On 1 October 1922, a party of thirty social activists participated in the “sanitary round” of a working-class locality in G ward of Bombay Municipality. The inspection tour was organized by the Social Service League, one of Bombay’s leading voluntary organizations. In his written report of this sanitary round, Hiralal L. Kaji , a professor of economics at Sydenham College and an eminent social activist, decried the lack of basic civic amenities in the locality visited. His report documented the “terrible degree of overcrowding,” the “horrible privies,” and the “leaking drainage pipes” in the dwellings of working people. Professor Kaji expressed apprehension and fear over the possible social consequences of the filthy living conditions. He was convinced that “such insanitary areas are the surest breeding places for criminals, for clearly jails offer much better living conditions.” Linking insanitation to moral decay, he asked, “Is it any wonder if such homes drive the labourer from the factory to the grog shop where he drown his cares?” 1 Professor Kaji’s report reminded the educated, socially conscious people of Bombay about their social obligations and urged them to “uplift” the working classes:
Bombay’s educated citizens owe some duty to their less fortunate brothers and sisters because laboring classes themselves have not yet awakened to resent their conditions of life outside the factory. They are illiterate, inured to hardships [and] acclimatised to these slums. These people are dumb and passive sufferers . . . when the lower strata are [sic] dumb, it is the middle strata that have to come forward and voice the grievances and expose the horrible conditions of life of the Bombay workmen which is such a shame to civilisation, such a scandal of the 20th century and such a blot on the escutcheon of Bombay [,] “The queen of the East.” 2
Professor Kaji’s remorse for the ill-being of working-class people and his call for ameliorative interventions were not untypical. British officials, public health experts, and an eclectic mix of middle-class social activists shared such stereotypical images of industrial workers and the threats they supposedly posed to the city’s health and social order. Favoring a top-down imposition of change to working-class lives, they designed several remedial programs that aimed to create a healthy, contented, and productive class of urban industrial workers. Focusing on the cotton textile millworkers in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study analyzes the discourses and practices of worker well-being. The projects of worker well-being unfolded in the contexts of the British Empire, Indian nationalism, social reform movements, extraordinary infant mortality, epidemic diseases, and uneven urban development. The book examines how colonial political and economic relations, the patterns of urban development, the real and imagined dread of disease, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and caste influenced the discourse and practices of worker well-being.
The interpretive framework of well-being offers a new way to analyze labor history. The theorizing and application of well-being are considered important interventions in the fields of development economics and policy studies. Discussing this category, development studies scholars have argued that as an umbrella concept, well-being (and its inevitable obverse ill-being) encompasses discussions and debates over many different types of poverty—from income and consumption poverty, to poverty arising from social exclusion and the lack of access to basic public goods. 3 For instance, leading development economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have related that the “poverty of a life lies not merely in the impoverished state in which the person actually lives, but also in the lack of real opportunity—given by social constraints as well as personal circumstances—to choose from other types of living.” 4 The authors do not invalidate the central place of insufficient incomes (economic poverty) in curtailing human capabilities to achieve well-being. However, they point out that an increase in per capita income by itself is not a sufficient condition for well-being. A public policy that enables people to be adequately nourished and free from avoidable diseases, and that provides them with the means to be literate and socially active, is equally crucial in determining the well-being of a large part of the population. 5 Thus, the overall development of a society depends on its willingness to allocate resources in ways that enhance the human capability to attain bodily health, contentment, and social connectedness and that eliminates all forms of poverty—economic, social, and political.
It is pertinent to note here that the concept of well-being is relatively novel and no scholarly consensus regarding its meaning has yet emerged. It is, however, a useful term precisely because it denotes a variety of related ideas. In the context of this study, the term “well-being” suggests that in the industrial cities of colonial India , the poor quality of working-class lives was largely reflective of factory workers’ abysmal incomes. At the same time, workers’ well-being/ill-being crucially depended on the availability—or the lack—of clean adequate housing, facilities for leisure activities, and amenities for childbirth and childcare. Thus, the deprivations or ill-being of working-class people was also the product of an ineffective social policy that failed to create healthy conditions of living and working for the urban subalterns. Incorporating well-being into the historiography of South Asian labor allows a critical evaluation of colonial social policies with regard to urban industrial workers.
Development studies thinkers have pointed out that well-being is a relational and fluid concept and the meanings attached to it shift according to objective circumstances. Perceptions and practices of well-being/ill-being are continually produced and reproduced in the complex interplay between social, political, and economic processes. 6 Examining the shifts in worker well-being discourses and practices in colonial Bombay , this study delineates how the objective circumstances arising from a rapid industrial and urban growth stimulated the discourse of worker well-being. The threat of disease and discontent compelled local administrators and employers of labor to design worker well-being projects. However, the narrow material interests of colonial administrators and millowners restricted actions and postponed necessary improvements in the urban built environment. Contemporary nationalist ideology and elite-dominated social service rhetoric were also critical in shaping perceptions about worker well-being. By focusing on the notions of worker well-being, this book reveals the deeply gendered, paternalistic, and elitist nature of nationalist as well as voluntary activism in colonial times. Cited at the beginning of this chapter, the views of Professor Kaji illustrate the paternalism that was inherent in the nationalistic social service rhetoric of colonial Bombay . The framework of well-being thus provides ample opportunities to bring together scattered threads of urban, gender, social reform, and nationalist histories and reconstruct a much broader, embedded history of industrial labor in colonial India.
The cotton textile industry and its workforce had played a significant role in the transformation of Bombay from an inhospitable fishing hamlet into a modern industrial city. The first cotton mills were built in the city in the 1850s. The industry expanded rapidly throughout the late nineteenth century, and by the 1890s, there were nearly seventy mills in the city. 7 The mills exported yarn to the Chinese market and also supplied yarn and coarse cloth for domestic consumption. Despite fluctuating market demands and an unfavorable environment in which the colonial regime supported British textile manufacturers with protective tariffs, Indian textile production began to undercut that of Lancashire by the 1880s. In the late nineteenth century, India’s textile industry was primarily based in Bombay City. Subsequently, the industry gradually dispersed to other areas, especially Ahmedabad and Nagpur, but Bombay retained its prime position as the hub of cotton textile production.
The expansion of textile mills in Bombay created an urban industrial working class. The average number of millhands employed daily on all shifts in textile mills grew from 6,557 in 1865 to 213,085 in 1945. 8 The industry drew its laborers from the rural migrants who flocked to Bombay to find work in its mills. Most migrants came from the famine-stricken neighboring regions of Deccan and Konkan, especially the Ratnagiri district of Konkan, a densely populated and impoverished coastal area south of Bombay. 9 Women constituted between 20 and 25 percent of the total workforce. 10 Although men and women from Deccan and Konkan continued to dominate the textile labor force, rural poor from the United Provinces in North India and other regions of the Bombay Presidency were also present. 11 The migrant men and women workers and their families settled close to their mills in haphazardly constructed, dingy, overcrowded, undrained, and ill-ventilated chawls . 12 These chawls were typically multistory, barrack-like buildings with one-room tenements and shared bathing and washing spaces. The rapid spread of chawls coincided with the industrial growth of Bombay and gradually these structures became a feature of working-class neighborhoods. Situated in the northern parts of the city, the textile factories and workers’ chawls constituted the girangaon or the mill districts of Bombay. 13
This burgeoning industry in colonial Bombay was significant both politically and economically. In the industrial economy of colonial India, British capital featured prominently, as it dominated the Indian railways, the jute mills of Calcutta, and the textile mills of Cawnpore in North India and Madras in South India. In contrast, Indian entrepreneurs pioneered the establishment of Bombay’s cotton mills. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, the textile industry of Bombay had acquired a particular significance in the anti-colonial nationalist discourse. Reflecting the influence of Western modernity , the economic nationalist ideology of the late nineteenth century promoted large-scale industrializ...