Public order and the fear of the ‘outsider’: porosity of labour politics in late colonial India

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article discusses a militant worker strike at the Bata shoe factory in Calcutta in the year 1938. The strike owed to the communist mobilisation of the workers in the city and demanded various rights from the factory management including non-interference in their lives outside the factory. The discussion will show that the late colonial labour politics in Calcutta was dynamic and sought political solidarities with the broader anti-colonial mobilisation in the city. As a result, the factory management and the colonial administration could not sustain workers’ harassment based on an ‘insider-outsider dichotomy’ that attempted to segregate workers’ issues inside the factory from the larger politics outside it.