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Indian Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

Prasannan Parthasarathi
Prasannan Parthasarathi*
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

The 1980s and 1990s were decades of great creativity in Indian labor history. The study of labor moved from a long-standing institutional focus on trade unions to a study of workers themselves, as well as from the economism and determinism that had characterized many previous writings. A growing interest in labor led to the first conference devoted to Indian labor history at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1995 and the founding of the Association of Indian Labour Historians the following year. The dynamism and the new intellectual horizons of Indian labor history in that period are captured in the work of three major historians: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, and Chitra Joshi. For the purposes of this essay, there is no need to review their contributions in detail (not least because such overviews may be found elsewhere), but it is nevertheless essential to provide a quick sketch of the arguments of each.

Type
New Directions in Labor History Around the Globe
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012 , pp. 127 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

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References

Notes

1. Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar; “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions: Employers, Government and the Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1890–1940,” in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Guha, Ranajit (Delhi, 1983)Google Scholar; “Trade Unions in a Hierarchical Culture: The Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1920–50,” in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Guha, Ranajit (Delhi, 1984)Google Scholar.

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8. Some of these themes are explored in my Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar.

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11. Parthasarathi, Transition to a Colonial Economy, chaps. 1 and 4.

12. Joshi, Lost Worlds, 183.

13. Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 100.

14. Parthasarathi, Transition to a Colonial Economy, 56–61.

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21. Aditya Sarkar, “The Work of Law: Three Factory Narratives from Bombay Presidency, 1881–1884,” in Labour Matters.

22. See, for example, Papers Relating to the Introduction of a New Mode of Settlement of the Land Revenue for the District of Tanjore (no place or date of publication available), consulted in the Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai.

23. Chowdhury, Subhanil, “Employment in India: What Does the Latest Data Show?” Economic and Political Weekly, xlvi, 32 (2011), 23Google Scholar; also see Himanshu, “Employment Trends in India: A Re-examination,” Economic and Political Weekly, xlvi, 37 (2011), 43–59 Google Scholar.

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