chapter 9 Making the Personal Political: The First Domestic Workers’ Strike in Pune, Maharashtra

Lokesh

In February 1980 there was a domestic workers’ strike in the city of Pune (in Maharastra, India), most of whom were women. The agitation started with the demand for sick leave and a pay raise, and led to the formation of the Pune Sahar Molkarni [domestic servant1] Sanghatana. What followed were pro- longed negotiations with employers that resulted in a significant victory for this union in the city and personalized work relations were transformed into professional, contractual ones. This was probably the first time that domestic workers had struck anywhere in the country or formed a city-wide union. This paper documents the history of organizing among domestic workers in Pune. I shall look at the way “work” is understood within the “mainstream” labor unions and how the intersections of caste, class, and gender form our under- standing of paid domestic work. I began my engagement with the Paid Domestic Workers’ Unions in 2010 for a month in Pune, Nagpur, and Mumbai. This essay is based on fieldwork conducted in the May 2013 in Pune. My respondents were primarily the leaders and activists of three paid domestic workers’ organizations: Pune Shahar Molkarni Sanghatana (Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organization),2 Pune Zilla Ghar Kamgar Sanghatana (Pune District Domestic Workers’ Union),3

* This essay has benefitted from comments by Dirk Hoerder, Yvonne Svanström, Satish Deshpande, Prabhu Mohapatra, Rajani Palriwala, Sudha Vasan, Anuja Agrawal, Sanjay Kumar and Naveen Chander. I am also grateful to Prabhakar Gatade for translating the origi- nal Marathi sources into English and Prasanjeet A. Tribhuvan and Meghana Arora for helping in translating the interviews from Marathi to English. I am also thankful to Anupama Ramakrishnan, Amrapali Basumatary, Apoorva Gautam for their help in editing the text. I am grateful to the members of Pune Sahar Molkarni Sanghatana, Pune Zila Ghar Kaamgar Sanghatana, and Molkarni Panchayat for providing information and putting me in touch with domestic workers. In these organizations I would specially like to thank Mangala Mishra, Medha Thatte, Kiran Moge for enriching my knowledge about the history of domes- tic workers movement in Pune and other cities of Maharashtra. 1 See the section “Gender Consciousness” below for the term molkarni. 2 Organized by Lal Nishan Party. 3 Organized by All India Democratic Women’s Association, aidwa, and affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, citu.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004280144_010

Making the Personal Political 203 and Pune District Molkarni Panchayat4 which was also involved in organizing Hamals and Mathadis5 in Pune. Several of the responding domestic workers were from either the so-called Other Backward Classes (obc) or the dalit, the so-called untouchable castes.6 I will first present a brief review of the research on paid domestic work in India, next provide a historical account of the spontaneous February 1980 strike in Pune, and its aftermath of organizing, and conclude by analysing the main consciousness issues involved in organizing domestic workers: working-class, gender, and caste consciousness.

Review of the Research

Paid domestic service is one of the self-evident facts of everyday life in India, but this remains rather under-researched by sociologists and historians, including Indian labor historians. Recent writing by feminist scholars in India such as N. Neeta and Raka Ray, however, suggest an increasing concern with why paid domestic work is now increasing in importance. In an early study in the 1960s Aban B. Mehta traced the continuity between domestic service in modern India and older forms of servitude and debt bond- age.7 She assumed that paid domestic service would inevitably decline with the professionalization and commercialization of many services even as it would be made the subject of state regulation and protective legislation. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that the institution has been notoriously impervious to decline and despite state benefits, where available, it seems set to burgeon into a global institution. More recent research falls into three broad categories: several feminist schol- ars have discussed domestic service in ancient and medieval history and the intersection between caste and gender; other scholars have focused on devel- oping a conceptual framework for the study of paid domestic work; and finally, more contemporary feminist scholars, such as N. Neeta and Sujata Ghotoskar, have written about paid domestic workers’ rights and issues of legislation.

4 Organized by Baba Adhav, President of Mahatma Phule Samta Partishtan. 5 Hamals and Mathadis are local names used to refer to casual laborers such as head-loaders, women who transport loads of textiles on their heads, and porters engaged in heavy manual labor such as loading and unloading trucks of commodities. 6 In modern India, the so-called untouchable castes have gained political consciousness and pre- fer to call themselves dalit, literally meaning those in chains. In this essay I will use the term dalit. 7 Aban B. Mehta, The Domestic Servant Class (Bombay, 1960).