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Session #4: Saturday, 10 January, 11.30 - 13.15 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Prabhu Mohapatra, Department of History and Kamala Sankaran, Law Faculty, University of Delhi (prabhuayan@gmail.com/kamala.sankaran@gmail.com)
Chair/discussant: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Chairman, Indian Council of Historical Research (chairmanichr@gmail.com)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This panel aims to explore the conception of a 'worker' who is the object of legal protection. How have the state and law imagined the 'worker'; what have been the shifts and continuity in the law; why have certain categories of work and livelihoods been privileged over others, and in what manner; what are the implications of legal protection/ exclusion; and what are the costs the 'worker' and organizations/collectivities have to bear for inclusion in such legal coverage.
The paper explores the ways in which the worker was imagined as a social category and as an object of regulation in colonial legislation. Contrary to the commonly held idea that workers emerge as objects of welfare and thus of state policy only in the early 20th century I argue that Colonial state policy had afar earlier and wider impact in shaping labour relations in India. What was interesting was the coexistence of contradictory attitudes and conflicting definitions of the worker within the same policy discourse. The paper explores the theme in three broad temporal phases early Colonial (1780-1860), high Colonial (1860-1920) and late Colonial (1920-1947) period demonstrating transformations and continuities in the way the worker was imagined as an object of state policy. The paper will also show significant spill over of the process well into the post colonial period.
This paper explores the practices of factory regulation in India between the 1870s and the 1890s, with the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891, the tussles around them, and the figure(s) of work, industrial relations and worker agency that were disclosed and enabled by these tussles. The question of workers' entitlements was, I argue, simultaneously marginal and central to the debates around factory legislation and the operations of factory inspectors in the 1880s. Factory law simultaneously regulated large numbers of people out of employment, crystallized a (shaky) regime of normative industrial relations, and also provided grounds for the articulation of industrial tensions and worker entitlements that disturbed this regime. My paper seeks to demonstrate the simultaneity of these operations.
Daily wage labour markets (DLMs) are designated market-squares in cities where unemployed migrant labourers gather every day, to be picked up by potential employers for the day’s work and pay. A common feature in Indian cities - DLMs are characterized by high risks and vulnerabilities of migrant labourers. Some of their vulnerabilities are associated with their economic sustenance: availability of jobs, security over long term, access to and acceptability in appropriate networks that ensure work, etc. Other vulnerabilities are associated with their identity as a legal citizen of the city. Though they are not considered illegal immigrants, the workers encounter the state in myriad ways in their everyday lives as temporary, semi-permanent or permanent migrant workers. These encounters require them to prove their legality on a regular basis, which begins right from the location where they stand in crowds for jobs - usually at traffic junction. This extends till the point they gain access to basic services like water, sanitation, electricity and institutions like public distribution systems. This paper is concerned with the survival strategies of migrant labourers of DLMs in encountering the state and the law. In surviving through these encounters, the migrant workers adopt variety of political strategies. They participate in key networks and forge a range of political alliances. This paper builds upon the everyday practices of negotiating with the state by the DLM labourers and draws lessons for understanding the state and law in India. In the process, I critically engage with the actual encounters and imagined constructions of the state and the law from the perspective of the DLM labourers.
The paper draws upon an ethnographic study of the DLMs in the coastal city of Visakhaptanam in Andhra Pradesh. My approach is inspired by the feminist theoretical works that stress the situatedness of knowledge production and engages with the state and the law through the lens of labourers’ narratives of their own survival strategies. I further draw upon the traditions of ethnographic methods to approach the state and law in the conceptual intersection of the state and the society – along the works of postcolonial theorists like Timothy Mitchell and Akhil Gupta. The paper is organized into three major sections. In the first section, I discuss the specific characteristics of DLMs: the transboundary (rural-urban) expansion of coping strategies, temporary nature of migration, networks, complex patron-client relationships and group dynamics within the DLM spaces, and, their weak linkages with formal state institutions. I ague that the DLMs cannot be bundled together within the broader categories informal sector and require deeper and critical understanding of the spatiality of power relations, positionalities and political strategies. In the second section, I discuss my ethnographic study of DLMs in the Visakhapatnam city. In the third and final section, I take up particular narratives and life histories of labourers to draw implications for understanding the state and the notions of legality in India.