Introduction
In a classic 1978 essay, E. P. Thompson suggests a surprising convergence between the work of Karl Popper and Louis Althusser.Footnote 1 In a denunciation of the philosophical turn in western Marxism, Thompson cites Althusser as the chief proponent of an intellectualism that posits class as a subject of primarily philosophical, rather than historical enquiry.Footnote 2 For Althusser, historical process is unknowable, and historical knowledge is a product of theory.Footnote 3 Accordingly, Althusser proposes a radical re-reading of Marx, which claims that history appears in Capital as an abstract object that does not relate to any ‘concrete society’.Footnote 4 Thompson equates the writings of Althusser to the liberal work of Popper, for whom only the most discrete facts constitute true historical knowledge, whilst ideas about causal relationships and social transformations are themselves historical constructions.Footnote 5 In both scholars’ work, Thompson sees a denial of the historical method, whose analytic purchase rests upon interrogating the objective relationship between conditions and events. For Thompson, historical processes are tangible objects that involve struggles for power that create hierarchies, identities and political solidarities.Footnote 6 In this schema, conditions and events conspire towards observable outcomes, and class is a dynamic and contingent process that is best approached through a critical historical method that does not assume the fixed typologies with which some schools of history have applied Thompson's ideas.Footnote 7
This paper starts from the position that Thompson's use of the historical method is well-founded, and presents a comparative analysis of working-class formation in India's two oldest steel towns: the company town of Jamshedpur, founded in Jharkhand by the private sector Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) in 1908, and the company town of Rourkela, founded in Odisha in 1954 in order to accommodate the workforce of the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP). The purpose of this paper is to use a critical historical method to highlight the peculiarities and inconsistencies of class formation in industrial settings, in what are ostensibly two of its most perfect social laboratories. In the two cases discussed, labour politics has been historically informed by the provision of employment for local communities, or the inheritability of work within families over successive generations. These processes continue to structure class even amidst the recent decline of permanent employment in these environments, and invite a rethinking of how regional scholarship has conceptualized the Indian industrial working class.Footnote 8 In the iconic Indian company towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela, a working class has not emerged whose position and consciousness is primarily predicated upon a relationship to the means of production. On the contrary, ethnicity and kinship have historically structured labour politics in these environments, in ways that preclude the development of such a form of class consciousness. Following Thompson, we approach class as a dynamic historical- rather than abstract philosophical- object that necessarily relates to other forms of identity, and which undermines the rigid typologies that have sometimes constrained regional analyses.Footnote 9
This paper makes two points. First, we consider the historical reasons why the workforces of TISCO and RSP did not develop a solidary class consciousness with other Indian wage labourers during the twentieth century. We suggest that the corporate and political milieu in which TISCO and RSP were founded, made secure employment largely contingent upon kinship and ethnicity, to the effect that the ‘aristocracies of labour’ which emerged in these workplaces have been historically bounded in reference to identities that surpass a relationship to production. Despite moments of collective action that solidified the identities of their workforces, the politics of labour in TISCO and RSP have historically functioned on logics of family and ethnic interest, which excluded very large sections of the cities’ workforces. In Jamshedpur, the labour politics of permanent employees has been traditionally silent on the struggles of TISCO's temporary seasonal workers, or of those employed in the city's many ancillary industries. Here, an ancestry of company work defined the closely guarded boundaries of the Tata working class throughout the twentieth century, which did not concern itself with the struggles of outsiders. In Rourkela, the boundaries of the RSP working class became as impermeable as they had been in TISCO, despite being configured according to different principles. Although Nehru's steel towns were initially imagined as cosmopolitan spaces where migrants and locals might merge into a unitary working class, from the late 1960s an emergent ethno-regional politics in the Odisha state government increasingly sought to reserve RSP employment for ethnic Odias, with the effect that the workforce became progressively defined in reference to a loosely defined autochthony.
Second, we differentiate between different kinds of urban spaces in order to consider why autochthony mediates class more strongly in Rourkela than in Jamshedpur. A historical analysis of urbanization reveals that whereas Rourkela was imagined as a model company town that should absorb local communities, Jamshedpur was conceived as an entirely original space that should exclude them. Although in Rourkela the prevalent form of ‘localness’ that informs rights to resources is autochthony,Footnote 10 in Jamshedpur, local rights are conferred only through an ancestry of company employment. Explaining this phenomenon is a historical recruitment policy which favoured the employment of settled migrants, to the deliberate exclusion of ‘sons of the soil’.Footnote 11 The company town of Jamshedpur was accordingly built of ethnically diverse families, whose only common claim to employment was a shared ancestry of Tata work. Through a comparison of two projects of planned urbanization, we consider why in one industrial environment it is descent, and why in the other it is autochthony which decisively mediates the historical processes of class formation.
In our analysis of TISCO and RSP, we consider that if class is the outcome of historical struggle, then those forces and events that are peculiar to certain environments must create classes that are in some sense unique. Class seldom fully displaces other sources of power and identity, but rather interacts with them in ways that demand close historical attention. Comparatively, the structural facts and consciousness of class necessarily engage with everyday discourses about the work process itselfFootnote 12; practices of consumptionFootnote 13; the development of popular cultures and artistic formsFootnote 14; the politics of urban spaceFootnote 15 and gender.Footnote 16 Amongst this wealth of possible approaches, this paper is confined to an analysis of two key areas that have historically mediated class in Jamshedpur, Rourkela and elsewhere: kinshipFootnote 17 and autochthony.Footnote 18 An appreciation that employment regimes, kinship and autochthony might collide with one another in different ways in India's steel towns provides an added layer of analysis that explains how the similar processes of capitalism function in critically dissimilar contexts.
Company towns and the politics of nation-building in India
The foundation of the Rourkela Steel Plant in 1954 emerged from the Nehruvian state's Second Five Year Plan, which extended to the construction of further steel works and townships in Bhilai (Chhattisgarh, then Madhya Pradesh), and Durgapur (West Bengal). Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, imagined that the nation's state-owned ‘temples of modernity’Footnote 19 would create independence from industrial imports and stimulate development in the nation's mineral-rich provinces. Since public sector steel plants were also to provide mass formal employment to a mixed labour force of local autochthons and migrants from across India, it was hoped that an industrial working class, which transcended ethnic and regional divisions, would emerge in these spaces.Footnote 20 Consequently, in Nehru's steel towns, the inclusion of local people in industrial employment was integral to the project of post-colonial modernity: a practice still prevalent in the provision of employment for members of ostensibly ‘local’ ethnic communities.Footnote 21 The ideological consistency of Nehruvian socialism from the late 1940s is debatable, partly because the demands of the private sector continued to determine national economic policy throughout the early postcolonial period.Footnote 22 Nonetheless, Nehru's steel towns historically functioned on the principle that the development and proletarianization of local peoples was one of the primary aims of industrialization, and the provision of RSP jobs for ethnic Odias allows claims of autochthony to mediate class politics in Rourkela in important ways.
Two generations earlier in Jamshedpur, a grand project of industrialization was conceived on rather different terms. Located 300 kilometres northeast of Rourkela, in what is today the state of Jharkhand,Footnote 23 the city of Jamshedpur was built in 1908 by the Tata Iron and Steel Company: a Bombay corporation which sought to capitalize on the demand for steel during colonial railway construction.Footnote 24 Jamshedpur, the site of India's first integrated steel works, is arguably one of the first company towns in South Asia, and is the birthplace of milestones in Indian collective bargaining—namely the establishment of maximum working hours, holiday pay and pensions for industrial workers.Footnote 25 Although TISCO enjoyed considerable financial and political assistance from British colonialism throughout the early twentieth century,Footnote 26 the Tata project is popularly regarded in India as a patriotic enterprise, where British ventures into iron and steel production had previously failed.Footnote 27 However, unlike in Rourkela, Tata industrialization rested upon the exclusion of local communities from industrial employment and the modern township. As a consequence, class in TISCO became formally mediated by the principle of kinship, rather than autochthony.
Informed by prevalent racial stereotypes, early recruitment policy in TISCO deemed the local tribal communities of the region to be unsuitable for permanent industrial work.Footnote 28 Accordingly, the company town was conceived as an entirely original corporate space, to be populated exclusively by migrants drawn from across India. Whereas Nehru's steel towns aimed to shape a solidary working-class that consciously included local people, Tata envisaged an urbanized labour force of migrants, whose claims to the space of the town were dependent solely upon company employment. Within a generation, the migrant TISCO workforce had acquired a remarkable dependence upon company work that made it one of India's most stable industrial working classes.Footnote 29 The de facto heritability of company jobs allowed the labourforce to reproduce itself through time, so that by the start of the twenty-first century most Tata employees in Jamshedpur still claimed descent from four generations of company workers.Footnote 30
The foundation of TISCO and RSP are important moments in the history of Indian class politics, which express historically significant relationships between industrial capitalism, the state, urbanization and collective action. However, the tendency to read such moments as the ‘making of the Indian working class’ is an application of Thompson's work which this paper seeks to deconstruct.Footnote 31 The notion that the early RSP and TISCO labourforces are prototypical working classes, depends upon a typology that defines class as a politically conscious relationship to the means of production, and implicitly assumes that industrial workers function as a vanguard that prefigures the political consciousness of India's wage labourers.Footnote 32 This model relies upon the use of Thompson's thesis on the making of the English working class,Footnote 33 which does not fully confront the fact that class politics in India's steel towns has been historically informed by localized logics of place and kinship that exclude the interests of other labour forces. In Jamshedpur, whilst the relationship between Tata capitalism, the Indian independence movement, and the local development of trade unionism provides an intriguing study of the role played by industrial townships in the evolution of Indian labour politics, the wider class politics of the TISCO workforce require more critical attention.
The TISCO project began in 1883, when the Indian industrialist Jamshed Tata made an ambitious proposal to the Viceroy of India to produce local steel for colonial railway construction. Tata proposed the formation of an industry that would compete for state contracts against costly European imports, and would be based in a company town of the Pittsburgh model.Footnote 34 After several failed ventures, in 1902 Tata contracted an American prospecting team led by Charles Perin to locate viable iron reserves in the forests of eastern India.Footnote 35 In the districts of Singhbhum and Mayurbhanj, Perin identified a vast deposit of iron ore, which as of the mid-twentieth century, still contained two-thirds of the total known iron reserves of South and East Asia.Footnote 36 Tata acquired rights from the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj to mine the state's iron ore on a sliding royalties scale,Footnote 37 and provisionally sited his steel works in the village of Sakchi, 70 kilometres away. With a good deal of state assistance, and the private investment of the Indian elite, the Tata project began to take shape. The colonial administration constructed a rail network linking the mines to Sakchi, and encouraged potential investors by guaranteeing to purchase 20,000 tons of steel per year.Footnote 38 The Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) was formally registered in Bombay in August 1907, with capital of £1,545,000 raised from 8,000 shareholders, almost all of whom were prominent Indian landholders, merchants, industrialists and politicians.Footnote 39 Forest clearance in Sakchi began in February 1908, with the plant's coke ovens fired for the first time on 12 October 1911.Footnote 40 The city was symbolically born on 2 January 1919, when Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India, renamed Sakchi ‘Jamshedpur’ in honour of the company's founder.Footnote 41
The TISCO project was conceived on a grand scale, and was financed and directed almost entirely by Indians, at a time when the British Empire had failed to construct profitable steel works in South Asia. To many leaders of the independence movement, the Tata example was an inspiring one, which suggested that a post-colonial state would be successful, modern and efficient. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, a close relationship emerged between independence leaders and Tata industry, which prefigured that of Nehru's steel towns. Such was the depth of this relationship that in 1925 Mahatma Gandhi directly intervened in a TISCO industrial dispute, urging striking workers not to undermine the stability and prosperity of a uniquely Indian company.Footnote 42 Throughout the 1920s, TISCO's political capital also allowed the company to successfully lobby for the raising of import taxes on foreign steel, and to avoid bankruptcy with the aid of sizeable government loans.Footnote 43 However, following independence, TISCO's monopoly on the Indian steel industry was challenged by Nehru's Second Five Year Plan of 1954, which envisaged a grand programme of industrialization across a vast swathe of central and eastern India. The Nehruvian steel towns were imagined as planned urban spaces that drew upon the engineering expertise of Soviet (in Bhilai), British (in Durgapur) and West German (in Rourkela) contractors, and were provisioned with comfortable housing and full employment.Footnote 44 Unlike the TISCO project, the Nehruvian ‘temples of modernity’Footnote 45 were informed by developmental ambitions that outweighed concerns of profitability.
Cited in peripheral regions that were generally populated by socially disadvantaged communities, Nehruvian steel towns were integral to a project of post-colonial nation-building that favoured the formation of a cosmopolitan industrial working class, comprising a coalition of locals and migrants from across the country. Broadly based on an ethos of state socialism, the Nehruvian vision saw central economic planning and state ownership of heavy industries as a means to create a national identity that surpassed communal divisions. In the nation's most under-developed regions, Nehru's steel towns were supposed to bring modern industrial employment and urban housing to local communities, whilst encouraging them to work alongside the recent migrants who were now their class companions. Typically, the Rourkela site in the hills of western Odisha was populated by a community of indigenous Adivasis who possessed neither the manpower nor many of the skills needed to fill the tens of thousands of jobs created by the RSP project. Accordingly, the construction of RSP relied upon the labours of local Adivasis, Odia migrants from coastal Odisha, heavy plant operators from Punjab, managers and bureaucrats from Bengal, as well as several hundred engineers and mechanics sent by the West German companies contracted to build plant and township.Footnote 46 The Indian state acquired almost 20,000 acres of land from roughly 2,500 households in Rourkela, which contained a total of 15,000 individuals. Each displaced household was offered compensation in the form of cash payments,Footnote 47 land grants in resettlement colonies adjacent to the city, permanent RSP employment for at least one person per household and five acres of agricultural land for those who elected to remain agriculturalists.Footnote 48 However, despite the intentions of the project's architects, within five years, the politics of RSP labour had become the focus of ethnic conflicts amongst Odias and the diverse migrant labour force.
Within the Odia community, initially volatile relationships between displaced villagers and the state officials responsible for land acquisition were exacerbated by lingering conflicts between people of Odisha's western highlands and its eastern coastal lowlands. A decade earlier in 1948, Odias from the lowlands were perceived to have effectively seized administrative control of the highlands when the two regions were merged into a single union state, with the lowland city of Bhubaneswar as its new capital.Footnote 49 Throughout the 1950s lowlanders were popularly perceived by their antagonists in the highlands as a ‘conquering’ force, which acted without concern for the interests of Adivasis and other Odia in western Odisha.Footnote 50 Following the establishment of RSP in 1954, the Congress-led state assembly in Odisha began to pursue a project of Odia nationalism, which partly healed the schism between the state's western and eastern districts by capitalizing on the competition for secure and well-remunerated RSP employment that all Odia faced from more distant migrants. Consequently, the state government demanded RSP employment to be first and foremost provided to people from Odisha, whether or not they had actually been displaced, and progressively recast the Nehruvian development plan as a project of ethno-regionally determined resource allocation.Footnote 51 Echoing strong Odia nationalist resentment against out-of-state migrants,Footnote 52 a 1959 investigation by the Odisha state government concluded that people from Bengal, Punjab and southern India were over-represented in the skilled grades of RSP work.Footnote 53 By 1961 more than 76,000 migrants had arrived in Rourkela,Footnote 54 where they were increasingly met by ethnic violence that sought to drive people from them from RSP employment.Footnote 55
Until the late 1960s, RSP management preferred to recruit its skilled workforce largely from Bengal and Punjab, with Odia and local Adivasis being mainly confined to unskilled posts on the RSP shopfloor. However, when the Government of India ruled in 1968 that public sector posts salaried at less than RS500 per month should be filled by candidates drawn from local employment exchanges, the state government finally acquired the means to control access to Odisha's ‘temple of modernity’. Odisha state government regulations required that job-seekers at employment exchanges be resident in the state for no fewer than 12 years. In Rourkela, even non-Odia who satisfied these criteria routinely found that staff at employment exchanges refused to process their registration. From this moment onwards, the great bulk of RSP employment became almost exclusively available to sons of the soil, who were drawn from diverse Odia and local Adivasi backgrounds. By the 1970s, the vision of the cosmopolitan Rourkela working class had largely collapsed. Adivasi workers shared the shopfloor with a dominant majority of Odia from other parts of the state, who used a loosely defined notion of regional autochthony to oppose the presence of migrants from other states. The appropriation of the RSP project by Odia nationalists also disenfranchised non-Odia from the organs of local class politics, since the company's recognized trade unions became almost exclusively controlled by Odia lowlanders.
During the 1960s and 1970s, attempts by ethnic minorities on the RSP shopfloor to form alternative trade unions generally failed, since national labour law granted exclusive formal bargaining rights to the union which had the largest membership amongst the labour force. Since the responsibility for the verification of membership lists rested with state government, rival trade unions found it hard to achieve formal recognition without local political patronage, and had increasing difficulty attracting members. Such was the importance of ethnicity and autochthony to RSP class politics throughout the twentieth century that, as of 2006, leading figures in the Rourkela Mazdoor Sangh (until the 1990s the RSP's most powerful trade union) still considered that the union's greatest victory of the twentieth century was its successful opposition to the heritability of company jobs. As one high-ranking union veteran noted, making RSP jobs inheritable would have allowed Bengalis, Punjabis and other non-Odia to permanently settle in the city, as they had previously done in Jamshedpur. In less than one generation, a company town that was imagined as a synecdoche for a modern, multi-ethnic Indian nation, had become an Odia and—to a much lesser degree—Adivasi space whose formation was intimately connected to the politics of ethno-regional chauvinism. The boundaries and politics of the RSP working class are historical products of the coincidence between industrial development and ethno-regionalism in Odisha, and are characterized by the failure of a relationship to production to outreach ties of ethnicity in shaping labour politics.
Descent and the Labour aristocracy
In contrast to the Rourkela case, industrialization in Jamshedpur at the turn of the twentieth century created a working class that bounded itself in reference to familial descent. Informed by a profit motive that seldom guided state-sector industry, Tata industrialization envisaged a company town of the North American model, permanently populated by settled migrants who were wholly dependent upon TISCO employment.Footnote 56 Early Tata recruitment polices assumed that the most capable workforce would be drawn from diverse communities across India. Certain ethnicities were deemed suited to managerial positions, others to manual labour, whilst local Adivasis were regarded as largely unfit for permanent employment. The provision of jobs for local peoples was therefore not a consideration of this vision, which is furthermore characterized by a civilizing narrative, which suggests that Jamshed Tata founded the Indian steel industry in a jungle where there was little human activity to be impinged upon.Footnote 57
Prevalent racial hierarchies dictated that the bulk of TISCO's early senior managerial and engineering posts were filled by Europeans and Americans, whereas Bengali and Telugu migrants were associated with clerical positions and middle management. The majority of the manual labour force comprised non-Adivasi peasants, pushed from Northern and Central India in the 1900s by environmental crisis, and deemed suitable for strenuous industrial work. The 1900s saw a gradual degradation of soil in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, forcing successive numbers of mainly low caste peasants to seek Tata employment. Likewise, reliance upon peasant farming in much of Odisha and Chhattisgarh left the population susceptible to periodic famine and drought. Monsoon failure in 1921 caused large numbers of Chhattisgarhis to migrate to Jamshedpur, followed by a wave of Odia migration in 1927 caused by localized crop failure.Footnote 58 Adivasi communities were isolated from permanent TISCO posts, being employed almost exclusively in contract work gangs, and have historically comprised a relatively small percentage of the city's permanent population.Footnote 59
Whereas a rather loosely defined Odia autochthony has historically structured the class politics of Rourkela, in Jamshedpur the boundaries of the industrial working class are informed by the generational transmission of employment within families. The principal that TISCO employment should be heritable was established as an early means for Tata to stabilize a migrant labour force, in a private-sector industry that called for continuous year-round production. By 1938, the policy was successful insofar as less than 3 per cent of TISCO workers were engaged in agricultural production in their home regions, and a quarter claimed to have severed relations with their ‘native place’ entirely.Footnote 60 In comparison to the RSP labour force who frequently maintained households that spanned the urban/rural divide, scarcely a generation into Tata employment, TISCO workers lived year round in company homes and depended almost exclusively on company salaries for their subsistence. In the generations that followed, Tata offered a guarantee of lifetime employment to the children of its workers in Jamshedpur, allowing employees to nominate a ‘ward’ for preference in recruitment. More than a century after the city was founded, the Tata family has proven a remarkably durable institution. As of 2007, the vast majority of employees in Jamshedpur's Tata Steel (formerly TISCO) and Tata Motors plants still traced their ancestry to early settlers, and the principle of descent structured access to even casual Tata employment.Footnote 61 The ethnic hierarchies of TISCO employment have likewise proven resilient, with Bengalis still accounting for the majority of Tata managerial posts and indigenous Adivasis all but excluded from permanent company work.Footnote 62 However, beyond the structural facts of employment regimes, the formation of the Tata working class draws upon a history of political struggle that invites a Thompsonian analysis of the role played by the Tata Workers’ Union in defining the boundaries of the workforce,Footnote 63
The forerunner to the Tata Workers’ Union (The Jamshedpur Labour Association) was formed in 1920 during a strike by TISCO's manual Indian labour force against the low wages, poor living conditions, and lack of job security, which characterized much Tata employment at that time.Footnote 64 Prior to the mid-1920s, many unskilled TISCO employees were recruited on a temporary basis by foremen whose bribery demands left workers vulnerable to the predation of loan sharks. Lacking secure housing and employment, indebted temporary workers’ wages were a meagre RS20 per month, compared with permanently employed European engineers who earned an average of RS650 per month.Footnote 65 In 1920, the discontent of the Indian labour force culminated in the iconic strike from which the Tata Workers’ Union traces its ancestry. After several weeks of action, TISCO workers sought political support from the Bengal Indian Congress, who sent the activist Surinder Nath Halder to TISCO to found the Jamshedpur Labour Association. Serving as the union's first president, Halder formulated ambitious strike demands for a 50 percent pay increase for the lowest grade of employees, a 35 per cent pay increase for mid-level employees, sick pay in line with that awarded to civil servants, one month's paid annual leave for all workers, paid leave for religious holidays, and family compensation for deaths in the workplace.Footnote 66 After early negotiations with TISCO collapsed, the Jamshedpur Labour Association abandoned almost all of their demands in favour of a more modest 15 per cent pay increase for all workers. Apparently frustrated by the nascent union's lack of progress, on 15 March 1920 a large group of workers attempted to block the railway line which transported rural strike-breakers into TISCO from the surrounding areas. During a violent confrontation with the mounted police that were sent to disperse the crowd, five striking ‘martyrs of the working class’ were shot dead.Footnote 67 Shortly after, the Jamshedpur Labour Association accepted an offer of a 10 per cent pay increase and allowed work to resume on 20 March 1920.
The Jamshedpur Labour Association initially fared poorly in the years that followed. First, the union's negotiating power was constrained by TISCO's refusal to formally recognize its legitimacy in the aftermath of the 1920 strike. Second, lack of support for a further strike by worker-activists in 1922 cost the union the support of many potential members. However, from the mid-1920s the championing of the TISCO experiment by the independence movement provided the impetus for the consolidation of trade unionism in Jamshedpur. Concerned by the poor living standards and wage disparities that he observed in the Indian-owned company town, Mahatma Gandhi decisively intervened during a 1925 TISCO dispute to secure the formal recognition of the Jamshedpur Labour Association and the improvement of working conditions. In an address to TISCO workers that year, Gandhi emphasized TISCO's importance to a nationalist project where Indian employers and employees should maintain harmonious relations with one another.Footnote 68
In the decade that followed, the Jamshedpur Labour Association enjoyed the presidency of Bengali independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose and secured the world's first eight-hour working day in 1928.Footnote 69 Under the leadership of Abdul Bari between 1936 and 1947, the organization was renamed the Tata Workers’ Union and successfully lobbied for the revision of the TISCO wage structure and the introduction of incentive payments.Footnote 70 In the literature of the Tata Workers’ Union, the organization is a pioneer in the field of Indian class politics, which embodies a broad national solidarity based upon a relationship to production. The Tata Workers’ Union's 1956 collective bargaining agreement with TISCO is presented ‘as a landmark in the history of the trade union movement in India’Footnote 71, whilst the victims of the 1920 police firing on TISCO strikers are referred to as ‘the martyrs of the working class’.Footnote 72 Elsewhere, union literature claims that the Tata Workers’ Union (not established in any form until 1920 and formally unrecognized until 1925) was the country's first trade union. In fact, labour organizations of varying degrees of effectiveness had existed in India since the 1880s, whose struggles were frequently broader in scope.Footnote 73 A more critical reading of the TISCO case reveals the contradictions and inconsistencies of Tata class politics, which better embodies the type of dynamic class concept that Thompson's work suggests.
Despite the apparent centrality of political struggle to TISCO union history, and the prevalence of classist discourses in key areas of the Tata Workers’ Union's self-presentation, Tata labour politics has historically functioned according to principles which primarily seek to reproduce employment security within local families over time, rather than engage with the shared interests of even quite similarly positioned labour forces within the same sector. More importantly, formal Tata labour politics has been historically silent on the struggles of TISCO's own casual workers: most notably in the Tata Workers’ Union's lack of support for the 1981 regularization of approximately 10,000 Adivasi migrants in unskilled manual posts, who were subsequently forcibly removed from the shopfloor by police and company enforcers following a sit-in.Footnote 74 If there is a direct parallel with TISCO to the English working class described by Thompson,Footnote 75 it is with the elite community of English artisans, whose experiences dictated national class politics, yet whose control vis à vis production was greater than that of labourers, with whom they felt only a partial affinity. In an industrial context, the historical TISCO workforce is best conceptualized as an ‘aristocracy of labour’,Footnote 76 which has historically bounded itself on the basis of descent, to the exclusion of more distant and frequently more radical labour struggles.Footnote 77
Following Chandavarkar, we read Thompson's work as the articulation of a particular kind of historical method, which shows how social formations arise out of a coincidence of events, contexts, ideas and dispositions.Footnote 78 An application of the Thompsonian method in Jamshedpur suggests that Tata job heritability has historically conspired with migrant urbanization to create a bounded class defined by highly localized forms of employment: a condition that is itself dependent upon descent in any given instance. Which is to say the Tata aristocracy of labour is defined by its members’ ancestral engagement in company employment, which they are heavily reliant upon as a population that is permanently settled in a corporate urban space. In India's oldest steel town, the structural importance of descent divides the local working class into insiders and outsiders on the basis of their respective ancestry. We suggest that a class consciousness based upon a relationship to production has not historically typified the urban Tata working class, regardless of suggestions to the contrary in union discourses. Indeed, it is only since the mass casualization of Tata labour in the 1990s that such a consciousness may have emerged, as members of traditional company families find their prospects and standards of living converging with India's informal sector workers.Footnote 79 Nevertheless, even in this more recent context, access to the casual jobs that constitute modern Tata employment remains largely dependent upon an ancestry of company work.Footnote 80
If Tata labour politics has traditionally privileged the interests of those who enjoy an ancestry of company employment, then by contrast the boundaries of the RSP working class in Rourkela are drawn in favour of Odia and Adivasi ‘sons of the soil’. The distinction between these two apparently similar cases raises important questions regarding the types of urban spaces that they pertain to. Whilst both share a paternalistic company town model and a close relationship between local urbanization and nationalism, the two towns are in fact premised on rather different notions of what a city is for, and what its relationship to the past should be. In a recent reflection on the nature of urban anthropology, Parry's use of Redfield and Singer's distinction between Orthogenetic and Heterogenetic cities suggests a helpful way of theorizing the differences between the Tata and RSP cases.Footnote 81 Orthogenetic cities are urban conglomerations that have arisen organically and endogenously, and usually over lengthy periods of time. In these spaces, rural folk culture becomes progressively systematized by urban elites, who create an indigenous civilization in an emergent urban space. By contrast, heterogenetic cities are spaces that are frequently planned, and whose foundation is directed by dissimilar, often colonial, cultures. In such spaces, urban life is defined by a dynamism that is at odds with the local folk culture.Footnote 82
Both Rourkela and Jamshedpur are cohesive urban spaces whose shape, culture and purpose were conceptualized by distant architects prior to the building of their physical infrastructure. Likewise, both towns were founded according to developmental ambitions, which assumed that these cities should be spaces of technological and cultural innovation. In Jamshedpur, the city was imagined as a modern space in which the exploitation and regressive failures of colonial industry would be overtaken by the benevolence and success of Indian entrepreneurship. In Rourkela, company homes and RSP jobs were supposed to usher in a new age of prosperity and cosmopolitanism for a multi-ethnic workforce, in a nation still beset by poverty and communal conflict. Clearly then, neither of these company towns are orthogenetic in the sense that Indian cities like Varanasi are understood to be. However, one might conceptualize a continuum between Redfield and Singer's two ideal types, which sheds light on how the Tata case is distinct from Nehru's steel towns in eastern and central India, and the impact which this has upon class politics in their respective environments.
In comparison to Rourkela, the TISCO project inspired a heterogenetic city in Jamshedpur that corresponded far more closely to the ideal type described by Redfield and Singer's model. Based upon a notion of Indian industrialization as a pioneering, entrepreneurial force, Tata urbanization supposed that industrial modernity would wholly supplant the indigenous culture in the areas where it emerged. In Jamshedpur, this was to occur amidst an ostensibly undeveloped and thinly populated region of the country, in a planned city where all space was effectively company space, and urban life reckoned against its relationship to industrial productivity. As such, the urban culture that began to emerge in Jamshedpur in the 1900s was premised on replacing existing ways of life with new, modern forms that could maximize the productivity of the city's central industry. Key to this project of heterogenetic city-building was the initial need to replace a local culture of subsistence farming and hunter-gathering with a diverse migrant population, whose various skills and dispositions might be applied to a hierarchical and highly specialized industrial working life. In the years that followed, the stabilization of this migrant labour force through the heritability of company employment was central to the creation of a heterogenetic urban culture in Jamshedpur. It is this culture which effectively bounds the Tata working class in reference to descent, rather than autochthony.
The key distinction between the Jamshedpur and Rourkela cases is that although Tata industrialization may have assumed a distinctly nationalistic bent, it was nonetheless primarily concerned with the building of a private company and a productive city, whereas RSP was more determinedly engaged in the building of a nation. So whilst Tata urbanization excluded local people from its new industrial spaces according to their perceived abilities, in Rourkela the Nehruvian project was intrinsically concerned with the incorporation of autochthons into a cosmopolitan labour force. That RSP largely failed to create a labour force that transcended its ethnic differences in Rourkela, is largely due to the historical emergence of Odia nationalism in the 1960s, which regarded RSP employment as a scarce state resource that was disproportionally allocated to out-of-state migrants. It is this history which gives the heterogenetic company town of Rourkela a basic grounding in orthogenetic principles, and which explains why it is autochthony rather than descent from company employment which bounds the RSP working class.
Conclusion
In the iconic steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela, a reading of the TISCO and RSP labour forces as prototypical proletariats does not fully theorize these classes as industrial elites. More fundamentally, such an assumption ignores the fact that classes are dynamic and unique social formations, which are dependent upon the varied hierarchies and identities that surround them. Despite implicit interpretations to the contrary,Footnote 83 we suggest that it is the understanding of the role played by contingency that forms the core of Thompson's class concept, and which explains his insistence on the value of historical, rather than abstract analysis.Footnote 84 In TISCO and RSP, the contingencies of class formation extend to the structuring principles of descent and autochthony in industrial employment.
In Jamshedpur, membership of the working class has been restricted to those who can claim an ancestral engagement with Tata employment. The heritability of company jobs in almost all of Jamshedpur's Tata industries means that the working class is reproduced through families, via institutions such as apprenticeships that are largely closed to applicants from non-local backgrounds.Footnote 85 It is clear, then, that this class does not operate on the same lines as those suggested in union discourses, and should be regarded as an aristocracy of labour, which locally bounds itself with each successive generation. Tata class politics has accordingly been historically unwilling to engage with the class struggles of the city's seasonal and contract workers—a characteristic feature of conservative trade unionism in India's formal sector.Footnote 86 However, if descent is a technology of class for Tata's aristocracy of labour, then it is mutually exclusive to the principle of autochthonous rights that structures the RSP working class. We suggest that in Jamshedpur the particular history of Tata employment regimes prevents the convergence of any specific local ethnicity with employment rights for two reasons.
First, Tata's earliest recruitment policies were successful in constructing a workforce comprised of migrants. This labourforce was urbanized and dependent on company employment after less than one generation, and has historically built its collective class politics on the terrain of localized labour issues. Ethnicity is undoubtedly a historically important principle of Jamshedpur public life: the city experienced its share of communal violence in the Hindu/Muslim riots of 1964 and 1979, albeit on a lesser scale than in Rourkela. Likewise, class distinctions continue to characterize relations between Biharis and elite Bengalis on the shopfloors of Tata industry.Footnote 87 However, autochthony has never structured Tata class politics as in Rourkela, since none of the manual labour force of migrant Uttar Pradeshis, Biharis, Chhattisgarhis and Odias can claim an autochthonous identity. The region's indigenous autochthons were largely excluded from the city's urban core early in its foundation, since TISCO was a project of complete urbanization that depended upon the incorporation of racially ranked migrants. In this vision, the demands of autochthons played no role, and a popular ethno-regionalism was not able to successfully petition for them as in Odisha.
Second, the exclusion of autochthons from company employment in the 1900s is self-perpetuating, since the Tata working class reproduces itself though families. On today's Tata shopfloors, even casual jobs are the preserve of company children, and descent remains the most important determinate of class.Footnote 88 By contrast, in Rourkela the boundaries of the Nehruvian working class were shaped by policies that made employment contingent upon an apparent ancestral relationship with the land. This relationship is exclusive to particular communities of Odias and Adivasis, and cannot be acquired by employment. The success of Odia nationalism during the 1950s and 1960s, was to distort the notion of autochthonous rights in ways that afforded non-displaced communities from Odisha's coastal lowlands privileged access to the rewards of Nehruvian development. The result of the historical intersection of ethno-regional politics with state policy in Rourkela, was the making of an aristocracy of labour that, although potentially unstable within families over time, was increasingly ethnically homogenous.
The suggestion that the politics of labour is frequently structured by family, ethnicity and caste, has been well-articulated in a number of studies of Indian workplaces.Footnote 89 However, what this paper suggests is that these same practices, which have generally been understood to be characteristic of working life in India's informal sector, are of equal salience in large-scale enterprises whose employment practices and organs of collective action are highly formalized. This is perhaps to be expected in public-sector ventures such as RSP, where state employment reservations for disadvantaged communities have contentiously structured access to work for some time.Footnote 90 However, the formal intersection of class, descent and the ethnic hierarchies of labour in TISCO is more significant. In Jamshedpur it is the formality of such practices which renders them durable, as the Tata working class reproduces itself and its boundaries across several generations and in close reference to a specific relationship with a single employer. The tenacity of this system is evident in the extent to which even casually employed Tata workers from company families currently accept low wages and a high degree of job insecurity for many years: such employees are inured to the value of Tata employment, and conceptualize many of their family ambitions around it. As such, the increasingly precarious Tata workforce is often reticent to seek employment elsewhere, since they have vain hopes of achieving regularization in a company that has employed four generations of their family.Footnote 91 Whilst current working conditions may well collapse many of the distinctions between Jamshedpur's Tata aristocracy of labour and their counterparts in the informal sector, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, which follows almost a century of more elitist labour politics.
Historically, an ideal-type class consciousness has not emerged in either the RSP or the TISCO workplace. Which is to say, that whereas these sites have labour forces that are conscious of themselves as a class, with a history of local trade union struggle to support this assertion, in neither case have their actions stepped beyond the gates of their own workplaces to engage in anything approaching a broadly configured ‘class struggle’. On the contrary, considerations of descent and ethnicity have historically precluded these workforces’ identification with the struggles of more distant labour forces. Explaining the salient distinction of descent versus autochthony in these two cases, we suggest that in the private-sector steel town of Jamshedpur, the Tata company has an effective monopoly on the local civil and productive infrastructure, such that the descendants of employees remain reliant upon an ancestry of company work to access employment, rather than upon claims to autochthony. By contrast, in the state-sector steel town of Rourkela, RSP has never successfully established a monopoly of control over the means of production, nor has it necessarily sought to do so. Rather, access to RSP work has been historically mediated by the politics of ethno-regionalism, which considers public-sector employment as a state-resource, whose distribution should be determined by developmental considerations, and may be influenced by political pressure. Hence, logics of autochthony emerged as the formal mechanism by which access to RSP employment is structured, in ways that were not possible in TISCO.
We argue that what these comparative cases reveal are just two of the ways in which the complex social formation of class relates to other social orders. In the Tata company town of Jamshedpur, corporate conceptions of different ethnic abilities, and the demand for productive stability, have helped to shape a working class whose boundaries are drawn according to descent. In Rourkela, the historical collision of Nehruvian socialism with Odia nationalism has shaped a working class bounded by autochthony. A historical interrogation of the Rourkela and Jamshedpur company towns helps to explain how industrial class politics can vary so widely, in contexts that initially appear to be more similar than they are different.
