Labour history seminar - Strike-breaking or the Refusal of Subalternity? The Tatanagar Foundry strike of 1939
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
Weekly Seminar
3.00 pm on Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building
Strike-breaking or the Refusal of Subalternity?
An essay on ethnicity, class and gender in Chota Nagpur
Dilip Simeon
Formerly at University of Delhi
Late in August 1939, there took place a strike in a small
iron foundry in Jamshedpur, the premiere steel city of colonial India. Its
owners were a local Bengali businessman and a Marwari entrepreneur from
Calcutta. The workforce consisted of a little over two thousand five hundred
workers, most of them Adivasis and
Oriyas, with a few hundred workers from north Bihar and the Gangetic plain. A
large proportion - possibly up to 40 percent, were women. The management was
known for being arbitrary, even by the notoriously low standards of the
capitalists of this young company town. Their workers were low paid, with
virtually no security - at the beginning of the year hundreds of hands had been
discharged. The President of their union was the charismatic Congressman Abdul
Bari, who was also the Deputy Speaker of the Bihar Legislative Assembly.
Trouble at the workplace had resulted in spontaneous demonstrations, as was not
uncommon in the area in those times. In the ensuing developments the management
used their links with the emerging leader of the Adibasi Mahasabha, Jaipal
Singh and the Oriya Congressman Nilkantha Das to convince the bulk of their
workers to remain at work. They were abetted by Bari's chief rival in
Jamshedpur, Maneck Homi, who had led a famous general strike in TISCO in
1928.
By November the strike had ended and historic developments such as
the outbreak of world war, the resignation of provincial Congress ministries
nation-wide and the promulgation of emergency regulations in industrial areas,
had pushed the plight of the foundry workers into the background of local politics. Nevertheless, echoes of that event resounded for
some time; in political overtures to Jaipal Singh by the ex-President of the
Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose; in the content of Jaipal Singh's speech
welcoming Bose to Chota Nagpur; and in the stance of the administration towards
union leaders.
A close examination of the strike and its aftermath presents
interesting questions concerning the delineation of historical episodes and the
relative stress to be placed upon their determining elements. Was the strike a
case of ethnic identities being used by the management to sabotage
working-class unity? Why did prominent local personages such as Bari, Homi, and
Jaipal Singh get involved? Why did workers respond to blatant instigation to
strikebreaking, and did they have their own agenda? What role did gender issues
assume? What was the attitude of the bureaucracy and what was the political
significance of the affair?
This essay attempts to unravel the layers of
meaning that lie beneath the surface of a long-forgotten incident. The speaker
argues that it be treated as the first agitational expression of Adivasi sentiment
in a working class movement, fuelled in part by long-standing resentment
amongst tribal women about the misbehavior of up-country males. Such an
interpretation would buttress argument about the origins of the Adivasi estate,
because the history of industrialisation and the labour movement in Chota
Nagpur is interwoven with ethnic and gender issues. The speaker will begin with
the composition of the workforce during the thirties and a summary history of
the labour movement in Singhbhum and then use juxtapositions from other locales
in the area to highlight the importance of the Tatanagar Foundry strike.
All are welcome.
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