Comparativ: journal of european network of global and universal history, 2023
This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the ques... more This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the question of modern management. It resonated with the general thrust of development in those countries seeking industrialization in the aftermath of World War II. Decolonization and a dirigiste model of development in the Republic of India undertook the re-constitution of the managerial system inherited from the colonial age. In response, the new management movement arose. It bemoaned the managing agency system as costly, scam-ridden, inefficient, and non-professional, leading to its eventual discontinuation. Concomitantly, it fostered trained professional managers equipped with a liberal outlook, technological acumen, and scientific management. It addressed the shortage of talented managers for efficient and better management. It also sought to break away from the tradition of caste-like, blood-relationship-based hereditary managerial authority. Instead, it sought to open up business management to personnel from a wide section of society.
Comparativ: journal of European network of global and universal history, 2023
This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the ques... more This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the question of modern management. It resonated with the general thrust of development in those countries seeking industrialization in the aftermath of World War II. Decolonization and a dirigiste model of development in the Republic of India undertook the re-constitution of the managerial system inherited from the colonial age. In response, the new management movement arose. It bemoaned the managing agency system as costly, scam-ridden, inefficient, and non-professional, leading to its eventual discontinuation. Concomitantly, it fostered trained professional managers equipped with a liberal outlook, technological acumen, and scientific management. It addressed the shortage of talented managers for efficient and better management. It also sought to break away from the tradition of caste-like, blood-relationship-based hereditary managerial authority. Instead, it sought to open up business management to personnel from a wide section of society.
Explorations: E-journal of Indian Sociological Society, 2022
This article outlines the shifting meanings and modalities, relational and governmental aspects, ... more This article outlines the shifting meanings and modalities, relational and governmental aspects, of caste, power, and representation claims in modern and contemporary India. Beyond the questions of exclusion, humiliation, protest, and caste reforms, it extends the engagement with this subject to India"s development path, experiences of capitalist modernisation, the functioning of colonial institutions, and parliamentary democracy and labour relations. The recent publications examined here suggest that the shift from the mobilisation of ranked identities to unranked identities advanced in the Republic of India, accompanying the change from patrimonial to the participatory polity. These twin shifts ensured that caste as a source of identity remained conspicuously persistent while attenuating as an axis of inequality. Although the constitution outlawed untouchability, to some publicists of social justice, the reservation law, alongside the personal laws, unnecessarily consecrated caste and religion; others maintain that parliamentary democracy brought about an irreversible rupture in the tradition of castes.
Even as they helped connect the Indian subcontinent through the railways, what life opportunities... more Even as they helped connect the Indian subcontinent through the railways, what life opportunities were made possible by the wages paid to the humblest construction workers in colonial India? My study draws upon the documents, including pay sheets (also referred to as pay lists), contract documents, and private diaries, of one of the subcontractors who became a contractor, Joseph Stephens, who carried out construction projects in the Deccan region of India in the 1860s. This chapter provides a comprehensive view of the wage relations and economic conditions of construction workers in this region, which have received little attention until now. One of the leading scholars of construction of the railways in India, Ian Kerr, has lamented the paucity of wage data for the study of the economic conditions of railway building workers. According to him, railway companies usually hired labour agents to recruit, supervise, and distribute wages among construction workers. As far as we know, the pay sheets of these labour recruiters mostly never made their way into the archives, making the Stephens' documents a rare and valuable source. 1 In Indian historiography, the period of the 1850s-70s saw some defnitive socioeconomic developments. The progress of railway construction in this period led to both the emergence and the integration of labour markets. As argued by Kerr, this development helped workers to regain bargaining power in the economy, which they had lost in the frst half of the nineteenth century. 2 Other scholars share a similarly optimistic view of the recovery of per capita income overall and the real income of the productive classes. 3 My study pays close attention to this narrative of recovery. It ofers a more nuanced understanding of the circumstances responsible for the new bargaining power and wage gains secured by construction workers during the 1860s. My enquiry brings to the fore fve key features which are particularly relevant to observe: (1) the real income of workers improved; (2) the 'subsistence ratio'-the ratio of total income to the cost of the subsistence basket of sweat labourers-remained less than unity; (3) the element of a constraining contract characterized the work relationship; (4) these workers secured an income sufcient for basic household subsistence only by increasing
International Journal of Community and Social Development, 2022
This article discusses the shifting links between the articulation of caste, class and representa... more This article discusses the shifting links between the articulation of caste, class and representation claims on one side and development experiences in modern and contemporary India on the other. Going beyond the questions of exclusion, humiliation, protest and caste reforms, it extends the engagement with this subject to India's path of development, experiences of capitalist modernisation, the functioning of colonial institutions and parliamentary democracy, labour relations and the sexual economy. The works under review suggest that caste and merit became proximate instead of antithetical from the nineteenth century. In contemporary India, the discourse of meritocracy has responded to subalterns' assertions of their rights against inherited injustice. As a determinant of life chances and axis of inequality, class has largely superseded caste among contemporary Indians. However, the varied employment relations operate in the organised and unorganised sectors. And, they have been wedded to the structuration of class among the better-earning 'labour elites' in the organised sector, and the interlaced existence of caste and class among the labouring poor in the unorganised sector. This article suggests implications for action and research.
Workers employed in the Raniganj coalfield, India, were plagued by occupational diseases, a probl... more Workers employed in the Raniganj coalfield, India, were plagued by occupational diseases, a problem that exacerbated over time. However, the recognising and categorising these diseases, and the injury it caused to mineworkers, were a belated and gradual process. The issue remained under dispute from 1946 to 1971, between contending stakeholders. The postcolonial public authority began to take cognisance of this problem in the early 1950s, declaring it a compensable casualty source in 1959. A combination of reasonsnew medical knowledge about occupational diseases, the medical experts' and labour unions' documentation, the publicisation of occupational diseases like pneumoconiosis, and the national state's concerns about a healthy and efficient industrial populationshaped the twin initiatives for its official recognition, and protective legislative measures. Nonetheless, delayed official recognition, and persistent managerial prevarication practically diminished and distorted the protection and rehabilitation of afflicted mineworkers. Instead, colliery management preferred to get rid of afflicted mineworkers, by offering a small lump sum to recalcitrant victims, and coercing them into retirement. Mineworkers with impaired lungs placed a premium on continuing their employment, despite reduced working capacity, and undertaking quotidian negotiation. The gap between protective laws and abysmally low investment in medical support emerged as a new fractious issue, confronting a significant section of working peoples. Methodologically, this study draws upon archival materials and testimonies as oral histories.
This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived ... more This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived experiences in their pursuit of wellbeing. The worldview of workers transformed towards the emergence of a new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life from the aftermath of the WW I and onwards. In this worldview, the non-material component of wellbeing in the form of fraternisation in social connection and dignification in social exchanges was emphasised. This development was an outcome of the advocacy of ILO, the struggles of organised workers for industrial democracy, and caste upliftment campaigns among socially disadvantaged groups. All these took place amid the interplay between the migration pattern and changing social composition of workers on one side and intersection between economic relations and socio-cultural proclivities of working peoples, on the other. The new ethics mediated the struggles of social security and a sign of respectability. However, endogamous ethnicisation remained enduring, which had constraining ramification for particularly women and a fissure between migrants and the locals. With a focus on the socio-cultural roots of accumulation and wellbeing, the chapter historically addresses the non-material dimensions of wellbeing amongst migrant workers.
This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, hum... more This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, human life for mineworkers in the Jharia coalfields in eastern India, in the early decades of the twentieth century, had some ‘unsought for’ results. These results included the vulnerability of women excluded from certain categories of work, school-dropout children and above all absence of a reproductive support system. Industrialists as well as the industrial workforce slowly braced themselves to devise the means for satisfying reproduction requirements of the principal component of the workforce. The resultant reproduction regime, representing a shift to industrial paternalism, took effect within the matrix of mineworkers’ new reproduction politics, the competition between different categories of mineworkers, and their access to social and political power. On family and women questions, the familist discourse became the site of contestation between various ideas and practices that represe...
ABSTRACT The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in S... more ABSTRACT The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in South African mines. ‘Tacit knowledge’ evolved over time, is orally transmitted, learned on the job, and is central to worker safety; it lay behind acts of resistance and demands for a safer mining workplace which underpinned unionisation, and which won worker safety representation under apartheid. Under democracy, a modern consultative tripartite legislative safety regime was instituted. With worker representation institutionalised, health and safety legislation enacted and tripartite institutions established, procedural compliance eclipsed workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’. The right to refuse to do dangerous work, state-initiated safety work stoppages and the impact on safety of inter-union rivalry are currently in the spotlight and are noted below. With the state firmly in neoliberal mode post-Fordism, this article concludes by noting the emergence of the individualisation of safety – ironically motivated by a behaviourist construal of ‘tacit beliefs’ underpinning a major industry safety initiative.
In Jan Lucassen and Radhika Seshan (Eds.), Wage Earners in India, 1500 1900: Regional History in Global Perspectives, Sage 2022, 2022
The focus on wages, prices and the living standards has led the discussions around the great dive... more The focus on wages, prices and the living standards has led the discussions around the great divergence, resulting in varied perspectives. This paper builds a new set of relationships between these variables. This chapter describes the welfare levels of construction workers and their way of managing living standards in the expansive economy during the 1860s. It contends that the existing thesis – that real wages and living standards grew in both Britain and India in the modernisation 19th-century- needs to be reassessed. Additionally, it juxtaposes workers’ gains in wage income and bargaining power with their painful struggles at coming to terms with the unfavourable living standards. Consequently, the paper qualifies the growth in real wages of construction workers in the Deccan by laying out the following: The subsistence ratio of manual workers, however, mostly remained below the unity of one: their earning fell short of the cost of family subsistence. The living standards of workers in India were lower in comparison with their counterparts in Britain. The labouring poor secured the essential family consumption by increasing the supply of family labour on the labour market and agitating for wage revision. Here, women and boy coolies were far from receiving a wage rise comparable to their male counterparts. The labouring poor adopted strategies to come to terms with the meagre ratio of family subsistence. They calibrated the budget of household, thus maintaining the low levels of comfort itself. To meet the pressure of depressed living and deprivation, they entered in the labour dependency grounded on the payment of advance and loan in return of the continuous supply of labour efforts to employers. This kind of economic transaction and attendant labour institution cast an adverse impact on mobility and welfare outcome available to working peoples. It is equally noticeable in this study that the working families who collectively earned more than their subsistence wage, kept themselves from the vicious cycle of attached labour, indebtedness and low welfare levels. Thus, wokers frequently took loans and advance; as soon as possible they sought to get rid of such dependencies that limited their mobility in the labour market and their liberty at large.
This article explores the specific ways women performed conflicting gender identities at home and... more This article explores the specific ways women performed conflicting gender identities at home and when engaged in waged work in South African mines, as compared to other global cases. They fought back the belittling disreputable image of the urban working-class women and yet refused to be identified merely as acceptable housewives or mute witnesses of family disintegration. They negotiated claims for jobs, strove to salvage marriages and objected to domestic abuse. A woman compensated for marriage failure through initiating a new family structure consisting of her children, niece, nephew and / or other street children, and grooming them to achieve social advancement. Women took up the challenge of proving wrong the racist and sexist stereotypes made against them. They expressed dexterity and handiness, and occasionally, exerted themselves like men. Equally, they sought desexualisation of work relations, and qualified this pursuit with their association with “workerist” integrity and...
Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction pre... more Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the self-respect campaign and respectable tastes of consumption. Their economic propensity was an excess for capital’s ‘iron law of wage’. Mineworkers interrogated the latter, and graduated to play the game of wage-work with the rules of struggles for a minimum living wage for a human, ‘civilized’ life. This concept of the minimum living wage represented mineworkers’ new reproduction preferences, the compensation for the loss of supplementary earnings and their awareness of a mismatch between their work-efforts and their earnings. This article takes the historiography of wage disputes beyond the detail of cost-of-living index and trade union militancy. It further questions the argument that the returns to labour depended on the supply of and demand for labour; and that the local customs and labour surplus inhibited workers’ attempt to secure wages adequate for comfortable living.
A Book Chapter, in Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration, edited by Sadan Jha and Pushpendra Kumar Singh, 2021
This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived ... more This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived experiences in their pursuit of wellbeing. The worldview of workers transformed towards the emergence of a new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life from the aftermath of the WW I and onwards. In this worldview, the non-material component of wellbeing in the form of fraternisation in social connection and dignification in social exchanges was emphasised. This development was an outcome of the advocacy of ILO, the struggles of organised workers for industrial democracy, and caste upliftment campaigns among socially disadvantaged groups. All these took place amid the interplay between the migration pattern and changing social composition of workers on one side and intersection between economic relations and socio-cultural proclivities of working peoples, on the other. The new ethics mediated the struggles of social security and a sign of respectability. However, endogamous ethnicisation remained enduring, which had constraining ramification for particularly women and a fissure between migrants and the locals. With a focus on the socio-cultural roots of accumulation and wellbeing, the chapter historically addresses the non-material dimensions of wellbeing amongst migrant workers.
Comparativ: journal of european network of global and universal history, 2023
This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the ques... more This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the question of modern management. It resonated with the general thrust of development in those countries seeking industrialization in the aftermath of World War II. Decolonization and a dirigiste model of development in the Republic of India undertook the re-constitution of the managerial system inherited from the colonial age. In response, the new management movement arose. It bemoaned the managing agency system as costly, scam-ridden, inefficient, and non-professional, leading to its eventual discontinuation. Concomitantly, it fostered trained professional managers equipped with a liberal outlook, technological acumen, and scientific management. It addressed the shortage of talented managers for efficient and better management. It also sought to break away from the tradition of caste-like, blood-relationship-based hereditary managerial authority. Instead, it sought to open up business management to personnel from a wide section of society.
Comparativ: journal of European network of global and universal history, 2023
This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the ques... more This article suggests that India's decolonization efforts placed substantial emphasis on the question of modern management. It resonated with the general thrust of development in those countries seeking industrialization in the aftermath of World War II. Decolonization and a dirigiste model of development in the Republic of India undertook the re-constitution of the managerial system inherited from the colonial age. In response, the new management movement arose. It bemoaned the managing agency system as costly, scam-ridden, inefficient, and non-professional, leading to its eventual discontinuation. Concomitantly, it fostered trained professional managers equipped with a liberal outlook, technological acumen, and scientific management. It addressed the shortage of talented managers for efficient and better management. It also sought to break away from the tradition of caste-like, blood-relationship-based hereditary managerial authority. Instead, it sought to open up business management to personnel from a wide section of society.
Explorations: E-journal of Indian Sociological Society, 2022
This article outlines the shifting meanings and modalities, relational and governmental aspects, ... more This article outlines the shifting meanings and modalities, relational and governmental aspects, of caste, power, and representation claims in modern and contemporary India. Beyond the questions of exclusion, humiliation, protest, and caste reforms, it extends the engagement with this subject to India"s development path, experiences of capitalist modernisation, the functioning of colonial institutions, and parliamentary democracy and labour relations. The recent publications examined here suggest that the shift from the mobilisation of ranked identities to unranked identities advanced in the Republic of India, accompanying the change from patrimonial to the participatory polity. These twin shifts ensured that caste as a source of identity remained conspicuously persistent while attenuating as an axis of inequality. Although the constitution outlawed untouchability, to some publicists of social justice, the reservation law, alongside the personal laws, unnecessarily consecrated caste and religion; others maintain that parliamentary democracy brought about an irreversible rupture in the tradition of castes.
Even as they helped connect the Indian subcontinent through the railways, what life opportunities... more Even as they helped connect the Indian subcontinent through the railways, what life opportunities were made possible by the wages paid to the humblest construction workers in colonial India? My study draws upon the documents, including pay sheets (also referred to as pay lists), contract documents, and private diaries, of one of the subcontractors who became a contractor, Joseph Stephens, who carried out construction projects in the Deccan region of India in the 1860s. This chapter provides a comprehensive view of the wage relations and economic conditions of construction workers in this region, which have received little attention until now. One of the leading scholars of construction of the railways in India, Ian Kerr, has lamented the paucity of wage data for the study of the economic conditions of railway building workers. According to him, railway companies usually hired labour agents to recruit, supervise, and distribute wages among construction workers. As far as we know, the pay sheets of these labour recruiters mostly never made their way into the archives, making the Stephens' documents a rare and valuable source. 1 In Indian historiography, the period of the 1850s-70s saw some defnitive socioeconomic developments. The progress of railway construction in this period led to both the emergence and the integration of labour markets. As argued by Kerr, this development helped workers to regain bargaining power in the economy, which they had lost in the frst half of the nineteenth century. 2 Other scholars share a similarly optimistic view of the recovery of per capita income overall and the real income of the productive classes. 3 My study pays close attention to this narrative of recovery. It ofers a more nuanced understanding of the circumstances responsible for the new bargaining power and wage gains secured by construction workers during the 1860s. My enquiry brings to the fore fve key features which are particularly relevant to observe: (1) the real income of workers improved; (2) the 'subsistence ratio'-the ratio of total income to the cost of the subsistence basket of sweat labourers-remained less than unity; (3) the element of a constraining contract characterized the work relationship; (4) these workers secured an income sufcient for basic household subsistence only by increasing
International Journal of Community and Social Development, 2022
This article discusses the shifting links between the articulation of caste, class and representa... more This article discusses the shifting links between the articulation of caste, class and representation claims on one side and development experiences in modern and contemporary India on the other. Going beyond the questions of exclusion, humiliation, protest and caste reforms, it extends the engagement with this subject to India's path of development, experiences of capitalist modernisation, the functioning of colonial institutions and parliamentary democracy, labour relations and the sexual economy. The works under review suggest that caste and merit became proximate instead of antithetical from the nineteenth century. In contemporary India, the discourse of meritocracy has responded to subalterns' assertions of their rights against inherited injustice. As a determinant of life chances and axis of inequality, class has largely superseded caste among contemporary Indians. However, the varied employment relations operate in the organised and unorganised sectors. And, they have been wedded to the structuration of class among the better-earning 'labour elites' in the organised sector, and the interlaced existence of caste and class among the labouring poor in the unorganised sector. This article suggests implications for action and research.
Workers employed in the Raniganj coalfield, India, were plagued by occupational diseases, a probl... more Workers employed in the Raniganj coalfield, India, were plagued by occupational diseases, a problem that exacerbated over time. However, the recognising and categorising these diseases, and the injury it caused to mineworkers, were a belated and gradual process. The issue remained under dispute from 1946 to 1971, between contending stakeholders. The postcolonial public authority began to take cognisance of this problem in the early 1950s, declaring it a compensable casualty source in 1959. A combination of reasonsnew medical knowledge about occupational diseases, the medical experts' and labour unions' documentation, the publicisation of occupational diseases like pneumoconiosis, and the national state's concerns about a healthy and efficient industrial populationshaped the twin initiatives for its official recognition, and protective legislative measures. Nonetheless, delayed official recognition, and persistent managerial prevarication practically diminished and distorted the protection and rehabilitation of afflicted mineworkers. Instead, colliery management preferred to get rid of afflicted mineworkers, by offering a small lump sum to recalcitrant victims, and coercing them into retirement. Mineworkers with impaired lungs placed a premium on continuing their employment, despite reduced working capacity, and undertaking quotidian negotiation. The gap between protective laws and abysmally low investment in medical support emerged as a new fractious issue, confronting a significant section of working peoples. Methodologically, this study draws upon archival materials and testimonies as oral histories.
This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived ... more This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived experiences in their pursuit of wellbeing. The worldview of workers transformed towards the emergence of a new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life from the aftermath of the WW I and onwards. In this worldview, the non-material component of wellbeing in the form of fraternisation in social connection and dignification in social exchanges was emphasised. This development was an outcome of the advocacy of ILO, the struggles of organised workers for industrial democracy, and caste upliftment campaigns among socially disadvantaged groups. All these took place amid the interplay between the migration pattern and changing social composition of workers on one side and intersection between economic relations and socio-cultural proclivities of working peoples, on the other. The new ethics mediated the struggles of social security and a sign of respectability. However, endogamous ethnicisation remained enduring, which had constraining ramification for particularly women and a fissure between migrants and the locals. With a focus on the socio-cultural roots of accumulation and wellbeing, the chapter historically addresses the non-material dimensions of wellbeing amongst migrant workers.
This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, hum... more This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, human life for mineworkers in the Jharia coalfields in eastern India, in the early decades of the twentieth century, had some ‘unsought for’ results. These results included the vulnerability of women excluded from certain categories of work, school-dropout children and above all absence of a reproductive support system. Industrialists as well as the industrial workforce slowly braced themselves to devise the means for satisfying reproduction requirements of the principal component of the workforce. The resultant reproduction regime, representing a shift to industrial paternalism, took effect within the matrix of mineworkers’ new reproduction politics, the competition between different categories of mineworkers, and their access to social and political power. On family and women questions, the familist discourse became the site of contestation between various ideas and practices that represe...
ABSTRACT The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in S... more ABSTRACT The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in South African mines. ‘Tacit knowledge’ evolved over time, is orally transmitted, learned on the job, and is central to worker safety; it lay behind acts of resistance and demands for a safer mining workplace which underpinned unionisation, and which won worker safety representation under apartheid. Under democracy, a modern consultative tripartite legislative safety regime was instituted. With worker representation institutionalised, health and safety legislation enacted and tripartite institutions established, procedural compliance eclipsed workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’. The right to refuse to do dangerous work, state-initiated safety work stoppages and the impact on safety of inter-union rivalry are currently in the spotlight and are noted below. With the state firmly in neoliberal mode post-Fordism, this article concludes by noting the emergence of the individualisation of safety – ironically motivated by a behaviourist construal of ‘tacit beliefs’ underpinning a major industry safety initiative.
In Jan Lucassen and Radhika Seshan (Eds.), Wage Earners in India, 1500 1900: Regional History in Global Perspectives, Sage 2022, 2022
The focus on wages, prices and the living standards has led the discussions around the great dive... more The focus on wages, prices and the living standards has led the discussions around the great divergence, resulting in varied perspectives. This paper builds a new set of relationships between these variables. This chapter describes the welfare levels of construction workers and their way of managing living standards in the expansive economy during the 1860s. It contends that the existing thesis – that real wages and living standards grew in both Britain and India in the modernisation 19th-century- needs to be reassessed. Additionally, it juxtaposes workers’ gains in wage income and bargaining power with their painful struggles at coming to terms with the unfavourable living standards. Consequently, the paper qualifies the growth in real wages of construction workers in the Deccan by laying out the following: The subsistence ratio of manual workers, however, mostly remained below the unity of one: their earning fell short of the cost of family subsistence. The living standards of workers in India were lower in comparison with their counterparts in Britain. The labouring poor secured the essential family consumption by increasing the supply of family labour on the labour market and agitating for wage revision. Here, women and boy coolies were far from receiving a wage rise comparable to their male counterparts. The labouring poor adopted strategies to come to terms with the meagre ratio of family subsistence. They calibrated the budget of household, thus maintaining the low levels of comfort itself. To meet the pressure of depressed living and deprivation, they entered in the labour dependency grounded on the payment of advance and loan in return of the continuous supply of labour efforts to employers. This kind of economic transaction and attendant labour institution cast an adverse impact on mobility and welfare outcome available to working peoples. It is equally noticeable in this study that the working families who collectively earned more than their subsistence wage, kept themselves from the vicious cycle of attached labour, indebtedness and low welfare levels. Thus, wokers frequently took loans and advance; as soon as possible they sought to get rid of such dependencies that limited their mobility in the labour market and their liberty at large.
This article explores the specific ways women performed conflicting gender identities at home and... more This article explores the specific ways women performed conflicting gender identities at home and when engaged in waged work in South African mines, as compared to other global cases. They fought back the belittling disreputable image of the urban working-class women and yet refused to be identified merely as acceptable housewives or mute witnesses of family disintegration. They negotiated claims for jobs, strove to salvage marriages and objected to domestic abuse. A woman compensated for marriage failure through initiating a new family structure consisting of her children, niece, nephew and / or other street children, and grooming them to achieve social advancement. Women took up the challenge of proving wrong the racist and sexist stereotypes made against them. They expressed dexterity and handiness, and occasionally, exerted themselves like men. Equally, they sought desexualisation of work relations, and qualified this pursuit with their association with “workerist” integrity and...
Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction pre... more Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the self-respect campaign and respectable tastes of consumption. Their economic propensity was an excess for capital’s ‘iron law of wage’. Mineworkers interrogated the latter, and graduated to play the game of wage-work with the rules of struggles for a minimum living wage for a human, ‘civilized’ life. This concept of the minimum living wage represented mineworkers’ new reproduction preferences, the compensation for the loss of supplementary earnings and their awareness of a mismatch between their work-efforts and their earnings. This article takes the historiography of wage disputes beyond the detail of cost-of-living index and trade union militancy. It further questions the argument that the returns to labour depended on the supply of and demand for labour; and that the local customs and labour surplus inhibited workers’ attempt to secure wages adequate for comfortable living.
A Book Chapter, in Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration, edited by Sadan Jha and Pushpendra Kumar Singh, 2021
This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived ... more This chapter explains the role of socio-cultural propensities of working peoples and their lived experiences in their pursuit of wellbeing. The worldview of workers transformed towards the emergence of a new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life from the aftermath of the WW I and onwards. In this worldview, the non-material component of wellbeing in the form of fraternisation in social connection and dignification in social exchanges was emphasised. This development was an outcome of the advocacy of ILO, the struggles of organised workers for industrial democracy, and caste upliftment campaigns among socially disadvantaged groups. All these took place amid the interplay between the migration pattern and changing social composition of workers on one side and intersection between economic relations and socio-cultural proclivities of working peoples, on the other. The new ethics mediated the struggles of social security and a sign of respectability. However, endogamous ethnicisation remained enduring, which had constraining ramification for particularly women and a fissure between migrants and the locals. With a focus on the socio-cultural roots of accumulation and wellbeing, the chapter historically addresses the non-material dimensions of wellbeing amongst migrant workers.
The term of post-truth and post-fact has recently become a commonplace. It is no more confined to... more The term of post-truth and post-fact has recently become a commonplace. It is no more confined to the realm of politics, that is, post-truth politics but informs the subjectivity in a wider social life. It seems to constitute the substance of a public sphere of the post-Fordist multitude itself. Our following discussion makes an exposition of its characteristic feature and foundational root. It is, I suggest below, a discourse of the contemporary forms of life. Post-truth relates to a public sphere. It is characterised by the repeated assertion of a set of opinions, which disregards the contradictory fact and ignores the factual rebuttal. It accompanies a much higher volume of the tactical deployment of misinformation than what was noticeable in the context of rivalry between the capitalist and socialist blocks during what Hobsbawm (1995) calls 'the age of extremes' (1914-1991). Hence, it is, one and the same time, post-fact: the violation of what Carr (1961) and Ricoeur (1984) consider the scientific method. 1 This public sphere is akin to what Habermas (1989) terms 'the plebiscitary-acclamatory form of regimented public sphere'. 2 This is a consuming public rather than rational-critical debating public: the latter is the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere that puts reason to use for fostering public opinion. The latter normally happens to be a critic of the authorities and calls on the public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion. The latter is brought into play as a critical authority in connection with the normative mandate that the exercise of political and social power be subject to publicity. By contrast, post-truth public opinion is the object to be moulded in connection with a staged display of and manipulative propagation of publicity in the service of persons and institutions: what Habermas simplistically terms 'non-public opinion' and 'quasi-public opinion' (ibid: 236, 247). Post-fact public opinions are currently working in great numbers. The commentators have identified these in the contexts of the victorious campaigns of Trump, Brexit and the role of Russia and Syria in the Aleppo humanitarian crisis. As also the jingoist aggression over the issues, including beef, love jihad, the encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan, capital punishment of Afjal Guru and Yakub Menon (2014), the Bhopal Encounter of six SIMI associates (2016) and the likes, is a similar case in India. The term of post-truth, however, appears to be the elemental feature of the contemporary public sphere. It seems to be connected with the very desire of free people to live in a post-truth world, to express a post-truth tendency and work on a post-truth narrative structure cum strategy. It is an epistemological condition in which the attitude towards the very question of truth has become not merely ambivalent, pragmatic and self-serving. Instead, truth itself has become dispensable in this scheme of post-truth. 3 Here it is marked out from another Habermasian viewpoint. The latter maintains that in a comparative sense the concept of public opinion is to be retained because the constitutional reality of the social-welfare state must be conceived as a process in the course of which a public sphere that functions effectively in the political realm is realised: that is to say, as a process in which the exercise of social power and political
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Papers by Dhiraj Kumar Nite