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This article argues that the late 1940s in India should no longer be reduced to the twin events of partition and independence. A generalized political crisis unsettled, for a brief period, the structures of social and economic power, and not just intercommunity relations and the constitution of the state. These years were thus, among other things, a catalytic moment for the definition of ‘labour’ as both a political category and a parameter of post-colonial politics: processes dating back to the First World War, at least, were consolidated, under pressure from this crisis, into a new labour regime that has withstood political pressure for almost seven decades. The article offers an analysis of the almost-forgotten post-war strike movement, which was nevertheless unprecedented in its social and geographical spread. The movement elicited both repressive and reformist responses: the extraordinary level of emergency powers applied to suppress it are, therefore, as much examined as the series of momentous legislative and institutional changes of the late 1940s. In conclusion, the long-term consequences of this cycle of strike–reform–repression for India's post-colonial labour regime are adumbrated. A strongly etatist, potentially authoritarian, regime of industrial relations, it is argued, was checked by an enduring political trade union pluralism. At the same time, divisions within India's working classes were deepened and consolidated as labour law and social legislation sealed off the comparatively small ‘core workforces’ of public sector and large-scale industrial enterprises from the majority of workers in what would soon be called the ‘informal economy’.

The article explores the history of the Employees’ State Insurance Act of 1948 (ESI), a law enacted in the first year of Indian independence. Global trends in social policy had influenced debates on a social insurance for Indian workers since the 1920s. Transformations of Indian industry, World War II, the post-war crisis, and the emerging economic policy of the postcolonial State then created conditions for legislation. Just as the international welfare discourse, Indian contributions included, converged on social welfare as a universal citizen right, the regulatory content of the health insurance scheme devised for India diverged from this normative consensus: the ESI Act remained strictly employment-based, contributed to an emerging structure of graded entitlements, and to the hardening of boundaries between what would later be called “formal” and “informal” labour. Simultaneously, it also generated horizons of expectation that continue to inform labour struggles.

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I. IntroductionSince the 1990s, academic fashion has rediscovered and revamped theories of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (or rather, of the solipsism of cultures) that had already been popularized successfully in the early years of our ‘age of extremes’ by conservative ideologues like the German Oswald Spengler. Indian ‘indigenism’ appears to be another subsidiary branch of that ideological current. Recent writings on India's colonial period thus often tend to disconnect its precolonial from its colonial past, in order to construct incompatible exogenous and indigenous ‘principles’ of social organization. The imposition of ‘alien’ discourses on the Indian context is presented as the disruption of a communitarian social system that has been painted sometimes in pastel colours. ‘Indigenism’, as has been rightly remarked, tends to harmonize the precolonial past. The obsession with abstract cultural ‘principles’ (or, to use Spengler's term, ‘Urphänomene’, i.e. ‘primordial phenomena’) is often accompanied by a lack of interest in empirical research that is concerned with the material conditions of human existence and with the relations between human beings emerging from these concrete historical conditions. These trends notwithstanding, this paper is concerned with elementary aspects of social praxis, which rendered, for all their apparent ‘triviality’, members of South India's society, to use an expression of Marx, ‘actors and authors of their own history’. Hence, an analysis is attempted of labour relations in Madras City and its hinterland in the late eighteenth century, in the transitional period between the precolonial and colonial regimes. The discussion of the source material will highlight the problem of continuity and change—it is intended to identify ancien régime forms of subordinating labour that proved to be compatible with colonial conditions and to distinguish them from forms that did not survive or were newly created.