The 1980s and 1990s were decades of great creativity in Indian labor history. The study of labor moved from a long-standing institutional focus on trade unions to a study of workers themselves, as well as from the economism and determinism that had characterized many previous writings. A growing interest in labor led to the first conference devoted to Indian labor history at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1995 and the founding of the Association of Indian Labour Historians the following year. The dynamism and the new intellectual horizons of Indian labor history in that period are captured in the work of three major historians: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, and Chitra Joshi. For the purposes of this essay, there is no need to review their contributions in detail (not least because such overviews may be found elsewhere), but it is nevertheless essential to provide a quick sketch of the arguments of each.