I Contextualising the Problem: Unravelling the Paradox of ‘Peasant Workers’

From the late nineteenth century India witnessed an expansion in modern industries. By 1914 nearly a million people were employed in large industrial centres of the country. Cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Ahmedabad witnessed the emergence of industrial belts that surrounded these towns. The presence of large industrial working classes in these cities transformed the nature of urban politics. Between 1918 and 1940 Bombay witnessed eight industrial general strikes. In Calcutta three strike waves in 1920–21, 1929 and 1937–38 paralysed industrial activities. Prolonged industrial conflicts often produced widespread confrontations between law enforcement machineries of the colonial state and poorer urban dwellers.

Workers’ politics in this period was characterised by paradoxes. There were occasions when intense industrial action, marked by workers’ solidarity, was followed by communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims, or men from different regions. Numerous strikes were organised in the mills yet formal labour organisation remained weak. Few trade unions existed and those which did had a handful of members and very little influence. During strikes, workers faced the concerted repressive apparatus of the European managers and the colonial police. Yet, the workers did not form a ready-made political constituency of the Congress which was also confronting the colonial state in India in this period. All these confounded contemporary colonial observers and many readily concluded that workers in India were motivated more by their primordial loyalties and rural mentalities than a sense of belonging to a class. They lacked the ability to organise and sustain industrial action.Footnote ²

Historians of different ideological perceptions tend to echo many of these views based on colonial oxymoron: ‘peasant workers’. Historians concerned with the story of nation formation often dismissed workers as an insignificant social force incapable of organising themselves because of the resilience of rural ties in their social life which historians regarded as naturally atomistic.Footnote ³ In a different way, Marxist historians have explained the paradox as that of incomplete transition to capitalism whereby peasant mentalities of workers acted as constraints towards the emergence of a stable trade union movement and a revolutionary political party.Footnote ⁴ Political economists and historians working within modernising paradigm explained these paradoxes in terms of conflicts between traditional social organisation and modern institutional frameworks.Footnote ⁵ Subaltern historians, who self—consciously embarked on a project of history writing to provide voice to subaltern social groups, have formulated a critique of formulaic rigidity of traditional Marxists. Ironically, they continued to echo assumptions derived from colonial sources. In his well known work on Calcutta workers, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the pre-capitalist hierarchies of Indian society play a fundamental role in shaping labour politics. This thesis emphasises the resilience of pre-capitalist community structures among workers and the resistance of such communities to the logic of capital. Drawing upon Thompson's reading of English history, Chakrabarty argues that the notion of working class in England is embedded within a hegemonic bourgeois culture which helped sustain an inherited egalitarian notion of citizenship. He argues that Indian workers, steeped in their pre-capitalist hierarchical culture based on natal communities failed to develop an identity as worker in contrast to English case.Footnote ⁶ For Chakrabarty thus jute workers were trapped within the pre-capitalist loyalties of caste, religion and region. More importantly, their hierarchical culture enabled bhadralok (literally meaning gentlemen) trade union leaders in Bengal to create zamindaries (fiefdom) where workers served merely as retainers. Judged against the universalist yardstick of class and class formation, this past historiography tends to highlight the ‘peculiarities of Indian working class’, and it becomes a list of failures, the absence of strong trade union, the weakness of political parties aspiring to represent working classes and the inability of workers to make a significant impact on Indian politics in general.

Recent works on labour in South Asia have moved beyond the juxtaposition of class and community as oppositional entities. Indeed, challenging such teleology driven model of social transition whereby the process of industrialization is perceived as an inevitable historical process emanating from the West and workers were perceived to be passive victims, Raj Chandavarkar pertinently invited historians to view economy as constituted by production conditions, by relationship between town and country, by the agency of social classes, by the political presence of the colonial state and by the larger context of global economy.Footnote ⁷ Borrowing upon this view of economy and industrialization Chandavarkar rejected the notion of ‘structure’ or ‘cultural norms’ as fixed entities or as primary determinants of workers’ behaviours. Instead, Chandavarkar privileged political processes involving state, capital and labor whereby modes of collective action and solidarities among workers could be explained in terms of political conjuncture. This emphasis on political contingency enabled him to decipher various forms of collective identities of workers such as caste, religion and kinship in labor politics as both competing with and coexisting and reinforcing class identities.Footnote ⁸ Thus Chandavarkar curves a new path that moves ahead of the earlier dichotomies posited by class versus community or structure versus culture.

In recent historiography thus the earlier debate about the relationship between class and community, or structure and culture is replaced by new concerns about how social consciousness of workers can be viewed in terms of their own agencies in making sense of their own lives. It is from this perspective historians view ethnic or cultural ties as well as class solidarities in a different light. For example, Dilip Simeon has demonstrated how ethnic identity did strengthen workers’ ability to organize collective action.Footnote ⁹ More recently Leela Fernandez, by drawing upon Gramsci and Foucault, has explained how political boundaries around the social categories of gender, caste and class are produced through institutional, discursive practices, daily practices in the labor market in the context of present day jute industry and how such constructions acquire hegemonic meanings in workers’ lives.Footnote ¹⁰ In her recently published work, Chitra Joshi has demonstrated the crucial significance of history and public memory in recreating bonds among workers and their ability to critiquing the present bleak circumstances by accessing history of 1937 strike.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly through an investigation in the world of textile workers in Surat and Bhiwandi, Doug Haynes has demonstrated how workers and employers use, in a contrasting way, the language of morality, caste and kinship to express their current apprehensions.Footnote ¹² This complex historiography enables us to move beyond any pre-given dichotomous oppositional readymade notion of class and communities constructed through primordial ties.

Drawing upon various strands of these works, my research on politics of jute workers in the Eastern Indian region of Bengal questions the totalising notion of class in explaining workers’ politics. The assumption of ready-made solidarities among supposed social classes centred around production relations in the factories denied workers any agency in making their history. It is argued here that solidarities among workers were produced and dismantled in the process of political mobilisation in a particular historic conjuncture. The very idea of ‘peasant worker’ remains problematic as it emphasises the supposed dichotomy between agriculture, usually characterised by the atomised world of pre-capitalist subsistence production, and industry, generally marked by labour herded by capital.Footnote ¹³ It is argued here that there existed a symbiotic relationship between the two in shaping workers’ work, social life and political consciousness.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, rural bases have sustained workers in urban world and urban jobs actually helped workers to meet the uncertainties of rural social life. Trapped between diminishing returns from agrarian economy and an over-crowded labour market jute industrial workers needed to maintain their village ties for survival in industrial areas. Workers were unsettled settlers because of the lack of investment in urban infrastructure, the nature of urban ecology, public health system and above all the disposition of industrial governance that preferred temporary workers.

Similarly, the notion of workers’ entrapment into primordial loyalties presents a static image of the migrant workers’ social and political consciousness and replaces the totalising notion of class with a totalising notion of communities based on ethnic identities. It is true that in urban areas, migrants depended upon their fellow villagers, members of the same caste, religion and linguistic group for support and help. Yet these identities were by no means fixed or permanent and such ties merely indicated how migrant workers struggled to enter and survive in the urban labour market.

Similar to the fact that the complex mosaic of religious, linguistic and regional identities did not produce readymade building blocks for watertight communities, shared experiences of managerial oppression within work places did not lead towards the emergence of a homogenous monolithic working class. The differences among workers in terms of skill, wages, nature of job contracts tended to undermine the emergence of a homogenous working class. Strikes, conflicts with colonial state, collaboration with radical politicians were products of intense negotiations among workers themselves. These alliances were contingent upon immediate grievances and the nature of perception of their immediate needs among different segments of workers. In this context, the lack of the stable trade union organisation among workers may have reflected a ‘calculated’ strategy on their part. As indeed, in the face of other odds, lightning strikes may have been a preferred alternative since they had the potential to catch the management unawares and consequently perhaps avoid victimisation. At the same time, it could imply less suffering for more vulnerable groups of workers who were employed on a casual contract.

This essay is part of a wider work that advocates a new understanding of labour history where by identities can be viewed as products of complex on going interactions among economic, social and cultural factors.Footnote ¹⁵ Instead of viewing such identities as static and foundational, it sees them as constantly changing. From this perspective, the politics of workers based on their strategies of survival and struggle for a better life in an adverse social, economic and political terrain appear to be flexible and focussed on incremental gains rather than complete revolutionary transformation.

II Migration pattern and survival strategies of industrial workers in Calcutta-Howrah industrial belt

Calcutta in the late nineteenth century became a vast and thriving city. The dramatic rise of Calcutta as the ‘second city’ of the empire was accompanied by industrial growth in the immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis. Pivotal to this process of industrial expansion and urban growth was the jute industry. Jute mills stretched over an area of 20 miles, along the banks of the Hooghly, both north and south of the city. The jute mill belt was confined to 6 miles on both sides of the Hooghly.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1912 there were 61 jute factories in this region employing nearly 200,000 workers.Footnote ¹⁷ Many of these workers continued to migrate to and fro from villages to the town across five hundred miles in interior of eastern United Province (hereafter UP) and Bihar. The roots of such circular migration can be explained clearly by examining rural and urban contexts of workers’ world.

The changes in the rural economy of Bihar and east UP crucially influenced the pattern of formation of migrant work force in Bengal. The districts of north and central Bihar and east UP were located in the middle of the vast and fertile plain of northern India. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century these districts witnessed far reaching social and economic transformations. By the 1890s, due to rapid population growth, the demographic pressure on land increased significantly.Footnote ¹⁸ Virtually all cultivable land were brought under the plough.Footnote ¹⁹ This in turn had an adverse effect on pastures.Footnote ²⁰ Pastoral communities in Bihar and east UP were forced to give up pastoral pursuits and became cultivators.Footnote ²¹ As pressure on land increased, family holdings were increasingly subdivided.Footnote ²² Such subdivision and fragmentation of holdings increased the costs of cultivation and reduced the returns.Footnote ²³

The steady growth of population, and the relentless extension of cultivation also adversely affected the natural resources for agriculture. Bihar and east UP were not areas of heavy rainfall.Footnote ²⁴ Here cultivation to a great extent relied upon irrigation. But marshes and creeks, which were sources of water supply, dried up and tanks were filled up for new cultivable land. This made agriculture far more dependent on the monsoon and the failure could have disastrous consequences.Footnote ²⁵ The central Bihar, which was a primarily rice producing area, often suffered from drought in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ Perhaps the peasants’ need for water was most aptly reflected in the Bhojpuri saying:

Population growth apart, the Permanent Settlement introduced by the British in Bihar since the 1790s, tightened the control of the landlords over diminishing rural resources and thus served to deepen the agrarian crisis.Footnote ²⁸ In reality, the zamindars, who often combined money-lending with the income from landed estates,Footnote ²⁹ acquired land from indebted peasants.Footnote ³⁰ Tenants were frequently forced off the land and as landless labourers they lived on the edge of starvation. Increasingly, as zamindars acquired large landed estates, land distribution became extremely unequal and the average size of peasant holdings decreased.Footnote ³¹

Additionally, they imposed various forms of exactions on the peasantry like forced labour on zamindars’ land, homage or appropriation of the produce of orchards.Footnote ³² and taxed the tenants for the maintenance of the tanks and the roads, even though they spent little on the development of rural estates.Footnote ³³ With the rapid commercialization of agriculture there took place a further decline of the conditions of the peasant. This wider access to the market enabled the zamindars and affluent tenants to store produce until prices rose and make large profits. Moreover, in order to maximise profits, zamindars in many areas tried to switch over from nagdi or cash rent to bhaoli or produce rent. This attempt at reintroduction of produce rent probably further restricted the market opportunities to the poor peasants and possibly depleted the stock of food crops which peasants stored for consumption. In a period of increasing prices of food crops this perhaps pushed them further towards the edge of starvation. This presumably led to constant conflicts between landlords and tenants over the forms of the revenue payment.Footnote ³⁴ The mood of peasant bitterness was aptly captured in a local saying

In the late nineteenth century with the deepening of the agrarian crisis numerous small peasants faced starvation. Hunger was a condition of life for the rural poor. Throughout the late nineteenth century the purchasing power of the ‘poorer classes’ in this rural region constantly declined.Footnote ³⁶ Famines scarcities and consequently epidemics marked the region from 1860s onwards.Footnote ³⁷ By the 1890s population started to decline in this vast track of Indo—Gangetic plain.Footnote ³⁸ It became clear that an alternative source of income was essential for the survival of the rural population.Footnote ³⁹ The famines, starvation and epidemics caused large scale exodus of people from these regions to Bengal and Assam.Footnote ⁴⁰

The introduction of railways in this period enabled mass migration within shorter period of time at far less cost. As a consequence, after the first decade of the twentieth century migrants from Bihar and east UP districts were found all over eastern India and over seas colonies including British Guiana, Trinidad, Natal and Mauritius.Footnote ⁴¹ Calcutta was located on this mass migration route.

At the very point when flow of migration from Bihar and east UP quickened in the 1890s, the jute industry in Bengal began to grow rapidly. This mass movement of migrants to Calcutta and the neighbouring emerging industrial areas not only ensured an abundance of labour but provided an impetus to the proliferation of jute mill towns. In fact, from 1896 onwards, some of the mills in 24 Parganas had begun to replace local labour with ‘up country’ mill hands.Footnote ⁴² The most densely-packed migrant-dominated industrial enclave in the region was the Kankinara—Jagaddal-Bhatpara-Naihati belt, where in 12 Jute mills and 3 other large factories and 85,000 people were packed across an area of 5.5 square miles.Footnote ⁴³ This changed the demographic balance in favour of Hindi speaking migrants.

A steady flow of labourers from declining agrarian economic regions continued to serve these mill towns for the first half of the twentieth century. Single adult males were preponderant among the migrant workers. The uncertainties of life in an unknown distant land perhaps initially discouraged the migration of women and children.Footnote ⁴⁴ Most adult male migrants were marginal farmers or agricultural workers who had negligible plots of land in rural areas which were looked after by their wives and children.Footnote ⁴⁵ These men wanted to supplement their rural resources from urban employment. However, as the labour continued to arrive to the mills, labour market soon became glutted. Few workers earned enough to bring their wives and children in the mill towns. In 1929 according to one calculation, a working-class family of a husband and wife and three children required Rs 7 per week to subsist in the mill towns but an average mill worker at that time earned only Rs. 5 per week.Footnote ⁴⁶ As late as 1946, a survey of family budgets showed that expenses exceeded income in 70% of the working class house holds in the urban areas.Footnote ⁴⁷ This further indicates that workers could not maintain their families in the mill towns on urban wages alone. This separation of migrant male workers and their wives and children in turn reinforced the need for periodic migration to the villages.

The need for a rural base became necessary for migrant workers for health reasons too. The wages of jute mill workers provided them with bare subsistence. They were often hungry, and some were malnourished. In 1929, Dr. Batra, a Bengal Government health official, found that the jute workers’ average caloric food intake was much lower than that of prisoners in Bengal.Footnote ⁴⁸ Dr. Batra further observed that those workers who did not return to their village each year suffered most from the diseases related to malnutrition.Footnote ⁴⁹ Most workers lived in privately owned slums which according to Foley suffered from ‘overcrowding and a serious neglect of the [sic] sanitation.’Footnote ⁵⁰ In mill housing, four or five workers shared small rooms.Footnote ⁵¹ It is not surprising that such congested insanitary dwelling places created an unhealthy environment in the mill towns. This was particularly evident in the repeated occurrences of epidemics in working-class slums.Footnote ⁵² The causes of the epidemics in the mill municipalities was undoubtedly rooted in the insanitary conditions of the over-crowded bastees.

However, municipalities located the main cause of such insanitary environment in the ‘unclean habits’ of workers. The currency of these stereotypes among the members of the municipality was reflected in their annual report on town administration in 1918 which found that although there was ‘scarcity of good drinking water’ it was a less important factor for these diseases (including the water-borne viruses) in comparison to the ‘unclean habits of workers’.Footnote ⁵³ But despite their lamentation about the lack of good drinking water, mill managers were unwilling to pay for it.Footnote ⁵⁴

In these circumstances workers naturally preferred to go back to their villages when they fell ill. Municipal boards which were dominated by the mill managers might have preferred this periodic migration. In fact, if contagious diseases was noticed among the coolies, the management immediately threw those workers out of their dwellings. The detection of disease was often followed by harsh measures. The sick could be evicted and then their ‘clothes and other belongings would be burnt.’Footnote ⁵⁵

The high infant mortality rates in working-class slums also reflected the insanitary conditions of the mill towns. According to the municipality report of Bhatpara in 1931, 108 out of 822 deaths reported in the town were children under one year's age and 93 were from 1 to 5 years age.Footnote ⁵⁶ Women workers in many cases went back home to give birth to their babies and returned when the latter became old enough to work in the factories.Footnote ⁵⁷ In many mill towns death rate exceeded birth rates. It was possible that the high rate of infant mortality swelled the death rate in the mill towns because most of the adult workers, as the municipality report claims, went back home when they were ill.

Mill managers made only the most superficial attempts to improve the situation. In the 1920s they opened baby clinics and crèches in the mills, where according to mill doctor ‘the mixtures which the children are given when they cry is enough to ruin all but the strongest digestion and to swell the death rate enormously. Many are doped with opium and die eventually from inanition’.Footnote ⁵⁸

These high rates of infant mortality might have also discouraged workers from bringing their wives and children to the mill towns.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus, their villages for most workers were the only source to supplement their earnings from factory employment. By fragmenting these experience and by juxtaposing rural and urban industrial lives as two separate domains historians tend to miss crucial significance of rural urban nexuses in the survival strategies of workers in urban areas. Periodic migration to rural areas did not reflect a lack of commitment to urban industrial settings. On the contrary hopes and aspirations of rural poor driven out from their village habitats by push factors were linked with the opportunities available by the employment in the mills. In other words, the migrant jute workers did not lack a commitment to urban jobs but low wages and inhospitable living conditions in the mill towns compelled them to retain their rural ties for survival in urban areas. The periodic migration to the rural areas was a reflection of that survival strategy rather than simple rural mentality.

III Meaning of community: religion, caste and gender in delineating social organisation of jute workers

Migrant workers in Bengal mill towns supposedly developed social networks based on caste, religious, and regional affinities to get jobs, loans and housing. In times of need they depended upon these networks for help. Yet a detail investigation of the social organisation of workers does not reveal clearly formulated neat categories of ethnic identities; rather we find a complex process of formations of social ties that was the product of urban industrial work settings. The search for employment in the jute mills was expensive and time consuming. Migrants often took loans in the villages to come to the jute mills.Footnote ⁶⁰ The support of the relatives was essential to the migrants as they often had to wait for months to find employment. New arrivals also needed right contacts in the mills to obtain employment.Footnote ⁶¹ In most cases migrants came to the mill towns with their relatives or fellow villagers who helped them to find employment in the jute mills.Footnote ⁶² Workers who had no relatives in the urban areas depended upon their fellow villagers or ‘country men’ for support.Footnote ⁶³

Yet such ties were not clearly delineated and often language, caste and religious ties overlapped with each other. This was evident in the census of mill workers conducted by individual factory authorities, which indicated that notions of belonging to a community varied among different social groups. This point is further exemplified in the mill census. The Manager of Victoria jute mill conducted this census on the basis of information supplied by the workers. This information shows that workers used various categories of affinity to describe their identity. Telegus and Bilaspuris were classified on the basis of their region, but Hindustani speaking people were identified on the basis of language. In other words, such ties helped workers to enter in the mill but there was no singular interpretation of community identities among them. Caste, religious and linguistic affiliations always intersected with each other. The overlapping and changing nature of the so-called identities militated against the possibilities of the development of community identities based on kinship ties.Footnote ⁶⁴

Conjugal living in an overwhelming male environment also often tended to challenge the hold of caste and religion. Working-class women and men in the mill towns often selected their household partners among people from different region and religion. Predominantly adult male migrants who were separated from their wives for long periods dominated the mill towns. Migration patterns undoubtedly varied between linguistic groups and thus cohabitation with women also differed in mill areas.

The majority of single adult Bengali women workers, for example, were mostly widows, or otherwise alienated from their families. In the mill towns these women selected their partners from diverse social backgrounds.Footnote ⁶⁵ In many cases, these male partners had two different “Samsars” or ‘ household establishments’, one based in the mill towns, and the other in the villages. These relations cut across boundaries of religion, region or caste.Footnote ⁶⁶

Caste, language and religion based identities were also intersected by hierarchies based on skill, wages and the nature of employment of workers. The organisation of production in the jute factories divided workers into various segments in terms of skill, nature of employment and gender. The main divisions among workers occurred in terms of skill required for operating different machines in various stages of production. The raw jute passed through six different departments of a factory called batching, softening, preparing, spinning, weaving and sewing. The departments of spinning and weaving constituted the most important sections of jute factories because this is where jute was put into looms and was transformed into clothes for burlaps.

The social and economic distances between skilled and unskilled workers in terms of work-place hierarchy, wages, and the regularity of employment had an effect on life outside the factory. Relatively affluent adult male skilled workers like weavers often prevented their wives from working in the factories, while much poorer labouring families worked collectively for survival. Thus, although caste, regional and religious ties were important for workers in the mill towns and provided them with some security in an uncertain urban environment, social identities and affiliations were fluid. Within ‘communities’ defined by caste or religion, language or region, the occupational hierarchies, and divisions of labour, wage differentials and gender differences divided workers whom historians and anthropologists lumped together in a single cultural category. These overlapping social ties made community identities of workers extremely ambiguous, fragile and incapable of recreation.

If rural communities were not reproduced in urban industrial settings, could we talk about urban production relations, providing a framework of shared experience for the industrial workers that tightened bonds of communities? Here problems of community formation based on a shared working experience encounters a much more crucial problem. For example, social distances between weavers and general workers stood in the way of identification of common grievances. Weavers particularly earned much higher salaries than other workers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Furthermore, weavers were not paid on the basis of time like most other occupations but according to the output.Footnote ⁶⁸

Divisions between skilled and unskilled workers were strengthened by the fact that most of the unskilled workers were employed on a daily basis. Mill managers generally divided the entire jute workforce into three categories-daily or badli, temporary and permanent. The badli workers, who constituted a vast majority of jute work force, were recruited on day to day basis at factory gates.Footnote ⁶⁹ The jute industry mostly employed casual labourers, except for the spinning and the weaving department. Among jute workers only weavers were not employed on every day basis, as their work required much more time to learn than other workers. The managers sometimes permitted weavers to recruit new helping hands on their own.Footnote ⁷⁰ These divisions due to the regularity of work further distinguished weavers from other workers.

There were also sharp divisions between women and men in terms of employment and skill. With the increasing flow of adult male migrants, women were recruited into departments with low wages. Even for the same jobs women were paid much less than the male workers. Sewing departments in the mills were named ‘magi-kol’ by workers indicating the dominance of women.Footnote ⁷¹ These women workers were mostly single migrants and nearly all of them were casual workers. The differentiation of skills, rewards and nature of job alongside diverse forms of tensions militated against any water tight notion of communities among workers. This may raise the question: in what circumstances can there be solidarities among workers drawn from such a diverse background and fragmented along lines of skill, gender and income?

IV Interpreting Mutuality of Interests and the Mechanism of Workers’ Protests

The answer could be found in the workers’ notions of mutuality of interests centred around shared grievances over long working hours, wages, managerial practice of inflicting physical punishments and arbitrary dismissals. Mutuality should not be taken to signify the formation or emergence of class-consciousness. It would also be wrong to perceive that workers were always ready to engage into industrial action to redress these grievances.

Industrial conflicts occurred when workers perceived that managers violated what they regarded as customary rights (dasturi). For example, workers developed their own code of resistance to long working hours by refusing to be tied down to the machine throughout the working period. They moved around, took intervals for a short period and even smoked bidi or had food during such self-created recesses. Management made only selective intervention to regulate such activities. Workers regarded such behaviour as customary work practices. Related to such custom was the notion of fairness (insaf). Workers regarded the violation of such customs as unfair treatment or denied justice (insaf). In 1930s during the great depression in order to enforce and tighten the discipline in the mill, the management adopted measures to restrict the movement of workers during working hours. These developments unsettled workers who raised objections to what they perceived as gross violation of customary practices within factories.Footnote ⁷²

Izzat or sense of social honour plays a crucial role in causing conflicts. Physical punishments often caused conflicts as they appeared to have undermined the notion of social honour of workers. In September 1888, in Sealdah court, a case was brought against John Miller of Sealdah Jute Mill by a worker for assault. According to a contemporary newspaper account Miller had sworn at him when he asked for leave. When the worker asked for his wages held in arrears, he was set upon and kicked by Miller.Footnote ⁷³ Such incidents, not uncommon in the jute mills, provoked violence and often was regarded by workers as an infringement of their sense of social honour.

There were little evidence of rural ties of workers and religious or linguistic loyalties acting as a break on workers’ solidarities. Indeed, on different occasions religious loyalties or regional ties, could also strengthen solidarities among workers. For example, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when facing labour shortages, mill managers tried to impose a more rigid work discipline, this clashed with workers’ perception of work, leisure and festivities. While in the early years workers could easily take a day off,Footnote ⁷⁴ in the changed economic circumstances of 1890s, managers inadvertently interfered in the observance of religious festivals since they wished to prevent such ad hoc absenteeism. All absences, whatever the reason, were punished by fines and the withholding of wages. This situation created a tense environment in the mill towns which escalated rapidly into strikes on several occasions.

For workers, holidays on religious occasions were especially significant because they provided a rare opportunity for festive enjoyment. These migrant workers, isolated from their family, confined to a factory for thirteen hours, inhabiting over crowded slums, found in the collective celebration of religious festivals a respite from the monotony of mill life.Footnote ⁷⁵ Various religious and regional festivals like Chhat, Annapurna puja, Id and Muharram were celebrated in the bazaars and streets of the mill towns.

It is not surprising that workers were angered when denied the opportunity to participate in the festivities. Their anger was not only directed at a perceived infringement of their customary religious practices, but was also regarded as both a deprivation of the few opportunities for collective entertainment they enjoyed and an encroachment on work-place rights they had come to consider as established.Footnote ⁷⁶

During such strikes there hardly existed any tension among the workers themselves along religious lines. Rather, mill workers attacked the managers and in such instances police intervention escalated the scale of confrontation and workers became engaged in serious street level altercation with the police that threatened the entire law and order machinery of the colonial state in the mill towns. In this way, religious protest and anxiety along with social and economic grievances of mill-hands could transform into overall unity among workers. This indicates that religion or ‘communal consciousness’ and ‘class consciousness’ should not be regarded as marked by impermeable boundaries. Rather both were products of contingency of historic circumstances.

The role of religion in shaping and breaking alliances among workers themselves on work place grievances changed in accordance with changing political circumstances. For example, in 1937 when the general strike in jute mills challenged the hold of recently formed Muslim League government, tensions flared up among workers. The Muslim League organisation did campaign along provocative religious lines to cause further tensions. Thus the effects of religion in shaping labour politics were contingent upon overall political circumstances, the nature of political mobilisation and the very language in which political transactions were conducted. In this context, religious sentiments could not be regarded as pre-given uniformly oriented primordial loyalties that could simply break solidarities among workers on work place grievances.

Regional loyalties also found full play in labour politics in the swadeshi period when Bengali workers organised strikes in sympathy with the movement against Partition of Bengal, even if they were informed by more immediate concerns about wages and working conditions. Regional differences in this period at points led to clashes between upcountry workers and the Bengalis. Thus at points these regional loyalties did not only divide workers; they could in particular circumstance strengthen their unity as strikers. Indeed, role of religion or region in politics had no clear links with rural pre-capitalist community consciousness. Rather such loyalties became activated in different ways in different political contexts and these contexts were influenced by the nature of operation of industrial discipline, policies of the colonial state and more importantly the way rival nationalist movements imagined and re-imagined meanings, symbols and boundaries of national communities in India. In such contexts workers were no less and no more susceptible to communal consciousness than other segments of the Indian population. This analysis further raises a new question. If migrant workers’ politics did not reflect their ready made peasant communal solidarity why then strikes appear to be so sudden and volatile like peasant jacqueries? Why did trade unions remain so inherently unstable in the jute mills?

The mechanism of strikes in the jute mills often appeared unconventional to managers and the colonial state. Even though there did not develop any stable trade unions, the jute industry witnessed several prolonged industrial conflicts often catching the management by surprise because of their suddenness. Many lightening industrial actions were results of close nexuses between mill management, local government in mill towns and police. In their self-perception managers regarded themselves as ‘ma-baap’ of their employees and hence believed that they should exercise corrective influence over ‘irrational’ but ‘simple’, ‘child-like’ mill hands.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Scottish managers of jute mills established a stranglehold over mill town administrations in Bengal in the early twentieth century. They dominated municipal boards, controlled the local police force and acted as judicial magistrates of mill towns. They maintained their control over the municipal administration by forging alliances with propertied high caste Indians, generally from white collar professionsFootnote ⁷⁸

Workers’ response to such coalescing of managerial authority and state power was to organise lightening strikes to avoid immediate victimisation by the management. They also extended strikes beyond the confinement of factories and mounted wider industrial action to avoid dealing with the management of a single factory. Such industrial action often threatened the entire law and order machineries in the mill towns.

In the mill towns bazaars became the centre of working-class strike activities. During these strikes, workers attempted to mobilize resources by looting bazaars mainly owned by zamindars to ensure low prices of food items during strike.Footnote ⁷⁹ Shopkeepers, who were perceived as hoarders and held responsible for soaring prices, became a target of attack. Meetings were frequently held in bazaars and through discussions in these meetings, strikers decided their course of actions.Footnote ⁸⁰ These locality based mobilisations, through network of slums and bazaars, surprised the government officials who always suspected existence of a secret political organisation among the latter.

The pattern of social organisation of the workers in relation to the production system of the mills also influenced and informed the dynamism of this strike movement. In the jute industry weavers constituted the main backbone of the strikes. Their longer tenure of work in the factory gave them enough manoeuvring space in labour politics. As skilled and better paid workers, they advanced loans to other workers at a period of crisis and assisted them in getting jobs and housing and even employed extra hands on daily basis. Thus weavers were in a position to organise strikes more effectively than other workers. Furthermore, general workers, who were mostly badlis, did not stay in one factory for long and had little stake in long term collective bargaining. Often during strikes, the ‘badlis’ left work-place in search of new jobs to compensate immediate wage losses. Strikes thus started in weaving departments where skilled workers were employed, who could sustain immediate wage losses for a long term gain but the latter also knew that they had to resolve their demands in a short time. They could not afford to embark on long strikes which might crack the unity of weavers and other workers. In a way, competition for jobs and resources in a scarce situation ruled out any long term combination across various departments in individual factories. The short and lightening nature of the strikes in this context was in fact a better strategy for collective bargaining.

V Making Sense of Workers’ Politics in Bengal

This study of workers’ politics raises crucial questions concerning the existing consensus among historians of migrant workers as prisoners of their pre-capitalist rural ties. Rather than viewing the continuing rural urban ties as the manifestation of lack of commitment to urban industrial work, this essay demonstrates that such ties were necessary to the survival of workers in a hostile and volatile urban labour market. Migrants left their villages to earn livelihood in cities as village bases in labour supplying areas proved to be inadequate for the survival of rural poor. In industrial areas urban environment, the nature of urban labour market and low level of individual subsistence wages made it necessary for these workers to maintain ties with villages. Their survival in urban labour market hinged on these village bases. Similarly their village bases could be maintained through their urban remittances. Workers combined their rural income with urban jobs for both were needed for their survival. Thus it became imperative for them to remain committed to their urban jobs.

Similarly, workers’ social organisation in the towns did not reflect a transposition of rural social organisations into urban contexts that divided them into caste, language and kinship based ethnic groups. In contradistinction to existing historiography, this work describes such ties as survival strategies of workers in a new industrial environment. While thousands of workers competed with each other for employment, they needed to rely on their own social networks for survival. Isolated from their families and villages, engaged in a hard struggle to preserve their position in an overcrowded labour market characterised by uncertain employment conditions, workers had little other alternatives. However, despite the apparent uniformity of such nexuses, a detailed investigation reveals that these ties were flexible, permeable and overlapping. Similarly, workers’ work conditions did not lead towards uniform experience of work; there existed salient divisions among workers in terms of employment patterns, skills and gender. Thus there existed a multifaceted rubric of contradictions beneath all forms of seeming uniformity in workers’ lives. However, the workings of these social ties in shaping broader identities were contingent upon immediate political contexts in which labour politics developed.

Political contexts often influenced and informed how such ties were activated in different ways. Instead of viewing such ties as having singular divisive impacts in the context of labour politics this work demonstrates that such ties could unite and or divide workers on their work place related grievances depending on the way these ties impacted upon workers’ self mobilisations in a particular political circumstances. While religious sensitivities fostered unities among workers in the late nineteenth century, in a different political circumstances in the early twentieth century religious loyalties tended to undermine solidarities among workers as rival nationalist movements adopted mutually exclusive nationalism that impacted upon workers’ everyday politics.

If religion and regional identities had no singular divisive impact on workers’ politics then the suddenness of strikes and their lightning impact on industry was not a reflection of the irrational peasant outbursts that could not be explained within the framework rational explanations of politics. Rather they appear to be a calculated strategy in the face of coalescing of managerial authority with local administrative mechanism. In such circumstances trade unions were not an essential precondition of a successful collective bargaining. Hence workers’ politics could be better understood if we analyse in what circumstances, when and why did workers organise industrial action and confront colonial state machinery at local level. The significance of an elastic concept like ‘customary rights’ in explaining workers’ politics indicates that Calcutta workers were more conservative in preserving their limited hold in the labour market rather than mounting an offensive strategy. This struggle for the preservation of their limited hold in the fragile over crowded labour market indicates their attempts to gain immediate increments rather than a revolutionary transformation. Yet Calcutta workers were not mute victims of colonial capitalism. Their protests left an indelible mark on the popular politics of the city and constituted critical resource for the later development of radical movements aiming at restructuring of property relationships in Bengal.