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Book Review: Sanjukta Das Gupta and Raj Sekhar Basu, eds, Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India.

Indian Historical Review, 40, 1 (2013): 145–179 A crucial question remains to be answered. Was the role Upadhyay attributes to ‘colonialism’ in the creation of the ‘dual labour regime’ as decisive as he supposes? Can we conclude that the ‘creation’ had more complex origins, of which ‘colonialism’, that is, direct intervention by the State, was just one? Whatever the Colonial State’s attitude to ‘work and Indian social hierarchy’, the intervention had a peripheral role either in the entrenchment of the old coercive system or in undermining it. Claudio Costa Pinheiro’s highly perceptive study, ‘Blurred Boundaries: Slavery, Unfree Labour and the Subsumption of Multiple Social and Labour Identities in India’ makes a significant methodological point. Historians, he argues, are not often careful about ‘how words, terms and expressions have directly affected the composition of historiographic discourse’ (pp. 188–89). A citation from Marc Bloch clarifies his point. ‘To the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs’. Linguistics would help them in properly understanding social institutions. They can salvage ‘through the history of words the history of social realities which they reflect’ (p. 189). He briefly considers, as illustration, ‘certain aspects of labour forms in India and Portuguese colonies, comparatively, and especially those terms relating to forced labour’. The essays reviewed above belong to two distinct types: labour relations in ‘capitalist’ industry and other labour relations wholly unconnected with industrial organisation. They are distinct. Their historical origins are different. Their functions are different. So too is the will and strategy of labourers to modify their relations with their employers. For instance, labour in public works (such as road construction) and in the Andamans Penal Colony, and the labour of agrestic serfs (such as the Musahars of Middle Gangetic Plains) were clearly distinguishable from industrial labour, in all these respects. The only thing common thing in the two types of labour is that they are all engaged in a labour process. A relevant question therefore is the appropriateness of mixing up the studies of these two distinct types.