Long march of Mumbai's textile workers

On July 28 thousands of mill workers marched from Byculla in central Mumbai to Azad Maidan further south to press for free housing. In itself, the event was noteworthy for the roadblocks and traffic disruptions it caused in the densely crowded area, but more so as a throwback to the last century when south Mumbai with its administrative buildings and corporate offices would witness frequent demonstrations.

Most of the print media did not see it as an echo of a distant and vibrant, if inconvenient past when the city's carnival of mass protests would remind its citizens that more than anything else Mumbai was an industrial city.

For most of the media, the fact that almost every party had backed the demand for homeless mill workers seemed laden with apparent significance, with some focusing on the probable coming together of the two Thackeray cousins while others, taking a more general and political view found the presence of the BJP and the Republican Party of India alongside leftist parties newsworthy.

THE CITY THAT WAS

That the Shiv Sena, Raj Thackeray's MNS the RPI and the Left ended up at Azad maidan is certainly significant, but not for those obvious reasons that immediately spring to mind; political opportunism or, to be charitable, recognition of a cause that has not had a patron for decades.

The event has multiple symbolisms, some of which are cruelly ironical — who can forget that the Shiv Sena and the BJP were in power for a number of terms, and often looked the other way or blessed discreetly (while publicly endorsing an opposite policy) the transfer of mill lands and tenements to builders eager to cater to a middle class flush with rising incomes.

The mill workers became homeless because of lack of incomes and unbridled greed for mill lands-as-real estate in the central districts of the city. Is it any surprise that Worli and Parel, once working class neighbourhoods, are now fashionable addresses for the upwardly mobile?

The workers' march was also symbolic of loss of identities, their own as members of a proletariat rendered redundant for decades by the closure of the city's once thriving textile mills and pushed off into a forgotten corner of a city rediscovering itself.

On July 28, the march to Azad Maidan reminded Mumbai commuters only too happy to forget their past, that it had once been an industrial city

The march was also a reminder of the city's loss of a historic identity: Out of the woodwork as it were came those workers whose collective force had once shaped the city and the country.

For decades till the 1980s the working class and their employers, the millowners gave Mumbai, then Bombay, its reasons for existence as a melting pot, the crucible in which every right and responsibility of India's new Constitution could be tested, improved upon and showcased to a hesitant hinterland.

It was the city of Bombay that fleshed out for India even before Independence the idea of industrial democracy with its rights to a fair wage, fixed hours of work and social insurance every one of them won through collective action of a working class whose ragged and homeless descendants gathered in Azad Maidan end July.

INDUSTRY TO RENT-SEEKING

Two dates mark the beginning and end of the city's industrial character. In 1928, the largest general strike by textile workers that spread to other cities and drew international support seemed to confirm the power of labour to wrest rights from textile millowners, both shaping the city's peculiar dynamic of cosmopolitanism that was to resonate down to modern times.

The general strike by Mumbai's textile workers in 1982 represented a closure of possibilities for the traditional working class and capital, the collapse of the industrial phase of the city.

If the strikes of 1928 were evocative of a carnival of protest, those of 1982 were the manifestation of a desperate rage at the unravelling of a system of employment that had created a secular working class and by implication given India its taste of modernism.

The strikes of 1982 were literally the last gasps of industrial capital; mill-owners never recovered their ground despite the efforts of financial institutions to modernise and revive the moribund mills. For most, the inherited mill lands had become real estate. By the new millennium and defying teleology, the city had reverted to an earlier identity as the centre of merchant capital and rent seeking through land appropriation.

In an inversion of historical evolution, the city of Mumbai offers a peculiarly Indian syncretism; neither a financial hub like New York nor quite a Dickensian slum like the biggest located in its centre; yet a “vile promontory” of greed and scabrous filth populated by a dysfunctional political elite and a callow middle class, and of course the homeless workers, reminders of what the city once was.

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