SOCIETY
A people's history
KALPANA SHARMA
|
Thanks to Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon, the memories of a glorious and turbulent past will not be erased even as the physical structures are brought down.
|
THE PAST AND THE FUTURE: An abandoned mill and a high-rise apartment block. PHOTO: VIVEK BENDRE
One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices. The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History, Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon, Seagull Books, p.430, price not stated.
IN the very heart of Mumbai lies Girangaon, an area once dominated by over 50 composite textile mills. Today, if you want to see how rapidly Mumbai is changing, go to this part of the city. The chimneystacks and sheds that once hummed with the sound of hundreds of spinning and weaving machines, now lie silent. In their place, or alongside their mute skeletons, stand shiny high-rise buildings with luxurious apartments, expensive shops and restaurants and the offices of the burgeoning media and advertising world of Mumbai. Looking at these structures, can anyone imagine that history was once made on these lands? Will a future generation even get a whisper of the political and cultural history that these acres spawned and which defined what is Bombay/ Mumbai?
In their own words
Thanks to Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon, the memories of a glorious and turbulent past will not be erased even as the physical structures are brought down. The authors have chosen to do this in a most effective way, through the words of the men and women who inhabited that past but who have been given no place in its future. By doing this, the authors have revealed the enormous divergence between official histories and people's memories. Also, a people's history, as told in their own words and idiom, gives a texture to the narration that cannot be replicated even by the most evocative writing.
No one is left out in this story of Girangaon. It is not just a workers' history, although predominantly it is just that. You also hear the views of the mill owners. It is not just a Left history even though the Communist parties dominated this area for many decades. You also come to know about the Shiv Sena and its members and how the party consolidated its hold on the area. It is not just a male view of history even though Girangaon was mostly a "male space", with two men for every one woman. The women who participated in the struggles also find a voice.
As historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, in his masterly preface to the book, points out, "the history of Girangaon can, in a sense, be called a history of modern India". For, here, encouraged by the British, farmland was converted into mill land; sheds and machines were erected to house composite mills that spun, wove, printed and dyed cloth. Each mill employed hundreds of workers, mostly from the Konkan region but also from other parts of India. They were Hindu and Muslim, Dalit and other castes. They lived in "chawls", one-room tenements, inside the mills or around them. In fact the 1911 census noted that 69 per cent of the population of the city lived in one-room tenements. Bombay of those days was predominantly working class.
Part of the city's history
Today, you would find scarce mention of a strike or industrial action in the media. Yet for decades, striking workers were a part of the fabric of this industrial city. The history of the textile mills in Mumbai's heart is inextricably linked with the struggle of its workers for their rights — for fair wages, for reasonable working hours, for housing, for decent working conditions etc. Workers in the area were organised by the Communists in the 1920s and participated in a number of general strikes as well as individual strikes in different mills. "Not surprisingly", state the authors, "Girangaon sometimes came to be seen by the city's elites, especially in the late 1920s, as an insurrectionary centre".
The struggle for rights was also reflected in the cultural expressions found in the area. From songs to plays by the Amar Kalapathaks to the literary works of the Dalit Panthers, Girangaon represented a thriving cultural entity. People like Narayan Surve, the well-known Marathi poet whose poetry conveyed the pain and the struggles of these workers, lived and worked in Girangaon. But as Surve points out, the Left began to lose ground when it failed to understand the importance of culture as well as caste for the working class. "We kept on talking about the working class. But they only related with us on economic issues, and sometimes on political issues; we were not with them at the social and cultural level."
This is where the Shiv Sena succeeded in gaining a foothold. It built on the Samyukta Maharashtra movement for a separate state and made inroads into the largely Maharashtrian working class constituency of Girangaon. With more than a little help from the ruling Congress Party, the Shiv Sena effectively removed the hold of the Left and also introduced a communal divide within the working class that had not existed before.
The beginning of the end
The book ends with the painful period that marks the beginning of the end of Girangaon as an industrial centre — the famous 1982 strike led by Datta Samant which brought practically all the mills to a grinding halt. Now, more than two decades later, hardly any mills are working. The most contentious issue in Mumbai today is the future of the land on which the defunct mills are located. The people who worked in the mills, many of whom still live there, have been excluded from the debate. But as the authors write movingly in the epilogue: "Girangaon cannot be quietly wiped off the map of the city nor erased from its memory and history...The millworkers have moulded a century of this city's history and are now waiting for the city to return some part of that history back to their children". Adarkar and Menon's book makes an important contribution in doing just that.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
