At the beginning of the 1990s the discipline of labour history seemed to be in serious crisis. The editorial in Supplement 1 to this journal in 1993 was seriously concerned that, having peaked during the 1960s and 1970s, interest in labour history had declined very rapidly by the 1990s. The decline of “old labour history” prompted the question whether this was the end of labour history itself. The current phase of globalization, coinciding with the rapid decline of the industrial working class in advanced capitalist countries, the retreat of the state, the emergence of subcontracting, and the demise of the Soviet Union, was the context for nascent doubts about the foundational basis of labour history.

The discussion of labour history in South Asia was first shaped in the early twentieth century by the hands of the members of a very limited intelligentsia who assumed an adversarial role in relation to capital and colonial state power. Many of them happened to be activists and leaders in the organizations and protest movements of the working classes. Their constituents, sections of the labouring poor, were particularly underprivileged in the general context of economic underdevelopment and low per capita GNP in South Asia.

The advent and expansion of trans-oceanic shipping aboard wooden, wind-powered vessels between India and Europe created uniquely onerous working conditions for the Indian seamen who volunteered to labour aboard – conditions distinct from either coastal or land-based employment in either India or Europe. Indian (and European) seamen on such vessels may have been “free labour” prior to boarding ship, but they were in many respects “unfree labour” while at sea. They were unable to change jobs, to vary the amount of labour extracted from them, to increase the compensation or necessities provided, or to quit – in short, to do much to improve their working conditions generally. They sailed for uncertainly long periods of time, confined to constricted, unhealthy spaces and limited diet, almost constantly facing the various dangers of the open sea under the virtually unavoidable, unrelenting, and unalterable hierarchic authority and often brutal physical discipline of European officers.

For a long time it seemed indisputable that collective actions of wage labourers in general and strikes in particular were a typically European and American phenomenon, closely linked to the Industrial Revolution and its consequences. Modern imperialism and the concomitant spread of industrialization and modernization brought these phenomena to the rest of the world. Some decades ago, however, an awareness arose that even before that famous watershed in history people knew how to organize a strike. Although this critical reappraisal of the supposed link between the Industrial Revolution and labour tactics led, albeit slowly, to a renewal of interest in the early labour history of Europe, its implications for the labour history of other continents have not yet received the attention they deserve. If we want to take that next step, the question could be formulated as follows: “If strikes could take place in pre-industrial Europe, why not also in other pre-industrial parts of the world?”

In 1770 a British official in Madras observed groups composed of men, women, and children who formed “a kind of travelling community of their own under a species of Government peculiar to themselves, with laws and customs which they follow and observe wherever they go”. These itinerant, coveted groups of earth and stone workers – “even courted by Princes” – circulated from worksite to worksite where they dug tanks (small reservoirs), ditches, and wells, and built roads and fortifications. They lived close to their worksites in “temporary hutts which they throw up for the occasion, and always chuse a spot distinct from any village, wandering from one place to another as is most convenient”.

In the political and economic context of imperialism, the enormous nineteenth-century expansion of shipping within and beyond the Indian Ocean facilitated the development of a new and increasingly transcontinental regime of labour circulation. The Indian subcontinent, it is well known, emerged as a seemingly inexhaustible source for plantation, railway, and port labour in British colonies across the globe. Moreover, the new and predominantly seaborne “circulatory regime” itself relied to a considerable extent on the labour power of South Asian workers, on the lascar, as the maritime counterpart of the “coolie” labourer was called.

The tea industry, from the 1840s onwards the earliest commercial enterprise established by private British capital in the Assam Valley, had been the major employer of wage labour there during colonial rule. It grew spectacularly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when tea production increased from 6,000,000 lb in 1872 to 75,000,000 lb in 1900 and the area under tea cultivation expanded from 27,000 acres to 204,000 acres. Employment of labour in the Assam Valley tea plantations increased from 107,847 in 1885 to 247,760 in 1900, and the industry continued to grow during the first half of the twentieth century. At the end of colonial rule the Assam Valley tea plantations employed nearly half a million labourers out of a labour population of more than three-quarters of a million, and more than 300,000 acres were under tea cultivation out of a total area of a million acres controlled by the tea companies.

On 25 June 1887, a curious incident was reported in the San Fernando Gazette of Trinidad in the British West Indies. At the end of the month of Ramadan that year, on the great festival day of Eid ul-Fitr, the Indian Muslims of Victoria village and of nearby estates congregated for the mass prayer in the Little Masjid. A fracas began unexpectedly when several Muslims objected to facing east in the direction of Mecca for the prayer. They argued instead that they should face west as they were wont to do in India. Theological debates soon gave way to a free exchange of blows between the votaries of eastward and westward prayer. Peace was restored after a considerable period, but with appeals to the eminent lawyers, Messrs Wharton and Farfan, to mediate in the dispute. Was the dispute simply due to ignorance as to the true direction of Mecca? Or was it a case of “following custom”, the much maligned traits that the Indian Muslims shared with their compatriots?

This essay will explore themes of proletarian masculinity (mardaangi) and humor (mazaak) arising from research amongst male migrant workers in a metalworking export factory in contemporary Delhi. The paper seeks to describe and critique metalworkers' vocabularies and practises of joking and horseplay, with particular reference to their homoerotic and heteroerotic imageries, as well as to their subtle auto-critiques. The paper attempts to view mazaak, despite its often vulgar, dualistic, and otherizing imageries, as an assertion of the erosic drive to affirm life, beyond the desire to merely survive, and contra the thanotic will to submit to the life-denying conditions of urban-proletarian existence. The paper probes the capacities and potentialities of certain styles of workers' mazaak, such as satirical and sarcastic humor (vyang), to critique exploitation, oppression, and associated dominant imageries of masculinity and work, and to suggest alternative visions and possibilities for proletarian inter-relations.

Studies of working people have long been framed by the concepts of “free” and “unfree” labour, a pair that distinguishes workers who are fully proletarianized from those who are not. Proletarians are working people without property, and therefore compelled to sell their capacities for money, but at the same time personally free to choose whom to sell their capacities to. Such (double-) free labour is contrasted with labour that is unfree, either because workers are compelled to offer their capacities to specific takers – under conditions established by those takers rather than by means of a labour market – or because these workers are not completely propertyless. Throughout the twentieth century, a dominant assumption among labour historians has been that the two concepts of free and unfree labour also reflect a basic trend in modern world history: the progressive replacement of unfree labour by free labour – or the progressive proletarianization of the world's workers.

The outbreak of World War II accentuated, and its conduct and immediate aftermath sustained, the mounting pressures on the jobber system and exposed its weaknesses more fully. These pressures upon the jobber emanated from three sources. First, the imperatives of the war economy facilitated the more intensive exploitation of labour. The jobber's traditional task, to reconcile workers to the demands of the mill-owners, became almost impossible to sustain. Indeed, it drew the full wrath of the workers upon the jobber.