hut or brought to the fields, he has now to depend on a stranger's cooking and he has no money with which to pay for it, for it will be three, four, or six weeks before he receives any wages.

But it is not only at times when large groups migrate to Bombay that new workers come. The pressure of scarcity drives men thitherward all through the eight months of dry weather, and if the new-comer does not know where his connections live, or has none to whom he cares to go, he is in a still worse plight. The overcrowding of Bombay has been referred to already. Even if there were rooms to spare, the immigrant cannot pay rent for them. He will have to find his way to a house kept, it may be, by a foreman's wife. There, or at a relation's house, the charges are heavy when the coarseness of the food that is given is considered. Twelve to fifteen rupees a month seems not uncommon for board that includes only the cheaper forms of food and excludes milk, and ghi, which are such necessary elements in the otherwise vegetarian diet of the Indian. The staleness and dreariness of such food tempts the workers to go to liquor shops and to small non-resident hotels for meals where the food served, though spicier, is less sound, and where the habit of drinking tadi is commenced or strengthened.

Meanwhile, during the first month, when no wages are received the worker is running up a debt, additional, it may be, to one in the country, and when the longdeferred pay day at last comes, there may scarcely be enough to keep him during the coming month after the interest on his new debt is paid. By this time his wife in the village home is looking eagerly for money from her husband. Even if after the first two months he is able to send her a little the sum seems very small compared to her hopes. It may be that her relations make her feel uncomfortable when she has not more to give towards the common income and, at last, she follows her husband, greatly venturing, and, in many cases, leaving her children behind. If the lot of a man renting only a corner of a room ten feet by ten feet is trying, that of his wife is far

There is no absolute rule. Certain castes eat fish: others mutton. ? A drink made from the juice of certain species of palm.

more so, for unless there happens to be a covered verandah it is not customary for her to sleep out of doors in the city. Very soon she finds out for herself how dear bazar food is and how short a way money goes in the new surroundings. Soon she finds her way to the mill. If her husband has kept free or comparatively free from temptations to drink and gamble, the combined incomes will leave a margin to send home that may even help in the general demands of the family group as well as maintain their own children. If not, the children may very possibly be brought to Bombay with them after their first seasonal return to their home.

There are definite and important differences in the problems raised by migration in the Calcutta area.

There

is a group of mills to the east of the city and another group across the River Hooghly in Howrah. The other mills are scattered either singly or in groups at intervals along the course of the river for between twenty and thirty miles north, and twelve miles to the south-east. It is natural that in the mills that occupy isolated positions the workers are sometimes drawn very largely from one neighbourhood or from one jat. But while this is undoubtedly the case, the industrial population, as a whole, is drawn from a much wider area, from a larger number of different social groups, and from much longer distances than the majority of those who occupy a similar position in Bombay. There is no district near at hand that corresponds to Ratnagiri on the west. Owing to these facts there are people of more deeply differing standards crowded up against each other round the jute factories. And as each group unit is confronted with a larger number of other group units there is added difficulty for those whose home communities upheld a superior social order in keeping true to their customs even so far as it would be possible in the new surroundings.

The greater distances tend to discourage annual visits to the country. The worker frequently stays in the city for a period of years, after which he returns home and

In great heat women sometimes sleep on pavements out of doors, but this seems to be unusual.

remains there permanently, or at any rate, until scarcity again drives him to the mill. The distance, too, makes it more difficult for the wife and family to accompany or follow the husband and father, and in many cases, especially amongst the Punjabis and the Muslims, the men of the families come alone. The actual problem of accommodation is not so desperate as it is in Bombay, but the social problems are more complicated.

In spite of the difficulty and expense of long railway journeys there is a very great deal of seasonal migration in Calcutta. April, May, and June are the months when there is apt to be a shortage and when any temporary dissatisfaction will be followed by an exodus. In April and May the heat is oppressive and work in the close atmosphere of the mills becomes specially burdensome. As the jute harvest is in August the mills may be working on short time in the early summer, and the smaller wages received encourage those who are hesitating to join their companions who trek for the country.

Considerable sums of money are sent by postal orders to the families and relations left in the mofussil. These sums are occasionally referred to as the savings of the workers, and are quoted to prove that wages are more than sufficient. This is an entire misrepresentation. No one would think of speaking of the money which a member of the I.C.S. sends to a family in England as savings, and it is as misleading to speak so of the money sent to the Indian villages. Doubtless some proportion of wages is saved, but it would be almost safe to say that none ought to be, and that it is only the slowness with which education progresses and the extreme difficulty of raising standards even to the height of bare efficiency that makes it possible.

The isolated unit arriving in Calcutta at one of the two great railway termini that touch the city on east and west is in much less difficulty about finding dwelling room; but on the other hand he is more likely to find himself not only amongst strangers but amongst those who are strangers to all the details of his habits and customs,

who not only do not know his language, but with whom he may have no common language, for Hindustani, the everyday phrases of which are understood by large numbers throughout Northern and Central India, is almost an unknown tongue to the Madrasi.

CHAPTER IX

THE MANAGEMENT AND SUPPLY OF LABOUR

A LARGE part of the cotton industry is in the hands of Indian firms and individual proprietors. The British firms that have no Indian representatives on the directorate are few. The jute mills are almost entirely in the hands of Europeans, principally Scots. 1

There is diversity in the composition of the external management in cotton mills. In the majority of cases there are boards of directors to whom the managers at the mills are directly responsible, and agencies to which the commercial side of the business is entrusted. Occasionally the latter firms not only attend to the commercial side, but under the name of managing agents, or of secretaries and treasurers, intervene between the board of directors and the manager. Sometimes, where this is not the case, there is a secretary at the mill as well as a manager. A large number of enterprises, however, are in private ownership. The exact line between this and the former is difficult to draw, as joint proprietors or partners may denote something not very different from a small board of directors. The large number of ginning factories are in private ownership.

In the jute industry, on the other hand, mills, with only two or three exceptions, while under the control of boards of directors, are run by managing agents. It is noticeable that the same groups of names of directors occur again and again in different mills, with perhaps in the case of each separate mill one name or two added. Thus in 1920, in the directorate of thirty-six mills, there There is at least one large American firm.