Analyse the workers’ movement in India in the pre-Independence period. (2022, 10 Marks)
Railways, jute, cotton mills, mines and plantations created a modern Indian working class from the mid-nineteenth century — working twelve-hour-plus days, without rest days or security, and in the plantations under penal contracts. Its movement grew through four phases, pulled between class demands and national ones.
Phases and components
- Philanthropic beginnings (1870s–1917): reformers such as Sasipada Banerjee campaigned on welfare; Narayan Meghaji Lokhande’s Bombay Mill-Hands Association (1890) was a pressure group for workers rather than a union of them, feeding into the Factory Act of 1891. The Bombay strike of 1908 against Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s conviction was the first political strike — Vladimir Lenin hailed it as the Indian proletariat’s entry into politics.
- Organisation and nationalism (1918–1927): post-war inflation and the ILO (1919) spurred organisation — Bahman Pestonji Wadia’s Madras Labour Union (1918), M. K. Gandhi’s arbitration-based Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (1920), and the AITUC (31 October 1920) under Lala Lajpat Rai. The Trade Unions Act, 1926 allowed registration and shielded unions from criminal-conspiracy charges over legitimate trade disputes.
- Radicalisation and repression (1928–1934): communists, organised formally at Kanpur in 1925, led the Girni Kamgar Union’s Bombay strike (1928). The state answered with the Trade Disputes Act (1929) and the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33); Sholapur (1930) saw workers join Civil Disobedience. Splits followed — Narayan Malhar Joshi’s moderates (1929) and the communist Red TUC (1931).
- War and endgame (1939–1947): the communists’ “people’s war” line kept them away from Quit India, but the post-war strike wave and Bombay workers’ support for the RIN mutiny (1946) showed labour’s political weight; the Congress founded INTUC in 1947.
Links with the national movement
- The Karachi resolution (1931) — living wage, limited hours, right to organise — shows labour shaping nationalism’s programme.
- But Congress, financed partly by Indian mill-owners, backed workers against the Raj more readily than against Indian capital.
Perspectives and limits
- Nationalist historians see labour as a wing of the anti-colonial front; R. Palme Dutt and the Marxists see a proletariat subordinated to bourgeois leadership.
- Structural weaknesses: party-dependent unions, caste and regional divisions, village-linked first-generation workers, a tiny organised sector, and unfree plantation labour — the most exploited, least organised.
Conclusion
The workers’ movement won legal recognition, pushed social rights into nationalism and left a legacy of protective law, but it never became autonomous. The four Labour Codes, in force from 21 November 2025 and consolidating 29 central laws, reopen that colonial-era question of whether labour law is won by workers or granted by the state.