Dock Worker Solidarities in International Perspective

[Please do not cite] Embracing Waterfronts: Dock Worker Solidarities in International Perspective Shubhankita Ojha In recent years there has been growing interest in the role of the Indian Ocean and its region in world history. Even though the Indian Ocean was important during the earlier centuries as well due to the flourishing trade in that region, it is only in the nineteenth century, according to Michael Pearson, that “many of the deep structural elements underlying Indian Ocean history for millennia— monsoons, currents, and land barriers are all overcome by steam ships and steam trains in the service of British power and capital; the Indian Ocean world becomes embedded in a truly global economy..”.1 The links and flows by this time contributed to the creation of an interesting “shared public sphere of the port cities that ringed the Indian Ocean in this period”2 and needs to be explored. It is in this network, that Bombay, as one of the most important ports along the Ocean’s rim, is unique. What is interesting about Bombay is the nodal position it came to occupy by the nineteenth century not only in the expanding Asian sea-borne trade, rather also in terms of technology like shipping and communications which connected Europe and the Indian Ocean with the rest of Asia. Big steam liners loaded with passengers, cargoes and mail sailed between Atlantic Europe, the US and the Indian Ocean and charted a fascinating history of global movements. 1 Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 12 2 Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006, p.278 1 [Please do not cite] While maritime history identifies lascars as ‘world’s first global migrants’ for their work on ship and experiences abroad, workers who prepared these ships for its voyage and remained at the docks still need a more careful study. Ports need to be acknowledged more than just transient spaces in the larger narrative of the journey of a ship. Dock workers have been attributed certain stereotypes. They are usually seen as strong casual workers roughened by long hours of strenuous physical work and hence given to drinking, violence and crime. Dockers have traditionally been seen as militant and strike prone and hence most of what has been written about them pertains to dock strikes and trade unions. A lot of it has also been shaped by their portrayals in cinema like Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront which shows dock workers given to crime and the dominance of gangsters at the New York docks or even the Bollywood movie Deewar which is a depiction of the life of a man from being an ordinary dock coolie to being a smuggler. The recent shift to global histories and transnational studies makes it crucial to enquire into a range of intellectual issues like the possibility of looking at dock work as an international occupation. The ship was not only the means of communication between continents, but also the first place where working people from different continents communicated. The Ports similarly were not just places where such ships were loaded, unloaded or repaired. There is a need to study them as work sites but also ones that witnessed interactions and experiences of several kinds. As Frederick Cooper says, “ Unloading a ship, whatever the language in which the labourers talk about what they are doing, is still unloading a ship”3.My paper tries to look at how Bombay dock workers are placed at the intersections of crucial crossroads. This paper combines part of my doctoral work on Bombay dock workers and my future research plans of locating Bombay in a wider network of 3 Cooper, Frederick. “Dockworkers and Labour history”, Sam Davies et al (eds.) Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790-1970, Vol 2, Aldershot: Ashgate 2000, p. 523. 2 [Please do not cite] oceanic trade and movements and on looking at dock workers as part of a global working class and dock work as an international occupation. In the first part of the paper I look at two very significant changes in the twentieth century – decasualization and containerization that have had a huge impact on the nature of dock work worldwide. The paper in assessing these two changes also tries to unravel moments of dock worker association at work, neighbourhoods and in a more global imagination. The importance of port workers emanates from the crucial and nodal role they hold in global capitalist relations but also the fact that the concentration of workers with varieties of experiences in a small space also makes it particularly vulnerable to disruption. It is in this context that I attempt to study how the changing labour regimes in the twentieth century have affected these workers. The second part of the paper is still in a nascent stage and tries to locate dock workers as part of an international community which even though divided by seas and oceans, presents a unique form of solidarity. Dockers present an interesting case of various networks and linkages. They are connected both to the urban workers and the lascars geographically and also to villages due to migratory linkages which make them a very interesting case study. Situating Bombay in the Indian Ocean Network By the nineteenth century Bombay stood at the crossroads to significant exchanges and interactions in the Indian Ocean region which also established its linkages with the global capitalist economy at large. Apart from the British colonial enterprise and decline of Surat as the most important port of Western India, it was also the sustained economic relationship between China and India that gave rise to Bombay. The one event that was significant in the beginnings of this industrial phase was the American Civil War due to which supplies of textile from American mills dried up and the British had to look towards India. The outbreak of the American Civil War, the opening of the 3 [Please do not cite] Suez Canal and the resulting exponential growth in trade brought Bombay to the threshold of modernity and urbanism. Apart from the cotton boom, what also needs to be emphasized in the growth of Bombay is the role of indigenous shipping in India. Indigenous shipping and the cotton- opium trade were closely interlinked at Bombay and this activity made the port here increasingly busy as also connected with wider networks. There were also other leading Parsi capitalists involved in the Bombay ship building industry eventually. Some of these were the Jamsetji Jejeebhoy, Dadyseths, Readymoneys, Banajis, Patels, Narielwallahs and Camas. They came to be important shipowners of the time and were involved in the profitable China trade. Apart from the Parsis, there were also other communities like the Lohanas, Bhatias, Bohras, Khojas and Memons who frequently crisscrossed the Indian Ocean also came from the Kachchha region and as Chhaya Goswami’s work shows that these communities were both reputed for being engaged as mariners or in the shipbuilding industry and most importantly as traders in the Muscat and Zanzibar regions4. These mercantile communities either settled in Kachchha, Gujarat and Bombay or even in Muscat and Zanzibar and took part in the Indian Ocean trade. These Kachchhi traders had developed a web of service providers and connected the markets of Muscat and Zanzibar to the ports of Bombay and Mandvi. Also important were the Konkani Muslims, a mixed race of Sunni Muslims tracing ancestry to the Arabs who settled along the coast of Western India from Goa to Cambay. They came to Bombay from Ratnagiri, Bankot, Alibag, Panwel, Thana, Kalyan, Bassein, Ghodbundar and other places on the western coast where they had, for years, followed the professions of trading and sea faring5. Along with this trade grew a new section of Indian financiers, rising entrepreneurs and their increasing dominance over the Asian seas. Most of the men employed at the dockyards were 4 Goswami, Chhaya. The Call of the Sea: Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar, c.1800-1880, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011 5 The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol.I, p. 255 4 [Please do not cite] also said to be direct descendants of workers who migrated from Surat originally6, perhaps due to the prior experience in ship-building etc. Hence, it was common to find a large number of Konkani Muslims from Ratnagiri, Janjira and Malwan, Goans and Parsis among the skilled labour here like riveters, platers, hammermen etc. There are strong reasons to believe that most of the communities involved in shipmaking and dock building like the Konkani Muslims or also the Parsis figured amongst dock workers and lascars due to their familiarity with the coastline. Dock Work and The Case of the ‘Casual’ The employment of dock workers all over the world, well into the twentieth century, had problems peculiar to itself. This was due to the fact that port traffic was subject to wide fluctuations which were not necessarily seasonal or otherwise cyclic, rather occurred daily depending upon the number of ships entering or leaving the port on any day, the quantity of cargo to be loaded or unloaded, the nature of the cargo and the manner in which it was received or dispatched, the type of mechanical equipment and facilities available both on board ship and on shore and the rate at which the cargo could be cleared from the shore or made available to feed the ship. Here local conditions varied considerably from port to port, between cargo and cargo, between ship and ship, and even between the holds of the same ship or different parts of the same shed, so that a standard could hardly be laid down.

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