From Girangaon to 'Mini Pakistan': The Precarious Place of Working Muslims in Twentieth-Century Bombay
Final Report Abstract
The starting point of the project had been a critique of the prevailing historiographical tendency to regard the population of Mumbai’s fast-growing industrial district “Girangaon” (lit. the “factory village”), one of the largest centres of industrial work in colonial India, as essential Maharastrian, inhabited by Marathi-speakers from intermediate Maratha castes and as Hindu. But Muslim neighbourhoods contributed, too, to a political culture that was of a specific placebound kind while its influence was felt in social movements across late colonial India. “Girangaon’s” political culture could not be reduced, therefore, to a springboard for right-wing regional and Hindu nativism. However, the social histories of neighbourhoods inhabited by Muslim (or also dalit) immigrants from other regions of India had to be integrated with a political history that connected these neighbourhoods to larger political developments in the city and beyond. The task before the researcher was thus to rewrite the extremely complex political history of Bombay from the perspective of its working-class Muslim neighbourhoods. This widened the scope of relevant primary material as well as secondary literature and created challenges in defining the relevant scope of investigation. The scope of research had to be initially very wide, but needed to be narrowed down again in the process of writing. The monograph manuscript that emerged in process consists of eight very substantial chapters of the manuscript and integrates the political history of Bombay between 1918 and 1946 with the social history of “Girangaon’s” Muslim neighbourhoods. Chapter 1 retraces how the general post-World-War I crisis played out in working-class Bombay and particularly among Muslim workers—a crisis that unsettled colonial rule and ushered in a period of diverse and widening social movements across the subcontinent. Chapter 2 examines a political triangle that arose from the upheaval of the immediate postwar months, namely the interdependence of three simultaneously emerging currents of social mobilization: the nationalist Non-Cooperation Movement, the pan-Islamic Khilafat Movement and a labour movement that initiated a proliferation of trade unions. Chapter 3 examines a specific language of class that was shaped in Bombay’s industrial district in the 1920s—a language that was deeply shaped by local notions of caste and religious community. Chapter 4 reassesses the rise of more militant labour movements and of communism in “Girangaon” taking Muslim neighbourhoods as a new ‘window’ onto these developments. Chapter 5 re-examines the Civil Disobedience Movement, too, from this unusual angle, which permits to demonstrate how the Indian National Congress was forced, despite strong misgivings and anxieties, to accommodate to the political forms that had emerged in Bombay’s industrial district. A version of this chapter has been published already and attracted some attention in India’s national press. Chapter 6 turns to the complex implications for the intertwined politics of labour, caste and religious community of the Government of India Act and the Provincial Elections of 1937. The enormous volatility of a political situation characterized as much by a rise of labour militancy and dalit mobilization as it was by a sharpening of conflicts between religious communities is brought out clearly with its implications on Muslim neighbourhoods. The final and 7th Chapter then examines the war years and the transitional period between the end of World War II and Indian independence. It connects developments that have conventionally been investigated only in strict isolation: the social and political conflicts triggered by the war, the popularization of the Pakistan demand and the divided response to this demand among Muslim workers and the labour movement as a whole. The approach chosen highlights the major political tendencies without brushing over developments heading into different directions, which always remained strong in “Girangaon” throughout the period of investigation and bore the potential for future dynamic developments. The book manuscript is a highly original contribution to a new political history of labour in India and is certain to attract the attention of scholars both in India and among scholars abroad.
Publications
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“Civil Disobedience and the City: Congress and the Working Classes in Bombay, c.1930-32”, in Prashant Kidambi et al, eds., Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos, Hurst & Company, London, 2019, pp. 265-283
Raman, Robert Rahman
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‘”Produce or Perish”. The Crisis of the Late 1940s and the Place of Labour in Postcolonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 54,4 (2020), pp. 1041-1112
Ahuja, Ravi
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‘Ramchandra Babaji More, Amir Haider Khan, and the Genres of Working-Class Biography: A Comment’, South Asia, 44,2 (2021), pp. 398-401
Ahuja, Ravi
