Variations of labour aristocracy and union trajectories across South Asia

Abstract

This book is a consolidation of Jonathan Parry’s longstanding argument about the importance of looking at variations of lived experience among blue-collar workers. His ethnographic engagement with industrial labour in the postcolonial steel town of Bhilai in central India humanizes class alongside caste and culture while urging readers to consider eclecticism as the lens through which to study working class lives. Parry’s Bhilai ethnography is enriched by the comparisons he draws with sister undertakings in Orissa and West Bengal, using which he proposes that a diverse range of social life is inextricably interwoven within the so-called working class, thereby generating a distinct cycle of social coercion and political exploitation that goes beyond the bifurcation of class.