Crossing the tracks: Railway workers and the terrain of popular politics in late colonial Lahore (1919 - 1947)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ravi Ahuja
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 180348380

This project continues to explore the sphere of popular politics of late colonial Lahore (ca. 1919-1947). So far, the immediate post-war confluence of diverse forms of popular politics, in the form of the Khilafat movement, Non-Cooperation movement and the railway strike of 1920, has been prised apart for a nuanced appreciation of what were complex, overlapping as well as contradictory movements involving elite as well as plebeian actors. Furthermore, another culmination point of popular political mobilization, the early and mid-1940s, that displayed the seemingly contradictory picture of a rise of labour militancy in an environment of an increasing "communalization" of elite as well as plebeian politics has also been researched in the first project phase. The extension, if granted, will be used to finalize the planned monograph after filling three remaining lacunae in terms of research: (a) While political movements in Moghalpura's railway workshops and railway workers' settlements have been focused upon so far, the interrelatedness of these newly created social spaces with the "old city" needs to be analyzed systematically in order to situate the workshops in the urban history of Lahore. (b) The dense picture of popular political currents animating the space of the city, as it emerges through this research, needs to be supplemented by further analysis of the workplace and particularly of the complex impact of racialized hierarchies in the workshops on the articulation of plebeian politics in Moghalpura. (c) The two most ostensibly dynamic conjunctures in terms of popular mobilizations, namely the early 1920s and the period from 1940-1947, are being thoroughly explored in the present first phase of the project. The subterranean developments of relatively quiescent 1930s however require a closer investigation in order to understand the fundamental shifts in the political culture of the railway workers' labour movement that unfolded between these two conjunctures.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants