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chapter 4 Anasuyaben Sarabhai Engages Ahmedabad’s Working Classes Sometimes there are those we regard as opponents . Sometimes they may turn out to be friends. —GANDHI to ANASUYABEN A t the time of Gandhi’s arrival, half of Ahmedabad’s population were of the industrial working classes. Anasuyaben Sarabhai saw their poverty, oppression, and need for help. Her vision began with compassion and manifested itself in social work. Her dedication attracted Gandhi and engaged his own orientation toward the poor and the underdog. Together, the efforts of Anasuyaben and Gandhi inspired the establishment of the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (TLA), and reassured employers and the Ahmedabad Millowners Association (AMA) that they could trust the new union. As it grew, the TLA attracted members not only through its ability to win higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, but also through its schools; child care facilities; housing programs; cooperative societies; anti-untouchability campaigns ; lobbying in the municipality for basic facilities of light, water, toilets, sewerage, and streets in the workers’ neighborhoods; and participation in the nationalist organization for independence.1 In the 1918 strike, the presence of Anasuyaben at the head of the workers and of her brother, Ambalal Sarabhai, at the head of the owners seemed to incarnate Anasuyaben’s and Gandhi’s vision of a family relationship between labor and ownership. But the relationship between sister and brother is not what either actually had in mind. Gandhi spoke, rather, of the paternal relationship between father and child. Even following a long, bitter, unrewarding strike in 1923, Gandhi addressed this advice to the workers: “Owners and workers ought to be in a relationship of father to son. We ought to understand that to the extent that we have not reached that stage, several kinds of difficulties will come directly or indirectly. Despite the difficulties we should not become bitter. We have been wise, courteous, tested, and loyal. If you remain loyal and firm, the employers will not desert you.”2 Anasuyaben Sarabhai Engages Ahmedabad’s Working Classes 95 Anasuyaben’s social work activities stemmed from a similar point of view. The leaders of the AMA also accepted that view sometimes, but often they seemed to envision instead a patron–client relationship, the relationship between the head of household and the family servants. Gandhi, too, suggested that even this relationship might be appropriate if it were accepted by both sides: There was a time in India when servants used to serve in the same household from father to son for generations. They were respected and treated as members of the family where they served. They shared the misery of the employer and the employer was with them in their joy and sorrow. When this was the state of affairs the social order in India was simple, and it lasted for thousands of years on that basis. . . . Servants did not ask for higher wages when there was a dearth of servants, and masters did not reduce wages when supply was plentiful . This was mainly due to mutual regard, discipline, courtesy and affection.3 These parent–child, patron–client views of management–labor relations ultimately determined the strategies of the TLA. On the one hand, the union challenged owners to manage their businesses with a sense of responsibility, of “trusteeship,” and to regard their employees with respect as “copartners”: “What I expect of you, therefore, is that you should hold all your riches as a trust to be used solely in the interests of those who sweat for you, and to whose industry and labour you owe all your positions and prosperity. I want you to make your labourers co-partners of your wealth.”4 On the other, it produced a union that was described by the Royal Commission on Indian Labour in 1931 as “managed more for the workers than by the workers.”5 Anasuyaben and Gandhi’s vision of labor–management relationships did not go unchallenged, even in Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s stronghold. The communist leader Dinkar Mehta expressed a counter viewpoint and tried to build an alternative union. In Mehta’s Lal Vavta (Red Flag) Union, “we had become not the uplifter of the workers, but their companions, friends, and comrades.”6 These alternative visions of labor–management relations competed with one another during the thirty years covered in this chapter, 1918–48, with the TLA’s philosophy consistently dominant. In 1938, its vision was incorporated into law in the form of the Bombay Industrial Relations Act, which encouraged arbitration...

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