Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T16:45:30.270Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c.1750–1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2002

Ravi Ahuja
Affiliation:
Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin

Extract

I. Introduction

Since the 1990s, academic fashion has rediscovered and revamped theories of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (or rather, of the solipsism of cultures) that had already been popularized successfully in the early years of our ‘age of extremes’ by conservative ideologues like the German Oswald Spengler. Indian ‘indigenism’ appears to be another subsidiary branch of that ideological current. Recent writings on India's colonial period thus often tend to disconnect its precolonial from its colonial past, in order to construct incompatible exogenous and indigenous ‘principles’ of social organization. The imposition of ‘alien’ discourses on the Indian context is presented as the disruption of a communitarian social system that has been painted sometimes in pastel colours. ‘Indigenism’, as has been rightly remarked, tends to harmonize the precolonial past. The obsession with abstract cultural ‘principles’ (or, to use Spengler's term, ‘Urphänomene’, i.e. ‘primordial phenomena’) is often accompanied by a lack of interest in empirical research that is concerned with the material conditions of human existence and with the relations between human beings emerging from these concrete historical conditions. These trends notwithstanding, this paper is concerned with elementary aspects of social praxis, which rendered, for all their apparent ‘triviality’, members of South India's society, to use an expression of Marx, ‘actors and authors of their own history’. Hence, an analysis is attempted of labour relations in Madras City and its hinterland in the late eighteenth century, in the transitional period between the precolonial and colonial regimes. The discussion of the source material will highlight the problem of continuity and change—it is intended to identify ancien régime forms of subordinating labour that proved to be compatible with colonial conditions and to distinguish them from forms that did not survive or were newly created.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This essay is an abridged and revised English version of chapter 5 of the present authorÕs Heidelberg thesis Die Erzeugung kolonialer Staatlichkeit und das Problem der Arbeit. Eine Studie zur Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Madras und ihres Hinterlandes zwischen 1750 und 1800 (Beiträge zur Südasienforschung 183) (Stuttgart, 1999). There relevant evidence has been reproduced in greater detail. An earlier English version of this article was presented in March 1998 to the 1st Conference of the Association of Indian Labour Historians in New Delhi where a lively discussion encouraged me to develop my argument further. As always, I am indebted to Dr Nicole Mayer-Ahuja whose help was essential in more than one way.