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Segmented Possibilities: Migrant life Histories of Hindustani Workers in Post Colonial India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2020
Abstract
Starting in the late 19 th century, workers from north India came to constitute the backbone of the urban and industrial labour force in Calcutta and neighboring mill municipalities. As they settled in and around the colonial metropolis, these Hindustani workers maintained strong connections with their rural homes. One generation after the other, they reproduced this dual settlement over the following decades. This bi-local structure of labour circulation, which linked village and city through the constant coming and going of men and women, progressively broke down from the late 20 th century onwards, following the closure of the large textile, engineering and paper industries which underpinned the economic vitality of the Calcutta region. The article sketches out the history of this socio-spatial configuration over the second half of the 20 th century, through the life histories of two migrant Hindustani workers. Born around 1940, Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal both spent the greater part of their working lives in Calcutta's industrial suburbs. Siraj, a potter by caste, was engaged in the artisanal production tea-cups in Howrah. Born into one of the most marginalized sections of north Indian society, Mohan managed to train as a mason, and was employed in the Titagarh Paper Mill through the 1960s and 70s. Both have now settled back in their respective villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Teasing out the contradictory ways in which both men frame their life trajectories, the article contributes a micro-perspective to the social history of rural-urban migration in post-colonial north India.
- Type
- Oral History and Indian Labor History
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- Copyright
- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2020
Footnotes
This research would not have been possible without the help and support extended by Vaseem Akhtar, Vijay Rao and their families through my successive stays in eastern Uttar Pradesh. I am especially grateful to them for introducing me to Siraj Prajapati, Mohan Lal and their families, making possible the collection of the life narratives reproduced here. This paper was first presented at the workshop “Oral History and Labour in South Asia”, organized by ICAS:MP, re:work Humboldt Universiät zu Berlin and CeMIS, University of Göttingen on 23–24 May 2017. Extensive discussions with Naveen Chander on the life narratives presented here were instrumental in deepening my reflection on these sources and on the method of oral history. I am grateful to Ravi Ahuja, Vanessa Caru, Chitra Joshi, Paul André Rosental, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Catherine Servan Schreiber, Victoria Zurita, and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. I remain responsible for all shortcomings of the paper.
References
NOTES
1. A generic term used to refer to Hindi and Urdu speakers, “Hindustani” is specifically used in Bengal to identify migrant workers from northern India. Tulsi Ram makes a reference to it in his autobiographical account see Ram, Tulsi, Murdahiya, Part One (New Delhi, 2012)Google Scholar.
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7. The following is based on various conversation with Siraj Prajapati, his wife Saraswati Devi and cousin Jagdish Prajapati on 2 October 2015, 12 November 2015, 13 November 2015 and 22 March 2017.
8. The following is based on various conversations with Mohan Lal, his wife Sarita Devi, and his elder son Sanjay especially on 7 October 2015, 16 Mach 2016, 23 March 2017 and 16 September 2017.
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31. Other sectors, similarly witnessed very little growth. Daily employment in the engineering industry, where 35% of the workforce originated from these regions, barely rose from 347 577 in 1974 to 361 784 in 1989, Labour in West Bengal, relevant years.
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33. Barbara Harriss-White rightly notes that patriarchy is as much about the subordination of women as about power relations between men “In this arena of power, young men are subordinated to older men – patriarchy in its original sense, the governance of male society by its elders. These ‘male relations of patriarchy’ – relations among men in which gender identity is important – (…) actually reinforce the marginalisation and subordination of women in various ways” Harriss-White, Barbara, India Working, Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge, 2002), 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34. In the village, where they mostly produced for local consumption, they collected clay and fuel in nearby fields, while in Howrah they purchased their raw material from private retailers and sold their products to nearby tea-sellers (within a two-kilometre radius of their settlement).
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39. The ability to adapt to changes in consumption patterns through time and space has been documented for other artisanal communities. See Haynes and Tirthankar Roy, “Conceiving mobility”.
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43. Geetha, “Bereft of Being…”, 97.
44. Thakur is the title given to members of the Rajput caste, a landed and socially dominant community in the area.
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