'The making of the working class': E. P. Thompson and Indian history

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 177-196

  Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040338899     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1997.43.177     Document Type: Review

References (129)

1. This paper was originally written for and presented to the conference on 'E. P. Thompson and the Uses of History' organized by History Workshop in London on 8-9 July 1994. The focus of this paper inevitably derives from the purpose for which it was written. Consequently, it reflects upon Thompson's influence on the writing of Indian working-class history. Although it comments on various trends in Indian historical scholarship, it does not set out to offer a comprehensive review either of the historiography of labour in India or of particular developments within it. I am grateful to Gareth Stedman Jones who first suggested the topic, to those who participated in the conference, and to the editors of the journal, for their comments, and to Amiya Bagchi, Tony Cox and especially David Feldman, for their suggestions.
2. See the perceptive comments of Sanat Bose, 'Indian Labour and its Historiography in the pre-Independence Period' Social Scientist, 143 (April 1985), pp. 3-10.
3. See R. K. Das, Factory Labour in India, Berlin, 1923;
4. J. H. Kelman, Labour in India: A Study of Conditions of Indian Women in Modern Industry, London, 1923;
5. G. M. Broughton, Labour in Indian Industries, London, 1924;
6. A. R. Burnett-Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay: a Study in the Economic Condition of the Wage-earning Classes of Bombay, London, 1925;
7. M. Read, From Field to Factory, London, 1927;
8. Raj Bahadur Gupta, Labour and Housing in India, Calcutta, 1930;
9. R. K. Das, Plantation Labour in India, Calcutta, 1931;
10. R. N. Gilchrist, Labour and Land, Calcutta, 1932;
11. Dewan Chaman Lal, Coolie - The Story of Labour and Capital in India, Lahore, 1932;
12. S. G. Panandikar, Industrial Labour in India, Bombay, 1933;
13. Radhakamal Mukherji, The Indian Working Class, Bombay, 1945.
14. N. M. Joshi, The Trade Union Movement in India, Bombay, 1927;
15. B. Shiva Rao, The Industrial Worker in India, London, 1939;
16. S. D. Punekar, Trade Unionism in India: A Study in Industrial Democracy, Bombay 1948.
17. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, 'From Communism to "Social Democracy": the Rise and Resilience of Communist Parties in India, 1920-1992' Science and Society, 61:1, Spring 1997, pp. 99-106.
18. Proceedings of the Meerut Conspiracy Case, Statement by S. A. Dange, Made in the Court of R. L. Yorke, I.C.S., Additional Sessions Judge, Meerut, 26 October 1931, National Archives of India; Communists Challenge Imperialism From the Dock: Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929-33: The General Statement of 18 Communist Accused: the Statement Made Before R. L. Yorke, Esq., I.C.S., Additional Sessions Judge, Meerut, U. P. India by R. S. Nimbkar, Accused, on behalf of 18 Communist Accused Mentioned Above, Calcutta, 1967;
19. Rajani Palme Dutt India Today, London, 1947;
20. Indrajit Gupta, Capital and Labour in the Jute Industry, Bombay, 1953.
21. Morris D. Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1854-1947, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1965;
22. C. A. Myers, Labour Problems in the Industrialization of India, Cambridge, Mass., 1958;
23. Ranajit Das Gupta, 'Factory Labour in Eastern India: Source of Supply, 1855-1946: Some Preliminary Findings' Indian Economic and Social History Review, 133, 1976, pp. 277-328;
24. Colin Simmons, 'Recruiting and Organizing an Industrial Labour Force in Colonial India: the Case of the Coal Mining Industry, c. 1880-1939' Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13:4, 1976, pp. 455-85;
25. B. Misra, 'Factory Labour During the Early Years of Industrialization: An Appraisal in the Light of the Indian Factory Labour Commission, 1890' Indian Economic and Social History Review, 12:3, 1975, pp. 203-28;
26. Richard Newman, 'Social Factors in the Recruitment of the Bombay Millhands' in K. N. Chaudhuri & C. J. Dewey (eds), Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History, Delhi, 1979, pp. 277-95.
27. Dick Kooiman, 'Jobbers and the Emergence of Trade Unions in Bombay City' International Review of Social History, 22: 3, 1977, pp. 313-28;
28. E. A. Ramaswamy, The Worker and His Union: A Study in South India, New Delhi, 1977;
29. E. D. Murphy, Unions in Conflict: A Comparative Study of Four South Indian Textile Centres, 1918-1939, New Delhi, 1981;
30. Richard Newman, Workers and Unions in Bombay, 1918-29: A Study of Organization in the Cotton Mills, Canberra, 1981.
31. Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, 1977 edition, first published London, 1963, p. 10.
32. The debate was conducted in the early 1970s primarily in the Economic and Political Weekly and reprinted in Utsa Patnaik, (ed.), Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The 'Mode of Production' Debate in India, Bombay, 1990.
33. Sabyasachi Bhatlacharya, 'Capital and Labour in Bombay City, 1928-29' Economic and Political Weekly, (17-24 October 1981), pp. PE36-PE44;
34. Newman, Workers and Unions in Bombay,
35. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, 'Workers' Politics in the Mill Districts of Bombay Between the Wars' Modern Asian Studies, 15: 3, 1981, pp. 603-47.
36. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, Cambridge, 1994.
37. Edward Thompson, 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century' Past & Present, 50, February 1971, pp. 76-136.
38. Edward Thompson, 'Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?', Social History, 3, May 1978, pp. 133-65;
39. Edward Thompson, Customs in Common, Penguin, 1993, first published, London, 1991, pp. 16-96.
40. Eric Stokes, 'The Return of the Peasant to South Asian History' in Eric Stokes The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, Cambridge, 1978, pp. 265-89.
41. These signs were revealed in the work of historians, who later marched under the subaltern banner; notably, Gyanendera Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926-1934: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization, Delhi, 1978;
42. David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917-1934, Delhi, 1981;
43. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal's Jute Mill-Hands in the 1890s' Past & Present, 91, May 1981, pp. 140-69;
44. but also in the work of others, who did not - for instance, Majid Hayat Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in Northern India: The United Provinces, 1918-1922, Delhi, 1978;
45. Chandavarkar, 'Workers' Politics';
46. Kapil Kumar, Peasants in Revolt: Tenants, Landlords, Congress and the Raj in Oudh, 1886-1922, New Delhi, 1984;
47. Chitra Joshi, 'Bonds of Community, Ties of Religion: Kanpur Textile Workers in the Early Twentieth Century' Indian Economic and Social History Review, 22:3, 1985, pp. 251-80.
48. The nine volumes of Subaltern Studies were published in 1981 (Vol. 1), 1983, (Vol. 2), 1984, (Vol. 3), 1985 (Vol. 4), 1987 (Vol. 5), 1989 (Vol. 6), 1992 (Vol. 7), 1994 (Vol. 8). 1996 (Vol. 9).
49. Notably, David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, Delhi, 1987;
50. Shahid Amin, Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur: An Inquiry into Peasant Production for Capitalist Enterprise in Colonial India, Delhi, 1984;
51. Gyanendera Pandey, 'Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919-1922' in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. I, pp. 143-97;
52. 'Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, c. 1888-1917' in Vol. II, pp. 60-129;
53. and '"Encounters and Calamities": The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century' in Vol. III, pp. 231-70;
54. Sumit Sarkar, 'The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-Co-operation, c. 1905-1922', in Vol. II, pp. 271-320;
55. and 'The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early Twentieth Century Bengal' in Vol. V, pp. 1-53;
56. and perhaps, the most impressive of all, Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992, Berkeley, 1995.
57. Subaltern Studies, taken as a whole, as well as its associated monographs, have been extensively reviewed elsewhere. For a post-structuralist critique of the early volumes see Rosalind O'Hanlon, 'Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia' Modern Asian Studies, 22:1, 1988, pp. 189-224;
58. for a thoughtful and measured critique of the influence of Said on Subaltern Studies, see Sumit Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian History' Oxford Literary Review, 16:1-2, 1994, pp. 205-24;
59. see also Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, 'After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World' Comparative Studies in Society and History 34:1, January 1992, pp. 141-67;
60. on the working classes, see Amiya Kumar Bagchi, 'Working Class Consciousness' Economic and Political Weekly, July 28, 1990, pp. PE54-PE60;
61. Vinay Bahl 'Class Consciousness and Primordial Values in the Shaping of the Indian Working Class' South Asia Bulletin, 13:1&2, 1993, pp. 152-72;
62. for a recent self-assessment, see Gyan Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism' American Historical Review, 99:5, December 1994, pp. 1475-90,
63. accompanied by assessments of the impact of Subaltern Studies in Latin American and African history by Florencia E. Mallon, 'The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History' pp. 1491-1515,
64. and Frederick Cooper, 'Conflict and Correction: Rethinking Colonial African History', pp. 1516-1545.
65. Ranajit Guha, The Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Delhi, 1983.
66. For instance, Gareth Stedman Jones, 'From historical sociology to theoretical history' British Journal of Sociology, 27:3, 1976, pp. 295-306;
67. Tony Judt, 'A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians' History Workshop Journal, 7, Spring 1979, pp. 66-94;
68. most explicitly, Richard Johnson, Thompson, Genovese and Socialist-Humanist History' History Workshop Journal, 6 , Autumn 1978, pp. 79-100; and the debates which continued through several successive issues of the journal.
69. John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal (eds) Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870-1940, Cambridge, 1973;
70. Tapan Raychaudhuri, 'Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics' Historical Journal, 22: 3, 1979, pp. 747-63.
71. Ranajit Guha, 'On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India' in Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies, Vol. I, Delhi, 1982, pp. 1-8.
72. This, for instance, is a recurrent refrain in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940, Princeton, 1989.
73. For example, David Arnold's largely administrative history of the police. Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859-1947, Delhi, 1986.
74. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, p. xii and passim. The research-in-progress by Tony Cox, comparing the jute industries of Dundee and Calcutta, suggests that few of the attributes of 'egalitarianism, individualism and democracy' Chakrabarty found to be missing in Calcutta arc to be found in early twentieth-century Dundee.
75. Tony Cox, 'The Culture of Resistance of Two Urban Working Classes: the Jute Mill Workers of Dundee and Calcutta, 1918-1939', unpublished paper.
76. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, p. xiii.
77. Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 92.
78. Thompson, 'Eighteenth-Century English Society', p. 149;
79. Thompson, Customs in Common, Ch. 1.
80. It is ironical, therefore, that it was precisely on the basis of asserting the traditional, hierarchical and pre-capitalist character of Indian society that Chakrabarty embarked upon 'rethinking working class history'. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History.
81. Guha, 'On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India', p. 7.
82. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, p. 186.
83. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, p. 69;
84. David Arnold, 'Industrial Violence in Colonial India', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13:2, 1980, pp. 234-55.
85. Arnold, 'Industrial Violence';
86. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History,
87. Chakrabarty, 'Communal Riots and Labour';
88. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'On Deifying and Defying Authority: Managers and Workers in the Jute Mills of Bengal, circa 1890-1940' Past & Present, 100, (August, 1983), pp. 124-46;
89. Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress, pp. 131-2, 127-42;
90. Joshi, 'Bonds of Community, Ties of Religion'.
91. The following paragraphs are based upon Chandavarkar, The Origins of industrial Capitalism in India.
92. Jacques Pouchepadass, 'The Market for Agricultural Labour in Colonial North Bihar, 1860-1920' in M. Holmstrom, (ed.) Work for Wages in South Asia, Delhi, 1990, pp. 11-27;
93. Neeladri Bhattacharya, 'Agricultural Labour and Production: Central and South-East Punjab, 1870-1940' in K. N. Raj, N. Bhattacharya, S. Guha and S. Padhi (eds) Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture, Delhi, 1985, pp. 105-62;
94. Prabhu Mohapatra, 'Coolies and Colliers: A Study of the Agrarian Context of Labour Migration from Chotanagpur, 1800-1920' Studies in History, new series, I:2, 1985, pp. 13-42;
95. Crispin Bates & Marina Carter, 'Tribal Migration in India and Beyond' in G. Prakash (ed.), The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India, Delhi, 1992, pp. 205-47.
96. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism;
97. Samita Sen, 'Women Workers in the Bengal Jute Industry, 1890-1940', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1993.
98. For Bengal, in the preceding and subsequent paragraphs, I have drawn upon Sen, 'Women Workers in the Bengal Jute Industry, 1890-1940';
99. and Subho Basu 'The Labour Movement in Bengal, 1880-1930', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1994.
100. For a different view, see Parimal Ghosh, 'A History of the Bengal Jute Millhands: Class, Community and Colonial Experience, 1880-1930', unpublished seminar paper, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, February 1995.
101. Vinay Bahl, The Making of the Indian Working Class: the Case of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, Delhi, 1995.
102. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, 1985.
103. For an approach which draws upon 'everyday resistance' in Kanpur, see Chitra Joshi, 'The Formation of Work Culture: Industrial Labour in a North Indian City, Purusartha, 14, 1992, pp. 155-72.
104. For some recent research on the working classes in India, not already cited, see Dilip Simeon, The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism: Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur, 1928-39, Delhi, 1995;
105. Ranajit Das Gupta, Labour and the Working Class in Eastern India: Studies in Colonial History, Calcutta, 1994;
106. Parimal Ghosh, 'The Colonial State and Colonial Working Conditions: Aspects of the Experience of Bengal Jute Mill hands, 1881-1930' Economic and Political Weekly, July 30, 1994, pp. 2019-27;
107. Janaki Nair, 'Production Regimes, Cultural Processes: Industrial Labour in Mysore' Indian Economic and Social History Review, 30:3, 1993, pp. 261-81;
108. Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874, Delhi, 1995;
109. Ian Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850-1900, Delhi, 1995.
110. Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited'.
111. For instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for the "Indian" Pasts?' Representations, 37, Winter 1992, pp. 1-26. Chakrabarty cites with proper demur Inden's lofty judgement that for the first time, with Subaltern Studies, 'Indians are showing sustained signs of reappropriating themselves'.
112. Ronald Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India' Modern Asian Studies, 20:3, 1986, p. 445.
113. See also Edward Said, 'Foreword' to Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak Chakravorty (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York, 1988;
114. see also Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism'.
115. Ranajit Guha, 'Preface' in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1, p. vii.
116. Said, 'Foreword', pp. vi-vii.
117. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, pp. 68-9.
118. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, pp. 255-76;
119. Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London, 1992;
120. Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited'.
121. Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited', p. 209.
122. See footnote 32 above. I have examined the contemporary discourse of violence and its consequences for the working classes, more fully in Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, imperial Power and Popular Politics, 1850-1950, Cambridge, 1997, forthcoming, Ch. 5.
123. For a critique of the analysis of rumours in epidemics, see Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, 'Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914' in Terence Ranger & Paul Slack (eds) Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 223-6;
124. for an account of such rumours, see David Arnold, 'Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896-1900' in Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies, Vol. V, pp. 55-90.
125. See also Shahid Amin, 'Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2' in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. III, pp. 1-61.
126. Compare Chakrabarty's account of the paternalism affected by Scottish mill managers in Bengal in Rethinking Working Class History, Ch. 5 and the account of Zoe Yolland, Boxwallalis: the British in Cawnpore, 1857-1901, Norwich, 1994, especially her account of her grandfather. Alfred Butterworth, weaving master, Cawnpore Woollen Mills, pp. 249-51.
127. See Shahid Amin, 'Agrarian Bases of Nationalist Agitations in India: An Historiographical Survey' in D. A. Low (ed.), The Indian National Congress: Centenary Hindsights, Delhi, 1988, p. 105.
128. in comparison with Government of India's Despatch on Proposals for Constitutional Reform, dated 20th September 1930, Parliamentary Papers, 1930-31, Vol. XXIII, p. 695.
129. Marc Steinberg has recently noted that while Thompson's post-structuralist critics 'reify political language in ways quite contrary to the epistemology of the linguistic turn' his 'cultural Marxism at times is truer to the spirit of the revisionist's proffered perspective than their own analyses.' Marc Steinberg, 'Culturally Speaking: Finding a Commons Between Post-Structuralism and the Thompsonian Perspective' Social History, 21:2, May 1996, p. 194.