Suchergebnisse

The historical and global contexts of artisan production -- Consumers, merchants and markets -- Artisanal towns -- The organization of production -- Small town capitalism and the living standards of artisans -- The colonial state and the handloom weaver -- The paradox of the long 1930s -- Weaver capitalists and the politics of the workshop, 1940-60

Papers presented at a conference "Towards a history of consumption in South Asia" held at Pune in 2005

This book explores the rhetoric and ritual of Indian elites undercolonialism, focusing on the city of Surat in the Bombay Presidency. It particularly examines how local elites appropriated and modified the liberal representative discourse of Britain and thus fashioned a "public' culture that excluded the city's underclasses. Departing from traditional explanations that have seen this process as resulting from English education or radical transformations in society, Haynes emphasizes the importance of the unequal power relationship between the British and those Indians who struggled for political influence and justice within the colonial framework. A major contribution of the book is Haynes' analysis of the emergence and ultimate failure of Ghandian cultural meanings in Indian politics after 1923.The book addresses issues of importance to historians and anthropologists of India, to political scientists seeking to understand the origins of democracy in the "Third World," and general readers interested in comprehending processes of cultural change in colonial contexts

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers' neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as 'patched-up societies' whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.

AbstractAnalyses of capital-labour relations in Indian industry during the colonial period have generally been confined to studies of large-scale units. This essay turns to an examination of the organization of the workplace among handloom producers in the Bombay Presidency during the period between 1880 and 1940. While recognizing the importance of contradictions between weaving families and various kinds of capitalists, the essay eschews any straightforward model of "proletarianization" to characterize this relationship. Weavers possessed methods of resistance, particularly "everyday" actions, which thwarted efforts to impose tight regimes of labour discipline within the workshop. Seeking to contain these resistances, shahukars (putting-out merchants) and karkhandars (owners of establishments using wage labour) developed complex social relationships with their workers based upon patronage, debt, and caste. Consequently, collective protest in the industry was limited, and when it did emerge in Sholapur during the later 1930s, it was highly conditioned and constrained by the multiple lines of affiliation weavers had with karkhandars.

This paper explores discourses about industry by looking at the representations of the past formulated by owners, workers and trade union leaders in the cities of surat and Bhiwandi. Drawing upon literature on social memory as well as upon Scott's discussion of 'weapons of the weak', it argues that current circumstances of different social groupings in these cities and their views of prospects for change in the future have a profound effect on the ways they view owner-employer relations before 1960. A particular focus here is with the willingness of different participants in the textile industry to accept a portrayal of past relations as having been 'like a family'. For workers, nostalgic attitudes and more critical recollections both serve as means ofcontesting a present characterised by serious strains between capital and labour, by serious fears of losing work, and by widely shared perceptions that collective action is futile: These views of history are contrasted with those of owners on the one hand and labour activists on the other.