Dipesh
Chakrabarty Ranajit Das Gupta
Some Aspects of the Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century
Two Views
Introduction by Janaki
Nair
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Contents
About the Authors
About the Editors
About the Introduction Writer
General Introduction to the Series
Partha Chatterjee and Rosinka Chaudhuri
Preface
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introduction: ‘Class Consciousness’—A Concept in Crisis or in Terminal Decline?
Janaki Nair
Some Aspects of the Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century
1 Class Consciousness and Labour History of Bengal: A Critique of Ranajit Das Gupta’s Paper ‘Material
Conditions and Behavioural Aspects of Calcutta
Working Class 1875–99’
Dipesh Chakrabarty
2 A Reply
Ranajit Das Gupta
Notes and References
Index
About the Authors
Dipesh Chakrabarty studied Physics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and Management at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He received a PhD in History from Australian National University, Canberra. After having taught for several years at the University of Melbourne, he is now the Lawrence A. Klimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at several institutions around the world. He is the author of Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (1989), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), Habitations of Modernity (2002), and The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth (2015). He has also published two volumes of essays in Bengali. The paper reprinted in this volume was written when he was a fellow in History at the CSSSC from 1974 to mid-1976.
Ranajit Das Gupta studied Economics at the University of Calcutta. In his youth, he was closely involved with the labour movement and the Communist Party of India. After teaching for several years at Ananda Mohan College, Calcutta, he was a Fellow at CSSSC in the 1970s, before joining the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, as a member of its faculty. His books include Problems of Economic Transition: Indian Case Study (1970), Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri 1869–1947 (1992), and Labour and Working Class in Eastern India (1994).
About the Editors
Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, New York, USA. A member of the CSSSC faculty for 36 years, he was also its Director from 1997 to 2007, and continues as Honorary Professor of Political Science. Among his books are Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2001), The Politics of the Governed (2004), and The Black Hole of Empire (2012).
Rosinka Chaudhuri is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the CSSSC. She is also the first Mellon Professor of the Global South at the University of Oxford. She has written Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal (2002), Freedom and Beef Steaks (2012), and The Literary Thing (2013) and edited Derozio, Poet of India (2008), The Indian Postcolonial (co-edited, 2010), A History of Indian Poetry in English (2016), and An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (2018). She has also translated and introduced Rabindranath Tagore: Letters from a Young Poet (2014).
About the Introduction Writer
Janaki Nair has been teaching History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, since 2009, before which she was at the CSSSC between 2002 and 2009. Beginning with an interest in labour history, she has also written on the history of law, urban history, and visual culture. In addition, she has a research interest in feminism and women’s history. Her books include Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (1998); The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (2005; for which she won the New India Book Prize) and Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011). She has also produced a film based on her labour history of Kolar Gold Field, entitled After the Gold (1997). She is a founding member of the Association of Indian Labour Historians.
General Introduction to the Series
Partha Chatterjee and Rosinka Chaudhuri
This series of publications from Oxford University Press brings to a general audience a selection of the papers and lectures delivered at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), over the last four decades. They fall into two categories: first, a chosen few from among the Occasional Papers circulated by the Centre’s faculty and second, from the two series of memorial lectures in the name of Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, for lectures on Indian history and culture, and Romesh Chunder Dutt, for lectures on political economy.
The CSSSC was founded in 1973 as an autonomous research institute financed primarily by the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Government of West Bengal. Since then, the Centre, as it is ubiquitously known, has established an academic reputation that places it at the crest of research institutes of excellence in India. Its faculty works in the fields of history, political science, sociology, social anthropology, geography, economics, and cultural studies. Its unique interdisciplinary culture allows for collaborations between scholars from different fields of research that might not find support in traditional department-based institutions, attracting students and researchers from across the country and abroad.
The R.C. Dutt Lectures at the CSSSC have focused on themes from economic theory, economic history, and development policy, mostly relating to India. As is well known, Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909) served in the Indian Civil Service from 1871 to 1897. On retirement, he lectured at the University of London, UK, and
wrote his classic work in two volumes, The Economic History of India under Early British Rule (1902) and The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (1904). He was elected president of the 1899 session of the Indian National Congress. Apart from his extensive writings on the colonial economy, the condition of the peasantry, famines, and land rights, Dutt was also a poet in English and a novelist in Bengali, writing on historical and social themes. Over the years, some of the most eminent economists of India have delivered the R.C. Dutt lectures at the Centre. Among them are Sukhamoy Chakrabarti, K.N. Raj, V.M. Dandekar, Ashok Rudra, Krishna Bharadwaj, A. Vaidyanathan, Suresh Tendulkar, Prabhat Patnaik, I.S. Gulati, Amit Bhaduri, C.T. Kurien, Praveen Visaria, Kaushik Basu, Geeta Sen, Debraj Ray, Abhijit V. Banerjee, Ravi Kanbur, and Dilip Mookerjee. The lectures selected for publication in the present series will capture key debates among Indian economists in the last four decades in topics such as the crisis of planning, economic liberalization, inequality, gender and development, sustainable growth, and the effects of globalization.
The S.G. Deuskar Lectures began as a series on Indian nationalism but widened to reflect the cross-disciplinary interests the CSSSC nurtured, featuring a range of distinguished speakers on the history, culture, politics, and society of India. Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869–1912) was Maharashtrian by ancestry and member of a family that migrated in the mid-eighteenth century to the Santal Parganas on the border of Bihar and Bengal. A schoolteacher and journalist by profession, he is best known for his Bengali tract Desher Katha (1904)—a damning indictment of the exploitative and violent character of British colonial rule—which is reported to have sold 13,000 copies in five editions within five years during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. Some of the finest scholars and artists of modern India have delivered the Deuskar Lectures, including, among historians, Ranajit Guha, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra, Romila Thapar, Partha Sarathi Gupta, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muzaffar Alam, Gyanendra Pandey, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and
Shahid Amin; among philosophers, J.N. Mohanty and Bimal Krishna Matilal; among artists and art critics, Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram, K.G. Subramanyan, and Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh; among social theorists, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Veena Das. A selection of these lectures will now be reprinted in this current initiative from Oxford University Press.
Occasional Papers published by the CSSSC represent the research of the CSSSC faculty over the years. Many of these papers were later published in journals and books, some becoming classic essays that are essential reading for students and researchers in the field. Some of the most important works in the Indian social sciences, it would be fair to say, are represented here in the form of papers or drafts of book chapters. Of the nearly 200 Occasional Papers published so far, we will reprint in the present series only those that are not already in wide circulation as journal articles or book chapters. Included among our Occasional Papers will be the current initiative of the Archives Series Occasional Papers, meant specifically to showcase the collection in the CSSSC visual archives.
By turning these outstanding papers into little books that stand on their own, our series is not intended as a survey of disciplinary fields. Rather, the intention is to present to the reader within a concise format an intellectual encounter with some of the foremost practitioners in the field of humanities and social sciences in India. R.K. Narayan, in his childhood memoir, My Days (1947), had written that when, as young men, he and his friends had discussed starting a journal and were thinking of names for it, someone suggested ‘Indian Thought’. ‘There is no such thing’ was the witty response from a friend. Narayan nevertheless began publishing Indian Thought, a quarterly of literature, philosophy, and culture, which lasted all of one year. We suggest that this series might, in the end, prove his friend wrong.
Preface
It is a mixed privilege to have something of one’s eristic youth brought into the glare of public attention decades later. Mixed, because from so far away in time, I can only look at the sharp edges of my polemical prose with a remote sense of amusement; and yet it is undeniable that the issues debated here were of capital importance in the early phase of my development as a historian. But personal history apart, what this debate testifies to is the importance attached to the question of consciousness in certain Marxist circles of Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s. The criticism I received in the 1990s for the perceived ‘culturalism’ of these exchanges or for my untimely use of the adjective ‘primordial’—once a respectable word now fallen into disrepute—in qualifying human relationships to caste or religion, often missed the context that made questions of workingclass culture truly controversial. ‘Consciousness’ assumed a theoretical importance because it was thought that a ‘working class’ born in the deprived conditions of a colony could not depend merely on ‘objective’ circumstances for the development of a class-outlook, so indispensable for the overthrow of capitalist relations. Understanding workers’ culture and raising consciousness would have to be the first task of any revolutionary project. Right or wrong, that was the debate.
Sadly, Ranajit Dasgupta, my interlocutor, is no longer with us. My appreciation of his work may be found in what I wrote in his memory in Economic and Political Weekly, 33 (38), 19 September 1998.
Dipesh Chakrabarty Chicago, 25 August 2018
Introduction
‘Class
Consciousness’: A Concept in Crisis or in Terminal Decline?
Janaki Nair
A spectre—of a post-work world where ‘humans need not apply’1 — is increasingly haunting the imaginations, and more importantly, driving the research agendas of those who are sizing up the scale of a change that will be like no other that has gone before it. The predicaments and possible futures of the ‘precariat’ that has replaced the secure, committed, spatially rooted working class are a concern more of sociologists, economists, and political scientists than, naturally, historians. But even among historians, the ‘proletariat’—endowed with the world historical role of transforming capitalism itself—now appears like a museumized fossil, a chimera of the past that holds no more than nostalgic value. With the rise of information-rich technologies and forms of immaterial labour, greater uncertainty regarding the relevance of skills, greater informality, and greater inequality are the features of the workplace. The end of ‘work’ as we once knew it has important consequences not only for modes of political mobilization in the present, but also for the study and analysis of our pasts. What life, therefore, does a debate on class consciousness between two scholars more than three decades ago have among historians of the subcontinent in general, and labour and working-class historians in particular?
The brief, and sharply posed, exchange between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Das Gupta, entitled ‘Some Aspects of the Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views’2
was sparked off by two previous Occasional Papers, 11 and 22, authored by Chakrabarty and Das Gupta, respectively.3 The exchange, and the articles they were based on, revealed at least three levels of difference between the authors, which continue to have some resonance for our times: theoretical/conceptual, political/ethical, and methodological.
The chosen theoretical orientation of each author’s investigations into working-class consciousness in the same region, period, and industry marks the first difference. Which labour historian has not been mesmerized by E.P. Thompson’s magisterial work, The Making of the English Working Class?4 Both authors here are clearly under his spell. At the end of nearly 900 pages, Thompson had convinced readers that consciousness is not a mechanical outcome of the capitalist mode of production, not a thing but a process; that even failure must be taken on board in order to flesh out that process; that not only was the working class present (and therefore conscious) of its own making, but drew from rich pre-capitalist cultural traditions of dissent, rebellion, and republicanism.
Nowhere in his book did Thompson feel compelled to specify the Marxist theorist who animated his work, allowing instead the captivating narrative to tell its tale. It speaks, perhaps, of a subcontinental preoccupation that the preferred Marxist framework is spelled out here with such obvious relish by each author. Therefore, arguably the most important of the differences that were investigated in these two articles was what indeed accounted not just for the ‘low-classness’ of workers (the term used by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya to describe the pervasive surrogation phenomena of the middle-class representation of labour in India5) but for the unprecedented and disruptive Talla riot of 1897.6 Participation in this riot by relatively fresh Muslim immigrants from the North-West Provinces and Bihar, who readily rallied to the pan-Islamic call, produced not a little discomfort among labour historians. Was the allegiance to religion (or other non-class identity such as language, caste, or ethnicity) merely transitional in an incompletely capitalist (because colonial) economy? Would it decline or disappear as
working-class experience of factory work deepened and when alternative organizational forms became available? Or were affiliations to religion, region, caste, and language more than just residues of peasant consciousness, a ‘primordial loyalty’ (Chakrabarty’s preferred term7) that was irreducibly stable and longlived, defining ways of being in the new urban location?
An approach to answering these questions lay in the two other differences between the two historians. While both historians therefore relied largely on similar official sources in their construction of working-class history, and both revealed their debt to the rich and complex heritage of Marxism, their interpretations were founded on the possibility, or not, of emerging working-class consciousness. Ranajit Das Gupta was an activist, with a background in peasant and working- class organizing. His rich empirical research on working-class life and protest in the colonial period made links with contemporary forms of protest, and the visionary futures of the Communist Party of India. In this, he was part of a long (and one must admit, until recently, hardy) historical tradition, which analysed non-class identities as needless distractions—no, ‘deviations’8—on the road to class consciousness.9 Chakrabarty faulted Das Gupta for falling prey to this impulse, and instead privileged a methodological focus on the community consciousness of the migrant to explain the Talla riot of 1897. On the one hand was the unreconstructed Third Internationalist Marxism of Ranajit Das Gupta; on the other, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reliance on the antivanguardist Antonio Gramsci.
The political or moral charge which was so evident in Ranajit Das Gupta’s reading of the same material defined his economistic methodological focus as well. He relied on wages, hours, and conditions of work and the material miseries of the nascent working class. These early experiences, and not the residues of a peasant life, determined their actions and lives: workers were ‘mere cogs on a complex mechanism’;10 they were ‘characterised by a good many ethnic, religious, caste and other differences’ but common interest and solidarity was ‘beginning to get an upper hold on the workers’
minds….’11 The demand for a holiday for Bakr-Eid or Muharram, rather than a few hours off work, was no more than a veiled class demand for reduced working hours and more leisure.12
If there was discrimination between Muslim and Hindu workers, it was part of the management’s artful ploy to ‘foster fissiparous tendencies among workers….’13 Since all, and not just Muslim workers, suffered from the exploitation in the mills, their reactions cannot be explained in ‘narrow sectarian terms’.14 In the absence, says Das Gupta, ‘of any alternative ideology and programme, the country people, now in the process of becoming factory workers, were compelled to turn towards traditional customs and religion’.15 The teleology that Chakrabarty found fault with was embarrassingly evident.
On the contrary, Chakrabarty argued from a culturalist perspective: in order to take E.P. Thompson’s problematic, and not only his rhetoric, seriously, one would have to acknowledge that the cultural inheritance of the Indian worker bore little resemblance to that of the English worker This inheritance was divisive, hierarchical, and even when religious, contained no seeds of redemptive Methodism or radical non-conformism, with its promise of equality and justice.
Indeed, one could argue that both authors, lacking the embarrassment of riches that British social historians had used so creatively, brought their speculative historical imaginations to bear on conventional material that was suggestive at best. Chakrabarty admitted that ‘much of what I say is conjectural’.16 Predictably, a good part of his construction of community consciousness (as opposed to communal consciousness, which he usefully distinguishes between) is derived by inference. ‘Undoubtedly’, the sardar in his capacity as recruiter ‘would have become extremely important to the worker’.17 ‘Perhaps’ the Bengali bhadralok leader felt distant from ‘the world of men who worked in the mills’ and possibly, ‘community consciousness’ was ‘the migrant workers’ substitute for closed shop communalism’.18
More important, in this lively exchange, was the charge of ‘ahistoricity’ that was made by both authors.19 Both authors agreed on the stifling effects of colonialism on the economic transformation of the subcontinent. But to Chakrabarty, Das Gupta had stuck so closely to the English template as to miss both the peculiarities of the English, and the specificities of the Indian setting. Das Gupta, in turn, averred that the exclusive focus on ‘community consciousness’ had blinded Chakrabarty to the other collective actions and solidarities of workers.20
In this exchange, and judging from the somewhat petulant though resolutely economistic response of Das Gupta, Chakrabarty won the day. The latter had raised a question that was to be a particular burden of all subcontinental labour historians: What are the aspects of working-class lives that cannot be explained by, or subsumed under, the capital-labour conflict? Why was labour militancy too often accompanied by persistent organizational weakness? And why were all collective public actions of workers marked by an inherent duality, which often dissolved class solidarities into fights between workers themselves, on religious or ethnic lines, spectacularly as in Bombay in 1893 and 1929?21
Interestingly, Chakrabarty’s Achilles’ heel turned out to be his insistence on the ‘actual empirical consciousness’ of the worker,22 on ‘what actually goes on in people’s minds in specific historical junctures’23 or for that matter within people’s heads.24 Chakrabarty had no more privileged access to this than Das Gupta, certainly no more than what a creative historical imagination would permit. It was no surprise then that the most important challenges to Chakrabarty’s confident, if thought-provoking, assertions were labour historians working on other industries, cities, and regions, for whom his arguments about a ‘primordial loyalty’ were empirically unfounded and conceptually flawed since they were profoundly ‘ahistorical’. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, perhaps the most severe of Chakrabarty’s critics, remarked that the worker’s cultural inheritance in the latter’s hands had ‘turned into a static, timeless, indeed Orientalist characterisation of a “traditional” Indian—implicitly
“Hindu” culture—in Bengal, a predominantly Muslim province’.25 No inheritance, as Chandavarkar decisively demonstrated in his own thick and innovative description of Girangaon in Bombay in the early twentieth century, was impervious to the new cleavages and solidarities that were enabled, as much on the shop floor as in the neighbourhoods. The ‘neighbourhoods were not therefore, the repositories of the primordial loyalties of the working class’.26 That Chandavarkar himself proposed that working-class actions, no matter how contradictory, were a rational response to material conditions, did not undermine the pioneering quality of his work on non-workplace concerns and the duplex role of neighbourhood affiliations.27
Broadly, the close investigation of new ties that were forged in the city, new family strategies, and the altered scale of kin and regional networks in the cities of Bombay and Kanpur was enabled in the work of other historians like Radha Kumar and Chitra Joshi. They painted a far more nuanced, contingent, and yet refreshing portrait of a working class in the making, which was both methodologically and conceptually innovative.28 These works, and many others that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s, were at a remove from the stultifying frames that either posited eternally rebellious workers, or workers mired in their ascribed identities. Historians were now encouraged to acknowledge the creative use of religious symbols that were made by union organizers, even left-wing ones.29 Others brought in the contradictory opportunities offered by capitalism to women,30 those of the oppressed castes less often,31 tribes, generating new perspectives that benefitted both labour history and social history more generally32
There were early signs that the search for radical artisanal traditions could overlook other desires and longings of workers.33 But in the new millennium, many obituaries of the ‘working class’ have been written (for which the International Labour and Working Class History journal provided a hospitable home34). As a political subject, on whom many revolutionary hopes were mistakenly
pinned; as a unified economic category, whose foundational exclusions were exposed; as a site of a more ambiguous ‘consciousness’ than class alone—a fatal preoccupation with working-class consciousness may have led to a certain blindness.35 Such notices were met with fierce, and sometimes, one must admit, moralistic, reassertions in India and elsewhere, of the continued importance of class as an analytical category, and as a political force.
Obituaries to class have been far fewer in India, but there is no doubt a discernible shift, and narrowing interest in questions of class consciousness, whether in the political or academic domain. Some proxy discussions of class consciousness have nevertheless continued. Subho Basu’s detailed ‘revisit’ of Bengal jute mill workers from the 1890s and his querying of the category of ‘peasant worker’ attempted to reconcile both the nuances proposed by Chakrabarty and the assertion of class solidarities by Das Gupta.36 Parimal Ghosh has more appreciatively taken forward Chakrabarty’s formulations, by making links between community and communal consciousness of the 1920s.37 Arjan de Haan’s anthropological approach to the history of migration to a jute mill area of Bengal provided some useful correctives to historians’ certainties about the effects of capitalism or colonialism, and foregrounds migrants as rational, calculative strategists.38 Other questions veered away from class consciousness towards structural aspects: the feminization of agricultural labour, for instance, or the constitutive role of gender in shaping the working class.39
This ‘demise’ of ‘class consciousness’ as a focus of interest has by no means diminished the importance of class as an analytical category, though its limits are today more readily recognized in labour history or in histories of work. The themes of the conferences, and extremely impressive output, of the Association of Indian Labour Historians, which has met every two years since 1995, are an indication of Indian labour history’s new and very creative impulse. They have taken on questions that the excessive focus on the small but organized, factory-based working class had
effectively overlooked. As Ravi Ahuja notes, there was an attention to labour in public life and the academy ‘out of all proportion to the consistently small share of factory workers in India’s workforce’.40 How indeed, when there was/is a multiplicity of ‘modes of production’ dominated by non-factory, even non-urban work, could one place such emphasis on the urban, male, factory-based working class?
A powerful stimulus to labour history came from the currents of Indian feminism and caste politics, with extraordinary dividends. One might even say that Indian labour history got a fresh lease of life from these currents, as much as it was refreshed by other disciplinary orientations, notably that of anthropology.41 A productive new strand of research, for instance, has been on the spectrum of free/unfree labour, on the vastly heterogeneous worlds of informal/unorganized labour,42 ranging from domestic production and domestic care to sex work, from self-employed mechanics and fisherfolk to scavengers; indeed, labour history may well be recasting itself as a history of work more generally.43
Labour history, or a history of work, insofar as it is concerned with the lives of labour, in all its complexity, is also laying claim to the interests of a far larger body of social history. There is a danger of the distinction becoming blurred, of labour history vanishing into the far greater reaches of social and cultural history as the plebeian replaces the proletarian as the centre of this discourse. More recently, the ‘history of everyday life’ has proved to be a compelling attraction, turning away from the objective, structural, material institutional factors in labour history to the subjective, cultural, contingent, and more emotional aspects of working-class history.44 Just as the disappointments about the failure of the nineteenthcentury English working class to usher in a revolutionary political order absorbed British Marxists, or the regularity with which largescale working-class struggles dissolved into communal or caste riots in the subcontinent furrowed the brows of Indian labour historians, the indisputable enthusiasm of the German workers for imperialism
in 1914 and the working-class support of Hitler in 1933 called for explanation.
The turn to the quotidian, the affective, and the ephemeral may not replace the force and energy that was for so long enjoyed by the concept of the ‘working class’ and its contradictory consciousness. We may take heart in the fact that the (research) card-carrying historian will certainly go further in developing the more inclusive terms on which a new world may be thought.
Additional Reading
Joshi, Chitra. ‘Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities.’ History Compass 6, no. 2 (2008): 439–54.
Kumar, Radha. ‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919–1939.’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 1 (1983): 81–96.
Sarkar, Sumit. ‘Review.’ Historical Materialism 12, no. 3 (2004): 285–313.
Sen, Samita. ‘Unsettling the Household: Act VI (of 1901) and the Regulation of Women Migrants in Colonial Bengal.’ International Review of Social History 46, no. S4 (December 1996): 135–56.
van der Linden, Marcel. ‘The “Globalization” of Labor and WorkingClass History and Its Consequences.’ International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 65, Agriculture and Working-Class Formation (Spring 2004): 136–56.
Some Aspects of the Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century
1. Class Consciousness and Labour
History of Bengal: A Critique of Ranajit
Das Gupta’s Paper ‘Material Conditions and Behavioural Aspects of Calcutta
Working Class 1875–99’
Dipesh Chakrabarty*
It is only too often the case that the theory takes precedence over the historical material which it is intended to theorise. It is easy to suppose that class takes place, not as historical process, but inside our own heads. Of course we do not admit that it goes on only in our heads….
—E.P. Thompson, 19781
Ranajit Das Gupta’s paper contained important criticisms of my essay on ‘Communal Riots and Labour’ (CRL).2 I am flattered by his attention and occasional complimentary references, but I do feel called upon to answer some of his charges and investigate our differences.3 If the tone of my disagreement is sharp at places, it is not because I do not consider Das Gupta’s work valuable. Even in opposing, one learns. But I am concerned about the ideas being put forward, and it is this sense of concern that my tone may betray.
The following are some of our differences that I have been able to pinpoint:
• Das Gupta finds my essay ‘somewhat exaggerated’ (p. 79).
• He finds my term ‘community consciousness’ ‘too narrow’ (p. 137).
• He implies (p. 150) that CRL in effect ‘belittles’ the ‘significance’ of the jute workers’ struggles in the 1890s, when, according to him,
