A CONSPICOUS MODEL OF PEACE 63
scheme of things both capital and labour had rights and obligations towards each other. If the worker could demand a decent human standard of living, the employer expected the worker to be considerate in his demands and relate these to the 'health of the industry* (p.44), a term that was deliberately left vague, as Patel points out. Thus the mill-owners always backtracked on arbitration (established after the 1921 strike) whenever the mill industry faced a crisis or depression. The 1923 strike proved disastrous for the workers. The period up to 1939 which saw the arbitration machinery enshrined in the Bombay Industrial Disputes and Relations Bill was a familiar one of pressure, retreat and compromise by the working class till the AMA accepted arbitration as the best strategy for a long-term peaceful relationship with workers.
Patel calls this process hegemonisation, thereby accepting the arbitration machinery. Capital gained the upper hand over labour. But one is not sure how this hegemony came about. From her evidence it seems more like tactical strategy and political expediency by AMA than any overarching hegemony that led to this settlement. As Patel shows, there were too many conflicts within the AMA for it to have acted in so monolithic a manner. Similarly, by her own admission, the TLA at its best represented only 25 per cent of the workers (p.85). Yet in her discussion of TLA the equation TLA equal to labour movement* seems to be an inescapable conclusion. One wonders about the hopes and fears of the remaining 75 per cent of the workers. This labouring force was far from being unilaterally nationalistic in the Gandhian way. During the Rowlatt Satya-graha in 1919, the mill-hands went on a rampage destroying 51 government buildings in Ahmedabad alone (K. Gillion, 'Rowlatt Satyagraha in Gujarat 1919', in R. Kumar (ed.) Essays in Gandhian Politics, Oxford, 1971. (p.137). Janet Harvey Kelman who visited India in 1920-21, asked an Ahmedabad mill worker why she was on strike, got the reply, 'the Raj has said we must not work' (J.H. Kelman, Labour in India: A Study of the Conditions of Indian Women in Modern Industry, London. 1923, (p. 111). The workers had clearly many loyalties and in this context Patel's blanket statement that 'for the workers nationalist feelings were superimposed over those of class conflict' (p.94) is too general to be of any relevance. Incidentally, both Gillion's essay and Kelman's book do not find a mention in Patel's bibliography.
Patel argues that hegemonic domination was possible because the workers showed militancy. Cannot it also be argued, as Dipesh Chakarabarty has done (in Subaltern Studies Vol III), that the ideology of the ruling classes are often crucially modified by the limitations that working class culture sets on that ideology? And finally, all through the book, Patel talks of labour without distinguishing between male and female workers. There is not even the obligatory census chart showing the sex-ratio of the Ahmedabad cotton mill workers.
PARTHO DATTA Zakir Hussain College (Evening), Delhi University
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Chie Nakane. Garos and Khasis — A Comparative Study in Matrilineal Systems^ Mouton and Co, Paris. 1961.
2. Ibid.
3. P.C. Kar, Garos in Transition, Cosmo Publications, New Delhi, 1982.