Lords of labour: Worsting and shirking in Bhilai

At the ethnographic level this paper discusses work and work-groups in the company town of Bhilai (Madhya Pradesh). Though its central focus is on tho se who have permanent jobs with the Bhilai Steel Plant, a large-scale publi c sector enterprise, brief comparison is made with current attitudes to pea sant agriculture, with contract labour in the plant and with workers in the private sector: At an analytical level, it offers a critique of E.P. Thomp son's thesis that modern machine production requires and promotes a new con cept of time a,ld a new kind of work discipline, arguing that this thesis n or only romanticises task-oriented peasant agriculture but also effaces the extremely variable nature of industrial production. it further suggests th at-at least here-public sector employment serves in significant measure as a 'melting-pot' which creates important solidarities between work-mates tha t transcend the barriers of caste, religion and regional ethnicity, whereas recruitment procedures and the composition of work-groups in the private s ector have tended to reproduce such 'primordial' loyalties. The tentative h ypothesis is that the dominance of the public sector is riot unrelated to B hilai's history of relative communal harmony, which is potentially threaten ed by current economic and policy trends.