About the Book: Working Lives and Worker Militancy
In contemporary India, work for wages expands substantially as a mode of
subsistence, while labour, at the same time, suffers a dramatic depreciation as
a political force and as a target of state policy. This is a reversal of an
earlier, little understood process that originated in the late colonial period
but fully unfolded only in the years of Nehruvian rule. The six essays of this
volume reconstruct this now marginalized political history of an age of labour
from various angles using previously inaccessible police records, rare
autobiographical documents and other neglected material. They examine how
political conflict, militancy and