Hope and despair: Textile workers in Kanpur in 1937-38 and the 1990s

Abstract

This essay focuses on two moments in the lives of Kanpur textile workers: 1937-38 and the 1990s. The first was a time of militant working-class struggle, often represented as a period of 'red Kanpur'. I look at the different ways in which this was narrativised. What seems to distinguish May 1938 from other periods of strike is the sense of a whole city in upsurge. It was a period when workers felt empowered, when existing hierarchies were questioned, when rules at the workplace were publicly flouted and order inverted. Industrialists, gripped with panic, had visions of a workers' take-over. The 1990s present a contrast. The textile industry is in a state of crisis, most mills are closed, the labour movement is fragmented and the working class appears decimated. For workers, closure is more than a threat to economic survival. Their lives and identities are closely intertwined with work in the mills. Work was physically empowering, its absence created a sense of weariness and physical disability, a loss of identity. I look at the ways in which this crisis is experienced by workers and how this moment of despair and worklessness reshapes the working class memory.