Labour historian Dilip Simeon’s seminal book, The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism – Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur 1928-1939, narrates many untold stories about the Tata Iron and Steel Company plant in Jamshedpur. The first part of Ajaz Ashraf’s interview with Simeon ended with a confrontation brewing between the TISCO management and workers’ leader Maneck Homi in 1928. In this installment, Simeon discusses how Homi was neutralised and the many deals the Tatas cut all around.
So the TISCO workers saw in Maneck Homi a labour leader in whom they could repose faith?
They had full faith in Homi. The workers loved him for the forthright position he took, for the manner in which he expressed their demands. Moreover, the workers were denied the chance to bring about a change in the Jamshedpur Labour Association leadership by electing new office-bearers. The management achieved this through a secret deal with [Gandhi's associate] CF Andrews.
Why did CF Andrews jump into Jamshedpur?
CF Andrews was then the secretary of the All-India Trade Union Congress, or AITUC, and was responsible for organising elections in unions affiliated to it. I am an admirer of Andrews, but the fact is that as AITUC leader, for reasons best known to him, he thought it necessary to postpone the JLA’s election. The need to protect a ‘national industry’ from avoidable militancy was probably uppermost in his mind. The problem was that the workers were genuinely agitated. I have seen managerial correspondence to the effect that they had arranged for the LA [Labour Association] elections to be "postponed indefinitely". This meant that the radical faction of workers could not elect those whom they wanted to represent them. It led to a schism – the workers went ahead with the strike committee, which the management saw as communists. The TISCO general manager was now saying this was “a fight as to who is going to run the place – management or the communists”. His refusal to negotiate with the workers’ preferred leader prolonged the strike. Ultimately, the only solution was to rope in someone else to mediate.
This was when Subhas Chandra Bose stepped into the picture?
Yes. Those were the days Subhas Bose was trying to emerge as a strong labour leader. I’ve found remarks wherein he refers to himself as a “controller of labour”. Since the Tatas were unwilling to negotiate with the strike committee, it was arranged to bring Bose into the picture. This was brought about by the Tata management and national leaders. He came to Jamshedpur in August-September 1928, and began by asking the Bengali clerical staff to strike work, thus demonstrating that he was on the side of the strikers. The Bengali clerical staff dominated the JLA. Bose took them on board, made some fiery speeches, and then negotiated a settlement with the Tatas. Strike pay was not given [the Strike Committee called it lock-out wages], and many workers lost their jobs.
Bose said that the settlement was the best that could be had at that point of time. The workers however, felt that the settlement didn’t match their expectations – whether in terms of emoluments, supervisory behaviour, layoffs or redundancy. As a result, the advent of Bose simply proved to be a way out of the impasse, by which everyone managed to save face.
So the Tatas, the management and Bose were all playing a game?
Whether or not it can be called a game, the complex pre-history of the strike shows that there were energetic calculations and maneuvers amongst managers, colonial officials and national leaders to defuse the crisis, use it to achieve managerial ends, and after that, to get the workers back to work. This was achieved at the expense of workers. There was a lot of tension at workplace after the strike ended.
When the commemorative coin in honour of Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was issued in January, the Tata website noted that it was because of his vision the group introduced pension and gratuity schemes way back in 1877. Yet, in a speech delivered to TISCO workers on Oct 17, 1931, you quote Subhash Chandra Bose demanding, among other things, the introduction of gratuity and pension schemes “promised for years”. Would you say the Tatas have airbrushed history?
Yes. This speech may be found in the Netaji: Collected Works. What is interesting is the background against which Bose made the statement. For a while, Bose became leader of the JLA and he’d come regularly to Jamshedpur. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the workers had realised that the JLA had served to end the impasse. Within a matter of weeks, Homi set up the Jamshedpur Labour Federation, the JLF. There was now another union within TISCO, again, a product of the working-class movement. In 1929, the JLF became very popular.
Then came an upsurge of the national movement. On January 26, 1930, Homi had joined a national flag-hoisting ceremony. This may indicate a signal towards Bose, and also that workers were drawn towards the Independence struggle, so Homi couldn’t keep aloof from it. Meanwhile, 1930 saw two cases instituted against him. In one case Homi was accused of embezzling union funds; in the other case he was accused of intimidating a supervisor. In the 1980s, I interviewed one supervisor, an elderly gentleman, who had retired as a middle-level Tata employee. He told me that these cases were fabricated.
That was the time Bose made the statement. In 1930 he had already made conciliatory moves towards Maneck Homi. He must have said these things on the basis of fair knowledge of the workers’ grievances. Certainly, the claims made by the Tatas [about of gratuity and pension schemes] would not have been correct for TISCO at that time. They may have introduced it for certain sections of their employees, or in their concerns elsewhere. It was not a norm in Jamshedpur.
What happened to Homi? You claim that the Tatas fabricated the cases against Homi?
It’s a complicated story, and the devil is in the detail. I have put down all the evidence I could collect in police files and other records. It does appear that some people fabricated cases against Homi; and it is inconceivable that the Tatas had nothing to do with all this. They took a keen interest in Homi’s fate, and a senior police officer reported the GM’s anxiety at Homi’s popularity. A case of cheating had been registered against him in the neighboring princely state of Seraikela, whose peasants had been gathering around Homi. About this case, the inspector general of police reported the managements’ opinion that “if he be convicted, labour would settle down.” In addition, Homi is said to have threatened a TISCO supervisor called Kutar, whom workers believed to be an arranger of goondas.
The atmosphere at the workplace was tense and rough. Kutar reported Homi for threatening him, and a criminal case was filed against Homi. Be that as it may, in 1930, even Homi’s rivals in the JLA were repeating his allegations that the management was engaging rowdies to break up labour organizations.
Your book alleges that the Tatas backed the persecution of Homi.
Yes. The Tatas’ lawyer, Manecksha Poachkhanawalla, coordinated the anti-Homi campaign. He was also advising the management about how to deal with the unions. Without question, the Tatas were interested in seeing the back of Homi.
What about Bose’s meeting of 1931, which was attacked and disrupted?
By mid-1930, Homi had been convicted and disappeared from the scene. Convictions in different cases put him in prison for four years, but his jail-term was extended by another nine months. Meanwhile, the Great Depression had set in, and the workers were under severe hardship. Bose visited Jamshedpur then, a time he was making conciliatory sounds about the JLF. After all, the JLF leader Homi was in jail, and Bose was aware of his tremendous popularity among workers, who thought him to be suffering on their behalf – which he was. Bose alleged that the Tatas had put away the workmen’s leader and were hand-in-glove with the British. During different phases of the national movement, the Tatas would shift their political stance. In this period, their approach was distinctly pro-British. At a time of political upheaval, some directors may have felt this to be necessary in order to combat the threat of communism.
It was during this time that Bose said the “Tatas’ concern in Jamshedpur is much less national than even the textile mills of the Indian industrial magnates for whom ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ is often a convenient excuse for robbing the public.” His statement showed the distance that now existed between the TISCO management and the man who had helped them settle the 1928 strike. The Tatas now feared that Bose was the new threat. They therefore decided to disrupt one of Bose’s meetings. I have a fair amount of evidence about this from the CID reports as well as from the personal correspondence of TISCO’s general manager JL Keenan and others. Keenan, in fact, made it clear that he had met that section of workers whom the police used to refer as “anti-party”, which was their name for a gang known for breaking up workers’ meetings.
Bose’s meeting of September 20, 1931 was violently disrupted. But this time it was not one-sided. An eyewitness from those times, the activist Moni Ghosh, reported in his memoir, Our Struggle, that 300 drunken hooligans had arrived at the maidan, determined to disrupt the meeting. He said: “Everyone in Jamshedpur knew that the big officials of the Steel Company were connected with this hooliganism. One of the hirelings frankly admitted to Subhas Babu that it was the Steel Company's doing.” Subhas apparently sent him to the general manager, who took no notice. Ghosh further reports that the hooligans’ lathis were met with retaliation, and that “Subhas Babu stood firm”, as the fight went on for an hour. He goes on to say that “this was perhaps the first time that the steel Company's hirelings were injured in their attempt to break labour meetings. This gang had driven out Homi from his meetings,...they had made the Federation powerless, humiliated Mangal Singh (labour leader)... but the table was now turned.”
Bose had no doubt as to the management’s role in the affray, and explicitly warned them, in a press note issued a couple of days later. He also recounted the event in an article written in 1935, entitled Labour in Jamshedpur, wherein he spoke of TISCO’s “ruthless policy towards workers.”
Let me add here that we are not in a court of law. We are historians. We can only go by historically relevant evidence, or rather, whatever part of it is accessible to us. This includes official and managerial archives, interviews with people who remember those events, written memoirs, and newspaper reports. We are not trying the Tatas in court. They are not up for conviction. As historians, we can only report what the evidence tells us.
And the evidence tells you what?
The evidence tells me that the disruption of Bose’s meeting was brought about by the Tata management. In my book, I have cited evidence of general manager Keenan’s involvement in the incident. For example, the district commissioner reported that there was good reason to believe that the disruption had been arranged by Tatas’ land officer SC Gupta. The police were proximate to the management and tended to see workers unrest as a communist conspiracy. From their light-hearted attitude towards the 20 September fracas, it seems they were in concert with management and wanted to humiliate Bose. Humiliated he indeed was. As a matter of fact, I found a statement of an English officer who said, “Subhas Bose is reported to have been hit on his posterior with a lathi, but I have not been able to confirm this information yet.” You can see almost feel the glee in the officer’s report. Bose was not very active thereafter, mainly because of involvement elsewhere, but he remained very angry with the Tatas for some years.
But the Tatas and Bose did patch up subsequently?
They patched up during Bose’s presidentship of the Congress. In 1939, he was elected for second term, but had to resign. Between the end of his first term and his resignation after re-election, he made conciliatory moves towards the Tatas.
At the time, the Congressman Abdul Bari, deputy speaker in the assembly, was the most popular leader of workers in Bihar. In 1939, he was bitterly opposed to the centenary birth anniversary celebrations of Jamsetji Tata. By contrast, Bose was asking trade unionists to be responsible, saying that the Tatas were great industrialists, and citing their contribution to the nation. Bari, on the other hand, was saying what Bose had said eight years before – that the Tatas were exploiting patriotism to rob the public. Bose had thus changed his position once he became Congress president. Perhaps he had no option.
The Tatas seemed to be propping one labour leader after another. Yet they were not able to overcome the resistance of workers.
To understand this, we must take into account what happened after 1931. For three or four years, there was quiet in TISCO. Bose had lost his leverage with the Tatas, Homi was in jail, and workers were somehow coping with their travails themselves. Into this vacuum jumped VV Giri, who later became the president of the country. He was a railway unionist from Madras. What he did was to set up a union in Jamshedpur. It was called the Metal Workers’ Union. Strangely enough, in his two-volume memoir, Giri didn’t mention this union. But it got the attention of the police. Giri had a very dubious role in Jamshedpur. The Metalworkers’ Union main role was to keep tight control over the workers. They were closely aligned with management.
Homi was due to be released in 1934. The TISCO management was alarmed, as it was the time of year that bonuses were paid. Management feared that Homi would take the credit for getting bonus, that he would once more muddy the waters for them. There is evidence that TISCO was acutely aware of their need to manipulate the standing of this or that union leader.
Your books claims that the Tatas conspired to keep Homi in the jail.
Yes, the Tatas wanted to keep Homi in jail for as long as possible. They arranged it by seizing upon an opportunity – Homi had gone on a hunger strike in jail and they used this to indict him under section 52 of the Prison Act, which deals with "heinous offences against prison discipline". I can’t see how a hunger strike may be deemed a heinous offence, but there you are.
Homi was in Seraikela jail, in a principality that bordered Jamshedpur. Sometime in April 1934 Keenan lunched with the governor of Bihar & Orissa and obtained a reassurance that the government did not favour an early release for Homi. Keenan then went ahead with a plan to get the ruler of Seraikela to reject Homi’s appeal for an early release. Thereupon Homi embarked on a series of hunger strikes, the third of which Keenan got wind of. He then leaned upon the raja to extend Homi’s jail term by nine months under section 52. In fairness, I should add that one of Tata Sons’ directors, Sir HP Mody, disapproved of the company’s taking "such an extreme step". But the plan was set in motion.
There is an entire report on this episode, which was sent by the local TISCO official on the spot. This official wrote to JRD Tata saying he had met the Raja of Saraikela and that the raja, “after a few minutes of whisper” with his advisors, agreed to extend the jail term. The raja extracted some concessions from TISCO regarding those of his adivasi residents who worked in Jamshedpur and who might try to “stir up trouble” for him in Seraikela. You can say it was a case of judicial corruption. The Tatas had used their clout to influence the judicial process for achieving their goals. Homi underwent a further nine months of rigorous imprisonment, or RI.
But Homi was ultimately bought over, wasn’t he?
Homi was released in November 1935. Soon after, he made his peace with the Tatas. This was the time when Bari was the rising star. As far as I know, Homi was the only non-communist labour leader to have undergone five years RI for his work as a trade unionist. From then on, he played a conciliatory role. May be his spirit was broken.
What happened to Homi? Did he remain in Jamshedpur?
Homi remained lived in his house in the Mango area in Jamshedpur till the 1970s. He died there. He had a nephew, whom I met during my research in the eighties. I got Homi’s photo from him, but he was still scared enough to say he didn’t want any acknowledgement.
So Bari replaced Homi as the most influential leader of the TISCO workers.
Bari became the favoured trade union leader of the TISCO management through the intervention of Rajendra Prasad and later also Sardar Vallabbhai Patel. Bari was a fiery speaker. He was among the few Congress leaders to have attacked the Bombay Trades Dispute Act of 1938. But he was a loyal Congressman and very close to Rajendra Prasad. The Congress leaders prevailed over the Tatas to accept Bari. He became the accredited leader of the Tata Workers Union, the successor to the JLA.
What was the controversy over the centenary celebrations of Jamsetji’s birth?
The Tata management had made workers’ participation in the celebrations mandatory. They were forced to stay overtime, do marches, appear in events. They rebelled against it. In the preparation phase there was already a lot of tension. Bari was very contemptuous of the management’s attempt to regiment workers. Bose came out with a public statement in patronising language regarding Bari. Mind you, both were in the Congress and Bose was the president. Bose said he was very happy to see Bari emerge as the labour leader, and take so much interest in workers, however that labour leaders should be responsible and moderate and pay homage to the great Tata for setting up such a great industry, generating wealth for the country, etc. Bari being the man he was, countered that it was sad to hear Subhash babu make such statements, that the Tatas were riding roughshod over the workers, that it was a regimented affair. As regards the JLA, he said it had been defunct for years “despite the best efforts of Subhash Babu”. Anyway, the celebrations were boycotted after the first day.
Did the TISCO workers teach the Tatas liberalism?
Right through the late 1920s and the 1930s, one finds that TISCO was engaged in machinations to crush the workers’ movement, refused to recognise workers’ leaders and they worked with the administration to restrain or control these leaders. Their actions can’t be categorised as liberal. If they learned some liberality, it was because of the severe resistance of workers. It was they who compelled TISCO to accept their leaders, as they eventually had to with Bari. I suppose, by then, the Tatas had learnt a lesson in democratic practices. The force and power of the working-class movement made the Tatas aware of the need to be conciliatory.
How nationalist was the Tata project?
If we imbue the words national and nationalism with virtuous content, then of course it wasn’t. It’s the vocabulary we use that causes the confusion. Nationalism is ambiguous – it can include good as well as unsavoury elements. TISCO made use of national feelings when it was convenient, when their connection with the national leadership could be of use to them. This happened in 1924, and I have already pointed out how they got Bose to Jamshedpur in 1928. In the 1930s, however, Tata management were closer to the colonial administration than to the nationalists.
Enterprises of this nature cannot be evaluated in ideological categories. They exist for purposes of self-expansion, and negotiate their political stances along the way. Profit is the highest value, everything else is incidental. That’s the truth about capitalist society, which workers get to learn in the school of industrial labour. It’s a bitter experience, and yields no degrees. I got my PhD [Simeon’s book is a shorter version of his thesis], but all I can do is to salute their memory.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist based in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, is available in bookstores around the country.
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So the TISCO workers saw in Maneck Homi a labour leader in whom they could repose faith?
They had full faith in Homi. The workers loved him for the forthright position he took, for the manner in which he expressed their demands. Moreover, the workers were denied the chance to bring about a change in the Jamshedpur Labour Association leadership by electing new office-bearers. The management achieved this through a secret deal with [Gandhi's associate] CF Andrews.
Why did CF Andrews jump into Jamshedpur?
CF Andrews was then the secretary of the All-India Trade Union Congress, or AITUC, and was responsible for organising elections in unions affiliated to it. I am an admirer of Andrews, but the fact is that as AITUC leader, for reasons best known to him, he thought it necessary to postpone the JLA’s election. The need to protect a ‘national industry’ from avoidable militancy was probably uppermost in his mind. The problem was that the workers were genuinely agitated. I have seen managerial correspondence to the effect that they had arranged for the LA [Labour Association] elections to be "postponed indefinitely". This meant that the radical faction of workers could not elect those whom they wanted to represent them. It led to a schism – the workers went ahead with the strike committee, which the management saw as communists. The TISCO general manager was now saying this was “a fight as to who is going to run the place – management or the communists”. His refusal to negotiate with the workers’ preferred leader prolonged the strike. Ultimately, the only solution was to rope in someone else to mediate.
This was when Subhas Chandra Bose stepped into the picture?
Yes. Those were the days Subhas Bose was trying to emerge as a strong labour leader. I’ve found remarks wherein he refers to himself as a “controller of labour”. Since the Tatas were unwilling to negotiate with the strike committee, it was arranged to bring Bose into the picture. This was brought about by the Tata management and national leaders. He came to Jamshedpur in August-September 1928, and began by asking the Bengali clerical staff to strike work, thus demonstrating that he was on the side of the strikers. The Bengali clerical staff dominated the JLA. Bose took them on board, made some fiery speeches, and then negotiated a settlement with the Tatas. Strike pay was not given [the Strike Committee called it lock-out wages], and many workers lost their jobs.
Bose said that the settlement was the best that could be had at that point of time. The workers however, felt that the settlement didn’t match their expectations – whether in terms of emoluments, supervisory behaviour, layoffs or redundancy. As a result, the advent of Bose simply proved to be a way out of the impasse, by which everyone managed to save face.
So the Tatas, the management and Bose were all playing a game?
Whether or not it can be called a game, the complex pre-history of the strike shows that there were energetic calculations and maneuvers amongst managers, colonial officials and national leaders to defuse the crisis, use it to achieve managerial ends, and after that, to get the workers back to work. This was achieved at the expense of workers. There was a lot of tension at workplace after the strike ended.
When the commemorative coin in honour of Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was issued in January, the Tata website noted that it was because of his vision the group introduced pension and gratuity schemes way back in 1877. Yet, in a speech delivered to TISCO workers on Oct 17, 1931, you quote Subhash Chandra Bose demanding, among other things, the introduction of gratuity and pension schemes “promised for years”. Would you say the Tatas have airbrushed history?
Yes. This speech may be found in the Netaji: Collected Works. What is interesting is the background against which Bose made the statement. For a while, Bose became leader of the JLA and he’d come regularly to Jamshedpur. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the workers had realised that the JLA had served to end the impasse. Within a matter of weeks, Homi set up the Jamshedpur Labour Federation, the JLF. There was now another union within TISCO, again, a product of the working-class movement. In 1929, the JLF became very popular.
Then came an upsurge of the national movement. On January 26, 1930, Homi had joined a national flag-hoisting ceremony. This may indicate a signal towards Bose, and also that workers were drawn towards the Independence struggle, so Homi couldn’t keep aloof from it. Meanwhile, 1930 saw two cases instituted against him. In one case Homi was accused of embezzling union funds; in the other case he was accused of intimidating a supervisor. In the 1980s, I interviewed one supervisor, an elderly gentleman, who had retired as a middle-level Tata employee. He told me that these cases were fabricated.
That was the time Bose made the statement. In 1930 he had already made conciliatory moves towards Maneck Homi. He must have said these things on the basis of fair knowledge of the workers’ grievances. Certainly, the claims made by the Tatas [about of gratuity and pension schemes] would not have been correct for TISCO at that time. They may have introduced it for certain sections of their employees, or in their concerns elsewhere. It was not a norm in Jamshedpur.
What happened to Homi? You claim that the Tatas fabricated the cases against Homi?
It’s a complicated story, and the devil is in the detail. I have put down all the evidence I could collect in police files and other records. It does appear that some people fabricated cases against Homi; and it is inconceivable that the Tatas had nothing to do with all this. They took a keen interest in Homi’s fate, and a senior police officer reported the GM’s anxiety at Homi’s popularity. A case of cheating had been registered against him in the neighboring princely state of Seraikela, whose peasants had been gathering around Homi. About this case, the inspector general of police reported the managements’ opinion that “if he be convicted, labour would settle down.” In addition, Homi is said to have threatened a TISCO supervisor called Kutar, whom workers believed to be an arranger of goondas.
The atmosphere at the workplace was tense and rough. Kutar reported Homi for threatening him, and a criminal case was filed against Homi. Be that as it may, in 1930, even Homi’s rivals in the JLA were repeating his allegations that the management was engaging rowdies to break up labour organizations.
Your book alleges that the Tatas backed the persecution of Homi.
Yes. The Tatas’ lawyer, Manecksha Poachkhanawalla, coordinated the anti-Homi campaign. He was also advising the management about how to deal with the unions. Without question, the Tatas were interested in seeing the back of Homi.
What about Bose’s meeting of 1931, which was attacked and disrupted?
By mid-1930, Homi had been convicted and disappeared from the scene. Convictions in different cases put him in prison for four years, but his jail-term was extended by another nine months. Meanwhile, the Great Depression had set in, and the workers were under severe hardship. Bose visited Jamshedpur then, a time he was making conciliatory sounds about the JLF. After all, the JLF leader Homi was in jail, and Bose was aware of his tremendous popularity among workers, who thought him to be suffering on their behalf – which he was. Bose alleged that the Tatas had put away the workmen’s leader and were hand-in-glove with the British. During different phases of the national movement, the Tatas would shift their political stance. In this period, their approach was distinctly pro-British. At a time of political upheaval, some directors may have felt this to be necessary in order to combat the threat of communism.
It was during this time that Bose said the “Tatas’ concern in Jamshedpur is much less national than even the textile mills of the Indian industrial magnates for whom ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ is often a convenient excuse for robbing the public.” His statement showed the distance that now existed between the TISCO management and the man who had helped them settle the 1928 strike. The Tatas now feared that Bose was the new threat. They therefore decided to disrupt one of Bose’s meetings. I have a fair amount of evidence about this from the CID reports as well as from the personal correspondence of TISCO’s general manager JL Keenan and others. Keenan, in fact, made it clear that he had met that section of workers whom the police used to refer as “anti-party”, which was their name for a gang known for breaking up workers’ meetings.
Bose’s meeting of September 20, 1931 was violently disrupted. But this time it was not one-sided. An eyewitness from those times, the activist Moni Ghosh, reported in his memoir, Our Struggle, that 300 drunken hooligans had arrived at the maidan, determined to disrupt the meeting. He said: “Everyone in Jamshedpur knew that the big officials of the Steel Company were connected with this hooliganism. One of the hirelings frankly admitted to Subhas Babu that it was the Steel Company's doing.” Subhas apparently sent him to the general manager, who took no notice. Ghosh further reports that the hooligans’ lathis were met with retaliation, and that “Subhas Babu stood firm”, as the fight went on for an hour. He goes on to say that “this was perhaps the first time that the steel Company's hirelings were injured in their attempt to break labour meetings. This gang had driven out Homi from his meetings,...they had made the Federation powerless, humiliated Mangal Singh (labour leader)... but the table was now turned.”
Bose had no doubt as to the management’s role in the affray, and explicitly warned them, in a press note issued a couple of days later. He also recounted the event in an article written in 1935, entitled Labour in Jamshedpur, wherein he spoke of TISCO’s “ruthless policy towards workers.”
Let me add here that we are not in a court of law. We are historians. We can only go by historically relevant evidence, or rather, whatever part of it is accessible to us. This includes official and managerial archives, interviews with people who remember those events, written memoirs, and newspaper reports. We are not trying the Tatas in court. They are not up for conviction. As historians, we can only report what the evidence tells us.
And the evidence tells you what?
The evidence tells me that the disruption of Bose’s meeting was brought about by the Tata management. In my book, I have cited evidence of general manager Keenan’s involvement in the incident. For example, the district commissioner reported that there was good reason to believe that the disruption had been arranged by Tatas’ land officer SC Gupta. The police were proximate to the management and tended to see workers unrest as a communist conspiracy. From their light-hearted attitude towards the 20 September fracas, it seems they were in concert with management and wanted to humiliate Bose. Humiliated he indeed was. As a matter of fact, I found a statement of an English officer who said, “Subhas Bose is reported to have been hit on his posterior with a lathi, but I have not been able to confirm this information yet.” You can see almost feel the glee in the officer’s report. Bose was not very active thereafter, mainly because of involvement elsewhere, but he remained very angry with the Tatas for some years.
But the Tatas and Bose did patch up subsequently?
They patched up during Bose’s presidentship of the Congress. In 1939, he was elected for second term, but had to resign. Between the end of his first term and his resignation after re-election, he made conciliatory moves towards the Tatas.
At the time, the Congressman Abdul Bari, deputy speaker in the assembly, was the most popular leader of workers in Bihar. In 1939, he was bitterly opposed to the centenary birth anniversary celebrations of Jamsetji Tata. By contrast, Bose was asking trade unionists to be responsible, saying that the Tatas were great industrialists, and citing their contribution to the nation. Bari, on the other hand, was saying what Bose had said eight years before – that the Tatas were exploiting patriotism to rob the public. Bose had thus changed his position once he became Congress president. Perhaps he had no option.
The Tatas seemed to be propping one labour leader after another. Yet they were not able to overcome the resistance of workers.
To understand this, we must take into account what happened after 1931. For three or four years, there was quiet in TISCO. Bose had lost his leverage with the Tatas, Homi was in jail, and workers were somehow coping with their travails themselves. Into this vacuum jumped VV Giri, who later became the president of the country. He was a railway unionist from Madras. What he did was to set up a union in Jamshedpur. It was called the Metal Workers’ Union. Strangely enough, in his two-volume memoir, Giri didn’t mention this union. But it got the attention of the police. Giri had a very dubious role in Jamshedpur. The Metalworkers’ Union main role was to keep tight control over the workers. They were closely aligned with management.
Homi was due to be released in 1934. The TISCO management was alarmed, as it was the time of year that bonuses were paid. Management feared that Homi would take the credit for getting bonus, that he would once more muddy the waters for them. There is evidence that TISCO was acutely aware of their need to manipulate the standing of this or that union leader.
Your books claims that the Tatas conspired to keep Homi in the jail.
Yes, the Tatas wanted to keep Homi in jail for as long as possible. They arranged it by seizing upon an opportunity – Homi had gone on a hunger strike in jail and they used this to indict him under section 52 of the Prison Act, which deals with "heinous offences against prison discipline". I can’t see how a hunger strike may be deemed a heinous offence, but there you are.
Homi was in Seraikela jail, in a principality that bordered Jamshedpur. Sometime in April 1934 Keenan lunched with the governor of Bihar & Orissa and obtained a reassurance that the government did not favour an early release for Homi. Keenan then went ahead with a plan to get the ruler of Seraikela to reject Homi’s appeal for an early release. Thereupon Homi embarked on a series of hunger strikes, the third of which Keenan got wind of. He then leaned upon the raja to extend Homi’s jail term by nine months under section 52. In fairness, I should add that one of Tata Sons’ directors, Sir HP Mody, disapproved of the company’s taking "such an extreme step". But the plan was set in motion.
There is an entire report on this episode, which was sent by the local TISCO official on the spot. This official wrote to JRD Tata saying he had met the Raja of Saraikela and that the raja, “after a few minutes of whisper” with his advisors, agreed to extend the jail term. The raja extracted some concessions from TISCO regarding those of his adivasi residents who worked in Jamshedpur and who might try to “stir up trouble” for him in Seraikela. You can say it was a case of judicial corruption. The Tatas had used their clout to influence the judicial process for achieving their goals. Homi underwent a further nine months of rigorous imprisonment, or RI.
But Homi was ultimately bought over, wasn’t he?
Homi was released in November 1935. Soon after, he made his peace with the Tatas. This was the time when Bari was the rising star. As far as I know, Homi was the only non-communist labour leader to have undergone five years RI for his work as a trade unionist. From then on, he played a conciliatory role. May be his spirit was broken.
What happened to Homi? Did he remain in Jamshedpur?
Homi remained lived in his house in the Mango area in Jamshedpur till the 1970s. He died there. He had a nephew, whom I met during my research in the eighties. I got Homi’s photo from him, but he was still scared enough to say he didn’t want any acknowledgement.
So Bari replaced Homi as the most influential leader of the TISCO workers.
Bari became the favoured trade union leader of the TISCO management through the intervention of Rajendra Prasad and later also Sardar Vallabbhai Patel. Bari was a fiery speaker. He was among the few Congress leaders to have attacked the Bombay Trades Dispute Act of 1938. But he was a loyal Congressman and very close to Rajendra Prasad. The Congress leaders prevailed over the Tatas to accept Bari. He became the accredited leader of the Tata Workers Union, the successor to the JLA.
What was the controversy over the centenary celebrations of Jamsetji’s birth?
The Tata management had made workers’ participation in the celebrations mandatory. They were forced to stay overtime, do marches, appear in events. They rebelled against it. In the preparation phase there was already a lot of tension. Bari was very contemptuous of the management’s attempt to regiment workers. Bose came out with a public statement in patronising language regarding Bari. Mind you, both were in the Congress and Bose was the president. Bose said he was very happy to see Bari emerge as the labour leader, and take so much interest in workers, however that labour leaders should be responsible and moderate and pay homage to the great Tata for setting up such a great industry, generating wealth for the country, etc. Bari being the man he was, countered that it was sad to hear Subhash babu make such statements, that the Tatas were riding roughshod over the workers, that it was a regimented affair. As regards the JLA, he said it had been defunct for years “despite the best efforts of Subhash Babu”. Anyway, the celebrations were boycotted after the first day.
Did the TISCO workers teach the Tatas liberalism?
Right through the late 1920s and the 1930s, one finds that TISCO was engaged in machinations to crush the workers’ movement, refused to recognise workers’ leaders and they worked with the administration to restrain or control these leaders. Their actions can’t be categorised as liberal. If they learned some liberality, it was because of the severe resistance of workers. It was they who compelled TISCO to accept their leaders, as they eventually had to with Bari. I suppose, by then, the Tatas had learnt a lesson in democratic practices. The force and power of the working-class movement made the Tatas aware of the need to be conciliatory.
How nationalist was the Tata project?
If we imbue the words national and nationalism with virtuous content, then of course it wasn’t. It’s the vocabulary we use that causes the confusion. Nationalism is ambiguous – it can include good as well as unsavoury elements. TISCO made use of national feelings when it was convenient, when their connection with the national leadership could be of use to them. This happened in 1924, and I have already pointed out how they got Bose to Jamshedpur in 1928. In the 1930s, however, Tata management were closer to the colonial administration than to the nationalists.
Enterprises of this nature cannot be evaluated in ideological categories. They exist for purposes of self-expansion, and negotiate their political stances along the way. Profit is the highest value, everything else is incidental. That’s the truth about capitalist society, which workers get to learn in the school of industrial labour. It’s a bitter experience, and yields no degrees. I got my PhD [Simeon’s book is a shorter version of his thesis], but all I can do is to salute their memory.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist based in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, is available in bookstores around the country.
