[Reader-list] family and labour
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Tue Aug 24 10:43:00 IST 2004
Family and Work
The coal mining industry in the Jharia coalfield started working from the
decade of the 1890s. The laboring masses, in an increasing number, began
pouring for colliery work from different parts of South Asia. The Mazdoors
who initially joined colliery came mainly from the contiguous areas and
neighbouring districts. The males, females, and the children of these
Mazdoors families worked together in the collieries. This was true by and
large for both the underground and the surface works.
I have elsewhere discussed the nature of streams of mining classes taking up
colliery work between the 1890s and the 1970s. From the early years of the
decade of the 1900s, the migration began to flow from relatively distant
areas into the colliery work . They also joined colliery largely as Family
Mazdoors/family labour. Some of them were, though, single male workers. The
latter category of labour swelled in number during the boom period of coal
trade (1915-19) and its aftermath . The single female workers also came to
occupy a small proportion of the total work force in the decade of the 1920s
and the 1930s. They were largely widow woman workers
The mining community lived broadly in three kinds of houses in the
coalfield. One- those miners who lived in their Bustees in the nearby mines.
Second, those who lived in the Dhowrahs obtained from the coal Companies .
Third those who lived in self-built huts of mud and straw . The second and
third types of homes constituted the predominant forms of the colliery
bastis/pada/neighborhoods and grew around each colliery . This relocation
around collieries meant the re-organisation of their lives. They had to
cope with the colliery working and living contexts (at the work place and
the Dhowrahs). For instance, the mining people who worked in a family
gang, had to habituate to the situation when women workers were withdrawn
from underground work from the decade of the 1920s onwards . In reaction
there was at times an exodus from collieries. Some miners protested.
Similarly, Mazdoors families had to struggle and devise ways for sustaining
and maintaining the combination between the tasks of production and
reproduction (of physique as well as generation). While, the industrial
regime worked to redesign the organisation of their lives and scope of
familial- social obligation (family/home lives), workers sought to maintain
their own conception of family life.
This paper is intended to study the following set of questions. What was the
form of organisation of socio-familial relation of mazdoors? How did they
apprehend the socio-familial time? In what ways and, how far the
labour/time regime in the mines affected the organisation of mazdoors
socio-familial relation? How did the mining community react to the
challenges? What extent and why only to that did they succeed in resolving
the tension? And what were their experiences of the struggle of adaptation?
I explore these issues of the lives of the mining community in the period
from the decade of the 1920s and largely till 1940s/60s. In this period,
they witnessed the phenomenon of the reorganization of the production
process and work force, the gradual removal of the woman workers and the
child labour, the consequent subsistence crisis, the precariousness of
disruption of the family/home life in the coalfield, the adamant and
adverse attitude of the coal-proprietors/employers and the state before
their demands and, the larger vanility/vanity of their struggle.
I
What do I understand by the term family? We have at least two sets of well
acknowledged definitions of Family.
1. A group of people tied with each other along the blood- line and sharing
one household.
2. A group of people who share a marital and generational bond between each
other. And, they are a part of a household economy .
The third conception of the family is as follows: the social grouping of the
people that is formed through the particular form of sexual life of the
human kind and, the system of the consanguinity .
I see some limitations in the former two conceptions. They heavily emphasize
on biological ties & legal relation, and household economy. In
contrast, a family of a group of people may exist, whose members feel a
sense of ties/attachment with each other. And the feeling is both
substantial and concrete. I should emphasise here the contention to make a
distinction between the household on the one hand and, the family on the
other. The former refers the family of the procreation /reproduction as an
economic unit; while the family is of orientation /feeling/belief . I have
deployed this meaning/ understanding of a family and at places juxtaposed
with the historical forms of the family in the subsequent analysis.
II
There was more than one form of social- familial organisation amongst the
colliers. [The latter lived and conceived those organisation at different
levels]. One form of socio-familial organisation was a family gang. They
lived in Dhowrahs, allotted to them by companies. The Santhals from
Hazaribagh & Santhal Pargana, the Bauris from Burdwan, Bakura & Manbhum, the
Rajwars from Manbhum, the Bhuiyans from Monghyr worked in family gangs .
These families included the husband, the wife, the children, and even some
other kith & kin.
But, some of the family miners preferred to live in their houses in bastis,
and did not live in Dhowrahs. They were predominantly the Santhal of nearby
areas/bastis. They lived there with their kith of the same social group. At
this time members of a social group known as Mahto also lived in those
bastis. Bishu Mahto reported people were simple and honest the original
inhabitants- the Santhals and Mahtos lived together amicably
almost like
members of the same family . There is, hence, a notion of a bastis family
Dhowrahs were very crowded from the early years of mining. On an average
around one dozen people lived in a small room. The workers preferred to
live with fellow workers of their kith or same caste/ territory/ jila
(district)/ilaka/gaon- group . I would call these forms of social
organisation as a communitarian-family. Some of them were socio-familial
group, which did not maintain regular links to the kin living in their
bastis of origin. The proportion of this form of labour was very small till
the 1920s. It was around 15% of the total work force .
An overwhelming majority of miners maintained their contact with their kin
and homes in villages. They were located within an extended family. Chitra
Joshi has shown largely similar phenomena in the case of Kanpur textile
workers. These were Mazdoors from both adjacent and distant areas. The
single male workers, who constituted a large section of the miners by
1920s, were largely of this category. Some of them had to bring their
female-folks. It was done for obtaining work of malcuttas, a job with better
pay . A great number of male workers could not bring their female
counterparts and children. They preferred to work as a trammer,
timber-mistri and other surface works, where a family gang did not work.
They lived in dhowrahs, in which a group of single male workers lived. They
preferred a fellow worker of own kith & kin, of the same Gaon/ elaka
(socio-cultural territory, and not essentially administrative one).
Over time the para/ dhowrahs developed along the line of caste/ elaka
community. We hear of Bhuiya Dhowrahs, Bauri, Paschima Dhowrahs etc. I want
to explore whether employers planned such type of housing/ spatial
arrangements. This form of configuration of socio-familial relationship led
the formation of different cohesive circles of miners.
This socio-familial relation was manifest even at the workplace. A sizeable
number of miners worked belowground as a family gang. They were not always
linked to each other through marital and parental ties. The pairs of
malcuttas and loaders of family gangs contained the males and the females of
broad socio- familial groupings. Workers preferred to be paired with the
colliers of their kin/ caste/ tribe/bastis/elaka. The Kamins, working
belowground in the 1910s and 1920s, declined to work along side the male
workers other, than the members of their socio- familial groupings. The
Kamins of the social group like, the Santhals, the Rajwars, the Mahtos, the
Bhuiyans, the Bilaspuris, some of the Bauris, etc refused to accompany
Paschima male miners, as loaders.
III
The family labour and the family working system remained a predominant
form of the work unit (if not the production unit)-like in the Assam tea
plantation, agrarian society and economy in South Asia-in the coal-mining
industry in Jharia till the decade of the 1920s, likewise in the Raniganj
coalfield . They were employed in two ways in colliery works. One, they
worked belowground in the form of family gangs . Second those working
families whose members worked un-unitedly at surface and underground. The
family gang included the male, female and the children. They were not always
linked to each other through marital and parental ties. The pairs of
malcuttas and loaders of family gangs contained the males and the females of
broad socio- familial groupings. It has been usual to see that the two woman
workers loading coal for the four to six persons. Workers preferred to be
paired with the colliers of their kin/ caste/ tribe/bastis/elaka. The
Kamins, working belowground in the 1910s and 1920s declined to work along
side the male workers other, than the members of their socio- familial
groupings. The Kamins of the social group like the Santhals, Rajwars,
Mahtos, Bhuiyans, Bilaspuris, Mushahrs and some of the Bauris refused to
accompany Paschima male miners, as loaders. Some Kamins of the Bauri social
group stepped over time to work as loaders with the Paschima male miners.
The female-folks was found in higher number than the male-folks between the
Bauri social group in 1921 .
The male members worked as malcuttas and the female members and the children
largely worked as loaders, trammers, water-bailers, etc. in the family gangs
in the case of belowground works . They in numerous gangs/Dangles extracted
the coal. Each dangal was of 6 to12 colliers. It included mulcuttas,
loaders, trammers, mining sirdars etc . Usually male members cut coal, while
Kamins gathered cut coal into a basket usually of 80 bl (80 pound=36 kg).
The Kamins then laboriously carried out basket on their head and put the
coal into either tubs kept at some distance from working faces, or up to
bullock cart. They then pushed the tubs forward to the pit bottom. They
sometimes, carried them on head at the surface. This form organisation of
production process was predominantly in vogue till the decade of the 1920s,
when the shift started to take place. A pair of mulcuttas and loaders was
found cutting and loading coal on an average, in normal condition, 2 to3
tubs in a day.
In the case of the surface work the family working system was involved in
the earth cutting and removing works. The toiling people from the regions
like Orissa and Nagpur and Bilaspur preferred this work. If the family
members worked separately, the male-folks usually worked belowground as
timber-Mistries, railway line Mistries, etc.; while the female-folks and the
children worked at surface as loaders, wagon loaders, shale-pickers, wooden
ginners, and the jobs such as, raising coal from the pit-mouth.
They slogged to carry the combined tasks of production and reproduction even
at the colliery workplaces. They took their babies and elder children there.
The latter members also worked as loaders or shale-pickers along side of
their parents. The attempts of combining production and reproduction tasks
such as, in minding their babies seem took some time out from work . The
employers, however, not only allowed but welcomed the family system of
working. This system was the guarantee of acquiring a maximum number of
labourers at the lowest wage rate and the fringe benefits. The coal industry
continued to struggle for obtaining adequate cheap labour till the early
years of the 1920s . The mining condition that characterized by the over all
absence of the automated production process and the mechanical power driven
machinery, the employment of the family system was to have hardly been
non-desirable. While, it helped the employers to secure the labourers only
by paying individual wage than paying the family wage to the breadwinners.
The colliery employers were, that is why, opposed to the any legislation
that restricting the recruitment of the female-filkes . A few big European
coal companies, nevertheless, started to bemoan the family system of mining
from the early years of the 1920s. The external observers such as T R Rees,
Noyce and Foley in the 1920s noticed the wretched condition of mining
population. I am not informed whether the labour ever waged the battle for
or asked for the family wage. They entered the colliery work as the family
labour. There was, of course, a long tradition of system of family labour in
the agrarian fields in the 19thc and the early 20thc among the social groups
the miners were drown from . The imperialist colonial state in the disguise
of the policy of the laissez faire helped the colliery employers in keeping
the wage rate repressed for instance during the period of the 1915-1920.
The mining families, nonetheless, never saw the practice of
combining the production and the reproduction works as anomalous. For them
those tasks were organically associated . L.Barnens in her fieldwork noted
that the women workers often narrated with joy the work they did below
ground, the people they worked with, members of their gang- and how they
used to sing and work. Mostly, kamins used to revert back to their village
during the period of child bearing and rearing (initial years of it) . The
[Santhal] women loaders in the later 1920s revealed that they often
absented themselves for 6 months or one year at the time of childbirth.
After this, they could return to the mines &take up employment again.
Thus, Kamins could combine production & reproduction /familial tasks in the
collieries at this time, as in the pre colliery days. While male members
could largely continue their work. It has been the conventional conception
that the industrial economy created a disjunction between the temporal
organisation of productive task and reproductive/ familial obligations at
the work . In the case of Jharia collieries the miners strove for combinely
carrying on both tasks.
They experienced the course of the decrease in the number of the working
members in their household families, and consequent subsistence crisis,
difficulties in maintaining the balance between the tasks of mining works
and familial obligation and the crisis in the old mining order in general.
The scholars like B R Seth and L Barnes- have analysed in depth the process
and the factors that caused the shift in the order of the organisation of
production and the work force, and the consequent changes in the working and
the living contexts of the coal miners. I will just critically brief those
expositions. The coal industry underwent through the progression of the
investment in the technological form of the capital such as, coal cutting
machines, underground railway lines, use of the explosives, ventilator fans,
electrification, etc . The coal proprietors had fetched a huge profit/
surplus during the boom period between the 1914-20 under the impact of the
coal driven war machinery. A great share of it, though, went into the
enjoying of the dividends. A small of it was invested in the technological
upgrading for reducing the relative cost of labour payment and raising the
productivity. The kind of technology was installed that rendered the woman
workers in particular redundant for instance from the works of the
water-bailing, pushing the tubs from the work face to the pit mouth or at
the surface, from the screening and the shale-picking work, etc.
L Barnes argued that the installation of the particular verity of the
machinery for some job in-itself does not explain the entire story of the
removal of the woman workers and the reduction in their number. The
selection of machinery for a particular work and for other is in-itself a
gendered policy biased against the female-folks. Second the latter were
actually replaced by the male-folks both underground and at the surface .
The jobs on the newly installed machines were allotted to the male-folks
such as on the haulage engine, tramming, water-pup-pumps, line mistry,
channak, etc. The male workers also intruded the job of coal loading into
the tubs belowground. They were largely distant immigrant miners. Employers
adopted a policy of removing woman workers from a certain jobs. These were
carried out especially at the big mines-predominantly owned by Europeans.
The family majdoors underwent a number of new developments during the 1920s
and the 1930s/40s. The changes in the organisation of the production
process, means of the production and the organisation of the labour forces
were accompanied by the phenomenon of the over arrival of the toiling
people, relative slump in the coal trade, the reduction in the number of the
operating mines and in the scale of the job opportunity in the Jharia coal
field .
They mining classes were subject to the process of regidification of labour
regime/work regime during second half of the decade of the 1920s. These
took place especially in big mines (European owned). These mines had gone
through the progression of investment in technological capital. Colliery
owners wanted quick and greater return from their investment in
technological upgradation, so they also wanted their miners to use maximally
those machines and organization of production. Mazdoors, thus, witnessed and
experienced the increasing demand from their employers for greater
regularity at work and greater attention towards it. This resulted in
intensification of work for respective miners.
This change (business strategy) influenced and was manifest on the
employers discourses of time routine. Employers, managers and supervisory
authorities, towards the late 1920s, began to bemoan vociferously against
the ostensible irregular, irrational and non-disciplined/non-efficient
working pattern of Indian miners. From 1925 onwards CIMAR (D.P.Denman),
European and big colliery owners agreed-in contrast to their position in
previous years-that women at present keep cost up by hampering the work.
They are very largely in the way and prevent speeding up. They lead to
difficulties about discipline and that sort of thing reduces output.
Now, the Kamins suffered from their forceful gradual removal from
belowground works. It had begun to take place even before the stipulation
of the Act of 1929 (seeking the withdrawal of Kamins from belowground).
Their withdrawal increased from 1929-30 onwards in all collieries favoring
such replacement or/and retrenchment. The small and medium sized collieries-
largely owned by the Indian coal proprietors were opposed to the Act. These
were the collieries where very low level of technological means of
production were installed and the traditional mining techniques based on the
manual labour with picks, hovels and baskets were predominant. The women
workers continued to carry strenuous work in the quarry mines. But the
industrial slump and the subsequent depression in the coal trade during the
1923 and 1936 further aggravated the problem. It caused the gradual closure
of the increasing number of the small and the quarry mines in particular. As
a result the spaces for the family mining system further shrank. Meanwhile,
the presence of the family system of mining swelled owing to two
institutional and socio-cultural reasons. The employers also adopted the
policy of replacing the old local peasant/ tribal workers by the distant
immigrant labourers. The replacements of the local the Santhals, Bauris,
and the Ghatwals coal-cutters were accompanied by the resignation of the
respective female-folks .
The course of the removal of female-folks and the replacement of the old
family majdoors predisposed the preponderant family working system to
tremble through the reduction in the number of wage earners in their
families and the consequent subsistence crisis (?). The condition of the
majdoors was further aggravated by the onslaught of the curtailment of the
wage rates, and the working days during the period of the 1930-36, a period
of coal trade depression in particular. It was around 40% reduction in the
wage rates, while between 40to 80 percent in the overall earning of an
individual on an average. B R Seth critically overhauled the deteriorating
condition of these working class families. I will here just brief it. More
than one investigator like T R Rees (1919), Noyce (1920), Foley (1925),
Whitely (1930), BLEC (1938) and BR Seth (1934) noted the pitiable material
living condition of the mining classes during the 1920s and the 1930s. An
average real earning of miners was inadequate even to the minimum basic
subsistence needs of mining household-family consisting on an average 5to 6
persons . It disposed them to the enslaving cycle of indebtedness, observed
Royal Commission on Labour in 1930. The condition further deteriorated and
the proletariat household families were crippled by the unrecoverable budget
deficit and sapping physical and biological existence like relative high
child death rate, maternal death rate, etc., owing to the reasons above
discussed and some other, noted BLECR and BR Seth.
One nevertheless must note that the all these industrial context
differentially affected the different segments of the people engaged in the
coal mining industry. The coal proprietors continued to reap rather
ironically high percentage of dividends, noted Burrows coalfield committee
in 1937. Similarly the managerial and the supervisory staffs-including the
sirdar continued to fetch rather a higher wage rates than the real producers
like coal cutters, loaders, trammers, timber-mistry, line-man, and the
wagon-loaders. The women labour, in general, and the single female
breadwinners such as, widow women labourers were disposed to at-most
financial hard hit. They were subject to receive rather lower wage rates
compared to the male counterparts for the same works . Likewise the
different segments of the beneficiaries of coal industry were availed fringe
benefits such as, housing, water supply, extra-allowance, medical benefits,
etc. The corrupt and the predatory managerial and the supervisory authority
favored one group of the miners against other in regard of tub distribution,
fines and the deduction, bribes, etc. The local-tribal people were
predisposed to the loss from this form of function of the mining-regime .
Indeed, the colliery employers, stuck with the mercantilist and
hierarchical labour economy, were far short of paying family-wage in
the Jharia coalfield.
These changes- the route of the removal of female-folks and the grip of the
proletariat household financial predicaments made the family majdoors liable
to the trembling and disorganisation of the old form of the family/home
life. They could hardly afford the non-working/non-earning members in
existing economy of households. On the other hand the delicate order between
the colliery works and the reproduction obligation was made liable to
unmanageable. The child labour of below the age 13 in the colliery was
prohibited from 1923 by the mining Act .
[There was a practice of working together between these labouring poor for
their sustenance . The male and female members of those families used to
share household-familial tasks at homes. One old women worker reported to
L.Barnes that after returning back from work both she and her husband used
to jointly do house works such as, cooking, child-caring etc. Theme of
joint work recurs from their joyful memories of working careers. It is also
mentioned during the debate on the withdrawal of Kamins participants. Some
old Kamins informed me in Dubaree colliery that these Kamins also worked to
build their own houses of mud and straw. Inadequacy of Dhowrahs and of
sharing rooms with sometimes more than dozen of members of a socio- family
was a problem acutely felt by them.]
IV
How did the family majdoors experience and cope with the attempts by mine
owners to intensify labour, the predisposition of the decimating
subsistence predicaments and the onrush on their household-familial
organisation of lives? Mining community adopted more than one strategy to
cope with the situation, and they responded in multifarious ways. They now
evolved new tactics in order to maintaining a balance between the fulfilment
of production and the familial obligation. They initially wilesly contrived
to come to term with the regimenting work- discipline. The Kamins hid their
children in mines, when white men visited, and left older ones in the care
of other retired/old women in Dhowrahs, [after the ban on child labour
(below 13 years) in 1923]. They were known that they were being removed
from the work because they carried their babies at the workplace. While, the
white-man considered that practices an un-civilised practice and were
repugnant to that. The other strategy that some of the family majdoors,
especially when they consisted only the wife and the husband and an infants,
worked out was to put up other families in their in one room, so that when
they go to work, they may leave their infant with the members of other
families who will go to work in the next shift. Some other families drugged
their infant with opium to keep it quiet and to prevent it from being too
hungry when the mothers milk is not sufficient. These option were explored
at the cost of the resulting over-crowdedness or the congestion which does
not fail to affect the health of the inmates of the room adversely. In other
case, as Miss M. Read observed, it is nothing short of a terrible race
suicide because drugged babies seldom grow up to be healthy children . But
these escaping attempts to turn down the onrush of the marginalisation could
yield for long in securing the ends. The structural and the institutional
reasons responsible for their predicaments were located somewhere else. In
contrast, there were three misapprehensions/delusions prevailed among the
mining classes in the Jharia coalfield, which guided the formulation, the
strategy of adaptation. Besides the one I have already discussed above the
rest two were as follows: One, the woman workers were prohibited from the
underground work after an incidence of the women giving birth to a child at
work belowground. This incidence officially took place sometimes in the
period of the second half of the 1920s . In the memory of the miners in the
Jharia coalfield the incidence is placed at varied date with only common
point of reference of the rule of Aungrej. But it has been the popularly
well known factor behind the removal of the female-folks. Second, according
to a folktale- young miner used to take in flute belowground and that he
plays music, and women would stop work (?), sing and dance, so no work was
done. Hence, bosses stopped the women from going down the mine. Notably,
these commonsensical reasons are imbued with the moral legitimacy. E P
Thompson suggested that the industrial regime also works through instilling
its disciplinary rationale in terms of the appealing moral order . It will
be a worth investigation that in what ways did the mining regime created
such favorable order? How and why did the proletariat accommodate that
economy of the moral order?
I would like to explore further, how colliers came to terms with the new
rules and regulations?
The Kamins, nonetheless, could not successfully fight and survive to the
gradual process of marginalisation. [The conservative philanthropists,
scholars, the gender biased labour economy of the employers and the State
acted in collusion against the rights of the Kamins to employment]. Being
witnessed the venilety at large of the escaping methods some hundreds of
family Majdoors remonstrated. Several pairs of Malcuttas and loaders -from
the Santhals, Bauris and the Bilaspuris social groups in particular, left
the coalmines in the years 1930-31 in search of works, in the places they
could work together. Some of them concentrated themselves in quarry works
in coalfield. A thousand of the male and the female Mazdoors organised a
huge protest-demonstration in 1934 in Jamadoba.
[I will discuss the significance of this demonstration for the examination
of domestic economy.
I would like to explore how workers came to terms with the new rules and
regulations.]
[One may examine a question: why the mining class could not come to resist
collectively that onslaught?]
The existing formal labour unions were not opposed to that. In fact, they
voiced in favour of 1929 Act . Some of the participants of discussion such
as, Royal Commission on Labour- recommended wage increase otherwise, poor
miners might get away from colliery works. A trade union leader from second
half of 1930s demanded for family wages to compensate the loss of income
to miners- families. It became one of the core demands of labour unions, in
response to withdrawal of Kamins. This in some way helped to de-prioritise
the demands/voices of family-miners.
But, family majdoors struggled to get scope for continuing wage works. They
steeped, in some collieries, to foster a little reprieving practice. The
kamins who were lay-off could get work at surface for a few days in a week.
Here, they had to sometime suffer from the sexual victimisation by Munshi
responsible for distribution of works. B L E C in 1938, noted that munshi
used to ask for sexual favour from Kamins in return of award of regular
employment. There were a higher number of job seekers including women and
men. Munshis tended to exploit this situation . Every one could not grease
the palm of munshis. Some Kamins from Bauri social-group in particular
succeeded in obtaining their ends by serving / making such nexus . The
formation of such rapport did not essentially disrupt their
household-familial relation. It in some cases led the making of a
household-familial relation between those of munshi and Kamins. Illyas Ahmad
Gaddi discusses such cases of (live-in) in his novel Fire Area. This was
also expressed in the folk-tales of a Kamins, I have quoted in chapter one
(p-5-6, section-I). It is sometime portrayed in terms of intensified
practice of relation of prostitution in the Jharia coalfield. I would,
rather like to suggest that one needs to make distinction between operation
of socio-familial relation, and, of prostitution. The former was beckoned
aiming to make earning through tasks of actual production.
Now, family miners needed to assert them in one more way. The Kamins had to
show their regular presence at work. It required a re-designing of relation
between work and the time of child bearing and rearing. To practice the old
form of its organisation i.e. to reverting to gaon for a period of ½ to1
year was costlier. In this situation those who could secure jobs started
increasing demand for maternity benefits.
V
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