“Are we miners first?”: The politics of the caste-labour dialectic in Kolar Gold Fields

Keywords: South Asia, postcolonial, environment, caste, labour
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial, key political agreements were brokered in the Indian subcontinent to address questions of minority representation within emergent majoritarian states. Of these, the Poona Pact (1932) oversaw the reservation of electoral seats for subaltern castes, to compensate for their lack of territorial majority at the provincial level. In this paper, I aim to critically evaluate the expediency of reserved constituencies through a multilayered analysis of a case study, Kolar Gold Fields (KGF)—a defunct gold mining border town in the south Indian state of Karnataka. I argue that the changes to the political economy of caste labour that have occurred against the century-long agrarian to urban transformation of the hinterland has meant that today subalternity has been reterritorialized to coalesce around company towns and public sector units in industrial belts—particularly those related to mining. KGF is one such space. Drawing on oral histories and official archives, the paper illustrates that although the subaltern mining force at KGF has long been at the forefront of critical labour and anti-caste struggles, two decades of deindustrialization have fundamentally reshaped caste and labour solidarities in ways that potentially undermine these historic mechanisms ensuring subaltern representation.