The Textile Labour Association and Dadagiri: Power and Politics in the Working-Class Neighborhoods of Ahmedabad

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Labor in South Asia

Present-day mill neighborhoods in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad still retain traces of their previous incarnations. The vast emptiness of the former textile mill compounds is a material reminder of the city's earlier prominence as an industrial center rivaling Bombay. Contemporary styles of everyday political functioning similarly owe their origins to the historic position of these localities as sites of prosperous industrial activity and as spaces of vibrant working-class politics. The growth of these neighborhoods accompanied the proliferation of textile mills in Ahmedabad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Workers from neighboring districts settled these areas, as chawls¹and tenements sprouted across the landscape of eastern Ahmedabad. The city, in the early years of the twentieth century, could boast of a flourishing textile industry fuelled largely by Indian capital as well as robust urban governance institutions that were being given a new direction by the Congress Party²and "indigenous elites."³When Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915, he chose Ahmedabad as his base, and the city assumed a central role in shaping nationalist politics as well as promoting Gandhian trade unionism through the formation of the Textile Labour Association (henceforth referred to as the TLA) in 1920. Until 1960, Ahmedabad was part of the Bombay Presidency⁴till the Maha Gujarat Movement prompted a struggle for separate statehood for Gujarat.

A close reading of the local politics of the working-class neighborhoods of Ahmedabad reveals the layers of mediation that existed between the dominant trade union, the TLA, the Congress Party, and the city municipality. It offers us crucial insights into the texture of working-class politics in an industrial city and leads us toward a more complex understanding of local political practices. It is in one such neighborhood, Ravipur,⁵that I locate my study of local political intermediaries.

This article analyzes the transformation of local political practices over the period of the Textile Labour Association's political ascendance and its subsequent decline--roughly from the early 1920s to the late 1960s. In particular, I examine the techniques through which the TLA extended its control over the space of the mill as well as into the surrounding neighborhood. Training our...