The Students Council and Students of Color Committee of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the South Asia Forum at MIT invite you to a screening of the documentary film “Q2P” directed by Paromita Vohra on FRIDAY 27 APRIL at 6.00 P.M. in the Audio-Visual Theatre in Room 7-431 at DUSP, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139.

Q2P

(Documentary, 2005, 53 minutes, DV, English, Hindi)

LOOK AT THE TOILET …
… SEE THE CITY

Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of a futuristic Mumbai and finds… public toilets… not enough of them.

As this film observes who has to queue to pee, we begin to understand the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape and the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space.

We meet whimsical people with novel ideas of social change, which thrive with mixed results. We learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together. In the Museum of Toilets, at a night concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet”, in a Bombay slum, we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality.

The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions - about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

The Indian economy underwent a radical transformation from the late nineteenth century onwards under the twin impact of global capitalism and financial needs of British imperial networks. Complex interactions among these factors contributed to the emergence of a large industrial sector comprising mining, tea and coffee plantations, railway networks, cotton textile, sugar cane processing and various agro based seasonal industries. These industries generated new employment and brought into existence large wage earning industrial working classes. Though employed in a variety of work settings under different working conditions, the process of emergence of industrial working classes was viewed by many from the perspective of universally applicable homogenizing discourse of class formation. Many contemporary observers and later historians and sociologists were dismayed by the failure of Indian workers to behave in accordance with the theoretical master script prepared for them. Many scholars sought to explain their belied expectations in terms of structural in adequacies of India’s transition towards industrialization. For example, though by 1931 nearly four million workers were employed in the organized industrial sector and the number of urban dwellers came to constitute nearly 17% of Indian population, this industrialization appeared to be limited in scope in comparison to the vastness of agrarian economy. Indeed, many were disappointed by the nature of slow progress of industrialization in India and the industrial growth had been characterized as enclaved in nature. There often existed a sense of dejection in this seemingly spasmodic development of industrial sector and the related transformation of Indian society and economy which was aptly captured in India’s one of the most influential Marxist historian Sumit Sarkar’s words “incomplete transition towards bourgeois society”.

This very use of the term ‘incomplete transition’ points towards various universalizing discourses of transition from pre-capitalist societies towards capitalist industrial societies. Depending on their ideological convictions scholars used different theoretical tools to explain this incompleteness of Indian transition. Developmental sociologists often described such ‘incomplete transitions’ in terms of battle between modernity and tradition, many nationalist Marxist historians pointed their fingers to the retardation of Indian economy under the impact of colonial rule and hence the limited nature of industrialization. Some subaltern scholars analyzed such development in terms of the failure of universalizing logic of capital to subjugate indigenous pre-capitalist forms of community. In the context of labor history, these concerns were also invested with political expectations. Can workers steeped in peasant traditions of India act as revolutionary proletariat? Can class and class consciousness constitute a critical conceptual apparatus in understanding forms of social and political consciousness in India? Does India constitute a cultural exception that cannot be analyzed through existing theories of social transformations towards capitalistic modernity? India in this case became larger than its geographic location and stood almost as a metaphor for African and Asian societies where industrial working classes were perceived to be a hybrid creature ‘peasant workers’ who were incapable of organizing effective resistance to designs of capital.

Raj Chandavarkar challenged these notions in his PhD thesis written in 1981. He then transformed this thesis over a span of thirteen years into a book entitled The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). . He further explored implications of the arguments of the tome in the sphere of Indian politics in his second monograph Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). . Chandavarkar questioned these universalizing narratives by looking into specificities of the business strategies and labor resistance in Bombay. In a highly imaginative account he dissolved different boundaries that often informed labor history writing. He rejected the perceived dichotomy between agriculture and industry, rural and urban, work place and neighborhood, informal and formal industries. Chandavarkar also sought capture workers’ experience of their lives rather than viewing them as actors in contests between larger than life forces ideas namely modernity and tradition. For Chandravarkar labor history could not be divorced from business strategies and also more significantly the way state exercised political power in shaping politics of business and labor. If ideological moorings of early subaltern scholars could be located in Thompsonian and Foucauldian concerns, Chandravarkar’s work was heavily influenced by his intellectual mentor Gareth Stedman Jones whose seminal work Outcaste London (Pantheon, 1984). cast its long shadow over Chandavarkar’s analysis of the making of Bombay working classes. Stedman Jone’s influence is evident in the way Chandavarkar challenged the fixity of the notion of class as a given category produced on the shop floor where working classes and bourgeoisie supposedly confronted each other.

Rather than perceiving them to be homogenous and naturally solidaristic, Chandavarkar demonstrated the fluidity and tensions embedded in such categories. Almost reversing earlier historical assumptions in this regard, Chanadavarkar brings forth the salience of neighborhood and how the extension of industrial conflicts on the streets of neighborhood create conditions for the production of class solidarity and the intensification of class conflicts. Like Gareth Stedman Jones, Chandavarkar actually brings forth the significance of multiple processes of industrial production organizations ranging from small workshops to large industries and how the emphasis on the distinction between informal and formal industries actually blur our understanding of labor history. Here obviously one has to also take into account seminal contribution of Mark Holmstorm as well. Based on the reading of this genre of labor history Chandavarkar sought to provide agency to Bombay mill workers in shaping business strategies of their employers. Indeed, the most important aspect of Chandavarkar’s writings is the centrality he attributed to the story of resistance mounted by workers and their ability to compel mill owners to refashion the strategies of industrialization. In a way Chadavarkar undertakes a political reading of social history and thus provides new conceptual power to the idea of class not as a given totalizing category but as a social force that is in the process of making and unmaking within a particular historical context through interactions with state, strategies of capital and historical organization of social spaces within urban context. He thus simultaneously denies and affirms what Marx said in the Eighteenth Brumaire “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Chandravarkar further elucidated this argument in his second monograph which was a collection of essays. Here Chandavarkar actually explored fundamentally the fluidity and flexibility of social formations of class in relation to political language, power and political practice. Two important essays stand out in this volume where Chandavarkar advances the earlier understanding of labor history writing in India through an analysis of discourse of colonial governance. Echoing Stedman Jones’ arguments about casual workers of London Chandavarkar further asserted that workers were not intrinsically violent rather the colonial state because of its deep seated insecurity of masses actually engaged in violent practices that was reproduced by workers in their moments of resistance. More importantly he shows how workers’ response to the nationalist movement actually evolved through different and unusual medium of the Communist Party due to the Congress’s attempt to being everything for everybody and thus catering to large and disparate constituencies with contradictory interests. Though Chandavarkar strenuously denied that class relations were not inscribed in industrial relations his works actually broadened the framework of the idea of class formation and demonstrates again how class action within neighborhood, in the context of nationalist movements and as a form of resistance to police atrocities inform not only labor history but also politics in general in Bombay in the interwar period.

I would now turn towards a rather uncertain territory of explaining briefly how these insights generated by Chandavarkar had informed and influenced my work. By delving into the politics of Bengal from late 19th century to 1939, I have sought to demonstrate how struggles waged by industrial workers actually transformed not simply labor politics but the very nature of urban popular struggles in Bengal and finally Bengal politics. Workers in Bengal, despite their ever shifting fragmented loyalties towards diverse forms of templates of identities, were not only able to assert their presence in Bengal politics, but because of their location in jute industry at the nodal point of connections between global capitalism and peasant economy, had actually compelled in 1937 the propertied elites to consolidate their support behind a rickety alliance between British capitalists spearheaded by Benthal, Bengal landlords represented by Nazimuddin and B. P Singh Roy and Indian capitalists such as Nalini Ranjan Sarkar backed by G. D Birla. This coalition could continue up to 1939 because of the labor militancy from below. In other words, if we remove from the idea of working class their assigned and expected task of liberating humankind from capitalism and accept it as a diffused social force always engaged in the process of making and unmaking, we may find that even in a predominantly agrarian economy intense class action waged by an alliance among working classes could play a pivotal role in shaping not only popular politics but politics in general. While asserting that I must say at the end that I affirm and possibly also contest my intellectual mentor Chandavarkar’s thesis by stating that class relation is inscribed in the action of workers and we could recognize it if we de- scale our perspectives from the metaphysics of orientalist assumptions about Indian working classes.