Strikes and ‘Communal’ Riots in Calcutta in the 1890s: Industrial Workers, Bhadralok Nationalist Leadership and the Colonial State

Abstract

The growth of industrial suburbs with a large working-class population around Calcutta in the final years of the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the politics on the streets of the ‘second city’ of the British empire. The increasing concentration of a large industrial work force in the newly growing mill towns around Calcutta in these years was accompanied by frequent industrial action and violent confrontations between the colonial law enforcement agencies and various sections of factory operatives in the city and the suburban mill towns. In the 1890s, when the Indian Jute Mill Association (hereafter IJMA) extended working hours and increased the work load in the factories, Calcutta and suburban mill towns witnessed numerous strikes. In 1895 these strikes frightened the jute mill owners so much that the IJMA pleaded with the government to reorganize police forces in the mill municipalities in order to protect the European managerial staff from the wrath of angry workers.