This article has benefited from comments by József Böröcz, Ethel Brooks, Robyn Rodriguez, Paul McLean, Ann Mische, and two anonymous reviewers of International Labor and Working-Class History. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Politics and Protest Workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Rutgers University Sociology Colloquia in October 2009. The research for this article has been funded by the Social Science Research Council—International Dissertation Research Fellowship, as well as generous grants from Rutgers and Princeton Universities. The author thanks the American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements/Critical Sociology Section for giving the Honorable Mention Award to this article in 2010. The interviews for this article happened due to the cooperation of the workers in Bhilai and Dalli-Rajhara and countless facilitators; this article is testimony to their relentless struggle for survival and dignity.

1. The mines provided raw material to the Bhilai Steel Plant, one of the first state-owned steel plants in independent India.

2. The interviewees included men, women, leaders, followers, peasants, and tribal people. Chhattisgarh has a huge tribal population (thirty-seven percent of the total population belongs to the Scheduled Tribes category of the Indian census), and the mining township is located in an election constituency reserved for the tribal people. The tribal people, whom I interviewed, however, classified themselves as peasant-cultivators, thus distinguishing them from the tribes of the forests and linking them to the lower-caste peasants.

3. Passerini has stated how left-wing activists consider only their collective identity worthy of being passed on, and hence silence their private life in oral testimonies of their life. Passerini, Luisa, Fascism in Popular Memory (London, 1987), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Such personal narratives included stories of alcoholic husbands, death or illnesses of children, and sibling rivalry.

5. Bhilai is significant due to the presence of one of the first state-owned steel plants in postcolonial India and many private industries supported by this steel plant.

6. The company, one of the first mergers of significant industrial groups in India—the Tatas, Khataus, Killick Nixon, and Dinshaw—became a part of the Swiss multinational corporation Holcim Limited in 2005.

7. This rally by the industrialists was covered in the newspaper Deshbandhu, January 29, 1992. The newspaper Roudramukhi featured an industrialist of the Simplex Company pleading with the public to forgive his sins and save his company from the clutches of the CMM. June 9, 1992.

8. The worker who was supplied by the contractors on demand.

9. Regular worker.

10. The red and green colors in the CMM's flag represent workers and peasants.

11. Sankar Guha Niyogi, known as Niyogi bhaiyya (brother) among the workers, is usually credited with organizing the workers in Dalli-Rajhara and Bhilai. He was shot dead on September 28, 1991, allegedly by an assassin hired by the private industrialists in Bhilai. The accused were initially sentenced to death and life imprisonment by the lower court but eventually were acquitted (except the assassin) by the Supreme Court of India in January 2005.

12. The Indian state initiated a complete revamping of the postcolonial developmental structure in 1991 in response to a foreign debt crisis. A caveat of the new program was the state's loosening the regulations within which labor could be deployed, which in turn provided a free space for private capital to deploy labor at its will, especially in a third-world country such as India, where labor does not possess any comparative advantage in numbers or skill. In the previous mixed-economy model, the workers, especially those in the organized sectors, either worked for state-owned enterprises or were protected by the elaborate state laws and guidelines that made workers' movements possible. However, the state actively withdrew from such a protective and facilitating role since the 1990s.

13. The Maoist movement in the bordering states of Chhattisgarh got the support of the tribal population that was protesting the proposed Tata steel project as well as rural poverty and neglect of the Indian state in general. See the BBC news report of June 30, 2010: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/south_asia/10446513.stm.

14. Chhattisgarh is known for the seasonal migration of rural workers to other regions of India to work in brick kilns, construction, and as domestic helps. The firsthand evidence of this is the swarm of poor Chhattisgarhiya alighting and boarding the trains from and to Chhattisgarh at the New Delhi railway station.

15. Poletta, Francesca, “‘It was like a fever….’: Narrative and Identity in Social Protest,” Social Problems (1998): 137–59Google Scholar.

16. Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event (Albany, 1991)Google Scholar, 51. See also Joshi, Chitra, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories (Orient Longman, 2003)Google Scholar.

17. Portelli, Death of Luigi, 52.

18. While Hindi was the official language in Chhattisgarh, most people spoke Chhattisgarhi, an eastern dialect.

19. I worried at times that my coming from the US, which the Indian Left stereotypically considered as the bastion of imperialism, would be a problem for doing fieldwork, despite my being an Indian citizen. The workers, to my pleasant surprise, were not bothered by such stereotypes, and wanted to know how people in the United States lived, what they ate (how much a kilogram of rice or okra cost), produced, etc. On the other hand, I was accused of being a spy by some government officials in Delhi while I was requesting access to public government of India documents in the heavily guarded Department of Industries library of the Udyog Bhavan. Some of my worries and experiences as a field researcher have been shared by Ann Mische and Ethel Brooks in their own work. Mische, Ann, Partisan Publics (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar. Brooks, Ethel, Unraveling the Garment Industry, (Minnesota, 2007)Google Scholar.

20. Portelli elegantly notes that “To tell a story is to take arms against the threat of time, to resist time, or to harness time.” Portelli, Death of Luigi, 59. This somewhat fluid “chronology” of events that my interviewees have been offering is an attempt to withstand time and preserve and transmit their collective memory.

21. Both groups of workers had confrontations with the police that led to police shootings, the first in 1977, the second in 1991.

22. Kalb argues that class-based politics created “effective politics,” creating disappearance of violence, increased use of “industrial muscle” and the strike weapon, and the general shortening of labor conflicts. See Kalb, Don, Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950 (Durham, 1997), 59Google Scholar; See also Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, (New York, 1963), 424Google Scholar. These politics were possible because the workers were using what Charles Tilly would refer to as social movement repertoires. See Tilly, Charles, “Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain, 1758-1834,” Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action, 15–42Google Scholar.

23. Report 1960-61, Ministry of Steel, Mines and Fuel, Department of Iron and Steel.

24. Steel Authority of India Limited Annual Reports 1955-2005, Ministry of Steel Annual Reports 1959-1960 to 2005.

25. For some history of subcontracting of labor in Indian factory system, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working-class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar; Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar; Simeon, Dilip, The Politics of Labor under Late-colonialism: Workers Unions and the State in Chotanagpur (New Delhi, 1995)Google Scholar; Sen, Samita, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar.

26. Editorial, Economic and Political Weekly, October 5, 1991, 2273–4Google Scholar.

27. Jha, Praveen, with Mitra, Dipankar and Nair, Manjusha, “Economic Reforms and the Poor: A Study from Madhya Pradesh, India.” (Focus on Global South, Bangkok, 1999)Google Scholar. See also for a discussion of casualization of labor as a characteristic feature of globalization, Silver, Beverley, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Passerini has argued that women's recollections are subversive of the moral code; these women excelled in showing how they deployed their bodies in the struggle. Passerini, Fascism, 1987.

29. This experience was common to the loading and transporting workers. Most workers pointed to this experience of transport workers as a prima facie evidence of workers' hardships, because of the emotional toll.

30. Roy argued that the Indian steel towns were upheld as exemplary national spaces for the new India after independence; and the workers in these steel towns were the “producer patriots.” Roy, Srirupa, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. The industrial labor camps started initially in the 1950s to temporarily house the laborers engaged in the construction of the mines. They have stayed on to become almost permanent mud housing clusters, where the local miners lived. Many miners, later, refused to shift to the official “quarters” of mine employees, which for them was “unclean” since it had toilets within the apartment. Workers preferred the open fields to “stinking” toilets.

32. Shahid (martyr) hospital still caters to the needs of workers as well as villagers from the surrounding regions. The workers also started their schools, many of which have been taken over by the state.

33. The miners narrated stories of intimidating the mine management with their threats of violence. While the mine officials were treated with respect as the educated sahib, the management in general was derided for keeping the rival unions as concubines (rakhel) and for engaging in secret deals with the contractors.

34. The Congress Party has more or less continuously ruled, with some interruptions, the federal state of Madhya Pradesh till 2003, of which Chhattisgarh was a part. Currently, Chhattisgarh has a BJP government.

35. For the relation between “repertoires” and “performances,” see Tilly, Charles, Contentious Performances (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. CMM celebrated at least four martyr days a year and more depending on the availability of funds.

37. The head of the state cabinet. Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh at that time was Arjun Singh. He has been under recent scrutiny for his alleged role in orchestrating the escape of Warren Anderson, the chairman of the Union Carbide Corporation after the Bhopal Gas tragedy. Bhopal is the state capital of Madhya Pradesh.

38. The Bhilai workers were disillusioned with the state after their long rather fruitless struggle and were openly voicing support to the Maoist movement, which angered the Dalli miners.

39. The interviewees referred to their eternal youth in the mining township due to the presence of iron in drinking water. Going back to the countryside, literally and figuratively symbolized frailty and old age.

40. An AITUC leader told me: “Niyogi was a naxalite. He was associated with the naxalite movement in Durg (district capital). He was brought to Dalli by me and two other persons. When he came, we made him take a vow by keeping his hand on the photo of Lenin that he is interested in trade union activities only and nothing else.”

41. For more in this aspect of Indian trade unionism, see Nair, Manjusha, “Mixed Repertoire of an Indian Labor Movement, 1990–2006,” Journal of Historical Sociology 22 (2009): 180–206Google Scholar.

42. To give one instance of the reality of state support to the industrialists, a previous researcher told me that none of the files of the complaints filed by the workers were available with the state-appointed labor officials. They, most probably, must have been destroyed to suppress evidence.

43. Javier Auyero uses this term to describe the functioning of Peronist clientele networks in Argentina. Auyero, Javier, Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Durham, 2001)Google Scholar.

44. Akhil Gupta has argued that corruption is the narrative lens through which state agents are routinely viewed in India, while others argue how in practice, the narrators themselves collaborate in producing such state governance. The Dalli workers, in this instance, point at their ideals of state and leadership, faced with the failures of the postcolonial developmental state. Akhil Gupta, “Narratives of corruption: Anthropological and fictional accounts of the Indian state.” Ethnography 2005. See also “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State,” The Anthropology of the State: A Reader 22:375–402Google Scholar.

45. The miners and the Bhilai workers perceived themselves as simple country bumpkins that were easily manipulated. Terms like Chhattisgarhiya Parbuddhiya (A Chhattisgarhiya follows another's brain) were used by the workers and villagers alike to refer to their simple mindedness.

46. Sundar, Nandini, “Bastar, Maoism and Salwa Judum,” Economic and Political Weekly (2006), 3187–92Google Scholar.

47. See http://www.ilps-news.com/central-info-bureau/events/mumbai-resistance-2004/program/, accessed February 2, 2009.

48. Unlike the mining township, most workers in Bhilai were men. There were strong women leaders in Bhilai, some workers and others who organized the families of the working men, but only two of my interviewees were women, compared to seven in the mining township.

49. The developmental state is “roughly, those agencies of state and governmental practices that are charged with improving or protecting the incomes, capabilities and legal rights of people.” Corbridge, Stuart et al. , Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India, (Cambridge, 2005), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. The theory of white supremacy was used to vertically segregate ethnic labor in imperial corporate plantations. Bourgois, Philippe, Ethnic Diversity on a Corporate Plantation (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Mintz, Sidney, “The Rural Proletariat and the Problem of Rural Proletarian Consciousness,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1974): 291–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Baviskar, Amita, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.

52. Seidman, Gay, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Agarwala, Rina, “Reshaping the Social Contract: Emerging Relations Between the State and Informal Labor in India,” Theory and Society 37 (2008):375–408Google Scholar.

53. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.