The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding down to the Bottom of the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, Inda: Sliding down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India - Hardcover

Breman, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9053566465 ISBN 13: 9789053566466

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Based on a survey of over 600 households over the 1999-2002 period, this monograph charts the progressive disenfranchisement of Ahmedabad's textile workers and their families throughout the 1980s and 90s. Challenging the myth of the infinite absorption capacity of the informal sector, the author elaborates on the dimensions of poverty often neglected in studies based on statistics alone. Like the companion photobook title, the monograph also examines the significance of religious fault lines in the community, which exploded into riots in spring 2002. The Ahmedabad crisis, typical of the textile industry in India, can also be found in Asia at large, where entire communities sink below poverty line in the absence of social provisions. Co-published with Oxford University Press, India

About this title

Review:

'Jan Breman has spent his own life celebrating those of labourers and teaching us of their exploitation and oppression. In his latest tour de force, he tracks the unravelling of an organised labour force - one of liberalisation's 'gifts' to India - and reveals the social fault lines cracking open in Gujarat as a result. A book of the first importance.'[-][-]Barbara Harriss-White[-]Professor of Development Stuides[-]Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 9053566465
• ISBN 13: 9789053566466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320