BECOMING “LABOUR”: PANCHAMAS AND WELFARE IN THE LATE 1910s

Who were to be counted as the backbone of India's labour force in the early decades of the twentieth century? The government of Madras first broached this question in 1918, when an extensive report on “Panchamas”, those at the bottom of India's caste hierarchy who were primarily landless agrestic servants, was published in Madras. The report, widely known as Gray's report after the Collector J. Gray who directed the enquiry, was the first in colonial India to take Dalits as its subject. It evaluated the piecemeal measures of “uplift” directed at Dalits, which had been instigated by agrarian conflict in the countryside as well as missionary publicity, and deemed them ultimately ineffectual.

With the publication of the report the provincial Revenue Department was determined to rationalize Panchama welfare, in the first instance by directly involving state agents in the manning of welfare schemes. Hitherto, it was missionary agents who had provided the capital and oversight for schemes such as, inter alia, the resettlement of Panchamas on agricultural wasteland.Footnote ⁶ This background is significant because the missionaries’ manner of conceiving of and acting upon Dalits was largely taken over wholesale by the state. Mission agents, pace views prevailing in the historiography of mission activity in colonial India, did not seek to alter what they viewed as the fundamental structure of agrarian society. They wished instead to rationalize caste, which they saw as a perversion of what could otherwise be an efficient and socially necessary division of labour. Shorn of its Hindu excrescences, caste could be purified, and agrestic servitude would simply become agricultural labour. What required transformation, moreover, according to missionaries, was primarily the attitudes and habits of Pariahs themselves. As one influential Wesleyan missionary and ardent advocate of the Pariah cause put this: “Chief among the Pariah's enemies is himself.”Footnote ⁷ Self-directed moral improvement was therefore the need of the hour, and in this colonial state officials readily concurred.

In understanding how Gray's report brought about a new administrative usage of labour, it is instructive to consider what gave rise to it: as we shall see, conceptual ambiguity plagued it from the start. The report was ordered in response to a politically inconvenient account of the condition of Panchamas in Chingleput District written by the Wesleyan missionary Adam Andrew.Footnote ⁸ Investigations leading up to it, begun in 1916, focused on agricultural wages in general, and only secondarily on Panchamas in three districts where the conditions of agrarian labour were reputed to be most severe, since Panchamas comprised the bulk of agrarian labourers.Footnote ⁹

Why was the report not straightforwardly carried out as a study of Panchamas in the first instance, but instead cast as a general enquiry into agricultural wages? In this case, Indian members of government refused to support an enquiry into the condition of Panchamas, on the grounds that even to inquire into such matters would stir up trouble. As one P.S. Sivasamy Ayyar put it,

As I have argued elsewhere, defensive responses of this kind were ubiquitous, and must be located in a coherent structure of sentiments among Indian elites whereby caste difference was above all a source of embarrassment.Footnote ¹¹ Dalit difference, a persistent reminder of the tenuousness of both nationalists’ and loyalist sub-national elites’ claims to represent a unified people, was either downplayed (by representing it as a difference merely of degree but not of kind, and one that would naturally dissolve in the course of time), or suppressed altogether, as in this instance, when the condition of “Panchamas themselves” was anxiously proclaimed unworthy of specific investigation. Indian members of government did agree, however, to support an investigation into the “agricultural poor”.Footnote ¹² Their position foreshadows how contentious the counting of Panchamas as labourers would soon become in Madras, as sub-nationalist politics – and thence the political need to deny Panchama difference – gained ground.

Yet while categories of persons such as “the poor”, “the houseless poor”, “labourers”, and “Panchamas”, were treated as notionally distinct within government, they remained difficult to disambiguate in practice, because they were largely co-extensional.Footnote ¹³ For this reason, whichever of these names were applied to them, these persons were administratively indistinguishable, and were one and all subject to the same governmental schemes. While the empirical coincidence of these categories was openly admitted, at least at first, their being treated as conceptually distinct in bureaucratic parlance would determine whether or not native politicians would be willing to support specific programmes, as well as how far that support would extend. And thus terms that meant the same thing at a practical level were, for political reasons, subject to a sort of conceptual apartheid that placed their systematic relations beyond the pale of acceptable debate.

The conclusion of extensive discussion of Gray's report was that the measures for the uplift of Panchamas adopted hitherto had not sufficed to secure a significant improvement in their conditions. A coordinating officer who could give his entire attention to the matter was deemed necessary and thus a post of Special Officer to act as protector of the depressed classes was instituted. George Paddison was its first holder. The Madras Revenue Department also sought to align this position with the increased concern with industrial development, prompted by the Report of the Indian Industrial Commission published in 1918.Footnote ¹⁴ In that connection, the Secretary of State for India had observed that “[b]y her adherence to the International Labour Convention India will now become subject in respect of labour conditions to international criticism”. This persuaded revenue officials in Madras that “It is not sufficient to confine the duties of the Special Officer to what are commonly known as the depressed classes, but that it is necessary to include within the scope of his duties all the depressed and backward classes, in other words, labour in general.”Footnote ¹⁵ That is to say, the depressed classes were, in this view, a specific, if paradigmatic, instance of a general category, labour.

What must be emphasized here is that the founding of the Labour Department in Madras, the first of its kind in colonial India, preceded India's joining the International Labour Organization when it was founded in 1919, and was initially instigated by a programme directed specifically at Dalits.Footnote ¹⁶ Only as the Madras government's concerns with labour, and particularly industrial labour, grew in the years succeeding the institution of the International Labour Organization, of which India was a founding member, did Madras's Labour Department come to conform to a more traditional conception of labour – and that too as a result of political as much as policy considerations, as we shall see.

By 1920, permission had been secured to constitute a fully-fledged establishment whereby the Special Officer would become the Commissioner of Labour, and have under him eight Assistant Commissioners and a host of lower-level employees. The primary duty was described as the improvement of the depressed classes. Just as “depressed classes” could sometimes be used interchangeably with labour, and elsewhere be considered to refer to only one class of labourers, the category “depressed classes” too encompassed several others within in. It could refer only to Panchamas, and in most public discourse this was its reference,Footnote ¹⁷ but in technical documents such as these it was also used more generally to refer to a threefold grouping of Panchamas, criminal tribes, and aboriginal and hill tribes; as with labour, Panchamas were the most numerous members of the group.Footnote ¹⁸

The protection and elevation of the depressed classes, then, included the amelioration of the conditions of Panchamas and hill tribes, and the supervision of criminal tribes settlements, as well as the following subjects of governance, all considered by administrators to be, in various respects, “cognate” with work for the depressed classes: (1) the portions of the Factories Act that concerned factory labour; (2) the supervision of the wage census, (3) the emigration of labourers, (4) the workings of the Planter's Labour Act and the Workman's Breach of Contract Act; and (5) all general labour questions, “including those of the organisation of labour, of the recognition or registration of labour unions, of cooperative housing, and of the co-ordination of un-official assistance directed towards the improvement of the health and the condition of labour in general”.Footnote ¹⁹ The document granting expenditure for the new establishment concludes, “As labour questions play such an important part in the work of the Special Officer, the Governor in Council proposes to designate him, in future, by the title of Commissioner of Labour.”Footnote ²⁰

His duties were no doubt “multifarious,” but as noted, they were regarded as “cognate” with work on depressed classes concerns and in summing up the tasks of the Assistant Commissioners of Labour, which I will describe more fully below, the order concluded that their “primary duties” were “generally of promoting the interests of the depressed classes in any […] way that suggests itself”.Footnote ²¹ “Labour” was the genus to which various kinds of depressed and backward classes, including so-called hill tribes and aboriginals, criminal tribes, and factory workers, all belonged as species. And in this genus, the depressed classes properly speaking – the Panchamas – were undoubtedly the paradigmatic species; this was a classic case of what Louis Dumont dubbed “conceptual encompassment”, the relation that obtains when a term for one member of a set is used also to name the set of which it is a part (as in the use of “man” both in opposition to women and children, and as encompassing all human beings).Footnote ²²

CLASS: THE RATIONAL COMPONENT OF CASTE

If Dalits were conceptually enfolded within the category labour, the Labour Department's programmes were designed to make this subsumption concrete – in short, to produce the ideal example of the very category, “labour”, for which the department had been founded – by working on the subjectivity and habits of Dalit agricultural servants. It is in this significant respect that the new state programmes were most in continuity with those of missionaries of a previous generation: the activities of the office of Labour Commissioner may be read as intending to produce a class identified by and unified because of their shared role as labourers, shorn of heathenish caste characteristics.

The Special Officers (later named Assistant Commissioners of Labour) directed the transformation of Dalits along three distinct planes – political, moral, and economic. These three aimed, however, at a unified end: economic regeneration would require moral improvement, which in turn would produce political subjects capable of self-representation, an official desideratum of the state under the rubric of the devolution of governmental responsibility that was taking place at the time. Thus, discussion appended to Gray's report included the opinion that:

How might this end be achieved? The most ambitious and interventionist of the early projects of the Labour Commissioner was the provision of house sites to depressed class labourers in those districts in which landlords, known in South India as mirasidars, owned the sites on which their labourers dwelt – and thereby maintained labour subordination with threats of eviction. The ownership of labourers’ homesteads by their masters was a very longstanding problem in Madras Presidency, having been identified as a “species of slavery that casts a slur upon th[e] administration” as long ago as 1889,Footnote ²⁴ but one that had failed to arouse any remedial action until the changed social and political context of the late 1910s. The district in which this practice was particularly rampant was Tanjore, and it was therefore there that the state focused its initial efforts.

Officials undertook a number of economic-moral interventions that were meant to enable agricultural labourers to take up ownership of their house sites. Cooperative credit societies were considered especially effective in allowing Panchamas to develop habits of saving. These habits in turn would produce, or so it was hoped, not only an economic but also an affective investment in the soil, and thus make absconding rarer. As a Tanjore District Munsiff put this rather poetically, “To provide house sites of their own to Panchamas is […] [to] make those that are now [the] poor and disinherited of this land feel the magic of property and the possession of some stake in the country.”Footnote ²⁵ Once granted ownership, that is to say, the “magic” that is property (the phrase comes from the eighteenth-century economist, Arthur YoungFootnote ²⁶) would, far from inducing labourers to leave in search of better wages – as mirasidars objected that it would – in fact persuade them to stay. Because they would now be invested, in both the affective and economic senses of the term, in their homesteads. “There is a greater danger”, the Munsiff continued, “of a Panchama having no stake in the village running away […] than one who owns a site there and has some inducement to remain.”Footnote ²⁷ Just as wages had to be invested in cooperative societies and not squandered on drink, so too in the realm of the sentiments, Panchamas themselves must be made to invest in their own rational subordination to a regime of property.

To induce the internalization of habits of thrift, officials devised quite novel measures, including the circulation of heroic tales of those who had succeeded in raising themselves up by diligent economizing. These moral exemplars included women such as Arasayi. Every effort was taken to make hers a household name among the region's Panchamas and her road to self-sufficiency was narrated as follows to audiences in ceris (the ghettos in which Panchamas lived in segregation in villages throughout the Presidency) by the Assistant Commissioners of Labour and their subordinate staff:

The story illustrates the radical transformative potential of thrift and temperance. Arasayi's willingness to undergo hardship in the present – by such things as imposing restrictions on the family diet – for the sake of an improved status in the future highlights the value of individual investment as against profligacy, and its basis in self-control. It was well-known at the time that women's and children's wages for agricultural work were far lower than men's, making her ability to save based entirely on those wages all the more remarkable.Footnote ²⁹ A Madras missionary I cited earlier had cautioned his readers in a pamphlet on Pariah uplift not to forget that “Chief among the Pariah's enemies is himself.”Footnote ³⁰ Here in Arasayi's story was a restatement, now in positive terms, of essentially the same individualizing judgment: the Pariah, when properly self-directed, could also be his or her own best friend.

But Arasayi's story goes further. In enlisting the mother of the household in a central role, Arasayi's success story promotes a bourgeois vision of the family that also shares in native stereotypes about Dalit men's and women's respective roles in the process of their own improvement. Arasayi's tale enjoins patient self-sacrifice on Dalit women, and presents improvement as within their reach with the right kind of self-exertion and will, the unspoken logical correlate being a woman's high degree of culpability for a family's failure to thrive. At the same time, it is a dramatic set piece that casts in the role of villain, not the landlord, the employer, or the dominant caste enforcer, but Dalit men. Where Dalit writings at the time, as we will see below, found the source of their oppression in the unjust practices of their caste employers, the state propagated a narrative that drew at once on familiar Victorian tropes of the profligacy of the poor, as well as very local representations of Dalit men as unusually given to drink and excessive spending.Footnote ³¹ It is interesting that postcolonial development schemes run by both the state and NGOs in India today also routinely seek to enlist women as the vector of governmental intervention, by interpellating them as economically responsible victims within the households of the poor, while painting poor men as irresponsible, workshy, and hopelessly alcoholic, thereby displacing what might become caste or class antagonism by resituating it within the targeted family.

We cannot know exactly how Dalit men and women interpreted these stories. But state officials recorded, with not a little surprise, that object lessons such as these were apparently not lost on the Panchamas who heard them. The Special Officer in charge of granting house sites in Tanjore, D. Arulanandam Pillai, reported on his activities in Adambar village, where, following the acquisition of sites,

The Panchamas of Tirukkandiswaram too had given up drinking, and relatives of some of the Panchamas of Adambar had apparently been persuaded as well. Whether or not as the result of Arasayi's stirring moral example, when confronted with a viable option to alter the status quo, Panchamas in rural Madras leapt at the chance.

But as I have indicated, the government's design was not simply to change habits, but to alter the internal landscape of Panchama subjects. Panchamas themselves were to grasp fully the rationale driving the schemes they were being enjoined to take up, namely that they were paradigmatic representatives of labour. Panchamas were thus invited in numerous ways to recognize the dictum that the single source of social standing was wealth, and not the ascriptive characteristics associated with caste. Most striking in this regard are the series of slogans, following a pithy assonant form familiar to Tamils from folk and moral maxims, which were to be pasted on to the mud pots, or uṇṭi kalayanṅkal̤, in which cēri [Panchama ghetto] cooperative societies were meant to store their monies.

Some follow a form that is familiar to historians of Protestant missions almost anywhere in the colonial world, advocating the moral and economic transformation of persons in a project that mission activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared with many imperial powers. Consider the following slogans (whose alliterative and metrical qualities are lost in the English translation): Kuṭittāl kuṭittaṉam keṭum [“Drink destroys the household”]; Orukkālum cōmpal ākātu [“Never be lazy”]; Vānṅkina kaṭaṉaik kētku muṉ koṭuttuviṭu [“Return loans even before they are due”].Footnote ³³ Where these uṇṭi kalayam maxims became specific and indeed definitive of a new project for the formation of labourers from the raw material of caste subordinates, however, was in adages of the following type, in which caste was explicitly translated into class terms: kācu iruntāltāṉ mariyātai kiṭaikkum [“Respect will come only with money”]. The reduction of status to wealth was reaffirmed again in the distich mirācutārkal̤ukku mariyātai tavaṟātai [“Show unfailing respect to mirasidars”], followed by kācu iruntāl mirācutārkal̤um matippārkal̤ [“If you have money, the mirasidars will respect you in turn”]. You must respect them without hindrance, but if you practice thrift, eschew laziness and drink and thereby accumulate money, that respect will be returned to you.

Figure 1 A sheet of maxims to be cut up and pasted on Adi-Dravida savings boxes in village cooperative societies. The first here reads: Aracāyi kataiyai maṟakkate [“Don't forget the story of Arasayi”]. The second reads: kācu iruntāltāṉ mariyātai kiṭaikkum [“Respect comes only with money”], and the final maxim reads: kācu iruntāl mirācutārkal̤um matippārkal̤ [“If you have money, (even) the mirasidars will respect you in turn”].

Courtesy of Tamil Nadu State Archives.

I have argued elsewhere that to be a mirasidar was also to be high caste, and likewise that labourers were at one and the same time Panchamas. Caste and class, which had not been either conceptually or materially abstracted from one another in rural Madras, were now being disarticulated.Footnote ³⁴ Maxims like those described above were but one component of a more general translational project, in which the terms of caste subordination were being painstakingly rewritten in the language of bourgeois class values, which, needless to say, also served to reinforce normative concepts of gender and the family. It was Arasayi after all, whose self-sacrifice and economizing ensured her family's success. This shining vision was the carrot. The unspoken reverse – the “stick” as it were – was the derogation of Dalit men and, simultaneously, the threat that lassitude on the part of a household's women would bring about its collective ruin.

THE OBDURATE UNREASON OF CASTE: WAR IN VILLAGE LABOUR RELATIONS

Yet there were cracks in the veneer of these ideal class subjects in the making. Neither the newly-minted labourers nor their “employers” appeared able to forfeit entirely their commitments to a labour regime which operated in contravention of economic rationality. It is no surprise that mirasidars would resist state-led changes to a labour regime in which they exercised such formidable authority; what is interesting for our purposes is the language in which they did so. They denied that the “Pariah qua Pariah”Footnote ³⁵ was the victim of unique suffering, and therefore styled their own provision of house sites for Panchama labourers as being entirely of a piece with housing provided for labourers by management in modern factories. There was nothing, mirasidars would claim, that made mirasi labour management distinct from all forms of modern labour control, and there was thus no justification for state intervention. To cite just one illustration of the numerous arguments proffered in this vein over the course of several years in the Legislative Council, in petitions to government, and by litigators in suits brought against the Revenue Department, a petition signed by leading landlords of Tanjore explained:

Insisting on the likeness of traditional village organization and rationalized labour, the petitioners explained that Panchama labourers lived in housing owned by their employers in a manner identical to many industrial workers; mirasidars’ ownership of house sites was therefore only “a rational organization of labour”, akin to factory labour, even when its ancient origins might obscure that fact. Landlords, in short, sought to erase rhetorically the distinction between Panchama labour and labour tout court. That is to say, mirasidari opposition to the house site scheme shared with the scheme's official justification the fundamental premise that Pariahs and labourers were indeed one and the same. The signal difference was that mirasidars took this premise to be entirely descriptive of existing agrarian conditions, while the state schemes saw “labour” as currently best embodied in the Panchama, but as nevertheless an ideal that was as yet unachieved, and for which the eradication of certain feudal characteristics of Indian labour was essential.

Panchamas themselves, meanwhile – and to the surprise of officials who had for decades repeatedly alleged the resignation or, more positively, the “contentment” of India's agrestic servants – took to these schemes with enthusiasm, as we have noted. As a Tanjore District Munsiff Krishna Ayyar had put it, “Even a spirit of healthy discontent is a matter of education and requires time to develop”, and officials were unanimously of the view that they would have to work hard to drum up any interest in the programmes.Footnote ³⁷ Given these prevalent assumptions, the response of Panchamas from villages across Tanjore astonished officials, and a flood of petitions for house sites quickly overwhelmed the officers put on special duty to receive them.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, because officials had been ordered to make assignments only to Panchamas who requested them of their own accord (i.e. not forcefully to persuade them to adopt the programme, thereby flagrantly upsetting landlords), many of these requests have been recorded in great detail and reveal Panchamas’ enthusiastic embrace of state programmes – though not quite for the reasons the state itself had envisioned. Rather, Panchamas appear to have participated in state projects in order to gain ground in what we may describe, in the words of the most well-known spokesperson for civil rights in India, B.R. Ambedkar, as “the perpetual war [that went] on every day in every village between the Hindus and the Untouchables”.Footnote ³⁹

Let us take a typical case of house-site acquisition to illustrate how this perpetual war was carried on. In 1917, the Panchamas of Thenperambur village in Tanjore asked for new house sites because, they said, the river Vettar was in danger of flooding the existing cēri.Footnote ⁴⁰ The complaint was judged to be real, and no government-owned lands were found to be available for the acquisition, meaning that land would have to be bought from a local landowner in a suitable location. A piece of land was chosen, and the Panchamas agreed to pay a rather large part of the full price up front, and the remainder in instalments, as well as to perform the necessary labour to raise the elevation of the land – since it too, like their old homestead, was slightly low-lying. The Pallars (a specific caste of Panchamas predominant in south-eastern Madras) were very “keen about owning their own house sites”, we are later told, because “the KallarFootnote ⁴¹ mirasidars appear to treat them rather harshly”.Footnote ⁴² While the danger of flooding was real enough, it was in fact their landlords’ treatment that impelled them to make an official request.

The land that the government had selected was owned jointly by forty mirasidars, three of whom failed to respond to the government's notice of acquisition. The remaining thirty-seven, without exception, refused to part with the land for government compensation, but agreed to give it free of cost on condition that their āl̤s (servants) be made to perform the required field labour – they explained that they “would otherwise lose all hold on [their panchamas]”.Footnote ⁴³ But the Panchamas in Thenperambur remained insistent, explaining that they were willing to pay what for them were large sums of money as down-payments on house sites – even when threatened with the loss of employment in a situation in which, as officials regularly confirmed, alternative employment was difficult to come by. Though counter-intuitive from the perspective which assumes that the bonded labourer clings to her bondage above all else for the security it provides, cases like this continued to arise.Footnote ⁴⁴ As the officer charged with implementing the house-site scheme explained in his interim report, the Panchamas of Tanjore were in fact “more anxious to secure the ownership of their house sites than to be retained in the employ of their mirasidars”.Footnote ⁴⁵

As the government sought to teach them to live according to the principles of economic rationality, Tanjore Panchamas participated in state schemes only to alter their position in an ongoing struggle against caste landlords. In order to secure their own house sites from government, they routinely acted at net financial loss to themselves, and in the face of threats to their employment. As government sought to produce conscientious labourers, Panchamas appeared to officials to be “quite cheerful” about risking loss of employment in order to become owners of their house sites.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nor were risks financial alone. In a number of cases, petty obstructionism – caste peoples’ refusing to sell land if it might go to Panchamas, for example – gave way to armed violence.Footnote ⁴⁷

While Panchamas in villages exploited these new possibilities, albeit not purely in the service of the principles of economic rationality that government sought to instil in them, a small but significant cohort of Panchama activists and writers were developing their own distinctive understanding of “the economic” and its relationship to Panchama servitude. Thus, as mirasidars sent petition after petition to government, so too did a group calling itself the South Indian Oppressed Classes’ Union (SIOCU). The few issues of its magazine, Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ [The Leader], that have survived reveal the politically active Panchama’s intense interest in the situation in Tanjore.Footnote ⁴⁸ Let us begin by considering the magazine's position on the question of the relation between the Panchama's labour and his caste, for the position Vaḻikkāṭṭuvōṉ would take on the house-site issue can be more accurately pinpointed by considering several key passages in which caste is analysed both in terms of social relations, and in terms of wealth [aicuvariyam]. The former is evident in an explanation by the editor, S.A.S. Tangamuttu, of how the SIOCU acquired its name.

Tangamuttu identified two pivotal aspects of the mirasidars’ position, which elided their own role in socially reproducing the Panchama as Panchama. First, he impugned the apparently value-neutral language by which Panchamas were dubbed “depressed”. Such language allowed the Panchamas’ poverty to be depicted as a natural fact, guaranteed by the universal existence of such a class. One petition by mirasidars, for instance, explained that, “There must be a certain class of people with whom the better sort do not freely associate and the position in the Tanjore district is in no way worse.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In contrast, Tangamuttu described the Panchamas’ condition as one not of depression but oppression, in which the tactics of mirasidars effected a decidedly man-made degradation. In the same vein, Tangamuttu denied any similarity, of the kind that mirasidars were so keen to promote, between the factory- or millworker and the paṇṇaiyāl̤, resolutely particularizing the regime that mirasidars portrayed as universal. And by means of revealing the particularity of Tanjore's rural labour relations, Tangamuttu highlights as well their relational nature: oppressed classes can exist only by virtue of those who so oppress them. Classes, in this usage, are as much social and political as economic relations.

Figure 2 Front cover of Vaḻikkāṭṭuvōṉ.

In another decisive passage P.S. Samuel, a co-founder of the SIOCU, explained the centrality of wealth, aicuvariyam, to the conception of oppressed caste improvement [oṭukkapaṭukiṟa cātikal̤in virutti] that the SIOCU sought to propagate amongst its members. A hortatory piece on the importance of careful money management began with the following observation:

It was for this reason that oppressed caste leaders enjoined members to exercise stringent control over their earnings and expenditure. They thus embraced the state's concerns for thrift and property, but re-situated them in the framework of their everyday experience of caste antagonism. Wealth, for Samuel, was thus the immediate need of the oppressed castes, and its lack was the proximate cause of their condition of oppression.

While mirasidars acknowledged Panchamas’ poverty, they were at pains to deny any ontological relationship between economic (or class) status and caste and, indeed, never tired of repeating a refrain that is echoed by high-caste apologists even today: that many people were poor, not just Panchamas. Against this prevalent high-caste argument Samuel maintained that “wealth alone [was the] principal reason for […] [a caste's] superiority”. In Samuel's analysis, this was the cause, and not the result, of the practices of social ostracism and accusations of moral turpitude that beset Panchamas. Samuel underscored that the Panchama's poverty was linked to the disdain with which he was treated, for “a poor man is thought to be evil and disreputable”. Indeed, Tamil aphorisms like illātava pollātava [“Have-nots are wicked”],Footnote ⁵² attest to the cultural resonance Samuel's observations would have carried for readers. This is not unlike official maxims of the sort, “Respect comes only with money”. Yet Samuel's observation emphasized the agonistic and relational field in which the accumulation of wealth took place.Footnote ⁵³

I have described, then, how a more or less seamless categorial equation of Panchamas with labourers had taken place in Madras governance, among landed elites, and in circles of Panchama activism. There were significant variations among these groups to be sure, for instance with regard to the question of culpability for the Panchamas’ poverty. And there was disagreement as to how, exactly, this fact should be acted upon – landlords in the countryside, and their representatives in the provincial Legislative Council, would sometimes violently oppose the schemes of the Labour Department insofar as they interfered in existing labour regimes. Yet no-one questioned the synonymy of caste and class with respect to the Panchama. It would certainly not have made sense to anyone to imagine that, categorially speaking, labourers and Panchamas were in any respect in tension.

“BLACKLEGS”: THE DIREMPTION OF CASTE FROM LABOUR

In the course of the next couple of years, however, the conceptual world of Madras administration and politics would be irrevocably altered by instances of labour militancy that emerged in two British-owned sister mills, the Buckingham and Carnatic, located in the industrializing areas of northern Madras, and surrounded by a concentrated mass of labourers residing in close but caste-segregated quarters. By a series of strikes and lockouts in the years between 1918 and 1921 – referred to in public talk as the “mill troubles” – caste difference was thrust into the public eye and into political struggles over labour organization. It is in this light that we may assess how the very existence of the Labour Department, and thereby, the local meaning of labour itself, came under attack. I want to provide only a brief schematic of these well-known events, before turning to what has gone unrecognized, namely the changed context of the debate over whether “labour” was a suitable target of government administration.

The troubles at the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills began over questions of discipline and working conditions during the years of World War I, exacerbated by the massive inflation in food prices unmet by any rise in wages. What had been sporadic outbreaks of insubordination from the days of the mills’ inception in 1876 grew into frequent riots and strikes, leading millworkers in 1918 to seek the help of outside organizers. Two social workers, Chelvapathy Chetti and Ramanajulu Naidu, founded the Madras Labour Union, and in turn approached and secured the support of a promiment Madras nationalist and lawyer associated with Annie Besant, B.P. Wadia. The Union was among the first in India, and certainly one of the largest and longest-lived, functioning for decades with virtually no competition in Madras.Footnote ⁵⁴ During various stages of conciliation with management, Wadia was able to bring national attention, and at one stage, the presence of Gandhi himself to serve as arbiter, in a protracted and bitter series of strikes and lockouts that lasted well over two years, until 1921.Footnote ⁵⁵

The definitive crushing of the millworkers’ movement by the managers is, in its barest outlines, a familiar story, in which dissension within the union occasioned by political rivalries among union leaders, economic hardships caused by prolonged loss of wages, and the strategically timed use of strikebreakers allowed the negotiation of new terms and an end to conflict without recompensing millhands or even very substantially altering the conditions against which they had fought. But in its specifics, the meaning of these events is not at all a settled matter. For the strikebreakers – or, in the contemporary term, “blacklegs” – used in the final strike were not brought from outside as they had been in the past. They were Adi-Dravidas (as Panchamas had come to be called at this time in Madras) who were themselves for the first year and a half loyal participants in the strikes.Footnote ⁵⁶ And it was the violent retaliation against these Adi-Dravida “blacklegs” by fellow millhands, and the general lawlessness that followed, which produced serious political rifts in Madras. These rifts were in turn reflected in a new determination of the meaning of “labour”.

Before the final strike was even called, on the evening of Sunday, 19 June 1921, Adi-Dravida millhands met with Madras Union Leaders to say that if the Union chose to strike again, they could not participate. The reason they offered was simple: the last strike, which had occurred a few months earlier and lasted for over three months, had been nearly impossible for them to survive, requiring them to pawn what little they possessed in order simply to feed themselves and their families. Caste Hindus and Muslim workers, it was widely acknowledged, could find work in people's homes, or return to their nearby villages to wait out the dispute, neither of which option was available to Adi-Dravidas.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Subho Basu has observed, ties to the village, rather than being necessarily in tension with processes of urbanization, in fact allowed newly arrived urban workers to better survive the rigours of city working conditions, not least by providing succour during strikes that thereby increased their collective bargaining power.Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet these findings apply, of course, only to those emigrants whose position in the village could indeed secure them support. Urban Adi-Dravidas had no such recourse to maintenance. As Eamon Murphy has put this, they were in this sense more thoroughly proletarianized than their caste Hindu and Muslim co-workers. Given that this is so, it is surely wrong to surmise, as Murphy does, that we can analyse the fractures in union membership by considering caste and class as two mutually exclusive factors corresponding to economic and so-called ascriptive difference. What distinguished Adi-Dravida workers was not only their “caste status”, if by that we mean their position in a ritual hierarchy. It was precisely also their inability to draw on economic resources other than their wages. Murphy's depiction of the relatively greater difficulties Adi-Dravidas had in holding out during a strike acknowledges as much, but he nevertheless remains wedded to a conceptual language in which caste and class are opposed, thereby undermining his own astute observations.Footnote ⁵⁹

The next day the strike was announced, and about 150 Adi-Dravida workers remained at work; in a week's time that number had swelled to 700 or 800.Footnote ⁶⁰ On 29 June, minor skirmishes around the entrance to the mills gave way to the first of several major fires: about 100 Adi-Dravida huts were burned down in the nearby cēri [Adi-Dravida settlement] of Puliyantope; Adi-Dravidas’ huts, already segregated by caste and therefore easily identified, were ransacked and torched over a period of four days, and hundreds were made homeless. Many were also attacked, and fearing for their lives, most Adi-Dravidas fled the neighbourhood, eventually ending up in refugee camps located further north; in 1924, some three years later, most of the Adi-Dravidas who had been driven away were still living in camps.Footnote ⁶¹ No-one was charged with the crimes, though it was widely accepted that strikers had perpetrated them. Adi-Dravidas too, it appears, initiated a few counter-attacks, armed with stones and crudely fashioned swords. So grave was the general lawlessness that prevailed in many quarters in Madras that the Adi-Dravida leader and member of the Legislative Council, Rao Bahadur M.C. Rajah, widely seen as having instigated Adi-Dravida workers to return to work, was forced to go into hiding for fear of angry rioters.Footnote ⁶²

The Labour Department, given its duties to attend to the welfare of factory labourers, intervened in the events at a number of levels, and the political crisis that emerged turned not only on whether the department was acting in the interests of management, a charge we might expect, but on whether it was sufficiently directing its attention to labour in general, as opposed to Adi-Dravidas only. And here the two questions were in one sense inextricable, since Adi-Dravidas were also strikebreakers. For instance, the Commissioner of Labour at this time, T.E. Moir, was widely observed riding on police-protected buses and lorries with Adi-Dravida millhands as they made their way to work, publicly, it would seem, declaring an affinity with both Adi-Dravidas and management. Second, with respect to the victims of rioting, it was believed that Adi-Dravidas received disproportionate care and relief.Footnote ⁶³ It could not be denied that Adi-Dravidas constituted the majority of victims of the fires and the assaults, but it was nevertheless also the case that others had lost property and been victims of physical violence at the hands of the police, and, thereby, it was alleged, government, via the Department of Labour, had made plain where its preferences lay. In fact, a large Adi-Dravida relief camp was indeed constructed to house the dispossessed in Vyasarpadi, but it appears that the few caste Hindus and the large number of Muslims whose homes had been destroyed (nevertheless a small fraction of the total affected) had taken shelter with family and friends.Footnote ⁶⁴ As during the strikes, they had drawn upon social and economic support systems unavailable to Adi-Dravidas.

As the violence continued, police reserves were called in from neighbouring regions, so overwhelming was the fury and size of the crowds. Finally the army had to be summoned to provide backup; fires nevertheless continued to rage in cēris in north Madras for four days. In several instances rioters attacked police, and one British constable was killed, while a few rioters were injured in bayonet charges. On many of these occasions, Labour Commissioner T.E. Moir arrived on the scene to consult with high-ranking police officials, and given the fact that police were primarily engaged in street battles against caste Hindus and Muslims, the perception that the Labour Department was biased appeared more and more credible.

Moreover, past events were reinterpreted by prominent political caste Hindus to lend support to this view. Thus, in December of 1920, six months prior to the final strike which ultimately broke the Madras Labour Union, Adi-Dravidas had been brought in as strikebreakers, though they were not themselves millworkers or former Union members. On 9 December 1920, police, besieged while protecting lorries of Adi-Dravidas being transported to the mills, had turned their rifles on the crowd of striking millhands, killing two and injuring many others. This provoked major uproar in the nationalist press, prompting comparisons to the killings of unarmed protesters in Punjab at Jallianwala Bagh, an event that then as now was considered the apogee of colonial state brutality. Like Jallianwala Bagh, though in a more local domain, the killing of striking millhands was thus quickly incorporated into nationalist narrative – a narrative within which, however, the issue of caste difference remained significantly absent.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet when relations between Adi-Dravida union members and others had decisively turned in mid-1921, the fact that the shooting had resulted only in caste Hindu injuries was invoked to prove Adi-Dravidas had never been loyal strikers, and correlatively, that government was biased in their favour: now Commissioner of Labour T.E. Moir was made the Madras equivalent of Punjab's mastermind, Michael O'Dwyer: “Mr. Moir […] has in him the making of great Sir Michael. If only he is given a free hand, he could make Perambore Barracks a Madras Jallianwala Bagh.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Indeed a small but significant minority opinion held that Adi-Dravidas may themselves have torched their own huts, confident that government, given the sympathies of the Labour Department, would provide them with superior dwellings.Footnote ⁶⁷ Most people dismissed this hypothesis out of hand, but it illustrates the widespread and deep-seated suspicion entertained by caste people with respect to the Labour Department's apparently preferential position on Adi-Dravidas. No-one at the time (other than British officials, and Adi-Dravida leaders like M.C. Rajah and L.C. Guruswami) believed the department to be entirely above suspicion. Indian officials otherwise sympathetic to government registered their disquiet:

And in contrast to these conciliatory expressions of dissatisfaction, criticism of the government's actions, and the Commissioner of Labour's office in particular, was expressed with unbridled rancour in the popular press, in the Legislative Council, and on public platforms.Footnote ⁶⁹

THE UNDOING OF “LABOUR” IN THE POLITICAL ARENA, OR, GOVERNANCE AS WAR BY OTHER MEANS

The mill troubles would set in motion a chain of events in which political elites in Madras would entirely transform the status and functioning of the Labour Department. In 1922, a heated debate took place in the Legislative Council over the Labour Department's rightful remit in the context of a discussion of the budget to be allotted to the Labour Department for the following year. It is worth quoting at length from the member, Ramalinga Chettiar, who first proposed a reduction in the expenditure of the department:

The speaker here denied what had hitherto been the assumption of governance all along, namely that to tend to the welfare of labour was to tend to the welfare of the depressed classes; the depressed classes and others together comprised, in the words of the document that sanctioned the founding of the Labour Department, “labour in general”. The mill troubles thoroughly transformed this conceptual universe. Here, for the first time, Chettiar introduced the idea that someone enlisted to tend to both labour, and the depressed classes were very likely to find themselves in a contradictory position – as though, in other words, the two were not only distinct, but actually opposed.

Chettiar's motion did not go entirely unchallenged. One passionate opponent of the motion, M.D. Devadas, expressed his position in a manner that captures what had been the prevailing climate well, explicitly avowing the worthiness of the depressed classes not only for state welfare, but for welfare under the aegis of a Department of Labour, remarking, “I do not wish to use the term depressed classes, because they are really our labouring classes. They are the real labour of this country.”Footnote ⁷¹ Yet rebuttals like these were isolated, and some even seemed to concede Chettiar's basic premise. Thus one A.T. Palmer, in response to the call for separate establishments to govern labour and the depressed classes, remarked that with respect to

Palmer's weak rebuttal, along with Devadas's, were in any case soon to be minority positions. Chettiar's view, which took for granted the difference between labourers and Adi-Dravidas, would more and more come to seem obvious. Thus in 1922, two prominent representatives of what was called the Justice Party, O. Tanikachala Chettiar and Shanmuga Pillai, both highly influential businessmen, went so far as to propose the summary abolition of the department.

Before considering how their proposal fared, it is essential to understand what Justice stood for politically, and what its relationship to Adi-Dravidas was. The Justice Party is most commonly understood as the vanguard of the political and social movements to oust Brahmin supremacy in Madras (movements dubbed “non-Brahminism” or “Dravidianism”), and in general as the force that first brought movements against caste discrimination to Madras.Footnote ⁷³ While the movement is therefore widely hailed as progressive, or at least as having significant progressive elements within it, it is important to recognize that its early proponents, in the form of the Justice Party, were elite non-Brahmins ranging from powerful rural landed magnates to the scions of Madras’ leading business houses. Indeed, the “Non-Brahmin Manifesto” with which Justice launched itself in 1916, urges the state to honour Justicites’ demands for increased representation in government services relative to Brahmins not on the basis of their being an oppressed class, but on the grounds that their “large material stakes, traditional and inherited interests in the soil and the social prestige that goes with it” – in short, their power in rural society, a designation that excluded Adi-Dravidas virtually by definition – should be more properly reflected in state administration.Footnote ⁷⁴

As far as Adi-Dravidas were concerned, both Brahmins and non-Brahmins were simply caste people, and in the countryside as much as in politics both represented a force unified against landless labourers like themselves. The fact that political elites – both nationalists like Ramalinga Chettiar and loyalist Justicites – could call for a reduction in state-sponsored programmes for Adi-Dravida improvement could only confirm this view. In sum, although Adi-Dravidas might be potential political allies under the newly-minted umbrella category “non-Brahmins”, for Justicites they were more plainly a serious threat. Adi-Dravidas had yet to be convinced of the political wisdom of a platform built on putative non-Brahmin unity, and their members were in direct conflict with the base of Justice support in the countryside.

I should briefly address whether the political situation I have described above can be understood as an example of “divide and rule”. This is the standard framework by which the relations between Dalits and non-Dalit political leaders in colonial India have been understood. Yet it fails to account for the complexities of the native political sphere in Madras Presidency, and cannot explain the state's short-lived solicitude towards Dalits in Madras Presidency, either in the form of founding the Labour Department or in the specific instance of intervention in the mill strikes. In brief, the colonial state's paramount concern of checking the nationalist politics of Congress entailed, in Madras, avoiding actions that would upset or politically weaken the powerful non-Brahmin loyalists associated with the Justice Party. Efforts to uplift or politically empower Dalits were a direct threat to the state's most important allies against nationalism. What efforts the state made on behalf of Dalits it undertook not in service of its divide-and-rule policy, but despite it.Footnote ⁷⁵

It was in this political context that Justicites Tanikachala Chettiar and Shanmuga Pillai brought forth their proposal for the abolition of the Labour Department. It was circulated among all council members, prompting opposition from Adi-Dravida organizations throughout the Presidency who were likely alerted by the five Adi-Dravida nominated members of the Council.Footnote ⁷⁶ What did “labour” mean to these organizations, and how did they conceive of its relationship to Adi-Dravidas themselves? A number of the petitions are in virtually identical language and make no explicit mention of the caste Hindu claims that labour and Adi-Dravidas were somehow opposed. But that silence itself implies a fundamental belief that they referred to the same categories of person. By their accusation that the Justice Party men mooting the proposal for the abolition of the Labour Department were plotting against the interests of depressed classes, they revealed that they saw no difficulty with the Labour Department overseeing depressed classes protection. The issue of whether depressed classes’ protection and questions of labour might run athwart one another was simply not acknowledged. One particularly eloquent petition in this vein, received from an organization headed by Adi-Dravida activist and politician Rettamalai Srinivasan, alludes as well to the serious social-political stakes of the debate on the Labour Department:

Srinivasan's argument rested on foregrounding the disproportionately large economic contribution of the depressed classes, and specifically their contribution as labourers, and in the most lucrative sector, agriculture. In this way, Srinivasan reminds us that when the Labour Department was first formed, the depressed classes were conceived as paradigmatic agricultural labourers. Their role in urban labour, and indeed the relationship of urban labourers to those in the countryside, which proved to be of such importance in determining the outcome of the strikes, does not figure in this account. Instead, Srinivasan stresses the importance of the agrarian economy and Adi-Dravidas’ role in ensuring its functioning.

But in addition to the view that labour and Adi-Dravidas could not and should not be administratively or even conceptually distinguished, was Srinivasan's parethentical remark, in which he refers to the depressed as “Dravidas (misnamed Panchamas)”. Contained in these three words is a political history that even today is virtually unknown. The word Dravida, or Dravidian, is most often associated in the popular imagination and certainly in historical accounts of the period, with movements for political Non-Brahminism.Footnote ⁷⁸ Srinivasan claimed this term, however, solely for those that others preferred to call Panchamas, or indeed Adi-Dravidas, “original Dravidians”. Srinivasan thereby asserted that the difference of the depressed classes from all others was more salient than any difference between non-Brahmins and Brahmins. At a time when the term Dravida connoted the unified non-Brahmin masses as righteous autochthons ranged against Aryan invaders, Srinivasan limited its meaning to the depressed classes alone. In short this was a political repudiation of non-Brahminism, and more precisely, against its claim that there was any natural unity or shared interests among all non-Brahmin castes.

Srinivasan's position may also be seen as a continuation of the scepticism towards non-Brahminism expressed by Adi-Dravidas since non-Brahminism's inception. At several moments in the years preceding the mill strikes, the potential conflicts of interest that might plague political movements for a unified non-Brahminism had occasionally come to the surface, as, for instance, when the Adi-Dravida leader Anchas is reputed to have rebuffed the invitation to join Justice proffered by Dr. T.M. Nair, a well-known Justicite social reformer.Footnote ⁷⁹ The inherent fragility of non-Brahmins’ claims to represent Adi-Dravida interests became increasingly visible during public contests over the meaning of “labour”.

The entirely novel conception of labour as something distinct from the depressed classes, and therefore of the Labour Department as a fundamentally flawed undertaken, continued to be disseminated widely by prominent Justicites and others,Footnote ⁸⁰ and given their positions in government, it did not remain only a conception. For reasons primarily concerning priorities in the council, the proposal for the abolition of the Labour Department was never directly debated, but the sentiments underpinning it were expressed instead in discussions over the budget to be allocated to the Labour Commissioner's office. In the 1922 budget debate, the Council voted to abolish several of the positions beneath the Commissioner of Labour, in a move that Adi-Dravida representatives saw as vengeance for the state's institution of welfare schemes and for its role in assisting Adi-Dravida millworkers. Over the course of the next couple of years, the budget of the Labour Department continued to be drastically cut.Footnote ⁸¹ Most importantly, the positions of the eight Assistant Commissioners were entirely removed, meaning that Revenue Divisional Officers (RDOs), already by all accounts vastly overburdened, would report directly to the Commissioner. RDOs in turn would be reliant on local Indian officials to do the work: these officials were, as was widely acknowledged at the time, and as has been amply documented by historians, themselves intimately involved in the forms of everyday warfare between caste Hindus and Adi-Dravidas that I adumbrated above.Footnote ⁸² The functioning of the department had therefore been irremediably hamstrung, and this is evident in the department's annual reports in succeeding years, which showed how little it was accomplishing.Footnote ⁸³

The undoing of the Labour Department was cemented by the institution of dyarchy in colonial India, according to which certain governmental responses would be devolved on to Indians themselves. Departments of government were to be newly divided among reserved and transferred branches, the former to be under government control, and the latter delegated to locally elected Indians.Footnote ⁸⁴ The government of India had provided guidelines to the provinces on how to divide up administrative work. While loud and bitter complaints were made at the time regarding the retention of critical financial control in the reserved branch, the silent transfer of the Labour Department to the Justice cabinet (which came to power in the 1920 elections) has never excited comment. The decision to make labour a transferred subject occurred not in the relative open of the Legislative Council, but behind closed doors, and primarily at the behest of Sir A.P. Patro, a prominent Justicite, former judge, and large-scale landowner (zamindar).

British officials hesitant to give up the Labour Department finally decided there was nothing in the new constitution upon which they could argue this, since the Department of Labour in Madras was one of its kind, and therefore no specific provisions had been made for its retention in the reserved branch of government by the government of India.Footnote ⁸⁵ Justicites knew that a critical fault line lay between their own political interests and that of Adi-Dravidas, for Adi-Dravida politicians broke with Justice publicly after the mill troubles. When Justicite O. Tanikacala Chettiar alleged government bias towards Adi-Dravidas, a position that M.C. Rajah – the leading representative of Adi-Dravidas at the time – felt was only provoking violence against them, Rajah exclaimed:

This was, in short, a situation of serious political animosity between Justice and the Adi-Dravidas, itself the result of ongoing social and political-economic antagonisms between the two groups’ supporters. Yet by 1923, Justice would come to enjoy sole authority over the now skeletal remains of the Labour Department, the outfit that oversaw the provision of welfare to its most recalcitrant political enemies.

Figure 3 M.C. Rajah, one of the most influential Adi-Dravida leaders in Madras between the 1910s and 1920s, and first Adi-Dravida Member of the Legislative Council.

Photograph: Anonymous.

CONCLUSION: CASTE, CLASS AND POLITICS IN COLONIAL MADRAS

Two projects took shape in the later 1910s that in different ways attempted to recategorize Adi-Dravidas. The first was a state initiative to train and persuade Adi-Dravidas to become ideal labourers and labourers alone; subsumed under the broader rubric of labour, they were nevertheless to be its paradigmatic and most numerous members. The second, a political project on the part of elite non-Brahmins, denied the reality of the political-economic and social antagonisms between Adi-Dravidas and themselves in order to portray themselves as the legitimate representatives of the a newly conceived “Tamil people”. Both of these projects turned on the question of when and whether Dalits were primarily caste or class subjects. These two projects clashed, but the conflict, politically inconvenient for both caste elites and the state itself, was diffused when control over the Labour Department fell into the hands of Justice politicos, and the sensitive question of whether administration could treat Dalits as “labour” was placed forever beyond debate.

As I briefly described at the outset, the historiography of Indian labour has grappled with caste in the following way. Originally viewed as a premodern vestige that could not be incorporated in any story of class struggle, caste came to be understood as central to the experiences of many Indian workers. In recent accounts, transformations in “caste consciousness” and forms of caste-based mobilization are recognized as intimately linked to changes in labour regimes. This is a welcome development. But in focusing on consciousness, discussions of caste's role in organizing labour tend to reproduce the questionable assumption that caste is itself ultimately a matter of culture – that is, as something subsisting in representations, religious sentiments and values, ritual proscriptions, and so on.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus, even as the highly reified understanding of culture that appeared in works such as Dipesh Chakrabarty's Rethinking Working Class History has been roundly criticized by labour historians for treating culture as a transhistorical essence,Footnote ⁸⁸ what I have implied in this essay and argued in detail elsewhereFootnote ⁸⁹ is that the culturalization of the caste remains a problem even when culture is understood as historically constituted.

Because caste is not reducible to culture. It is also a matter of social organization, political-economic relations, endogamous kinship arrangements, and the property regimes and rules of inheritance these imply. It entails exclusion from resources (symbolic and otherwise) not merely accidentally, but in its very essence. And in the case of Dalits, especially in Madras Presidency in the period I am describing, it also entailed being born into a category of people who were virtually to a number, servile labourers. This fact poses a fundamental problem for formulations that seek to understand a relation between caste and class, because in the specific case of Dalits – in some parts of India and in some historical periods – these are not two intrinsically distinct matters that can be “correlated” a posteriori. They are ontologically inseparable. What needs to be historicized is not their relationship (because relationship implies difference) but precisely how they came to be conceptually separated in the first place. In the case I have described here this separation was simultaneously the political defeat of Madras's most exploited workers, the outcome of social and political struggles that produced in Madras's governance the naturalized intelligibility of “labour” as an unmarked category.