18 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Government Attitudes to Labour It is first of all necessary to explain the general character of government attitudes to industrial labour disputes before 1937 and then to indicate the extent to which the Madras Congress ministry diverged from its British predecessors. To their annoyance and at times dismay, European businessmen and industrialists in India had never enjoyed the automatic support and protection of the state to which they felt themselves entitled. Although the British empire in India had grown out of the trading activities of the East India Company, by the late nineteenth century there was a wide gulf between European administrators and European businessmen. The administrators rarely came from manufacturing or commercial families in their own country; their {Public school and university education blinkered them from the world of trade and indu* stry and encouraged them to despise it; and once established in a predominantly agrarian province like Madras they were far more likely to become experts in land revenue matters or amateur anthropologists of rural castes and tribes than to develop a specialized appreciation of the problems of industrial labour. For most administrators, European businessmen were socially inferior, politically naive, and, in administrative matters, meddlesome. As much from disinterest, therefore, as from attachment to the tenets of laissez-faire, until the late 1920s the Government of Madras held that it was not the duty of the state to intervene in the relations between employers and workers. The government clung. to this policy of non-intervention despite the presidency's experience of intense labour unrest between 1918 and 1922 and again between 1926 and 1929. Laissez-faire and general indifference apart, the Madras government saw political wisdom in remaining aloof from postwar labour disputes. In January 1919, for example, it decided not to prosecute certain labour leaders because such a step would ^seem definitely to place Government on the side of the capitalist (and European) and against the labour (and Indian.)"3 Similarly, in 1921 it opposed the acceptance of rewards offered to the police by the European management of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in Madras because "local agitators and labour leaders would say the police were taking sides and working for the capitalists... But if the British hoped that such evasive tactics would convince the industrial workers of a genuine impartiality they were mistaken. Fiom 1918 onwards the government was repeatedly drawn into labour disputes when lockouts and strikes exploded into violence: these were now law and order problems in British eyes and the police and magistrates durriedly intervened, almost invariably to the advantage of the management. Bitter experiences of strikes broken by police lathi charges and firing soon persuaded industrial workers that the colonial