The Making of the Madras Working Class

The Making of the Madras Working Class The Madras Labour Union, founded in April 1918, is the first organized labour union in India. May Day was first celebrated in India in Napiers Park, Madras, in 1923. These are well-attested facts in the histories of the labour movement in India. There was,however, no coherent account of the labour movement in Madras until D. Veeraraghavans seminal study, The Making of the Madras Working Class. Covering the period 1918-1939, this work is based on an exhaustive study of the voluminous documents in the colonial archive lodged in the Tamilnadu Archives, Chennai, supplemented by research in the National Archives of India. The author also makes extensive use of contemporary news papers. He unearthed the Swadharma, the first periodical exclusively devoted to labour issues in India, and exploited to the full his access to leading labour and communist leaders including G. Selvapathy Chetty, C.S.Subramanyam, P. Ramamurthy, V.P. Chintan, K. Murugesan, Gajapathy,and others. This book is an indispensable record of their experiences.The present study surveys the industrial development in the city, and examines the origins of the working class, its structure, and the working and living conditions of the workers. It describes some of the forms of protest and resistance during the early phases of industrialization and discusses struggles that took place prior to the founding of the Madras Labour Union in 1918. The contributions of the leaders of the Home Rule and Non-Cooperation Movements are analyzed, as well as the disunity and unrest in the ranks of the workers. T