Caste norms persisted in Mumbai’s mills from 1870–2006, shaping job access despite modernization and constitutional protections.
Author
Sumeet Mhaskar, Professor, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Summary
The chapter examines how caste-based norms of occupational mobility and immobility have structured labour markets in modern Indian industry from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, focusing on Mumbai’s textile mills between 1870 and 2006. Drawing on colonial censuses, labour commission reports, the 1940 and 1955 Bombay Millowners’ Association surveys, subsequent secondary data, and a 2009 survey of 924 former mill-workers’ households supplemented by qualitative interviews, the study reconstructs the changing caste composition of key departments such as Ring/Spinning, Winding and Reeling, Engineering, and Weaving.
It demonstrates that socially superior and dominant castes, together with Other Backward Classes, moved flexibly between the least desirable and the most prestigious jobs. On the other hand, Dalits were concentrated in low-paid, stigmatized departments and were actively excluded from weaving, even after the constitutional ban on untouchability. Muslim Julaha-Ansaris initially enjoyed preferential access to skilled weaving work, but technological change, shrinking employment, and intensifying anti-Muslim sentiment led to their gradual displacement and exclusion.
The chapter argues that state policies and upper-caste academic practices that discouraged or ignored the production of caste data contributed to the invisibilisation of caste in urban industrial settings, even as caste continued to organise access to occupations, wages, and security. Contrary to assumptions about modernisation and Marxist theorists that large-scale industry would erode caste, the findings demonstrate the enduring centrality of caste norms in shaping opportunities, constraints, and trajectories within modern manufacturing.
Published in: Dalit Journeys for Dignity: RELIGION, FREEDOM, AND CASTE
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