Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1: Western India, 1931
- Map 2: Municipal wards and districts of Bombay City, 1931
- 1 Problems and perspectives
- 2 The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
- 3 The structure and development of the labour market
- 4 Migration and the rural connections of Bombay's workers
- 5 Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
- 6 The development of the cotton-textile industry: a historical context
- 7 The workplace: labour and the organization of production in the cotton-textile industry
- 8 Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
- 9 Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge South Asian Studies
8 - Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1: Western India, 1931
- Map 2: Municipal wards and districts of Bombay City, 1931
- 1 Problems and perspectives
- 2 The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
- 3 The structure and development of the labour market
- 4 Migration and the rural connections of Bombay's workers
- 5 Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
- 6 The development of the cotton-textile industry: a historical context
- 7 The workplace: labour and the organization of production in the cotton-textile industry
- 8 Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
- 9 Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge South Asian Studies
Summary
From the late 1920s onwards, the problems of the Bombay textile industry focussed in public discourse upon its allegedly inefficient and intractable labour force. For what came to be perceived as its ‘labour problem’, the colonial state prescribed rationalization. This official panacea for the industry's problems was conceived in a highly charged political context. In the 1920s, as chapter 6 has shown, the Bombay industry was forced to adapt to the imperatives of the domestic market, in which demand was stagnant and contracting, and which was in addition saturated with the cheap coarse goods produced by the expanding up-country mills. In the finer varieties, however, the Ahmedabad mills and the imports of Lancashire and, especially, Japan, had established a powerful, indeed daunting presence. Moreover, the Bombay mills were trying to adjust to an internal market which was reported to be the most open in the world. The Bombay millowners urgently sought tariff protection. But for the colonial state, keeping the Indian market open for British manufactures was one of its most important imperial commitments. Rationalization thus became the official alternative to tariffs and indeed, the progress made by the millowners to implement the former became, at least rhetorically, the yardstick by which the colonial state measured how much they deserved protection.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in IndiaBusiness Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, pp. 335 - 396Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994