A Little Embarrassment of Sociological Riches:Studies Into the Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour

This volume is a reprint of the special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (1999). It brings together papers presented by anthropologists, sociologists and historians at a conference on 'Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour' held in Amsterdam in 1997.I n a continental and ethnically so diverse a country as India, labour can hardly be fitted into one homogeneous sociological world. Much more so when we add to this heterogeneity at which owes to differences in technology and modes of production. The world of men employed in a multi-national corporation differs substantially from that of women in bidi rolling or of men and women engaged in other kinds of household industry. Hence, the volume rightly presents, not the world but different worlds of Indian industrial labour sadly neglected as subjects worthy of attention by the disciplines represented at the conference.