The Boom And Bust Of Bombay Mills

Even when he was in his teens, Cowasji Nanabhoy, the man who lent ample girth to Bombay’s capitalist ambition, had a nose for fortune.

At 16, he joined his father’s stock-broking business in the 1830s.

By 1853, Cowasji and an Englishman, Edwin Heycock, who later became the city sheriff, started the Mercantile Bank of Bombay, now an HSBC entity. Soon, the duo would launch their most ambitious project, one that would change the destiny of Bombay forever.

From just a cluster of islands, inhabited by Koli fisherfolk, the businessmen would transform the city into an island of hope, dreams and aspiration for centuries to come.

A year after the first train chugged between Bori Bunder —now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a Central Railway terminus— to Thane, Cowasji and Heycock in 1854 started the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company in South Bombay’s Tardeo. 

More than a century later, the busy Tardeo area became home to one of Mumbai’s (Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995) first malls ‘Crossroads’, laying the foundation for Mumbai’s mall culture, cannibalised from deserted mill complexes after they folded up around the turn of the millennium. 

The Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company was the city’s first textile mill. It was mammoth, outfitted with 20,000 spindles, equipped to spit out thousands of yards of yarn.

The mill’s spindles spun a web of aura around the city. The spinning wooden pegs which were used to intertwine cotton into fine threads and roll them together at great speed into cloth, propelled the growth of the city at an even faster pace.

One could make a case that the root of the axis of pace at which present-day Mumbai spins, could be credited to the fast, but predictable speed of the spindles that wove the city’s commercial fortune.

Between 1854-70, 12 other textile mills sprung up in different parts of the port town. Cowasji added another mill, the Bombay Throstle, to his portfolio after the success of his maiden venture in the textile industry.

Other textile units like the Victoria Mill (1860), Arkwright Mill (1863), Albert Mill (1867) started springing up nearby. Bombay gradually grew familiar with the bustle of its textile mills and the grey smoke, which hurried out of the tall chimneys defining Bombay’s skyline for a long time to come.

By 1870, Bombay was processing cotton threads out of 2,91,000 spindles spinning at breakneck speed, along with 4,100 looms powered by a workforce of 8,100 hands, according to the 1927 edition of The Indian Textile Journal. 

Bombay’s cotton exports to Britain skyrocketed, after the US civil war curbed its export from the North American continent. The British government which had just taken over overseas affairs from the East India Company also set up the Bombay Port Trust to improve shipping and port related infrastructure. The Mumbai port, which made a fortune on cotton exports alone, handled 20 per cent of India’s foreign trade in 2020-21 and facilitated 53.32 million tons worth of maritime cargo. 

As the city prospered, Bombay got its own civic corporation, the Municipal Council of Greater Bombay, to administer to it the city’s growing needs.

In less than four decades after Cowasji and Heycock’s pioneering effort, in 1892, mill workers accounted for more than 7 per cent of the city’s population. The mill worker headcount rose to 10 per cent of the total population in a matter of years.

The city’s native population was just not enough to fuel the human resource needs of the sprawling textile factories — there were around 200 textile mills by the early 1900s. The hungry mills, like large smoking dragons across Bombay’s skyline, would consume labour, just as easily it could consume bales of cotton.

Faced with the manpower crunch, mill owners began to send jobbers, in the present context labour contractors, to villages in the Konkan.

“The number of workers in textile mills doubled by the 1920s with the large scale of migration from Ratnagiri, Konkan, and Satara regions. Later with technological advances like ‘power loom,’ the Indian textile industry displaced British imports in the Indian market. These mills contributed significantly to the prosperity and growth of Bombay during the late 19th century. Thus, the city’s history is inextricably linked to the mill culture,” says Palak Vashist in his research paper ‘Age as a Historical Category of Analysis: A Study of Bombay Textile Mills in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’.

The massive influx of workers helped power the fortunes of the city as well as Bombay’s mill promoters. 

But the mass migration to the city, also gave rise to a new chain of urban dynamics. Housing for mill workers, sanitation facilities for the vast incoming population, schools for their children, medical aid, were issues which needed urgent solutions. Communal riots were also reported in the city in 1893 between Hindus and Muslims. Apart from religious differences, excessive proximity in the overcrowded city in this case, had caused conflict.

The unprecedented growth of the city had already left a scar, the plague of 1896. It killed 20,000. At its peak, the plague killed more than a 1,000 people a week. The dreaded epidemic taught Bombay two things. One was to prepare for such eventualities.

To prevent further epidemics, the British administration invited Dr. Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian Jew microbiologist who had tackled cholera epidemics in Europe in the past. Haffkine started the ‘Plague Research Centre’ in Parel in central Bombay. It was later called the Haffkine Institute, a major city landmark even today. 

The other intervention was the Bombay City Improvement Trust. It was this Trust, along with mill owners, who came up with the solution to tackle the housing and sanitation crisis in the city, which had inflicted the plague in the first place.

Chawls were essentially small, one or two room tenements with a connecting passage built over several floors assembled with the help of wood and iron. A typical room in a chawl was roughly spread over 100-200 sq. ft. with a common set of toilets for the residents of each floor. The housing was low cost and could host large groups of the workforce.

Since most of the mills were located in south and central Bombay, chawls sprung up in areas like Girgaum, Tardeo, Byculla, Parel, etc. Bombay’s early chawls were constructed by mill owners in close proximity to the mill itself. 

Nearly 70 per cent of the city’s population lived in chawls or one-room tenements, according to a government census conducted in 1911, the same year that the Gateway of India was built to commemorate the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary.

Bombay’s chawls have seen generations spawned and reared. Father to son, to father and then again to the son engaged as workers at the same mill or another one which had sprung up nearby. In the room, next door and the one next to it and in the other rooms of the chawls nearby, the story was similar.

A chawl, especially rooms along one floor of a chawl, were like one large joint family cluster, whose members did not share the same DNA.

“This physical proximity to the workplace increased the involvement of the workers and the community at large in trade union activities as well as in larger political movements like the independence struggle and the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. A rich network of physical and social infrastructure evolved in Girangaon, spread over the centrally located 25 sq. kms of Lalbaug, Parel, Sewri and Byculla areas, due to an integrated community environment,” says Neera Adarkar and Vidhyadhar Phatak in an article ‘Recyling Mill Land’ in the Economic and Political Weekly.

As the article suggests, the geographic dependence of the mills on workforce from the Konkan belt also led to a broad cultural homogeneity, which when welded together became a strong force, socially and politically.

Chawls have served as a chaotic, yet nostalgic backdrop for several commercial art films like Katha, Black Friday, Vaastav, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman. The Dagdi chawl in Byculla is home to Arun Gawli, once one of Mumbai’s feared underworld dons. The old housing structure, home to around 300 residents, is on the verge of being redeveloped, with two 40-storey skyscrapers likely to replace the chawl cluster, from where Gawli ran his writ through the 80s to 90s. 

During the pre-Independence era, this mass solidarity among chawl dwellers was cleverly tapped by Lokmanya Tilak. Tilak defied a British administration’s ban on public assembly by organising a public celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi at the Keshavji Naik chawl near Charni Road, in the city’s mill district for the first time in 1893.

Work conditions in the trying hot conditions of the labour-intensive industry were rarely favourable to the workers themselves.

Mill workers would trudge to and from their chawls on cue from a siren blast which announced the beginning and end of every work shift. It was mostly dawn to dusk affair, with a 15 minute to half an hour lunch break. But the introduction of electric lighting at mill complexes around the 1890s, tempted mill owners to push their workforce further, stretching their work hours, causing friction between the workers and their employers.

“Typically, a mill worker had to get up very early in the morning at about 4-4:30 (am). After making his ablutions, he cooked his meal if he was alone. If he had a family or was staying with a khanawal (budget eatery), he took a quick meal and started for the mill. He could not afford to be late because fines would be imposed otherwise. If he arrived at the factory a bit too soon, he lay down on the pavement beside it and took a short rest till the gate opened. Then he had to insert his chappa or ticket of presence into its proper slit in the box kept for the purpose,” according to Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay in the Economic and Political Weekly.

Once he punched into the mill, what awaited him was a large, hot cavern, with sharp sounds ricocheting in precision as large metal shafts, wheels and spindles moved in rhythm. The challenge before the mill worker was to adapt to this rhythm. It was this increasing monotony which defined the pace of the city. The workers had to blend in.

Around the same time that the first electric local train quietly made its journey from Churchgate railway station to Borivali (the city had already started growing vertically), the first major strike was announced by Bombay’s mill workers in 1928-29. 

The striking workers demanded increased wages and better working conditions among other demands. The Bombay Mill Owners Association and the Joint Strike Committee, formed by a cross section of workers’ bodies, had a stand-off which lasted for nearly five months over 17 demands put forth by the latter.

The strike, according to anthropologist Georges Kristoffel Lieten, also marked the growing influence of Communist-aligned unions among Bombay’s mill workers.

“During the drawn-out textile strike in Bombay, in which Communists for the first time played an active role in an industrial conflict, the multiclass front was broken as a consequence of the workers’ independent action against the entrepreneurs as a class. Even before, the no less dramatic strike in 1929, the Communist leaders had consolidated their positions and fought at the helm of a one lakh-strong organisation,” Lieten says in his paper ‘Strikes and strike-breakers: Bombay Textile Mills Strike – 1929’.

Left wing Communist unions, though splintered and later influenced by South Indian union leaders, continued to control the textile trade union and had a head-on with a young, nativist Shiv Sena after the 1960s. 

While the strike ended virtually in a stalemate, it did give a sense of confidence to the workers, that collectively they could negotiate with their employers.

The period from 1928 to 1938 witnessed 460 strikes which besieged the city’s mills. Very few of the strikes were successful.

In the decades which followed 1938, Bombay weathered hardships of the Second World War, the throes of joy of liberation in 1947, rise in the popularity of cricket in the city’s youth. The textile industry appeared to stabilise, even as the city continued to grow beyond its mill compounds. The Western, Central and Harbour Railway lines snaked like long, nimble fingers, stretching the city limits deep into the suburbs.

By 1970-80s, there was a growing unease in the textile industry, as well as its workforce. Mills owned by large industrial houses had widened their footprint on the city by adapting to new technology and sharp business practices, while smaller mills were finding it difficult to keep pace.

Handlooms were slowly being phased out by power-looms, which no longer required a large manual workforce to operate. The division in ranks was not just between the mill owners. Workers’ unions aligned to the Left, Congress and the Shiv Sena had added to the chaotic mix.

The roots of the 1982 mill workers strike, which hastened to change Bombay forever lay in a failed negotiation between the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS) and promoters of the Standard Mills over a bonus pay-out.

“The linchpin of this strike was the issue over payment of bonuses. RMMS had promised the workers in Standard Mills, a bonus of 20 per cent while at the end of negotiations it conceded to 13.7 per cent. This proved to be the last straw (for those) who were already disgruntled with RMMS (which) was perceived to be a Congress outpost. It was the CPI-affiliated Mumbai Girni Kamgar Union which quickly issued the threat of an indefinite-general strike,” according to Yashashree Mahajan in her paper ‘The Bombay Mill Strikes: The Politics of Change’.

One could smell the era of unionism in Narayan Surve’s poetry. Surve was reportedly abandoned by his parents on the streets of Bombay, went on to become a Left ideologue.

His poem, ‘Char Shabd’ (A Beginning) translated by a Mumbai-based collective, has the makings of a struggle coming. A struggle where a swashbuckling worker would emerge as the hero.

(First and the last stanzas of the poem)

The struggle for the daily bread is an everyday question
At times outside the gate, at times inside
I’m a worker, a flaming sword
Listen, you intellectuals! I’m going to commit a crime.

I haven’t arrived alone; the epoch’s with me
Beware; this is the beginning of the storm
I’m a worker, a shining sword
Listen, you intellectuals! A crime’s about to happen.

Datta Samant or Doctorsaheb appeared to have just rolled out of Surve’s poems and landed bang in the middle of Bombay’s union war with just such a sword in hand. Samant was the classic illustration of the phrase ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’. 

Samant migrated from Ratnagiri to Bombay to study medicine. He did become a doctor and practised in Ghatkopar. Most of his patients were mill workers, through whom he understood the pulse of the city.

By the time disillusioned workers from the Standard Mills approached him to intervene and guide their agitation, Samant had already established a reputation as a worker’s ally. 

Bespectacled and bold, Samant was affiliated to the Congress-based Indian National Trade Union Congress. His initiation into unionism began with quarry workers, who were plagued by breathing disorders. After negotiating on their behalf with their employers for better working conditions, the doctor also led negotiations on behalf of pharmaceutical, electronics and engineering sector workers. Gradually Samant’s numerous interventions in labour disputes, ensured better returns for workers’ groups. And his legend grew. 

Pravin Ghag worked at the Swan Mills in Sewri from 1977 to 2000 and was closely associated with Samant.

“Datta Samant had to be repeatedly pursued by the mill workers to take charge of the strike over the wage issue. He had an office in Pant Nagar. Mill worker union representatives went twice to meet him. He told them that the issue was political and the government would not leverage on the mill owners to increase wages, just because of one agitation. He said you need guts to fight this big fight,” Ghag recalls.

After Samant threw his hat in the ring, the strike started on January 18, 1982, supported by nearly 2.5 million mill workers. The demands were wage increase, permanent employment status for (badli) casual workers, better leave structure, among others.

“Although it is not too difficult to find examples of strikes lasting longer than the officially acknowledged eighteen-and-a-half months that the textile strike lasted, or involving more people than the roughly 2.5 lakh textile workers, it will be very difficult to find examples matching both these figures simultaneously. There may not even be another parallel in world history,” writes social anthropologist Hub van Wersch in his book ‘The 1982-83 Bombay Textile Strike and the Unmaking of a Labourers’ City’.

More than 2 lakh workers had taken to the streets with their demands. With agitating workers on its streets, the city fell as silent as its mills. 

The stand-off between the union leader and workers on the one hand and the city establishment and mill owners on the other led Sharad Pawar, then in the Congress party to tell The New York Times in 1982: “If Datta Samant wins, then it will be the Waterloo for the industrialists of Bombay, and if the mill owners win, then it will be the Waterloo for Dr. Samant.”

Ghag has a theory for the seemingly never-ending stand-off, which eventually dealt a crippling blow to the mill workers, mill owners, the city which nurtured both and Samant himself.

“The government was not keen on it. There was a reason. If Datta Samant had succeeded in the battle for the rights of mill workers, he would have been in a position to take on the sugar lobby next,” says Ghag. 

The sugar industry to Western Maharashtra in the mid to late 20th century is what the textile industry was in the late 19th and early 20th century. A powerful entity, which brooked no stopping.

Neither side blinked as the strike dragged on for six months.

But for the workers, going on strike also meant being left without financial means to run their homes. Armies do not march on empty stomachs, neither could the hundreds of thousands of striking workers.

“The strike lasted for around six months. After six months, the question of livelihood arose. We had no money. How much could Datta Samant do? There was a time during the strike that Datta Samant wanted to accept the Rs. 75 increase in wages as against the demand for a minimum Rs. 250 raise,” Ghag claims, adding that some unions dissuaded him from doing so.

The strike failed. So did the hopes of around 75,000 who lost their jobs. Many mills shut down during the period.

The ghost of the failure of one of the largest strikes in the country, continues to hang over the city. 

Ghag and thousands of mill workers, who fought for better pay and work conditions are now involved in another struggle. The right to housing in a city where there’s little space.

After the closure of mills, the land on which the giant factories stood on, estimated to be worth Rs. 10,000 crore in the early 2000s, became the battleground for the city’s commerce. Parcels were gradually sold for commercial exploitation to mostly real estate developers as part of the state government’s redevelopment policy. 

After the last mills shut down in the city in 2000, the now disbanded workforce was assured by the government of providing them with affordable homes on same tracts of land. A third of the total area of the now deserted mill land was meant to be reserved for housing former workers and their families. But deft ‘adjustments’ made to the Government Resolution in 2003, altered the one third of the total area clause to one third of the open area, thus drastically limiting the number of houses which could be constructed for ex workers.

Around 1.75 lakh former mill workers had applied for the housing scheme out of which only 18,000 homes have been allotted so far, including a Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority residential facility in Panvel, a faraway suburb.

In a city where escalating real estate prices, have made budget-housing nearly extinct, the fate of 1.5 lakh families of former mill workers, several of whom have already have lost or are in the process of losing their homes to redevelopment, is bleak. As bleak as the long wait for the bureaucratic red tape to unravel and repeated assurances given by the government to come through.

In Mumbai’s transformation from the industrial era, where mills championed the city’s rise to greatness, to today, when consumerism has fuelled the transformation of mill compounds into shining oases of entertainment, leisure and commercial rentals, mill workers appear lost in the blur. 

According to Ghag, several chief ministers have given them assurances, but regime changes tend to bring their negotiations back to square one.

“In May, Awhad (Maharashtra cabinet minister for Housing Jitendra Awhad) had conducted a meeting. Uddhav and Sharad Pawar were of the opinion that mill workers should get their homes. Their intention was to give us houses constructed under the Prime Minister Awas Yojana in Vasai, Shelu (near Karjat), Shirdon, where around 60,000 houses could be made available in two years,” Ghag said.

“If this had fallen in place, nearly one lakh homes could have been built. But now that the government has changed, there is an air of uncertainty about these proposals. I feel the whole process may need to be started again now,” he adds.

As former mill workers keep their fingers crossed hoping for a permanent roof over their heads, a blingy network of malls, clubs, restaurants, swanky offices now dot the same mill compounds where once a siren defined the course of a mill workers’ day.

And what finally happened to Datta Samant?

Samant went on to win the 1984 elections from the Bombay South Central as an Independent candidate. But according to one of his last interviews, he told Rediff.com that sometimes he felt that his life was a failure.

He told Rediff.com, “You see…the problem with workers in our country is that they are selfish. They are only concerned with their family. They are not interested in spreading the movement. I tell all my workers to spread the movement. But they are only interested in making more money, drinking all night, and enjoying themselves. So how then do you expect change in this country? India has no future. Sometimes I feel that my life is a failure.”

Thirteen years later, he was shot dead by gunmen. The police pointed fingers at underworld don Chhota Rajan.