//Time, work discipline, and factory legislation: social transformation of time in colonial Bombay - 2023

[This text was presented during an open studio titled "Sweat At Ease," organised in Jangpura, Delhi, on October 7, 2023]

Time is a fundamental element through which work is organised and experienced in a society, to the extent that the politics of labour and work are at the same time a politics of time. Regarding the relations between time and society, French social scientist Emil Durkheim asserted that it is impossible "to represent the notion of time without the process by which we divide it, measure it, or express it in objective terms". According to him, it is an interpersonal frame and the common organisation of temporal units and routines that ground individuals in their social background to ensure the regularity of their collective life. Time exists only inside this social and interpersonal framework; outside, it is unthinkable. In other words, the difference of the understanding of time between cultures is the difference of working pattern that a community acquire through practice and training in a particular environment, according to the Historian Tim Ingold.

Consequently, the impetus to expand an industrial system would inevitably face the anxiety of this diversity of the world. Hence, the induction of the colonies into the global market was contingent on the flattening of the world. The different temporal cultures were brought into cooperation with each other only in the service of profit. British historian E.P. Thompson argues that the older organisations of collective time, which were derived from the values and rhythms of social activities such as the sea tides, harvest cycles, the needs of farm animals, and domestic rituals that were based on the specificities of the geographical, political, and climatic conditions of a society, were replaced by a universally adaptable clock time during the nineteenth century. Being qualitatively indifferent and homogenous, clock time is a highly abstracted time where instants lack any form of value in their succession. Each discrete moment flows with the only objective of synchronising time with work. By reducing the role of time merely to the character of a measure, clocks have altered time to the order that is constructed only for the extraction of surplus value from work.

However, the conditions of time and work were slightly different and more complex in the colonial mills of Bombay, as the industrial pattern of work was not enforced top-down but was a result of the participation in the global economy by the local enterprises. This text examines the history of factory legislation in colonial Bombay and elicits the politics of time in colonies under the domain of work and discipline. I inquire how the colonisation of time leads to an epistemic shift that reorganises social and personal lives and even assimilates any modes of resistance that emerge against it. To understand this complexity, I will examine five events of history that are crucial to understand the transformation of time in colonial Bombay: the first factory commission in India in 1875, the declaration of standard time by the Government of India in 1881, the 1889 protest for standard working hours along with the 1890 factory commission, the worker's protest against standard time in 1906, and an ordinary event in a Bombay mill in 1921.

1875

The loss of American colonies and the abolitionist attack on the slave trade during the end of the 18th century, Britain's removal of a ban on the export of textile machinery in 1843, the insurgence of the American Civil War, and the temporary suspension of shipments from cotton plantations to the textile mills of Manchester led to, on the one hand, a momentous shift in the British colonial project shifting its focus from the North American and Caribbean islands to the Indian Subcontinent, and on the other hand, a rapid increase in the steam-powered machinery in the colonies, leading to a boom in the Bombay cotton market. As a result, Bombay emerged as the largest industrial metropolis in Asia and served as a gateway to the global cotton market.

The first mill was established in Bombay in 1851. According to the first year for which comprehensive records are available, 1879–80, there are 58 spinning and weaving mills in India, which account for 39,537 of daily average employment (History of Factory Legislation in India, 1920). The majority of the mill owners were upper-caste Hindu Marathas and Parsi families with expertise in the Indian Ocean trade (Hatice, 2020). With this drastic shift in the working order and discipline of the daily life, I believe a temporal shift is implicit with the emergence of colonial industrialism in India. However, Its conducts were complex in this regards.

Since the investment in the textile machinery proved to be risky for the mill owners, they developed a labour-intensive and flexible production business model. As the market prices were unregulated and thought to fluctuate due to the lack of protection and subsidies for the development of local businesses, this led to unsystematic working schedules. Workers were exploited by heavy work while prices were at their peaks and by no work during the recessions.

With a new government in 1874, a rise in interest in factory legislation in Britain emerged. Mr. Alexender Redgrave, H.M. inspector of factories, raised a concern for the industrial situation in India. “We see,” he wrote, “a cotton industry springing up in India, extending with rapid strides, and it behoves us to enquire whether that industry is carried on upon the old lines of the cotton manufacture here, and if it is so carried on, as is the common report, by factories working fourteen hours a day, it is well that the legislature should step in while the industry is, so to speak, in its infancy and by wise and moderate regulations stop the growth of habits of long hours and of the employment of child labour." After quoting statistics showing the progress of the industry, he continued, “It is clear that this is a progressive industry and looking to what factory legislation has achieved in this country, may we not hope that the native workers of India may be spared the ordeal which our cotton operators went through in former days and that they may be permitted to enjoy the blessings of moderate labour, of ample time for rest and meals and of protection to children of tender years” (A History of Factory Legislation in India, 1920).

In the same month, the Secretary of State requested that the Government of Bombay investigate the necessity of legislation. On March 23, 1875, the government appointed a commission to examine the conditions of work in the Bombay mills. This commission paid particular attention to topics such as the dangers of machinery and the necessity of its protection, the age of children employed, hours of work, holidays, sanitation, ventilation, education, and the necessity of legislation. Regarding the hours of work, the committee summarised these conditions.

The hours of work are stated to be from sunrise to sunset, with half an hour for rest in the middle of the day. On the longest days of the year, this would give about thirteen hours of work a day, including the half-hour rest. In the shortest days, it would give about eleven hours, and there are no fixed numbers of holidays (A History of Factory Legislation in India, 1920).

The bill was introduced and passed as the first Indian Factory Act in 1881 with the obligation that “all factories should be closed one day in seven, the day of closing being left to be fixed as the owners and operatives may wish”. The bill required that there be four holidays in total in a month. Mr. Grant, Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, circularised local governments seeking attention to the Factory Acts. He stated:

“It must be borne in mind that although many factories are managed on enlightened and liberal principles, yet the enquiries of the Bombay Commission of 1875 did undoubtedly disclose the existence in many places of grave defects in factory management; and it was to prevent the possibility of such abuses that the present law was enacted.”

At this point, an abstract order of time became essential not only for discipline and work to be organised well, but as an impartial means of measurement, it also became a means through which exploitation, or I should say deviation, could be harnessed.

1881

At the times when these commissions were inspecting their cases in the years 1875, 1881, and 1890, an attempt to implement a standard time over the entire country was also made. Clocks were not in coresspondence to each others. Different solar times were operating simultaneously in one nation, to the extent that if the Crawford Market clock tower shows 6:30 in the morning, the Lyallpur Clock Tower in Lahore will show 6:00 am, while the Howrah Station clock tower in Calcutta will mark 5:30 in the morning.

The emergence of telegraph and railway services, being the epitome of modern speed, bypassed these temporal gaps and thus explicated the need for coordination more urgently. The connection of the trunk lines of Bombay and Calcutta in the 1870s led to severe accidents, mismatches in communication, delays, and faults in the structure of railway timings due to the absence of a standard time in the country (Masselos, 2017). In particular, when Tory Governor James Fergusson repeatedly missed his train in 1881, this matter gained a political edge. Fergusson ordered all government administrative offices to adopt one standard time and invited the public to do the same. This time was derived from the observatory in Madras.

The government was obliged to return to local time in 1883 as a result of the strong local resistance.

Time, at this point, became a matter of identity and culture, and an overall standardisation appeared to be a tool for the erasure of regional identities for the sake of flexible circulation and connectivity.

1889-90

Three government inspectors arrived at the Hindustan mill on October 10, 1890, to check out the possibilities of new legislation. They were inquiring about the need for consistent working hours and whether the factory whistles should be reinstated after they were banned due to the noise pollution in the neighbourhoods around the factories. This committee was significant as it was chaired for the first time by an Indian labour representative, Narayan M. Lokhande.

When the inspectors first arrived at the mill in the morning, a woman piercer named Thaki was already at work. She appeared to be an expert in her work. However, she found it difficult to persuade the inspectors that she had a strong understanding of time. A portion of the commission's report states that when they inquired about her age, she answered insufficiently and said that she had an adult daughter. She gave her age based on some chronological calculation, and the man next to her suggested that she may be far older than that. When the conversation turned to holidays, she revealed that the mill closes on two Sundays each month, and on those days she has to come to clean the machines as they need to be oiled and cleaned once every fifteen days.

This flexible labour system, which the mill owners continued to use long after the first factory act, led to overtime work, and maintaining the machinery during breaks was viewed as a form of time cribbing by the mill owners. This led to another protest by the workers, only more articulated this time. Including the committee meetings that became the platform to raise dissent, a signed petition of 6,000 workers was also presented to the government. The demand was for fixed uniform hours of attendance; the hours of work should be limited to between 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.; a full day off on Sundays; and a half-hour break every other day of the week. At the committee meeting, the workers asserted that the morning time should be completely fixed to the clock.

At this point, time has become a language, a system of thought in which inability to communicate could result in a threat to one's existence or an inability to resist. So the workers appropriated the master’s language in order to reorganise things around them, or, to put it differently, carve out a niche for themselves. The phrase from sunrise to sunset, which was used for the first commission, was now transformed from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (Hatice, 2020).

1906

The mill owners collectively decided to join a host of trades and to change the factory working hours to the standard time of the country. The idea was not accepted by the workers. Headlines appeared in the Times of India: “The new time imposed an additional forty-five minutes of daily work on them [workers]”. In January, 4,500 workers gathered in front of the Jacob Sassoon mill. As the news asserted, “They did not want standard time, nor working by electric light. The hours should be fixed from 6 to 6 Bombay time”. The strike soon turned into a violent protest, during which workers pelted the factory with stones and smashed its clock.

The disagreement, at this moment, was not with the clock and the order of time it propagates, but with those who were claiming it.

1921

Approx thirty years after the factory law “An interesting example of their [workers] capacity for joint action is seen in a mill in Bombay where there is, on the wall of one of the rooms in which they work, a clock that was bought for forty rupees by the women in the room and was brought by them to the mill. When it arrived they asked if they might have it put up on the wall; the management agreed, said that they would be most happy to give the clock to the workers, and offered to pay the forty rupees that had been collected for it. The workers refused the offer. They wished the clock to be their own, and no doubt they also wished to keep the management of it. Whether they feared that the time would be tampered with if they accepted it as a gift, it is impossible to say.”

At this stage, time appeared synonymous to clock. Furthermore, clocks have created an order that is not easily manipulated by anyone as it is impartial and neutral for all. Resistance here becomes indirect obedience as it is conducted within/through the master’s categories. Thompson elicits this condition well: “As the new time-discipline is imposed, so the workers begin to fight, not against time, but about it.”

The primary objective of these factory commissions in India was to compare the conditions of the workers with those in Britain. Any issues with the work regulations will determine whether the former needs to be incorporated into the latter's regulatory framework (Hatice, 2020). The idea was to alter the syntax through which we make sense of time and to reduce it in the service of connectivity, circulation, and hence profit. Out of a concern to emancipate the workers in India, the commissions enabled a greater epistemic erasure to the extent that it even co-opted the mode of resistance. Thompson reflects on this: “The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for overtime or time-and-a-half. They had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them.”

Bibliography

Jim Masselos (2017) Bombay Time/Standard Time, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40:2,281-284, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1292603

 

Émile Durkheim, and Joseph Ward Swain. (1912) 2012. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Mansfield Centre, Ct: Martino Publishing.

 

J. C. KYDD. 1920. A History of Factory Legislation in India. Compiled by J.C. Kydd. Calcutta University Press, Senate House, Calcutta: University of Calcutta.

 

Janet Harvey Kelman. 1923. Labour in India.

 

Thompson, E P. 1967. Time, Work Discipline & Industrial Capitalism. Oxford University Press.

 

Yildiz, Hatice. "The Politics of Time in Colonial Bombay: Labor Patterns and Protest in Cotton Mills." Journal of Social History 54, no. 1 (2020): 260-285. muse.jhu.edu/article/780546.