The Silent Rebellion: Labour, Caste, and Education in Colonial India

The Silent Rebellion tells a history of labour subjectivity formation at the site of education and the defiance of labouring subalterns who refused to see themselves solely as labouring bodies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the one hand, the book examines how elite power—encompassing colonial officials, employers, and caste elites—attempted to integrate caste labour into their modern projects of industrial and technical education, thereby reproducing labouring conditions and subjectivities. It focuses on the hitherto neglected social histories of industrial, technical, factory, and night schools. On the other hand, the book reveals how labouring subalterns—artisans, factory labourers, and other service-providing workers—used education to challenge their portrayal as mere labouring bodies. Focusing on their desire for literary education, book learning, and their dream to become teachers, clerks, and poets—what the book articulates as the nonwork self of working lives—the book develops new analytical frameworks to write nonworking histories of working lives.