HIMA 230_f15_284-313II 11/18/04 1:40 PM Page 285

REVIEW ARTICLES

The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes
in Bombay, 1900–1940
RAJ CHANDAVARKAR
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Building the Railways of the Raj

IAN KERR
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.

The Politics of Labour under Late Colonialism: Workers, Unions and the State in Chota
Nagpur, 1928–1939
DILIP SIMEON
Delhi: Manohar, 1995.

Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950
RAJ CHANDAVARKAR
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore

JANAKI NAIR
New Delhi: Sage, 1998.

Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories

CHITRA JOSHI
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.

Reviewed by SUMIT SARKAR

The Return of Labour to South-Asian History

I
Some thirty years ago, Eric Stokes had hailed ‘the return of the peasant’ to modern
Indian history.1 And, indeed, studies of peasant protest and of ‘autonomous‘ or
‘indigenous’ forms of popular, predominantly rural, culture came to be prioritised in

1 Stokes 1978.

Historical Materialism, volume 12:3 (285–313)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004
Also available online – www.brill.nl
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286 • Sumit Sarkar

South-Asian scholarship for a whole generation, above all through the impact of the
subaltern studies project. Today, an important renewal of labour history has begun
after years of neglect and marginalisation, though with much less fanfare and attention
internationally or even within the country.2 Significantly, this is not a revival in the
sense of a mere return to old interests and approaches. It has been accompanied by
intense debates, auto-critiques, the exploration of new themes, dimensions, methods.
Raj Chandavarkar’s two substantial volumes on the Bombay (Mumbai) textile industry,
labour and city life need to be located in the context of this renewal. The significance,
as well as the limits, of his achievement can be best appreciated through a simultaneous
look at certain other works of recent scholarship. Among the latter, I have chosen
four: Ian Kerr on railway labour, Dilip Simeon on Jamshedpur steel workers and
Chota Nagpur coal miners, Janaki Nayar’s comparative study of the Kolar gold mines
and Bangalore textiles, and, most recently, Chitra Joshi’s masterly work on Kanpur.3
Early research on capitalist industry and labour in late-colonial India followed
patterns reminiscent of the preliminary phases of scholarship in other parts of the
world. There was, first, a certain amount of research with a ‘managerial’ kind of thrust,
notably Morris David Morris’s study of the Bombay cotton textiles labour force in
terms of recruitment, adaptation of rural migrants to the conditions of modern industry,
and the evolution of mechanisms of labour control and discipline.4 Development along
broadly unilinear, rightly and properly ‘modernising’, capitalist lines was assumed
to be the norm. Indian departures from it – slow or distorted growth of industry, an
unstable, inefficient, and volatile working class, backward styles of management –
needed to be explained. Here, the big debate turned around whether the impediments
came primarily from colonial constraints, or from the persistence of indigenous
structures and values. Scholarship of a second kind started from a very different kind
of commitment, one given to the cause of labour, and often to socialist revolution.
Activists, present or past, of labour movements and trade unions made significant
contributions to this other kind of work. As in labour histories of this type elsewhere,
in the pre-Thompsonian era, the focus tended to be on strikes, the rise and fall of
trade unions, debates on Communist or other leadership strategies – on all of which
there would be a considerable amount of easily available and obvious data. Explanations
for the ebb and flow of labour movements and organisations tended to be in terms
of a combination of economic conjunctures and ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ styles of leadership:

2 There is now an active Association of Labour Historians, periodic conferences on labour

history, and the building-up of a central archival collection at the National Labour Institute near
Delhi (accessible at <www.indialabourarchives.com>). There are signs also that research interests
of younger scholars, for long focussed, successively, on anticolonial popular movements,
predominantly rural ‘subaltern’ protest, and then questions of culture somewhat abstracted from
material conditions, is beginning to move towards labour history.
3 Chandavarkar 1994, Chandavarkar 1998, Kerr 1995, Simeon 1995, Nair 1998, Joshi 2003.
4 Morris 1965.