20131112

New Release from Tulika Books

New release from Tulika Books!

Working Lives & 
Worker Militancy
The Politics of Labour in Colonial India

Edited by
Ravi Ahuja


October 2013 
9.5 x 6.25 inches 
xviii + 330 pages
Hardback
ISBN: 978-93-82381-21-1 
Rs 695

In contemporary India, work for wages expands substantially as a mode of subsistence, while ‘labour’, at the same time, suffers a dramatic depreciation as a political force and as a target of state policy. This is a reversal of an earlier, little understood process that originated in the late colonial period but fully unfolded only in the years of Nehruvian rule. The six essays of this volume reconstruct this now marginalized political history of an ‘age of labour’ from various angles using previously inaccessible police records, rare autobiographical documents and other neglected material. They examine how political conflict, militancy and trade union activism were rooted in the everyday lives of construction workers and artisans, of ‘untouchable’ tanners and sweepers, of seafarers, railway staff and factory labourers, throughout the late colonial period. They analyse how transformed politics of caste intersected with the late colonial upsurge of labour politics. They reassess the complex relationships of nationalist mobilizations and labour movements, of elite politicians and an emergent group of ‘organic’ worker-intellectuals and proletarian militants. They provide meticulous reconstructions of how incidents of labour protest unfolded in India’s varied industrial spaces. They argue, in sum, for a reappraisal ofIndian labour history as an eventful political history. The volume is rounded off by the political memoirs of Bashir Ahmed Bakhtiar tracing his metamorphosis from militant worker to trade union leader. The memoirs, originally published in Urdu, are made available in English translation for the first time and provided with a detailed introduction.

Ravi Ahuja is Professor of Modern Indian History at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany. He works on various problems of social history, including labour, urbanism, infrastructure and war.
Cover photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

To order copies of the book, please contact:
Tulika Books, 35 A/1 (ground floor) Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049. Email: tulikadelhi@gmail.com
IPD Alternatives, 35 A/1 (ground floor), Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049. Email: ipd.alternatives@gmail.com
To buy copies of the book online, please visit:www.leftword.com, www.scholarswithoutborders.in



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