Negotiating the Mines: The Culture of Safety in the Indian Coalmines, 1895–1970

Abstract

This article explains the way mineworkers negotiated workplace hazards and articulated their ideas of safety. Mineworkers increasingly attained mining sense and made use of it, thereby surviving terrible working conditions and seeking to mend the accident-control mechanism. The formation and function of their mining sense were part of the industrialization process. It involved mineworkers’ particular ways of adaptation—quixotic and prudent—to the demand made by work relations. The miners’ unions strove to push the safety regime beyond voluntary codes of discipline and practical and technological solutions. They invested in legislative disciplining and sought informed safety-supervisory controls. They got involved in ‘civic engagement’ with agreeable investigators and legislators within the colonial context and afterwards. Confronted with the limits of such measures, the rank-and-file moved on, from the latter half of the 1950s to direct action in the very mining faces, thereby insisting on the right to withdrawal from danger. The historiographies which argued that Indian workers knowingly acquiesced to perilous mining to maintain livelihoods inadequately lend us the safety ideas shared and action at protection prevention undertaken by mineworkers. This article shows that Indian mineworkers reinforced the safety campaign through their strategic manoeuvring in legislative and workplace struggles as did their counterparts in Britain and some other societies.