The Village in Urban Social Imaginaries: Anti-Khoti Agitations and the Working Class in Mumbai, 1919–39

The migration of small holder and tenant farmers to Mumbai in the late 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century has been a much debated and well documented feature of labor histories of the city. In the city, the migrants relied on their caste and kinship network to find housing and employment. They also participated in political movements that had differing notions of community that were imagined along the affinities of caste, class, and nation.  The politicization of migrant workers in the city was not merely confined to issues that shaped their urban life – wages, housing, employment. The village - to which migrants continued to have affective and economic ties – and the forms of labor control in the village continued to play an important role in the social imaginary of migrants. This paper studies the social imaginaries of village labor by migrant workers’ and their leaders in Mumbai. More particularly, it focuses on the anti-Khoti agitation (a particular form of land tenure in the Konkan region of Mahrashtra) during the inter-war years in which opposition to the upper-caste landlord and his domination of rural labor produced a political formation that included city based leaders like the communists Lalji Pendse and S.S. Mirajkar, leaders of the non-Brahmin movement like G.R. Kasle, and the dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar. The paper relies on labor reports, pamphlets, newspapers, and literature circulating in the working class public sphere to emphasize the important role of the village in the imagination of urban workers.