The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai by Maura Finkelstein (review)

Bombay’s first textile mills opened in 1854. A decade prior, arguably one of the first texts of urban anthropology was published: The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels 2009). In it, Engels luridly catalogues the effects that industrial capitalism is having on cities, towns, and the countryside in England. During this time, Manchester became an urban center for a globalizing economy that had cotton and textile manufacturing at its core. Not only were displaced peasants and weavers from the countryside corralled into insalubrious housing quarters and compelled to work on mechanized looms, the Manchester exchange became a hub for the global cotton trade while these industrial endeavors were financed through capital flowing in from across England and Europe. Engels described Manchester’s streets and homes where this industrial labor-force resided as settlements haphazardly built with poor and damp ventilation, piles of offal and rubbish, and stagnant pools of water. In an industrial city like Manchester, working-class communities, Engels reminds us, were unrecognizable and invisible within the urban landscape. Now, more than a century and a half later, we might wish to ask, what is happening to industrial workers in contemporary cities purportedly undergoing deindustrialization? In The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, Maura Finkelstein takes up this difficult but necessary question.

Globalization reached its ideological apex at the turn of the millennium, when the flowing fabric of labor, finance, technology, knowledge, and capital was supposed to weave together a liberal and democratic world order. Commentators at the time notified us that we now inhabit a post-industrial world, where affective, immaterial forms of work and labor were becoming increasingly dominant in a rapidly globalizing world (Hardt and Negro 1999). In Europe and North America, industrial forms of work and labor that once sustained aspirations for the good life had been incrementally eviscerated by changes in the welfare state, which was analyzed under the rubric of “post-Fordist” affect (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012, Berlant 2007). Yet in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that transition to a post-industrial present has been much more differentiated and heterogenous. Arjun Appadurai, writing about what he called millennial Mumbai, described the city’s spatiotemporal landscape at the time as being “disjunctive, yet adjacent,” where all kinds of activities, from Fordist manufacturing and informal and artisanal work to the service sectors and technology industry “live in an uneasy mix” (2000:627). A few decades later, the transition to a post-industrial present, whether in Mumbai or elsewhere, has yet to be realized. We continue to live in a world in transition, where an industrial past sits uncomfortably within the post-industrial present. How does one write an ethnography of such a world without falling into the trope of post-industrial inevitability?

Through an eloquent ethnography of Dhanraj Spinning and Weaving, Ltd. and the laborers who remain there, toiling intermittently away, Finkelstein’s captivating account incisively explores industrial forms of labor in the post-industrial world of contemporary Mumbai. Dhanraj is one of the many textile mills that once populated and gave life to central Mumbai. Though owned by prominent Indian merchants, textile production in colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) was embedded within the global economy that had Great Britain as its imperial locus (see Goswami 2004). In conjunction with many other centers across the world (e.g., Manchester), the textile industry propelled Mumbai forward into regional and global economies, where rail and shipping infrastructures converged to transform the city into a commercial, industrial, and financial hub. In the decades immediately following India’s independence, the textile industry would only expand, with Mumbai containing 58 textile mills and 600,000 workers in the early 1960s (9). Mill work was then seen as dignified work that offered textile workers the stability of employment and conferred on them social status and a sense of self. The textile worker, like the industrial worker generally, was valorized as the laboring symbols of progress...