Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities

Abstract

This article looks at the shifts in Indian labour historiography through a focus on certain key themes: community, politics, gender and law. For more than a decade, historians of labour in India and outside have critiqued teleological frameworks within which working class formation was conceptualized. The article examines the ways in which these critiques have complicated received ideas of class, community and working class politics. In addressing issues of gender, writings on labour are moving beyond earlier masculinist frames to look at the production of gendered identities. Recent writings on law and legislation point in new directions and unsettle old binaries of formal/informal, free/unfree labour.