Everyday Lives of Indian Labour: A Panel (in-person)

Panellists:
Chitra Joshi, Emeritus Professor of History, Indrapastha College, University of Delhi, currently Visiting Fellow of the GHIL (IRP)
Arun Kumar, Assistant Professor in Modern British Imperial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial History, University of Nottingham
Amanda Lanzillo, Lecturer in South Asian History, Brunel University
Nitin Varma, Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin

Convener:
Indra Sengupta, Head of the India Research Programme and Senior Fellow, GHIL

In the 1980s and 90s, historians of labour in India began to pay closer attention to the quotidian in the lives of India’s labouring poor. This was inspired in no small part by Alf Luedtke’s concept of Alltagsgeschichte or the everyday histories of the labouring classes. Chitra Joshi (Delhi), senior visiting fellow at the GHIL from October to December 2024, is one of the leading historians who since the 1990s has engaged with Luedtke’s approach, taking his argument and analysis beyond its German and Western European moorings and examining how such a perspective, applied to the study of Indian labour under colonialism, can yield deeper insights into the history of labour in colonial India and labour history in general. By using sources beyond the official archive, such as oral narratives and popular literature, her work (see, for example, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories, 2005) has opened up new ways of understanding the everyday worlds of the working class both at work and within the community. Her research has, in turn, inspired newer generations of scholars to explore the everyday worlds of Indian labourers and thereby substantially stretch the possibilities of the approach.

Our panel consists of scholars who have worked on quotidian histories of the labouring classes in colonial India, engaging thereby with Chitra Joshi’s work and making significant contributions to newer, innovative approaches to the history of labour under colonialism. Arun Kumar (Nottingham) has examined the everyday lives and aspirations of the industrial working class in India through education; Amanda Lanzillo (Chicago) has explored the ways in which North Indian Muslim labourers have adapted religious cultures and practices to negotiate shifting industrial regimes and forms of economic authority; and Nitin Varma (Berlin) has engaged with the world of domestic labour, thus focusing on a space where the world of work and the world of home merge.

The panel will bring Chitra Joshi, Arun Kumar, Amanda Lanzillo, and Nitin Varma together to discuss the everyday in the history of work and the working classes in colonial India from the perspective of their own research. The panel aims to achieve three goals: 1) to trace the trajectory of Alltagsgeschichte as an approach to the history of labour from its European origins to its use in Indian labour history; 2) to trace the evolution of the approach within the historiography of Indian labour from Chitra Joshi’s early work to the present; and 3) to throw light on the ways in which the historiography of Indian labour can sharpen our understanding of labour history in general.

Host or Publisher German Historical Institute London