Public order and the fear of the ‘outsider’: porosity of labour politics in late colonial India

ABSTRACT

The article discusses a militant worker strike at the Bata shoe factory in Calcutta in the year 1938. The strike owed to the communist mobilisation of the workers in the city and demanded various rights from the factory management including non-interference in their lives outside the factory. The discussion will show that the late colonial labour politics in Calcutta was dynamic and sought political solidarities with the broader anti-colonial mobilisation in the city. As a result, the factory management and the colonial administration could not sustain workers’ harassment based on an ‘insider-outsider dichotomy’ that attempted to segregate workers’ issues inside the factory from the larger politics outside it.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour politics
• colonial India
• section 144 CrPC
• Bata factory
• public order
• porosity
• insider-outsider
• workers militancy

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Dr Rajarshi Dasgupta (Assistant Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University), Dr Markus Daechsel (Reader, Royal Holloway, University of London), Prof Lawrence Liang (Professor, Ambedkar University Delhi) and Ms Sana Khan (UNESCO MGIEP) for their comments on the initial drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the Editor and the two anonymous reviewers of Labor History for their critical comments and encouraging suggestions on improving the manuscript. The flaws in the article are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Home Poll. 7/20/37, Notification by the Government of Bengal, Political Department, No. 1110-P.S., Calcutta, 1 March 1935. In 1935, thirteen workers organisations were banned because the colonial authority perceived them as a major threat to maintenance of law and order. These banned organisations were diverse sand comprised of communist parties, various workers and peasants’ organisations, Jute Mill workers union, railway workers union, and youth and student organisations organised on communist lines. The scope of communist mobilisation is evident from the proliferation of such organisations. After the provincial elections of 1937, such mobilisation only further intensified. Also see, Das (2011).

2. Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code allowed preventive detention, the imposition of curfews, and other forms of pre-emptive legal action and was invoked mainly to deal with ‘unlawful’ assemblies, riotous mobs, and promulgated to prohibit access to various public or industrial spaces. It fell into a wider category of laws designed to maintain ‘public peace and tranquillity’; and could prohibit the use of public space for a person or a group. It dealt with ‘Power to issue order in urgent cases of nuisance or apprehended danger’. A District Magistrate or any designated magistrate empowered by a state government could serve orders directing any person to abstain from a certain act and where its invocation is likely to prevent obstruction, annoyance or injury to any person lawfully employed, or posed danger to human life, health or safety, or is a disturbance to public peace and tranquillity.

3. According to the Bata Company’s website, it was incorporated as Bata Shoe Company Private Limited in 1931. It was set up initially as a small operation in Konnagar (near Calcutta) in 1932 and in January 1934, the foundation stone for the first building of Bata’s operation was laid. A town ship around the factory was developed which was popularly known as Batanagar. It was a multinational operation then and continues to be present in around 39 countries today. See https://www.bata.in/bataindia/sc-179_cat-42/about-us.html, accessed on 29 May 2020.

4. The influence of Mrinal Kanti Bose as a trade unionist is evident in Park (1949).

5. Subho Basu is referring to scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty understands questions of culture and community by critiques which reduce culture to economic determinants, yet such an approach reifies culture by seeing identities in terms of fixed cultural meanings. Chakarbarty sets out to capture the contrariness of workers’ lives, their existence in class and non-class ways, but in the process, he privileges one kind of identity over another.

Additional information

Funding

The author has no funding to declare.

Notes on contributors

Javed Iqbal Wani

Javed Iqbal Wani is Assistant Professor at the School of Law, Governance, & Citizenship at Ambedkar University Delhi. He is interested in History(ies), Culture(s) & Politics of South Asia, particularly India. His research focuses on issues of ‘law making’ and law enforcing.’