Abstract
Over the last few decades, historians in India and outside have critiqued the framing assumptions of existing labour histories, reconstituting their temporal and spatial boundaries, opening up new frontiers of research. Writings on India moved from a focus on the formal to the informal, from the factory to the non-factory, from trade union politics to the everyday. If this shift since the 1990s marked a second moment for Indian labour history, Sarkar’s finely crafted monograph marks a third: it returns to the factory, but from a radically different perspective. In raising fundamental issues concerning the relationship between law, state and capital through richly textured micro-histories, the book gestures towards new ways of doing labour history.
The first part of the book examines the conflicting pressures through which state policy emerged, arguing that any simple causal connections between the commercial interests of Manchester industrialists and the emergence of Factory Acts in India elides the entangled history of regulations. To begin with, manufacturing interests in Britain were concerned primarily with tariff reforms and the repeal of protective duties on British imports into India and not so much with factory reforms. The demand for factory laws in India as a way of protecting the textile industry in Britain from Indian competition, emerged more as a bargaining ploy in the negotiations over tariffs between the state, the British Indian administration, and Lancashire capitalists. The urgency of factory reform in India and the dangers of competition from Indian mills, Sarkar argues, were greatly exaggerated in a context when Lancashire industrialists felt besieged by militant working-class movements. Workers were told to direct their opposition against their ‘real’ enemy and oppose the Indian government’s measures to protect the mill industry in India.
There is another level at which the book engages with the dialogue on factory reform. The arguments of reformers like Mary Carpenter, Sasipada Banerjee, Shahpurji Bengali and Lokhande came from perspectives quite different to those of official and business representatives. For Carpenter and Banerjee (in the 1870s), reform was part of a larger disciplinary project that included an emphasis on worker’s education. The politics of radical reformers like Lokhande, associated with lower caste social movements in the 1890s, had a wider appeal among mill workers in Bombay.
The book tracks the ways in which the boundaries of regulation were demarcated, pointing to the unexpected turns that sometimes defied the intentions of framers. In principle, there were certain shared assumptions that underlined the making of factory laws in Britain and India. (a) In Britain, as in India, laws were limited to categories of workers considered ‘unprotected’ and ‘vulnerable’—in other words, women and children. An extension of regulations to adult male labour was seen by lawmakers as a violation of the principles of free labour. (b) Regulations concerning wages or those that formed part of the sphere of social reproduction were excluded from legislative enactments. But laws, as Sarkar demonstrates in rich detail, acquired a life of their own, thereby creating a ‘horizon of expectations’ among factory workers and demands for new claims and entitlements.
Through a nuanced interpretation of the proceedings of the factory commissions of 1875 and 1890, Sarkar underlines the contradictory implications of official policies. Though the report of the Factory Commission of 1875 affirmed the viewpoint of the Bombay millowners—resistant to regulations, it also undermined the idea that regulation could be decided as a ‘compact between state and capital’ (p. 96). Sarkar closely interrogates the process of the inquiry, examines how the questions were framed, and the answers they elicited. The mode of inquiry, he observes, put ‘the mill owner on trial: the labourer, as it were, stands on witness’ (p. 96). The ‘disavowal’ of legislation by its opponents, Sarkar notes, produced the ground on which future laws were built. The outcome of commissions of inquiry often went beyond official intentions: they produced knowledge which entered the public domain, undermining the image of a ‘happy’ and ‘contented’ factory worker projected in millowners’ representations.
The incorporation of the workers’ voice in the Factory Commissions of 1890 created an important precedent. Who represented the authentic voice of workers? This was a question raised by many contemporaries and an issue that historians still grapple with. A leading figure who mobilized witnesses for the Commission in Bombay was Lokhande, founder of the Millhands’ Association (social reform society) and closely associated with Jotiba Phule and the non-Brahman movement in the region. Lokhande’s credentials as a spokesperson for workers were questioned by his critics who saw him as an ally of British advocates of factory legislation in India. The ‘meliorist’ politics of Lokhande, Sarkar suggests, had an appeal at a time when a relatively stable model of industrial relations marked by an absence of open conflict was characteristic.
But Sarkar raises questions which further complicate the argument of ‘representativeness’. Women like Sakoo (p. 253), testifying before the Commission, were anxious that any limitation on hours of work would reduce their earnings. These testimonies raise larger questions around issues of gender and the woman’s voice. Women, tellingly, raise questions of social reproduction absent in Sarkar’s narrative on reform. A letter to the Times of India by a woman named Sowthoo raises two substantive issues not addressed in the official proceedings of the Commission: (a) the question of women’s agency and (b) the issue of the social reproduction of labour. Sowthoo was categorical: ‘let there be no Factory Act (sic) till we want’ (p. 115). In her view, any legislation must have the consent of women. Sowthoo also underlined the need for providing food, lodging and education for workers. Was this a perspective that appears only in women’s narratives? In a work of such unusual depth and richness, one would have liked a more detailed exploration of such issues around gender.
Sarkar follows the operations of law through a micro study of small events in the life of the factory. Tragic events and accidents at work ruptured the seeming consensus provided by laws exposing the limits and exclusions they created. Radhoo Saitoo, a worker, was crushed to death in a bone crushing machine in Bombay. The incident triggered off a public outrage. Advocates of legislation emphasized the need to make laws more inclusive and bring establishments employing fewer than 100 workers within the purview of legislation. There was also a wider debate in local newspapers about fixing guilt and making employers liable for factory accidents. With the passing of the Factory Acts, the ‘child’ worker became an entity regulated by law. The age of the child had now to be certified by inspectors. But the uproar around corrupt doctors like Partridge and Hunter who charged a fee for issuing certificates point to the anomalies of a law that could become operative only through various illegal practices. The scandals around factory inspection in Sarkar’s account bring out the subtle ways in which the meanings of law were reconstituted by those administering them. The processes through which formal regulations were introduced in nineteenth-century Bombay concealed within them a range of informal practices. This resonates powerfully with the working of laws in the contemporary Indian context.
The final chapter marks a climactic moment of Trouble at the Mill. Catastrophic events around the plague epidemic of 1896–1897, set off a chain of connected actions which are recounted in dramatic detail. Mass deaths and flight of workers created a virtual labour famine in the city. The exodus of carters, porters, dockers, sanitary workers paralyzed life in the city. The collapse of credit networks and the desertion of the city by moneylenders deepened the crisis. There were desperate bids to recruit labour on the streets. Agents at mill gates calling out: ‘ready cash paid daily in this mill; come as many as want eight annas a day’ (p. 294). These events left a deeper imprint by ‘snapping’ the ties that defined relations between employers and workers. The plague years, Sarkar emphasizes, marked a crucial turning point with the bargaining powers of workers reaching unprecedented levels. The picture of the pre-war years drawn in the book in many ways runs counter to a dominant strand of argument reflected in the writings of Chandavarkar and others who see the ‘real story’ of labour beginning in the post-First World War years.
Finally, I would like to underline two takeaways from Trouble at the Mill that are of profound methodological and conceptual significance. (a) The narrative developed through the book demonstrates the limits of simple, reductive connections between law, state, capital and labour. It shows the possibility of conceptual frames that can bring together perspectives drawn from the critical legal theory tradition and from Thompsonian notions of rule of law. The operation of factory laws often produced ‘immunities’ for workers in ways that were quite contrary to the intentions of lawmakers. Despite their limitations, laws also created a basis for the articulation of worker voices and the emergence of the labour question in the public domain. (b) The book very effectively deploys a narrative strategy in which seemingly small events become a window into relationships within the factory and outside. An accidental death in the factory, plague, mass mortality and panic in the city, rupture and set off a chain of actions which have a transformative impact on life and labour. Industrial relations which hinged on a separation between the realm of production and social reproduction of labour were unsettled. Employers in Bombay had to confront questions of social reproduction and the urgency of the wage crisis in the aftermath of the plague. If dramatic events provide a trigger for change in Sarkar’s story, a question which one may raise is about the place of the non-dramatic events in the lives of mill workers. Can one also look for agency and change in the day-to-day encounters—a kind of ‘lateral agency’—which emerges not through critical events but in the ordinariness of the everyday?