14 October, 2012

Existence, Identity and Mobilization: The Cotton Millworkers of Bombay, 1890-1919


Existence, Identity and Mobilization: The Cotton Millworkers of Bombay, 1890-1919

By- Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay

This work is concerned with the early history of labour in the Bombay cotton textile industry. It takes into account various facets of workers’ lives—economic as well as social, cultural and political—and emphasizes both the uniqueness and commonness of the workers’ experiences with relation to the rest of the population. The author begins with a structural outline of the industry, its history and demographic specificities. The long hours of work, the struggle to reduce them, ventilation, wages, housing, liquor consumption, diseases and indebtedness are discussed with reference to various points of view—of workers, of millowners, of colonial officials of social workers and of nationalists. Numerous citations of workers’ descriptions of their working and living conditions are given both to counter the official versions as also to augment them.

The author then goes on to analyse the formation of the certain crucial identities in the modern, colonial and urban context. These were related to religious community, nationalism and class. All these were generated as a result of modern political ideas and movements sometimes based on pre-modern identities and resulted in three biggest mobilization during this period—the communal riots of 1893, the nationalist mobilization in 1908 and the protests and small mobilizations around economic issues culminating in the general industrial strike of 1919.

The chapter dealing with the communal riots of 1893 incorporates official debates and characterizations of the riots, along with the agitations by the cow-protection societies and the ideological assumptions behind census mechanisms. The nationalist mobilization is discussed with reference to the famous instance of workers’ strikes and protests against Tilak’s incarceration in 1908. The interplay of religious and nationalist sentiments, and of myth-making with conditions of life and work, is carefully developed into a complex explanation. Finally, the study deals with the emergence of class identity through the first general industrial strike on economic issues. The present work tries to explore how far these identities were ingrained in the consciousness of the workers.



Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay is a Reader of History in the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi.



ISBN  978-81-7304-529-5   2004   238p.   Rs.495/Pounds 40

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Essays on Religion, Literature and Law


Essays on Religion, Literature and Law

By- Günther-Dietz Sontheimer,  Heidrun Brückner, Anne Feldhaus and Aditya Malik (eds)


The present volume contains fourteen selected papers in English by the late G.-D. Sontheimer and follows up on his earlier volume King of Hunters, Warriors, and Shepherds: Essays on Khandoba (Delhi, 1997). The articles chosen for publication here span a wide thematic and temporal range and will be of interest to students of Hinduism. The volume contains essays on the juristic personality of Hindu deities, the history and religion of pastoral groups in the Deccan and the interdependence of folk and scriptural religion. The articles reflect Sontheimer’s multidisciplinary approach, combining the methodologies of philosophy, anthropology, history, archaeology, epigraphy and iconography. Three other articles illustrated by over a hundred photographs, focus on hero- and sati-stones of the Deccan and Western India. Sontheimer identified the worship of heroes and satis as an important element of folk religion. He analyses the memorial stones in the context of other historical, social and religious references, physical ecology and literary sources. Yet another set of articles deals with aspects of oral literature. Two papers can be considered building blocks for a model of Hinduism that was finally worked out in ‘Hinduism—The Five Components and their Interaction’ (1989), the article which concludes the present volume.

The two volumes of Sontheimer’s collected papers are complemented by a memorial volume entitled In the Company of Gods which is being published simultaneously by the same editors.


Günther-Dietz Sontheimer (1934-92) taught History of Religions and Philosophy of Religions and Philosophy of South Asia, traditional Hindu Law, and Marathi language and literature at the South Asia Institute of  the University of Heidelberg. He was a scholar of Indian folk culture, especially the oral traditions, religion and customs of pastoral communities in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Heidrun Brückner is Professor of Indology and South Asian Studies at the University of Würzburg.

Anne Feldhaus is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

Aditya Malik is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.




ISBN  978-81-7304-521-9    2004   486p.   Rs.750/Pounds 65

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Environment and Livestock in India: With a Comparative Study of the Indian and US Dairy Systems


Environment and Livestock in India: With a Comparative Study of the Indian and
US Dairy Systems

By- S.N. Mishra and A.K. Dikshit

This book presents the first comprehensive study of the national and global environmental effects of India’s livestock production system. The first few chapters provide a descriptive account of India’s livestock biodiversity as determined by environmental conditions, modes of livestock farming, chief features of mixed livestock farming integrated with agriculture, and its direct and indirect linkages with environment. The authors have also formulated an environmental model of the livestock production system in an input-output framework. Environmental effects are shown to occur on both sides of the system. The model should be of interest to environmental scientists and economists.

Based on the model the book provides estimates of greenhouse gases (methane) emission from cattle and buffaloes, carbon dioxide emission prevented due to animal energy use in agriculture arising out of fossil-fuel saving, arable land area saved by recycling agricultural by-products as animal feed, as also from during cake as a source of biofuel, and the saving of chemical fertilizers by using during as manure. The authors then value these positive environmental contributions in rupee terms. Interestingly, they conclude that the sum of these values is much more than the value of output of India’s livestock sector as a whole.

Finally, the book compares the environmental effects of the Indian dairy production system with that of the US. This comparison is particularly addressed to environmentally concerned readers in the developed world.


Dr. S.N. Mishra (b. 1935) is a well known name for his pioneering contributions to economics of livestock in India.

Dr. A.K. Dikshit is presently an Associate Fellow at Livestock Research and Conservation Centre, Society for Economic and Social Research (SESR), Delhi. He has published a number of research papers in journals on various topics relating to livestock




ISBN  978-81-7304-563-9   2004   196p.   Rs.500/Pounds 35

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