Visualising Fieldwork

In the early twentieth century, industrial conditions in colonial India were deplorable. Factories, mills, mines, and plantations had mushroomed largely unchecked, aided by a range of policies that were designed for the benefit of British capitalists seeking profits in the subcontinent. Regulation had been so piecemeal, and so slow in implementation, that workers were bearing the brunt of 60-hour work weeks, abysmally low wages, having to labour in perilous heat and dust in sweatshop-like conditions, and faced harsh disciplinary regimes at the hands of their employers.

Unable to withstand poverty and precarity, workers were voting with their feet—in 1928, Bombay cotton mill workers staged the longest factory strike yet in the history of colonial India lasting 172 days; the East India Railway workshops in Bengal had a strike and lock-out lasting 134 days; and the Indian-owned Tata steel enterprises were out of action for a similar duration. Between 1927 and September 1928, 30 million working days were lost to strikes, and workers lost some £4 million in wages—a shocking figure given that wages were so low to begin with.[1]

The situation was so grave that it prompted the appointment of the Commission to investigate the conditions of labour in industrial undertakings and plantations in India, Burma, and Ceylon. British imperial rule in India had long rested on ‘fact-finding’ surveys that relied on the collection and aggregation of information. Over the nineteenth century, India had been more thoroughly investigated, mapped, drawn, and measured than most of Europe. Such surveying was not for matters of domestic colonial governance alone; they also provided the data for scientific developments in the metropole.[2] The experience of conducting the decennial Census in India was used as a model for census-making in other British colonies, including the 1931 Census of Palestine.[3]

The Royal Commission on Labour undertook an incredibly serious exercise in data collection—not only was its scale and ambition unusual, it also gathered and analysed very diverse types of information on how millions of the subcontinent’s people worked and lived.

Of the Commission’s twelve members, as many as seven were Indian. Between 1929 and 1930, the members of the Commission travelled 16,000 miles, visited 180 industrial establishments across the length and breadth of the subcontinent, examined 490 memoranda and spoke to 837 witnesses. The result was a main report and 18 volumes of evidence that brought together masses of information including statistical returns, detailed qualitative summaries at national, provincial, and firm levels, excerpts from written submissions including those sent in by business owners and trade unionists, and transcripts of oral interviews with workers, supervisors, medical personnel, labour organisers and others. The Commission proposed 357 recommendations.[4]

Method Matters

The photograph depicts members of the Commission talking to women working in the tea plantations of Assam, one of the largest employers in the subcontinent. No one’s faces are clearly visible: the women’s backs are turned to the camera—there are presumably four of them—and there are six Commission members visible in side profile, most with hands in their pockets. There are two women in the frame, one of whom must be Power. One of the men is at the ready, equipped with the classic apparatus of the interviewer: a notepad and pen. workers are in sarees, and stand with their heads uncovered, while most of the interviewers are wearing sola topis (safari helmets) and are dressed in three-piece suits. One stands with a pipe in his mouth. Their legs disappear into the dense foliage of the tea bushes.

In the archives of the colonial state, working women rarely appear as identifiable individuals. The Royal Commission's reports are unusual in preserving fragments of their conversations, albeit in translation.

The image presents itself as visual evidence of that key task of a social scientist: fieldwork. In fact, it captures two kinds of fieldwork in the same frame: the surveyors' fieldwork and the work in the fields undertaken by the tea plantation labourers they had come to study. The photograph raises important questions about the very nature, process, and method of social scientific enquiry, and directly calls attention to the fundamental inequality between the surveyor and the surveyed. The workers are outnumbered by the interviewers, who crowd around them. What did it mean for them to be surveyed? How did they experience being the objects of this data collection exercise? Who are these women, and how were they selected? When every aggregated summary is the sum of several individual experiences, what gets smoothed over or who is dismissed as an outlier? 

Yet the photograph also underscores the importance of fieldwork: visiting people in situ and not simply relying on statistical returns and written submissions that would have been replete with employer bias. Commission members of upper-class white British and elite Indian extraction travelled to plantations, mines, mills, and factories. They were exposed to the discomfort of extreme heat, humidity, and dust. They witnessed firsthand the physical demands of industrial labour and their effects on the workers they spoke with. 

Between text and table, official reports hardly allow insight into the process by which words and bodies and conversations are turned into information, which is in turn analysed and aggregated into data. But, method matters. The photographer, knowingly or unknowingly, captured both promise and friction.

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Urvi Khaitan is a historian of gender, economic life, and the British Empire, with a particular focus on South Asia. She is currently a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University. 

References

[1] ‘Indian Labour Problems: The Coming Royal Commission’, News Cutting, Royal Commission on Labour in India scrapbooks: Volume 1, 1929 - 1930, GBR/0271/GCPP Power, B 2/2/1, Girton College Archive.

[2] For example, the Great Trigonometrical Survey led to the extensive territorial mapping and surveillance of the subcontinent and contributed tremendously to geodesy, the science of measuring and representing the geometry of the Earth. Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 83-4.

[3] Isaac Sasson and Ronen Shamir, ‘The 1931 Census of Palestine and the Statistical (Un)Making of an Arab Landless Class’, Middle Eastern Studies 56, no. 2 (2020), pp. 239–56.

[4] ‘The report of the Royal Commission on labour in India’, International Labour Review 25, no. 2 (1932), p. 236.