Abstract
This article follows the administrative usage of the term “labour” and its political effects in the period from roughly 1918–1924 in Madras Presidency, India. In this short period, I will argue, fundamental tensions in the ability of the concept to refer coherently to its object came violently to the surface. The prevailing tension in both governmental discourse and in the sphere of political representation concerned the extent to which either caste status or economic class were to be understood as the primary determinant of the meaning of labour. At the nub of this conflict lay the contested status of the descendants of hereditarily unfree labourers who supplied the bulk of the Presidency's labour requirements and were referred to in this period as Adi-Dravidas. Should they be construed as ritually disadvantaged caste subjects who also happened to labour, or as paradigmatic labourers who were also subjected to caste discrimination? Adi-Dravidas provoked both the anxiety of the elite political classes who wished to incorporate them into larger nationalist projects, as well as the reformist zeal of the colonial state, throwing the category “labour” into crisis. By navigating the use to which “labour” was put by caste elites, state officials, and Adi-Dravidas themselves, I will reflect on the coherence of caste and class as analytic concepts for political and social struggles of the kind I am describing.
Highlights
Over a period of roughly seven years, from 1918 to 1924, the administrative and political meanings of the term ‘‘labour’’ became a matter of great anxiety among native elites in colonial Madras, who recognized in it Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
This article follows the administrative usage of the term ‘‘labour’’ and its political effects in the period from roughly 1918–1924 in Madras Presidency, India
The prevailing tension in both governmental discourse and in the sphere of political representation concerned the extent to which either caste status or economic class were to be understood as the primary determinant of the meaning of labour
Summary
Over a period of roughly seven years, from 1918 to 1924, the administrative and political meanings of the term ‘‘labour’’ became a matter of great anxiety among native elites in colonial Madras, who recognized in it. If Dalits were conceptually enfolded within the category labour, the Labour Department’s programmes were designed to make this subsumption concrete – in short, to produce the ideal example of the very category, ‘‘labour’’, for which the department had been founded – by working on the subjectivity and habits of Dalit agricultural servants It is in this significant respect that the new state programmes were most in continuity with those of missionaries of a previous generation: the activities of the office of Labour Commissioner may be read as intending to produce a class identified by and unified because of their shared role as labourers, shorn of heathenish caste characteristics. The unspoken reverse – the ‘‘stick’’ as it were – was the derogation of Dalit men and, simultaneously, the threat that lassitude on the part of a household’s women would bring about its collective ruin
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