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Labor in South Asia: Introduction

Mao’s counsel to “let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” applies to the articles that make up this special issue on South Asian labor. The authors are drawn from three continents. They include senior historians of labor and early-career researchers as well as doctoral students. Several of them write on issues of labor from neighboring disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and environmental sociology. In many respects, they reflect the pluralism that has overtaken the field of South Asian labor history in recent years as the focus on factory labor in the formal sector has given way to an engagement with workers in all their variety and diversity. For readers interested in global labor history, the issue contains two articles that examine the long-distance movement of South Asian laborers. In “Oceans without Borders: Dialectics of Transcolonial LaborMigration from the Indian to Atlantic Ocean World,” Subho Basu and Yoshina Hurgobin use transoceanic migration to rethink the agency of the indentured laborer from nineteenthcentury South Asia. Navigating between two poles that see these migrants as either victims of a “new system of slavery” or as free agents choosing migration as a path to betterment, they argue that while migrant workers “chose” to move, they did so under the heavy constraints imposed by global colonial capitalism. Exploiting disjunctures and contradictions in the global order, and armed with their own networks of information, laborers moved across the world from the Indian subcontinent to survive under harsh economic conditions. This migration formed part of a larger labor resistance to the authority of capital for Basu and Hurgobin. Radhika Singha, in “The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France: Experiences and Representations,” returns to a topic she has explored in previous writings: Indian laborers serving as support for the military effort during the First World War. In her earlier work she examined the Indian Labour Corps from the perspective of recruitment in British India. Here she turns to the experiences of these men after their arrival in France. In powerful and moving language, Singha recounts the racism and harsh conditions under which the Indians operated and the efforts of workers to resist and redefine the terms of their service. For the politically inclined, in “Textile Labour Association and Dadigiri: Power and Politics in the Working-Class Neighborhoods of Ahmedabad,” Rukmini Barua explores the role of political intermediaries, especially the dada, the local tough, and the pratinidhi, the labor union representative, in the lives of textile workers between the 1920s and the 1960s. There is renewed interest in the political dimension of working-class life in South Asia, and Barua brings into focus previously neglected but critical figures.