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
9 - Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
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
This book has attempted to examine the social processes underlying the formation of the working classes in Bombay in the early twentieth century and their interaction with the strategies of capital: how the processes of social formation were shaped by the nature and forms of industrial capitalism and how they were constrained and conditioned by its pattern of development. The economy of Bombay's workers has been analysed in terms of a nexus of social connections, which operated across the boundaries of city and village, workplace and neighbourhood, the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sector. The extensive use of casual labour in the textile industry, and its preponderance outside, the operations of the jobber system and the pattern of industrial action, as the repression of combinations at work drove workers to organize in the street, integrated the spheres of workplace and neighbourhood. The social relations of the workplace cannot, therefore, be abstracted from the wider social context of the neighbour-hood. Moreover, the casual and uncertain conditions of employment forced most workers to maintain their links with their villages. It also shaped the social organization of the neighbourhood. Since jobs were easy to lose but difficult to obtain, most workers sought to develop connections with jobbers, who might keep them in employment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in IndiaBusiness Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, pp. 397 - 431Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994