Strike-breaking or the Refusal of Subalternity? Ethnicity, Class & Gender in Chota Nagpur: The Tatanagar Foundry Strike of 1939
NB: This paper was first presented to the Association of Indian Labour Historians conference in Delhi,
March 2000. It refers to material presented in my book, The Politics of
Labour Under Late Colonialism: Workers, Trade Unions and the State in Chota
Nagpur, 1928-1939. It was also presented to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Weekly Seminar in June 2015 and to the ADRI conference in Patna in April 2017. The paper deals with a little-known event that was subsumed within much larger historical events, yet contains a story of great poignancy. This story relates to the working class of Jharkhand, especially the experiences of labouring women. I am obliged to the VV Giri National Labour Institute for publishing it. The PDF may be read here: DS
Strike-breaking or
the Refusal of Subalternity?
An essay on
ethnicity, class and gender in Chota Nagpur
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?
see also
