The Withering Public: Lives of Mill Workers in Working in the Mill No More

Visions of abandonment and dereliction capture what follows the closure of the mills: a peacock perches on the rafters above empty, still machines; a union hall is bathed in a light that illuminates the bare floor as small groups of men cluster in corners; rows of vacant bicycles are parked in front of the union building, in the background a bronze relief depicting Gandhi pointing the way upward to economic prosperity for the ordinary labourer glints with irony. These scenes capture the devastation which unfolded across a decade as mills in Ahmedabad gradually shut, leaving the workers in a lurch.

 

 

As formerly unionised workers were absorbed into the status of informal labour, they were “…condemned to perpetual mobility in the search for work, both within and between sectors of employment.” Breman and Shah astutely recognise the fact that in the storm that is the loss of employment for thousands of workers, the ripples spread unevenly for members of their families. The lack of a fixed source of income impacts everyone, including the loss of formal education for children, a reduction in the quality of schools, a withdrawal from visiting weekly markets for purchases etc. These alterations signal the far-reaching implications of not just the mill closures, but a neoliberal economy. As Byung-Chul Han notes in “Why Revolution is No Longer Possible,” neoliberalism transforms “…the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise.” 

 

The concluding section of the book conducts a powerful enquiry into the slow accumulation of unemployment, impoverishment, and loss of shared public spaces and its relation to the widespread violence seen in the mill localities of Ahmedabad during the 2002 pogrom against the Muslim community. The scale of the violence is captured in a revealing data point: of the then 55,000 women registered with Self-Employed Women’s Association, 38,000 were victims. An image depicts how every shop in a street was burnt except the one owned by a Hindu shopkeeper; another tells the precarity of Abdul Sattar and his family, a former mill worker whose Hindu neighbours did not wish for them to return to their home. In the relief camp, those seeking shelter narrated tales of houses being destroyed in Bapunagar and Gomtipur. Many of them were previously workers in the mills who had entered other avenues for making a living, such as running tea stalls, shops, or as rickshaw drivers. Photographs of Sanklit Nagar, a slum where Muslims lost their homes during the pogrom or were forbidden from returning by their neighbours, are included as well. The book informs us that “In the middle-class Hindu quarters of Ahmedabad, this ghetto is known, and hated, as mini-Pakistan.” Breman and Shah had just completed work on their book around February 2002, when the pogrom happened. In light of this, they decided to conduct an inquiry into the status of erstwhile mill workers in the aftermath. This inquiry became critical as Breman notes in his prefatory essay, to establish the links between the loss of shared, public spaces and identities beyond the religious or ascriptive, both of which the closure of mills erased. It also highlights the absence of collective action or bargaining by the mill workers, who were caught in the scaffolding of a Gandhian union that failed to bring the mill owners to account. For Breman and Shah, the spread of violence in mill localities captures the intricate binds between “informalisation of employment and social marginalisation, compounded by politics of communal segregation.” The book concludes with the futures of not only mill workers and members of minority communities, but the city of Ahmedabad—split by progress on one side of the river and devastation on the other—staring bleakly into the abyss of communal divide.

To read more about Working in the Mill No More, please search for “The Machine and the Worker: The Decline of Ahmedabad’s Mill Industry in Working in the Mill No More” in the Grants section.

All images by Parthiv Shah. From Working in the Mill No More by Jan Breman and Parthiv Shah. India: Oxford University Press, 2004.