Acknowledgments
I am grateful for funding for research from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, the University of California Chancellor's Fellowship, and the Michigan Society of Fellows. Versions of this paper have been presented at the Michigan Society of Fellows, the History Seminar at the University of Natal, and the Association of American Geographers. I have benefited from comments from these audiences, and I am particularly grateful to Keith Breckenridge, Michael Burawoy, Catherine Burns, Fernando Coronil, Maraika DuToit, Gillian Feely-Harnik, Gillian Hart, Gabreille Hecht, Mark Hunter, Maya Jassanoff, Vashna Juggernath, Nita Kumar, Alaina Lemon, Julie Paarl, Monica Prasad, Caroline Skinner, Jeremy Straughn, Rachel Sturman, Padmini Swaminathan, Tom Trautmann, Michael Watts, Marina Welker, Jim White, and three very thoughtful reviewers for CSSH.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect the whole town works like a decentralized factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. What is more, these self-made men hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to ‘toil’: the word ulaippu is distinct from the conventional Tamil word for work. How did Gounder peasant-workers remake the dynamics of work through their toil, to make Tiruppur a powerhouse of global production?
This paper emerges from a larger exploration of the regional historical and geographical processes that have enabled certain subaltern men to accumulate capital in provincial India. Against dominant renditions of Tiruppur as an industrial district on the model of the much-vaunted Third Italy, or of Tiruppur as a success story of unleashed entrepreneurial energies and decentralization in a time of unprecedented economic liberalization and globalization of capital, I argue that work in Tiruppur is forged through a regional configuration of power, meaning, and practice. What is more, Tiruppur's industrial form took formative shape in the late 1970s, before its turn to global production, when Tiruppur was primarily a producer of banians, knitted men's undershirts.1
“Banian” has come to mean knitted cloth and any garment made from it, though it is most specifically the term for men's undershirts.
Tiruppur's rise to the center of the national market in this quintessentially working man's garment, I will argue, mirrors the rise to dominance of a class of fraternal capitalists who created the social and spatial conditions for Tiruppur's subsequent turn to global production.
In this paper, I concentrate on the relevance of the agrarian question for industry in Tiruppur. I show how Gounder toil draws from a specific agrarian labor regime forged in the 1930s, and how Tiruppur became a specialist town through regional processes of agrarian transition and geographical specialization. I then turn to the ways in which Gounder peasant-workers came to the industrial cluster in Tiruppur and remade practices of work while remaking themselves as a fraternity of decentralized capital. I conclude by suggesting how ex-worker Gounder owners enact their propensities to toil in stitching sections at the heart of the division of labor, where they revive an agrarian past to remake the industrial present. My point is not that the subaltern can accumulate capital. Rather, I am concerned with how certain subalterns remake self and circumstance to harness specific cultural-historic resources to the possibilities of capitalist development. In the process, subaltern knowledge and power become a means for provincializing capital within the uneven development of capitalism.2
Thanks to Keith Breckenridge for this formulation. History and African Studies Seminar, University of Natal-Durban, 17 Sept. 2003.
Invoking subalternity and provincialization in this way requires that I situate this research in relation to the highly influential Subaltern Studies Collective, and underscore its departure from the traditional concerns of agrarian political economy. As Chakrabarty's (2000) genealogy of Subaltern Studies argues, quite rightly in my view, the divergence between Marxists and postcolonial scholars may in fact be dramatized by polemical rather than intellectual or political commitments. Indeed, Marxist broadsides against postmodernists who valorize the singular fragment parallel postmodernist broadsides against Marxist who adhere to vulgar class reductionism. While I share Chakrabarty's pessimism regarding fruitful synthesis through metropolitan Marxism, I suggest that this does not hold for traditions of Marxism that do not carry metropolitan presumptions of liberal subjectivity and class reductionism. Neither do these latter traditions assume that the singular and fragmentary are necessarily sites of resistance to global capitalism. Gounder self-made men demonstrate how certain subalterns might use singular constructions of inequality and difference to work the system, to accumulate capital and dominate an increasingly fragmented working class. Decentered ethnographies of the capitalist present might better begin with actual interactions of capitalism and subalternity, seeking forms of resistance alongside relations of complicity.
Scholars in the agrarian tradition of Marxist political economy, in particular, have for the past several decades developed anti-essentialist understandings of capitalist change that explore creative uses of the past in ways that may nonetheless be deeply exclusionary.3
For instance, Roseberry (1989); Hart (1986); and Watts (1992).
My contention is that these sorts of investigations have been partially foreclosed by intellectual shifts between the peasant studies of the 1970s and the emergent postcolonial studies of the 1980s. In a retrospective essay, Stoler (
1995) captures a moment of heightened debate and revision within agrarian studies, alongside a moment of departure from its central concerns toward a renewed interest in colonial power/knowledge. It is the passage of concern between these two moments, rather than the creative tension between them, that has characterized intellectual shifts, and my central concern in this paper is with roads not taken. If the earlier form of agrarian studies was obsessed with what constituted peasants and proletarians, and with how peasant institutions functioned, postcolonial studies drew attention to the cartography of power/knowledge and a subtler understanding of ideology that could attend to affect, comportment, and “structures of feeling” through which hegemony is differentially lived.
4 “Structures of feeling” is Raymond Williams' (1977) term for emergent understandings, for “feeling as thought and thought as felt,” an important and yet under-explored aspect of what Graeber (2001) might call the Heraclitan or processual strand in Marxist theories of power and knowledge.
Functionalism has no analytical purchase on the what Stoler calls the vulnerable “underside of hegemony,” the unstable ways in which elements of the past are used to articulate, in the dual sense of joining and voicing, contradictory capitalist presents. I argue that it is imperative for scholarship to return to the older set of agrarian questions concerning the dynamics of agrarian institutions in perpetuating marginality, but that we must do this through an attention to the vulnerabilities of capitalist hegemony as configured by situated knowledges and forms of comportment. Through the strange careers of Tiruppur's fraternal capitalists, I ask both how Gounders articulate their agrarian past to remake the industrial present, and how, in the process, they provincialize the dynamics of capital.
Why do Tiruppur's self-made Gounder men pause predictably to hinge their retrospective narratives of success on their toil, and what does this have to do with remaking place, class, and industrial work? In situating these narratives of work on a broader canvas, I focus on two linked agrarian questions that have fundamentally shaped dispersed specialist towns centered on producing specific commodities. First, Gounder farmers forged a particular work politics in the flexible Gounder tóttam, or garden farm, of 1930s commercial agriculture in the area of Coimbatore District. These ways of working and controlling work provided resources that Gounders could draw on in very different contexts. Second, agricultural specialization and regional agro-industrial linkages in Coimbatore District produced a series of specialist towns with Tiruppur at the helm, in a regional mosaic of rural-urban development that set off Coimbatore from the rest of South India. These two aspects of the regional agrarian question—centered on flexibility and specialization, in contemporary terms—also emerged within a distinct political climate. Coimbatore has, until recently, been a stronghold of Congress and Communist Party activism, in contrast to the anti-Brahminism and Tamil linguistic nationalism that swept the rest of Tamilnad and the radical grassroots communism that grew in the neighboring state of Kerala.5
For a general introduction to politics in Tamilnadu, see MIDS (1988), and for Kerala, see Kannan (1988) and Heller (1999). Certainly there were regions of CPI activism in other parts of Tamilnadu as well, as in Thanjavur District, but communist organizing in a region of highly polarized class and caste relations resulted in a much more militant history of mobilization centered on Dalit labor.
In contrast to these neighboring regions, politics in Coimbatore District has not taken a radical communist, anti-caste, or nationalist-populist turn. Instead, this region of relative political quiescence has seen the emergence of a number of specialist towns with local capital at the helm. The most dramatic form of local hegemony and sustained accumulation has been in Tiruppur knitwear, through a particular confluence of social relations and agrarian legacies.
production politics in gounder farming, 1890s–1930s
If the Coimbatore ryot is compared with the peasant proprietors of Europe, he undoubtedly suffers by the comparison. In mere agriculture he is behind them, not so much in empirical knowledge as in energy of practice . . . [T]he minute and patient industry with which the French ryots [sic] cultivate . . . find[s] little parallel amongst the Coimbatore ryots, and a striking feature of the Coimbatore rural economy is the want of energy and thrift in dealing with space and time. . . . What then can be expected for the Coimbatore peasant proprietor not many years emancipated from the rigors of tyranny, from barbarous invasions, and from a tyrannous fiscal system.
———F. A. Nicholson (1887:260)6
Ryots refer to smallholders with long-term rights to land conferred by the state under the ryotwari system of land tenure, which was intended to create a class of capitalist smallholders, as the zamindari system was supposed to create “improving landlords.” Guha (1963) demonstrates how colonial designs were undermined in practice, in the case of zamindari in Bengal. Ryotwari similarly faltered in creating capitalist ryots because of the ambiguity of land deeds, which only intensified with their transfer through inheritance and debt. These systems of land tenure have shaped the broader contours of spatial inequality in rural India, as ryotwari areas of south and west India are precisely where agrarian capitalism has taken hold in postcolonial India (see Byres 1991; Srivastava 1995).
In writing the most important ethnographic source on fin-de-siècle Coimbatore in the late nineteenth century, both for history and colonial rule, Frederick Nicholson was profoundly ambivalent about the “industry” of Coimbatore's ryots, or smallholders with long-term rights to land. While bemoaning their contrast with “French ryots,” Nicholson also notes peasant proprietors investing in wells and helping other laborers access land to become owner-cultivators in their own right. This colonial order of things presumes that Pax Britannica has allowed both Tamil and French ryots to occupy the same spectrum of possibility, in which tyranny can give way to industry. What is remarkable is that by the 1930s and 1940s, Gounder peasant proprietors would become known as a caste whose virtues were precisely in their thrift and industry. Nicholson's normative position, that Gounders might rather emulate French peasants' rational use of space and time, seems to have been borne out in practice. What explains this progressive caste whose conduct appears complicit with the demands of colonial capitalism?
This question must be posed in light of broader geographical transformations in the late nineteenth century, through which several pre-colonial geographies in the Madras Presidency became parts of a colonial periphery while retaining distinct regional trajectories. By the Great Depression, these peripheries could then be seen by historians and political economists as reeling from shared effects of a recently-global economy. In the process of making this differentiated colonial periphery, ethnographic expertise like Nicholson's brought modernization theory into historical consciousness. While colonial experts marked Indians as different, increasingly through the ideology of caste, this historiography also marked in normative gestures how Indian castes should rather be. In this context, Gounder peasants in the frontier country of Coimbatore were being primed as a progressive caste precisely as Madras was becoming part of a global economy. My argument is that this progressive caste did not emerge fully formed from the minds of colonial experts, but was forged as much through changing practices in the fields of rural Coimbatore.7
As Fred Cooper (1997) argues more generally about the emergence of development thought in postcolonial Africa.
In the construction of colonial hegemony, the colonial state and its successor have been relatively weak in shaping rural Coimbatore, leaving considerable room for non-state forms of power and knowledge to thrive well into the era of postcolonial neoliberalism.
8 This is only renders more complicated the analysis of what Nicholas Dirks (2001:7) calls the modern career of caste, through dynamics of ethnicization and localization. Elsewhere, Dirks (1996:268–69) identifies how the ideological dualism of Brahman/anti-Brahman has become commonsense in a variety of political positions in South India, even lending tacit support to contemporary forms of Brahman power. On the face of things, backward caste power, such as that of the Gounders of Tiruppur, disrupts this dualism, but the question is whether it provides the basis for an anti-hegemonic class and caste bloc, or whether it supports existing elite caste power.
The new popular prejudice of the industrious Gounder was forged in the rural west of the Tamil country through a particular work politics in the early years of commercial agriculture. Until the late nineteenth century, regional agriculture was mainly of food crops destined for local markets, but by the mid-twentieth century Coimbatore had become a bastion of commercial agriculture in the south. By 1931, Coimbatore's agrarian structure was dominated by cultivating owners (40.9 percent) and agricultural laborers (49.3 percent), with relatively small groups of cultivating tenants (7.6 percent) and non-cultivating proprietors (1.9 percent).9
The region's characteristic farming system took shape in an environment marked by sparse rainfall and heavy black soils which required more labor than the dry plains to the east and northeast of the Tamil country. Irrigated farming required wells cut through the hard gneissic rock to the deep water table. Well irrigation required masonry and draught power, and well-irrigated
tóttams or gardens sought to recover these investments through year-round farming.
10 Cattle rearing on poorer lands complemented smallholder farming on better soils, and draught power was readily available through the older order of cattle raising and ranching. The Pattagar of Palaikottai, once recognized as the lineage heads of the Gounder caste, raised prized Kangayam cattle. When I met the current Palaikottai Pattagar in 1996 in his decaying palace on the outskirts of Kangayam town, he had me taken first to see his magnificent Kangayam bulls.
A form of intensive smallholder farming took root in Coimbatore as new black soil was brought under the plough in the 1920s.
The commercialization of land was also well underway by the early twentieth century. The scarcity of labor and the persistence of a land frontier prompted colonial experts like Nicholson to note the ease with which laborers could access land and become owner-cultivators in their own right. Struggles over land pepper the legal records, and the deepening of the land market by the 1930s parallels rural Coimbatore's notoriety for its violent entrepreneurs.11
“Murder was a local pastime and Coimbatore had for a long time led the province in this respect; by the 1930s many of the murders revolved around land. [A] local historian noted that the Gounder farmers were ‘easily affected by land disputes. Even an inch of ground or a small water-course or the right to a palmyra tree or a tamarind tree standing on the edge [of a plot] would result in the chopping off a head’” (Baker 1984:212). The image of the violent Gounder, passionate about land, persists in popular media, as in the film Cinna Gounder.
By the 1940s, there were more land sales and the price of land was higher in Coimbatore than in other parts of Madras Presidency, including the rich paddy-growing banks of the Cauvery River. A 1946 tenancy survey shows that the highest rental values of well-irrigated land are in Coimbatore. Money and land markets were tightly connected, since defaults on loans were often the impetus to land transfers, so much so that a Coimbatore banker claimed that entire village lands changed hands every forty to fifty years. Along with active land markets, Coimbatore saw the early development of tenancy markets with varying degrees of landowner involvement in the rented farm. As a measure of their commitment to the market, farmers would often exchange plots of land to consolidate their holdings around the most rational use of water.
12 Gounder farming changed qualitatively with the introduction of American long-staple ‘Cambodia’ cotton in the early twentieth century. As early as 1909, a key institution for crop research and development, the Agricultural University, moved to Coimbatore and became a center for research on varieties of cotton. Areas of Coimbatore subsequently went through a dramatic shift from coarse cereals to Cambodia cotton, and this shift in cropping patterns was most pronounced in Palladam Taluk, in which Tiruppur lay. While Gounder tóttams also grew tobacco and groundnut with success, irrigated Cambodia led the expansion of cash cropping in the 1920s. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Coimbatore increased production of cotton in relation to all cash crops faster than other districts in the south. The region's farmers also intensified tóttam farming rather than cutting costs and wages.13
Ibid.: 205–7; Cederlöf 1997:99.
What was key about Gounder tóttams was that they were highly flexible in relation to changing agricultural markets. In part, this flexibility had to do with secure and perennial access to groundwater. During the 1910s and 1920s, farmers in Tiruppur and nearby Dharapuram Taluks lead the district in using state loans for sinking new wells, and in Avinashi and Tiruppur Taluks for repairing existing wells. The Government Department of Industries claimed to have played a key role in boring existing wells, particularly in the late 1920s.14
Another aspect of the flexibility of Gounder farms had to do with their ability to spread risks borne of market and nature by simultaneously growing a variety of crops, shifting emphasis as needed. As the price of cattle increased the costs of plowing as well as of draught-powered
kavalai irrigation, farmers either grew more fodder crops, leased land out for straw, or hired in professional plowing teams. The
tóttam as a unit of agriculture allowed Gounder farmers to develop a reputation as risk-takers. Baker's now canonical history of agrarian south India takes this as fact, but in fact goes farther in arguing that the flexibility of the Gounder
tóttam rested on a particular set of labor arrangements. Unlike other parts of Tamilnad, this farming system neither revived forms of forced labor or debt bondage nor fully proletarianized agricultural workers. Instead,
pannaiyals or ‘permanent farm servants’ were treated as an extension of the family, often housed and fed with the cultivator's family. This rendition of agrarian relations centered on “reasonably well-paid and apparently reasonably well-satisfied labor force” has become staple in all writing on western Tamilnadu.
15 The village studies from the 1930s that provide the ethnographic basis for many of Baker's claims, particularly those on familial labor relations in Gounder farms, however, belie such a tidy consensus and reveal instead a more caste- and gender-differentiated reality of work politics.16
Baker relied on research on Perumanallur and Madathupalayam villages to the north of Tiruppur; both were Gounder-dominated ryotwari villages in which ryots or smallholders were granted long-term leases of land by the colonial state (Ganesamurthy 1935).
First, it appears that Gounder farmers in fact used a range of labor arrangements that included unpaid family labor, hired Gounder families who lived with the household, indentured Dalit (Madari, in their contemporary affirmative terms) male labor paid in kind, and temporary female labor paid in cash. Labor arrangements were extremely differentiated by caste and gender; they carried varied rights, obligations, and forms of payment. Only with the expansion of rural electrification in the 1940s did electric pumps transform rural social relations, and by 1944 Coimbatore district had more pumpsets, at 1763, than any other district in the Presidency.
17 Zacharias 1950:44–45. Electric pumps were the most significant form of mechanization in Coimbatore District.
In the 1930s, Madaris, who were restricted to handling carcasses and leather, were indispensable for stitching the
pari or leather water bags for
kavalai irrigation. In effect, the formal subsumption of Madari family labor through ritual and economic relations was central to agricultural expansion without significant mechanization.
18 Most of my Gounder respondents, all from nearby farms, said their wells were dug in their grandfathers' times, around the 1930s. All used kavalai irrigation for their wet-land, or tóttam, on the order of ten acres. Most only switched to electric pumps or “pumpsets” in the late 1960s, the earliest having been in 1951. Though the Pykara hydroelectric works were operational after 1929, and electrification spread through the countryside in the 1930s and 1940s, it was only by the 1950s that rural electrification in the fields of Coimbatore made electric pumpsets viable. Moreover, almost all Gounders I talked to said their families had hired-in labor since their childhood. Mechanization was slow, but reliance on hired labor alongside family labor was strong from around the 1930s (fieldnotes and interviews, 1996–1998).
Baker's notion of familial permanent labor corresponds best to Gounder men under annual work contracts, while the bulk of
pannaiyals were Madaris bound through debt and custom:
The most fortunate type of farm servant is the one whose caste position approximates that of his master and who ‘lives in.’ Such a man is often treated as one of the family and shares their fortunes in good and bad times. On the other hand, a large number, especially of the lower castes, are frequently very badly off. They are given an advance on some special occasion such as a wedding and nominally the loan is to be repaid in service. If the workman is invaluable the master takes care that this loan shall not be worked off and this man is attached compulsorily to the master for life, and sometimes also his sons inherit the debt after his father's death.19
The evidence of Sir George Paddison (in Government of India 1927:313–14).
Only men were registered in official sources as “permanent servants,” while their wives and children who were also beholden to work for the landholder were recorded as “casual labor.” Families of tied pannaiyals provided a captive sphere of casual labor for Gounder farmers. These familial workers had neither the security of contractual relations nor customary rights. Between ‘customary’ and ‘free’ labor, in effect, gender and caste mediated the selective proletarianization of labor. Importantly, the Gounder farmer was not an overseer; he worked alongside this differentiated workforce while appropriating the fruit of their shared work. This was a work politics that used caste and gender difference as well as participant supervision to subordinate working class families to the farmer who tilled alongside them.
The intensification of farming through permanent labor seems not to have taken place under the auspices of large farmers, but rather, as land records from 1912 indicate, through middle peasants with an average of about 20 acres. Of deed-holders, 39 percent were such middle peasants holding 64 percent of the land, while 60 percent of deed-holders were small peasants holding on average five acres, or 25 percent of the land. This differentiated agrarian structure favored smallholders, but, following the Depression, class differentiation deepened further through processes of indebtedness.20
Another important point about agrarian relations in this period is the phenomenon of ‘working partners’ in tenancy contracts. There were three types of tenancy relations: (i) fixed rents in money or cotton, with the tenant meeting all cultivation costs; (ii) the tenant as the landowner's
working partner sharing labor, expenses, and produce equally after a fixed deduction of land rent; or (iii) the landowner contributing half the bullocks with produce divided in proportion to the landowner's contribution after a fixed deduction for land rent. These tenancy contracts demonstrate a spectrum of relations between land and labor markets, with the ideal tenant being a ‘working partner’ combining both. Despite the decline in tenancy relations in the countryside, the notion of working partners echoes partnerships between labor and capital in Tiruppur knitwear which allow certain Gounders to access capital, and others to work for a profit share.
21 Turning to the spatial separation of work and home in Gounder farming, what is curious is that there was no attempt to consolidate fragmented agricultural holdings. Instead, one notes a curious phenomenon in the 1930s of each tóttam farm containing a “dwelling in which the farmer or a permanent laborer lives.”22
Gounder farmers stayed out in the fields during the cotton season, when “the cultivator and permanent coolies watch the crop during the night [in] turns.”
23 This need to be close to the place of production rings very familiar to the Gounder industrialist in Tiruppur today, who keeps a furnished room or suite so that he can sleep in the factory during the export season. A final key aspect of Gounder farming rests on the crucial role of the
Goundachi amma, the mother of the Gounder household who engaged not only in unwaged reproductive work but also in marketing household products. Gopalaratnam implies that the
Goundachi amma held the purse-strings of rural Gounder households, a claim that recurs in my interviews with Gounder men who insisted that they accessed family savings through their mothers.
24 “[H]is wife manages the household and works in the fields. A small vegetable garden and a cow or a buffalo are looked after by her. She gathers the harvest, disposes of the vegetables, milk, butter and ghee at the shandy nearby or . . . at her own house. With the money realized, and supplementing, at will, the income which her husband gets from the crops he raises, she maintains the whole family” (Gopalaratnam 1931:525).
I have sought to argue that there are several emergent characteristics of 1930s production politics that could become elements of a usable past. The key element in agrarian work politics was the Gounder farmer's participant supervisory skill in controlling differentiated labor arrangements: by exploiting workers through familial idioms in the case of fellow Gounder men, through customary caste rights backed by indenture and ritual power in the case of Madaris, and through casual and insecure spot-market relations in the case of women. Finally, these gender- and caste-differentiated labor arrangements and the possibility of class mobility for Gounder male permanent workers may have attenuated conflict in agrarian labor relations, which would help explain the dearth of archival records concerning agrarian labor unrest in Coimbatore.
regional agrarian transition and industrialization
A second crucial aspect of the agrarian question concerns the ways in which specialization in Coimbatore's agrarian capitalism linked agriculture, trade, and manufacturing to create conditions for the emergence of specialist towns, Tiruppur being but the most dramatic case. Industrial development in the region, built on the base of agricultural commercialization and specialized linkages, fed a pattern of urban development that Rukmini (1993), drawing on Bairoch (1988), calls “a thickening of the countryside,” through the transformation of industrial villages rather than of established towns.25
Bairoch's argument was that urban centers like Liverpool, Birmingham, and Manchester displaced the old county seats by emerging out of “over-grown industrial villages.” Bairoch (1988:22), cited in Rukmini (1993:7).
The underlying mechanism was a process of capitalist industrialization that took root in the countryside in order to access natural resources and cheap labor, but which then built on activities along agro-industrial commodity chains to forge new spaces of urban manufacture. However, agrarian families expanded their reach into other realms of economic activity without leaving agriculture until they were pushed to do so through agrarian distress. When they did, these agrarian families followed the contours of geographical specialization in the region's specialist towns, with Gounder peasants at the helm.
By the late nineteenth century, Tiruppur had emerged as an important railway station on the main line across the width of Madras Presidency, connecting Madras to industrial Coimbatore city and to the plantations of the Nilgiri Hills. With the intensification of cotton farming, Tiruppur became an entrepôt in the cotton trade, and this opened up opportunities for a variety of processing activities. The spread of Cambodia cotton was initially pushed by large textile and cotton interests in Coimbatore District, but production finance for cotton farming came not from urban merchants but from a range of village moneylenders, landlords, rich peasants, and grocers. As a result cotton, in contrast to the groundnut market, remained outside the direct control of mercantile interests.26
This is why the thriving commercial economy of agrarian Coimbatore was so different from the dry plains of Arcot, for instance, where merchants' capital dominated the regional economy. Cotton trading could remain the province of farm households, with Gounder women managing the marketing of raw cotton at
cantais (Anglicized as ‘shandies’ or periodic markets) with their own production finance.
27 Gounder farmers were loath to entrust cotton marketing to merchants because the cotton market was highly speculative, and profits were made on the timing of cotton sales. Tiruppur emerged as the key south Indian cotton market, in which most of the cotton was brought to market by cultivators themselves.
28 The growth of Tiruppur's cotton market in the 1920s spawned institutions and agents to mediate market relations. Commission agents monitored market fluctuations and secured the appropriate time of sale through ties with particular farmers. Ginners converted raw cotton for a commission. In both cases, Gounder farmers retained control over the lint until final sale in Tiruppur. The baroque structure of credit and commodity markets swirling around the cotton commodity chain was swiftly rationalized through the effects of the Great Depression. The liberal credit of the late 1920s had disappeared by the late 1930s; bazaar banks and creditors closed shop, Bombay merchants picked up and left, and in their stead a small group of mercantile interests bought most of the cotton and, in the absence of the range of creditors, credit was entirely in the hands of joint-stock banks. In the post-Depression Madras Presidency, the center of gravity of circuits of capital shifted more strongly to the cities, to urban finance, speculation, and industry. The Depression was a watershed in urbanization both in the pull of industrial, commercial, and urban growth, and in the rise of rural distress and entitlement failure among the rural poor. The state's failure to support rural livelihoods left many in the countryside pauperized and vulnerable to catastrophes, and entitlement failure among the rural poor compelled many to migrate to towns. Farmers who rode out the depression took opportunities to invest idle capital not only in mills but also in cotton ginning, trading, and finance. By the late 1940s, cultivators were selling as much as half of their cotton directly in the market, while Gounder cultivators and ginners sold directly to textile mills. Despite the emergence of other market towns dealing in cotton, Tiruppur remained preeminent in south India, and Gounder farmers were key in keeping it so.29
When agricultural commodity and credit markets collapsed during the Depression, Tiruppur grew spectacularly at rates of 117 percent, much faster than other regional towns or Coimbatore city. Rural distress and incipient urban industry helped make Tiruppur the fastest growing town in the Madras Presidency. By mid-century, Tiruppur began shifting from a cotton entrepôt to a bustling manufacturing town with abundant supplies of cheap labor. To explain the emergence of specialist towns like Tiruppur, Rukmini (1993) analyzes how twin processes of regional specialization and crop concentration shaped the agrarian transition in Coimbatore. Udumalpettai and Palladam Taluks, the former containing Tiruppur, specialized in cotton, while Pollachi Taluks specialized in groundnuts. Agricultural specialization in combination with existing transportation and communications routes helped shape economic development through marketing and processing along the agro-commodity chain. Another key to dispersed rural urbanization lay in the ways in which regional industrialization was a diversified and interlinked process. Coimbatore District experienced sustained urban growth from 1920 to 1970 in a process of intensification across several towns along with extensive urbanization and ancilliarization from the main centers. The crucial period connecting processes of agrarian and industrial change was the 1920s and 1930s, the same period in which a new production politics was forged in Gounder farms. The missing ingredient in the analysis of Tiruppur's phenomenal urban growth is precisely how the internal changes in Gounder agriculture created conditions for the progressive Gounder peasant to make inter-sectoral linkages work.30
I have sought to make two arguments about the agrarian question in Coimbatore District. First, a new production politics forged in Gounder farms during the 1930s hinged crucially on the Gounder farmer's participant supervision and control of caste- and gender-differentiated labor arrangements. The flexible Gounder tóttam rested on this work politics, in interaction with specific features of the regional farming system that could be recalled through the metonym of Gounder toil. Secondly, regional agricultural specialization and inter-sectoral linkages prompted by a diversifying peasantry created the conditions for dispersed, commodity-specific towns. These agrarian questions came together in a particular landscape of agro-industrial flexible specialization across town and country to allow Gounder ‘self-made men’ to remake place and class in Tiruppur, and to turn their toil into capital.
class mobility and industrial decentralization in tiruppur's agrarian transition
Most owners here aren't big owners. Most still go to work in their companies . . . A banian company cannot run if labor and owner are on opposite sides, and if they don't respect each other. . . . These Gounder farmers are used to working the Vanna, Nasuva, Chakkilian [agrarian service castes and Dalits] by scolding them and extracting their labor. In the same way, in banian companies the owners have to scold the workers and extract work from them. . . . You didn't need to enter with large capital. . . . Big men couldn't stand. Only small people from modest backgrounds have succeeded.
———New Saturn Nalasamy, Gounder31
Author's interview, 12 Mar. 1997.
How did Gounder peasant-workers use specific histories of working and controlling work, expressed as their propensity to toil, as legacies in forging their class mobility while transforming the politics of work? Gounders narrate their life histories as slow and variegated processes of transition from agriculture in which most peasants were reluctant to leave the land entirely. By the 1950s, many poor Gounder households had diversified their income sources considerably: men and boys went to spinning mills, rice mills, and the first knitting companies, while women often worked in cotton gins. Spinning mills and knit-ting companies offered rural men privileged forms of waged work relative to other working castes and to women. Gounder men also dominated the regional Communist labor movement which emerged from the spinning mills. There were times, I was told by older knitwear workers, when work was regular and unions were strong. In discussing their specific differences from town workers, Gounder workers spoke in terms of their toil:
We came to work from a ten to twenty mile radius . . . When it was 5:00 p.m., the town worker would take his shirt, cover his head and leave. He'd go off and talk about MGR and Shivaji [film icons] or Lenin and Stalin. He'd talk about film and politics all night long, then he'd come slowly in the morning, never before 8:00. The rural worker would never talk back to the owner. We would do all sorts of things . . . stand by the threshold, get water and tea. The town worker would say “no, that's not my job” and leave. To workers who listened, the owner would give any work . . . he'd get O.C.32
“O.C.” is a colloquialism meaning free, but with a hint of hoodwinking. It is an artifact of East India Company language, meaning perquisites that officers could get ‘on company’ account.
work from them. I
toiled. Gounders will
toil. No other caste would stand against this. We suffered more,
toiled more.
33 Interview with Tommy Kandasamy, 11 June 1997.
While I cannot do justice to the range of ways in which Gounders came to Tiruppur as workers and became small owners, narratives such as this one use toil to refer directly to specific forms of access to people, skills, and resources.34
See Chari (2000; 2004) for more on “routes of entry and accumulation” in Tiruppur knitwear.
What is important is that certain Gounders were poised to become multi-skilled through their work careers in stitching, machinery fitting, and packing, since all activities in early firms were conducted under one roof, in contrast to today's disintegrated labor process. Giraffe Nalasamy, for instance, came from the countryside with his two brothers in the early 1950s after the major drought of 1952–1953. He joined Star Bhai's company in 1955 while his two younger brothers went to school.
35 The convention of naming owners in Tiruppur is to call him by his company and then given name. Thus “Giraffe Nalasamy” is Nalasamy, owner of Giraffe Knitting Company. “Bhai,” brother in Hindi-Urdu, is a term of respect in the south for Muslims, hence “Star Babu Bhai” or simply “Star Bhai” is Babu Bhai, owner of Star Knitting Company. I have changed all names of living people.
For the first three months, he worked without a wage “to become familiar” (
palakkarthukku) in an informal apprenticeship. With some frustration, Nalasamy compared his work experience in three companies over six years—in stitching, machinery fitting, and packing—with that of workers today: “workers of that time learned all the work; today's workers don't know anything but the job: if they come to sweep, they only know how to sweep.” In other words, in the 1950s workers like him could become multi-skilled in integrated firms, with broadly defined and relatively secure work contracts.
36 Interview with Giraffe Nalasamy, 11 June 1997.
When Gounders started coming to Tiruppur for work, Coimbatore District was a hotbed of labor unionism led by the Communist Party of India (CPI).37
The communist movement in Madras city was dominated by Brahmins in its early days. Unlike the rest of India, where the CPI has its strength in industrial labor and the CPM among agrarian labor and the rural poor, in Tamilnadu the situation is reversed. The CPI led efforts to organize Dalit agrarian labor in the paddy fields of Thanjavur District, while the CPM has a strong following in industrial Madras and Coimbatore.
Communists gave voice to the concerns of upwardly mobile backward castes such as Gounders through a vocabulary that represented their concerns in caste- and gender-neutral terms. An early regional history of unionization prepared Gounder workers' engagement in labor politics in the 1960s, just as the first stirrings of industrial decentralization began to erode workers' entitlements. Gentex Palanisamy, one of the “first batch” of Gounders to become small owners, reflected on the communist party union in which he was involved from 1958 to 1965 as a promoter of class compromise. “When I was a worker,” he said, “strikes would not come because unions wouldn't tell workers to strike; there was automatic wage increase.” Labor unions of his day “made sure that the worker could get back to work.” In this narrative of a self-made man the virtuous worker could anticipate that industrial decentralization also held the possibility of class mobility. What underlay this sensibility was relatively permanent work: “Then a worker could put in eight to ten years of service; now eight to ten
days of service. There's no service now.”
38 Interview with Gentex Palanisamy, 28 Feb. 1997. The English word “service” is a Tamil idiom for sustained work relations. Employers use it to bemoan the declining loyalty of workers, while older workers use it in speaking of lost entitlements and job security. A union leader said to me: “If you have permanent workers, you cannot fire them at your convenience and they are covered service-aha [or as befits service] by ESI, PF, gratuity, and other legal entitlements” (interview with Mohan Kumar, 13 Dec. 1996).
The recollections of a non-Gounder worker from the 1960s who watched his Gounder comrades rise far above his class provides a contrasting narrative that clarifies the processes at work. Arumugam, a Vannar or washerman, now irons shirts on a cart in northern Tiruppur, but in the 1960s he ironed in knitting firms. When he joined Jippy Knitting in 1962, there were 100 people working in one place and he earned Rs.5.25 a day. Five years later, the owner had refused workers benefits and had split the company into “four to five sections . . . with fifteen to twenty-five workers each.” His next job was piece-rated, and while he had year-round regular work at the beginning of his career, by the end he said that most work was temporary. He explained his decision to leave knitwear work in terms of transformations in production that passed him by, but his explanation of how some workers became owners also hinges on the language of toil:39
Interview with Arumugam, 17 May 1997.
Actually, through support, that's how they came [to be owners.] If you are just within a company and are just a worker you cannot do it. Only if someone in the bank says that he knows the worker, ‘so put something down,’ only then can he rise up. Not from one's own toil. There was work for one to nine months. If there had been [regular] work there might have been a chance. You can't be a laborer and come to the front. If someone at the bank support's you, one can . . . There's no casteism here. Any caste can know the work and do it. [S.C.: Then how did Gounders ’rise'?] Yes, they have inheritance. They can manage with inheritance and ‘background.’ They didn't just do it themselves. Either they have land, or means, or someone gives it to them. It didn't work for me so I said “Okay, I'll do my own work.”40
Arumugam's materialist explanation cuts through the ideology of self-made men to the social relations which he saw as enabling Gounder class mobility. He notes the importance of toil, but denies that its references are universal. I will return to this point in arguing that the sign operates differently when it is used in the labor process—not in conscious reference to hard work, but as an index of shared historical and contextual knowledge. Arumugam also refuses explanations centered on individual agency. In this way he contrasts sharply with self-made men, like Gentex Palanisamy, who says he “‘developed’ capital through self-management (suyasaambaadiyam).”41
Interview with Gentex Palanisamy, 28 Feb. 1997.
After starting a partnership power-table unit with a few stitching machines, Gentex Palanisamy split off from his firm when it grew into a garment-manufacturing company. Firm-splitting was common among the first generation of workers-turned-owners, as partners broke off to form their own “family concerns.” New firms were most often not proprietorships but rather other partnerships with closer family members and landowning kin who would join as “sleeping partners,” who would contribute capital for a profit share but would not be involved in day-to-day production. Palanisamy was reticent in describing how he actively supported others from his village, because he felt some of the recipients of his support had since become big owners and would think he was taking credit for their success. To disrupt the narratives of self-made men in such a way would betray the caste and gender exclusion that undergirds their individualism. He did, however, hint at five prominent owners having been “one of our men.”42
In explaining how they accessed family savings, early Gounder entrants to the ranks of small ownership often spoke of the key roles played by their mothers. Marriage dowries only became important for initial capital for young Gounder grooms after the export boom of the late 1980s. Older Gounders insisted that dowries are a recent phenomenon, and that in their time the bride's side would demand pari panam, or brideprice, half of which went to wedding expenses, and about a quarter directly to the young wife. While it is difficult to verify a transition from brideprice to dowry precisely, a portion of this brideprice may have provided a seed for the savings funds of the Goundachi amma, or Gounder mother. When Gounder ex-workers say that they accessed money through their mothers, it is still not clear what kind of discretionary power Gounder mothers had over the family purse-strings, but it one can at least surmise that sons could make the strongest claims on these family savings.43
Interview with Muthusamy Gounder, 26 Nov. 1996. Women were significant wage earners in seasonal agricultural operations since the 1930s, as well as in vegetable sales and cotton ginning, the last of which accounted for a significant share of familial earnings reinvested by Gounder self-made men. I am grateful to a questioner after my talk for the Institute for Development Alternatives at Katha-South Publishers, Chennai, Feb 1996, for asking me how the Goundachhi amma secured an agrarian surplus, though I am only able to provide a partial response.
Lenin Kaliappan relied first on Rs.2,500 from his mother's petty agricultural trade in rice, which allowed him to become a partner in a stitching section. When this fledgling unit was in financial trouble, he turned to his sister, and sold her gold jewelry for Rs.300 to keep it running. What is significant here is that he could acquire his sister's jewelry relatively easily. When Kaliappan's partners left their struggling firm to return to wage work, his mother again came to his aid by selling off her stock of sacks from agricultural trade for Rs.3000, allowing Kaliappan to become a proprietor.44
Lenin Kaliappan, 13 Feb. 1997.
Sometimes a mother's support came in the form of her gold jewelry, which, for example brought Rs.2,000 for P. P. Natarajan to add to his savings to provide Rs.15,000 initial capital for his first venture.
45 Interview with P. P. Natarajan, Jan. 8, 1998.
Sometimes it came from “mother's savings,” like the Rs.600 initial capital that Elan Manickam and his brother used to start a unit in 1972.
46 Elan Manickam also said he gave his earnings to his mother, Nov. 26, 1997.
Sometimes a mother would save part of her son's earnings during his career as a worker, as in the cases of Manickam and Blue Sundaram. Such narratives perpetuate the notion that the
Goundachi amma held the purse-strings of the Gounder family, and that she was a key figure in enabling self-made men.
47 Blue Sundaram, Nov. 5, 1997. Ragam Tex Sundaram said that when he could save, it went to his mother for family expenses, Nov. 27, 1997.
Not all familial relationships nurtured class mobility, however. Crown Rangasamy came to work for his taimáman, or maternal uncle, at the age of fifteen. In terms of kinship entitlements, he is an inessential pankali or “brother,” in that a taimáman does not have the same rights over his nephew as he does his niece.48
Pankali literally means “shareholder” and refers to agnates who can inherit property, but in popular usage it extends to include fictive ‘brothers’ who can share ownership as patrilineal male kin would.
Rangasamy began as a helper and received no wage for fifteen years, during which his uncle housed and fed him. Only after working as a power-table contractor for seven years did he manage to save enough from his earnings to start a partnership company. The
taimáman did not play a significant role in nurturing his nephew's class mobility; indeed, he may have exploited his unfree labor for as long as he possibly could.
49 Interview with Crown Ramasamy, Dec. 15, 1997.
A. Duraisamy and K. Saraswati continue to rue the day they wrote a deed for Dint Knitting in the name of Duraisamy's brother Ramasamy, since he proved to be an errant
pankali who eventually splintered from the partnership to become sole proprietor of Dint. Fictive fraternity held no guarantees of trustworthy ties, and business in Tiruppur can have the drama of a soap opera.
50 Interview with Yummy Garments Duraisamy and Saraswati, Dec. 18, 1997.
In a context of regional agrarian decline, some young men sought capital and land through familial networks, but claims on family savings also fueled conflict between pankalis. When brothers could not be convinced to divide assets or pledge family land to the bank, marriages provided alternate resources, and women continued in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways to enable the construction of self-made men. It must be said that many Gounder peasant-workers neither received much direct support from kin, nor offered much to them. L.M.K. Balu claims that, of the steady stream of forty-two Gounder men from his village to Tiruppur knitwear, none gave him much help, nor did he help them. It took minimal capital for Balu to start a small stitching section in 1967, with two machines at Rs.3000 worked by himself, two brothers, and three boy helpers.51
Interview with L.M.K. Balasubramaniam, 26 Feb. 1997.
Brothers or ex-worker castefellows with different skills could pool their resources and talents to start a small unit in which they would do the major work. Capital requirements were low enough that a Gounder boss could support his kin, or a castefellow or ex-worker, to start ‘jobwork’ units that would work for him when necessary. Self-made men accessed various bits of capital and land through relatives, who appeared on paper only as “sleeping partners.” In various ways, Tiruppur continued to provide rural families with opportunities to divert their small savings into partnerships in knitting companies, and to thereby mitigate some of the increasing risks associated with agricultural decline.
While many new entrants to the ranks of ownership slid back into waged work, where in the 1970s income was steady, the mark of arrival was an introduction to the bank. Gounders were different from others in that many still had land that could be used to access institutional credit. Peasant households would sell land only under extreme duress, opting instead to pledge their land as collateral for loans. This was particularly so after the nationalized State Bank of India (SBI) began actively supporting small industry after 1970. It is widely held that state intervention in Tiruppur's small industry has been circumspect. Indeed, to paraphrase an economist from Western Tamilnad familiar with these environs, Gounders have succeeded despite the state, and it is this success under inhospitable conditions that highlights, in his view, the central role of the entrepreneur.52
Indeed, for Neelakantan (1996), it seems that development is entirely fortuitous and the agents he describe were indeed self-made. To be fair to his own experience, Neelakantan told me in passionate terms the effect of the Non-Brahmin Movement on his own sense of possibility as a young man in Western Tamilnadu. Though neither Periyar nor the movement had an overt influence in Tiruppur's political culture, it has worked discursively and behind the scenes in reworking the meaning of caste.
Indeed, the state's primary role has been in protecting specific commodities for the small-scale sector—defined in terms of plant and machinery—and in subsidizing firms to make them more competitive. SBI credit was state action of a more interventionist nature that would prove central to agrarian transition and industrial decentralization in Tiruppur. I have discussed the origins of “small scale populism” as a kind of hijacking of Gandhian ideology in Chari (
1998), in which I follow Tyabji's (
1989) general discussion of small-scale industries policy in India. While small-scale populism allowed larger capital to make incursions into the small-scale sector in other regions and commodities, in Tiruppur knitwear it enabled upward class mobility and a profusion of owner-operators.
State intervention in the supply of credit, particularly working capital to pay for production in advance of final garment production and sale, fueled both industrial dispersal and class mobility. In the ethnography of SBI's lending practices elaborated in Chari (2004), I show how the bank actively sought to support what it saw as the creditworthy peasant. An older employee of SBI's branch in Tiruppur insisted that loan decisions were based on a person's “background” and that they held the view that “A person who has come from the laborer stage to start a unit by himself, he should be an enterprising man.”53
Interview with SBI Manager, Palanisamy, 14 July 1997.
Another staff member in the early 1970s stressed that what was more important for security for small loans for new Gounder clients were field officers' estimations of family reputations and the “background” of potential customers.
54 Personal connections with established owners, particularly if they were also relations of kinship, served to reinforce “background.” Gounders' expansive notions of kinship served them particularly well under these circumstances.
When collateral security was necessary, as for loans over Rs.25,000, Gounders often offered agricultural land. When I asked how field officers valued rural land when it was used as security, a staff member said that field officers “would just go to the village and ask and they would simply tell them the value. Generally village people wouldn't lie, at least in those days.” The early development of Coimbatore's land market meant that land transactions could be referred to the bank's valuations, but this particular SBI officer evinced a remarkable faith in a kind of rustic honesty that would prevent collusion by villagers in inflating rural land values.55
By the late 1970s, SBI was handling 80 percent of knitwear owners' accounts in Tiruppur, despite there being some ten other banks in town. In the event of default, SBI was particularly lenient. Other banks did not initiate similarly liberal practices towards small industrialists until the 1980s.
56 The 1960s and 1970s brought a gradual process of decentralization that reshaped work in Tiruppur. Initially, section after section of the labor process underwent a transition from time-rated wages to piece-rates, subsequently codified through Taylorist time-motion studies and institutionalized in collective bargaining agreements. Kongu Velusamy explained piece-work, firm-splitting, and subcontracting as moments in a history of class struggle, with each phase in the fragmentation of work having followed significant strike activity.57
Kongu Knitting Velusamy Gounder, 9 Mar. 1997.
Piece-rates provided a way in for capital to strip away rights won through years of labor unionism, as owners claimed that piece-rates included Employee Sickness Insurance (ESI), Provident Fund (PF), Annual Bonus, Gratuity, No-Work Allowance, and other bonuses. Punyamurthy, a union organizer of the time, described piece-rates as a way of lowering the general wage.
58 Interview with Punyamurthy, 30 Nov. 1996.
The problem, in his view, was that workers could now actually make money, which is why non-union workers agreed to the new regime of payment, and unions had no choice but to comply.
59 In response, another union organizer, Mohan Kumar, could not accept that workers desired piece-rates: “They say workers suffer and prefer it. That's not just, is it? To say that they don't want their rights is not just.”
60 Interview with Mohan Kumar, 13 Dec. 1996.
Piece-rates seemed to cede to workers power over labor-time, and appeared to promise more money without technical change or union action. Punyamurthy and Mohan Kumar's perspectives reflect debates within the communist unions over workers' individual interests and broader goals of social justice, but the terms of this struggle were set by capital. Zintex Srinivasan was the main negotiator from the domestic owners' association, SIHMA, and he sat across the bargaining table from Mohan Kumar in the intense period of negotiation over the new regime of wage payment. In recalling why owners brought in piece-rates as late as 1972, he pointed to the limitations of increasing the rate of exploitation within the working day: “Work was limited by time-bound shifts. We wanted to induce labor to double the quantities produced.” Piece-rates also provided a way for owners to indiscriminately terminate labor contracts by just saying, as Srinivasan put it, “You take this money and get out!” Yet, the regime of piece-rates only radicalized the new labor union of the breakaway Communist Party of India-Marxists (CPM), the CITU. This union subsequently began to educate its workers so that they would not accept the inclusion of their Deepavali festival bonus within the piece-rate. Militant union organizers could then directly critique intensified exploitation and the breakdown of workers entitlements.
61 Interview with author, 19 July 1997.
With the generalization of piece-rates by the mid-1970s, work politics had been decisively transformed. The memories of owners, ex-workers, and unionists collectively reveal a time of rising workers' entitlements, subsequently eroded across the board in the shift to piece-rates and contracting. The crucible of change lay in stitching sections that were pried out of integrated firms of an earlier era and came to house the toiling Gounder and his piece-rated workers in the new, intensified politics of work.
provincializing capital: gounder toil and fraternal hegemony
In the morning I would go to the bank. In the afternoon I would watch cutting. I could cut and iron, my two brothers could stitch and another brother could also cut. Since 1967 when we started and at least until each of us got married, we would all work from 6:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. daily. The reasons for our development are bank support and our toil.
———Zintex Srinivasan62
Interview with L.M.K. Balu, 26 Feb. 1997.
The knitwear industry rests centrally on manual labor and on close supervision and labor control in stitching sections, where cut-pieces of knitted cloth are stitched into batches of garments of particular shapes and sizes. Batch production of garments is particularly suited to separating stitching from the rest of the labor process. Overwhelmingly, peasant-workers started out as owners by creating small, dependent stitching sections. As they worked alongside their hired labor at the power-table, these toiling owners were drawing from their histories of agrarian work that were part of their identities as Gounder peasants. This brings me to the geography of work practice, where the agrarian past is used in remaking the industrial present.
Gounder workers did not make a smooth transition from being workers to being owners; they worked in their own firms for an average of five and eight years, for exporters and domestic producers, respectively. As owners, they tended not to rely on family labor, but rather worked alongside their hired labor. A Gounder leader suggested to me that this was because “Gounder community has a knack of extracting work in a mutually beneficial manner.”63
Chairman Velusamy, 13 May 1997.
What everyday work practice lay behind this “knack”? A.C.T. Selvaraj, a Naidu industrialist who watched the class mobility of Gounders around him, explained their advantage in working “close to labor in order to take advantage of the rights of labor; they could extract more work without paying attention to workers' rights.” Selvaraj explained how Gounder workplaces of the 1960s and 1970s were different in that “the owners' table was close to the cutting section. . . . Profit was counted in the cutting section and all problems were seen visibly there. Owners would watch each lot and calculate on the cutting table.”
64 ACT Selvaraj, 2 Nov. 1997.
Gounder owners' social and spatial closeness to workers accentuated their ability to control work directly.
In part this was a calculated move. My survey evidence indicates that Gounders were less educated than other owners and even many workers. They often hired a kanakku pillai, or accountant, to take care of the books while they guided the practical task of manufacturing banians. On the shop floor, the working class owner could use his practical knowledge in production. I found on several occasions that these Gounder owners were most reluctant to be interviewed until it became clear that I wanted to know about their personal histories and lived experiences.65
One owner told me several times from the shop floor, to come back again as the owner was indisposed. I kept up my visits until we got to be friendly enough for him to trust that I wouldn't belittle his lack of formal education and would value his story of class mobility.
On the other hand, I also met slick accountants who told me when I pressed for interviews to forget about interviewing the uneducated boss: “What would he know, he's only studied till the third [grade].”
Moreover, most Gounders had finished their careers as wage-workers in stitching or cutting, or as contractors of ‘power-table sections,’ and they had typically become multi-skilled in the central production tasks of garment manufacture. My survey evidence shows that most also entered the division of labor as owners in stitching sections. By the early 1970s, there were a profusion of taiyal nilayangal or independent “stitching sections” which bought cut-pieces and produced garments. These units were profoundly frustrating for industrial elites, and one textile mill owner disparaged these “pseudo-manufacturers” as mere traders.66
Soundappa Chettiar, in Manthagani, 1983.
On the contrary, these units marked a transition to a modern form of subcontracting based on tighter control of labor power, both in the detailed division of labor and across social labor.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gounder industrialists had remade the industry through two means. First, in their attempt to consolidate their hegemony over the cluster, a small group of Gounder owners launched a successful putsch in the main owners' association, the South India Hosiery Manufacturers' Association (SIHMA). While SIHMA was in the 1950s controlled by a mix of Muslims, Chettiars, Mudaliars, and a few Gounders, by the 1970s Gounders had become dominant. For the ensuing decade, SIHMA ruled industrial relations in Tiruppur and it managed to discipline militant unions into a new order of class conciliation. Indeed, this paralleled the emergence of a pattern of Gounders holding all prominent public positions in local politics and civic associations, as has been the case to date. Older monuments in Tiruppur's public spaces have been forgotten with the installation of a dazzling silver statue of Palanisamy Gounder, “Tiruppur Tandai,” Father of Tiruppur, at the most important intersection in town. Indeed, by the 1970s, Gounders had become the upstart elite.
Second, and in a more gradual manner, Gounder owners elaborated the process of industrial decentralization and contracting through networks of “sister concerns” linked by relations of fraternity and ownership. Contracting, in turn, met the increased requirements for labor supervision and control demanded by the production of “fine” or forty-count banians, that consolidated Tiruppur's command of the all-India market. SIHMA built its power over social labor in the 1970s through the institutionalization of piece-rates and collective bargaining procedures, and this occurred at precisely the time when Tiruppur began to produce fine banians. Through SIHMA, the Madras Productivity Council conducted Taylorist time-motion studies in Tiruppur in order to regularize piece-rates for various categories of workers laboring on different categories of yarn. Unions were drawn, reluctantly, into the process of instituting these piece-rates through the mediation of the Industrial Tribunal in Madras, and SIHMA's dominance over the new regime of variable wages was sealed for a time. Unions nonetheless continued to fight these institutionalized workloads, arguing that they were inordinately high and could not provide a living wage.67
Cawthorne 1990, 212–14, and Appendix 7.
The Communist Party in India divided in 1964, and this was followed by the communist labor unions splitting at the national level in 1970. The CITU subsequently emerged during the 1970s as the radical arm of labor organizing , and quickly gained ground in Tiruppur's labor struggles. By the mid-1970s its membership rivaled its parent AITUC, the older labor union of the undivided Communist Party of India. A series of general strikes in the first half of the 1970s reflect the rise of this radical section of the labor movement. At the same time, however, the industrial form was being progressively decentralized through the contracting of garment stitching.68
Palaniappan claims that the old union leader Velusamy learned about contracting through a 1961 Central Government Order to end contract work in all industries; in this rendition, Velusamy then explained it to the leadership of SIHMA as a way of increasing production (interview with Palaniappan).
Often, loyal or “familial” workers were kept in charge of garment sections and were given contracts for work by the owners, who could then say they ‘owned the machines but not the work.’ Union strength dropped from 100 percent under the undivided communist union to less than 60 percent with the spread of contracting in the 1970s. Moreover, while union strikes in 1972 and 1973 forced SIHMA to negotiate, a sixty-day general strike in 1974 was a dismal failure because the AITUC withdrew its support.
69 Interview with Palaniappan. Although these numbers must be taken with a grain of salt, the decline is apparent across the interview evidence I have collected from the period. See also Durairaj (1996).
Sister concerns were a key strategy through which Gounder fraternal capital could allow Gounder toil to be writ large across Tiruppur's scattered worksites, to secure the hegemony of decentralized capital, and to make the whole town work as never before. By the 1970s, the leading Gounders of worker-peasant origins had institutionalized their power over the industrial cluster by taking over the main owners' association, and they secured a long period of class conciliation with the communist labor unions. Until the 1980s, it seemed that the Gounder fraternity had forged its hegemony over industrial work.
There were certainly spaces for small acts of resistance within this broader transformation. In 1974, for example, a prominent Gounder owner of working class origins started a second production unit, a sister concern, and refused to give workers in the new unit the same wages and benefits as the other. A series of posters, unsanctioned by the labor unions, showed up on all the main streets to the bus station which portrayed Nalasamy the Worker next to Nalasamy the Owner: on one side as a thin, monkeyish, emaciated worker and on the other as a fat, cigarette-smoking owner. It read “Andre ni, Indre ni” (You then, you now), using the impolite form of ‘you,’ no less. This lampoon of class mobility was a spontaneous and damning critique of Gounder toil from the crowd.
However, this critique of toil only scratches the surface of its uses in Tiruppur. Like many signs, “Gounder toil” is multifunctional. When it is used in work practice, the sign toil functions indexically; that is, it points non-arbitrarily towards specific shared understandings that enable Gounder men to draw from their past to discipline labor in the present.70
Lemon clarifies how indexical signs work by pointing toward the objects or relations through which they have been produced. Participants must implicitly understand their context of production and use, and as Lemon clarifies, context “is not limited to the ‘real-time’ here and now but can include knowledge about the past, about social hierarchies, or about cultural and generic associations” (2000:25).
Those who share an association with the specific agrarian past of Gounder farming in the 1930s can then hinge their retrospective narratives of success on
their toil, naturalizing this sign as marking
their difference as Gounders. Today's flexible proletariat do not, for the most part, recognize themselves as
ulaippalis, or toilers, in this respect. On the rare occasions that non-Gounders stake claims to being able to turn their toil into capital, they know that toil is
not quite their advantage, and yet some non-Gounders have used the structural openings in Tiruppur's industry to rise up the ranks to petty ownership. Toil can reference a generic notion of hard work for a variety of Tamil speakers, as it does for Arumugam, the non-Gounder worker I referred to earlier in this paper. As an indexical sign, however, toil does not refer to physical effort; it points to a specific, shared history of work that confers advantages in work discipline largely to Gounder men. Precisely because toil recruits subjects selectively through its multi-functionality, it becomes the linguistic means for reworking social and spatial difference, hence remaking class and place in a particular geography of accumulation.
71 Thanks to Marina Welker for sharpening my treatment of the pragmatics of invoking toil (personal communication, Ann Arbor, 17 Apr. 2001).
In this manner, the toiling fraternity of capital turned the entire town into a decentralized factory before its shift to global markets. Chari (2004) shows how, in the transition to export production in the 1980s, in interaction with wider discourses and practices of the ‘feminization’ of garment production, and with the massive entry of women into the workforce, fraternal hegemony through Gounder toil would generate a new gender regime at work that accelerated decentralization and the erosion of workers' entitlements. Hence, gender regimes mediate the accumulation of both capital and surplus labor. On one hand, an apex class fraction has risen out of fraternal capital, using Gounder toil in new ways in the age of exports. On the other hand, the gap between institutionalized rights and workplace realities has only been widening through the increasing fragmentation of work and deepening exploitation combined with the routine use of sexual violence. Between these two dynamics of accumulation, fraternal capital steers its tenuous path.
conclusion: toil, subalternity, and capitalist uneven development
Because we came from agricultural families, I have the ability to toil.
———Lenin Kaliappan72
Author's interview, 13 Feb. 1997. My translation attempts to capture that “ulaippu irukkithe enkitte” literally means “I have toil,” a claim to an attribute rather than a practice.
Gounder toil encapsulates the dialectical tensions of Tiruppur's modernity. In the engagement of worker-owners in stitching sections, toil makes agrarian history an attribute. By transforming the structure of work from within, Gounders of modest origins open a route for continued class mobility through toil, challenging an ‘ascriptive’ notion of caste as determinative of occupation and social location. If self-made men are the liberal antithesis of caste, their toil also provokes a revolutionary challenge to capitalism by summing up specific demands for the fruits of labor and the dignity of work. As a translational device, toil is a double-voiced tool: it reveals a particular use of the past in shaping agrarian transition and industrialization, and, moreover, toil emerges from a singular history of work that solidifies caste and gender exclusion under a regional capitalism. Agrarian memory is an unlikely resource for capitalist industrialization, and yet it is key to the transitions enacted by Tiruppur's fraternal capital.
I want to conclude by suggesting that postcolonial studies, and Subaltern Studies in particular, is important for its discomfort with implicit comparison with idealized roads to capitalism. What I have sought through the translational device of toil is an account of hegemony that breaks with comparative political economic categories that carry Eurocentric presumptions. I have sought to demonstrate how purportedly universalistic processes of accumulation are used by unlikely agents in exclusionary ways. In these unlikely uses of capitalist opportunity, the politics of work articulate through singular cultural histories and forms of exclusion that make space for the individualist renderings of both Gounder self-made men and most others who will never see their labors become the toil that becomes capital. Capitalist development continues to slip past most people's lived opportunities, leaving them to pick up the pieces of the commodity detritus. To write capitalist histories from this decentered vantage, requires finding many moments of resistance to capitalism, but also the necessary complicities that make resistance possible. Without subaltern complicity with capitalism's anarchic developmentalism there would be little point in claiming a politics of solidarity derived from immanent critique. As a path not taken, Tiruppur presents the possibility of working class social determination denied by the exclusionary individualism of fraternal capital.
