Abstract
Towards the end of his fine introduction, Sabayasachi Bhattacharya, one of the editors of this book, points out that it is essential for historians to account for the interests of those students of labour matters whose interest is more than academic. The editors of this volume obviously address this concern to historians who are urged to understand and address the concerns of people associated with working class movements. If read from this perspective, this collection of articles resonates with some of the challenges that labour organizers continue to face and have persistently faced in their day-to-day work. In the world of such organizing today, when the struggle for unionizing itself is fundamentally challenging, can the organizer afford to merely confine herself to the workplace and ignore the challenges involved in changing the political consciousness of the workers in their places of living, in their domestic spheres of family and kinship? Is it merely a question of priority of one over the other, or how does one integrate these two apparently different tasks into the core of organizing itself; or to put it differently, how does one alter the ‘economism’ of the trade union movements and yet address the tasks of democratizing the varied spaces occupied by the workers? The official printed documents and resolutions may not testify to the practices that these challenges entail in day-to-day political work of the organizer, yet a simple sympathetic conversation would reveal that their work is preoccupied with the issues of fighting the hegemonic factors stemming from their belonging to communities, castes, regions and neighbourhoods. Especially now, the necessity to speak and practice the language of class consciousness remains central to the organizer of the working class movement, especially when factors like credit supply and bondages of various kinds both at the work place and otherwise have become the dominant methods of recruitment in a neoliberal era.
Having said that, as the articles in the book repeatedly emphasize the diverse ways in which community, caste and religious ties play a vital role in the ways in which workers come together. The historical and contemporary case studies in the volume highlight that this theme needs to be recognized and acknowledged as integral to the histories of labouring lives. It is such factors that constitute ‘vernacularization of labour politics’. In this book, ‘vernacularization’ is considered as a process which enables the organizers to embed their strategies in local networks and institutions in order to access unreachable workers. It is seen in contrast to conventional trade union modes of organizing that tend to confine themselves to the work place issues, a model that the editors argue is derived from the experience of class-based mobilizing of labour in nineteenth century Europe. The editors argue that advantage of this vernacular approach in the writing of labour history is that it offers more possibilities, it is more inclusive and better captures the processual nature of labour in its different spheres of life and work.
To cite one example from experience, in the East Tanjore region of the Kaveri delta area in South India, known for its communist-led resistance against caste oppression and bondage since the 1930s, one of the effective means of organizing has been the village-level assemblies of Dalit landless labour on the new moon days of every month, where important decisions related to wages, strikes, harassment at work place and in the village and issues that concern the settlement including family disputes were addressed. These new moon day assemblies continue even today. But they are also assemblies where some of the decisions taken are not particularly democratic, especially when it comes to matters concerning women workers, or, say, when they decide if a young girl student has to continue education or go to work in distant garment factories. The task before the agricultural workers, movement in the region today is whether to intervene and democratize these spaces or to just retain them as they are the most ‘convenient’ forms of mobilization. In the face of increasing levels of household indebtedness due to high levels of credit supply through the so-called non-banking finance sector or the erstwhile credit cooperatives, to withstand the harassment of the moneylenders or to even lend local solidarities to assist particular families withstand crisis, these continue to be politically relevant. Such predicaments are part and parcel of the world of organizing today as it has been so for such working class movements in the past as well. If this world is vernacular, organizing at these levels then definitely have been vernacular, not to forget that it is from these vernacular worlds that particular challenges from particular regions and occupations have come about, all along the pathways and processes in the building of an internationalist workers movement. Should such experiences be counted as ‘alternatives’ to trade unions or the much contested spaces of conventional unionism or should these histories then speak to and invite a critical engagement with the rich experiences of workers’ lives, their practices including their tedious efforts in organizing themselves in not very clean categories that class politics dictates? This emerges as the significant question that this collection of essays along with the Introduction seems to raise. What then constitutes the concerns for the practice of labour history and to whom such histories need to speak and how is also a question that could probably better integrate the potential and relevance of historical scholarship to its very different students.
This book is organized into three themes. The first theme, ‘Vernacular Alternatives to Trade Unions addresses’ how labour mobilization happened beyond the shop floor and the factory gate, in diverse spaces such as neighbourhoods and towns forging different solidarities and forms of collectives such as in a public sector industrial unit in Bombay, Sao Paulo in Brazil and in the case of migrant workers in post-socialist China, while pointing to novel practices of organizing as in the case of rice cultivation in Kuttanad region in Kerala or in the case of Julaha weavers in early twentieth century North India. The second theme, ‘State and Social Regulation in the Vernacular Mode’ takes up experiences of social regulation of work and resistance in illustrated through cases involving artisanal labour in Lucknow, the resistance of Parayar labour to colonial taxation policies in late eighteenth century Madras, manumission in Brazilian small slave holdings and the means of coming together of caste and labour in fixing sanitation as caste occupation in colonial Madras. The third theme, ‘Ideologies of Power and Resistance in the Vernacular Idiom,’ takes up issues such as caste and labour segmentation viewed through emerging notions of skill in late colonial India, characterizing the relationship between caste and labour in the official labour department in the crucial years of independence analysed through the views of Ambedkar and Jagjivan Ram, followed by an interesting analysis of how the Indian state perceived labour in a curiously social democratic manner.
Every essay in each of these themes choose very interesting set of historical sources and reflect the growing interest and commitment to study labour history, across generations of scholars in India and from other parts of the world. Each article painstakingly strives to unpack the multiple experiences of labouring lives, with keen attention to the context, location, particular occupations and the labour process, and contingent technologies at the place of work. It documents the violent nature of exploitation pervading such experiences, be it the Kuttanad rice-growing area where ecological factors dictated the terms of labour engagement along with blatant forms of bondage; or the case of manual scavenging in colonial Madras when the economic concerns of a colonial Municipal administration and the deeply rooted caste Hindu interests could reconfigure scavenging as an occupation of particular castes which continues to haunt the workers till today; or the extreme misery of the artisans of Lucknow during times of famine, along with recon-figuring the character of their craft itself in tune to a different market which marked what were the initial concerns of technical education. The articles show how such histories of institutionalization made possible the perpetuation of caste hierarchies subjecting the labour market to internalize them, while modern ideas of merit and skill became tools to reformulate hierarchies that helped particular sections of the political class during the 1930s limiting their political imagination; and how credit liabilities became the condition to become a worker and as a means of further exploitation in the mines of Ghana. Each of these essays as the rest of the articles in this collection offer a rich insight into the past of workers and the possibilities that labour history offers to the organizer to learn as well as to rethink the ways of engaging with the contemporary challenges of the working class movement itself.
In a situation where academic historians increasingly tend to read only those of their own kind, it also is probably an appropriate moment to think of ways of presenting historical research that could tell such stories and raise questions addressed both to the internationalist and the vernacular organizers, in more accessible forms, especially writing in the vernacular languages, and not merely as translations which as a political task, interestingly, have only been the responsibility of the workers movement.