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[OPE-L] caste and class in Tirupur

Examining the role of caste and class in the transformation of Tirupur into a booming global centre for knitwear production.

SHARAD Chari's book, written in a vivid and compelling style, tells the story of the Gounder-caste entrepreneurs who transformed Tirupur from a provincial backwater into a booming global centre for knitwear production. The book is ambitious - it seeks to understand both the historical and the contemporary processes by which Gounder "agrarian histories" led to the industrial present over half a century and more. It does this by "bringing a decentred Marxism" (page 275) into relation with a wide range of data: economic, cultural and political.
Chari argues that the "histories of practice" of Gounder farmers enabled them to enter Tirupur's hosiery production as workers and then rise to the position of employers and entrepreneurs and in due course coming to dominate local industry. The particular "practice" that enabled Gounder men to triumph as "self-made" entrepreneurs, despite a highly competitive environment, was "Gounder toil". Gounder men used this phrase to express what they claimed as their unique ability among other upwardly mobile castes simultaneously to participate in manual labour alongside their workers and to extract the maximum work from them. Chari argues that Gounders successfully transferred the agricultural labour relations they had been familiar with, where they controlled the labour of `lower' castes, including Dalit agricultural castes, to Tirupur's industry.
He makes much of "Gounder toil", contrasting it with the elitist behaviour of the old guard of Tirupur owners who kept aloof from the shop floor. The book unequivocally celebrates Gounder toil, describing these entrepreneurs as heroes for their ability to emerge from modest agrarian backgrounds to build a stunningly successful global industry not only without state assistance, but in spite of state-imposed constraints on small-scale industry. However, this flattering portrait of the globalising Gounders is moderated by Chari's simultaneous acknowledgement that `Gounder toil' is, after all, a legitimating ideology, a careful construct of Gounder self-presentation, purveyed by them in order to persuade their (male) workers that `toil' is the means by which any man, regardless of caste, can become an industrial boss. Thus, `Gounder toil' is part of the seemingly egalitarian and meritocratic ideology that declares that in this industrial democracy no one is born to serve, but all (men) can, through hard labour, rise and join the capitalist class.

Chari argues that from the 1940s until the 1970s, as long as Tirupur was focussed on production for domestic markets, the message was reiterated and apparently validated by the class transformations of thousands of Gounder men. In the 1980s, however, these entrepreneurs started venturing into the global knitwear market, and by the 1990s, Tirupur was a global centre for production. This resulted in a dramatic change in the ethos of this industrial town. With alarming speed, the meritocratic ideology of the rewards of "toil" vanished, to be replaced by capitalist greed. Women workers were increasingly brought in, first to fill the new ancillary jobs created by the export industry and then, with time, to take over "male" tasks at lower pay.
Women were paid much less than, men often for the same work, and were consistently regarded as unworthy of a living wage. Chari attributes this to upper-caste Tamil cultural notions about the male identity of the breadwinner.
Simultaneously, Gounder employers initiated the break-up of their large companies into much smaller units in order to evade labour laws. They also set up subcontracting links in order to divest themselves of their central problem: the control of labour. In this new export-oriented world, time was of the essence, hence keeping the workers docile and obedient was key to ensuring that export deadlines were met. Facing international competition, employers also tried to slash their prices - and thus had to minimise costs. The female worker became their ideal worker, as she was required by local cultural norms to be both subservient and low-paid. Another factor was the new uncertainty of the market - global markets were not as predictable as domestic markets had been. Here again flexible females came to the rescue, for subcontracted women workers could be denied work even more easily than subcontracted male labour.

In this brave new world, Gounder employers found that they no longer had any use for fraternal industrial relations or the ideology of "toil". Instead of the meritocratic ideology that they had purveyed on their `democratic' shop floors, employers now withdrew to their tinted, air-conditioned offices, leaving labour control to their contractors (usually their Gounder kinsmen or at least men of the Gounder caste). Thus, the feminisation of industrial labour in Tirupur signalled far more than the new demand for docile and obedient female workers. It marked a radical increase in class differentiation in social relations. In Chari's words: "Gender fetishisms are potent precisely because of the way they harness sexed bodies to broader projects of differentiation", exacerbating "multiple dimensions of social inequality" (page 241).
With the feminisation of labour in Tirupur, male workers' rights have been mortally weakened and the entire workforce is much more insecure. Thus, Chari argues, the entire regime of labour relations has changed, for "fraternal capital" has now given way to a new "gender hegemony", where gender actually stands for a "feminisation [that] works as a powerful, productive fiction to violate the entitlements of a variety of groups of people rendered marginal and perpetually insecure by contemporary capitalism" (page 241). This is an important insight into what the feminisation of an industry actually means. As Chari points out, it entails much more than larger numbers of women workers; it signals a sea-change in labour relations throughout the industrial arena where it occurs, for it is used in contemporary industry as a tool with which to erode and destroy the remaining rights of all workers.
Chari's story has an underlying tension. On the one hand, the Gounder workers who entered Tirupur's industry in the 1940s and 1950s are portrayed admiringly and so is their eventual conquest of the elite peaks of export production. On the other hand, in the later, export-focussed phase of their history, the Gounder captains of industry appear singularly unappealing, for they nonchalantly destroy the local environment with the toxic wastes from their industry, just as they cold-bloodedly ensure that a new workforce, where female migrants play a major role, bends utterly to their will. Chari acknowledges this central tension thus: "Globalisation in the mofussils requires this Janus-faced critique in order to question the ties that bind the globalisation of capital to the conditions of subaltern inequality" (page 275). This is acceptable.
While Chari's critique may have to argue against itself at times, one of the central theses of this book deserves closer scrutiny: Chari argues that the Gounders who successfully made the transition from provincial agriculture to a global industrial empire were "subalterns" or "peasant-workers". Like Barbara Harriss-White, I would question this characterisation, because Gounder landowners are known to have been the dominant caste in this region and included among them "a substantial fraction [who] were agrarian capitalists" (Harriss-White 2003: 223).

M. BALAJI

Women were increasingly brought in to fill the jobs created by the entry of Tirupur's knitwear industry into the global market in the 1990s.

Furthermore, Chari's own account makes it clear that Gounder workers, unlike workers from other castes, were able to access capital quite easily, particularly from their own kin and caste members. He also vividly delineates the ways in which rural Gounder workers built up relations of familiarity with other key non-Gounder players in the industry, a type of capital that served them well when they started up their own small units (page 201). It is also very significant that throughout this history Communist labour union organisers, if they were Gounders, tended to put the interests of Gounder employers above the interests of non-Gounder workers.
This, I suggest, is not so much a case of caste identities being prioritised over class identities as it is an indication of the ways in which caste and class merged for the Gounders of Tirupur in a manner that made non-Gounder workers declare, with considerable resentment, that Gounders always stuck together and prioritised their caste interests, giving Gounder workers an unfair advantage over all others. This unfair advantage explains why so many Gounder workers managed to become small employers and, in later years, sub-contractors, on the basis of start-up capital borrowed from wealthy Gounder entrepreneurs. In short, caste identity looms very large in this narrative both explicitly, in Chari's own account, and implicitly, when he is read against the grain.