Mumbai Fables Page 21

  VILLAGE OF THE MILLS

  The story of Bombay’s saffronization began in the mill districts. It was there, in the densely packed working-class neighborhoods of Parel and Lalbaug, that the Communists dreamed of coloring the city red.

  The area was known as Girangaon, or Village of the Mills. The name registered the concentration of textile mills in the area and the rural origins of its inhabitants. Most were migrants from the villages of western Maharashtra and the Konkan coast and from farther afield in North and South India. The labor migrants were also predominantly male. This was not only the result of patriarchal control over women’s mobility and employment, but also because the mill owners preferred male workers due to restrictions on the hours of women’s work and their entitlement to maternity benefits. With limited employment opportunities in the mills, the women who migrated to the city because of desperate circumstances in the village, widowhood, or to escape family control in the countryside were consigned to low-status and low-paying casual jobs. This included running khanavals, or dining spaces, where male workers gathered to eat home-cooked meals. Away from their native villages, laboring men would meet regularly over meals to gossip, exchange information, and discuss problems and shared experiences, developing a heavily male-oriented working-class culture. The khanavals provided not just a place to eat but also a space of friendship and community.

  The migrants to the city came to earn a livelihood, but low wages and insecure employment rendered their position precarious.6 With transportation expensive and inadequately developed, they congregated in the mill neighborhoods, where housing consisted of packed chawls and jerry-rigged shacks erected by mill owners and landlords. As many as twenty men would cram into a single room, often less than six square meters, in the timber-built chawls. One group of workers would vacate the sleeping spaces for the next when the shift changed in the mill, and they all shared a common bathroom at the end of the hallway. To secure even this space in shifts, they had to rely on caste, village, and kin links. The same was true in securing employment, housing, and credit. The need for credit also connected them to the grocer and the moneylender, many of whom were Pathan migrants from Afghanistan, who also acted as muscle for the mill owners. Finally, there was the Dada, the neighborhood tough guy. Known for his physical prowess, the Dada ran vyayamshalayas, or gymnasiums, commanded musclemen, organized religious festivals, and acted as a neighborhood patron.

  With work and neighborhood so closely connected, the workers were not just an industrial proletariat determined solely by their status as wage earners; the web of neighborhood ties also shaped them. The densely packed living conditions blurred the lines between the street and the home, the public and the private, fostering a sense of community in Girangaon.

  Neighborhood organizations played a part in this process. Chawl committees took care of the welfare of the residents, settled disputes, represented the tenants before landlords and municipal authorities, and organized religious festivals. Among them was the popular Ganeshutsav Festival. Traditionally, this had been a domestic ceremony. But in the early twentieth century, the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak turned it into a public celebration. Since then, it has become a widely observed celebration, which ends with a public procession for the immersion of the elephant-headed god Ganpati’s idol in the sea. Chawls and neighborhoods took a lead in mobilizing people in this celebration of Ganesh, the benevolent and imperfect elephant god.7

  Popular cultural forms and performances also imparted a distinct flavor to Girangaon’s working-class milieu. Street entertainment, folk art, the loknatya (popular) theater tradition, dance dramas, and devotional music flourished.8 Accomplished singers, called shahirs, drew large audiences. Tamasha, a bawdy and improvisational theatrical form drawn from the countryside, was wildly appreciated. Madhukar Nerale recalls that there were already many tamasha theaters in the city when his father founded Hanuman Theatre in 1946. Mill workers flocked to these performances, which used no written script; the performer would draw upon characters from the epics and improvise on the spot. Tamasha, which had developed in the Deccan districts, coexisted with theatrical forms from other rural areas. Initially, artists were invited from the countryside to perform in the city, but over time Girangaon developed its own band of performers.9

  Clearly, rural cultural forms and the social ties of caste, village, and kin were the glue binding the migrants into clusters of community. But Girangaon, despite its name, was no simple extension of the village into the city. The working-class neighborhoods of Parel and Lalbaug were irreducibly urban. The migrants patched together a distinctive collective urban identity from bits of the countryside, reflecting the circumstances of their industrial recruitment and conditions of survival. The reference to the village in the name and the invocation of rural kin and caste links served as a meaningful means to cope with and implicitly critique the difficult conditions in the city.

  DREAMING RED

  A collective identity forged from the neighborhood ties of village, caste, and kin did not automatically translate into a proletarian mobilization against capital. It was one thing to find workers bound together through shared cultural and social conditions, but quite another to mobilize them as a revolutionary force for socialism. This was the challenge that the Communists faced when they began their activities in Girangaon in the 1920s.

  Although the Communist Party of India was founded in 1920 at Tashkent under the direction of the Comintern, the first conclave of Communist activists in India took place in Kanpur in December 1925. Out of this conference came the Workers and Peasants Party, the name of the Communist Party at that time. Absent from the conference was S. A. Dange, one of the leading Communists. Born in 1899 to a Maharashtrian Brahmin family, Dange had started his political career as a follower of the nationalist leader Tilak. But like several other nationalists of his generation, he gravitated to Marxism after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1921 Dange published a pamphlet, Gandhi vs. Lenin, reflecting his conversion to revolutionary politics. A year later, he started an English journal called the Socialist with the help of a sympathetic flour-mill owner.10 Strikes by workers drew him to Girangaon, where he began spreading Marxist ideas among labor activists. The British took note of his Communist activities and threw him into prison in 1924, charging him with conspiracy to overthrow his majesty’s government.

  At that time, the principal trade union was the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC). Founded in 1920 by Congress leaders, the AITUC was by no means a revolutionary organization. Nor was the Girni Kamgar Mahamandal, the main trade union founded by mill clerks and jobbers during the 1924 general strike. The opportunity for the Communists came in 1927.11 The mill owners introduced “rationalization” schemes, developed by Henry Ford in the United States and admired by businessmen and efficiency experts throughout the world. As elsewhere, rationalization raised the workload and created fears of unemployment and lower wages. The workers became restive.

  The protest began at Sassoon Mills, one of the largest and most advanced manufacturing units.12 Soon, the workers struck in mill after mill. As industrial action spread to the industry as a whole and spilled into the public sphere of the street and the neighborhood, the Marxist anticapitalist ideology provided the workers with a robust rallying point. Unlike the established labor leadership, which had particular neighborhood and political connections to defend, the Communists were unconstrained; they championed a general strike for larger political reasons. Dange, who had just been released from jail in 1927 after serving three years for his conviction in the “Bolshevik Conspiracy” case, returned to Bombay and plunged into labor activism.13 While the established labor leaders wavered, Dange and his comrades pressed for a general strike.

  A police firing on a workers’ procession added fuel to fire. Inflamed by the shooting, which felled one of their comrades, the mill workers went on a general strike in 1928 that lasted for six months. The Communists worked furiously to keep up the workers’ morale, organ
izing eight hundred public meetings.14 They raised a strike fund from trade unions in Russia, Britain, and Europe and collected money in India.15 Dange and the Communist leadership fashioned a system under which grain was collected, bought, and distributed for consumption among the striking workers. Even small grocers in Girangaon contributed grain, reflecting the strike’s impact on the balance of power in the neighborhood.16

  Passions ran high. Black legs, or scabs, were not welcome. Once, the workers heard that two Bhaiyyas (North Indians) had broken the strike. The striking workers lay in wait for the Bhaiyyas to emerge from the mill, nabbed them, painted their faces black, and tied them to a tree. Women activists, sporting red ribbons, picketed the mill gates, daring anyone to break the strike. The Communist leaders would roam the streets of Girangaon from 5 a.m. until late at night, overseeing the strike and boosting the workers’ spirits. Their idea of uplifting the morale was to deliver speeches that sought to inspire the strikers with alluring portrayals of the Soviet Union as a proletarian paradise.17

  The Communist militancy paid dividends. The Girni Kamgar Mahamandal, the existing trade union of mill hands, split in 1928, and the Communist Girni Kamgar Union (GKU) emerged as the dominant force. According to Dange, the growing Communist influence was a product of the strike, not its cause: “The strike was not our creation, but we were the creation of the strike.”18 Emboldened by the general strike, the GKU led several lightning strikes against the rationalization schemes. By January 1929 its membership shot up to one hundred thousand.19 The GKU established several centers that fostered tight connections between the union, the mill committees that had sprung up during the general strike, and the neighborhood. As Dange was later to claim, the strike and the GKU’s rise led to a new source of power, one that bent the neighborhood ties in the direction of worker militancy.20

  The British government once again went after Dange, charging and convicting him in the Meerut Conspiracy Case for plotting to establish the Comintern in India. He was imprisoned from 1929 to 1935. The GKU’s influence, however, remained unaffected. A wave of strikes in 1933–34 further consolidated its presence in Girangaon. Through chawl committees and party cells in mills, the Communists were able to mobilize both the workplace and the neighborhood against their employers. They matched the coordination among the employers through the Millowners’ Association, with the organization of workers scattered in individual mills as a militant class force.

  In this class confrontation, there was no question about the Communist commitment to workers. Their ideology was to champion the working class, shunning any accommodation with the mill owners. Nominated to no legislature, seated in no royal commission, they carried no stigma of association with the state. Their opposition to the British government as an imperialist force resonated with the workers, who saw the colonial state on the side of the employers. They viewed police repression in the name of maintaining law and order as a ruse for supporting the mill owners. The discriminatory excise policies of the government, designed to favor Manchester over the Bombay textile industry, appeared to confirm the colonial state’s hostility to their interests. This favoritism was one of the reasons that several mill owners threw their support behind the Gandhi-led Congress’s nationalist campaign in the early1920s.21 But this only seemed to reaffirm the Communist claim to be the only party solely on the workers’ side. The CPI, like the mill owners, supported the Congress-led nationalist campaigns against the British, but it mobilized the working class as a political force ranged against both capitalism and imperialism.

  The Communists turned Girangaon into a red bastion not just with industrial actions but also with attempts to forge a progressive culture. The formation of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1942, following the establishment of the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in 1936 by leftist intellectuals, was a step in this direction. Whereas the IPTA’s central squad consisted of middle-class intellectuals and artists, the performers in Girangaon were drawn largely from the working class. The legendary performers in the working-class districts were Amar Sheikh, Annabhau Sathe, and D. N. Gavankar. Sheikh, a Muslim, had worked as a menial bus cleaner before becoming a celebrated singer and performer. Sathe was a Dalit and had worked as a mill hand.22 Only Gavankar belonged to the middle class. He had earned a BA degree before getting involved in nationalist activities and joining Sheikh and Sathe in founding Lal Bawta Kalapathak (Red Flag Artists’ Group).23 Drawing on tamasha (a folk form of drama that combines song and dance), these performers fashioned loknatya, a people’s theater form that spoke to the conditions of working-class lives. Sathe’s song “Majhi Maina Gavavar Rahili, Majha Jeevachi Hotiya” (My Beloved Is Left behind in the Village, My Heart Aches for Her) spoke to the homesickness of migrant workers. His “Mumbaichi Lavni” (Mumbai’s Song) evoked the workers’ city, their daily struggles to survive, and their hopes of the good life in Bombay.24

  Sheikh, Sathe, and Gavankar formed part of a worldwide phenomenon of radical working-class cultural resistance against capitalism. Similar protests against the exploitation of workers were articulated, for example, by the activists in the Workers’ Theatre movement in Britain and agitprop theater in the United States.25 Like their revolutionary compatriots elsewhere, the Bombay trio never achieved international or even national fame. Their lives and activities are not commemorated in official histories and monuments; that honor is reserved for opium kings such as Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. But they played a vital role in Bombay’s working-class life as the trio sat together regularly to experiment and compose songs for theatrical performances and political meetings. Sathe wrote the lyrics for the songs that Gavankar and Sheikh sang.26 They were a popular group, often performing at Kamgar Maidan, the Girangaon venue where the Communists held big political meetings. Sheikh Jainu Chand remembers one such meeting at Kamgar Maidan that began with the trio singing without microphones. The large crowd joined them. When Dange arrived, firecrackers greeted his appearance. Chand found his speech mesmerizing. “It was not a speech; it was as if a worker was speaking.”27 Dange was known to have an uncanny ability to communicate with the workers. He would use his knowledge of Sanskrit and the epics to explain issues of class injustice. The workers from the Konkan coast affectionately called him Dango in their language.28

  Women were at the forefront of this politically militant army in Girangaon. Middle-class women, radicalized by Marxist ideals and by their Communist family members, became activists in the trade union. Marxism’s modern outlook also freed them from customary constraints and sparked their activism. Usha Dange, Ahilya Rangnekar, Kusum and Vimal Ranadive, Kamal Donde, Tara Reddy, and many others were deeply involved in working-class activism. Leaders also emerged from the ranks of women mill workers. Among them was Parvatibhai Bhor, who rose to become the vice president of GKU. Women activists would go to the mill gates and sing songs. The mill hands coming off their shift were exhorted to “lift high the flag of revolt, the blood red flag steeped in our blood.” Songs depicting class injustice were addressed to women mill workers: “My son Raghu has to go to school, but he has no clothes to wear, and he is cold, my hunger is the reminder of the red flag.”29 During strikes, women activists stood at mill gates and spat betel juice at strikebreakers. The women khanavals smuggled pamphlets and leaflets into the mill—concealed under the food baskets—and pasted them on the walls.30

  The color red figured heavily in the Communist iconography. Red flags were planted on factory and mill gates, at road corners, and in playgrounds. During strikes, red flags, banners, and placards were ubiquitous. In processions, everyone carried small red flags. Torans (strings with little triangular colorful papers) of the red flag were created and hung on walls and street corners.31 Inside the mill, the workers would celebrate May Day right outside the manager’s office, putting up portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and hoisting red flags. The workers would come and bow before the portraits as if they were worshiping a Hindu deity.32

  Indus
trial actions and cultural activism kept the red flag fluttering in Girangaon through the 1940s, and Dange was its undisputed labor leader. He led a strike in 1939, for which he was imprisoned. Released after four months of rigorous imprisonment, he led another strike in 1940 and was thrown back in jail. In 1943–44 he was elected the chairman of the AITUC. In part, this was because of Dange’s popularity as a militant trade unionist. But it was equally due to the imprisonment of the nationalist leaders by the British, leaving the AITUC open for a Communist takeover. The colonial authorities spared the CPI and allowed it to function legally because of its sharply changed stance on World War II.

  When World War II broke out in 1939, at first the Communists denounced it as an “Imperialist War.” The nationalist leadership, however, was sympathetic to the Allies and opposed to the Nazis. Winston Churchill’s stirring words promising nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” in the fight against tyranny earned him plaudits in Britain and the United States but appeared deeply hypocritical in colonial India. The nationalists demanded self-government in exchange for supporting the war effort. In March 1942 the British sent a delegation headed by Sir Stafford Cripps, offering full dominion status after the war. Dismissing the proposal as a “post-dated cheque on a failing bank,” Gandhi called for a mass movement to force the British to “Quit India” in August 1942. A wave of repression followed. Gandhi and other nationalist leaders were promptly jailed. Churchill thundered in the House of Commons that he had not become “the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”