Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T09:20:43.333Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Bonded to Industrial Labour: Precarity, Maoism, and ethnicity in a modern industrial factory in western Nepal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2018

MICHAEL PETER HOFFMANN
MICHAEL PETER HOFFMANN*
Affiliation:
Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies (ZIRS), Martin Luther University Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article focuses on how people who formerly worked as bonded labourers adapt to the new realities of an insecure capitalist labour market. It examines how the past shapes the uncertain labour situation of the present, including resistance. The article reflects on the current experiences of precarious labour at industrial sites in western Nepal. It describes how former bonded labourers and their descendants have begun working as contract workers in a modern industrial food-processing factory, with the help of contractors related to them by kin. The article further shows that one of the defining features of their new life as contract labourers is its chronic precariousness. Undisguised forms of confrontation, such as open disregard for management instructions, are also part of their new reality in the labour market. Contract labourers are often strongly assertive in the face of managerial authority, and this assertiveness has been shaped largely by either past experiences or memories of bonded labour. The article contributes to debates about bonded labour and its transformations in South Asia. It also offers a reflection on the limited impact of the Nepali Maoist Revolution on precarious labour and on the ethnic dimensions of this segment of Nepali society. Finally, it contributes to discussions about industrialization and Adivasi communities in South Asia and beyond.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1917 - 1937
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Breman, Jan. 1996. Footloose Labour: Working in India's informal economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chhetri, R. B. 2005. The plight of the Tharu kamaiyas in Nepal: A review of the social, economic and political facets. Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology 9, pp. 22–46.Google Scholar
De Neve, Geert. 1999. Asking for and giving baki: Neo-bondage, or the interplay of bondage and resistance in the Tamil Nadu power-loom industry. Contributions to Indian Sociology 33 (1-2), pp. 379–406.Google Scholar
Engelshoven, Miranda. 1999. Diamond and Patels: A report on the diamond industry in Surat. Contributions to Indian Sociology 33 (1-2), pp. 353–377.Google Scholar
Frantz, Elizabeth. 2013. Jordan's unfree workforce: State-sponsored bonded labour in the Arab region. Journal of Development Studies 49 (8), pp. 1072–1087.Google Scholar
Fujikura, Tatsuro. 2001. Emancipation of kamaiyas: Development, social movement, and youth activism in post-Jana Andolan Nepal. Himalayan Research Bulletin XXI, pp. 29–35.Google Scholar
Fujikura, Tatsuro. 2003. The role of collective imagination in the Maoist conflict in Nepal. Himalaya XXIII, pp. 21–30.Google Scholar
Fujikura, Tatsuro. 2007. The bonded agricultural labourers’ freedom movement in western Nepal. In Ishii, H., Gellner, D. and Nawa, K. (eds) Political and Social Transformations in North India and Nepal, Volume 2. New Delhi: Manohar Books, pp. 319–359.Google Scholar
Gardener, Andrew. 2010. City of Strangers: Gulf migration and the Indian community in Bahrain. Cornell: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gosh, Kaushik. 1982. A market for aboriginality: Primitivism and race classification in the indentured labor market of colonial India. Subaltern Studies 10, pp. 8–48.Google Scholar
Guneratne, Arun. 2002. Many Tongues, One People: The making of Tharu identity in Nepal. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Michael Peter. 2014a. A symbiotic coexistence: Nepal's Maoist movement and labour unions in an urban municipality in post-conflict far-western Tarai. Journal of South Asian Development December 9, pp. 213–234.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Michael Peter. 2014b. Red salute at work: Brick factory work in postconflict Kailali, western Nepal. Focaal 70, pp. 67–80.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Michael Peter. 2015. In the shadows of the Maoist Revolution: On the role of the ‘People's War’ in facilitating the occupation of symbolic space in western Nepal. Critique of Anthropology 35 (4), pp. 389–406.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Michael Peter. 2017. From casual to permanent work: Maoist Unionists and the regularization of contract labour in industries in Western Nepal. In Hann, C. and Parry, J. (eds) Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, class, and the neoliberal subject. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Michael Peter. 2018. The Partial Revolution: Labour, social movements and the invisible hand of Mao in western Nepal. New York: Berghahn Publications.Google Scholar
Kapadia, Karin. 1995. The profitability of bonded labour: The gem‐cutting industry in rural South India. The Journal of Peasant Studies 22 (3), pp. 446–483.Google Scholar
Lüdtke, Alf. 1993. Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitserfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus. Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag.Google Scholar
Maycock, Matthew. 2015. Hegemonic at home and subaltern abroad: Kamaiya masculinities and changing mobility in Nepal. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24 (6), pp. 812–822.Google Scholar
Mohapatra, Prabhu Prasad. 1985. Coolies and colliers: A study of the agrarian context of labour migration from Chotanagpur, 1880–1920. Studies in History 1 (2), pp. 247–303.Google Scholar
Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating Development. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Nash, June. 1979. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat us: Dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. New York: Colombia University Press.Google Scholar
Padel, Felix and Das, Samarendra. 2010. Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the aluminium cartel. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar
Parry, Jonathan. 2014. Sex, bricks and mortar: Constructing class in a central Indian steel town. Modern Asian Studies 48 (5), pp. 1242–1275.Google Scholar
Rankin, K. 1999. The predicament of labor: Kamaiya practices and the ideology of freedom. In Skar, H. (ed.) Nepal: Tharu and Tarai neighbors. Kathmandu: Biblioteca Himalayica, pp. 27–45.Google Scholar
Shah, Alpa. 2006. The labour of love: Seasonal migration from Jharkhand to the brick kilns of other states in India. Contributions to Indian Sociology 40 (1), pp. 91–118.Google Scholar
Shah, Alpa. 2007. Keeping the state away: Democracy, politics and imaginations of the state in India's Jharkhand. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1), pp. 129–145.Google Scholar
Shah, Alpa. 2010. In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous politics, environmentalism and insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Shah, Alpa. 2011. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Maoist movement in Jharkhand, India. Modern Asian Studies 45 (5), pp. 1095–1117.Google Scholar
Shakya, Malika. 2007. Our hymns are different but our gods are the same: Religious rituals in modern garment factories in Nepal. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 31, pp. 67–81.Google Scholar
Shakya, Malika. 2015. Marwari traders between Hindu neoliberalism and democratic socialism in Nepal. In Hart, Keith and Sharp, John (eds) People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the global South. Berghahn Human Economy Series. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 190–206.Google Scholar
Steinmüller, Hans. 2010. Communities of complicity: Notes on state formation and local sociality in rural China. American Ethnologist 37 (3), pp. 539–549.Google Scholar
Strümpell, Christian. 2014. The making and unmaking of an Adivasi working class in western Orissa. In Shah, A. and Bates, C. (eds) Savage Attack. Adivasi insurgency in India. Delhi: Social Science Press, pp. 200–227.Google Scholar
Subramanian, Dilip. 2009. Work and autonomy in the assembly of printed circuit boards: An ethnographic account. Contributions to Indian Sociology 43 (2), pp. 183–213.Google Scholar