Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten HistoriesAnthem Press, 2005 - 359 pages Set against today's context of globalization and the decline of large-scale industry, Lost Worlds is a detailed exploration of the world of labour in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia. Using a wide range of oral and archival sources as well as popular literature, Chitra Joshi reconstructs working class lives, exploring their everyday worlds at the workplace and within community life, as well as their moments of conflict and struggle. Revising perceptions of workers' culture as primitive, and of workers as passive objects of managerial strategy, Joshi examines how workers actively reinterpreted their cultural past, and actively negotiated the ways in which they worked. The book considers the ways in which migrant workers moved between urban and rural environments, struggled to retain their pasts, adapted to new life in the industrial city, and developed alternative methods of family and household existence. In demonstrating the ways in which community and religious ties were redefined within the context of neighbourhoods and workplaces and exploring workers' worlds beyond the community, Joshi also considers workers' perceptions of nationhood and how nationalist politics impacted on their precarious existences. Returning to the present, she reflects in her concluding pages on the meanings and experiences of contemporary worklessness. In its analysis of the complex relationship between past and present, memory and history, culture and practice, community and nation, everyday life and moments of upheaval, this book represents a very significant academic contribution to labour history in South Asia. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 33
Page 114
... settlements the lives of workers were more closely regulated . The Allenganj settlement , for instance , was a walled settlement , with Company guards inspecting all incoming strangers . Despite these restrictions some workers managed ...
... settlements the lives of workers were more closely regulated . The Allenganj settlement , for instance , was a walled settlement , with Company guards inspecting all incoming strangers . Despite these restrictions some workers managed ...
Page 126
... settlement had only been recently started and in his [ the medical officer's ] opinion these cases came in to begin ... settlement suffer- ing from plague ; in others they were persons who neglected ordinary precau- tions by living ...
... settlement had only been recently started and in his [ the medical officer's ] opinion these cases came in to begin ... settlement suffer- ing from plague ; in others they were persons who neglected ordinary precau- tions by living ...
Page 211
... settlement on 9 August added to the militancy of the strikers . The Employers ' Association agreed to recognise the KMS , withdraw cases against workers , and appoint an inquiry committee to investigate workers ' grievances . The ...
... settlement on 9 August added to the militancy of the strikers . The Employers ' Association agreed to recognise the KMS , withdraw cases against workers , and appoint an inquiry committee to investigate workers ' grievances . The ...
Contents
Labour and Its Historiography | 1 |
Part I | 13 |
The Village and the City 62 229 | 62 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
absenteeism Allahabad areas Arya Arya Samaj Awadh bastis bazaar Bombay Bundle 110 UPSA cantonment Cawnpore Cawnpore Cotton Mills cent Chakr Chamars Colonial committee communist Congress context coolie Cooper Allen Cotton Mills culture dada Dalit decline Delhi discourse earnings Elgin Mills employed employers European factory File Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi goondas Gwaltoli hata Hindu History households identity IFLC India industrial instance Julahas Jute Kanpur Cotton Mills Kanpur district Kanpur Mazdur KLIC Progs Koris Kureel large number leaders leather living lower castes Lucknow managerial Mazdur Andolan Mazdur Sabha migrants mistris mohalla movement Muir Mills municipal Murari Lal Muslim nation nationalist official organisation P.C. Joshi Papers NMML period picketers Pioneer police politics Prasad Pratap Ramcharan Ranajit Das riots settlement Shriram social strategies strike strikers Swadeshi trade union UICC UICC Report Vidyarthi village wages weavers weaving women Woollen Mills workers workforce Yalland