The outbreak of World War II accentuated, and its conduct and immediate aftermath sustained, the mounting pressures on the jobber system and exposed its weaknesses more fully. These pressures upon the jobber emanated from three sources. First, the imperatives of the war economy facilitated the more intensive exploitation of labour. The jobber's traditional task, to reconcile workers to the demands of the mill-owners, became almost impossible to sustain. Indeed, it drew the full wrath of the workers upon the jobber.

Second, the 1940s witnessed deepening tensions and bitter conflicts at the workplace. Attempts to enforce labour discipline under these conditions met with fierce, sometimes violent, resistance. The general strikes of 1940 and 1950, co-ordinated across the industry, revealed the perennial weakness of jobbers, when called upon to operate at a supra-mill level. Conversely, strikes occurred with greater frequency in individual mills in the mid 1940s. These were fractious disputes, often accompanied by violence directed at jobbers as well as supervisors and managers. To some extent, these disputes were fuelled by rivalries within the managerial hierarchy, as various ranks of managers intervened in the jobber's domain and as power balances shifted within the supervisory apparatus of the mills.

Third, the decade was marked by political volatility. Apart from the increasing number of strikes between 1943 and 1947, the Quit India movement, launched from Bombay, proved the most powerful of the Gandhian agitations and the most ruthlessly suppressed. In 1941 and 1944, the city was wracked by communal riots. When they recurred in 1946–1947, they raged with an unprecedented ferocity.

From the late 1920s onwards, the problems of the Bombay textile industry focussed in public discourse upon its allegedly inefficient and intractable labour force. For what came to be perceived as its ‘labour problem’, the colonial state prescribed rationalization. This official panacea for the industry's problems was conceived in a highly charged political context. In the 1920s, as chapter 6 has shown, the Bombay industry was forced to adapt to the imperatives of the domestic market, in which demand was stagnant and contracting, and which was in addition saturated with the cheap coarse goods produced by the expanding up-country mills. In the finer varieties, however, the Ahmedabad mills and the imports of Lancashire and, especially, Japan, had established a powerful, indeed daunting presence. Moreover, the Bombay mills were trying to adjust to an internal market which was reported to be the most open in the world. The Bombay millowners urgently sought tariff protection. But for the colonial state, keeping the Indian market open for British manufactures was one of its most important imperial commitments. Rationalization thus became the official alternative to tariffs and indeed, the progress made by the millowners to implement the former became, at least rhetorically, the yardstick by which the colonial state measured how much they deserved protection.

Among the dominant themes of modern history has been the social organization and political action of peasants and workers in the Third World. The changing relationship between the West and the Third World has been vitally affected by perceptions of their political attitudes and social aspirations. At the same time, assumptions about their social character and expectations about their political behaviour have informed the strategies of political leaders, activists and parties in the Third World. Yet these perceptions of the working classes and their political threat have been frequently generalized from a particular understanding of the historical experience of the West, either by contrasting it with Third World societies taken as a whole, suggesting thereby that they need their own culturally specific explanatory frameworks, or by positing it as a model towards which other societies are assumed to be moving.

The study of Indian society, conceptualized in these ways, has posed intractable problems. On the one hand, it is often treated as an exception in the discourse of social theory. Yet rules which require such gigantic exceptions to sustain themselves can only have the most limited power to explain. On the other hand, thus excluded from the dominant discourse of social theory, it is placed and examined with the category of ‘developing’ or ‘Third World’ societies.

Cotton textiles, India's most important industry, underpinned the social relations and economy of Bombay City. It was Bombay's staple industry and its only large-scale employer of labour. It was also the foundation of the city's prosperity and growth from the late nineteenth century onwards, and the basis of its claim to be a major industrial metropolis of Asia. Its development influenced the nature of the local labour market, the patterns and rhythms of rural migration and the relationship between workplace and neighbourhood in the city's mill districts. The previous three chapters have analysed the processes of social formation as they affected the city's workers in general. The final three chapters turn specifically to the case of the cotton-textile industry and examine some of the major influences which shaped the relationship between labour and capital. This chapter will examine the origins and development of the cotton-textile industry to delineate a historical context within which business strategies, the organization of work and the deployment of labour took shape.

The Bombay millowners were neither, it would appear, driven by the relentless pursuit of the most advanced and sophisticated techniques nor by the imperative to achieve and maintain ideal standards of labour efficiency. Rather, they sought to maximize profits in the short run within the economic and political conditions in which they found themselves.

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.

Rural migration formed the most important source of labour supply to Bombay. The fluctuations of the labour market have commonly been attributed to the migrant character of the workforce and their lack of commitment to the industrial setting. But as the previous chapter demonstrated, this is to confuse the symptoms with the problem itself. The patterns of labour use were conditioned by the structure of the city's economy; they were not simply a function of the attitudes, mentalities or culture of the workforce. Rather, the irregular and uncertain conditions of work in Bombay made it essential for most workers to retain their rural connections. The village remained integral to their social nexus in the city. But the maintenance of their rural connections cannot be understood simply as a transitional phase in the formation of the labour force in the early stages of industrialization. A recent study of the Bombay labour market in the 1970s still found that the city's working population ‘consists overwhelmingly of migrants’. Industrial development in India appears to have strengthened what are normatively described as the pre-industrial characteristics of the workforce. This chapter will investigate the rural connections of Bombay's workers and the interplay of town and country in shaping their social organization.