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In 1981, on the eve of the general strike that convulsed the Bombay cotton textile industry, millowners, managers and workers alike acknowledged that the jobber was a thing of the past. The jobber system, they agreed, had been dismantled decades previously. For some, it was a practice of 'British times', before independence, when at last Indian industry, like its society, had the opportunity to enter the modern world.1 In 1979, an official historian of the industry observed, 'Today the jobber in a cotton mill is a pale shadow of his former self'.2 Similarly, van Wersch reported in his study of the 1982 strike, 'In former days the jobber could hardly have been included in the ranks of the workers but the distinctions have been watered down to such a degree that they scarcely rank above the workers'.3 Thirty years earlier, the Secretary to the Government of India'sMinistry of Labour pronounced definitively that the days of jobber power and 'corruption' were 'gone'. 'The jobber, mukkadam and the sirdar', declared Shri Shamaldharee Lall, 'have been put in their right place'.4 In the mid-1920s, S. M. Rutnagur quoted labour leaders on 'the waning influence of the mill jobbers and Naikins over the male and female workers'.5 At the same time, A. R. Burnett-Hurst reported that 'employers state that in recent years the jobber has lost much of the influence which they formerly had over their subordinates'.6 Nearly two decades earlier, in 1909, Vinayak Talcherkar, a mill manager with twenty years of experience in the industry behind him, explained growing rates of absenteeism by the decline of the jobber. He looked back to a time when 'the operatives were more under the control of the headmen, and regular attendance was easily ensured'. The workers, he lamented, 'have no leaders now. No jobber would in these times venture to guarantee similar attendance once the workers have their full earnings in their hands'.7 So, it would seem, the jobber appeared to have been declining since at least the 1880s.
How should this evidence of the receding significance of the jobber be interpreted? Obviously, the jobber's position in the managerial hierarchy, his relationship with the workers and the nature of his power did not endure unchanged through the late nineteenth and early...