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Earlier versions of this essay were presented at conferences and seminars in Budapest, Paris, Delhi, and Bielefeld. I am grateful to all discussants, particularly to Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, Prabhu Mohapatra, Gareth Austin, Paul-André Rosental, Lutz Leisering, and Ulrike Davy, whose interventions helped me to sharpen the argument. I am also indebted to the five anonymous reviewers of the IRSH for their deep engagement and constructive criticism. While I have not been able to do justice to all valuable suggestions in this article, they will help to develop future work. The following abbreviations are used in the footnotes: BL = British Library; ILOrep = Monthly Report of the ILO India Branch Office; IOR = India Office Records; RCLI = Royal Commission on Labour in India; ToI = Times of India.
E-mail: [email protected]I. PRECARIOUS RIGHTS OR “ARISTOCRATIC PRIVILEGE”?
Social Policy in India has emerged as an imaginable, if hardly appealing topic of historical research only recently. One reason for this delay may be that many of the policies and institutional forms of social security in postcolonial India do not seem to match Euro-American expectations: crucially, they have diverged from the proclaimed universalism of welfare policies in the centres of metropolitan capitalism in the period following World War II.1 In terms of enforceability, “welfare” never became a universal social right or an integral attribute of citizenship in postcolonial India.2 This blatant historical fact has facilitated the almost complete exclusion of India from existing scholarship on global welfarism, which, until recently, has been largely confined to the North Atlantic rim.3 As we shall see, it has also led senior researchers of South Asian societies to make untenable historical claims, for instance that, at the time of independence, “the Indian project of what may loosely be called welfare was untouched by any of the contemporary debates on the subject”.4
Such notions of an Indian disconnect from the twentieth-century global history of welfarism could be maintained more easily because, until the early 2000s, historians of South Asia were deeply reluctant to trespass the conventional chronological marker of 1947, when the double event of partition-independence seemed to have sharply severed India's national present from its colonial past. To examine the continuity of processes running across this chronological divide...