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Chapter 3
OF CONDITIONS AND CULTURE
When the Government of India appointed a committee in 1946 to enquire into the conditions of the jute mill workers of Calcutta, the committee found that there was 'very little literature available' in regard to the subject.^ These conditions, in other words, had not been investigated before with any degree of thoroughness. Today, this creates a special problem for the historian, for any projected history of the conditions of this working class is soon bedevilled by the problem of paucity of sources. True, some of this scarcity of documents can be explained by the characteristics of the Bengali intelligentsia who s e l d o m , if ever, produced social investigators like, for instance, Henry Mayhew. Some of it may also be explained by the non-literate nature of the working c l a s s . A problem however still remains. What is puzzling is the relative poverty of the information in the documents of the state - especially documents that needed the co-operation of employers, the factory inspectors' reports, for example - which
compare rather b a d l y , s a y , with the apparent richness of similar English documents that M a r x , for o n e , put to such effective use in the first volume of Capital.
To find a way out of this impasse, \i/e shall treat the problem of 'paucity of sources' as constituting in itself an important problem in the very history we are trying to understand. We will therefore read the available documents on jute workers' conditions for both what they say and their 'silences'. We will look at the conditions of production of these documents and in this way we hope to be able to make their
'silences' speak. For, as we argue below on the basis of our reading of Marx, an attempt to analyze these silences invariably takes us into questions of culture and demonstrates a point central to our overall argument: that a theoretical understanding of the working class needs to go beyond the political-economic and incorporate the cultural.
The discussion in the first volume of Marx's Cap-LtaJi raises the possibility of a relationship between the day-to-day running of
capitalism and the production of a body of knowledge about working- class conditions. Marx in fact presents us with the elements of a possible theoretical approach to the problem. Even at the risk of
appearing to digress, it may be worthwhile to go over that theoretical ground once again, as the rest of this chapter will use that discussion as its own framework. Perhaps it should also be emphasized that what we are borrowing here from Marx is essentially an oAgamtnt. Marx used the English case to illustrate his ideas but the specifics of English
history do not concern us here. We are not reading Marx as a historian cf England and this is not an exercise in conrparative history.
As is well known, Marx used the documents of the English state for the wealth of detail they usually offered on the living and working conditions of the English proletariat. But Marx also noted in the
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process that the English state's interest in closely monitoring the conditions of labour had an extremely usefu] role to play in the development of English capitalism. 'This industrial revolution which takes place spontaneously', wrote Marx, 'is artificially helped on by the extension of the Factory Acts to all industries in which women, young persons and children are employed'.^ This the Acts achieved in two important ways. First, they sought to make 'the conditions of competition' between different factories uniform: Marx referred in his discussion of the Factory Acts to the 'cry of the capitalists for
equality in the conditions of competition, i.e. for equal restraint on all exploitation of labour'. Secondly, by regulating 'the working day as regards its length, pauses, beginning and end' - that is, by making
'the saving of time a necessity' - they 'forced into existence' more developed and complex machinery and hence, by implication, a more efficient working class.^
For the Factory Acts to secure these aims, however, the state needed to ensure that the knowledge generated by the administration of the Acts was not influenced by the narrower considerations of any
particular industrialist. Individual masters, it is true, were often in 'fanatical opposition' to the Acts. But the very fact that Marx derived a lot of his details of the 'cruelties' of early capitalism directly from factory inspectors' reports speaks of the 'political will' that the English state was capable of mustering, the will that allowed it to distance itself from particular capitalists and yet serve English capitalism in general."*
M a r x ' s d i s c u s s i o n c l a r i f i e s some of the c o n d i t i o n s for this s u c c e s s , The 'political w i l l ' of the E n g l i s h state did not fall from the s k i e s . W h i l e Marx did see the Factory A c t s as 'that first and m e a g r e c o n c e s s i o n wrung from c a p i t a l ' by the g o v e r n m e n t and the working p e o p l e , he also noted that i m p o r t a n t s e c t i o n s of English i n d u s t r i a l i s t s w e r e in fact t h e m s e l v e s in favour of the Factory A c t s , their h u m a n i s t i c i m p u l s e s often s p u r r e d on by the forces of c o m p e t i t i o n . Competition w a s the key to the demand for 'egual r e s t r a i n t on all exploitation of l a b o u r ' .
' M e s s r s . Cooksley of B r i s t o l , nail and c h a i n , & c . , m a n u f a c t u r e r s ' , Marx n o t e d , ' ^ p o n t a m o L U l y introduced the regulations of the Factory Act into their b u s i n e s s ' (emphasis a d d e d ) . The Children's E m p l o y m e n t C o m m i s s i o n of the 1860s e x p l a i n e d w h y : '"As the old irregular system p r e v a i l s in n e i g h b o u r i n g w o r k s , the M e s s r s . Cooksley are subject to the d i s a d v a n t a g e of having their b o y s enticed to continue their labour e l s e w h e r e after 6 p . m . " ' . Marx also gave the instance of one 'Mr. 3. S i m p s o n (paper box and bag m a k e r , London,'' who told the C o m m i s s i o n that 'he would sign any p e t i t i o n for it [legislative i n t e r f e r e n c e ]
...'. S u m m a r i z i n g such c a s e s , the Commission said:
It would be u n j u s t to the larger e m p l o y e r s that their f a c t o r i e s should be placed under r e g u l a t i o n , w h i l e the h o u r s of labour in the smaller places in their own b r a n c h of b u s i n e s s were under no legislative r e s t r i c t i o n ... F u r t h e r , a stimulus would be given to the m u l t i p l i c a t i o n of the smaller places of w o r k , which are a l m o s t invariably the least favourable to the h e a l t h , c o m f o r t , e d u c a t i o n , and general
i m p r o v e m e n t of p e o p l e . ^
Even if c o m p e t i t i o n in the economy is regarded as i n s t r u m e n t a l to the a u t o n o m y of the E n g l i s h s t a t e , one still has to e x p l a i n why the f a c t o r i e s , in the first p l a c e , p r o d u c e d the necessary d o c u m e n t s w i t h o u t
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the state having to do much policing. Marx's answer lies in his discussion of the industrial discipline that the capitalist system of manufacture involved. In the process of 'disciplining' the labour force, the
interests of individual capitalists and those of the state meshed, since, in England, the pressure towards discipline arose both from u/ithin and from without the factory. If one effect of the factory
legislation was to produce 'uniformity, regularity, order and economy', within 'each individual workshop',^ these were also produced internally, according to Marx, by the capitalist division of labour: 'continuity, uniformity, regularity, order are also the words that Marx used to describe discipline.^
Discipline, in Marx's discussion, had two components. It entailed a 'technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour'; hence the need for training, education, etc. Secondly, it made supervision - 'the labour of overlooking' - an
integral part of capitalist relations of production. The supervisor or the foreman was the executor of the 'private legislation' of capital, the 'factory code in which capital formulates ... his autocracy over his workpeople'. The supervisor thus embodied the authority of capital, and documents representing factory rules and legislation - e.g. attendance registers, finebooks, timesheets - became both symbols and instruments of his authority. Supervision, so crucial to the working of capitalist authority, was thus based on documents and produced documents in turn. In Marx's words:
The place of the slave-driver's lash is taken by the overlooker's book of penalties. All punishments [in capitalist production relations] natuAolly resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages.®
(emphasis added;
The every-day functioning of the capitalist factory, therefore, produced documents, hence knowledge, about working-class conditions. This was so because capitalist relations of production employed a system of supervision - another name for surveillance - that, in the language of Michel Foucault, 'insidiously objectifies those on whom it applied'.^ It was thus in the nature of capitalist authority that it operated by forming 'a body of knowledge' about its subjects. In this it was different from, say, pre-capitalist domination which worked more by deploying 'the ostentatious signs of sovereignty' and could do without a detailed knowledge of the dominated.^®
In pursuing Marx's ideas on the relationship between industrial discipline and the documentation of the conditions of workers, we thus end up with the notion of 'authority'. Marx was quite clear that the supervisor represented the disciplinary authority of capital over
labour; but 'authority', in Marx's hands, was never a one-sided affair. Quite early in his discussion on capital, Marx wrote: 'A ... cannot be "your majesty" to 8, unless at the same time majesty in B's eyes assumes the bodily form of A Or a few pages later:
Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex-categories, form a very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is a king.^^
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A particular form of authority or a system of power then implies a particular cultural formation producing and supporting it. As
discussed in Chapter 1, the labourer of Marx's assumption belonged to a culture characterized by the 'formal equality' and the 'formal freedom' of the 'contract', in this case the contract of the wage. The disciplinary power of capital embodied these very notions. If our exposition of Marx's ideas is correct then it would mean that such power was rooted as much in the factory codes that capital legislated out of its own needs as in the culture of the working man over whom the authority was exercised. The point seems important in a
further respect. By assuming a particular kind of culture on the part of the worker, Marx assigns the working class a place? an active presence, in the whole process of disciplining by supervision and record-
keeping. And this he does, not just for moments of protest when the working class is obviously active and shows its will, but even when it does not protest and is seemingly a passive object of documentation and knowledge.
Marx's argument can thus be used in two ways. It can be used as a measure of how different capitalism in colonial Bengal was from the one described by him. There is also another question he helps us raise. The Calcutta jute mill workers, being mostly migrant peasants from Bihar and U.P,, did not have a culture characterized by any ingrained notion of 'human equality' and were thus very unlike the workers of Marx's assumption. Their's was largely a pre-capitalist, inegalitarian culture marked by strong primordial loyalties of community, language, religion, caste and kinship. ^^ Since, in Marx's argument, the question of documentation of conditions of work within a factory was linked to
the problem of 'disciplinary authority', and that in turn was linked to the question of vi/orking-class culture, the cultural specificities of the Calcutta working class raise a whole series of problems. Were relations of production within a Calcutta jute mill still characterized (in spite of differences in working-class culture) by the disciplinary authority that Marx described? The answer would appear to be in the negative. What then was the nature of 'supervision' in a Calcutta jute mill? Did it behave like a huge apparatus documenting the conditions of labour? Did it have a bearing on the problem that a historian of the working class faces today: paucity of 'sources'?
The following sections will pursue these questions. They have two objectives. They aspire to draw a picture, however incomplete, of the conditions of the jute mill workers of Calcutta in the period mentioned. At the same time, they seek to account for the gaps in our
knowledge and argue that the gaps are as revealing of working class conditions as any direct reference to them. They provide therefore a history both of our knowledge and of our ignorance. And since knowledge of labour conditions ultimately relate to the problem of discipline and authority within the factory, the culture of the workers must occupy a special place in the history of such knowledge.
II
Government interest in working-class conditions in India is of relatively recent origin. It was only after the end of the First World War that the conditions of Indian workers became an object of
knowledge for the Government of India. A Labour Bureau was set up in May 1920 'to collect all available information on labour conditions in
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India, and classify and tabulate it'.^'' One important factor contributing to this development was the establishment of the International Labour Office (I.L.O.) immediately after the war. The Indian government had been an 'active participant' in the process of the formation of the
I.L.O. and was pledged to its goals.^^ A second important factor was one internal to the Indian political scene. The conclusion of the war and the subsequent period of nationalist agitation had seen trade unions mushroom all over the country on a scale previously unknown. This was accompanied by a countrywide outburst of labour unrest. With the
Russian revolution still fresh in its memory, the Government of India's reaction to these developments was coloured by its fear of Bolshevism.^^
'Labour is growing more conscious of its own wants and power', the Government warned its provincial heads in 1919, '[and] it is showing signs of a capacity for organization'.^^ By its militancy, therefore, labour was drawing upon itself the gaze of the Government.
What distinguished this new outlook on labour from the traditional law-and-order view of the state was a desire to reform the conditions of labour and thus change the nature of the workforce. In an impressive range of labour legislation considered (and partly enacted) in the 'twenties and afterwards, the Government of India sought to take a direct role in structuring the situation of the working classes. The amended Factories Act (1922), the Workmen's Compensation Act (1923), the Trade Unions Act (1926), the Trade Disputes Act (1928), the
Maternity Benefits Bill (1929), the Payment of Wages Act (1933), etc.
were all aimed at creating a working class different from the traditionally held image of the industrial labour force in India, The worker was
some official help in organizing into trade unions (naturally, of a