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The Hindu
July 20, 2004
Book Review
Labour politics in colonial Bengal
DOES CLASS MATTER - Colonial Capital and Workers' Resistance in
Bengal, 1890-1937: Subho Basu; Oxford University Press, YMCA
Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 595.
THIS MONOGRAPH is a welcome addition to the literature on India's
labour history. Drawing upon the experience of Bengal's jute mill
hands between 1890 and 1937, Basu offers fresh insights into labour
politics in Bengal by situating the issue in the context of class,
although not in its economically deterministic sense, but as "a
defused form of social and political entity that can be made and
remade depending on the contingency of immediate social and political
circumstances."
He exposes the fallacy of the contention of Subaltern Studies Group
that Bengali mill hands remained entrapped by pre-capitalist
loyalties of caste, religion and region. Instead, he demonstrates how
at historical conjunctures of resistance and strikes the labouring
classes were driven by overarching class interests and driven by a
sense of "horizontal unity" amongst themselves.
Largely relying upon the framework of Chandravarkar's pioneering work
on colonial Bombay's industrial workforce, Basu studies the working
class politics in Bengal in the context of daily conflicts at the
workplace, neighbourhood, trade unions and political parties,
municipal boards, provincial councils and the relationship between
global capital and the colonial state.
Particularly impressive is the marshalling of data to underline the
shaping of collective identity of Bengal's working hands by their
experience with colonial administration in the mill towns. In
establishing the link between the social history of labour with
"political history of institutions and governance" Basu enters into a
hitherto unexplored area in Bengal's labour history. Freeing the
working class from the stereotype of a "politically innocent migrant
peasant force", he has projected the picture of a work force adopting
sophisticated techniques to interact with employers, "sirdars", the
colonial state and nationalist leaders.
At the same time he shows how the anti-colonial political
mobilisation, especially between 1918 and 1922, provided the working
class with a channel for ventilating their grievances along the lines
of direct resistance. Such a reconstruction of labour politics
challenges the thesis of the autonomy of "subalterns" from organised
politics.
Although Gandhian nationalists remained averse to labour militancy,
the growth of "socialist political formations" in Bengal owed much of
their emergence to labour militancy of the inter-War years. The
author, however, cautions that the labouring hands were not passive
followers of such political groups. This was evident during the
General Strike of 1937 when factory committees carried on the
agitation where union leaders or "sirdars" had hardly any presence.
He also goes beyond the simplistic explanation for workers'
participation in religious violence in terms of their communal
identity, and relates the problem to changing politico-economic
configurations.
The book has two parts. While the first three chapters outline the
rise of an industrial workforce in colonial Bengal, the remaining
four unravel within a chronological framework the changing contours
of working class politics both within and outside the industry.
I, however, feel that Basu's delineation of the relationship between
labour, nationalist, communal and socialist politics would have been
sharper if the study had been extended to 1947. The book will
certainly be an essential reader for students of labour history of
colonial India.
SURANJAN DAS
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