Social realism and labour strikes in interwar Bombay: what has socialism got to do with it?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 1920s and 30s were a period of frequent, industry-wide labour strikes in the cotton mills of Bombay city. Labour upheaval inspired literary production in Marathi, the primary language of many workers in the city. In the early 1930s, the prolific and beloved Marathi writer Bhargavram (Mama) Varekar published a play and a novel set in the mill district of the city (Mumbai in Marathi); social realism was the mode of depiction in these works. The setting, storyline, and many characters in the play and the novel were the same, but the resolution of the central conflict in these works – the tussle between millowners and millworkers – was different. At around the same time, a textile worker from the city, P. S. Sawant, wrote a play when he was on strike; it was performed in the mill district of the city. Both the plays by Varerkar and Sawant proposed co-operation between millowners and workers as a solution to the strike. The novel, though, left the conflict unresolved. Does genre itself account for a different ending? What was the politics of depiction of the working class in these works? What role did the literary history of the region and the politics of the conjuncture play in influencing them? The paper argues that political economic categories deployed by the city’s Marxists at the time inform the play and the novel. But the authors take great pains to skirt a socialist horizon. In its absence, the works reflect the perspective of social reformers who had an important presence in working-class neighbourhoods and imagined the mill district as an insular space where socialists and socialism were intrusions from outside.