Sharad Chari. Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, andGlobalization in Provincial India. Stanford: Stanford University Press,2004. xxv + 379 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8047-4873-X.
Reviewed by Manu Goswami, Department of History, New York University
Published by H-Asia (September 2006)
Transforming Toil into Capital in Tiruppur
It is hard to envision contemporary "globalization" studies without the academic labor of economic geographers. Geographers and geographically inclined social scientists have been at the core of a variety of debates about the reciprocal making of social relations and spatial structures, the entwined spatial and temporal dynamics of uneven development, the gendered geographies of labor and power, the historical production of geographical scales, and the like. The explicit political impetus and empirical referent of many of these debates was an effort to grasp the dynamics and trajectory of contemporary neo-liberal capitalist restructuring. But the course of the so-called spatial turn across disciplinary arenas has not always run smoothly. All too often, the generalization of spatial metaphors and frameworks has proceeded without adequate attention to historical dynamics or temporal differentiation, thereby either fuelling untenable claims of the radical novelty of globalization or eliding questions of political subjectivity and collective agency. The attribution of an exaggerated causal privilege to global processes over local and regional actors and arenas has often glossed over the particularity and complexity of local-global dynamics. In the weakest articulations of the spatial turn, certain strands of "globalization studies" have appeared less as a determined repudiation of modernization theory and more as its continuation.
Fraternal Capital is unburdened by such common lapses. It skillfully braids together critical geography and economic anthropology to provide an unexpected, engrossing, and close-to-the-ground account of the ascent of Gounders, a specific caste and class group of peasant-workers in Tamil Nadu, into the dominant fraction of capital in the globally competitive knitwear industry of Tiruppur, India. Chari explains the apparent anomaly of peasant-workers becoming owners, of their acquisition of enormous economic and symbolic capital, by taking seriously a category central to their self-understanding. Gounder economic ascendancy hinged, as they insist, and as Chari elaborates, on their collective and long-run practice of "toil."
Entering Tirupur's industrial sector in the 1940s and 1950s, Gounder workers adroitly transposed their skills at managing the labor of agricultural castes, including Dalits, onto a new terrain. More crucially, even after they became owners of production units they continued to engage in manual labor in contrast to other upwardly mobile castes in the knitwear sector. This was nowhere more visible than at the ubiquitous stitching tables. Here Gounder owners labored alongside their workers in a textbook instance of direct labor control but one that also worked as a demonstration of the virtue and reward of "toil." Stitching was central to both the transformation of social labor into value and the reproduction of Gounder self-understanding as men constituted by their "toil." Though stitching retains its primacy in the production process, among the overt shifts associated with the post-1980s turn toward global production have been the feminization of the workforce, the weakening of labor unions and wages, the fragmentation of the production process in the familiar form of promiscuous sub-contracting, and the conspicuous absence of Gounder owners on the shop-floor. Subjected to a volatile, globally mediated, temporal rhythm of production, the organizational and ideological coordinates of the export-oriented knitwear sector of Tiruppur now bear scant resemblance to the thickly knotted fabric of fraternity and capitalism that secured its initial emergence. And the language of "toil" has thus acquired an increasingly ersatz quality.
The six substantive chapters encompass an extended temporal and analytical span. Following a lucid introduction and a fine exposition of the contemporary industrial and social geography of Tiruppur, chapter 2 dispels many of the myths associated with the much-heralded economic model of "Third Italy" by locating the expansion of small-firm networks in Tiruppur in terms of the ever more precarious and uncertain labor market conditions bred by heightened global competition. Chapter 3 examines the social morphology of different fractions of capital in the knitwear industry, demonstrating the dominance of Gounders in the industry as a whole. Chapter 4 turns away from the industrial present toward colonial era representations of Gounders as entrepreneurial castes and emphasizes the dual impress of a flexible agrarian production process and geographical specialization in shaping Tiruppur's growth in the early twentieth century. Chapter 5 explicates the early- and mid-twentieth-century entry of Gounder men in industrial labor and shows how they selectively reworked their agrarian lived experience in a new arena transforming, along the way, their "toil" into capital. Chapter 6 explores the reconfiguration of production and labor processes in the contemporary era, paying particular attention to the entwined logics of the feminization of the labor force and the deepening of class divides.
At first glance the book's deployment of "toil," a local category of practice, as an analytical category--indeed, as the central explanatory frame--might appear epistemologically naïve. And, to be sure, the book is celebratory of what it regards as a subaltern success story. Yet this initial concern is overcome by the multiple conceptual and empirical strengths of the work as a whole. _Fraternal Capital_ provides, for instance, a fine-tuned elaboration of the industrial and social geography of the knitwear industry written with a scrupulous attention to the presence of agrarian pasts in shaping an industrial present as well as an animated rendering of the labyrinthine production process that characterizes cities-as-factories such as Tiruppur, and a nuanced account of the forms and consequences of contemporary gendered accumulation. These strengths, a product of considerable "toil," underscore the importance of this work for scholars interested in political economy, industrial geography, labor and gender relations, and caste-class dynamics within and beyond the South Asian context.
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