Historians and Decolonization

Any writing about the role of labor on the eve of independence must draw upon wider literature that considers the interrelationship between subaltern militancy and the Indian anticolonial struggle. While a subject of rich debates, these have been had among only a small group of historians. Shahid Amin, in his fascinating work on Chauri Chaura, draws attention to nationalist narratives and nationalist history that inevitably suffer from “selective national amnesia.”Footnote ⁸ He posits that events not fitting the grand national narratives are either completely forgotten, or even worse, with circular logic, are recounted only in ways that reinforce the validity of the same narratives.Footnote ⁹ For instance, Karnik has argued about the post-war strikes: “But all these [strike] activities were carried on by them [workers] as members or followers of the nationalist movement. They [workers] did not play any independent part [emphasis added].”Footnote ¹⁰ For one, the nationalist leadership was negotiating a transfer of power, and was actively against direct action on the streets; even hunger strikes were discouraged.Footnote ¹¹ Workers’ strike action continued despite public warnings from leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, M.K. Gandhi, and Vallabhhai Patel, and in the face of severe state repression, even if workers’ political languages, and perhaps outlook, remained nationalist, a subject on which little research has been done. This article will challenge conventional narratives in which the most radical period of Indian labor is subsumed in the story of the triumph of national independence.

Labor movements played a significant role in decolonization across the colonial world—in Vietnam, in West Africa, in Malay, to name a few—as the Second World War sharpened class conflict, more so in colonies than in the metropolitan countries.Footnote ¹² In this respect, African decolonization has been best studied. Fred Cooper has drawn attention to how labor movements in French West Africa generalized citizenship offered by the French government. To hold on to power, they concretized the formal conception of equal citizenship to demand conditions of employment and living comparable to French workers. In doing so, African workers forced the French to rethink the feasibility of empire.Footnote ¹³ Decolonization in the French empire or the British cannot be conceived of as a steady and linear march toward “nation-building” and as fully determined by the high politics of negotiations between the colonial and the nationalist elites. It cannot be understood as a proclamation signed in the imperial boardrooms; it was a process that was replete with contradictions and possibilities for the subalterns. This article brings the experiences, agency, and militancy of Indian dockworkers to the heart of debates about decolonization, labor, and empire.

Histories of Indian decolonization suffer gravely from a tendency to write history backward. Despite the depth of labor militancy that preceded August 15, 1947, and continued afterward up until 1949, analyses of these phenomena within the larger frame of the struggle for independence or decolonization have remained few and far between.Footnote ¹⁴ The various possibilities that both labor as well as popular struggles opened up and were consciously closed-off by contemporaries remain forgotten.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, historical writing often leaves us with the nationalist narrative of a peaceful “transfer of power” shaped by the politicians in New Delhi and London, and/or that of the devastating partition of India.Footnote ¹⁶ In an ironical twist, subalterns only enter this historical stage as participants in communal carnage or victims of the partition. Apparently forgotten are events in the streets of industrial cities like CalcuttaFootnote ¹⁷ and Karachi,Footnote ¹⁸ where the flags of Muslim League, Indian National Congress, and the Communist Party of India were hoisted aloft together in a number of popular demonstrations. Rarely explored are the meanings and the implications of participation by the subaltern in the shaping of independence beyond partition, and beyond politics of identity.

A complex historical moment with varied, competing, shifting, overlapping tendencies is thus reduced and flattened. In 1940s Bengal's rich historiography, it is striking that the rise of communalism and its consequences on both sides of the religious divide remains the theme with rare exceptions.Footnote ¹⁹ The tragedy of partition has led to a one-dimensional historiography, where every sphere of politics from Bhadralok, peasant, Dalit, and Muslim seems to be shaped and determined by communalism. Urban workers have largely been left out of such accounts; Suranjan Das has documented the participation of urban workers as “foot-soldiers” of the elites of their respective religious communities during the 1946 riots.Footnote ²⁰

Such a historiography suggests that no alternate visions and practices of politics existed, especially after the Direct-Action Day. It is the present state of despair, and not the hope of the 1940s, that haunts the most recent works on the topic, which argue in the most categorical terms that “intercommunity relations gradually collapsed” and stress “freezing of [communal] identities into solid blocs.”Footnote ²¹ In fact, between February and April of 1947, strikers numbered around fifty thousand each month in and around Calcutta.Footnote ²² Two of the biggest strikes were sustained in Tramways and Calcutta Port, both of which employed Hindu and Muslim workers.Footnote ²³ The same years that resulted in the deadliest communal riots and intensification of communal identity inspired some of the most powerful episodes of labor politics, where unity across religious lines was propagated and practiced. The swings between hope and despair, violence and solidarity were extremely sharp in these fluid years, something that historical narratives need to engage with. The lens of labor politics widens the historiography of the 1940s, by taking into account the divergent and thwarted political possibilities, which too shaped the process of decolonization and postcolonial state-making.

When Malcolm Darling toured the countryside in 1946, he observed that azadi, or freedom, “echoed all along our route from the Himalayas to Narbada,” even in the remotest of villages. It held various meanings for the peasants; for instance, freedom to travel in cars, to not pay taxes on wells, not wear purdah, etc.Footnote ²⁴ Such aspirations, molded into popular movements, had social and political consequences. In an exploratory article, Sarkar has shown just how the most important episodes in labor militancy influenced the various turns in the imperial policy at this crucial stage, quickening the pace of British exit.Footnote ²⁵ In a recent article, Ravi Ahuja has argued that the incoming Congress regime was threatened with the “labor question” right from the first day of the new order.Footnote ²⁶ After all, the Indian National Congress split the CPI-dominated AITUC to form its own trade union federation, the Indian National Trade Union Congress, in May 1947.Footnote ²⁷ The political crisis of late 1940s shaped a catalytic moment in the history of labor: the largest number of strikes in the history of colonial India accelerated the enactment of extensive body of legislations to regulate conditions of employment and granting of state social welfare, which has remained the main framework for labor regulation ever since.Footnote ²⁸

Even so, episodes of labor militancy have been seen mainly as a collection of industrial disputes without any historical or political content. Labor radicalism on the eve of independence did not assume a determinate political shape in a program or a sequence of events, on the scale of a city or the country, in such a scenario, the optimism and possibilities that this “moment of labor” on the eve of independence inspired and contained are easily forgotten and hard to narrativize. A micro historical approach is highly useful in piecing together fragmented dreams of independence that nevertheless spurred on workers to dramatic and daring collective action. It is by reconstructing the arena of collective action—by focusing on the context, the modalities, and the social content of the major strikes of port labor—that this article seeks to recover the radicalism of the time, as well as its limits. It will show how workers contested and outstepped the politics of nationalist leadership(s) and communalism in significant ways and multiple times, placing a politics of labor rights and entitlements, of struggles against exploitation and poverty, on the postcolonial agenda.

The article will show how port workers forced the question of daily bread—the social question—as a gnawing subject matter of Indian independence, which was not allowed to be reduced to a desideratum of two rival nation-states. In doing so, it will shed light on the unruly workplace and an alternative vision of politics, however hazy, that shaped Indian independence. Events include the general strike of 1946—the first of its kind in the city's history—the deadliest communal riots in the history of the country, and the Calcutta port strike of 1947.

Labor Power in Calcutta's Streets

The ferment among port labor became evident repeatedly in the postwar years. A wildcat strike took place on the issue of the dismissal of a clerk for pilferage. Port workers participated in the anticolonial demonstrations of November 1945 and February 1946. They planned their own strike across a wide variety of sections. They participated in the first ever general strike in the city, organized in solidarity with the countrywide strike of postal and telegraph workers. It is on the last event that this section will focus, as it helps contextualize port workers’ militancy in the broader context of the city's politics.

The general strike of July 29, 1946, was called by the Bengal branch of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and became a city-wide proletarian event. The postal strike itself had severe consequences for the British administration across India.Footnote ²⁹ This event threatened to demoralize British troops further than they already were as letters from home, so important for their morale, especially at this juncture, were delayed, for instance.Footnote ³⁰ The solidarity strike involved “workers of all descriptions”: of commercial and banking firms, mills and factories, transportation—including those in sections of railways as well, and government institutions.Footnote ³¹ Shopkeepers, workers at cinemas and theatres, and even “dealers in foodstuff, including fish and vegetable sellers” stopped work.Footnote ³² The main demonstration of the strike in Maidan (central square) was attended by over one hundred thousand people according to police figures,Footnote ³³ and three hundred thousand according to the figures of the AITUC.Footnote ³⁴ Elsewhere a few hundreds of thousands took part in the strike picketing outside their factories and workplaces.Footnote ³⁵ The speeches and slogans of the day reflected the charged atmosphere on the eve of independence. According to one account, as workers from Kidderpore and Metiaburuz, marched toward Maidan, they were greeted with the shouts of “Fauji-mazdoor bhai-bhai” (“soldiers and workers are brothers!”) from the Indian soldiers; slogans from workers were “Hindustan ghulam hai, bhoolo mat, bhulo mat” (“Hindustan is enslaved, do not forget, do not forget!”).Footnote ³⁶

Port workers and seamen were prominent participants. The scene in the dock neighborhoods was described thus by a contemporary:

Workers picketed most of the entrances to the port. Even those sepoys employed by the Port's Armed Police were on strike.Footnote ³⁸ It seems that these workers did not fear being victimized for having participated in a “solidarity strike”; and in the event only three cases of victimization were reported afterward.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, the Shramik Union later used the participation of workers in the general strike to claim that that the port chairman should understand from those events that “all employees of the port are ready to respond to the call of the association [sic].”Footnote ⁴⁰

The strike was variously labelled as “a historic hartal,” “solidarity strike” in the press; Hindusthan Standard described it as: “unique hartal (general strike).”Footnote ⁴¹ Such shifting terminology reflects the expanding terrain of labor politics, from the industrial districts and mills to the Maidan, or central park of Calcutta. In fact, a similar general strike in support of postal and telegraph workers was held a few days back in Bombay.Footnote ⁴² Mrinal Kanti Bose, acting editor of the daily Amrita Bazaar Patrika and the president of the AITUC, was impressed to the extent of saying:

Calcutta had witnessed strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers when jute mills struck altogether. Since the early twentieth century, strikes that spread through various industries have also been noted, but all these were organized at the scale of a group of mills, workshops, and at best, at the level of industry. The general strike was a novel event for the political landscape of Calcutta; it announced the power of organized labor and trade unions in the city, which proved their control over labor militancy, to some extent. A journalist commenting on the unprecedented scale of the strike, compared it to Congress hartal of 1921, to boycott the visit of the Prince of Wales.Footnote ⁴⁴ The crucial difference was that workers were not following the demonstrations called by the nationalist parties. The general strike had been called by the AITUC, as a spectacle for the wider population to see, and to participate in demands that were specifically class demands—the so-called economic demands. The demonstrators “completely paralysed the life of the city” proclaiming their solidarity and sympathy to the postal strike in slogans, such as “postal workers’ demands are our demands,”Footnote ⁴⁵ while Nehru advised postal strikers to take recourse to arbitration and rebuked them for forgetting the interests of the “masses of our people.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Congress's difficulties in arresting labor militancy were a matter of a wry comment in the employers’ weekly, Capital: “Pandit Nehru in his wisdom has described these strikes as boils and ulcers in the administration of the British government. He may well reflect that his and other Congress leader's efforts have had as little effect in curing them . . . ”Footnote ⁴⁷

A highlight of the strike was the participation of clerical workers along with manual workers. Main entrances of “a large number” of business and administrative houses were shut, as the strike as a method of protest and resistance resonated beyond the factory and transportation workers.Footnote ⁴⁸ Within the historiography of Bengal, clerical workers, also known as “babus,” are considered as part of the lower rungs of Bhadralok, the respectable literate Bengalis.Footnote ⁴⁹ Babus, even with their low pay and mundane office-work, have been seen as possessing and claiming a social status far superior to manual workers, who were largely non-Bengali speaking and illiterate migrants.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1946, clerical workers were marching in the same trade union demonstration as workers and the poor, adopting the vocabulary of the rights and strengths of labor and zealously, sometimes violently, guarding the picket lines.Footnote ⁵¹ Dhoti-clad babus were the unusual subjects in an artwork titled Demonstrators in Calcutta, they were depicted marching with Congress, Communist, and League flags, determined in the face of military police. The novelty of the alliance between clerks and workers was celebrated in terms such as: “today as the babu has stood by the worker, an invisible energy as powerful as the atom bomb has been released.” The genteel babu was compared to “a soldier alert and on the march.”Footnote ⁵²

Figure 1.

Demonstrators in Calcutta, Gopal Ghose, British Library, Papers of W.G. Archer, Indian Civil Service, Bihar 1931-1947, MSS EUR/F236/155

The general strike involved large numbers of Muslim workers, a fact widely commented upon in the contemporary pro-nationalist newspapers. Unity in the face of colonial power, which had a long history, not-least in Congress-led mass movements, seemed to be regained in labor and popular demonstrations, even as negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League leadership floundered. Mrinal Kanti Bose, for instance, commented about the strike: “it was a mass national demonstration on a colossal scale not on a political but economic front including Hindus and Muslims . . . who had made common cause” [emphasis added].Footnote ⁵³ For many contemporaries, such demonstrations on the “economic front” were portentous of a different and a more desirable future. Such radical moments raised hopes in solidarities of labor and politics of class, however vaguely defined, which appeared as an alternative pathway to the partition. Aruna Asaf Ali, a prominent Congress Left leader, too had remarked in the aftermath of the naval mutiny, it would be easier “to unite the Hindus and Muslims at the barricades than on the constitutional front.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Workers voices in such events are hard to come by in the sources we do have, but these are not absent. Bazloo Mohlah, who worked as a mariner at the port and belonged to the milieu of East Bengali boatmen, deeply apprehensive of the perils of ongoing communalization, spoke in ultimative terms on the day of the strike: “We are all men, Hindus and Muslims, if they don't unite, they are bound to perish.” With remarkable confidence and hope in the strength of labor, he added: “but today they are bound to unite for the mazdoor has become a ‘mugur’ [club], and the babu has become a ‘bamboo’” [meaning unclear].Footnote ⁵⁵

Calcutta Riots of 1946 and Port Workers

The fears of Bazloo Mohlah came true in a matter of weeks. The general strike was followed by the Direct-Action Day, which was the immediate cause of the deadliest urban communal riots in the subcontinent. August 16, 1946, was declared a “public holiday” by the then Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal, H. S. Suhrawardy. Historians of Bengal agree that the rioting in which at least five thousand were killed was not spontaneous, but was well-prepared by political parties on both sides of the religious divide. The complex motivations of crowds, including large sections of Muslim working classes who attended this event, have not been studied.Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact, part of Suhrawardy's call was directly addressed to Muslim workers: they were to go on a strike. The memoir of Jolly Mohan Kaul, an activist at the port, gives us rare insight into the mood of workers. He describes a context where Muslim workers were sympathetic to Suhrawardy's demonstration, for a vaguely defined Pakistan, and in fact they were obstructed in attending it. CPI gave a call for all workers to cease work and Kaul even led a procession to the Maidan under the banner of the Shramik Union. It was only when the procession reached the destination that it became clear to them that riots had broken out.Footnote ⁵⁷

Workers’ participation in Direct-Action Day was the result of a decade-long intervention of the Muslim League and a number of Muslim political parties in the docklands. In fact, Suhrawardy himself was the president of Calcutta Dockers’ Union, which was subsequently ran by his relative, Ziauddin Ahmed. Suhrawardy's men proliferated in the various white unions among boatmen, dockers, and seamen in the docklands, and were prominent in violent rivalries that beset the docklands. During the war, Kidderpore emerged as a central training ground for a range of Muslim volunteer groups or armed militias—Khaksar, the Muslim League, and Khilafat.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Mayday rally in 1941 was funded and attended by a number of prominent Muslim politicians, both pro-League and the nationalist ones.Footnote ⁵⁹ A systematic study on the subject remains to be done, but it is evident that separatist politics with its moto “Islam is in danger” was gaining ground in working-class milieus in the 1940s.

As it happened during the August riots of 1946, the working-class districts adjacent to the port—Kidderpore, Watgunge, and Metiaburuz—were the scenes of extensive rioting. The account of Kaul, an eyewitness, is ridden with contradictions about the subject. At pains to stress that unity of dock workers was maintained, he notes how a Muslim worker, Haroun, guarded the trade union office and escorted Hindu worker activists out of the neighborhood, which also tells us how dangerous crisscrossing the highly mixed neighborhoods had become during the riots. Kaul, a key leader of the CPI, left the party commune in Manastala to go back to his middle-class family residence the next day as the situation was “out of control,” even so he concludes that worker unity was maintained in the “immediate vicinity” of the party commune.Footnote ⁶⁰ The official report of the Port Trust administration, which policed the “dock area” extensively for ten days after the riots began with the professed aim of limiting the spill-over of riots from the adjacent neighborhoods, makes the picture clearer. The report stated 12 died, 158 were injured, and 1,400 were evacuated. Such figures were used as evidence that the dock area remained “comparatively immune” to the riots, compared to adjacent workers’ neighborhoods, which saw “continuous murdering, burning and looting.” Despite the heavy presence of police, military, tanks, and a curfew, details of the official report suggest serious rioting and deep tensions within the dock area: the dockyards, railway yards, warehouses, nearby factories, and employer-provided housing. Some vignettes include: attack on the Port Emergency hospital, burning and looting of Kidderpore market, “the trouble developing between the Hindus of Hide Road Cooly Lines and B.N.R. [Bengal Nagpur Railway] Muslims,” and “50 Muslims armed with lathis were attacking Port commissioners’ quarters.”Footnote ⁶¹ It is telling that the administration did not even mention an estimate of the number of their employees involved in rioting or very little attempt was made to distinguish outsiders from dock workers; and this was a management which kept detailed and sophisticated records of its employees. The omission is significant, and probably points to the involvement of dock workers employed through the Port Trust on a significant scale.

Workers no longer lived in an atmosphere conducive to actions of collective resistance, especially if that required solidarities across religious lines. The fear of defending one's scant belongings and even one's life, temptations of looting, or revenge were paralyzing. Streets that had come so alive in the past year with solidarities of class and anticolonial demonstrations, with the hopes of a new future were now left to organized gangs of both communities.Footnote ⁶² It was in such a context that the port strike, which was planned to start on September 1, 1946, had to be postponed.

An agitational leaflet produced by the Shramik Union titled “Don't forget your demands” in the aftermath of the riots, read against the grain, reveals how the riots weighed heavily on the prospects of the labor movement. The riots degraded the living conditions of poor Hindus and Muslims further. Mukherjee has noted the massive dislocation that ensued in the first two weeks of the violence: approximately 5 percent (or 189,015 people) of the city's population became riot refugees, losing their homes to the turf wars between Hindus and Muslims.Footnote ⁶³ The leaflet discussed the destruction that resulted from such an extensive “exchange of population”—it was said thousands of workers lived in even more cramped conditions than before; in some places, twenty to twenty-five workers now lived in a single room.Footnote ⁶⁴ It was risky to even go to work, to continue activities of daily life, and the prices of necessary goods rose even higher.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nepal Bhattacharya, the most popular leader of dock workers, insisted that the “road to success for the Hindu and Mussalman labourers was the same.”Footnote ⁶⁶ He argued that riots were a “trap” set up by the capitalists and the government. A number of silences—on workers’ participation in the Direct-Action Day and the riots, on the role of nationalist parties, such as Congress, the Muslim League, and Hindu Mahasabha, who were key to the organization of riots, and the burning question of Pakistan—can be read as the union attempting to walk on thin ice, of attempting to maintain unity of workers in a context of deepening hostilities and division among workers.

Even so, it is significant that the most influential and significant union among the port workers chose to make the case for not giving up the planned strike, and successfully so, as we shall see below. The Congress and the league were not mentioned, but the implication was that workers had different and more effective methods of fulfilling their aspirations and they need not follow the paths charted by their respective elites. It is remarkable that they were able to argue in such terms publicly a couple of months after the riots, probably because such ideas resonated on the ground. The idea that solidarities of class could overcome the deepest cut of communal divisions, which 1946 arguably was, found expression in popular literature, too. Sameresh Basu, a communist activist, wrote a short story “Adab,” in the same year, which shot the author to prominence.Footnote ⁶⁷ The choice of characters—a boatmen and a textile worker—was hardly incidental especially since the boatmen of the city, employed mainly at the docks, were popularly considered to be perpetrators of mindless violence.Footnote ⁶⁸ The author was challenging the widespread view that the city's subaltern population simply served as “automatons” of communal violence. “Adab” paints the chilling atmosphere of suspicion and violence, and at the same time captures the possibilities of crossing the religious barrier in the by-lanes of Calcutta amidst the communal violence. The two characters managed to build trust in each other, so much so that a Hindu worker decided to follow a Muslim boatman to reach a safe place. In the end, the mill worker was deeply shaken by the possibility of the boatman's death, as if it was his own brother. The story depicted the shared everyday experiences between workers and the poor of the city that tied their fate together, that evoked friendship and deepest solidarities across religious identities.

“Workers’ Way”

Even as rioting seems to leave no possibilities for any form of collective action except for community-based in the historiography, spaces of resistance were found in widespread strike action and peasant revolts. In the urban arena, the swing-back from the deadliest episode of communal riots to highly militant strike actions, in a matter of months, signifies the extreme fluidity of the political situation in the late 1940s, which is somehow missed in the conventional historiography. The field of political action had expanded with tremendous rapidity with the end of the war; its narrowing was neither quick nor without consequences.

The urgency of finding practical solutions to the problems of retrenchment, wages, and food, is palpable in the sources, for instance, Nepal Bhattacharya noted in a strike leaflet: “when our demands were just and fair before the disturbance [the riots], they have now become essential and fulfilment of which is now compulsory [sic] [emphasis added].”Footnote ⁶⁹ The union had a well-known charter: an extensive list of demands, common to both Hindu and Muslim workers, and workers of diverse occupations, which had been prepared through various small and big struggles over the previous two decades. The demands were precise on the one hand, and wide in scope on the other.Footnote ⁷⁰ The first and foremost demand was no retrenchment and absorption of all those retrenched. Following demands ranged from uniforms, promotion, leave, minimum wages, an improved scale of wages, permanency of staff, and railway passes.Footnote ⁷¹

A close reading of the idiom of demands as presented to the chairman illuminates the grandeur of workers dreams at the time as well as an unmistakable pride in their cause.Footnote ⁷² Many of these demands were legitimized by discussing the cases of workers who had won them elsewhere in the country. For example, a bonus for workers’ contribution to the war effort and higher dearness allowances.Footnote ⁷³ Workers did not limit comparisons to Indian workplaces and they compared their lot to the workers of European countries.Footnote ⁷⁴ A crucial demand was for better wages: a minimum wage of Rs.40 (per month) in addition to a minimum dearness allowance of Rs.50(per month) and a housing allowance of Rs.8(per month). The total minimum wage each month was to be at least Rs.98.Footnote ⁷⁵ In reply to his argument that this was an “extravagant” demand, the chairman was told that according to one Dr. AckroydFootnote ⁷⁶ the wages should be even higher to maintain the minimum nutritional standard of workers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Workers demanded a forty-hour week (an eight hour day), on the basis that an eight hour day was in fashion in Europe, and workers in tropical countries should work even fewer hours.Footnote ⁷⁸ By comparing themselves to “brain workers” they argued they should be allowed their conditions of leave (at least), since their work (manual work) is more tiring.Footnote ⁷⁹ The most detailed of all was the demand for housing, described in an appendix. It said that the quarters should be made so that families of workers could be accommodated. Family quarters should at least include two rooms since to call one room a family quarter was “manifestly absurd.” The rooms should have a minimum of two windows to allow for a draught even when the door was shut. The rooms should have electric lights and power points; a bathroom with a reservoir to collect water given the short supply of water in the city; open space that can be used as playground; and every block of quarters should have a common room for children to use as a “schoolroom” or a “common room.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Such an expansive composition of demands reflected the strong and deep connections of the port workers’ unions with the wider labor movement in the country. Trade unionists at the port were constantly comparing the conditions of workers at the port with other ports and also industrial establishments of a similar nature—especially the Railways.Footnote ⁸¹ They drew on the experiences of workers in various ongoing industrial disputes, of the policies of the government and the employers.Footnote ⁸² It was discussed above how the all-India postal and telegraph workers’ strike echoed across the different sections of working classes in Calcutta, leading to the first general strike in the city's history. Declarations of solidarity with the port strike were sent to the chairman from trade unions in Calcutta and dockers’ unions in Vishakhapatnam and Madras.Footnote ⁸³ Trade unions had emerged as political actors on the scale of the country in the 1940s, capable of articulating and coordinating demands, negotiations, and powerful collective action across the country.

Trade union action was not limited to the so-called “economic demands”; for these activists, politics of labor had anticommunal vision. In fact, the union propaganda had called upon workers to strike not just for their own selves but to be exemplars to the whole country. Workers organized peace squads that were joined by a significant minority of workers “during and after riots.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Such squads stood as a publicly visible example, on a limited scale, that workers would act together for common aims, in the most dangerous of circumstances. Within their own milieu, such peace squads were living proof to those who did not decide to participate that collective action across religious lines was possible. Recognizing this, Nepal Bhattacharya used the example of forty-five hundred workers who had united against rioters in defense of workers’ neighborhoods as he argued the necessity of the strike a couple of months after the riots.Footnote ⁸⁵ This was not atypical: in the August 1946 riots, eight thousand tramway workers marched through the streets of Calcutta in their uniforms, carrying red and congress flags without being disrupted.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such instances even entered the columns of the pro-British press, leading The Statesman to publish a letter from a reader who commented on the distinction of a “workers’ way” in dealing with riots, as they were able to form “peace committees” including both Hindus and Muslims, compared to the bourgeois way, in which “defence committees” of “guards” and “forces” on communal lines are formed, which are in fact used against the “rival community.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Port Strike of 1947

The postponed port strike began on February 3, less than six months after the August riots.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although at the beginning of the strike the Governor of Bengal casually remarked that the strike probably involved only the Hindu workers, it was the first strike of its scale in any Indian port.Footnote ⁸⁹ It spread across all sections of workers and even the Muslim cooks of managers refused to work.Footnote ⁹⁰ The strike involved around twenty-two thousandFootnote ⁹¹ to thirty thousandFootnote ⁹² manual and clerical workers employed by the Port Trust, and continued for eighty-seven days, severely affecting the regional economy and aspects of national economy.Footnote ⁹³ Although for shorter periods, employees of the largest contractor at the port, Bird and Company, and the more skilled stevedores’ dockers also struck, which brought the total number of port workers on strike to just over thirty-five thousandFootnote ⁹⁴—fifty thousand at its height.Footnote ⁹⁵ Also, tens of thousands of seamen employed on ships going abroad threatened to strike.Footnote ⁹⁶ This was remembered as a “historic strike,” which produced worker activists who were central to the running of the union for decades.Footnote ⁹⁷ A strike that laid the basis for the All India Port and Dock Workers’ Federation (AIPDWF), with branches in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.Footnote ⁹⁸ Tens of thousands of workers decided to act together across religious and even “national” lines, a couple of months before the partition. Port workers included over two thousand East Bengali Muslim mariners who were to become “Pakistani” citizens in a matter of months, and who were witnessing escalating communal violence in their villages. The charged issue of Pakistan failed to disrupt their solidarity with the “Indian” workers for the duration of the strike.Footnote ⁹⁹ The wider background included strikes of tramway, engineering, and sections of jute workers. The Statesman remained silent on the details of the strikes in most cases, but regularly reported number of “idle workers due to strikes and lockouts,” which remained around fifty thousand between February and April.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The strike was presented as a legal industrial dispute to the employers, and even directed as such by the leadership.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But the strike on the street was hardly a peaceful and orderly affair, it assumed a highly disruptive form. It exemplified the optimism generated by the hopes of independence and drew its energies from anticolonial struggles and solidarities of the time. Strikers were conscious and proud that they were resurrecting their own vision of politics and rejecting the politics of their respective communal elites. Second, workers took the opportunity to contest the control of one of the crucial imperial-industrial spaces of the British Raj, including those employed through contractors at the port. The stevedores’ laborers and Bird and Company coolies had initially gone on their own strike and even when their strikes were over, the stevedores’ laborers were reported to be on a go-slow.Footnote ¹⁰² The chairman estimating the tremendous impetus for industrial action wrote to an employer organization, that it was the “unanimous view” of the commissioners that the “strike must be fought and that any compromise would only lead to further agitation.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The strike lasted for almost three months with significant economic and administrative costs but the interim government, now formally run by the Congress under Nehru, intervened very cautiously.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By taking advantage of a port that had been fortified during the Second World War by special armed guards under the command of a military headquarters stationed within its perimeter, in addition to the already existing Port Police, the Port Trust administration attempted to carry on essential and minimum services.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As a result, the strikers had to defend their strike with extraordinary strategic planning, physical presence, and extensive campaigning for public support. As Jolly Mohan Kaul noted only eight full-timers of the CPI were involved in the strike, a number too small to ensure stoppage of work across eighty miles of waterfront.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The strike was defended by workers in their own sections and areas, and the work of the sections was coordinated through “section committees,” which had organized their own “volunteer corps.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The section leaders met almost daily to coordinate the activities of defending the strike.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Workers not only challenged strike-breakers from entering and working in the port, they also obstructed the mobility of management. Numerous cases of violence against the managers, supervisors (who were mainly British), police, and army personnel were reported.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Putting aside this vague label of violence, we see that workers wielded enough collective strength to take revenge against the most-hated managers and to control which of them could enter the port and for what purposes. An instance is the case of Engineer-in-Charge at the Jetty Engine House. He reported that he had boarded a bus with the electrical foreman from near their office. Some strikers boarded the bus along with them.Footnote ¹¹⁰ He reported that

The strikers allegedly assaulted him and hit him on his face, but still nobody came to his help. Finally, he got down at a bus stop and escaped—but the strikers told him that “we know your house how long will you stay here.”Footnote ¹¹² He requested that he be provided with an armed guard at his house and an armed escort for traveling to work. Managers and supervisors did not feel safe enough to travel to work anymore, let alone, to carry on the running of the port.

This point is better made with another example. One Mr. Baker, superintendent (transportation), “had accompanied an engine” out of a railway yard.Footnote ¹¹³As he was leaving in his car about fifty workers, who had been “abusing the workers in the engine,” starting throwing stones at him.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He complained that one constable and two head constables did not intervene in the incident. Mr. Baker had to be sent to the hospital and the top of his car was ripped apart. Why was Mr. Baker stoned after he had completed his job and was leaving? Undoubtedly, he was a target of the anger of the strikers, and he was being warned of the dangers of continuing the port operations during the strike in the future.

The balance of forces was tilted in the favor of workers to the extent that even the loyalties of the military officials and soldiers stationed at the port was suspect. One Captain Fyfe Smith reported that he saw a military lorry carrying “outside labourers” or “volunteers” from the North Workshop to Chowringhee being stoned in the dock area by a group of twenty-five to thirty strikers.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Moreover, in the captain's version the truck driver drove away leaving behind two armed sepoys, who, instead of protecting the volunteers, absconded.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This last allegation became an important issue at the Military Headquarters. Upon investigation it was found that the allegation that armed sepoys had run away was untrue, however, since the lorry driver had stopped the truck right in front of the strikers he was found to “be in league with the strikers.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

It may be Captain Smith was mistaken about the allegiances the armed sepoys had with the strikers but it is significant that Captain Smith conceived of such a possibility. In fact, there was general uncertainty over the loyalties of the armed sepoys. In response to Captain Smith's complaint a statement was published by the military establishment of the port expressing concern over the effects of “irresponsible statements” like that of Captain Smith and its adverse effects on the morale of not just the ordinary sepoys but their officers, too, and a written apology was demanded from Smith.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At this time police strikes had broken out in various parts of the country, and it is likely that impacted the port armed guards, too.Footnote ¹¹⁹

As comes through in the examples given above, the port workers asserted their collective presence, against their managers and supervisors, and even made the military personnel apprehensive about their actions. Port authorities’ strike preparation rules allowed “peaceful picketing” with up to five workers, here thirty to fifty workers were found defending their strike by means they judged opportune. It was this aspect that was commented on in an anti-strike letter-to-the-editor in The Statesman. The author “Alright” wondered how strikers who claimed to have such low wages carried on strikes that lasted over a couple of months. He concluded that the “real reason” for the strike: “is that a spirit of lawlessness and challenge is abroad.”Footnote ¹²⁰Undoubtedly, job losses and low wages were urgent concerns of strikers as reflected in the demand charter discussed above. But it was as much the “spirit of lawlessness,” of challenging the existing order that explains the intensity, determination, scope, and violence of the struggle. In fact, a similar feature was noted of a wildcat “sympathy” strike a year ago in 1946, when five hundred cranemen, loading workers, contractual workers, and clerical workers stopped work to demand the immediate release of an arrested shed clerk on pilferage charges, trade union leaders declaring that the police of 1940s cannot be like that of the 1920s, since “the days of dictatorship are over.”Footnote ¹²¹ The management's most urgent concern, then too, was that workers were taking “law and order” into their own hands. It is this spirit of rebelliousness, so palpable for the contemporaries, but which leaves rare historical traces, that characterizes the moment of labor on the eve of independence.

Strikers relied on wide anticolonial solidarities, in moral and material terms, including in the army and in the police, as described above. In fact, the only jeep in the possession of the union relied on secret supplies of petrol from the Watgunge (local) police station.Footnote ¹²² The strike's organizing body, the Council of Action, ensured somewhat favorable propaganda about the strike through a nationalist daily, the Amrita Bazaar Patrika,Footnote ¹²³ and through various public meetings.Footnote ¹²⁴ Squads of workers went around Calcutta, and even into the districts of Bihar, Orissa, and Madhya Pradesh, with collection boxes bearing a union seal to collect money for the survival of the strikers and the conduct of the strike.Footnote ¹²⁵According to one account, such squads were able to travel free of charge on the trains.Footnote ¹²⁶ Within Calcutta such squads consisted of Muslim and Hindu workers,Footnote ¹²⁷ this was probably a matter of practical necessity, as it ensured that they would be less likely to be attacked by gangs of either communities.Footnote ¹²⁸ Letters proclaiming solidarity with workers were sent to the port authorities from the trade union at the Madras Port, and locally in Kidderpore, from Brooke Bond and Cox and King's workers. The resolution forwarded by Madras port workers declared:

Figure 2.

Madras Port Workers ResolutionFootnote ¹³⁰

Gaining the support of, and respect from, a variety of trade unions contributed to the sense of power and ambition that striking workers felt as part of the labor movement. In fact, ever since the beginning of the strike, the strikers’ representativesFootnote ¹³¹ repeatedly rejected the adjudication proposed by the central government.Footnote ¹³² Through adjudication, Congress promised workers a “fair” deal, if workers left it in the hands of the government to secure it. Its rejection, on the other hand, implied a significant level of distrust in the promises of the Congress leadership in the founding moment of the nation.Footnote ¹³³ Over two months into the strike, workers still refused the proposal of India's first Labour Minister, Jagjivan Ram, who promised to “send” the Pay Commission's report to the port authorities. The report would lay down the broad guidelines to be followed regarding the pay and allowances of port workers in line with those of central government employees.Footnote ¹³⁴ In a telling instance of the insistence on working-class autonomy in workplace matters, the strikers argued that they preferred a “direct settlement” with management “on the basis of their organised strength.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Ultimately, port workers secured their demand of the applicability of First Pay Commission as well as, in principle, their demands for no retrenchment and no victimization.Footnote ¹³⁶ Even so, this victory signified the narrowing terrain of labor politics, it opened doors for the channeling of labor militancy through specific institutions of the post-independent state, reserved for privileged sections of working poor. The division of labor into a formal sector, highly regulated by the state, with considerably better working conditions, and the unregulated informal sector was one of the main strategies of stabilization adopted by the state in the late 1940s.Footnote ¹³⁷ The major ports would go on to become some of the most regulated postwar workplaces in the country, as part of the formal sector. The casual labor regime, characteristic of port labor throughout the colonial rule, was extensively reformed, including through partially successful governmental “decasualization” schemes.