|
|
|
Sort Order |
|
|
|
Items / Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
185803
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
The role of skills has been eclipsed in the transition from an agrarian-craft economy rooted in hand-labour in small households to a modern political economy where productive work takes place outside the household, in offices and factories. Yet the ideological erasure of skilled work should not be confused with its actual disappearance. Precisely because such work was typically construed as private and unimportant, the embedded hierarchies and skills that shaped the handloom weaving industry in the North Indian province of United Provinces under colonial rule could escape systematic conversion to capitalist structures. Skill as human capital constituted the capitalist labour processes in the modern handloom industry, not as an abstract act, but as a historical experience. Handloom workers were reproduced, generationally, socially, and hierarchically, through the passing on of skilled labour within the unorganized informal sector of handloom weaving. Thus the stuff of community skills should move beyond its projection as either ‘endangered’ or ‘regressive’ to explore its access to capitalist structures and the exploitative networks that contain, transmit, and enable the production of skills.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
123065
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2013.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This essay explores the rapid expansion of small handloom centres in Western India between 1930 and 1970. It attributes the transformation of these places into larger cities to the role of local weaver-capitalists, who developed new markets for local textiles and introduced significant technological innovations into the industry, and who forged strategies for combatting the growth of labour resistance. The essay also highlights the role of the late colonial and early post-Independence states, which promoted the growth of weavers' co-operatives and which imposed extensive regulations on larger enterprises. The paper argues that the powerloom centres of Western India sustained a 'hyper-industrial' quality, with limited economic or cultural diversification, restricted urban amenities and public services, and the extensive concentration of poor urban migrants in slums.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 3 |
ID:
132272
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2014.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
A comparative study of mobilisation by two lower-class occupational groups in Varanasi, India, presents a puzzle: one group, the boatmen of the Mallah community, have successfully formed and sustained several associations to promote boatmen's occupational interests, whereas another group, the handloom weavers of the Ansari community, have no self-formed, durable, active associations. This paper argues that transformation and decline of the weaving industry and significant class divisions within a community that continues to be highly marginalised have left the handloom weavers particularly vulnerable and pose steep challenges to self-organisation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|