The informal sector and informal employment relations occupy a prominent place in India's economy: one of their key features is the apparent absence of the state from labour regulation. This article seeks to trace the emergence of the division between the formal and informal sectors in India's economy from a historical perspective: it shows how the state, far from being absent, played a fundamental role in creating the dichotomy. This is done through a close study of labour legislation and the politics around it, taking South India as a case study. The article examines the enactment of four laws in Madras province in the late 1940s, ostensibly aimed at protecting workers, and their subsequent implementation by the Madras government. It shows how these laws ended by excluding workers from small unorganized industries (such as beedi-making, arecanut-processing, handloom-weaving, and tanning) from legal protection. It explores the ramifications of this exclusion and argues that the reinforcement of the formal–informal divide was the outcome of a complex political struggle between employers, workers' unions, and the state during this formative period.
Most research on the handloom industry is focused upon the export trade and production for export, and, by extension, upon the Coromandel Coast. This article, by contrast, explores the physical and human geography of weaving for the 'domestic' market in the 'inland' regions of south India. Using visual sources such as Company paintings, together with archival materials and statistical data, it reconstructs everyday modes of dress and clothing in the early nineteenth century in order to obtain a picture of the 'kinds' of cloth produced: this analysis shows that the largest proportion was white or predominantly white, and of coarse to middling quality. It goes on to map different systems of cloth production, and the pattern of weaver settlements, and shows that both were significantly different from those described for the Coromandel Coast. In the inland regions, coarse and durable kinds of cloth were woven almost everywhere by plebeian weavers scattered through the countryside; patterned and fine varieties were woven by specialist, full-time weavers who usually lived in large settlements. The article describes a diversity of markets and production systems, unpicks the meanings of part-time and full-time work, and their significance. The data and analysis serve to complicate the debate on the nature of the textile economy in early modern India.
Weaving Histories looks at the economic history of South Asia from a fresh perspective, through a detailed study of the handloom industry in colonial South India between 1800 and 1960, drawing out its wider implications for the Indian economy. It employs an unusual array of sources, including paintings and textile samples as well as archival records, to excavate the links between cotton growing, spinning and weaving before the nineteenth century. The rupture and re-configuration of these connections produced a sea-change in the lives of ordinary weavers. Weaving Histories uncovers the impact this transformation had on different kinds of weavers, particulalry those who wove coarse cloth. It unpacks the configuration of forces – social, political and economic – at different levels – local, regional, national and global – that came together to shape this transformation. The book uses this story of the transformation of the handloom industry to throw light on the historical processes at work in creating what has come to be called the ‘informal sector’ in India and more broadly reflect on debates around industrialisation.
This chapter documents the diverse ways in which weaving was organised in the beginning of the nineteenth century, ranging from weaving directly for the customer to weaving organised by merchants for faraway markets. It then goes on to document and analyse the changes in these structures and the emergence of new labour regimes and how these affected different kinds of weavers.
This chapter brings places the transformation of the handloom industry in the context of the emergence of India’s modern economy and examines how it came to be incorporated into what came to be known as the ‘informal sector’. It also uses the conclusions of this study to reflect on the divergent paths of economic development, both within India and globally.
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