BOOK REVIEW 75 development of the Bombay textile unions was not so much the mounting resistance of a class conscious workforce against the jobber influence. Rather it was the relative success of the attempts to institutionalise informal, short-term interest organisations in bureaucratic frameworks' (p. 45). Those who have read R.K. Newman's book (Workers and Unions in Bombay, 1918-1929, ANU Monograph, 1981) must be quite familiar with this argument. But while Newman views the jobber phenomenon as a continuation of the village, i.e. pre-capitalist, mentality of the workers, Kooiman explains it as the result of 'the subordination of a weakened village economy to the needs of the capitalist mode of production* (p. 27). He, however, takes the power of the jobber over the workers for granted. And although he accurately describes the relationship of association and conflict between the workers and jobbers, he fails to see the same dialectical relationship of association and conflict between workers' and jobbers' and the real tightrope which the latter were forced to walk during the time of class conflict. Despite the title, the workers are conspicuous by their absence in this book. Except for a brief account at the beginning of the second chapter, the workers' problems and struggles are dealt with only by proxy and that too quite perfunctorily. This is even more apparent in the last two chapters. The fourth chapter deals with the growth of communism in India up to the Kanpur trials in 1924. Kooiman reaches the plausible conclusion that during the early 1920s the communist influence in Indian politics was overestimated because of the official Russophobia and obsession 'with fighting the red phantom' (p. 76). The fifth and the last chapter, which had appeared earlier as an article (see Dick Kooiman, 'Labour Legislation and Working Class Movement: The Case of Bombay Labour Officer, 1934-1937', in EPW, November 1981, Special No.), gives new facts and an interesting analysis about the role of the Bombay labour officer appointed through the Bombay Trade Disputes Conciliation Act of 1934. Morris D. Morris has argued that the labour officer, had played a crucial role in transforming the jobber system (see The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India, OUP, 1965, pp.138-40). Kooiman, on the other hand, quite convincingly shows that the labour officer was 'more successful in undermining the new leaders (unionists) than in elimina-ting the old ones (jobbers') (p.108). It is because of this that the labour movement in Bombay suffered much and took a long time to recover. Even though it may be an overstatement, it brings into focus the role of the state in shaping the growth of the working class movement in India. Shahi Bhushan Upadhyay Centre for Social Studies Surat