Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. Industrialization in India before 1947: conventional approaches and alternative perspectives. 3. Workers, trade unions and the state in colonial India. 4. Workers' politics and the mill districts in Bombay between the wars. 5. Workers, violence and the colonial state: representation, repression and resistance. 6. Police and public order in Bombay, 1880-1947. 7. Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896-1914. 8. Indian nationalism, 1914-1947: Gandhian rhetoric, the Congress and the working classes. 9. South Asia and world capitalism: towards a social history of labour. Bibliography. Index.
"In this series of interconnected studies Raj Chandavarkar offers a powerful revisionist analysis of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence. Dr. Chandavarkar rejects the 'Orientalist' view of Indian social and economic development as unique and exceptional, which calls for explanations specific to its culture, and reasserts the critical role of the working classes in shaping the pattern of Indian capitalist development. He demonstrates the inadequacy of 'culture' as a dominant tool of historical analysis, especially as manifested in those recent subaltern studies which have focused upon colonial discourse to the almost complete exclusion of the material world. An underlying and recurrent theme of the book is how perceptions of power shaped alignments of class and influenced changing definitions of social identity. The book ranges widely across the social and political history of the working classes in India, examining the character of trade unions, the political culture of the working class neighbourhoods, the nature of violence and policing, popular responses to the moral panic of the plague epidemic and the Gandhian inflection of nationalist rhetoric. Dr. Chandavarkar's analysis of political discourse, community structure and class relations in industrialising India has major implications, and Imperial power and popular politics offers one of the most sustained and sophisticated critiques yet made of both Marxist and functionalist narratives of industrialisation. In their stead Dr. Chandavarkar emphasizes the fluidity and flexibility of the relationships between discourse and power, language and political practice, and the work's concluding chapter he offers an alternative schematic view of the process of class formation in India, within the context of 'world' capitalism'.
"Sustained in argument and elegant in exposition, this book represents a major contribution not only to the history of the Indian working classes, but to the history of industrial cpaitalism and colonialism as a whole, Imperial power and popular politics will be essential reading for all scholars and students of recent political, economic and social history, social theory, and cultural and colonial studies."
[Rajnarayan Chandavarkar is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and a University Lecturer in History. His books include The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India.]
