The coolies labour under the burden of sacks of food grain on their backs – not a grain of which they have the right to. The foodgrain is meant for Seth Laxmidas (played by Chandra Mohan) who hoards foodgrains and sells them at a premium in the market. For Laxmidas, his mazdoors were nothing more than tools for him to top up his gold reserves. This is a synopsis of Mehboob Khan’s Roti (1942), one of the first significant Hindi films to highlight the woes of the labour force.
As a celebration of International Labour Day, we look at how Bollywood has highlighted the challenges faced by the labour force.
Maybe it was a lack of awareness but in those days, the labourers regarded their factory owner as their ‘mai-baap’ or ‘annadata’ and contrived to create an autocrat out of thin air. ‘Vested’ with this power, year after year, cotton mill owner Seth Sevakram (Motilal) in Paigham (1959) got receipts for Rs 450 as a production bonus signed off from each worker but paid them only Rs 150. Further, the case report of a labourer who suffered a serious accident from a fall while on duty was fabricated as an ‘attempted suicide’ so that the company would not have to pay the due medical and disability compensation of Rs 12,500 to him. It took an educated man like Rattan (Dilip Kumar) to drive awareness of their rights and responsibilities and to create a workers’ union. Curiously, even 20 years later, in Kala Patthar (1979) the owner of Dhanraj Coal Mines Dhanraj Puri (Prem Chopra) was seen doing the identical mischief of getting receipts signed for bonuses three times the actual amounts paid. Further, Puri had no hesitation in exposing the lives of 400 miners to death by tunnel flooding in his greed to dig out more coal. Here again, it was an educated engineer Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) who interceded with Puri for their bonuses and for the upliftment of medical facilities and the safety of workers. In Mazdoor (1983), the young new owner of the factory backdated the acquisition of a loss-making sugar mill and booked the losses of the sugar mill in the P&L of a profit-making company so that he can avoid paying bonuses to the workers. In the period film Sagina (1974), there was physical exploitation by the British masters of a loco workshop in which the manager, Smith, asked one of the elderly workers, Gurung, to fetch a woman at the bungalow. And when Gurung refused, Smith publicly beat him up severely. Later the sahib raped one of the local women too.
Managers with good intentions like Mr Kapoor (Prem Nath) in Baharon Ke Sapne (1967) have their constraints too. Labourer Bholanath had worked in his mill for the past 30 years but now he was old, weak, ill, and therefore unproductive. And Kapoor had to let Bholanath go after remitting the notice pay. “Bholanath, tum samajhte kyon nahi? Mai koi zyati dushmani ki wajah se tumhe nahi nikaal raha …. Yeh mill hai mill, koi dharamshala nahi….”, Kapoor said firmly, explaining that he was answerable to the owners.
For all the struggle that the workers go through, they do not always enjoy the support of the very family for whom they toil every day. Take the case of the young smarty pant Albert Pinto in Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (1980). He scoffed at the idea of striking work when his father, a worker at Bombay Textile Mill, mentioned it. In the levity of his fantasy world, Albert felt that strikes were done by crackpots or by goondas. But when the mill’s mazdoor union did strike work, and subsequently, when Albert’s father was manhandled by the management goons, Albert’s feet had a rough landing on hard realities. He, too, became as angry as the rest of the workers.
So, what is the poor labourer’s recourse? A strong union, of course, headed by a leader with integrity. And this was the other problem — a bigger one. Sometimes the Union leader himself happened to be a stooge of the management — the puppet Pradhan in Baharon Ke Sapne (1967) for instance, whose hollow tales of his fiery arguments with the management over labourers’ demands nobody believed. Conversely, management often tried to get rid of a strong leader by planting a parallel. As in the case of Somu (Rajesh Khanna) in Namak Haraam (1975) who was planted by the owner’s son Vicky as the union leader to dislodge the highly respected incumbent union leader Bipin Lal. The act went like clockwork till Somu started empathising with the penury of the workforce and started making a case with Vicky for Dearness Allowance (DA) to be paid to the workers to beat inflation and price rise.
Other options for the management to remove intractable union leaders included buying them out or killing them. Or, by promoting them to a much bigger role so that the labour force did not associate themselves with the person anymore, which was precisely the trick the management played on Sagina. In cahoots with another so-called leader Anirudh, they appointed Sagina, the Welfare Office of the workers. “Your Anirudh babu made you (the) Welfare Office because he said: Sagina ko accha makaan do, accha khana do, accha kapda do, bas, Sagina khatam”, Mr Cunningham, the general manager revealed.
Another factor that derails the healthy relationship between management and the union is certain vested interests that purport to act in the interest of the workers but are driving their own agenda. In Baharon Ke Sapne, it was the Das Kaka who wanted to torch the mill while in Sagina, it was the fascist Anirudh (Anil Chatterjee) who wanted to bomb the loco factory. These elements could be easily identified by their intent of arson and destruction because, for them, the factory was like a mere firecracker whose explosion could attract attention towards them. Whereas for a labourer, the factory and the machines are like his ‘mother that feeds him and his family’.
Unfortunately, the Workers’ Union itself being a proto-mafia outfit, was not far-fetched. Trade union leader Rustom Patel (Naseeruddin Shah) in Govind Nihalani’s Aghaat (1986) was modelled on Datta Samant, the militant trade union leader who, in 1982, convinced the workers of 50 textile mills in Bombay to go on a mass strike. Arm twisting and coercion of workers to join Rustom’s union was a testimony to the mafia-like intent of the union. Another example is Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). Sometime in the mid-1950s, the Coal Welfare Association was created, and from this, the National Trade Union (NTU) was born. Taking advantage of this, the supervisors of the NTU gradually became the earliest avatar of the coal mafia. They became labour contractors who would enlist labourers into NTU and force them to pay subscription fees. The mafia lent money to the labourers and would withhold their wages against the exorbitant interest that the labourers owed the mafia.
With the emergence of IT, foreign banks and the retail sector, we see fewer films nowadays about the factory labour force and their woes. But remember, almost everything we see around us carries the fingerprint of some labourer, albeit uncredited. Let us salute them.
The author is an award-winning author, Bollywood commentator, columnist and speaker. Find him at www.balajivittal.com and on Twitter @vittalbalaji. Views expressed are personal.
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