Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1: Western India, 1931
- Map 2: Municipal wards and districts of Bombay City, 1931
- 1 Problems and perspectives
- 2 The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
- 3 The structure and development of the labour market
- 4 Migration and the rural connections of Bombay's workers
- 5 Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
- 6 The development of the cotton-textile industry: a historical context
- 7 The workplace: labour and the organization of production in the cotton-textile industry
- 8 Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
- 9 Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge South Asian Studies
5 - Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1: Western India, 1931
- Map 2: Municipal wards and districts of Bombay City, 1931
- 1 Problems and perspectives
- 2 The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
- 3 The structure and development of the labour market
- 4 Migration and the rural connections of Bombay's workers
- 5 Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
- 6 The development of the cotton-textile industry: a historical context
- 7 The workplace: labour and the organization of production in the cotton-textile industry
- 8 Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
- 9 Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge South Asian Studies
Summary
The patterns of capital investment in Bombay, cause and consequence of the constraints within which the economy had developed, shaped business strategies which geared production to the shifting demands of the market. Its effects were registered in fluctuating levels of employment. The overwhelming majority of the labour force in Bombay experienced irregular and uncertain conditions of work. No clear distinction can be sustained between temporary and permanent workers. Those who were regularly employed at one moment could, for a wide range of more or less arbitrary reasons, easily find themselves without a job the next.
The irregular conditions of work and the low wages which accompanied them shaped the social nexus of the working class. This social nexus was composed of several overlapping sets of connections. Although migrant workers came to Bombay to protect their position in the village economy, these conditions perpetuated their need to maintain their rural connections, as an essential base of material provision and social organization. Ties of caste and kinship, based in the village, provided the social framework within which migration occurred. Yet the social organization of Bombay's workers developed beyond their confines. To find and retain employment, and indeed to obtain moral and material support, workers were drawn into networks of patronage based in the urban neighbourhoods.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in IndiaBusiness Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, pp. 168 - 238Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994