The Worker and the Machine: Decline of Ahmedabad’s Mill Industry in Working in the Mill No More

In 1861, the city of Ahmedabad saw its first steam-driven cotton mill. Over the next six years, the Ahmedabad Spinning and Weaving Company grew from employing 63 workers to 500. By 1891, the number of mills had grown exponentially, such that the mill owners established an association to protect their rights and demand greater work.

 

Jan Breman and Parthiv Shah’s expansive volume Working in the Mill No More (2004) published by Amsterdam University Press, traces the lives of the mills and mill workers of Ahmedabad. The thematic aperture of the project—which maps the trajectory of an industry, heterogenous working classes and social groups, and a city through the entirety of the twentieth century—was realised through support in the form of a research grant by the Regional Office in New Delhi of the International Labour Organization (ILO); a production grant by HIVOS, a Dutch NGO; travel and other grants by the University of Amsterdam. The resultant publication, originally published by University of Amsterdam was made available at a subsidised price due to support from the Dutch Trade Union – FNV, and the Indo-Dutch programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD)—with the intent to support the book's circulation and use by NGOs, trade unions, and centres for the study of social work. 

An industry which was crowned the “Manchester of India” in the early twentieth-century, witnessed a hyperbolic expansion and a subsequent decline. Its story is one of workers’ rights and their fragility in a market economy. Breman and Shah take care to present the torrid conditions of work and living faced by the mill workers, who performed double shifts, received no breaks, were exposed to hazardous materials with no safety protocols, and lived in makeshift chalis or chawls resembling “…the coolie lines constructed on plantations and in mining enclaves.” The mills employed men, women and children and organised its production along caste lines, with the most arduous, damaging tasks assigned to members of the lower castes.

The workers only gained a union as late as 1920. Majoor Mahajan Sangh (MMS) known also as Textile Labour Association (TLA), was a body presided by Anasuyaben Sarabhai, a social reformer and the sister of a leading mill owner. Historically, it took a non-confrontational approach towards the owners, ignored concerns of caste-based discrimination on the shop floor, demanded incremental changes and followed a Gandhian paradigm that focused on social welfare over dismantling the infrastructures of class. As the mills began to shut, shrinking from eighty-five textile mills in 1985 to twenty-three functioning mills in 1994, workers found themselves deprived of employment with no safety net. Breman notes how the loss of work at the factory mills also led to the loss of access to public schemes such as the Employees State Insurance Scheme, which covered healthcare.

As Breman and Shah narrate, many workers of the erstwhile mills—which had gradually shut in the face of power looms, a trenchant owners’ association and neoliberal policies that encouraged the informalisation of labour—had to shift to working in smaller workshops at piece-rate wages or as casual factory hands, foregoing the meagre labour rights and provisions accrued over decades of union activity.

In the sections titled “In Search of Other Work” and “Coping with Impoverishment in the Household,” Shah traces the lives of those who lost permanent work with the shutting of mills. Many turned to work as guards, rickshaw-pullers, shop attendants, repair and construction labour, with all members of the family having to work and contribute. A complex series of images capture the changing dynamics of gender in households—the redundancy experienced by male workers has been accompanied by greater assertiveness by the women. For instance, a picture shows a woman rolling a cigarette as her unemployed husband peels garlic.

 

 

The book adeptly expands and contracts its lens—conveying personal narratives, social movements, and global trends in economic policy through detail and focus, never abstracting the “mill worker” as a homogenous category. A striking image is of empty cycles parked outside the TLA office. Upon the closure of the mills, the TLA also disbanded without either returning the membership fees it owed to the workers or fighting for their compensation. In discussing the failures of the TLA, it presents the rise of “militant” union groups like Lal Vavta, or the more successful and sustained organisations like Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), capturing a heterogenous milieu. While the first two-thirds of the book focuses on the lives of the mill-workers, the final part traces the rise of organisations like SEWA and the impact of communal riots of 2002 on the city and its workers.

To read more about Working in the Mill No More, please search for “The Withering Public: The Lives of Mill Workers in Working in the Mill No More” in the Grants section.