Working in the Mill No More: photobook

In this book, sociologist Jan Breman and photographer Parthiv Shah continue their remarkable documentation and analyses of the working class in India that started with Down and Out. Labouring Under Global Capitalism. Working in the mill no more carries more than 200 powerful images that narrate the story of the rise and decline of Ahmedadbad's 120.00 textile mill workers. Describing the patterns of early recruitment and employment in the textile industry, and its intrinsic link to the nationalist movement, the narrative goes on to the creation of the Textile Labour Association, and finally the closure of the mills from the early 1980s onwards. The photographs vividly portray how the mill workers, once a proud and hard working lot that constituted one of the most organized industrial labour forces in the country, were thrown out to the informal sector as a result of massive retrenchment. They also highlight the lawlessness that characterized the now defunct textile industry including the non-compliance with standard labour rights, the greed and highandedness of mill owners, and emphasize the plight of workers mauled by the onset of global capitalism. Pictures of rioting and arson testify to the divisions among the ex-mill workers along caste and religious lines that added to disadvantageous employment conditions and intensified community cleavages and violence. These moving photographs and the intense narrative supporting them, will interest sociologists, historians, labour economists, and social anthropologists as also activists, journalists, and general readers.

About the Author :
Jan Breman is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam and author of several books on Indian labour history. Parthiv Shah's camera has captured the lives of the people of Ahmedabad throughout the decades.

Review :
'Over a period of more than three decades, Professor Breman has enriched South Asian and Asian history with publications which are best described as history with a conscience. An anthropologist by training, he has written with rare and passionate elegance about the fate of the dispossessed in Asia and done so without theoretical flourishes avoiding the very attractive snares of both structural-functionalism and opaque post-modernist nihilism. His new book on the fate of the jobless in Indian industry, particularly in Ahmedabad, the city he knows very well, brings a new dimension to his work. The horrors of Gujarat are traced to their root causes with new insights. Every student of Indian society will look forward to the publication of this book by a leading observer of the Indian past, as well as present, reality.'[-][-]Tapan Raychaudhri[-]Emeritus Professor, St Antony's College, Oxford University[-][-]'Most scholars do it with non-fiction, but there are other ways: Vikram Seth did it with a novel, Sebastiao Salgado through his photography. Now Jan Breman has linked his lyrical pen to[-]Parthiv Shah's searching images to tell the story of[-]the destruction of a labour force {(and of peoples' responses)}. The result is unforgettably powerful.'[-][-]Barbara Harriss-White[-]Professor of Development Studies[-]Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University