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Labour in India 1860–1920: Typologies, Change and Regulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Peter Robb
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Extract

In recent years several important books have discussed aspects of labour in India. Some have been significant in their fields more generally, and the subject as a whole can be seen to be changing. This essay reflects on four works, a three-volume collection of documents published by the Indian Council for Historical Research, and Gyan Prakash's monograph on Bihar, which together might be taken as representing the transition in Indian labour studies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , April 1994 , pp. 37 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1994

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References

1 Punekar, S. D. and Varickayil, R., eds, Labour Movement in India. Documents: 1830–1890, vol. i: Mines and Plantations (New Delhi, Indian Council of Historical Research, and Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1989; pp. xviii, 327)Google Scholar, and Labour Movement in India. Documents: 1891–1917, vol. ii: Factories (ibid., 1990; pp. xix, 375), and A. R. Desai, Labour Movement in India. Documents: 1918–1920 [vol. iii] (ibid., 1988; pp. xxiii, 446), and Prakash, Gyan, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge South Asian Studies, No. 44; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; pp. xvi, 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8 illus., 5 maps; £27.50). There are 18 volumes projected in all for the documents series; those under discussion are cited hereafter as LMI, i to iii. Other important recent works, not directly discussed here, include Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1914 (Delhi, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Breman, Jan, Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in West India (Delhi, 1985)Google Scholar, and Ramachandran, V. K., Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture. An Indian Case Study (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar. Since this essay was written a collection of readings, with an introduction by Gyan Prakash, has also appeared in the series of Oxford in India Readings: Themes in Indian History, namely The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India (Delhi, 1992)Google Scholar. See also Hülmstrom, Mark, ed., Work for Wages in South Asia (New Delhi, 1990)Google Scholar, and Robb, Peter, ed., Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (Delhi, 1993). The present essay continues the discussion begun in my introduction to that last volume.Google Scholar

2 LMI iii, p. ix.Google Scholar

3 LMI iii, p. xiv.Google Scholar Compare: “The Indian labourer was turned into an industrial worker as a result of a revolution” (LMI i, p. ix and ii, p. xi)Google Scholar; and “the conditions… expose the myth that capitalists whether British or Indian were acting as trustees of the workers” (LMI i, p. vi and ii, p. viii).Google Scholar

4 For a discussion of the problems and possibilities of a study of culture from below, see Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (tr. John, and Tedeschi, Anne; London, 1980), especially pp. xiii–xxvi.Google Scholar Some attempts have been made at similar studies for South Asia, notably by Shahid Amin, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, B. S. Cohn, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman and Majid Siddiqi.

5 It has to be said that the first two fall below the minimum of competence in their presentation. None of them provides much in the way of scholarly apparatus, identifying individuals, providing background etc. Presumably because the work was sadly interrupted by the death of Professor Punekar, volumes i and ii present documents out of order, often out of context, sometimes misleadingly identified and sometimes not identified, and almost wholly without dates. Even the titles of the works are inappropriate: the first (1850–1890) contains material from 1860 to 1906, and in the second (1891–1917) the earliest document dates from 1875. No newcomer to the subject could safely be encouraged to use these books. The third volume.edited more professionally by A. R. Desai, provides a useful and usable collection, though it too has some oddities. One is that it claims to draw inter alia on archives, legislative debates, records of the International Labour Organisation, and papers from many associations. In fact there is no direct use of official records, and the collection comprises almost without exception extracts from the Bombay-based Times of India and the Bombay Chronicle. These are important materials, but a collection drawn from them alone (even when reporting events as far afield as Lahore, Calcutta, Jamshedpur and Madras) is obviously a different matter from one based on all possible sources. The volume also is a transparent attempt at slanting the reader's interpretation. It includes an extract from Balabushevich, V. V. and Dijakov, A. M., eds, A Contemporary History of India (New Delhi, 1964)Google Scholar which presents labour unrest as part of a “ nation-wide… anti-imperialist struggle”; this is undermined by most of the documents and by a further extract from a secondary work. To the summary provided by the latter, Karnik, V. B., Strikes in India (Bombay, 1967)Google Scholar, parts of this collection add little more than detail. Nonetheless overall the volume is more balanced than its declared motivation makes one fear: the historian got the better of the polemicist.

6 Report of the Indigo Commission 1860 (taken from Selections from the Records of the Government of Bengal, 1861) (hereafter IC), para. 120–31Google Scholar (LMI i, pp. 39–41).Google Scholar

7 See my “Peasants' choices? Indian agriculture and the limits of commercialization in nineteenth-century Bihar”, Economic History Review, XLV, 1 (1992)Google Scholar, and “Bihar, the colonial state and agricultural development in India, 1880–1920”, Indian Economic and Social History Review, XXV, 2 (1988);Google Scholar Pouchepadass, Jacques, Planteurs andpaysans dans l'lnde coloniale: l'indigo du Bihar et le mouvementgandhien du Champaran (1917–1918) (Paris, 1986)Google Scholar and also Paysans de la plaine du Gange. Croissance agricole et société dans le district de Champaran (Bihar) 1860–1950 (Paris, 1989)Google Scholar; Chaudhuri, B. B., The Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal (1757–1900) (Calcutta, 1964)Google Scholar; Fisher, C., “Planters and peasants; the ecological context of agrarian unrest and the indigo plantations of north Bihar, 1820–1920” in Dewey, C. and Hopkins, A. G., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Kling, B. B., The Blue Mutiny: the Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859–1862 (Philadelphia, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mishra, G., Agrarian Problems of Permanent Settlement. A Case Study of Champaran (New Delhi, 1978)Google Scholar; and Wright, H. R. C., East Indian Economic Problems of the Age of Cornwallis and Raffles (London, 1961)Google Scholar. See also the entries in Watt, G., A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (London, 1890).Google Scholar

8 After the disturbances at Nadia, indigo raiyats judged liable to damages had the resources or access to credit to be able to pay out Rs.31,225 within days of being fined; injessore 157 just as quickly paid Rs.6,226. Given that the annual advance to cultivators, a cash outlay to cover the costs of cultivation, was “invariably Rs.2 per bigha” (two-fifths of an acre), such payers were apparently, as the Indigo Commission claimed, “men of substance”; IC, para. 175 (LMI i, p. 43).Google Scholar See also para. 94–9 (pp. 32–3); and Selections (1861) (LMI i, pp. 2–10).Google Scholar

9 IC, para. 107 (LMI i, p. 34).Google Scholar

10 IC, para. 48 (LMI i, p. 20).Google Scholar

11 The Indigo Commission reported that planters and zamindars generally cooperated, and that local European officials tended to give support too, at least before the 1850s (magistrates had “not been sufficiently alive to the position of the ryots, and… not accorded to them a due share of protection and support”); IC para. 40–55 and 112–19 (LMI i, pp. 18–22 and 37–9Google Scholar).12 IC, para. 94–102 (LMI i, pp. 32–4).Google Scholar

13 IC, para. 176 (LMI i, p. 44).Google Scholar

14 IC, para. 31–5 (LMI i, pp. 16–8).Google Scholar

15 Ibid.; and IC, para. 59 (LMI i, p. 23).Google Scholar

16 IC, para. 31 (LMI i, pp. 16–7). Obviously there is a superficial resemblance between this indigo system (and other labour and management strategies to be discussed in this paper) and the “putting-out” arrangements found in Britain and Japan, and indeed most places, before, during and after industrial revolutions. Generally too they are regarded as liable to abuse, and subjected to legislation: there are repeated instances in nineteenth-century England, prompted by indignation at conditions in such “sweated” industries. The Indian examples perhaps differ in the range of the extra-economic controls, and in their ubiquity, completeness, complexity and resilience.Google Scholar

17 See above, note 14.

18 See Bose, Sugata, Agrarian Bengal. Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–10.47 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 12–5 and 254–6.Google Scholar

19 IC, para. 35 (LMI i, pp. 17–8).Google Scholar

20 IC, para. 69, 175 and also 162 (LMI i, pp. 27, 43 and 52). (The order of sections of documents is sometimes rather arbitrarily shuffled in these volumes.)Google Scholar

21 Selections (1861) (LMI i, pp. 10–13).Google Scholar Possible consequences of this attitude are discussed in the conclusion, below. Note also the comments in IC, para. 117–8 (LMI i, p. 38), on the order by the future Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Ashley Eden, when magistrate of Bariset, to the effect that “the ryots can sow on their lands whatever crop they like”, and that police would be “sent to the ryots’ land to prevent any disturbances that are likely to ensue from any compulsory cultivation of their lands”. This ruling was upheld by the government at the time and was, thought the Indigo Commission, “strictly in accordance with the law”. However, it was partly because of the outcry at this decision, and the explanation by the then Commissioner that it was not intended to afford police protection to indigo raiyats who were defaulting on their contracts, that the Commission concluded that normally a greater partiality had been shown to the planters.Google Scholar

22 IC, para. 101 (LMI i, p. 33).Google Scholar

23 See my “Law and agrarian society in India: the case of Bihar and the nineteenth-century tenancy debate”, Modern Asian Studies, XXII, 2 (1988)Google Scholar and “Ideas in agrarian history: some observations on the British and nineteenth-century Bihar”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1 (1990)Google Scholar; and Sen, Asok, Chatterjee, Partha and Mukherji, Saugata, Perspectives in Social Sciences, 2. Three Studies on the Agrarian Structure in Bengal, 1850–1947 (Calcutta, 1982).Google Scholar

24 IC, para. 70 (LMI i, p. 27).Google Scholar

25 IC, para. 67 (LMI i, p. 26).Google Scholar

26 The Watchman (1796), no. iii, in Potter, Stephen, ed., Coleridge. Complete Verse and Select Prose (London, 1962), p. 146Google Scholar. Obviously parts of this view – and particularly its appeal to the past – owed much also to Locke's views on property which will be mentioned below. But matters were being taken further. Compare the attack on “Liberty as the law of human life” in Matthew, Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (ed. Wilson, J.Dover; Cambridge, 1963), for example pp. 184–98: “…in the policy of our Liberal friends free-trade… is specially valued as a stimulant to the production of wealth…. Therefore, the untaxing of the poor man's bread has… been used not so much to make the existing poor man's bread cheaper…, but rather to create more poor men to eat it… And…our free-trade policy begets such an admirable movement, creating fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men…, that we are quite dazzled and carried away…. If…we persist in thinking that our social progress would be happier if there were not so many of us so very poor…, then our Liberal friends… take us up very sharply”. Their “error…is, perhaps, that they apply axioms of this sort as if they were self-acting laws which will put themselves into operation without trouble or planning on our part” – in short, pursuit of them “has been too mechanical”, because it ignored the facts that “about one in nineteen of our population is a pauper”, and “that the relations between capital and labour” are not understood.Google Scholar

27 See Breman, Jan, Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam, 1990).Google Scholar

28 On Ratnagiri's links with Bombay city (as also with Mauritius) see Gill Yamin's Ph.D. thesis (Salford, 1991). On Bihar see especially Kolfe, D. H. A., Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy. The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market of Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar, and Seema Alavi, “North Indian Military Culture in Transition: 1770–1830”, Cambridge Ph.D., 1991; Yang, Anand, The Limited Raj. Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Berkeley, 1989); and Jacques Pouchepadass, “The market for agricultural labour in colonial north Bihar, 1860–1920” in Holmstrom, Work for Wages. The continuation of independent and unassisted emigration (mostly seasonal) from Bihar and the North West Provinces was recognised by B. Foley's Report on Labour in Bengal (Calcutta 1906) (which is reproduced but not identified in the volume under discussion; see pp. 125–6). These included seasonal (mainly cold-weather) movements to East Bengal and Assam for harvesting, roadmaking, and railway work, and, on a different rhythm, to Calcutta for domestic and mill labour. See also Arjan de Haan's essay in Robb, Dalit Movements.Google Scholar

29 See the articles by Corbridge, Bouez and Engels in Robb, Dalit Movements; and also Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983).Google Scholar

30 See also Simmons, Colin, “Recruiting and organising an industrial labour force in colonial India: the case of the coal mining industry, 1880–1939”, Indian Economic and Social History Review, XII, 4 (1976).Google Scholar

31 Rothermund, Dietmar and Wadhwa, D. C., eds., Zamindars, Mines and Peasants. Studies in the History of an Indian Coalfield and its Rural Hinterland (New Delhi, 1978), for example p. 8.Google Scholar See also Detlef Schwerin, “The control of land and labour in Chota Nagpur, 1858–1908 ”, in ibid.; and, for a later period, Dienemann, Gunther, “Labour force and wage policy: an analysis of their structural characteristics and patterns of development” in Rothermund, E.Kropp and Dienemann, , eds., Urban Crowth and Rural Stagnation (New Delhi, 1980).Google Scholar

32 Report of the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee 1906 (hereafter ALC), para. 77 (LMI i, p. 168). On the recruitment systems generally see para. 25 (pp. 189–90), 48–61 (pp. 176–85), 67–98 (pp. 163–76), and 222–31 (pp. 185–9).Google Scholar

33 ALC, para. 92 (LMI i, p. 173), and see para. 20 and 90–7 (pp. 139 and 172–5). Garden sardars were legalised by Bengal Act II of 1870 and by Act VII of 1873. Local Agents were recognised in Act I of 1882. An oft-recognised result of the systems used was to link plantations with particular districts and villages, though patterns changed over time. In eastern U.P. and western Bihar, for example, Ghazipur was the leading district sending workers to Assam, because, it was thought, of its convenience. Though only 341 registered migrants were recorded in 1890, far larger numbers participated in “free” emigration. However, in 1915/16, 94,911 emigrants went to Assam from the provinces of Bihar and Orissa, an increase which was attributed almost entirely to bad harvests and more extensive use of garden sardars (following the abolition of contractors) in Orissa. In the previous periods (1913/14 and 1914/15) no emigrants at all were recorded as having come from the districts of Patna, Saran and Muzaffarpur in Bihar. See Government of India, Revenue and Agriculture Proceedings, Emigration Branch, A series, Nos. 1–4, Jan. 1890, and No. 25, April 1890; and compare Commerce and Industry Proceedings, Emigration Branch, B series, No. 27, Jan. 1916, and Nos. 72–3, Dec. 1916, National Archives of India, New Delhi.Google Scholar

34 ALC, para. 97 (LMI i, p. 175).Google Scholar

35 ALC, para. 74 (LMI i, p. 167). See also para. 192 (p. 158).Google Scholar

36 ALC, para. 151 (LMI i, p. 148).Google Scholar

37 Ibid., para. 152.

38 ALC, para. 141–62 and 193–200 (LMI i, pp. 144–56). Between 1899 and 1906 the percentage of labour working daily dropped from 87 to 73 per cent, and the task was reduced by 25 per cent, at the Empire of India and Ceylon Tea Company in Tezpur, “probably the most conservative district…in labour matters” (para. 152, p. 148).Google Scholar

39 ALC, para. 151 (LMI i, p. 148).Google Scholar On the early history of regulation, see para. 15–24 (LMI i, pp. 134–5 and 137–40)Google Scholar

40 ALC, para. 97 (LMI i, p. 176). See also para. 2–8, 16–24, 48–53, 59–61, 222–8 and 232–91 (pp. 140–3, 137–40, 176–8, 183–4, 185–8 and 194–213). (See note 20, above.)Google Scholar

41 ALC, para. 48 (LMI i, p. 176).Google Scholar

42 ALC, para. 76 (LMI i, p. 167).Google Scholar

43 ALC, para. 98 (LMI i, p. 176).Google Scholar

44 The point is made repeatedly in ALC. See para. 57–61 (LMI i, pp. 180–5), 156 (p. 150), 201 (p. 190), 237 (p. 195) and 240–73 (pp. 196–208).Google Scholar

45 ALC, para. 25 (ILM i, p. 189). This paragraph also (p. 190) suggests that planters should adopt “more elastic” labour relations.

46 This assessment was made in a special report compiled between 1886 and 1889; ALC, para. 224–5 (ILM i, pp.186–7).Google Scholar

47 ALC, para. 26–9 (LMI i, pp. 135–6). The percentage has been calculated from estimates in para. 28. In crowded districts Malthusian fears also encouraged the opposite reaction from officials, leading some of them to welcome emigration. A scheme in Bihar is discussed below (see note 88). But official ambivalence is illustrated in the attitude recorded in the Report on Labour Immigration into Assam for 1888, which noted the increase in “free” emigration as something that in itself, as “Government has observed”, was “not to be regretted”, though it did regret, however, “the practice of…inducing persons by deception to leave their homes”; Government of India, Revenue and Agriculture Proceedings, Emigration Branch, A series, Nos. 1–4, Jan. 1890.Google Scholar

48 One planter too thought it “to our interest to see” that the workers were contented and comfortable; ALC para. 155 (ILM i, p. 201). See also various similar and some contrary opinions in para. 58 (pp. 181–3).Google Scholar

49 Times of India, 13 May 1905 (ILM ii, pp. 68–81Google Scholar, and see pp. 66–7 and 81–7). For other points in this paragraph see ILM ii, passim. No attempt is made here to discuss the extensive literature on Indian factory labour; see for example Morris, M. D., The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in India. A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills 1854–1947 (Berkeley, 1965)Google Scholar, Newman, R. K., Workers and Unions in Bombay 1918–1929. A Study of Oganisation in the Cotton Mills (Canberra, 1981)Google Scholar, and Kooiman, Dick, Bombay Textile Labour. Managers, Trade Unions and Officials 1918–1939 (New Delhi, 1989).Google Scholar

50 The “Pettenkofer” system was used to measure carbon dioxide. Humidity was important in cotton manufacture; the test stated that any water was injurious “which absorbs from acid solution of potassium permanganate in 4 hours at 60°F more than 0.5 grain of oxygen per gallon”; Indian Factory Labour Commission 1908 (hereafter FLC), LMI ii, p. 195.Google Scholar

51 T. M. Nair, minute of dissent, FLC, quoted from Indian Textile Journal (hereafter ITJ) XIX, 218 (1909), pp. 57–8Google Scholar (ILM ii, p. 59). Extracts from this minute appear at several points in LMI ii, misleadingly attributed to the Labour Commission of 1875. Its importance has been noticed before but is worth reiterating.Google Scholar

52 Indian Factory Commission 1890 (ILM ii, pp. 280–1). Sorabji Bengallee dissented from this exception (p. 281).Google Scholar

53 Letter from Swadeshi Mills Ltd. Bombay, to the Secretary to the Mill-owners' Association, 16 March 1897 (ILM ii, pp. 89–91).Google Scholar

54 ITJ, I, 6 (1890), pp. 91–2Google Scholar (LMI ii, p. 97).Google Scholar

55 Reported in ITJ; see ILM ii, pp. 306–7. This was also a time of wage disputes, as mentioned below.Google Scholar

56 Report on the shortage of labour in industries, by an officer on special duty, 1906 (ILM ii, p. 260).Google Scholar

57 Nair's minute of dissent, ITJ, XVIII, 216 (1908), pp. 395–6Google Scholar (ILM ii, p. 43).Google Scholar This same passage is also attributed to the ITJ of October 1893, P.5 (ILM ii, p. 227).Google Scholar On working hours see also ILM ii, pp. 50–60 (Nair again), and 209–50.Google Scholar

58 Nair's minute, ILM ii, pp. 25–51.Google Scholar

59 Indian Factory Commission 1890, pp. 4–6 (ILM ii, p. 283).Google Scholar

60 See note I, above. The discussion which follows is supplementary to my comments on this work in Dalit Movements, pp. 13–21.Google Scholar Categories of unfree labour shade into one another; here the concern is with bondage in productive agrarian labour (excluding forced employment on one hand, or ceremonial and domestic servitude which treated the worker as a commodity, on the other). For a useful, balanced summary of these possibilities and the ubiquity of coercive labour relations in colonial India, see the essay by Sarkar, Tanika in Patnaik, Utsa and Dingwaney, Manjari, eds., Chains of Servitude. Bondage and Slavery in India (New Delhi, 1985).Google Scholar

61 Prakash, , Bonded Histories, p. 220. See also pp. 143ff. for a valuable discussion of early British consultations about slavery, showing the plurality of their initial approach, respecting Indian religion and custom as well as asserting moral certainties, so that judges in Bihar “recognised generally the rights of masters over their slaves, to the extent of enforcing any engagements voluntarily entered into by parties, according to the customs of these parts, and provided they be not repugnant to the feelings of a British judge” (Report of the Indian Law Commissioners, 1841).Google Scholar

62 See particularly Dewey, Clive, “Images of the Indian village community”, Modern Asian Studies, VI, 3 (1972).Google Scholar

63 Smith, , Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790); of course this differs markedly from Bentham's argument that the greatest happiness could be achieved by the exercise of egotistical interest, but it is plain from labour legislation, and much besides, that such unbridled utilitarianism was not consistently applied in India. There is a mix in all of these viewpoints with regard to India; thus Macaulay's Eurocentric universalism was ignorant of India but expected Indian “improvement”, while the influence of Henry Maine's comparison with medieval Europe shaded off into racism, essentialism and social Darwinism, as relativist anthropologists of the later nineteenth century understood much more of India, reinstated the value of community, but were more pessimistic about “improvement”.Google Scholar

64 This is a reason perhaps for the dogged search in ensuing centuries for a material demonstration of moral worth, be it in physiognomy, in art, in manners, or in self-made, self-improving wealth.

65 Being ill-equipped to discuss this point, I merely assume from ignorance that the individual is still the focus even when perceiving ultimate principles by reason (according to Kant) or the absolute as expressed in phenomena (after Hegel). To speculate on whether reality exists independently of the “idea” at least centres attention upon the perceiver-individual; it seems rather different in this respect from the idealism of Indian philosophy, which may begin in knowledge of self, but which leads to an ultimate unity that transcends reality and perception, a unit that is unknowable. The self too is moderated through dharma, artha and kama, generalising drives, aims and roles; it is subsumed in transmigration (karma being a bondage to be escaped rather than an opportunity for improvement); and as the highest goal it seeks to escape itself, in literal self-less-ness.

66 For the most famous passage, on mixing labour with, for example, land, see Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government (ed. Laslett, P.; Cambridge, 1960), pp. 328–9.Google Scholar

67 See Barnes, Georges, tr., Cicero on the Complete Orator (London, 1757), p. 228;Google Scholar “the yoke of tyranny”; or SirNorth, Thomas, tr., Plutarch's “Life of Julius Caesar” (in Spencer, T.J.B., ed., Shakespeare's Plutarch… in the translation of Sir Thomas North (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 77Google Scholar: “they chose him perpetual Dictator. This was a plain tyranny”).

68 “Freedom”, written in 1884; Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (selected by Charles Tennyson; London, 1954).Google Scholar

69 Utopia means of course nowhere: the work was surely intended as an ethical ideal rather than a social blueprint. Sir More, Thomas, Utopia (tr. Marshall, P. K.; New York, 1965).Google Scholar

70 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Harmondsworth, 1981).Google Scholar

71 See Prakash, , Bonded Histories, ch. 3, especially p. 97Google Scholar. The speculative discussion of land rights and cultivation patterns in this chapter is one of the less convincing parts of the book. Issue is being taken here with Prakash's view of colonial discourse and of the impact of concepts, on the basis of Western thought and Indian conditions. In support of the latter doubts, are numerous other accounts which have made plain that bondage was far from new in colonial India; and at least one essay (by Dingwaney in Patnaik and Dingwaney, Chains of Bondage) that has traced the inability of law to prevent it, from Manu to 1843 (with regard to slavery), from 1837 to, mainly, 1854 (with respect to indentured emigration), and between 1920 and 1976 (against debt bondage). For early examples and types of slavery, including debt bondage, see also Uma Chakravarti's and Salim Kidwai's essays in the same collection. They refer in turn to Irfan Habib's recognition (in “Potentialities for capitalist development in the economy of Mughal India”, Enquiry, winter 1971) that a “landless” servile class can exist in conditions of apparent land surplus, because of social and political power; and to the fact that the character and incidence of servitude depend on a variety of conditions, as shown in Hjejle, Benedicte, “Slavery and agricultural bondage in South India in the 19th century”, Scandinavian Economic History Review, XV, 1 & 2 (1961). On the variety of bondage, important to this debate, see also above, note 60, and Ramachandran, Wage Labour. Moreover, though there is clear evidence of a rising proportion of agricultural “labourers” over recent centuries, much of the increase would be explicable in the worsening man: land ratio, even without changes affecting the distribution of economic and social power, and hence access to land and control over people.Google Scholar

72 Ibid., ch. 5, and also ch. 2.

73 Ibid., especially pp. 77–9, 197 and (for Raghuni Dak) 204.

74 Ibid., pp. 77–9 and 207–16. The malik devata would also punish any undetected theft from the landlord, unless first propitiated; then theft would be disguised as a gift, the exact opposite of Proudhon's famous dictum on property.

75 See ibid., pp. 206ff., quoting from Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice.

76 Prakash, , Bonded Histories, pp. 151–2.Google Scholar

77 See ibid., pp. I75ff.

78 Ibid., p. 162.

79 Ibid., p. 142.

80 There is a valuable account of income and work cycles, in ibid., pp. 169ff. On evasion strategies, see pp. 175ff.

81 Space does not permit a full discussion of this volume, though there are many points at which it could be adduced in support of arguments in this paper. The first short section deals with the formation of unions in a wide variety of industries. The second, longer section describes strikes in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Lahore, Karachi, Sholapur, Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Madras and elsewhere. The third section, more briefly, outlines the formation of the All-India Trade Union Congress (re-printing an AITUC publication edited by S. A. Dange, with a Times of India report). The final section deals with the International Labour Organisation Conferences in 1919 and 1920. The appendices include some extracts from the Annual Reports of the Bombay Millowners’ Association. See also above, notes 5 and 49.

82 Bombay mill-workers’ petition 1889, see ILM ii, pp. 303–6.Google Scholar

83 ITJ, IV, 42, pp. 149–50Google Scholar (LMI ii, pp. 306–7)Google Scholar; see also ITJ, various extracts, 1890–1900 (LMI ii, pp. 308–9 and 317–9).Google Scholar

84 Times of India, 25 September 1905 (LMI ii, pp. 325–8).Google Scholar

85 ITJ, XXI, 246, pp. 190–1Google Scholar (LMI ii, pp. 336–41; and see replies, pp. 339–41)Google Scholar. There was also a Sahaykari Mandli, a workers’ defence association. A secretary of the Kamgar Hitwardhak Sabha visited Europe and North America, studying labour relations, between 1901 and 1911. For the disturbances following Tilak's conviction in July 1908, see LMI ii, pp. 329–36.Google Scholar

86 For a recent discussion of union-formation and identity among workers, see Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.

87 Note by J. D. Sifton, 24 Jan. 1936; this discussion is based on Bihar and Orissa Revenue File no. 2 of 1936, 1–48, Bihar State Archives. Government had eventually, in 1920, got round to trying to regulate the employment of kamias; the law sought to limit the conditions and terms of the bonds, but little effort was devoted to the enforcement or reporting thereafter, and the legislation was later thought to have failed; the question was shelved until the mid-1930s. The increase (if such it was) in bondage in that period was then attributed to a growing amount of bakasht, that is, sir or directly-managed zamindari land.

88 See Government of India, Revenue and Agriculture Proceedings, Land Revenue Branch, B series, Nos. 52–3, June 1895, and ibid., Nos. 3–4, Jan. 1898, National Archives of India, New Delhi. The emigrants were provided with bullocks and seed, and paid wages at local rates while they cleared land and became acclimatised; and then, gradually, they were moved on to crop-sharing arrangements, with a view to effecting their gradual ”transition from… coolies to… independent cultivators”. The transfer of whole families, so they would “take root and develop into healthy communities”, was supposed to include the “decrepit and aged as well as the infants in arms”. A better-known and far more important instance of such paternalism was the Punjab canal colonies. The moral may be as recently drawn on another issue by Clive Dewey: “Again and again one finds Indian imperatives – Indian values, Indian stereotypes – overwhelming official prejudices”; “Racism and realism. The theory of the martial caste”, paper presented to the seminar on the Concept of Race in South Asia, SOAS, 4 Dec. 1992.

89 ITJ, XIX, 218, pp. 55–7Google Scholar (LMI ii, p. 57).Google Scholar

90 Harrison to Secretary of State for India, 5 April 1890 (ILM ii, pp. 350–3)Google Scholar. The Bill in question became the Indian Factory Act, XI of 1891. See also Clive Dewey, “The end of the imperialism of free trade” in Dewey, and Hopkins, , eds., Imperial Impact (London, 1977), on the limits of the influence of English commercial and industrial interests on British policy in India.Google Scholar

91 See ALC passim, but especially at ILM i, pp. 147–53, 154–5, 192, and 198–208.Google Scholar

92 ILM ii, p. 259.Google Scholar The question of wages is a difficult one; but the deduction here is supported from other sources and has been suggested before. See my article in Dewey, Clive, ed., Arrested Development in India. The Historical Dimension (New Delhi, 1988).Google Scholar In this example from Kanpur, note also, on the special rates, that “when the pressure is relaxed the old rate returns”. It seems plain that rates were not always identical with payments, especially where there were payments in kind and the intervention of jobbers or of debt, and that they were entangled with non-economic expectations and influences.

93 ALC para. 226 (ILM i, p. 187).Google Scholar

94 On the limitation of statute and inspection and other forces promoting improvements, see LMI i, pp. 192–3.Google Scholar

95 LMI ii, p. 76.Google Scholar

96 Indian Factory (Lethbridge) Commission 1890 (LMI ii, p. 101).Google Scholar

97 ITJ, XIX, 218, pp. 55–7Google Scholar (LMI ii, pp. 59–60).Google Scholar