The 'working class' in a pre-capitalist culture : a study of the jute workers of Calcutta, 1890-1940

Abstract

This thesis examines the problems of protest, solidarity, organization and class consciousness in the history of the jute mill workers of Calcutta in the period 189Q to 1940. The jute workers were a very large labour force, numbering well over 250,000 in the years mentioned, who were involved in several strikes and other militant acts of protest against their employers. Yet they never formed strong and enduring trade unions and their sense of class-solidarity remained remarkably fragile, often giving way to internecine conflicts of religion or ethnicity. It is argued here that none of these problems can be reduced to purely political, technical or economic explanations. In particular,the thests examines the relationships of power and authority that the workers were involved in both inside and outside the jute mills. The consciousness of the Calcutta jute workers is shown here to be of a pre-bourgeois nature and this, it is contended, presents special problems in the development of labourcapital relationship or of class consciousness among the workers in the Calcutta jute industry. The history of this group of industrial labourers thus provides grounds for reflection on Marx's theory of the working class which takes a hegemonic bourgeois culture for granted.