Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories

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.