Skilling and Its Histories: Labour Market, Technical Knowledge and the Making of Skilled Workers in Colonial India (1880–1910)

Arun Kumar

doi:10.1177/0973174118810050

Abstract

Written in the backdrop of the emerging official discourse around occupational skill training in contemporary India, this article returns to the past to explain how the meanings of skill and skill training were produced through the interaction of the colonial education system and industrial actors in modern India. Using archival records, it studies the history of the Lucknow Industrial School—one of the earliest government institutes to skill Indians in various industrial trades and for the local railway workshop. The article argues that industrial training institutions, while crucial in defining and legitimizing a discourse of skill and efficiency based on the scientific and technical knowledge of workers, were subjected to the competing political and training discourses of the shop floor, financial unwillingness of the British empire to create a large infrastructure of industrial and technical education for the colony, local caste politics and aspirations of students. All these forces shaped the nature of skill transference and produced unintended results which strained the relationship between the training institute and industries. Similar conflicts and issues surround the contemporary skill programme. A historical study of skill development during the colonial era allows a better understanding of the prospect and perils of the present-day Skill India Mission.

Highlights

Buck who was appointed to inquire into the state of industrial and practical education in 1901 concluded that throughout 1886-1904 VNR (India) industrial schools were being used by a class of students who were not interested in doing manual work, and an illiterate artisan boy trained in his fathers’ workshop was better skilled than the schooled trained artisan.xi Later in 1902, the Industrial School Committee enquiry which examined the differences between the indigenous apprenticeship system and industrial school system further reiterated the failure of the industrial school
The railway workshop where boys were to be employed had generated a different notion of skill and skill training which was mediated by the power-relations of race, caste, age, region and by the strict hierarchies of mental and manual labour
Scientific and technical knowledge was the privilege of Europeans, and Indians were seen as having sheep mentality who were good at doing specialized tasks but were incapable of learning scientific and technical principles of machines

Summary

Introduction

It influenced training methods of trades (carpentry, iron-work, and glass-blowing) practised in the general market and produced skilled workers for the emerging subsidiary industries. III Social Composition, Aspirations, and the Lucknow Industrial School The LIS in the initial two years was only open to students from artisanal castes and was free for them along with free books, but by 1894 it began to admit boys from the ‘gentlemen’ class — middle- and upper-caste Muslims and Hindus of Lucknow — with a small fee.

Results

Conclusion