Book Review

Asia

In this book, as in his earlier Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (1994), Rajnarayan Chandavarkar writes his own, distinctive version of working-class history. Origins was the first book in Indian labor history to stress the importance of neighborhood social organizations and the larger urban context in understanding working-class lives and politics. The essays in this book continue that line of investigation. Although much of the empirical focus remains on the city of Bombay (Mumbai), the book expands to encompass topics such as the nature of imperial rule in India and its nationalist opposition. An abiding theme is how the imperial need to maintain public order, and the vagaries of Indian nationalism and world capitalism, determined the nature of the political options available to the urban poor in colonial India. There are essays, for example, on the histories of industrialization and colonial policing in India, on political relations in the mill districts of Bombay, on official and popular reactions to the plague in Bombay in the late 1890s, on Gandhian nationalism and the working classes, and on the overall nature of South Asian capitalism. The use of official archives and reports in this book is meticulous and intelligent. These essays confirm the productive nature of the innovative analytical move that Chandavarkar made in enlarging the scope of Indian labor history to include the politics of the neighborhood and the city.

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