agriculture created conditions for the progressive Gounder peasant to make inter-sectoral linkages work.³⁰

I have sought to make two arguments about the agrarian question in Coimbatore District. First, a new production politics forged in Gounder farms during the 1930s hinged crucially on the Gounder farmer's participant supervision and control of caste- and gender-differentiated labor arrangements. The flexible Gounder tóttam rested on this work politics, in interaction with specific features of the regional farming system that could be recalled through the metonym of Gounder toil. Secondly, regional agricultural specialization and inter-sectoral linkages prompted by a diversifying peasantry created the conditions for dispersed, commodity-specific towns. These agrarian questions came together in a particular landscape of agro-industrial flexible specialization across town and country to allow Gounder ‘self-made men’ to remake place and class in Tiruppur, and to turn their toil into capital.

class mobility and industrial decentralization in tiruppur's agrarian transition

How did Gounder peasant-workers use specific histories of working and controlling work, expressed as their propensity to toil, as legacies in forging their class mobility while transforming the politics of work? Gounders narrate their life histories as slow and variegated processes of transition from agriculture in which most peasants were reluctant to leave the land entirely. By the 1950s, many poor Gounder households had diversified their income sources considerably: men and boys went to spinning mills, rice mills, and the first knitting companies, while women often worked in cotton gins. Spinning mills and knit-ting companies offered rural men privileged forms of waged work relative to other working castes and to women. Gounder men also dominated the regional Communist labor movement which emerged from the spinning mills. There were times, I was told by older knitwear workers, when work was regular and unions were strong. In discussing their specific differences from town workers, Gounder workers spoke in terms of their toil:

While I cannot do justice to the range of ways in which Gounders came to Tiruppur as workers and became small owners, narratives such as this one use toil to refer directly to specific forms of access to people, skills, and resources.³⁴

When Gounders started coming to Tiruppur for work, Coimbatore District was a hotbed of labor unionism led by the Communist Party of India (CPI).³⁷

The recollections of a non-Gounder worker from the 1960s who watched his Gounder comrades rise far above his class provides a contrasting narrative that clarifies the processes at work. Arumugam, a Vannar or washerman, now irons shirts on a cart in northern Tiruppur, but in the 1960s he ironed in knitting firms. When he joined Jippy Knitting in 1962, there were 100 people working in one place and he earned Rs.5.25 a day. Five years later, the owner had refused workers benefits and had split the company into “four to five sections . . . with fifteen to twenty-five workers each.” His next job was piece-rated, and while he had year-round regular work at the beginning of his career, by the end he said that most work was temporary. He explained his decision to leave knitwear work in terms of transformations in production that passed him by, but his explanation of how some workers became owners also hinges on the language of toil:³⁹

Arumugam's materialist explanation cuts through the ideology of self-made men to the social relations which he saw as enabling Gounder class mobility. He notes the importance of toil, but denies that its references are universal. I will return to this point in arguing that the sign operates differently when it is used in the labor process—not in conscious reference to hard work, but as an index of shared historical and contextual knowledge. Arumugam also refuses explanations centered on individual agency. In this way he contrasts sharply with self-made men, like Gentex Palanisamy, who says he “‘developed’ capital through self-management (suyasaambaadiyam).”⁴¹

After starting a partnership power-table unit with a few stitching machines, Gentex Palanisamy split off from his firm when it grew into a garment-manufacturing company. Firm-splitting was common among the first generation of workers-turned-owners, as partners broke off to form their own “family concerns.” New firms were most often not proprietorships but rather other partnerships with closer family members and landowning kin who would join as “sleeping partners,” who would contribute capital for a profit share but would not be involved in day-to-day production. Palanisamy was reticent in describing how he actively supported others from his village, because he felt some of the recipients of his support had since become big owners and would think he was taking credit for their success. To disrupt the narratives of self-made men in such a way would betray the caste and gender exclusion that undergirds their individualism. He did, however, hint at five prominent owners having been “one of our men.”⁴²

In explaining how they accessed family savings, early Gounder entrants to the ranks of small ownership often spoke of the key roles played by their mothers. Marriage dowries only became important for initial capital for young Gounder grooms after the export boom of the late 1980s. Older Gounders insisted that dowries are a recent phenomenon, and that in their time the bride's side would demand pari panam, or brideprice, half of which went to wedding expenses, and about a quarter directly to the young wife. While it is difficult to verify a transition from brideprice to dowry precisely, a portion of this brideprice may have provided a seed for the savings funds of the Goundachi amma, or Gounder mother. When Gounder ex-workers say that they accessed money through their mothers, it is still not clear what kind of discretionary power Gounder mothers had over the family purse-strings, but it one can at least surmise that sons could make the strongest claims on these family savings.⁴³

Lenin Kaliappan relied first on Rs.2,500 from his mother's petty agricultural trade in rice, which allowed him to become a partner in a stitching section. When this fledgling unit was in financial trouble, he turned to his sister, and sold her gold jewelry for Rs.300 to keep it running. What is significant here is that he could acquire his sister's jewelry relatively easily. When Kaliappan's partners left their struggling firm to return to wage work, his mother again came to his aid by selling off her stock of sacks from agricultural trade for Rs.3000, allowing Kaliappan to become a proprietor.⁴⁴

Not all familial relationships nurtured class mobility, however. Crown Rangasamy came to work for his taimáman, or maternal uncle, at the age of fifteen. In terms of kinship entitlements, he is an inessential pankali or “brother,” in that a taimáman does not have the same rights over his nephew as he does his niece.⁴⁸

In a context of regional agrarian decline, some young men sought capital and land through familial networks, but claims on family savings also fueled conflict between pankalis. When brothers could not be convinced to divide assets or pledge family land to the bank, marriages provided alternate resources, and women continued in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways to enable the construction of self-made men. It must be said that many Gounder peasant-workers neither received much direct support from kin, nor offered much to them. L.M.K. Balu claims that, of the steady stream of forty-two Gounder men from his village to Tiruppur knitwear, none gave him much help, nor did he help them. It took minimal capital for Balu to start a small stitching section in 1967, with two machines at Rs.3000 worked by himself, two brothers, and three boy helpers.⁵¹

While many new entrants to the ranks of ownership slid back into waged work, where in the 1970s income was steady, the mark of arrival was an introduction to the bank. Gounders were different from others in that many still had land that could be used to access institutional credit. Peasant households would sell land only under extreme duress, opting instead to pledge their land as collateral for loans. This was particularly so after the nationalized State Bank of India (SBI) began actively supporting small industry after 1970. It is widely held that state intervention in Tiruppur's small industry has been circumspect. Indeed, to paraphrase an economist from Western Tamilnad familiar with these environs, Gounders have succeeded despite the state, and it is this success under inhospitable conditions that highlights, in his view, the central role of the entrepreneur.⁵²

State intervention in the supply of credit, particularly working capital to pay for production in advance of final garment production and sale, fueled both industrial dispersal and class mobility. In the ethnography of SBI's lending practices elaborated in Chari (2004), I show how the bank actively sought to support what it saw as the creditworthy peasant. An older employee of SBI's branch in Tiruppur insisted that loan decisions were based on a person's “background” and that they held the view that “A person who has come from the laborer stage to start a unit by himself, he should be an enterprising man.”⁵³

When collateral security was necessary, as for loans over Rs.25,000, Gounders often offered agricultural land. When I asked how field officers valued rural land when it was used as security, a staff member said that field officers “would just go to the village and ask and they would simply tell them the value. Generally village people wouldn't lie, at least in those days.” The early development of Coimbatore's land market meant that land transactions could be referred to the bank's valuations, but this particular SBI officer evinced a remarkable faith in a kind of rustic honesty that would prevent collusion by villagers in inflating rural land values.⁵⁵

The 1960s and 1970s brought a gradual process of decentralization that reshaped work in Tiruppur. Initially, section after section of the labor process underwent a transition from time-rated wages to piece-rates, subsequently codified through Taylorist time-motion studies and institutionalized in collective bargaining agreements. Kongu Velusamy explained piece-work, firm-splitting, and subcontracting as moments in a history of class struggle, with each phase in the fragmentation of work having followed significant strike activity.⁵⁷

With the generalization of piece-rates by the mid-1970s, work politics had been decisively transformed. The memories of owners, ex-workers, and unionists collectively reveal a time of rising workers' entitlements, subsequently eroded across the board in the shift to piece-rates and contracting. The crucible of change lay in stitching sections that were pried out of integrated firms of an earlier era and came to house the toiling Gounder and his piece-rated workers in the new, intensified politics of work.

provincializing capital: gounder toil and fraternal hegemony

The knitwear industry rests centrally on manual labor and on close supervision and labor control in stitching sections, where cut-pieces of knitted cloth are stitched into batches of garments of particular shapes and sizes. Batch production of garments is particularly suited to separating stitching from the rest of the labor process. Overwhelmingly, peasant-workers started out as owners by creating small, dependent stitching sections. As they worked alongside their hired labor at the power-table, these toiling owners were drawing from their histories of agrarian work that were part of their identities as Gounder peasants. This brings me to the geography of work practice, where the agrarian past is used in remaking the industrial present.

Gounder workers did not make a smooth transition from being workers to being owners; they worked in their own firms for an average of five and eight years, for exporters and domestic producers, respectively. As owners, they tended not to rely on family labor, but rather worked alongside their hired labor. A Gounder leader suggested to me that this was because “Gounder community has a knack of extracting work in a mutually beneficial manner.”⁶³

In part this was a calculated move. My survey evidence indicates that Gounders were less educated than other owners and even many workers. They often hired a kanakku pillai, or accountant, to take care of the books while they guided the practical task of manufacturing banians. On the shop floor, the working class owner could use his practical knowledge in production. I found on several occasions that these Gounder owners were most reluctant to be interviewed until it became clear that I wanted to know about their personal histories and lived experiences.⁶⁵

Moreover, most Gounders had finished their careers as wage-workers in stitching or cutting, or as contractors of ‘power-table sections,’ and they had typically become multi-skilled in the central production tasks of garment manufacture. My survey evidence shows that most also entered the division of labor as owners in stitching sections. By the early 1970s, there were a profusion of taiyal nilayangal or independent “stitching sections” which bought cut-pieces and produced garments. These units were profoundly frustrating for industrial elites, and one textile mill owner disparaged these “pseudo-manufacturers” as mere traders.⁶⁶

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gounder industrialists had remade the industry through two means. First, in their attempt to consolidate their hegemony over the cluster, a small group of Gounder owners launched a successful putsch in the main owners' association, the South India Hosiery Manufacturers' Association (SIHMA). While SIHMA was in the 1950s controlled by a mix of Muslims, Chettiars, Mudaliars, and a few Gounders, by the 1970s Gounders had become dominant. For the ensuing decade, SIHMA ruled industrial relations in Tiruppur and it managed to discipline militant unions into a new order of class conciliation. Indeed, this paralleled the emergence of a pattern of Gounders holding all prominent public positions in local politics and civic associations, as has been the case to date. Older monuments in Tiruppur's public spaces have been forgotten with the installation of a dazzling silver statue of Palanisamy Gounder, “Tiruppur Tandai,” Father of Tiruppur, at the most important intersection in town. Indeed, by the 1970s, Gounders had become the upstart elite.

Second, and in a more gradual manner, Gounder owners elaborated the process of industrial decentralization and contracting through networks of “sister concerns” linked by relations of fraternity and ownership. Contracting, in turn, met the increased requirements for labor supervision and control demanded by the production of “fine” or forty-count banians, that consolidated Tiruppur's command of the all-India market. SIHMA built its power over social labor in the 1970s through the institutionalization of piece-rates and collective bargaining procedures, and this occurred at precisely the time when Tiruppur began to produce fine banians. Through SIHMA, the Madras Productivity Council conducted Taylorist time-motion studies in Tiruppur in order to regularize piece-rates for various categories of workers laboring on different categories of yarn. Unions were drawn, reluctantly, into the process of instituting these piece-rates through the mediation of the Industrial Tribunal in Madras, and SIHMA's dominance over the new regime of variable wages was sealed for a time. Unions nonetheless continued to fight these institutionalized workloads, arguing that they were inordinately high and could not provide a living wage.⁶⁷

The Communist Party in India divided in 1964, and this was followed by the communist labor unions splitting at the national level in 1970. The CITU subsequently emerged during the 1970s as the radical arm of labor organizing , and quickly gained ground in Tiruppur's labor struggles. By the mid-1970s its membership rivaled its parent AITUC, the older labor union of the undivided Communist Party of India. A series of general strikes in the first half of the 1970s reflect the rise of this radical section of the labor movement. At the same time, however, the industrial form was being progressively decentralized through the contracting of garment stitching.⁶⁸

Sister concerns were a key strategy through which Gounder fraternal capital could allow Gounder toil to be writ large across Tiruppur's scattered worksites, to secure the hegemony of decentralized capital, and to make the whole town work as never before. By the 1970s, the leading Gounders of worker-peasant origins had institutionalized their power over the industrial cluster by taking over the main owners' association, and they secured a long period of class conciliation with the communist labor unions. Until the 1980s, it seemed that the Gounder fraternity had forged its hegemony over industrial work.

There were certainly spaces for small acts of resistance within this broader transformation. In 1974, for example, a prominent Gounder owner of working class origins started a second production unit, a sister concern, and refused to give workers in the new unit the same wages and benefits as the other. A series of posters, unsanctioned by the labor unions, showed up on all the main streets to the bus station which portrayed Nalasamy the Worker next to Nalasamy the Owner: on one side as a thin, monkeyish, emaciated worker and on the other as a fat, cigarette-smoking owner. It read “Andre ni, Indre ni” (You then, you now), using the impolite form of ‘you,’ no less. This lampoon of class mobility was a spontaneous and damning critique of Gounder toil from the crowd.

However, this critique of toil only scratches the surface of its uses in Tiruppur. Like many signs, “Gounder toil” is multifunctional. When it is used in work practice, the sign toil functions indexically; that is, it points non-arbitrarily towards specific shared understandings that enable Gounder men to draw from their past to discipline labor in the present.⁷⁰

In this manner, the toiling fraternity of capital turned the entire town into a decentralized factory before its shift to global markets. Chari (2004) shows how, in the transition to export production in the 1980s, in interaction with wider discourses and practices of the ‘feminization’ of garment production, and with the massive entry of women into the workforce, fraternal hegemony through Gounder toil would generate a new gender regime at work that accelerated decentralization and the erosion of workers' entitlements. Hence, gender regimes mediate the accumulation of both capital and surplus labor. On one hand, an apex class fraction has risen out of fraternal capital, using Gounder toil in new ways in the age of exports. On the other hand, the gap between institutionalized rights and workplace realities has only been widening through the increasing fragmentation of work and deepening exploitation combined with the routine use of sexual violence. Between these two dynamics of accumulation, fraternal capital steers its tenuous path.

conclusion: toil, subalternity, and capitalist uneven development

Gounder toil encapsulates the dialectical tensions of Tiruppur's modernity. In the engagement of worker-owners in stitching sections, toil makes agrarian history an attribute. By transforming the structure of work from within, Gounders of modest origins open a route for continued class mobility through toil, challenging an ‘ascriptive’ notion of caste as determinative of occupation and social location. If self-made men are the liberal antithesis of caste, their toil also provokes a revolutionary challenge to capitalism by summing up specific demands for the fruits of labor and the dignity of work. As a translational device, toil is a double-voiced tool: it reveals a particular use of the past in shaping agrarian transition and industrialization, and, moreover, toil emerges from a singular history of work that solidifies caste and gender exclusion under a regional capitalism. Agrarian memory is an unlikely resource for capitalist industrialization, and yet it is key to the transitions enacted by Tiruppur's fraternal capital.

I want to conclude by suggesting that postcolonial studies, and Subaltern Studies in particular, is important for its discomfort with implicit comparison with idealized roads to capitalism. What I have sought through the translational device of toil is an account of hegemony that breaks with comparative political economic categories that carry Eurocentric presumptions. I have sought to demonstrate how purportedly universalistic processes of accumulation are used by unlikely agents in exclusionary ways. In these unlikely uses of capitalist opportunity, the politics of work articulate through singular cultural histories and forms of exclusion that make space for the individualist renderings of both Gounder self-made men and most others who will never see their labors become the toil that becomes capital. Capitalist development continues to slip past most people's lived opportunities, leaving them to pick up the pieces of the commodity detritus. To write capitalist histories from this decentered vantage, requires finding many moments of resistance to capitalism, but also the necessary complicities that make resistance possible. Without subaltern complicity with capitalism's anarchic developmentalism there would be little point in claiming a politics of solidarity derived from immanent critique. As a path not taken, Tiruppur presents the possibility of working class social determination denied by the exclusionary individualism of fraternal capital.