Strike-breaking or the Refusal of Subalternity? Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Chota Nagpur.

Abstract

Late in August 1939, there took place a strike in a small iron foundry in Jamshedpur, the premiere steel city of colonial India. Its owners were a local Bengali businessman and a Marwari entrepreneur from Calcutta. The workforce consisted of a little over two thousand five hundred workers, most of them Adivasis (`tribal’ peoples)2 and Oriyas, with a few hundred workers from north Bihar and the Gangetic plain. A large proportion - possibly upto 40 percent, were women. The management was known for being arbitrary, even by the notoriously low standards of the capitalists of this young company town. Their workers were low paid, with virtually no security - at the beginning of the year hundreds of hands had been discharged. The President of their union was the charismatic Congressman Abdul Bari, who was also the Deputy Speaker of the Bihar Legislative Assembly.