Introduction
Nationalist historiography presents the history of late colonial South Asia as being at odds with developments in other countries. The history of the Indian anti-colonial movement from the end of World War I to decolonization is presented as uniquely non-violent and dominated by the non-militaristic political ideology and forms of mass mobilization such as hunger fasts, moral persuasion, boycott campaigns, and the peaceful breaking of the law developed by M.K. Gandhi.Footnote 1 Yet, in other contexts, the end of World Wars I and II extended into what has been called the “violent peace”, in the form of small wars, armed insurgencies, and the increased prominence of the army and army-emulating styles of mass politics, such as paramilitaries in a context of the mass demobilization of tens of thousands of soldiers.Footnote 2 Scholars critical of Gandhian nationalist narratives have considered how this violent peace shaped South Asian interwar politics from the participation of uniformed and bemedalled army veterans in anti-colonial, social, and religious protest in the interwar years to the militaristic forms of communal partition violence conducted by ex-servicemen in the aftermath of World War II.Footnote 3 This article fills a conspicuous gap within this body of literature: how did the violent peace shape labour mobilization and the rapidly developing labour movement in interwar South Asia?
In considering this question, this article suggests a novel method for studying the overlap between labour and military history. Two approaches have been prominent. One body of literature has conceptualized soldiering as a form of labour rather than duty, considering soldiers’ contracts, army labour processes, and methods of work discipline.Footnote 4 Connected to this approach is the work of scholars who have studied similarities between military and industrial forms of discipline and regimentation.Footnote 5 A second body of literature studies the labour performed by soldiers other than fighting, such as ditch digging, the work of the non-combatant labouring ranks of the army, and workforces in state-run and/or military-controlled ordinance factories.Footnote 6 In this article, I develop a third approach, looking at how a world shaped by war – discourses around the politics of army recruitment and demobilization, regimental practice and ideologies, the experience of army service, military forms of ceremony, and the heightened presence of the military in the public sphere – shaped the ideas and actions of interwar labouring populations. Through a study of the mobilization of labour volunteer movements and army-related claims-making by labouring communities on the colonial state, I suggest that “militarization” was an important aspect of labour mobilization in at least the first half of South Asia’s twentieth century.
Conceptually, I propose the idea of the “militarization” of labour politics, or the migration of military themes and forms of mobilization into labour politics, as an important aspect of interwar labour politics. In a recent work, Daly develops a conception of militarism as a state-led ideological project, which imposed the military’s values of authoritarian leadership, strict rules, discipline, and war-preparedness on postcolonial African societies.Footnote 7 Rather than treat militarism as a fixed set of values, this article conceives of military-related ideologies and practices as a contested field to which political actors with divergent commitments ascribe sometimes markedly different meanings and political valences. I also distinguish my work from George Mosse’s well-known and influential brutalization thesis, which states that the continuation of wartime attitudes after the end of World War I produced a combative political sphere and an increased threshold for human cruelty and violence in postwar populations.Footnote 8 This article considers forms of militaristic labour mobilization without correlating it with an increase in violence per se: there is no clear evidence that the labour movement was more violent after World War I than before it. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, even expressly non-violent Gandhian movements mobilized through militaristic forms such as volunteer movements in the interwar period.Footnote 9
Volunteer movements were civilian paramilitary organizations common in the interwar years. They emulated military practice – wearing standard uniforms, carrying small arms, organizing military-style marches, and performing flag salutations. Government officials used the term “volunteer movement” as a designation for all civilian paramilitary organizations and “volunteer” was frequently used in the names of volunteer movements. The reason this terminology was used is unclear. It likely referenced Britain’s World War I volunteer units – Kitchener’s New Army, the “Pals” battalions, the Territorial Force, and Volunteer Training Corps – which were part of a longer tradition of voluntary civilian military units in the country. In South Asia, the names of volunteer movements often emphasized the concept of Seva or public social service and their military character, employing terms such as Fauj or Sena (Army), Paltan (Platoon), and Dal (Force or Contingent).
Labour volunteer movements have been largely ignored in the existing literature on South Asian labour and volunteer movements.Footnote 10 Thus far, South Asian volunteer movements have generally been framed as symptoms of interwar fascisms and communal conflict through studies of organizations such as the Congress Seva Dal, Muslim League National Guards, Khaksars, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.Footnote 11 However, rather than a distinctly fascist form of organization, volunteer movements were a form of political mobilization that spanned the political spectrum. Labour volunteer movements were characteristic of several contexts in the imperial and colonial interwar world, including South Asia where they were formed among workers in the textile, railway, dock, jute, electricity supply and press industries, and in bazaars (marketplaces), in Bombay, Nagpur, Kanpur, Lahore, and parts of Bengal, Kerala, and Madras Presidencies.Footnote 12
This article builds upon Nandini Gooptu’s argument that labour volunteer movements were articulations of the urban poor’s aspiration to define loci of power for themselves in response to their marginalization and exclusion from political power.Footnote 13 I also take the historiographical debate on labour volunteer movements in a new direction, stressing their relation to colonial military recruitment and practice. In an age shaped by the movement of labouring populations between military and civilian forms of labour, I explore how the relationship between labour volunteer movements and military recruitment shaped the discourse and practice of interwar labour mobilization. Volunteer movements were most widespread in the major recruiting grounds of the Indian army: Punjab; the United Provinces; and the North-Western Frontier Province.Footnote 14 Military veterans and communities who were recruited for army service played an important role in the radical labour volunteer movements discussed in this article. Their participation in projects of labour and community emancipation demonstrates that demobilized servicemen did not always choose straightforward political loyalty to the colonial power and economic improvement within the existing political order as studies of Punjab and some African contexts, such as British colonial Kenya or German colonial East Africa, have shown.Footnote 15 Labour volunteer movements were an unintended consequence of the colonial state’s mobilization of society for war as they signified a refusal on the part of labouring communities to demobilize and demilitarize their politics after the end of World War I, leading to challenges and instability in the colonial order.
In this article, I argue that labour volunteer movements were an important form of mobilization for South Asian labouring communities. The activities of labour volunteer movements were closely connected to questions of labour assertion, protest, and emancipation.Footnote 16 In a context of subaltern deprivation and humiliation, labour volunteer movements had a strong symbolic politics in urban spaces, with workers asserting narratives and symbols from colonial and pre-colonial martial pasts and engaging in military-inspired practices such as marches and flag salutations. Their activities and association marked out local neighbourhoods as being under the control of particular political organizations, thereby contributing to the development of a distinctly “zonal” form of politics in the working-class part of the city. In employing military-style standard uniforms, practice, and ceremony, and bearing small arms such as lathis, they challenged the colonial state’s monopoly on military symbolism, practice, and the possession of arms, in some instances of mass labour mobilization subverting the repressive power of the army and the police. In response to the mobilization of these labour volunteer movements employer-backed, middle-class, and caste volunteer movements mobilized to discipline labour militancy, shaping a field of militarized interwar class and caste conflict.
Claims-making – the presentation of demands to an authority based on established or perceived rights or dues – by army veteran communities on the colonial state in India and more generally in the imperial and colonial world, have rarely been studied in the realm of labour politics. Studies of the claims that army veteran communities made on the colonial state in British colonial India and Kenya, German colonial East Africa, and postcolonial Indonesia have shown how they used their veteran status to demand state protection, economic opportunities, and higher social status.Footnote 17 In this article, I argue that labour leaders and workers made claims on the patronage of the colonial state through references to past community army service and martial race status during industrial disputes or for further recruitment into the army. Some labour and community leaders referenced workers as members of a “martial race”, a concept deployed by the colonial state that characterized particular religious, caste, or regional communities as distinctly martial and fit for military recruitment, and their past army service as giving them a right to the patronage of the colonial state over employers during industrial disputes.Footnote 18 Others referenced their loyalty to the colonial state through past community army service to demand further recruitment into the army of specific community-based labouring communities, connecting military service with the community’s social advancement. The perception by labouring communities that the colonial state was indebted to them due to their past army service and martial race status reveals that the colonial state’s portrayal of army labour as “service” rather than “work” and the martial race ideology employed in the service of recruitment were double-edged swords. Rather than just fostering loyalty to the colonial state among army veteran communities, they became sources of instability for it in the political sphere. They generated demands for colonial patronage in the realm of postwar, and, in this case, labour politics, producing a more volatile relationship between the colonial state and labour.
This article concerns itself with the politics of textile millworkers and Dalit labourers in late colonial Bombay. It compares how the militarization of labour politics played out on two overlapping communities. Recent studies show that the uniformity of war experience, known in some contexts as the experience of the “front generation”, mobilized by interwar states, was a myth as experiences of war were not uniform and differed significantly across communities.Footnote 19 Focusing on these two communities allow us to see how the army-related experiences of workers from two caste groupings – the Maratha caste group, which was part of the caste hierarchy, and the outcaste Dalit Mahar community – differed and how this shaped their politics. Bombay is a prime site for a comparative study on the relation between labour and military history given it was both the nucleus of India’s interwar labour movement and that many of the city’s workers came from parts of the countryside that were recruiting grounds for two caste-based regiments of the Indian Army, the Maratha Light Infantry, and Mahar regiments, creating an overlap of labouring and military milieus.
Labour historians have seldom studied the impact of the military on labour mobilization because phenomena such as volunteer movements and military-related claims-making by the labouring poor did not sit neatly with the police’s or labour department’s understanding of its role in surveilling labour protest. Colonial officials saw the task of labour control as consisting in moderating and co-opting the trade union movement, curbing and controlling strikes, and monitoring the influence of radical political groupings on the labour movement. Connections across categories, between military and labour politics, hardly ever show up in labour gazettes or in the notes of labour officers. To unearth the impact of volunteer movements and military-related claims-making on the colonial state, this article has had to go beyond the standard labour archive. The files of the colonial state on volunteer movements written during a spate of volunteer movement formation in the late 1930s and during World War II have been used, as have the speeches and writings of political spokesmen and labour leaders, workers’ court depositions, Marathi-language memoirs, and newspaper material. Where possible, the files and publications of volunteer movements and their leaders and proceedings of conferences have been used. For reconstructing the uniform, activities, and modes of self-representation of volunteer movements, I have used previously unused or rarely used photographs. For reconstructing political protest in which these volunteer movements were active, the files of strike enquiry committees and newspaper material have been employed. These sources are representative of the experience of wide numbers of workers: labour volunteer movements were a prominent presence in public spaces; they participated and even led forms of mass labour mobilization. The speeches analysed were given at mass meetings and gatherings related to army recruitment, which could draw large numbers of workers from communities that provided army labour.
The article first explores the military-related politics of textile millworkers in the Girni Kamgar Union (Textile Workers’ Union) and its volunteer movement, the Lal Fauj or “Red Army”, during the general strikes of 1928–1929. The second part explores similar themes among “Dalit” or outcaste labourers in the Ambedkarite movement and its volunteer movement the Samata Sainik Dal (Equality Soldiers’ Force) during a period of intense labour militancy from 1927–1938. While the focus is on Bombay, I reference analogous processes and phenomena that took place among other workforces and Dalit labouring communities in late colonial South Asia.
The Girni Kamgar Union, the Lal Fauj, and Bombay’s Textile Workers
Bombay’s textile workforce was shaped by the experience of World War I. Constructed and operated from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the city had eighty-two cotton textile mills, which employed some 150,000 workers in the northern suburbs of India’s industrial and commercial capital by the interwar period. The mills employed workers predominantly from the Maratha caste group, recruited in the countryside of Bombay Province and, in lesser numbers, Dalit Mahar workers and Muslim weavers from the United Provinces.Footnote 20 Marathas were designated a martial race and recruited for army service during the reorganization of the Indian Army in the late nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the mutiny of 1857 in which “sepoys”, or soldiers, had played a defining role.Footnote 21 Regiments such as the Maratha Light Infantry recruited in similar districts of Bombay Province that the mills did, while Non-Brahmin workers’ welfare organizations, along with the Bombay Police, recruited for the Indian Army at the mill gates, in workers’ tenement housing or chawls, and through neighbourhood gymnasia or akharas during World War I, creating an overlap between labouring and military milieus.Footnote 22 Battalions of the Maratha Light Infantry served in Mesopotamia, where they fought Ottoman troops, most prominently in the battles of Kut al-Amara and Sharqat. After demobilization, some veterans rejoined the mills, over 5,000 using the assistance of the Young Men’s Christian Association, which worked with the Bombay Soldier’s Board to find employment for unemployed soldiers in the industrial establishments of the city.Footnote 23 The interwar mill workforce was partly manned by military veterans from World War I, while Maratha workers operated in a larger milieu shaped both by military service and urban wage work.
In the early 1920s, textile trade unions formed volunteer movements in a context of widespread volunteer movement formation during anti-colonial movements and labour unrest in the city. For instance, after returning from Mesopotamia and rejoining the mills, the mill weaver A.A. Alwe participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement, picketing liquor and foreign cloth shops.Footnote 24 The campaign was organized by the nationalist Indian National Congress and pan-Islamist Khilafat Movement, which referenced World War I, protesting the Ottoman Empire’s dismemberment in its aftermath. At this time, nationalist and Khilafatist volunteer movements were formed in the city, including the Congress Seva Dal and the Khilafat Corps, which were hierarchically organized under “officers”, sometimes carried standards, wore badges and uniforms, drilled, protected nationalist and Khilafat leaders, popular religious festivals, and political demonstrations, and drew on army veterans and mill and other workers in their ranks.Footnote 25
In a period shaped by several textile general strikes in 1919, 1920, 1923, 1924, and 1925, Alwe organized an akhara to build a following in the working-class neighbourhood of Prabhadevi and, with other skilled millworkers, formed the Girni Kamgar Mahamandal (Textile Workers’ Confederation), recruiting through akharas and conducting clandestine meetings in the chawls.Footnote 26 The Mahamandal formed a volunteer movement to protect trade union meetings, which also participated in martial-patriotic events such as the celebration of the birth tercentenary of the seventeenth-century Maratha ruler, Shivaji Bhonsale.Footnote 27 In the colonial military imagination, Shivaji was an indelible part of the martial history and character of the Maratha “race”, a central character in the martial race narrative, which justified their fitness for army recruitment.Footnote 28 However, Shivaji had also been cast as an anti-colonial icon by the Congress leader B.G. Tilak, who organized Shivaji Festivals in the 1920s, where participants wore warrior costumes and carried spears and javelins in emulation of Shivaji’s seventeenth-century Maratha warriors.Footnote 29 The Mahamandal’s labour volunteer movement was thus shaped by martial race ideology and a longer history of military-inspired symbols and forms of organization associated with an evolving process of regional-patriotic identity formation.Footnote 30 At the celebration of Shivaji’s birth tercentenary, communist trade union leaders called on millworkers to emulate Shivaji by winning swaraj, or self-rule, with the sword of the general strike, reworking the Shivaji narrative from martial race theory and anticolonial rhetoric to the service of labour politics.Footnote 31 Another textile trade union, the Bombay Textile Labour Union, was established by the lawyer N.M. Joshi in 1926. It recruited primarily among Muslim weavers from the neighbourhood of Madanpura and also organized a volunteer movement.Footnote 32 In 1928, during a six-month textile general strike against the millowners’ attempts to intensify the labour process in the mills, the Joint Strike Committee of the Mahamandal, the Textile Labour Union, and the newly formed, communist-led Girni Kamgar Union (Textile Workers Union) formed a volunteer movement known as the Joint Strike Committee Volunteer Corps.Footnote 33 The Corps organized the picketing of the mill gates and was led by a certain Sayaji Havaldar, whose title “Havaldar” suggests that he claimed to be a non-commissioned officer in the British Indian Army with a rank equivalent to sergeant.Footnote 34 A list of members enrolled shows 102 workers from forty-four or over half of the city’s textile mills, a wide distribution suggesting a large and well-organized volunteer movement.Footnote 35 Labour volunteer movements were an essential part of the trade union movement in the textile industry in the 1920s.
In this context, the Girni Kamgar Union organized a volunteer movement known as the Lal Fauj (Red Army), sometimes known as the Lal Dasta (Red Military Contingent), which referenced communist themes, military practice, and the martial cultures of Western India in late 1928. The Kamgar Union was formed by communists and established millworker-activists influenced by nationalist and non-Brahmin movements such as the weaver Alwe and the fitter G.L. Kasle. The name of the volunteer movement derived from that of the Soviet Red Army, as did several other volunteer movements formed by communist, socialist, trade union, and “revolutionary terrorist” political tendencies on the subcontinent at the time.Footnote 36 The movement was led by a mill jobber “Captain” G.L. Kandalkar and the World War I veteran Alwe, who were assisted by the communists Ben Bradley and Dada Amir Haider Khan, both sailors in the British Navy during the war and, later, the weaver Mohammad Shahid, who had served in the Khilafat Corps.Footnote 37 Figure 1, taken in the style of official regimental photographs, shows Fauj volunteers in a standard uniform of army-like khaki shirts and shorts. Members drilled with lathis (sticks) in military formation outside mills, union offices, and chawls. Badges worn by members at times read “Workers of the World Unite” across the chest.Footnote 38 The Fauj also referenced nationalist and regional-patriotic Tilakite traditions, which connected military-inspired themes and symbols with regional-patriotic identity formation. Tilakite volunteer movements formed in the early twentieth century protected religious festivals and were part of nationalist demonstrations and festivals, while communist Kamgar Union leaders, such as K.N. Joglekar, had been part of Tilak’s Indian Volunteer Force formed during World War I.Footnote 39 Some Fauj members learned the use of patta, a long, straight, double-edged sword used in mardani khel, a martial art form associated with the Maratha Army of Shivaji, and Rani Laxmibai, a nineteenth-century ruler from the Princely State of Jhansi, who fought the East India Company’s Army during the revolt of 1857 and was venerated as an anticolonial hero.Footnote 40 Kamgar Union leaders, particularly millworkers such as Alwe and Kasle, invoked both Shivaji and Laxmibai in meetings as heroic regional-patriotic figures to be emulated in their courage and bravery during the 1928 strike, mobilizing anticolonial martial references for labour struggle against the industry’s largely Indian textile owners.Footnote 41 The melange of communist, regionalist, and militaristic imagery in the public image of the Fauj sought to invoke working-class and regional-patriotic pride in the mill workforce.
Figure 1. Group picture of the Lal Fauj.
The Fauj protected union leaders, offices, and meetings from attacks by employer-backed neighbourhood strongmen or dadas and others. One of the organizers of the Fauj, the communist trade unionist and former clerk S.S. Mirajkar, situated the need for its formation within a global interwar period of violent conflicts between labour and capital. This was characterized by the formation of strike-breaking, paramilitary, and strong-arm organizations by the governments of the United States of America, Great Britain, and Germany, such as the German Technical Emergency Corps and the British Citizen’s Guard.Footnote 42 After the end of the 1928 general strike, Keshav Borkar, the textile area’s most powerful neighbourhood boss and strongman, who was employed as “Superintendent of Labour” by the powerful Sassoon Mills group, along with thirty other men attacked three Kamgar Union officials, R.S. Nimbkar, P.T. Tamhanekar, and Kasle. In response, 5,000 millworkers ransacked Borkar’s house, burnt his belongings, raided his akhara, and brought workers out on strike in protest.Footnote 43 The Lal Fauj was formed in this context of spiralling violence in late December 1928. In February 1929, the Fauj was called upon to defend the Kamgar Union’s head office at Nagu Sayaji Wadi when it was attacked by a group of Pathan moneylenders, strike-breakers, and workers. The Fauj repulsed the attack with their lathis, reportedly leading 3,000 workers behind them. Through the days of these clashes, the Fauj also patrolled and protected neighbourhoods of mill and railway workshop workers from attack so that they could continue to attend work.Footnote 44 Later that year, the Fauj protected the Kamgar Union, popularly known as the “Red Flag” union from the activities of the employer-backed Girni Kamgar Hitsang Nila Bavta Union (Textile Workers’ Interests Organization Blue Flag Union) or “Blue Flag” Union. The Blue Flag Union sought to reimpose labour control in the mill areas in a context where, in the face of the mobilization of the Kamgar Union and the Fauj and increasing attacks on mill managers, supervisors, and jobbers by millworkers, mill managers were issued revolvers from local police stations.Footnote 45 Instigated by the powerful Sassoon industrial group, the union was led by Milton Kubes, supervisor of the Watch and Ward Department at the Sassoon Mills and a well-known boxer, and Babaji Rane, a former policeman who carried small arms and with his following of strongmen worked to disrupt Kamgar Union meetings. The Fauj picketed the mills during another general strike in 1929, in the face of the counter-picketing, threats, and intimidation of the Blue Flag Union.Footnote 46
The Fauj provided a way for the Kamgar Union and millworkers to claim and inscribe their presence in public urban space, inverting the humiliations of the mill. Testimonies by millworkers reveal a culture of violence against, and the sexual humiliation of millworkers by jobbers and other managerial personnel inside the mills in the 1920s.Footnote 47 The implementation of work speed-ups and intensification in the mills, which the 1928 strike tried to stop, were seen by millworkers as another assault on their bodily health.Footnote 48 In this context, the military-style marches of the physically fit, akhara-trained men of the Fauj outside the mills were an assertion of physical and union strength. The Fauj also helped consolidate the Kamgar Union’s organization in the mill areas by giving speeches, picketing mills during strikes, and acting as an information collection and dissemination network between the union leadership and union committees in mills and chawls.Footnote 49 In 1928–1929, through its activities, the Fauj marked out parts of the mill areas as being “under the control” of the Kamgar Union. By 1938, the Congress politician and trade unionist S.K. Patil claimed that the labour area was divided into zones or “spheres of influence”, and it was only possible for unions to hold meetings in “their” area.Footnote 50
The formation of the Fauj took place in a context where trade union leaders and workers made claims on the patronage of the colonial state during industrial disputes by referring to Maratha martial race status and their army service during World War I. Speaking at a mass meeting of millworkers organized by the Kamgar Union during the 1928 textile general strike, Kasle said:
When government were in difficulty they praised us as “Marhatta Marda, Marhatta Bahadur” (“Manly Maratha, Brave Maratha”) and begged us for help. We sprinkled our blood on the battlefield for this Government and now they are dragging their sword against us in order to defend these capitalists who were of no use to them in the battlefield.Footnote 51
Kasle’s claim on the patronage of the colonial state due to the martial race classification of Marathas and their service in World War I, while widespread among martial race communities on the subcontinent, is unique for being made in an industrial context. Not only did army service and bodily sacrifice rendered during World War I indebt the colonial state to martial race working-class communities during postwar strikes, but the colonial state’s partiality toward “the capitalists”, who did not serve the state during the war, was an act of betrayal against these communities. Army work was not just “labour” but “service”, obligating the colonial state to patronize army veteran communities in the postwar world instead of non-veteran ones. Similar claims, made by railway workers during a strike on the Great Indian Peninsular Railway in 1930, suggest that this was a widespread narrative in the region’s labour movement at the time.Footnote 52 In the interwar world, military references migrated to labour politics, opening possibilities for claims-making by labour leaders on the loyalties of the colonial state, destabilizing the state’s authority over labour.
The war shaped the ideological world of millworkers as well. Newspapers published by millworkers referenced military service and volunteer movements, such as Lal Paltan (Red Platoon) and Veer Swayamsevak (Brave Volunteer).Footnote 53 Class conflict was imagined in militaristic terms, as a clash between armies, with trade union leaders imagined in popular trade union songs as military commanders. For instance, the Girni Kamgar Phatka (Mill Workers’ Poem), a poem published by the Girni Kamgar Union as a pamphlet and distributed among workers reads:
II. 6. The heroes of the mills came out and laid siege to the city of Bombay; an assemblage was formed and the sea of the army was filled in a furious manner at the time.
7. An army (consisting) of a lakh and a half is marching (forward) to swallow Capitalism […]
8. The mill workers with their banners, the heroic followers of Alve, (and those of) Joglekar and Mirajkar vie with one another.
9. The sword of Mirajkar does not rest satisfied in its scabbard, that of Dange is really electricity and it goes one better than lightning.
10. (And the army of) Lalji Pendse and Krishna Arsekar, making real preparations, take part in the procession in an orderly manner.
[…]
V. 1. Come along warriors come to the battle, a bloody struggle is taking place, look, look (how) the enemies have led a counter attack and are assailing (us) on all (four) sides
2. (O, you) Soldiers, workers of the new spirit and new discipline […]Footnote 54
Here, the Kamgar Union is portrayed as a heroic marching army of millworkers organized into regiments led by martial trade union leaders at war with Bombay’s millowners in a very literal sense: the arena is the battlefield; the clash conducted as the movement of battalions or the siege of the city of Bombay; and workers are invoked as “warriors” and “soldiers”. Elsewhere in the poem, again the figure associated both with the colonial imagination of the Marathas as a martial race and a regional-patriotic martial hero, “King Shivaji” is invited to witness the battle between mill owners and millworkers. The war shaped workers’ imagination of class conflict and opposition in militaristic terms. Class conflict was imagined as class war.
Volunteer movements remained a feature of labour politics in Bombay’s mill industry from the end of World War I, through World War II, until the 1960s. The Fauj was active till at least the mid-1930s, engaging in a range of activities such as picketing during strikes and collecting relief for unemployed millworkers.Footnote 55 During World War II, many millworkers joined the Congress Socialist Rashtriya Seva Dal (Nationalist Service Force) while two millworkers and Congress Socialist activists, Bapurao Jagtap and Gulabrao Ganacharya, organized the uniformed Kamgar Seva Dal (Workers’ Service Force).Footnote 56 In the mid-1960s, the Communist Kamgar Union leader and former millworker and member of the Rashtriya Seva Dal, Krishna Desai, organized the Lok Seva Dal (People’s Service Force) to protect the union from the attacks of the Shiv Sena, a regional nativist right-wing Hindu force backed by the mill owners to rid the industry of the Communists and the Kamgar Union.Footnote 57 Trade union volunteer movements were an enduring feature of labour politics in Bombay’s mill industry.
The Ambedkarite Movement, the Samata Sainik Dal, and Bombay’s Dalit Labouring Poor
The historical experience of Bombay’s “Dalit” or outcaste Mahar labouring community was shaped by village-based caste labour, urban wage work, and colonial army service. The Mahar community of Western India was required to perform fifty-two forms of labour in the village economy in return for a share of the village crop. These forms of labour, which included the skinning and removal of animal carcasses, were stigmatized as ritually impure within the caste order and were thus connected to the untouchable status of the community for caste Hindus. Mahars lived outside the caste village community in segregated settlements known as “Maharwadas”. Unlike other Dalit communities in the region, the Mahar community was also heavily involved in urban wage labour in Bombay Province. From the nineteenth century, Mahars left their villages to work in army cantonments, as railway gangmen, in Bombay’s textile mills, and a host of other urban occupations. By the 1930s, Mahars were the most proletarianized of the “Depressed Classes”, the colonial-administrative term for the Dalit community in the region, accounting for ninety-two per cent of all Depressed Class workers in Bombay’s mills, railways, dockyards, and buses, and also working as motor mechanics, scavengers, sweepers, rag pickers, laundry women, sex workers, junk dealers, and casual labourers constituting a distinctive caste-based segment of the “labouring poor”.Footnote 58 Despite being integrated into the urban workforce, Mahars often lived in segregated chawls, sometimes explicitly known as “Mahar Chawls”, and they were engaged primarily in lower-paying jobs in textile mills, railway workshops, and engineering establishments.Footnote 59 In the textile mills, Mahars worked primarily as doffer boys in the low-paid spinning department and were actively excluded from the weaving sheds by Maratha weavers, who believed that if Mahars used their lips to suck the thread out from the bobbin, an essential part of weaving at the time, it would be ritually polluted.Footnote 60
The community was also shaped by Company and British Indian Army service. From the early nineteenth century, one prominent avenue for Mahars to leave the village economy and enter the wage labour market was by serving in the East India Company’s army. Mahars fought for the Company against the distinctly Brahminical Peshwai regime in Western India, where they were particularly prominent during the Third Anglo-Maratha War in the Battle of Koregaon fought in January 1818.Footnote 61 After 1857, Mahars in the British Indian Army rose to the viceroy commissioned officer positions of subedar, subedar major, and jamadar and non-commissioned officer positions in the infantry, rifles, and marines.Footnote 62 However, during the reorganization of the army in the late nineteenth century, Mahars were excluded from military service and, in some instances, Mahar army employees had to return to village economies and caste labour.Footnote 63 Before and during World War I, the community mobilized to demand re-enlistment and the 111th Mahar Regiment was constituted in 1917. It served in the North-West Frontier Province and Aden, while some Mahars were enlisted in labour units that served in France.Footnote 64 However, in 1921, the Mahar regiment was disbanded and demobilized army veterans had again to return to caste labour.Footnote 65 Historically, Mahar army service was punctuated by periods of mobilization and demobilization. Due to this historical background, certain spaces of Mahar community organization were shaped by military service. For instance, in Bombay City, in the Family Lines Chawl, Mahars who had worked in the army formed the “Brigade Caste Panchayat” or governing body, explicitly referencing army service, while certain villages and regions near cantonments were populated by Mahar army veterans.Footnote 66
Anti-caste radicals such as Dr B.R. Ambedkar, himself a member of the Mahar community, whose father and grandfather had served in the army and was brought up in a cantonment, maintained an enduring interest in military recruitment as a source of caste emancipation. For Ambedkar, the army was no less than a revolutionary institution of Mahar power, where the community had been able to escape the humiliations of caste society and even invert the relations of power of the village. Drawing on past Mahar army service in the East Indian Company and British Indian armies, Ambedkar claimed the patronage of the colonial state, demanding the reinstatement of Mahar military recruitment. Speaking at a mass meeting during the Mahad satyagraha of 1927, a mobilization by the Dalit community to demand the right to drink water from the Chavdar lake from which they had been barred by caste Hindus in Mahad, a city surrounded by countryside populated by army veterans and industrial workers, Ambedkar presented a polemical history of Mahar military recruitment:
[T]he Untouchable class that lived as a class of servants once upon a time had become so powerful through military employment as to rule over other classes […] the recruitment of Untouchables in the military had brought about a revolution in the structure of the Hindu society. The sepoys belonging to […] castes who considered Mahars and Chambhars in the villages as Untouchables and took it as an insult if they did not pay obeisance to them […] had to salute Mahar and Chambhar subhedars and could not dare to raise their head even if they were humiliatingly questioned by their Untouchable bosses. This kind of authority had never been available to the […] Untouchable castes.Footnote 67
Recalling colonial military service was thus recalling a revolutionary moment in the history of Dalit communities since it resulted in a dramatic change in their social status. Mahar and Chambhar authority in the military cantonment was an inversion of the village caste hierarchy and its ritually discriminatory practices and customs. Barring Mahars from military service in 1892 was in this context a cruel betrayal of the community by the colonial state, an act that had dramatically changed the Mahar community’s world for the worse:
The people who were so advanced once, have fallen today to such a pathetic state! […] this change has befallen because of the ban on their recruitment to army imposed by the British government […] One is compelled to say that the proscription of people of the Untouchable class from military recruitment not only exhibits partiality but also exemplified betrayal and worse, treachery against friends […] if the Untouchables had not backed the British, they would never have been able to conquer this country.Footnote 68
Ambedkar thus argued that past military service allowed for the community to seek the patronage of the colonial state. Exclusion from military service had undone the “revolution” that recruitment afforded, leading to the decline of the community. Ambedkar goes on to claim that World War I military service held out hope of the renewal of the military relationship between the British Indian Army and the Mahar community and its social effects, which was betrayed yet again by the disbanding of the Mahar Regiment in 1921.Footnote 69
This conceptual framing of Mahar military service made Mahar re-recruitment in the British Indian Army a priority for the Dalit movement in the interwar years and gave a political significance to militaristic forms of Mahar mobilization. In the interwar years, Ambedkar began mass annual rallies attended by the Mahar community at the Koregaon battle memorial, serving as a reminder of the role of East India Company’s Mahar troops in defeating the Brahminical Peshwai regime in 1818.Footnote 70 Forms of Mahar mobilization also recalled the region’s martial past and drew on martial race narratives. A speaker from Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party (ILP) instructed a local community on how to send off their men to Bombay City for an ILP march against the khoti form of landlordism on 12 January 1939 in the following terms:Footnote 71
You should take these soldiers in procession with tom-toms up to the boundary of your village just like the Mavlas used to do before […] The procession should be taken after blowing horn like Rajputs […] You warriors will have to go for war.Footnote 72
Here, the speaker mobilizes references to the martial past of the region and martial race theory to instruct the community on the form of mobilization. Mahars are called on to emulate the Mavlas, a reference to soldiers in the seventeenth-century armies of Shivaji, and the Rajputs, a community that historian Philip Constable has referred to as the “martial race par excellence” for its centrality in the colonial military imagination of the martial races.Footnote 73 The protestors are referred to as “soldiers” and “warriors” and instructed to blow horns, an act signalling the commencement of battle. Whether in the emulation of pre-colonial, Company or imperial military service, Mahar mobilization recalled the region’s military history, martial race theory, and particularly their past military service and power over Brahminical values, underlining the need to reacquire it.
Perhaps the most prominent and public instance of this form mobilization was the Samata Sainik Dal (Equality Soldiers Force),Footnote 74 a volunteer movement formed by Dalit Mahar army veterans and labourers to protect Ambedkar and the Mahad satyagraha from attacks by caste Hindus, which consciously emulated the Army. The run-up to the satyagraha had a militaristic character as veterans were involved in campaigning in nearby villages and workers’ neighbourhoods in Bombay, such as the Clark Road and David Mills chawls, Chandanwadi, Dhobi Talao, and Poibavdi.Footnote 75 Demonstrators converged on Mahad from surrounding villages in disciplined military formation.Footnote 76 The Sainik Dal, originally called the Dr Ambedkar Seva Dal and modelled on the Congress Seva Dal, was formed on 13 March 1927.Footnote 77 The Dal was formed by Subhedar V.G. Savadkar of the 2/9 Jat Regiment and R.B. More, an itinerant labourer and Dalit activist who had worked as a farm labourer, a coolie in the Bombay docks, on ships and in railway stations, and in the Khirki Arsenal near Pune.Footnote 78 The membership of the Dal included army veterans and hospital, municipal, mill, and railway workers and, by 1938, counted 2,500 members in the city.Footnote 79 The Dal emulated army uniform, hierarchy, and practice. Members wore khaki or blue shirts and khaki shorts with slight modifications of dress between the general officer commanding, superior officers, other officers and sainiks, and were organized into sections, platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments.Footnote 80 Figure 2 shows sainiks wearing war medals, solar topis, turbans, sashes, leather boots, and even the presence of a marching band at the Sainik Dal’s annual rally, held at Bombay’s Kamgar Maidan in 1939, which was attended by over 20,000 sainiks from across the region. In emulation of military practice, the Dal organized drills, parades, flag salutations, and presented guards of honour to Ambedkar during special occasions, meetings, and conferences.Footnote 81 More writes in his memoirs that the Dal’s presentation and practice was so army-like that, on occasion, observers mistook the Dal for the army.Footnote 82 The challenge to caste hierarchy, which Ambedkar argued army cantonment life and hierarchy offered, was to be encapsulated in the Dal, the Equality Soldiers Force. The Dal was the disbanded Mahar regiment made incarnate, a potent and visible demand for the re-recruitment of Mahars into the army. The Dal’s formation should be seen in the context of the formation of other volunteer movements among Dalit labourers in the region in this period, such as the Mahar Seva Pathak (Mahar Service Organization), organized by L.N. Hardas, a trade union leader of beedi (a type of local cigarette made from tendu leaves) workers in Nagpur, and the volunteers of the Mahar Dnyati Panchayat (Mahar Community Panchayat) organized by the ex-motor mechanic, who had worked in Bombay’s General Motors and Ford factories, Sambhaji Tukaram Gaekwad.Footnote 83
Figure 2. Annual meeting of members of the Samata Sainik Dal at Kamgar Maidan, 8 January 1939.
The Dal played an important role in Dalit labour militancy in the 1930s. In the Government of India’s reports on the volunteer movement, the Dal is repeatedly reported as having been formed specifically “for safeguarding the interests of depressed classes labourers” and being “particularly active during labour disputes in Bombay”.Footnote 84 In the period from 1928–1938, Dalit labourers participated in strikes in the mills, railways, municipality, and tanneries. Dalit leaders such as R.B. More, who while soon becoming a communist maintained his links with the Ambedkarite movement and the Sainik Dal, organized trade unions of liftmen, pressmen, watchmen, teachers and sanitation, construction, mill, and railway workers.Footnote 85 In the 1930s, Ambedkar was elected General Secretary of the Municipal Kamgar Sangh (Municipal Workers’ Union) and had a significant following among mill and railway workers, while the ILP organized unions among oil, engineering, and tramway workers and coolies, and intervened in disputes in tile-making factories.Footnote 86 Sainiks were involved in leading mass labour street protest, protecting Dalit meetings, breaking meetings of rival political formations seeking to make inroads among Dalit workers, such as the Congress, and distributing and reading out Ambedkar’s Janata (The People) and More’s Ahvan (The Call) newspapers to groups of workers, which regularly covered labour disputes.Footnote 87 Sainiks presented guards of honour to Dalit workers who had been killed during strikes, such as when 500 sainiks presented a guard of honour at the funeral of Bhagoji Waghmare, a Dalit millworker killed by police firing during a general strike in 1938, a powerful image demonstrating the migration of forms of military practice to labour politics in this period.Footnote 88 In the context of the discrimination in housing and jobs mentioned earlier, the militaristic marches and flag salutations of the uniformed Dal outside mills and railway workshops gave Dalit labourers an assertive public presence in a context of economic deprivation and caste discrimination.
Sainiks intervened in popular Dalit mobilization around a public debate on caste labour protest and control between Ambedkar and Gandhi, set against this background of Dalit labour militancy. During the First Round Table Conference held in London, a series of discussions between colonial officials, Indian politicians, and community spokesmen on constitutional reform, Gandhi opposed Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, claiming it would provoke caste violence, and he forced Ambedkar to accept his position by going on a hunger fast. Through this argument, Gandhi occluded the routine violence of caste society on Dalits, which kept them in their stigmatized position and occupations and defeated the possibility of Dalits electing their own representatives independent of caste Hindus. Moreover, in opposition to Ambedkar’s designation of the community as “Dalits” (“Downtrodden”), and his call for the community to leave their stigmatized occupations behind, Gandhi suggested that the community be sanctified within Hinduism and renamed Harijans (“People of God”), and that their occupations should be de-stigmatized rather than abandoned.Footnote 89 Sainiks propagandized for Ambedkar’s position in Bombay’s Dalit chawls and read out articles from Ambedkar’s newspaper Janata on the issue to Dalit workers while Ambedkarite activists performed plays and poetry mocking Gandhi’s attempts at ignoring their stigmatized position in caste society.Footnote 90 Sainiks also participated in the Nasik Kalaram Mandir satyagraha in 1930, which demanded that Dalits be allowed to access a temple barred to them by caste Hindus.Footnote 91
Gandhis’ rhetoric of a harmonious Hindu community threatened by Dalit labour militancy defined a field of mobilization for middle-class Congress and Hindu volunteer movements, making caste labour control the axis around which volunteer movements mobilized in Bombay city.Footnote 92 For instance, during the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate, the nationalist Desh Sevika Sangh (Nationalist Women’s Service Organization) operated as a caste Hindu organization, propagating Gandhi’s views on the Dalit question in Dalit workers’ neighbourhoods. The Sangh, formed during the anti-colonial Civil Disobedience Movement of the early 1930s, was originally involved in national flag salutations, swadeshi propaganda, picketing toddy shops, and breaking the government’s salt tax.Footnote 93 Its 300 members were recruited from the city’s business and professional families, while “undesirable women” of the working-classes were excluded.Footnote 94 The Sangh’s leaders, Goshiben and Perinben Captain, were related to one of India’s first king’s commissioned officers during World War I, K.A.D. Naoroji.Footnote 95 The Sangh emulated military practice, being hierarchically organized into squads led by senapatis (generals), marching and participating in flag salutations.Footnote 96 However, the Sangh also referenced a pre-colonial martial past as sevikas wore saffron saris, which recalled the popular historical imagination of jauhar as the mass self-immolation of Hindu Rajput women to protect their “honour” in the face of an approaching Mughal army.Footnote 97 However, like other “Gandhian”, “non-violent” volunteer movements, while militaristic in form, the Sangh remained unarmed.Footnote 98 At the time of Gandhi’s fast to force Ambedkar to drop his demand for separate Dalit electorates, the Sangh changed its name to the Gandhi Seva Sena (Gandhi Service Army) and sought to “retain” Dalits within the Hindu fold. Sevikas distributed literature, organized meetings, and sang prayers and kirtans or Hindu devotional songs propagating Gandhi’s position in municipal workers’ chawls in Mazgaon, Byculla, Mahalaxmi, and Prabhadevi.Footnote 99
At times, organizations such as the Sevika Sangh worked in cooperation with right-wing Hindu volunteer movements, such as the Swastik League, to maintain caste Hindu control over Dalit labour. Founded by M.R. Jayakar of the Swaraj Party and patronized by the city’s business and professional classes, the League was also supported by the royalty of Indian princely states, such as the Chief of Phaltan, Dowager Ranisaheb of Jath and the Maharajas of Bansda and Tripura.Footnote 100 The League was led by two veterans of the British Indian Army’s World War I Mesopotamia campaign, Lieutenant Colonel A.B. Gajendragadkar and Captain G.B. Gole, and was patronized by, among others, Colonel Sir Kailas Haksar, who served with the Gwalior State Forces during the war.Footnote 101 In Figure 3, we see how the 700-member-strong League emulated military uniform and practice, marching in military formation in khaki helmets, shirts, shorts, and boots. It also had a marching band.Footnote 102 The League had a strong right-wing caste Hindu character, being headquartered in the Seth Varjiwandas Motilal Swastik Mandir, named after a prominent cotton exporter in the city and advertised as a “temple of physical culture”, which held meetings on the need for the “militarization of Hindu society”, and parading on Hindu festivals.Footnote 103 In 1934, the League oriented its activities to attempting to retain Dalit labourers in the Hindu fold by organizing caste inter-dining and protecting the meetings of the Harijan Sevak Sangh (Harijan Service Organization), an organization formed by Gandhi and patronized by textile industrialists such as G.D. Birla for the welfare of the Harijan population, in cooperation with the Gandhi Seva Sena and Hindu akharas.Footnote 104
Figure 3. A march of Swastik League members during the Civil Disobedience Movement.Source: “Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party – K.L. Nursey”, Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. Used with permission.
Distinctively militaristic forms of mobilization, such as the presentation of guards of honour to leaders or martyrs, developed in the city with the mobilization of these volunteer movements over the question of Dalit labour militancy and control. The Sainik Dal regularly presented guards of honour to Ambedkar at Ballard Pier, during his departure to Mahad and London for the Round Table Conference.Footnote 105 On his return from London, Ambedkar was received by a guard of honour of 4,000 uniformed sainiks.Footnote 106 On the other hand, when Gandhi returned from the Round Table Conference in London, Dal members organized a black flag demonstration and clashed with 1,500 sevikas and other Congress volunteers who had assembled to receive him.Footnote 107 The Swastik League presented guards of honour to Maharajas, Congress, and Hindu Mahasabha figures, who “reviewed the troops” in emulation of military officers, as well as “martyrs” of the corps.Footnote 108
The activity of the Dal during the 1938 Bombay workers’ general strike demonstrates their active participation in labour protest, considerable following among workers, and role in claiming urban space for the Ambedkarite movement within the labour area’s zonal politics mentioned earlier. On 7 November 1938, the Bombay Provincial Trade Union Congress (BPTUC) and ILP called a one-day general strike against the Congress Ministry passing the Bombay Industrial Disputes Act, which banned lightning strikes and hampered the development of the trade union movement. In the run-up to the strike, sainiks and Red Flag volunteers of the BPTUC led groups of neighbourhood-based chawl committees, which propagandized for the strike from one neighbourhood to another.Footnote 109 They protected ILP and Communist Party, Kamgar Union, or BPTUC meetings and broke those organized by the Congress or its textile trade union, the Bombay Kamgar Sangh (Bombay Workers’ Organization), which were protected by sevikas and akharas such as the Tarun Bharat Vyayamshala (Young India Gymnasium).Footnote 110 On the day of the strike, sainiks and Red Flag volunteers led demonstrations of textile mill, tannery, railway workshop and transport workers, sailors, and sweepers in attacks on Congress activists, working mills, their managerial personnel, and strike-breakers, demonstrating their considerable influence on Bombay’s workers.Footnote 111 They claimed certain residential areas as “their” areas, such as the Worli Bombay Development Department Chawls, Poibavdi Cement Chawls, and Dharavi, disallowing Congress members from entering by forming cordons around them, typing ropes across the road to prevent motor traffic or threatening violence against Congress activists if they did not leave.Footnote 112
The authority of the Dal and Red Flag volunteers and their emulation of the military seems to have been such during the strike that they may have played a role in undermining the authority of the colonial police, their uniforms, and guns. The Bombay Chronicle noted the usurpation of authority by the Dal and the Red Flag volunteers from the colonial police on the day, reporting that the industrial part of the city “was handed over to the rule of the volunteer organisation of the Independent Labour Party and the pickets of the Bombay Provincial Trade Union Congress”. Rather than the police, “it was the [volunteers’] orders that were executed by the […] tens of thousands of workers in the city, it was their rule that was the law [and] their commands that were obeyed with implicit discipline by men, women and children […]”.Footnote 113 Workers attacked the police, mill managerial personnel and strike-breakers, despite the presence of uniformed and armed police, an act that surprised colonial policemen in the city. For instance, Sergeant Waller reported that when he came to the assistance of the Carding Master of the Spring Mills and a group of strike-breakers who were being pelted with stones by workers, workers continued throwing stones despite him being there in his police uniform, which he claimed would usually intimidate the workers. Firing six rounds into the crowd of workers, “did not even check them […] it had no effect whatever […]”.Footnote 114 Similarly, when Sergeant Kees came to the assistance of police being pelted with stones by workers at the Elphinstone Mills and drew his revolver, he claimed that, “[t]he answer was utter defiance”.Footnote 115 Could the Dal’s authority and its emulation of the military, their uniforms, and lathis, have played a role in undermining the authority of the police, their uniforms and revolvers during the strike? Indeed, less than two years later, in the context of World War II, the government banned volunteer movements. The government’s communique argued that the object of military drilling and the wearing of uniforms by official state forces was “the use or display of disciplined force”. What the communique called the “imitation of military methods” by volunteer movements was subversive, for it undermined the state’s authority and legitimacy in its use of force, its practices, and the uniforms and other paraphernalia of its armed forces.Footnote 116
Conclusion
Militarization was an important aspect of labour politics in the first half of the twentieth century. The interwar world was shaped by mass military recruitment and demobilization, the movement of working populations between military and civilian labour, and the important role of the army and war in public life. Military experience shaped the ideas and actions of interwar labouring communities. The refusal of labouring populations to “demobilize” and demilitarize their politics after World War I threatened the colonial state and the native elite’s control over the working-classes and the labouring poor in moments of mass labour mobilization. “Demobilization”, then, was not simply a question of state-led manpower redeployment or the “reintegration” of combatants into postwar societies. It was a long and contested socio-political process, never fully completed in the interwar years and never fully under the control of the colonial state, which produced a militarized public sphere. Through the “violent peace” and numerous regional wars of the interwar years, World War I extended into World War II.
Labour volunteer movements were an important aspect of the militarization of labour politics. In an era of tempestuous labour mobilization and the threat of revolution subalterns with lathis in their hands were spectral reminders of the recent war, living proof of its continued impact on society and the incipient armies of a possible revolutionary future. In a late colonial context shaped by the questioning of social power, labour volunteer movements became sites of labour counter-authority and power to both the colonial state and nationalist and religious political movements dominated by native elites, dynamically reconfiguring colonial urban space. While the constitutional framework for a future India with relatively greater self-governance was being discussed at the Round Table Conferences, the excluded labouring poor asserted their presence on the streets through marches and flag salutations. The mobilization of employer-backed and middle-class volunteer movements to discipline labour shows that behind the rhetoric of anti-colonial non-violence lurked the threat of violence by native elites against the threat posed by the mobilization of labour. In the interwar world, class and caste conflict referenced military themes and involved clashes between uniformed and drilled volunteer movements. Conflict was “war” in more than a rhetorical sence. The emulation of military uniform and practice by labour volunteer movements served to undermine at moments of mass labour mobilisation the authority of the army and the police.
South Asian labour volunteer movements were part of a broader global moment of labour paramilitary formation. However, they diverged in important respects from their historical counterparts elsewhere on the globe. South Asian labour volunteer movements were in instances divided along caste lines and referenced distinctly colonial military concepts such as martial race theory as well as pre-colonial martial themes, symbols, and practices, which had been reworked by contemporary anti-colonial and anti-caste political movements. If South Asian labour volunteer movements were similar to those in Europe in some respects, they were born of a distinctly colonial age. The proliferation of labour volunteer movements in the interwar world and their absence among labouring communities today underlines the historical transience or contingent nature of some forms of labour politics while others, such as trade unions, have proved more historically durable. However, beyond the realm of labour politics, volunteer movements were more generally a widespread style of doing politics across the political spectrum in a militarised interwar world. The legacy of World War I continues to haunt Indian society today in the form of the uniformed and militaristic Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, which was also formed in the interwar years.
Military-related claims-making to the colonial state was an important theme in labour politics in interwar India, particularly for those labouring communities that had been recruited into the soldiering ranks of the Indian Army and claimed martial race status, showing the impact of military ideologies on industrial labour. There was no uniform register of military-related claims-making. The formation, recruitment, demobilization, and disbandment of different religious, regional, and caste-based regiments and the categorization and re-categorization of which communities were included and excluded from martial race categories, were pivotal in shaping them. The instances of claims-making discussed in this article show how martial race ideology and promoting soldiering as “service” rather than “work” were not only factors of stability, but also factors of instability for the colonial state. Moreover, they suggest the importance of emphasising the mobility of labour and labouring communities between military and non-military forms of work in the interwar world and underline the migration of themes and demands from one arena of work to another. The military “sepoy” and labourer and the postwar worker were sometimes one and the same person. In this context, posing any clear division between “labour” and “military” history would be arbitrary and artificial.
Militarization was an important aspect of the “violent peace” that characterized the era of wars and revolutions that was the first half of the twentieth century. In the interwar world, an assertive South Asian working-class repurposed the organizations and ideologies born of a militarized age to advance its own interests.
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