Paradigms in the historical approach to labor studies on south Asia

 

 

Sabyasaachi bhattachaarya    

 

 

This presentation may be regarded as an attempt to bridge the gap between studies in the political economy of labor and the historically oriented studies of the past.

This discourse was first shaped in the early twentieth century in the hands of members of a very limited intelligentsia who assumed an adversarial role in relation to capital and colonial state power. Many of them happened to be activists and leaders in the organization and protest movements of the working classes.

In the colonial period was that capitalist relations were not sufficiently generalized.

In colonial south asia , right up to world world war II and perhaps even beyond that, pre capitalist and capitalist organization of economic life coexisted. The resultant stratification or class strcture is inchoate, in the process of being formed – and the working class constituted pre-eminently an example of this incomplete transition

This coexistence of different production regimes imparted a peculiar character to the class structure in colonial south Asia.

The intelligentsia i.e., the educated urban professionals, were surrogate leaders and spokesmen of the classes with a low degree of ‘class-ness’. The low investments in social overheads by the colonial state is well-known-and one of its consequences was a low level of literacy which blocked articulation of labor demands or rise of spokesperson from the rank of working classes.

Coolie: the story of labor and capital in india .. by Diwan chimanlal

The bias in this class of writing was contested by authors who spoke on behalf of the agencies of the state which were concerned with legislation and regulation vis-à-vis industry. In 1881 the first Indian factory act was passed (applicable to the few factories which existed in Bombay or Calcutta and limited to the objective of preventing employment of children below age 9.

The worldwide economic depression in the early half of the 1930 s catapulted studies in the condition and history of labour to public attention. the appointment of a royal commission on labor in India which published a multi – volume report in 1930-31.

The hegemony of European categories of thought often blocked the recognition of specificities of the south Asian economy and the persistence of pre- capitalist labor forms, especially in Marxist writings.

In the entire corpus pf writings on labor history the overwhelming emphasis has been on the industrial work force in the organized sector, excluding the vast greater numbers in the informal or unorganized sector.

The larger-than-life image of the industrial proletariat, as compared with rest of laboring poor, is due to an attribution of a "historical" role in a vision of things to come, an instrumentalist view of the vanguards effecting a social transformation through capture of state power, etc.

whether indeed the industrial worker had such a potential in underdeveloped colonial countries or whether, as Frantz Fanon believed, they were "in comparatively privileged position " compared to the rest of the laboring poor and the urban sub proletariat, is a relevant question in the light of historical experience.

sukomal sen providedaccounts of the growth of the trade union union movement,chronocles varying in historical depth `    1but uniformely limited to institutional history disarticulated from the deep structure of its socio economic context. Most of these tradeunion histories merited Hobsbawm'scritism of asimilar tradion in British labor historiography.It tended to identify class and movement,movement and organisation or leadership of organization,thus bypassing social realities.published about this time ,the only monograph of Cylonese labor history,Visakha KumariJayawardhane's  "The  Rise of the labour Movementin Cylon" constitutes an exception ;although the subject of study is mainly orrganized trade unionism,it is contexulaised in the social and economic trendsin sri lanka between 1880 and 1933