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The Labour Process in the Bombay Handloom Industry, 1880–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2008

DOUGLAS E. HAYNES
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Dartmouth College, 6107 carson Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Analyses of capital-labour relations in Indian industry during the colonial period have generally been confined to studies of large-scale units. This essay turns to an examination of the organization of the workplace among handloom producers in the Bombay Presidency during the period between 1880 and 1940. While recognizing the importance of contradictions between weaving families and various kinds of capitalists, the essay eschews any straightforward model of “proletarianization” to characterize this relationship. Weavers possessed methods of resistance, particularly “everyday” actions, which thwarted efforts to impose tight regimes of labour discipline within the workshop. Seeking to contain these resistances, shahukars (putting-out merchants) and karkhandars (owners of establishments using wage labour) developed complex social relationships with their workers based upon patronage, debt, and caste. Consequently, collective protest in the industry was limited, and when it did emerge in Sholapur during the later 1930s, it was highly conditioned and constrained by the multiple lines of affiliation weavers had with karkhandars.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 1 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 During the course of my research I conducted roughly two hundred interviews, concentrating heavily in Surat, Bhiwandi and Sholapur. I indicate in the text or notes which information comes from interviews but for confidentiality reasons am able only to cite specific individuals below in cases where the information involved is not sensitive.

2 For instance, see K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review [hereafter IESHR], 11, 2–3 (1974), 127–82; Hameeda Hossain, ‘The Alienation of Weavers: Impact of the Conflict of the Revenue and Commercial Interests of the East India Company, 1750–1800,’ IESHR, 16, 3 (1979), 323–346. S. Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and the Company: The Handloom Industry in Southeastern India, 1750–1790’ IESHR, 17, 3 (1980), 257–82; Vijaya Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India (Delhi, 1985), esp. 117–166; Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge, 2001).

3 See my articles, ‘Artisan Cloth-Producers and the Emergence of Powerloom Manufacture in Western India,’ Past and Present, no. 172 (2001), 170–198, and ‘Artisans and the Shaping of Labour Regimes in Urban Gujarat, 1600–1960,’ in Ghanshyam Shah, Mario Rutten and Hein Streefkerk, eds. Development and Deprivation in Gujarat: In Honour of Jan Breman (New Delhi, 2002), 77–95.

4 Tirthankar Roy, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century (Delhi, 1993), Chap. 3 and Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, (Cambridge, 1999). C.J. Baker also takes up these issues to some extent in An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–1955, The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford, 1984), Chap. 5. An important discussion of colonial efforts to reshape relations of production in western India is included in Abigail MacGowan, “Developing Traditions: Crafts and Cultural Change in Modern India, 1851–1924.” (Ph.D Dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, 2003), Chapter Three.

5 Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, 74.

6 Roy, Traditional Industry, 30.

7 Ibid; 233. Roy does suggest that the family often remained central in some segments of the handloom industry, but downplays its significance in handloom ‘factories” (termed ‘workshops’ in this study to distinguish them from mechanized mills).

8 These quotes are from Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, pps. 80, 82 and 103 respectively.

9 These challenges have ranged widely, from Dipesh Chakrabarty's cultural approach in Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, N.J, 1989) to Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's work, especially The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. (Cambridge, 1994) and Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1998), which stresses social conflicts at the level of workplace and neighbourhood.

10 This discussion has been influenced by Paul Thompson, The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process (London, 1983); Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1985) and Tessie Liu, The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750–1914 (Ithaca, 1994). Also critical have been studies that have looked at resistance in shaping capitalism in India, especially Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: and Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics; See also Ian Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj (Delhi, 1995); David Washbrook, ‘South Asian, the World System and World Capitalism,' in Journal of Asian Studies, 49, 3, (1990), 479–508.

11 The notion of everyday resistance and everyday politics is developed in James Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985) and Benedict J. Kerkvliet Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations in a Central Luzon Village (Berkeley, 1990).

12 For a fuller discussion of these issues, see especially my article ‘The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and Technological Change in Western India, 1880–1947’ in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Institutions and Economic Change in India, (Delhi, 1999), 173–206, which was conceived originally as a kind of companion piece to this essay but reflects much earlier thinking on my part. See also some articles mentioned in foofnotes 3 and 13. The analysis there has been strongly influenced by Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, and other recent works that somewhat less self-consciously have discovered dynamism in Indian weaving, such as Christopher J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy; Konrad Specker, ‘Madras Handlooms in the Nineteenth Century,’ IESHR, 26, 2 (1989), 131–166; and Peter Harnetty, ‘‘Deindustrialization’ Revisited: The Handloom Weavers of the Central Provinces of India, c. 1800–1947,’ Modern Asian Studies, 25, 3 (1991), 455–510.

13 Haynes, Douglas E. and Roy, Tirthankar, ‘Reconceiving Mobility: Weavers' Migrations in Precolonial and Colonial India’, IESHR, vol. XXXVI, 1 (1999), 35–67.Google Scholar

14 Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry [of the Bombay Presidency] (Bombay, 1909), 1, 6–7. The remaining five per cent were the shahukars themselves. Mehta clearly lumped all capitalists into the category of ‘sowkar’, whether they were involved in the production process or merely involved in selling and commissioning goods.

15 See footnote 1 and Haynes, ‘Artisans and the Shaping of Labour Regimes in Urban Gujarat,’ 79–82.

16 For some examples, ‘Petition to the Revenue Commissioner by 9 of inhabitants of Mazeh Nagar, Patoda Purgannah, Suba Naggar,’ 21st Sept. 1835 in MSA, RD 1836, vol. 52/739, comp. no. 33, 283–4. E.G. Fawcett, Report on the Collectorate of Ahmedabad: Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government,[hereafter Selections], new series, V (Bombay, 1849), 78.; Captain Wingate, Report Explanatory of the Revised Assessment Introduced into the Talookas of Badamee and Bagulkote in the Belgaum Collectorate in Selections, vol. V, old series (Bombay, 1853). Papers Relative to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessment into the Hoongood and part of the Uthnee Talukas and the Yadwar Mahal of the Gokak Taluka, all of the Belgaum Collectorate, in Selections, new series, no. LXXXI (Bombay, 1864), 6–7.

17 “Mohturfa Taxes: Mr. Langford's Report on the Konkan and Southern Maratha Country,” in MSA, RD 1840, vol. 97/1181, 10–11.

18 Papers Relative to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessments into part of the Uthnee Talooka, The Tasgaon and Samgaon Talukas, and Part of the Padshapoor Taluka, All of Belgaum Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. XCIV (Bombay: 1865), 40.

19 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. XVII, Ahmednagar, (Bombay, 1884), 349.

20 Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, 79.

21 Similarly N.M. Joshi's argument about the growing domination of capitalists from the 1870s to the 1930s in Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan (Poona, 1936) seems on strong ground when it stresses the growth of karkhanas paying wages, but is somewhat less compelling when it argues for a general pattern of decline in the proportion of independent workers.

22 This tendency is examined further in Haynes, ‘The Logic of the Artisan Firm.’

23 Hans Medick, ‘The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,’ Social History III, (Oct. 1976), 296. Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, eds. Industrialization before Industrialization. Trans. by Beate Schemp (Cambridge, 1981).

24 Annual Report Relating to the Establishment of Cooperative Credit Societies in The Bombay Presidency, 1912–3 (Bombay), 15; Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry, 7.

25 I suspect that many town weavers did join the casual labour market in small towns when weaving work was not available; temporary migration was also an option. So the terms ‘full-time’ and ‘part-time’ may not be sufficient to distinguish the kinds of strategies they adopted.

26 The appropriateness of the term ‘proto-industrial’ for such structures has also been highly debated in the European context in part because of its questionable value in setting out a transitional stage in industrial evolution. See D.C. Coleman, ‘Proto-Industrialization: A Concept Too Many,’ Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXXVI (1983), 435–48; Pat Hudson, ‘Proto-Industrialization, the The Case of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry in the 18th and early 19th Centuries,’ History Workshop Journal, XII (Autumn 1981), 34–61; Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonenscher, eds. Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge, 1983), 16–20.

27 Annual Report of the Department of Industries [Bombay Presidency], 1928–29, 23.

28 Dr. Hove, Tours for Scientific and Economic Research, Made in Guzerat, Kattiawar and the Conkans in Selections, new series, no. XVI, (Bombay, 1855), 140–141.

29 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 44, 103–4. Testimony from Sholapur District Weavers Central Cooperative Union, in Report of the Indian Tariff Board (Cotton Textile Enquiry), (Bombay, 1927), Vol. IV (Evidence), 602; Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVII, pt. 2 Thana (Bombay, 1882), 389.

30 ‘Rev. 548 of 1899, First Assistant Collector to Collector of Ahmednagar, 20 Oct. 1899,” in MSA, RD (Famine) 1900, vol. 72, comp. 215, 161.

31 Interviews gave a variety of ages from thirteen to eighteen for beginning weaving.

32 Interviews conducted in Bhiwandi and Surat, 1994.

33 ‘Note of J. W. Muir-Mackenzie’ [1908?] in MSA, RD 1910, vol. 63, comp. 1658, 9.

34 Gupte, BA., ‘Thana Silks,’ Journal of Indian Art and Industry, vol. I, no. 5 (1888), 34.Google Scholar

35 ‘Rev. 548 of 1899’, pp. 161, 167.

36 The literature on proto-industrialization is extremely rich in suggesting the kinds of demographic adaptations families might make to develop optimal equilibrium between labour and consumption. See Hans Medick, ‘The Proto-Industrial Family Economy;’ David Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (London, 1976).

37 ‘Rev. 548 of 1899’, 167.

38 One brief mention of weaving by females is found in Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. 20 Sholapur (Bombay, 1884), 270.

39 Interview with Nur Mohammad Peer Mohammad Killedar, Surat, 1994.

40 Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Yawal Taluka of the East Khandesh District in Selections, DLXII (Bombay, 1919), 4.

41 This system has largely been reconstructed from interviews in Dhule, Malegaon and to a lesser extent in Bhiwandi. It is also mentioned in Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 107, and Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Sholapur (Poona, 1947), 11.

42 For instance, Khalil Ansari told me of the time as a teenager his grandfather first sent him into the market to dispose of goods, recalling this as a proud moment marking his maturity. Interview in Malegaon, 1997.

43 This account is based upon interviews in several different towns, especially Dhule and Malegaon.

44 Report on the Handloom Industry, 7.

45 ‘Report of H. M. Desai, 19 Dec. 1896’ in MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 35, comp. 49, 193–195 contains a list of local merchants in the Guledgud area and the number of looms under their control.

46 Haynes, ‘The Logic of the Artisan Firm.’

47 Such characteristics of putting-out systems have been discussed more generally in S. A. Marglin, ‘What Do Bosses Do?: The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,’ in Andre' Gorz, ed., The Division of Labour: The Labour Process and Class-Struggle in Modern Capitalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1976), esp. 28–36.

48 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, and Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines.

49 This information has been gathered from interviews with merchants in Surat, 1994.

50 See, for instance, D. Naryana Rao's account of such practices in Madras in his Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries in Madras Presidency, (Madras, 1929), 26–27.

51 Mattison Mines, who has studied handloom weaving in Tamilnadu reports similar tendencies there. Master-weavers regularly complained about weavers reducing pick count or absconding altogether. Personal communication from Mattison Mines, 1994.

52 For instance, see John Styles, “Embezzlement, Industry and the Law in England, 1500–1800,” in Berg, Hudson and Sonenscher, eds. Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory, 173–210.

53 Chatterton, Alfred, Industrial Evolution in India (Madras, 1912). 214–8.Google Scholar

54 Testimony of Subrahmanya Ayyar in Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission, Vol. III (Madras and Bangalore) in Parliamentary Papers [Cmd. 236], 1919, 175–7, 185.

55 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 106–107.

56 Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry, 9.

57 Ibid., 1.

58 ‘Report of H.M, Desai,’ 131.

59 Testimony of Subrahmanya Ayyar, Minutes, 84–5.

60 Haynes and Roy, ‘Reconceiving Mobility.”

61 MSA, Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry, 1929–30 (Evidence), File 29/SH, C8.

62 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency: Thana, 388.

63 Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industries, 6–7. In the European context, Marglin refers to the similar role of wage advances. ‘Wage advances were to the capitalist what free samples of heroin are to the pusher: a means of creating dependence. Both represent an addiction from which only the exceptionally strong-willed and fortunate escape . . . [they] helped to prevent the worker from circumventing his legal obligation to work for no one else (until his debt was discharged)by restricting the outlet for his production. . .’ Marglin, ‘What Do Bosses Do?,’ 26.

64 MSA, Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry, 1929–30 (Evidence), File 88.

65 Report of the Indian Tariff Board, (1927) vol III, 90.

66 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 11.

67 In the 1930s, weaving establishments with as many as four looms would almost always use labour from outside the owner's family, so it is likely that at least some of these workshops hired workers on a wage basis.

68 ‘Report of H.M, Desai,’ 171–195. It is clear that in later periods few weaving establishments with as many as four looms were staffed entirely by family labour.

69 For a brief history of the karkhanas in Sholapur, see Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 11–12.

70 For instance, see Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 71. Interviews with members of old weaving families in Sholapur, Malegaon and Bhiwandi have also been helpful.

71 In this respect, I depart from the analysis of Marglin in ‘What Do Bosses Do?’

72 Such migration was hardly a new development among handloom weavers, though its character may have changed after the late nineteenth century. See Haynes and Roy, ‘Conceiving Mobility,’ for a discussion of both precolonial migration and of the movements of Padmasali and Momin weavers during the colonial period. On “labour catchment areas”, see Lalita Chakravarty, “Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in a Dual Economy,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XV, 3 (1978). Pp. 249–327. Telengana and the eastern part of the United Provinces, the main places of origins of weaver-migrants, were an importance souce of labour for modern factories as well.

73 Kakade concluded that there was little correlation between ‘the status of a unit of work and its size,’ A Socio-Economic Survey, 41; See also Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 108–9. Oral interviews conducted in Sholapur.

74 Kakade, 40–44.

75 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 86; S.B. Kulkarni, ‘The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,’ M.A. thesis for the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona, 1951, 16.

76 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts, 109.

77 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts, 103; Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 25–26.

78 ‘Notes by the Inspector, Weavers Cooperative Societies on the Statement of the Sholapur Weavers on the Sholapur Handloom Industry,’ 1 October 1929 in MSA, Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry, 1929–30(Evidence), File 30–14.

79 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 92; S. B. Kulkarni, ‘The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,’ 16.

80 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 50–51, see also p. 29 for the family connections of female workers performing preliminary processes.

81 Interviews in Sholapur, 1994, Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 51. Of course, it is especially unlikely that female members of the karkhandars' family would have been paid directly for their contributions.

82 Interviews; and Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 49n, 143.

83 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 51.

84 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 49–50.

85 Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee (Bombay, 1948), 30.

86 Few weavers among those interviewed, however, mentioned working as agricultural labourers during such periods. Migration from town to town was also a strategy of those unable to find regular work. See K.S. Venkataraman, ‘The Economic Condition of Handloom Weavers', Journal of the University of Bombay, n.s. 10, 4 (1942), 75–104.

87 This is reconstructed from interviews with both karkhandars and labourers in Sholapur, Bhiwandi and Malegaon. See also Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, esp. 50, 113–119. Kakade suggested that return visits to homelands declined for some workers during the 1930s. But clearly such returns, often for extensive periods of time, were important in the 1940s and afterwards.

88 Unsettled Settlers: Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta (Calcutta, 1994).

89 The practice of utilising jobbers or professional recruiters appears to have been uncommon during this period.

90 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 36; Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, 18–20.

91 ‘Rev. 548 of 1899,’ 165.

92 L.V. Tikekar in MSA, Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry, 1929–30 (Evidence), File 29/SH, C11–C12. Tikekar pointed out that the advance system was still prevalent in 1929, C. 15. Tikekar, a Brahman, himself ended up having to pay a higher wage rate than the Padmasali owners.

93 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 161, indicates that most weavers kept accounts of their debts in the Nizam's currency.

94 Geert de Neve offers a very interesting analysis of an advance system in contemporary South India. Initially designed as a means of securing labour, it now imposes strong constraints upon capitalists, who find they are unable to hire or hold worker without very substantial loans that are often never repaid fully. See de Neve, ‘Asking For and Giving Baki: Neo-Bondage, or the Interplay of Power and Resistance in the Tamil Nadu Powerloom Industry’ in Jonathan Parry, Jan Breman and Karin Kapadia, eds. The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (New Delhi, 1999), 407–432.

95 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 92.

96 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 164.

97 Ibid., 50.

98 Ibid., 164.

99 Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 111; Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 50; Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry, 31–32.

100 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 148.

101 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, (Moscow, 1958), vol. I, esp. 510–12; Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution,’ Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 45–47; Paul Thompson, The Nature of Work, 40–43. I reject of course the Marxian assumption that ‘formal’ subsumption logically should give way to ‘real’ subordination out of some inherent logic of capitalism, but do see the term as a useful descriptive device.

102 These arguments are elaborated in Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Just Like A Family?: Recalling the Relations of Production in the Textile Industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, 1940–1960,’ Parry, J. Breman and Kapadia, eds. The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour, 141–171.

103 See Haynes, ‘Just Like a Family?’ for a more in-depth discussion. Most of the detail in that article deals, however, with the transitional phase between handlooms and powerlooms and the period after powerlooms were established.

104 For Surat, see Desai, Kiran, ‘Suratman Kamdar Sangathanni Pravruti: Surat Textile Kamdar Sanganthanno Samajshastrya Abhayas’. M.Phil Dissertation, South Gujarat University, 1990.

105 Weekly Reports to Secretary, Home Department 1st Sept 1932 and 22nd Sept. 1932 in Maharashtra State Archives, Home Dept (Special), File 800(74) (8) of 1932–4.

106 The development of unions more generally is covered in M.K. Pandhe, ‘Labour Organization in Sholapur City,’ Phd. Thesis, University of Poona, 1960; Manjiri Kamat,’Labour and Nationalism in Sholapur: Conflict, Confrontation and Control in a Deccan City, 1918–39,’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1997.

107 The exact date this organization began is unclear. Kakade in A Socio-Economic Survey suggests that it started ‘some 7 to 8 years' previous to his survey’ (90–91) which would have placed the beginnings around 1933–4, perhaps too early. Pandhe, writing in 1960, mentions 1940 as a starting date. See ‘Labour Organization in Sholapur City,’ 72–105. An interview with V.N. Madur, Sholapur 1943, would place this development in the late 1930s. 1938 may be the best estimate.

108 Pandhe, ‘Labour Organization in Sholapur City,’ pp. 72–105.; Interview with V.R. Madur.

109 Pandhe, ‘Labour Organization in Sholapur City,’ p. 107. Interview with V.R. Madur.

110 Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, 90.

111 Interview with V.R. Madur; Pandhe, ‘Labour Organization in Sholapur City,’. 105–7.

112 See, for instance, Weekly Confidential Letters, Sholapur for 14 May 1941, 27 May 1943, 8 July 1943, 7 October 1943 in Maharashtra State Archives, Home Dept., File 74 (15) of 1941–43.

113 Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry, 37.

114 ‘What do Bosses Do?’.

115 Breman, Jan, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy (Cambridge, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

116 No systematic historical account of this development have been written, but various parts of the process have been discussed in my articles, ‘Artisan Cloth-Producers and the Emergence of Powerloom Manufacture in Western India,’ ‘Artisans and the Shaping of Labour Regimes in Urban Gujarat,’ and ‘Just Like a Family?’. For another historical discussion, see Tirthankar Roy, ‘Development or Distortion?: ‘Powerlooms’ in India, 1950–1997’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33, 16 (April 18, 1998), 897–911.