Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on India's Working Classes

Abstract

With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the ‘working poor’ that have often constrained ethnographic and historical analyses of India's working classes. Inspired by Marxist historiography, this forum engages with the historically contingent emergence of Indian working classes through different types of labour, gender and ethnic struggles, and considers the complex political boundaries that are produced by such processes.

Who Is a Migrant? Understanding Migrant’s Identity in a North Indian Industrial Setting

“…The HAL Township census I conducted in the year 2006 had migrants from different states of India shown in Table 1. Table 1 shows how the logic majoritarian from North India’s workforce in HAL is not similar to the study of Sanchez and Strumpell (2014), where they argue, In the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant, founded in the mid-twentieth century, the politics of ethno regionalism coincided with state development policy to inform employment reservation for autochthons. Through a historical analysis of urbanisation, migration and employment policy, we consider how elite workforces that bound themselves according to the principles of autochthony and descent were formed in the social laboratories of India’s steel towns.…”

“…families in the township of Lucknow has a slightly different sense of connection. Here comes the issue of regional identity which can be understood in the study by Sanchez and Strumpell (2014) autochthony has never structured Tata class politics as in Rourkela, since none of the manual labour force of migrant Uttar Pradeshis, Biharis, Chhattisgarhis and Odias can claim an autochthonous identity. The region’s indigenous autochthons were largely excluded from the city’s urban core early in its foundation, since TISCO 1 was a project of complete urbanisation that depended upon the incorporation of racially ranked migrants (The North Indian employees, especially from U.P., Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Bihar) consider southern and eastern employees as baaharwale , because of similarity in cultural markers’ (language/food habits).…”

Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility: Precarity, Translocality, and Resilience

“…2016: 3). That said, a more nuanced picture of labour relations also suggests possibilities for emerging intra-class hierarchies and, eventually, new solidarities (de Neve 2001; Sanchez and Strümpell 2014).…”

Canon Fire

“…In the 1980s, the (largely Indian) Subaltern Studies collective embarked on a radical rethinking of South Asian history, which initially sought to rewrite the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the region's poor and disenfranchised (Guha 1982). The European intellectual frameworks of Antonio Gramsci, E. P. Thompson and latterly Michel Foucault heavily informed the work of the Subaltern Studies scholars (Sanchez and Strümpell 2014). However, as Zeus Leonardo observes in his appraisal of Said (this volume), during the 1970s and 1980s an engagement with the European canon of academic thought was not deemed antithetical to the generation of new and destabilizing ideas.…”