Dangerous Labour: Crime, Work and Punishment

in Kolar Gold Fields, 1890-1946

Janaki Nair

Madras Institute of Development Studies

The methods devised for administering ’the accumulation of men’, Michel

Foucault reminds us, are as critical as the techniques that made possible
’the accumulation of capital’.’ Indeed the two processes are inseparable,
since industrial societies increase the utility of the body only by diminishing
its political force and producing obedience in its stead.2 Yet despite Foucault’s
assurance that the ’political anatomy’ of disciplinary power may successfully

operate in the ’most diverse political regime, apparatuses or institutions’,3

in colonial societies, the restructured modalities of power that accom-
panied capitalist modes of production remained confined to enclaves, and
since such societies were predicated on the ’rule of colonial difference’,&dquo;4
the deployment of costlier, more violent forms of power were not made
redundant. Conditions in factories, mines and planatations bore more than
a formal resemblance to the prison, with the organic composition of power
under colonialism tilting more towards unconcealed coercion than subtler
or less expensive forms of subjection. Besides, as~ Megan Vaughan has

pointed out, the object of colonial surveillance was rarely the individual,
since colonial regimes usually tended to address collectivities unlike their
metropolitan counterparts.r5
Acknowledgements: Versions of this paper have been presented at the Institute of Social and
Economic Change, Bangalore, and at the seminar on South Asian Labour: Global and
Local Linkages, Amsterdam. I am grateful to the audiences at these places for their
comments, and for the comments and help of C.T. Kurien, Padmini Swaminathan, M.S.S.
Pandian, Madhava Prasad and A.R. Venkatachalapathy as well as those of the anonymous
reviewer of Studies in History.
1
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans., Alan Sheridan,
London, 1977, pp. 220-21.
Ibid., p.138.
2
p.221.
Ibid.,
3
4
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories,
Delhi, 1994, p. 18,
5
Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Cambridge, 1991,
pp. 8-12.
20

The colonial idiom of Order enabled the mobilization of labour for the
plantations, mines and factories of nineteenth century India but also bound
the labourer to his or her task, penetrating, organizing and supervising the
everyday life of the labouring poor by unhesitatingly deploying an elaborate
penal system and formidable police force, while legislatively enabling the
efficient extraction of surplus value.’ Also, despite its many anxious
moments, this process was attended by a remarkable degree of success. If,
as E.P. Thompson has pointed out, the development of eighteenth century
law acted as a check on royal absolutism, or on the ruling class itself,’ the
law in colonial India represented the terrain on to which despotism was
displaced, even restructured, but never abolished. On occasion, the law
could be invoked against the rulers. But these occasions were few and far
between. The Mysore Mining Rules, for example, which were instituted as
early as 1897 in the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) of Mysore state, unlike the
Black Act studied by Thompson, were not tinged by even the dimmest
promise of protecting the rights of free born citizens: the ideology of law
could not so easily be delinked from ’the pretensions of the imperialist
donor’.8 For in colonial India, as Ranajit Guha insists, ’the idiom of Order
was allowed to intrude again and again into many such areas of the life of
the people as would be firmly kept out of bounds in metropolitan Britain’.9
As a result, the reconstitution of the field of illegalities through the
instrumentalities of law was, in late nineteenth and early twentieth
century colonial capitalist imagination, expected to produce a repressed
and docile workforce, rather than disciplined subjects. Towards this end,
both the workplace and the neighbourhood in the KGF were bathed in the
light of an abstract legality that identified new sites of criminality even
while it hoped to thwart criminality as such. At the same time, the ’abstract
legality’ took care to exclude European employees and managers from any
such scrutiny, casting into the shadows not only the criminally negligent
arrangements of the capitalist work process but also the organized criminality
of those distinguished by race and rank from the mass of Indian labourers.
The degradations of the capitalist workplace, after all, as well as its
uncertainties, conveniently resulted in an extraordinary degree of mobility
between the labouring and the dangerous classes, between whom at any
rate there was no more than a ’wavering and variable frontier’.’° It was this

Ranajit Guha, ’Dominance without hegemony and its historiography’, in k. Guha, ed.,
6

Subaltern Studies VI, Delhi, 1987, p. 236.

7
E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, p. 262.
8
Ibid., p. 267.
9 Guha, ’Dominance without hegemony’, p. 237.
10Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half
of the Nineteenth Century, Princeton, 1981, p. 366. Conditions in KGF never matched
conditions on Southern African mines, where adult male workers were frequently incarcerated in
one or the other type of ’total institution’, whether mining compound or prison. See Charles

Van Onselen ’Crime and Total Institutions in the Making of Modern South Africa: The Life
of "Nongoloza" Mathebula, 1867-1948’, History Workshop Journal, 1978, pp. 62-81.
 21

frontier that was brought into full public view by the mining regulations of
the KGF.
Few industries called for measures to straddle that frontier between the
dangerous and the labouring classes as the gold industry.&dquo; Gold, whose
function as a universal equivalent had become inseparable from its money
form, possessed its own mesmerizing ’magic’ since ’gold or silver in its
crude state becomes immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the
earth the direct incarnation of all human labour’.11 The nature of the
commodity itself placed a heavy burden on its producer, who, inevitably
dazzled by the product, was ’naturally’ inclined towards criminality, calling
for ’special precautions’ as early as 1893.’3
Early links were made between production and criminality in the Kolar
Gold Fields, located in south-eastern Mysore and run by the British man-
aging agents, John Taylor and Sons. From uncertain beginnings in 1880,
the gold industry was assured of success in 1884 following the discovery of
the Champion Lode, and for seven decades thereafter enjoyed spectacular
fortunes, principally generated by five (and after 1931, four) working
mines. 14 At its height in 1907 the KGF employed more than 30,000 workers,
drawn predominantly from the neighbouring Madras Presidency. If super-
vision and control of this accumulation of men15 required unusual measures,
the very product of the mine ’required adequate protection, something
more than was contained in the ordinary law’-as ’an industry of a peculiar
and hazardous nature’ it invariably attracted ’adventurous and unscrupulous
characters’.’&dquo; The theft of gold in small quantities was doubly criminal on

"
The
Mysore Coffee Stealing Prevention Act no. VIII of 1878 was an illustrious predecessor.
It designed to prevent thefts of coffee, i.e., to repress and punish the offence of receiving
was

or disposing of stolen coffee near plantations, and included corporal punishment, whipping,

in certain cases. Mysore Law Code, Vol. I. But by the early 1900s, hardly any cases were
being reported under the special law, and only a few under the IPC (Proceedings of the
Government of Mysore, June 1915).
12
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, New York, 1977, p. 187.
13
File no. 12, SI. no. 1-8, Police, Karnataka State Archives (hereafter KSA).
14They were: Champion Reef, Oorgaum, Nandidroog, Mysore and Balaghat mines; the
last was declared unprofitable in 1931, and property transferred to the Nandidroog Mining
Company. Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines in Mysore (hereafter RCIMM), 1932-33,
p. 7
15
The gold mining industry did not employ women underground, and only a very small
proportion of the surface work was assigned to women. This contrasts with the accepted
practice of using family-based labour in Indian coal mines and in the salt industry. Lindsay
Barnes, Women Work and Struggle: Bowra Colliery 1900-1940, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis,
JNU, 1989; and Michelle Maskiell, ’Gender, kinship and rural work in colonial Punjab’
Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1990). At the same time, except for the men from
north India employed in the watch and ward establishment, and the men from Kerala who
were employed as carpenters, familial rather than single male migration was actively encour-

aged in KGF. M.A. Sreenivasan Labour in India: Socio-Economic Conditions of Workers in

the KGF, Bombay, 1980, p. 5.
16
John Taylor and Sons to the Dewan of Mysore, 7 March 1912, File no. 19-12, SI. no. 1
and 2, Legislative, KSA.
22

the KGF, C.J. Muller, Chief Judge of Mysore, declared in 1915 since ’the
offences are committed by regularly paid coolies or other workmen employed
by the owners of the property stolen’.&dquo;
The KGF, which was established entirely with British capital mobilized
by the managing agents John Taylor and Sons, contributed a small propor-
tion of its revenues as royalty to Mysore state.’8 For Mysore state, however,
crippled by the burden of a Rs 35 lakh subsidy, this was a crucial source of
revenue. There was thus not even the mildest resistance to the surrender of

effective juridical control over the 75 square mile area of the KGF. i~ Year
after year, the Chief Inspector of Mines, a GOM appointee, produced
surprisingly detailed reports on the fortunes of the operating mines, the
conditions of work, the number and nature of accidents and the success of
worker surveillance measures, all in a voice that was indistinguishable from
that of the mining authorities. No attempt was ever made in the fifty-year
period between 1898 and 1947 to interrogate even a fraction of the labour-
ing men and women of the KGF, or to establish the veracity of the many
self-congratulatory claims of the mining authorities. Instead, there was an
enthusiastic annual endorsement of conditions on the mines and surrounding
areas from the perspective of the mining authorities and based on information

supplied by them. So much so, the apparatuses of the state were indistinguish-
able from those of the company; the two collaborated so closely that the
company was the state in the KGF.10
As the employment of labour expanded in the KGF from 9,038 in 1891
to 24,587 at the turn of the century (1900) and soared to 34,641 in 1907,z’
the task of devising techniques that would make the labour force adequately
productive while simultaneously reducing its potential for disruption, was
undertaken with the same vigour as capital was raised in the London
markets. In the mineral rich regions of Southern Africa, where large
numbers of local men were employed in the extraction of the precious
metal, a combination of the compound system (where single male workers
who laboured in the mines were housed, clothed and fed) and the pass laws
17
Annamma alias Mari vs Government of Mysore (hereafter GOM), 20 Mysore Chief
Court Reports (hereafter CCR), 1915, p. 155.
18
The rate of royalty was 5 per cent of the total gold mined between 1894 and 1940 and
although this was a small proportion of the total profits, it was a significant proportion of the
revenues of the GOM. Statistical Abstract of Mysore, 1926, Statement XXIII, Statistical

Abstract of Mysore, 1923-48, p. 56.

19
Of this, the mining area consisted of 30 square miles. E.R. Sundarajan, Report on the
Present Status of Birth, Death and Epidemic Diseases in Mysore District, Bangalore City and
KGF with Suggestions for Improvement, Bangalore, 1929, p. 12.
20
I shall emphasize this link throughout my discussion by using the term ’company/state’
which may be faulted for its grammar, (since each of the mines was registered as a separate
company) but is analytically justified (since overall charge was with John Taylor and Sons).
21
Colin Simmons, ’The creation and organisation of a proletarian mining force in India:
The case of the Kolar Gold Fields, 1883-1955’, in Mark Holmstrom, ed., Wages for Work in
South Asia, New Delhi, 1990, p. 104.
 23

together constituted what Charles Van Onselen has called a system ’unique
to the annals of capitalist development’.~ In the KGF, the preferred mode
of recruitment was through contractors and familial migration was the
norm, relieving the companies, although by quite different means from
those found on the South African mines, of the burden of housing, feeding
and clothing the mining population.&dquo; This never prevented the mining
authorities from praising the compound system as far more manageable
and efficient: thus W.T. Hudson, reporting on his visit to South Africa in
1925 said: ’I feel strongly that if it were permissible and possible to adopt
the compound system on KGF it would greatly benefit Indian employees.’21
Similar views were expressed as late as 1948.25
What the mining authorities at the KGF nevertheless strove to achieve
through the Mysore Mining Regulations of 1897 and 1906 was the effect, if
not the material arrangement, of the compound system. A double taxonomy
of crimes and punishments, with all its fine gradations, was developed over
the years, a taxonomy that often identified as ’criminal’ practices that were
customary,26 matching them with punishments that were excessive2’, dis-
pensing with the necessity of having to ’punish exactly enough to prevent

22
Charles Van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1933
London, 1976, p. 156. More generally on the compound system see pp. 128-194.
23
This is distinctly different from the point made by Harold Wolpe who discusses the
complex articulations between modes of production in the South African case, where the
Reserves were maintained and promoted as a means of ensuring the reproduction of the
mining labour force at no cost to the companies. It was the growing crisis within these pre-
capitalist reserves, Wolpe argues, that led to the articulation of an ideology of apartheid,
which vastly increased the power of the state over the residence and movement of the labour
force in South Africa. Harold Wolpe ’Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa:
From segregation to apartheid’, in H. Wolpe, ed., Articulation of Modes of Production:
Essays from Economy and Society, London, 1980, pp. 289-319. In the KGF case, miners did
not necessarily derive support from families located on the land, yet although family migration
was the norm, the family was not, at least until the 1930s, the basis for calculating the wages of
miners. Indeed the whole mining camp, and especially the thatti houses to which I refer
below, was imagined as the place for housing single, temporary, male workers. Nevertheless,
some amount of company attention was focused on the health of the workers, although in

very specific ways that did not include nutritional needs.

24
J.T. Hudson, ’Some features of South African mining practice’, KGF Mining and Metal-
) Vol. II, No. 16 (1925), p. 105.
lurgical Quarterly Bulletin (hereafter KGF Bulletin
25
Jack Spalding and J.D. Dixon ’Visits to Witwatersrand and goldmines in Eastern Trans-
vaal, March 12-June 1, 1948’, section 24.1, mimeo, KGF Technical Library, KGF.
26
See for instance Arun Mukherjee, ’Crime and criminals in nineteenth century Bengal’,
Indian Economic and Social History Review (hereafter IESHR ), Vol. 21, No. 2, 1984,
pp. 153-83, esp p. 155; also Janaki Nair, ’Prohibited marriage: State protection and the child
wife in Mysore, 1894-1930’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 29, Nos. 1 and 2,
January-December 1995, pp. 157-86.
27
In the words of J.A. Pringle, ’ ...the Indian can be—and is—fined a rupee when an
anna would fit his earnings and his offence much better ....’ ’Efficiency and economy in the

underground department’, KGF Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 5, July-September 1921, p. 136.

24

repetition V This massive reorganization of illegalities was not accomplished

overnight or by mere administrative fiat, nor did it remain stable and
unchanging thereafter. Instead the techniques of subjection were created,
refined and enlarged according to the shifting needs of the industry itself
and, equally important, in response to the ceaseless challenges posed by
the unwieldy workforce, with social, political, even criminal networks that
stretched beyond the territory of the company/state. (Section I) Frustrating
even the most finely graded system of penalty was the insistence with which
KGF labourers subverted or violently protested the illegalities of the
company/state, calling for fresh punitive efforts on the parts of the man-
agement. (Section II) This dialectic is stressed not in order to insist that the
subordinate classes played an equal part in forging the apparatuses of
domination, or that they derived the same measure of benefits from it, but
in order to suggest that there was no final and definite format that the
disciplinary mechanisms could take in the course of five decades, no
moment when the company/state could rest from the exacting labours of
constant vigilance.
I

Preventing Petty Pilferage

The very architecture of the mines defied the application of those panoptical
surveillance measures that were appropriate to factories or prisons. From
initial depths of a few thousand feet below the surface, and a small network
of shafts that traversed the underground,&dquo; the mines, (Champion Reef)
reached a depth of 6,000 feet in 1919-20.3° By 1932-33, both Oorgaum and
Champion Reef were at least 7,200 feet deep3’ and in 1936-37, Oorgaum
was the deepest mine at more than 8,000 feet .31 At these depths, temper-
atures soared to 131° F, accompanied by an enervating humidity for which
European constitutions were considered entirely unsuitable .31 Even the
Chief Inspector of Mines usually prefaced his annual reports with the
remark that ~the inspection of the mines constituted a challenge and was
accomplished only with great difficulty. 34 At rarer moments, some mining
engineers such as P.J. Crowle were willing to admit that in KGF the
labourer was working ’under conditions corresponding to permanent over-
load’ since wet bulb temperatures as low as 85° F were ’becoming a rarity’
28
Foucault, and Punish, p. 93.
Discipline
29
RCIMM, 1990, p. 16; RCIMM, 1908, p. 7.
30
RCIMM, 1919-20, p. 8.
31
RCIMM, 1932-33, p. 8.
32
RCIMM, 1936-37, p. 28.
33
Anthony Caplan, ’Heat exhaustion in KGF’, KGF Bulletin Vol. 9, No. 48, 1939, p.
113ff., reports the results of a study undertaken to determine the efficiency of workmen in
humid temperatures underground.
34
RCIMM, 1932-33, p. 17, but there were similar statements in nearly every report.
 25

by 1921.35 This was hardly conducive to the direct supervision of labour by

Europeans,’6 a process already complicated by the baffling array of languages
spoken in the mines.&dquo; Instead, work in the mines was divided between two
sets of labourers, those in the direct pay of the Company and those who
were employed by contractors;38 it was the latter who were entrusted with
the most difficult, risky and unrewarding (usually underground) tasks of
a11.39 The responsibility for disciplining labour underground was entrusted
to the mestri, whether in the company or contractors’ employ, who had to
pass a certifying examination .&dquo; As elsewhere in India, the mestri was a key
mediator in the chain of command, and the system was an inexpensive way
of retaining control of workers.41
Yet the mestri was too closely connected, whether by ties of caste,
language or region, with the labourers in his command to be sufficient
guarantee against the pilferage of gold at various stages of production. A
large and vigilant police force whose services could be utilized as the
occasion demanded, and whose very presence was designed to instil fear in
the labourer, was just one of the special conditions that the GOM was
willing to concede.42 By 1900, there was 277-strong police force on the
Fields,43 and gradual increments thereafter were regularly demanded by
the companies and conceded.&dquo; In addition, the GOM readily supplied
Reserve Police and even Imperial Lancers from Bangalore when the need
arose.45 When the Company deployed the KGF Rifle Volunteer Force
during the riot of 1907 the GOM did object strongly on the grounds of
’illegality’,~6 but in less than seven years, even this small check on the
35
Pringle, ’Efficiency and economy’, p. 140.
36
Ibid., pp. 132-33.
37
Thus all mining rules had to be made available in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada
and Hindi to cater to different segments of the workforce. RCIMM, 1898, p. 8.
38
In 1930s, a little less than half of all labour employed was contract labour a proportion
that declined to 32 per cent by 1946. Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 7; S.R. Deshpande
’Report of an Enquiry into the Conditions of Labour on Gold Mines In India’, New Delhi,
1946, pp. 3-4.
39
Simmons, ’The case of the Kolar Gold Fields’, p. 87.
40 The first examinations for blasters, mestris and engine drivers were conducted under the
Mysore Mining Rules in 1901. RCIMM, 1901, p. 2.
41
For the role of the jobber in the Bombay textile industry see Richard Newman, Workers
and Unions in Bombay, 1918-1929: A Study of Organisation in the Cotton Mills, Canberra,
1981; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business
Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 New Delhi, 1994. For Bengal, see
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890-1940, Princeton, 1990,
esp. Ch. 3.
42
RCIMM, 1899, p. 22.
43
RCIMM, 1900, p. 16.
44 File no. 102-17, Sl. no. 1, Geology, KSA.
45
File no. 123-08, Sl. no. 1-17, Police KSA; also File no. 159-29, Sl. no. 23, CB, KSA.
46 File no. 219 of 1912-13, Sl. no. 1 & 2, Police KSA; File no. 145-14, Sl. no. 1, 1a, 2 and 3,
Police KSA; Order Number J 2573-82, 4 February 1915.
26

arbitrary of power in the area was revoked, despite complaints from

use

government officials that ’there is a temptation to ask for excessive protection

and facilities for this place in the fact that the companies yield to the
Mysore Government a large revenue from a concentrated area’ .47
For their part, considering such concessions grossly inadequate, the
mining companies had their own watch and ward establishment to police
the shaft heads, and patrol the shaded avenues along which the European
mining officials lived with their families. Operating with prevailing colonial
stereotypes regarding the ’martial races’ who were ’naturally’ well equipped,
the watch and ward establishment consisted primarily of men from Punjab.&dquo;
The active deployment of ethnic, religious and linguistic difference between
the Punjabi Muslim watchmen on the one hand and the predominantly
Tamil Adi Dravida workmen on the other&dquo; was no mere coincidence.
The existence of a large police force and watch and ward establishment
were meaningless in the absence of a framework of legalities the company/

state could bring to bear on the labouring population. Here too, the
provisions of the Indian Penal Code were considered too general to ade-
quately deal with the special needs of the industry and the kinds of
criminality that it engendered The company/state recognized the need
for a set of rules which would reorganize the economy of illegalities in
order to highlight the transgressions of the subaltern classes while masking
those of the bourgeoisie. 51 In 1897, the Company secured a significant
concession from Mysore state in the shape of the Mysore Mines Regulation,
which made the invasive regime of the Company legal even as it recast the
entire non-white population of KGF as potentially criminal. This was
followed by Acts I and VI which granted the company/state extraordinary
powers to reorganize, supervise and regulate all aspects of the lives of
miners.
Prosecutions under the new rules fell primarily into two groups, those
related to the theft of mining materials such as gold amalgam, gold quartz,
sponge gold, mining candles and explosives, and those connected with
breaches of specified mining rules. The former were conducted by the
police, while the latter reached the courts following a reference from the
mining authorities, who sometimes dealt out punishments on their own. 52
47
File no. 66-13, Sl. no. 1-5, Police, KSA.
48
Sreenivasan, Labour in India p. 5; also File no. 125-07. Sl. no. 1-17, Police, KSA.
49 Census
of India, Volume 25, Mysore, 1941, table 78, p. 106; Simmons ’The case of the
Kolar Gold Fields’ pp. 99-100, comments on the ethnic division of labour, but does not
unpack the implications of such arrangements in the management of the labour force.
50
In the early 1890s, prosecutions were possible under IPC. In 1893, a young boy Ambrose
was caught in possession of amalgam and sponge gold and was punished under Section 380 of
the IPC, following the examination of two police witnesses. He was sentenced to ’12 stripes
with a light rattan’ since he was a juvenile. File no. 12, Sl. no. 1-8, Police, KSA.
51
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 86-87.
52
RCIMM, 1898, p. 21.
 /27

In the very first year of the operation of the Regulation, as many as 263
persons were prosecuted in 203 cases, of which 228 were convicted, a high
rate of 86 per cent (see Table 1). The recovery in the next year of
auriferous material worth over Rs 10,000, but a ’fraction of the several
lakhs worth of gold’ that ’leaked’ from the mines, led the companies to
demand a larger police presence on the fields. 13 This marginal increase of
the force on the Fields yielded dramatic returns, with a record 707 people
charged in 486 cases under the Mining Act in 1901 of whom 584 were
convicted, while the value of articles recovered was Rs 11,297.54
All residents, and not just mine workers, were now placed under the
hawkish eye of KGF police-goldsmiths, jewellers and an assortment of
rich inhabitants. Protests in the Kannada press were soon raised on behalf
of the ’innocents’ affected by the increased vigilance.55 Nadegannadi
expressed indignation about the fact that the operation of the Act indiscri-
minately placed all those who possessed gold under suspicion until ’every
goldsmith was seen as a receiver of stolen property’.56 Even more objection-
able, it said, was the slavish willingness of government to grant unprece-
dented authority to the British managing agents. 17
In KGF, more starkly than elsewhere in colonial India, the class interest
of the law stood exposed, unashamedly dispensing with the hypocrisies of
meting out ’justice’. If anything, the violence that subtended the Company’s
right to mining property was more obvious in the colonial setting than it
was in England. 18 Indeed, what the Kannada press so loudly protested was
that all Indian residents of the KGF, including men of means, were placed
urider a cloud of suspicion. ,

At the same time, repression produced its own problems, calling for a
constant fine-toothing of the law. For instance although the regulation
required all goldsmiths to be licensed, Subbachari, who was hauled up
before the Special Magistrate’s court in KGF for not possessing a licence,
was discharged by the court on the plea that he was only a worker in
silver.59 In operation, therefore, the scope of such a drastic Act should be
limited. How, for instance, could the gold produced in the mines be
distinguished from other gold that may already have been in circulation in
the area? The enormous technical difficulties involving much expense of

53
RCIMM, 1899, pp. 22, 23.
54
RCIMM, 1901-2, p. 23.
55
Nadegannadi, 5 November 1901, Native Newspaper Reports, (hereafter NNR).
Nadegannadi,
56 2 February 1904, NNR.
Ibid.
57
58
Douglas Hay, ’Property, authority, and the criminal law’ in D. Hay, et al., eds., Albion’s
Fatal Tree, London, 1975, pp. 17-63. The moral charge that subtends Hay’s argument does
not detract from its power, despite evoking the distaste of those wishing to hang on to the
illusion of an ’uninterested’ or ’autonomous’ working of criminal, law. See for instance John
Langbein, ’Albion’s fatal flaw’, Past and Present, No. 98, February 1983, pp. 96-120.
59
GOM vs Subbachari, 3 Mys CCR, 1898, p. 141.
 28

Table 1

Prosecutions in Connection with Theft of Gold, Amalgam, Quartz, Other

Mining Materials etc.

Source: Annual Reports of Chief Inspector

of Mines, Mysore, 1899-1946.
 /29

time and uloney did not prevent the prosecution from relying on expert
witnesses from the Department of Geology to determine the composition
of the gold in question. In 1903, Mysore’s Chief Geologist W.F. Smeeth
testified that the two gold bars in the possession of accused Gopaliah were
indeed mine gold, since ’the number of impurities in the bar are quite
characteristic of the impurities contained in the gold from the KGF’.6&dquo;
The cumbersome and expensive procedure of the mining authorities
having to prove that ’stolen’ property was gold from the mines was never-
theless eased by one aspect of the Mysore Mining Regulation. While the
ordinary provisions of the Indian Penal Code required the prosecution to
prove that a certain property had been stolen, the Mining Regulation
placed the burden of proof on the accused who had to prove that any gold
found in his possession was ’not mine gold or [if it was] that he obtained
possession of it in a lawful manner’.&dquo; Though there was some uneasiness
about the fact that ’the ordinary rules of law and procedure are altered
within this area in respect to certain articles to the detriment of the rights of
individuals in order to promote the interests of the mining industry’,62 this
mining regulation was nevertheless enthusiastically administered.
Materials other than gold, however, did not bear the imprint of the
mines. Candles issued to workmen moving about underground, for example,
were regularly saved for later sale or reuse at tremendous personal risk.63

Company authorities only thinly disguised their alarm about this possible
drain on the company’s resources as concern for the prevention of deaths
underground. How could mining candles be provided with some distinguish-
able feature ’which will restrict purchase and possession to mining companies’
and thus reduce theft?&dquo; The answer was to colour the candles pink, and
prosecutions for being in possession of this ’mining material’, pink stearine
candles, were then easily obtained.65 Yet in the next few decades, the
colour of the candles did nothing to prevent miners falling to their deaths
underground, and the Company showed a remarkable lack of concern for
suggestions that it provide better illumination underground, and protect
shaft heads adequately. As a result even in the 1930s, falling away of
labourers in winzes and shafts was a major cause of deaths.’

60
Gopaliah vs GOM, 8 Mys CCR, 1903, p. 333.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid., p. 331.
63
A jumper cooly moving about underground without a light fell from the 340 feet level to
540 feet and died instantly. RCIMM, 1898, p. 14.
64 Ibid.
65
Abdul Rahim vs GOM, 9 Mys CCR, 1904, p. 100; In re Abdul Razack, 5 Mys CCR,
1900, p. 185.
66
File no. 101-35, Sl. no. 1-6, Geological, KSA; File no. 31-37. Sl. no. 1-5, Geological,
KSA. When the question of better illumination did concern the management at all, it was
always in order to aid surveillance, to make the ’milling and cyanide’ processes ’secure and
well-lighted’ in order to prevent pilferage. RCIMM, 1899, p. 22.
 30

By 1906, a new Mysore Mines Regulation was passed with stiffer penalties
.

and plugged loopholes. The Mysore Mines Regulation IV of 1906 made

illegal the possession of unwrought gold within the mining area except with
a licence, and the possession of certain categories of ’mining materials’. It
provided for the weeding out of those classed as ’undesirable’ while making
it mandatory for hawkers and peddlers to take out licences to save them
from such a fate, and insisted that all goldsmiths and dealers keep detailed
accounts The Regulation was applied to the whole of Mysore, except
Sections 5-20 which only applied to KGF.68 At one level it seemed as if the
new rules yielded prompt returns, serving to prevent petty pilferage, since
the number of cases filed under the new rules, and the number of people
put up declined rather sharply after 1907, as also the amount recovered
from thieves (Table 1). Indeed the amount of gold and mining materials
recovered thereafter never touched the levels of the pre-1906 period, even
though the rate of conviction rarely dropped below 70 per cent, and
sometimes went up as high as 97 per cent as in 1926. Yet after a sharp
decline in the first decade of the century, there was a fresh spurt in the
number of cases and the amount of materials recovered in the immediate
post-War years, indicating that thefts by workers were closely linked to the
squeeze on wages. Thereafter, there was a visibly declining trend in the
number of cases registered and in the number of people charged under the
1906 Act.
The Regulation itself presented some problems of implementation, since
even the best laid surveillance plans were often defeated by the geography
of the mining area, the hot pursuit of suspected thieves taking the KGF
police into British India where their enhanced powers had no meaning.
Vadavelachari was seized by the police for being in unlawful possession of
gold, but only after he had got to the Bowringpet railway station. Although
he was convicted in 1905 under Section 8 of the Mysore Mines Act by the
District Magistrate, the conviction was struck down in the Chief Court of
Mysore on the grounds that the railway station fell outside the jurisdiction
of the District Magistrate. 69 The 11-mile length of railway which ran through
the KGF belonged to the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway Company,
and consequently fell within the jurisdiction of British India! The problems
presented by this zone of autonomy that ran right through KGF resulted in
repeated requests from the representatives of the Mining Board in the
Mysore Representative Assembly for an extension of the Mysore Mines
Act of 1906 to the KGF Railway ’which passes through the very heart of
the field and under existing conditions affords a sanctuary to thieves’.&dquo; By

67
Administration Report, 1906-7, p. 10.
Mysore
68
Law Code, Volume I, Unrepealed Mysore Acts, 1850-1920, GOM, 1955.
Mysore
69
In re Vadavelachari, 10 Mys CCR, 1905, p. 156.
70
Representation of Mr Richards, Proceedings of the Mysore Representative Assembly,
), 1907, p. 99; also, Arthur Gifford’s representation in 1909, PMRA, 1909,
(hereafter PMRA
p. 144.
 31

1918, the Mysore government showed itself willing to make the ’small
administrative adjustment’ to make the railway police accountable to the
Police Superintendent of KGF and in 1920, control of the local railway and
premises was vested in the Superintendent of Police in KGF, much to the
satisfaction of the Mining Board.&dquo;
The 1906 Act renewed fears that a serious and permanent infringement
of fundamental freedoms was being given the force of law. H.V. Bhima
Rao pointed out in the Representative Assembly that the Regulation
infringed on the fundamental principle that ’a man should be presumed
innocent until he is proved to be guilty’. To be sure, the outrage of the
Kannada press and representatives in the assembly, was primarily reserved
for the violations of the rights of ’respectable people 112 who were ignomini-
ously placed ’at the mercy of subordinate police’, usually their social
inferiors.&dquo; No similar concern was expressed for the indignities suffered by
the labouring poor, who were not even properly subjects of the Maharaja.
The rights of Tamil labourers counted for little against the acknowledged
rights of the mining industry, and the privileges of the indigenous elite.
Indeed, the guardians of the law showed themselves more than willing to
allow extra-judicial considerations-namely, ’respectability’Jsome measure
‘

of influence in their deliberations.&dquo; On 12 July 1907, the house of Venkat-

ramaiah Chetty ’a well to do’man resident at Bethmangala’ who paid an
annual revenue assessment of Rs 150, was searched by the police and some
jewellery and a gold bar weighing under 2 lbs were found.75 Chetty was
sentenced to one month’s simple imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50. The
Mysore Chief Court was far more sympathetic to the indignities he had
been made to suffer and set the conviction aside because ’the mining
regulation only contemplates two kinds of licences, one four goldsmiths and
another for gold dealers’ and left out of its reckoning ’a third kind of
person, who being neither goldsmiths nor gold dealers, yet like most well-
to-do natives of India, happen to possess remnants of melted gold at some
time or other’.&dquo;
In the elaborate taxonomy of crime that was being shaped, there were
those whose station in life automatically placed them above suspicion.
Goldsmiths who had in the early stages of the operation of the Act been

71
Address of the KGF Mining Board Representative, HMA Cooke to the Dewan of
Mysore, Appendix A, PMRA, 1920, p. 169.
72
Nadegannadi, 4 June 1904; 3 September 1904; 25 August 1906; Suryodaya Prakasika, 3
September 1906.
73
PMRA, 1906, p. 21.
74
For the link between judicial pardons and the preservation of class privilege, see Hay,
’Property, authority and criminal law’, pp. 43-45.
75
Venkatramaiah Chetty vs. GOM, 10 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 231.
Ibid., pp. 232-34. On the other hand, even as late as the 1940s, any mine worker found in
76
possession of a Rs 100 note was immediately taken to the police station for questioning since it
was assumed that he could not have come to possess it lawfully. Interview, Bernard, Retired
KGF miner, 6 January 1995.
32

indiscriminately subjected to checks and interferences, often gained the

sympathetic ear of the Chief Court judges. In the case involving Muniswa-
machari and two others, the Court declared that ’three months RI for
working without licence ... was unduly hard’, and suitably reduced the
sentences.&dquo; Similarly, Chengachari and his partner, accused of working
without licences, were able to have their convictions set aside.&dquo; The Court
was quite willing to acknowledge the symbolic value of gold for respectable

Indians, declaring that ’culturally gold is essential in Indian households’. 79

And if declining number of cases that came on appeal to the Chief Court
are any indication, over the years, even the Lower Court showed itself

willing to honour the sentiments of the ’respectable’ inhabitants of KGF.

This much was clear: the accident of birth counted for a great deal in the
emerging taxonomy of crime, a fact that was also emphasized in the
measures taken to identify ’Criminal Tribes’ who were considered to have
been born to a life of crime. For several decades, a Criminal Tribes Act
operated only in parts of north India, but in 1911 it was made applicable to
the whole country, permitting local governments to declare any tribe,
section or class of people ’a criminal tribe’ thereafter requiring its members
to report to the police who could resettle them if it was necessary.8° Some
itinerant tribes, such as the Korachers and Koravas, showed no particular
respect for the border between British and princely India, so there were
populations of Korachers, Koravas and Woddars in the border regions of
Mysore.81 Alarm bells were sounded by the KGF Mining Board in 1913
when ’a series of burglaries on the outskirts of the mine’ were attributed to
the criminal tribes who were immediately identified and sent back to
British India.82 In 1915, a leading Woddar was charged with receiving
stolen property.83 These arbitrary prosecutions and transportations of those
identified as criminal tribes were given the stamp of legality in 1916, when
Mysore followed the British Indian lead by passing a Criminal Tribes Bill,
after which the ’criminal gangs’ were regularly ’deported’ to British India.
The Criminal Tribes Act was more or less exclusively operative in the
KGF arena. Five tribes were brought under its purview-the Korachers,
Woddars, Kepmaris, Gantichors, and a few Handijogis.84 Of these, the
Korachers and Woddars, being the most numerous in the region around

"
12 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 75.
78
Chengappa alias Chengachari and another vs. GOM 12 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 78.
79
GOM vs Chittor Muniswami, 23 Mys CCR, 1918, p. 239.
80
Meena Radhakrishna, ’The Criminal Tribes Act in Madras Presidency: Implications for
itinerant trading communities’, IESHR 26.3, (1989), pp. 269-95, esp. p. 276.
81
While these tribes were not readily admitted into the labour force, there was a long
period over which their own productive roles were devalued while they were simultaneously
cast as incorrigibly criminal.
82 RCIMM, 1913-14, p. 26.
83 RCIMM, 1915-16, p. 24.
84File no. 23 of 38, Sl. no. 1-4, Legislative, KSA.
 /33

Kolar, were the most consistently harassed by the KGF police as well as
the watch and ward, and were registered and restricted in their movements.85
By 1923, the Mining Board sought to broaden provisions of the Act to
permit local officers to transfer criminal tribes from one locality to another,
even other parts of India, and authorize the arrest of identified tribes
without warrant.’ The sharpened laws in turn fuelled new demands for an
increased police presence, and a special staff consisting of two jamadars
and eight constables was deputed to supervise and watch the movements of
Woddars and Korachers in 1930.*
Yet by the early 1930s all references in the Report of the Chief Inspector
of Mines to the vigorous application of force against the criminal tribes
taper off into silence. Even so the Government of Mysore declared its
reluctance to repeal the Criminal Tribes Act in 1938 on the grounds that
these tribes were inured to punishment, and all available procedures were
too mild to curb their thieving proclivities. 88
The steady decrease in theft of mining materials over time was attributed
exclusively to the implementation of increasingly strict regulations89 (see
Table 1). Yet there was evidence that criminality as such had only been
suppressed, not curbed, since several hundred goldsmiths carried on a
thriving business in what was an overwhelmingly working class town.
Clearly, the demands of the labouring poor could not have sustained such
businesses as much as a steady and assured supply of smuggled gold from
the mines. Nor did business significantly decline after 1906: instead the
cases that came on appeal to the High Court indicate the nature of the

negotiations between a range of smugglers including the European employees

who were never subjected to checks at the shaft heads. The triumphant
reports of the steady decline in the theft of auriferous materials masked the
workings of organized smuggling, a point to which I shall return.

85
RCIMM, 1924-25, Appendix, p. 6; 1925-26, Appendix 3; 1926-27, Appendix 3. The
Woddars, or Odde, were gangs of tank diggers and quarriers of stone, executing a variety of
earth works for which they were frequently employed by the colonial public works depart-
ment, only a few of whom gradually came to be associated with professional thieving. E.
Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 5, Reprint, Delhi, 1975, pp. 422-25,
434-35. Korachers (or Koravas as they were sometimes known, which included the Kepmaris)
earned the reputation of being professional thieves even when they were engaged in petty
trading. According to Thurston, they ’readily adapted themselves’ to travelling by railways
and ’the opportunities afforded for going quickly far from the scene of a recently committed
crime, or for stealing from sleeping passengers’. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, Vol. 3, p. 439.
At least in the early part of the twentieth century the Handijogis, so called because they
reared pigs, were not associated with thievery. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, Vol. 2, pp.
323-24.
86 1923, p. 72ff.
PMRA,
87
RCIMM, 1929-30, Appendix 3.
88
Note of IGP of Mysore, File no. 23 of 38, Sl. no. 1-4, Legislative, KSA.
89
RCIMM, 1906-7, p. 45; RCIMM, 1910-11, p. 17.
34

amalgam and sponge gold in particular were stolen, and sometimes

Gold
quartz, all of which were available above ground at various stages of
production.’ But the demeaning and arbitrary search of underground
workers continued, and one song recalled that men were checked in all
their orifices, even asked to ’bend over like cattle to see if gold was stuffed
into the arse.’9’ Those identified as criminal tribes were subjected to worse
indignities. Thurston thought it fit to ascertain the criminality of Korava
women by making them jump, since ’they have no hesitation in concealing
small articles by passing them into the vagina’, particularly gold amalgam
and jewels, while ’male Koravas sometimes conceal stolen articles in the
rectum’.92 At any rate there were no strenuous objections to the Criminal
Tribes Act either in the Representative Assembly or the Legislative Council.
Even the Kannada press which had briefly expressed opposition to the
Mining Regulation in the early years of the century no longer railed against ’

the repression that prevailed in KGF.

Despite encouraging official signs of decreased criminal activity, the
costs of prosecution under law were becoming increasingly burdensome,
especially since, even when prosecutions were successful, the Company
found it difficult to reclaim stolen property from the government.93 The
companies had always found it worthwhile to settle some disputes depart-
mentally,94 and this became an increasingly attractive option in dealing
with cases that did not involve the theft of property and therefore the
police, that is cases involving breaches of mining rules. Here the authority
of the mining engineers and supervisors could be deployed without being
impeded by other government functionaries, although they too played a
role in displacing the responsibility for safety in the mines to workers
rather than management.95

Criminal Breaches at the Workplace

The entire panoply of regulations to control crimes against mining property
operated above ground, where the labours of the surveillance department
were amply aided by light and a manageable topography. But in the

labyrinthine passages underground, where gangs of men worked under the

supervision of their mestris, much could happen to threaten the steady and
90
File no. 12, Sl. no. 1-8, Police, KSA; Mys CCR 8 1903 pp. 336, 339.
91
Ve Sreenivasa Dass, Mysore Ilaka Kolar Thangavayal Ennum Gold Mines Sarantha
Ulagumathi Kallukadai Innum Palavithiya Paadalaagiya Vazhinadai Nondichindu, Madras,
1909, pp. 10-11.
92
Thurston, Castes and Tribes, Vol. 3, pp. 472-73.
93
There were endless debates on the validity of claims on recovered property, as in File no.
19-11, Sl. no. 1, Legislative, 1911-12, KSA. The difficulties faced by the state in realizing the
proceeds of the seized materials were innumerable. File no. 38, Sl. no. 1-5, Legislative; File
no. 16-10, Sl. no. 1-7, 12-26, 28, Legislative; File no. 28-23, Sl. no. 1-9, Geology, KSA.
94
RCIMM, 1906-7, p. 45.
 /35

lucrative process of gold extraction, affecting the resources of the Company

as surely as, and perhaps more devastatingly than, petty pilferage.
Thousands of workers risked losing their lives in mining for gold on a daily
basis, fearing rockbursts, blasts, fires and other mishaps. Descending to
the depths of mines held no guarantees of golden rewards: in the grim
humour that characterized their lives, workers believed that keelay ponal
ponam, melay vandal panam (’going down, death threatens, coming up
money beckons’).~ The death rate per thousand workers in KGF, though
lower than that in the gold mines of the Transvaal, was alarming. Over the
fifty-year period from 1891 to 1940, an average of sixty men lost their lives
annually, while hundreds of others were permanently maimed or seriously
injured.&dquo; In some years the death toll soared: while 114 deaths occurred in
1909,~ in 1913, 42 out of 112 deaths were caused by the fall of a cage used
to transport workers underground in Edgar’s Shaft,99 and a devastating
underground fire in the Nandydroog mine claimed 53 lives in 1931.’°°
Rockbursts, resulting from destabilized layers of rock underground, became
increasingly common as the mines went deeper: in 1916, there was a 100
per cent increase in fatalities due to rockbursts.101
Rockbursts and fires underground belonged to a category of ’unavoidable’
accidents, occupational hazards that multiplied as the mines plunged ever
downward. The Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines in 1924-25 admitted
that the number of heavy and very heavy rockbursts had increased.’°2 On
the question of rockbursts, the authorities more or less shrugged off any
responsibility: ’There is only one way to entirely avoid accidents due to
airblasts [rockbursts] and that is to close down the mines altogether. That
would be like curing a man of. being sick by cuttfig his throat but the
position by no means warrants such drastic procedure. 1113 To abandon
permanently, or even temporarily, those areas that were most prone to
rockbursts was uneconomical since the closure of the mine ’would have as
deplorable an effect over a mine field as an accident’. 1&dquo;
95
File no. 31-37, Sl. no. 1-5, Geology, KSA.
96
As cited in Sreenivasan, Labour in India; but the proverb is still current in KGF. ’Ponam’
is the colloquial word for ’pinam’/corpse.
97
Simmons, ’The case of Kolar Gold Fields’, pp. 114-15, Table 9.
98
RCIMM, 1908-9, p. 31.
99 RCIMM, 1913-14, p. 17.
100 RCIMM, 1930-31, p. 20.
101
RCIMM, 1916-17, p. 17.
102
RCIMM, 1924-25, p. 27.
p. 20.
Ibid.,
103
104
Chief Inspector of Mines
to Secretary, Development Department, GOM, 19 May
1931, File no. 3-30, Sl. 78-81, 87, 88, 93, 99, 107-109, 121, 127, 131-33. Geology
no.
KSA. Such solicitude for the lot of the mining labourer, expressed in terms of the ’equal’
measure in which a closed mine impinged on the fates of owners as well as workers, matched
the ingenuity of the colliery owners of Britain, from which respectable ancestry the managing
agents John Taylor and Sons were drawn. Although poor ventilation and gas explosions were
36

If the burden of these unavoidable accidents bore down disproportionately

on workmen themselves, so too did other kinds of accidents which were
considered ’criminal follies’ brought on by the deliberate carelessness of
workmen, resulting in an unconscionable ’loss of time and money’ .105 A
small number of accidents, both fatal and non-fatal, were thus attributed to
the ’recklessness’ or ’negligence’ of workmen. These accidents were given
an extraordinary degree of visibility in the accounts of the Board and the

annual reports of the Chief Inspector of Mines. Even when the GOM did
express concern over accidents in the mines, it focused on those classes of
accidents that should ’prima facie be susceptible of more control by regula-
tion’.I06 Mining rules that came into existence in 1911 attempted to achieve
a degree of efficiency that the workmen, primarily of rural background, did
not ’naturally’ possess. ’The overseer’s book of penalties’ did indeed ’re-
place the slave driver’s lash&dquo;’ with one difference. Although a ’barracks-
like discipline’ was in fact integral to the capitalist workplace, such measures
were not easily transposed to the colonial work situation where the chain of
command necessarily passed through the mestris. 108 In the gold mines,
moreover, the primary concern of the authorities was for a reduction in the
number of disruptions resulting from accidents, or more properly with the
affixing of responsibility for accidents in the mines to people other than
those who were accountable for inadequate safety measures. A deliberate
focus on the lack of dexterity or alertness among workers therefore served
to deflect attention from the conditions and terms of work which produced
accidents in the first place. The extraordinarily detailed investigations of
accidents on the mines that accompanied each report constitute a surpris-
ing archive, an embarrassment of riches on accidents which as the mine
management admitted in 1935, arose out of an anxiety to’fix the blame on
various categories of workers. 109
Principally, three groups of accidents resulted in deaths of workers: falls
in shafts and winzes, deaths due to blasts, and deaths resulting from the
collapse of cages due to winding errors. The taxonomy of ’breaches of

an enduring feature of nineteenth century English collieries, owners never failed to claim that

their (monetary) loss was greater than the workman’s, who after all had only lost his life! See
Karl Marx’s extensive quotations of such exchanges in Capital, Vol. I, p. 634.
105
RCIMM, 1923-24, p. 19.
106
File no. 101-35, Sl. no. 1-6, Geology, 1935, KSA; File no. 31-37, Sl. no. 1-5, Geology,
KSA.
107
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 550; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 144-45.
108
Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, pp. 100-101. The path taken by the
workman from his residence in KGF to his place of work became an object of scrutiny and
regulation in 1903-4, partly as a way of enhancing discipline, but primarily to put the mestri in
total command of his men, and therefore remain responsible for them. Such surveillance was
too unwieldy to put into practice in the long run. RCIMM, 1903-4, p. 25; Proceedings of the
GOM, 1903, December.
109
File no. 101-35, Sl. no. 1-6 Geology, 1935, KSA.
 37

mining rules’ ensured that there was no escape from punishment even
when there was narrow escape from death. In the case of workers who died
from falling down shafts, no one but the individual worker could be
blamed. But over time, a trio of men-the mestri, the blaster and the
engine driver, all of whom were among the better-paid Indian workers
requiring certification in order to work in the mines-was held primarily
responsible for two other kinds of accidents.
Falling down shafts and winzes was recognized as a serious problem even
in the early stages of the industry. In z1898, a coolie who died after falling
from a depth of 340 feet to 540 feet below was immediately classed as
’careless’ since he had moved around underground without a light.&dquo;~ The
cause of the accident was quickly traced to the fact that the ’cooly frequently
wished to save candles for subsequent sale’. The introduction of pink
stearine candles, which distinguished them as mining property, did little to
prevent deaths from falls in shafts, winzes and stopes; this class of accidents
continued to rise, even predominate, among all accidents in the mines. In
1914, the Chief Inspector of Mines declared that the alarming increase in
underground deaths was far from any indication that ’insufficient precautions
are taken to prevent persons from falling into or down openings such as

shafts, winzes and stopes’ as laid down in Sections V and XI of the Mining
Rule; instead, ’all these were individual accidents the greater proportion
being due to slipping and falling off ladders while climbing up or down and
leaving doors, barriers, etc open which should have been shut’.&dquo;’ Yet in
some cases men fell off ’perfectly good ladders’.&dquo;2 Ever so often the
worker continued to be faulted for ’valuing a candle more than his life’.&dquo;3
By 1920-21, when the problem of deaths from falls reached ’epidemic
proportions’ the annual report reluctantly admitted that ’indirectly higher
temperature underground may have something to do with a certain number
of [falls] as six out of the 19 cases were the result of falling away while
climbing up or down ladders’.&dquo;’ It was even admitted that the installation
of air conditioning plants in Oorgaum in 1938 ’led to a reduction of trivial
.115
accidents underground’ .
The authorities could not name the cause of this class of accidents
without implicating themselves and insisted on other causes. Higher
temperatures underground told only a part of the story, the other part of
which was inadequate wages that forced several categories of workers to
save fuel underground for use in their homes or even at work. In fact, in

110
RCIMM, p. 14, 1898.
111
RCIMM, 1914-15, p. 16.
112
RCIMM, 1924-25, p. 20.
113
RCIMM, 1918-19, p. 25.
114
RCIMM, 1920-21, p. 27.
115
Jack Spalding ’Mine ventilation with conditioned air’, KGF Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 45,
1938?
 38

the very year that the company/state complained of an ‘epidemic’, Champion

Reef workers struck on precisely this issue. The end of the War brought

not only spiralling prices but also shorter work hours, which the Company
enforced indirectly, by supplying only half of the normal number of candles
needed by workers underground. The Champion Reef labourers demanded a
full supply of candles, as well as more rice per rupee, and the agitation
appeared poised to spread to all the mines before it was successfully
diffused.&dquo;6 Contractors’ coolies who were accustomed to working more
than one shift continuously, were among the hardest hit. The problem of
saving candles and thereby risking death as well as the problem of slipping
off ladders due to sheer exhaustion arising from overwork or excessive
heat, were hardly the ’individual’ accidents they were made out to be and
were more than closely linked to the question of wages and conditions of
work.&dquo;’
.

own part, the company/state introduced a vigorous ’safety first’

For its
campaign. Perhaps it was no coincidence that this was just at the time when
the question of ventilation at the lower depths of the mines was becoming
&dquo;8
too urgent to ignore, especially since it impaired the efficiency of workers.
Yet mining authorities complained even years later that impoverished
workers still risked death in order to save a few paisa worth of fuel,
’

attributing this to the fact that the ’bulk of underground labour has been
wholly uneducated in the dangers of the mine and has been slow to learn
except by personal experience in accidents.’&dquo;9 Any reference to the better
illumination of mines, however, was studiously avoided by the mining
board as well as the government,.&dquo;
Efforts to delink the cause of accidents from the conditions and terms of
work were immensely successful in the case of other kinds of accidents,
easily punishable. Unplanned blasts underground were a direct result of
the ’irresponsible actions of mestris and blasters, who were fined, suspended,

116
File no. 111-20, Sl. no. 1-20, Confidential Branch, KSA.
117 The wage strike, which only lasted two days in August 1920, became an occasion for
labourers to vent a range of grievances about arbitrary fines, hut repair, and other living
conditions. The fear that the workers would strike again after pay day frightened the Mining
Superintendent into granting two-day strike pay. Only the unrestrained use of Section 17
prevented the leader from Madras, who was rumoured to be on his way to lead the strike,
from entering KGF. File no. 111-20, Sl. no. 1-10, Confidential Branch, KSA.
118
RCIMM, 1923-24, p. 19.
119
Roger Horseley, ’Accident prevention, past and future’, Vol.
KGF Bulletin, 9, No. 47,
1938, p. 100. Interviews with workers who had worked with carbide lamps in the 1940s
revealed not only that gangs of workers had worked out a scheme of careful cooperation
which enabled every worker to save a proportion of his fuel for home consumption, but that
they developed an underground sense which enabled them to move around without lights if
necessary. Interviews with Devanbu, Gnanaprakasam, and I. Subramaniam, 22 May 1995.
120
Ibid.; also Charles Todhunter’s observations on KGF. File no. 31-37, Sl. no. 1-5,
Geology, KSA.
 39

dismissed and even sentenced to rigorous imprisonment with great regular-

ity for not preventing hand jumper coolies from drilling into holes already
containing explosives’. On occasion, the mestris and blasters were not only
fined, but were required to ’compensate the relatives of the deceased.&dquo;’ In
one case, the mestri was fined Rs 50 and given a week’s RI. 122 Yet here too

the cause of blasts was unmistakably linked to the conditions and terms
under which coolies worked. In 1921-22, there were three cases of hand
jumper coolies ’deepening sockets so as to gain and be paid for a few extra
inches of hole drilled without counting the CoSt’.121 By 1927-28 it became
impossible to deny that the deaths of hand jumper coolies in unplanned
blasts was directly linked to the system of piece-rated work under contractors:
since ’the hand jumper coolies are generally paid by the depth of the hole
drilled, they are sometimes tempted to take advantage of socket holes
which are not free from explosives. 1121 In all such cases, action was taken
against the mestri or blaster in charge for permitting a breach of rulers. 125
Engine drivers who were responsible for the raising and lowering of
cages or bowks of workers, were frequently fined, dismissed or suspended
for overwinding which led to snapped cables and death of those in the
cages. At first, the Indian engine driver was considered congenitally incap-
able of responsibly handling these winding plants: safety, it was argued,
could be ensured only by replacing all Indian drivers with Europeans . ’21
But such racism was prohibitively expensive, considering that the European
engine driver was paid approximately seven times more than Indian drivers. 121
By no stretch of imagination could KGF mining management actually
claim that a European driver did seven times more work than an Indian, so
the ’mythical portrait of the colonized’ prevailed without question. 121
Unlike cases of theft, breaches of mining rules were prosecuted by the
District Magistrate on the basis of complaints from the inspectors or
officials of mines, and only rarely by the police. This presented its own
difficulties since ’evidence obtainable is either circumstantial or of a purely
expert nature’. 12’ The swifter, and sometimes harsher, penalties dealt out
121
RCIMM, 1923-24, p. 18.
122
Venketa Reddy vs. GOM, 10 Mys CCR, 1905, p. 80.
123
RCIMM, 1921-22, p. 31, emphasis added.
124
RCIMM, 1925-26, p. 26; also, 1936-37, p. 26.
125
Ironically, in the South African mines, miners were faulted for just the opposite reason,
i.e., for having been ’overcautious with explosives’. As a result, the basis for the payment of
bonus was changed from footage per machine shift, and explosives consumption per foot, to a
straightforward footage bonus. Spalding and Dixon, ’Visit to Witwatersrand’. 22.2.
126
RCIMM, 1908-9, p. 31.
127
RCIMM, 1908-9, Table on wages and salaries.
128
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans., Howard Greenfeld, London,
1990, p. 146. There were occasional words of praise for the KGF miner who ’has qualities
which make him cheap at the price’ in Pringle, ’Efficiency and economy in the underground
department’, p. 136.
129
RCIMM, p. 19, 1898.
 40

by the superintendent of mines were clearly less cumbersome as a dis-

’
ciplinary technique, but, more importantly, they eliminated the risk of
acquittal by technically ignorant, or worse, compassionate magistrates. 130
The difficulties of prosecution prompted the Board to suggest that the
mere fact of an accident having occurred be taken as ’prima facie evidence
of negligence’,&dquo;‘ but no such drastic measures were finally adopted, although
there was an increasing tendency for the superintendent of mines to
adjudicate,132 particularly in those cases where there were no casualties, 1 11
alungside the vigorous filing of cases in criminal courts. On occasion, the
superintendent of mines tempered their dispensations with a measure of
mercy, but only because the Divine Hand had already intervened on behalf
of the company/state and severe injuries were suffered by the mestris or
blasters themselves. 134
The impressive battery of fines, imprisonment, suspensions, and down-
grading of mestris, blasters, and engine drivers did nothing to reduce the
total number of serious and fatal accidents&dquo;’ (Table 2). Unlike the trend in
cases filed against theft, there was no significant decline in the number of
cases filed under the provisions for breach of mining rules, although the

percentage of convictions was exceptionally high, particularly after 1907.

Even more striking was the declining proportion of accidents that resulted
from ’negligence’ and ’recklessness’ and the leading edge that ’unavoid-
able causes’ began to have. If anything, the new rules, while minimizing
avoidable accidents, threw into sharp relief the high proportion of ’un-
avoidable’ accidents, as we see from 1907, a proportion which remained
consistently high through the 1920s and 1930s, until the 1940s when avoid-
able causes accounted for a negligible proportion of accidents. Clearly, it
was hardly for want of knowledge of the dangers of underground work that
hand jumper coolies continued to drill into existing holes’36 or several
others plunged to their deaths by falling down unprotected shafts. 137 Yet by
shifting the blame on to various categories of mining employees, additional
expenditures on safety measures were avoided. As Onselen says of labour
legislation in Rhodesia, its basic function ’was to reduce the death rate to a
level where it would not jeopardise labour supplies without threatening the
profitability of the industry by requiring unacceptably high levels of indirect
130
R1/1/1066 Foreign Department, Confidential C Internal Branch, Sect. A 1905, India
Office Library (IOL).
131 RCIMM, 1898.
132
File no. 31-37, Sl. no. 1-5, Geology, KSA; RCIMM, 1914-15, p. 19, 1920-21, p. 30;
1935-36, p. 35.
133
RCIMM, 1926-27, p. 21.
134
RCIMM, 1927-28, p. 25-26; 1935-36, p. 35.
135
L. Lubett, ’The control of handjumper stoping on Nandydurg Mines’, KGF Bulletin,
Vol. 13, No. 67, December 1947, p. 237ff.
136
Ibid.; see also RCIMM, 1936-37, p. 24.
137
File no. 101-35, Sl. no. 1-6, Geology, 1935, KSA.
 41

Table 2 ,

Accidents* in Mysore 1898-1946 (selected years)

Source: Annual Reports of Chief Inspector of Mines, Mysore, 1898-1946/47.

*
These are only investigated accidents. A very small proportion remained investigated. KGF
accounted for the overwhelming majority of accidents in the state.
42

Table 3

Prosecutions in Connection with Accidents and Breaches of Mining Rules

Source: Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector of Mines, Mysore, 1900-1940.

 /43

expenditure on compound inhabitants’. 138 Similarly, it was logical for the

authorities at KGF to expend time and money on investigating accidents in
order to affix responsibility on workers themselves.
Meanwhile, the first death from heat exhaustion occurred at a depth of
8,120 feet in Champion Reef where temperatures were 115° F (dry) and 96°
F (wet).139 Collapse was rare above 5,000 feet, and inadequate ventilation
at lower depths was the single most important local condition. Contract
labourers worked more strenuously under the supervision of the contractor
so there was a higher incidence of collapse among contract labourers,

especially since ’all contract labour and only 50 per cent of the Company
labour work in the hottest parts of the mines’ .140 Nevertheless, the author-
ities, ordinarily quite sensitive to numbers and figures relating to profits,
dividends and royalties, and the rates of gold on the market, continued to
attribute the persistently high rate of accidents to personal or human
failings. Therefore, any concern for the mining workers could only be
expressed in terms of even greater regulations and stricter fines, although,
as Table 3 shows, the rate of conviction of those held
responsible for
accidents was consistently high. &dquo;’ The successful prosecution of miners and
blasters for breaches of mining rules, said Charles Todhunter (Private
Secretary to the Maharaja), required a degree of technical competence
that the District Magistrate sorely lacked; at the same time, those punish-
ments given departmentally were too low (sometimes as low as Rs 3) to act
as sufficient deterrent. 112

The Mining Board also studiously ignored the links between the organ-
ization of piece work under the contractor system and low wages on the
one hand and accidents on the other, priding itself instead on its safety first

campaigns&dquo;’ which were pursued in several languages.&dquo; Those who stub-

bornly refused to obey the safety rules were blamed for their inherent
unteachability. Thus A. Stephenson, in an article on ’Action and Reaction
in Industry’, pointed out the dangers of printing posters showing the right
and the wrong way of doing things: ’with children and relatively uneducated
labourers’, he said, ’examples of the wrong way should not be given’.&dquo;5 On
the other hand, little or no attention was paid by the KGF Mining and
Metallurgical Society to the tacit skills that must have developed amongst
KGF miners through the long years served underground. Coal miners in

138
Onselen, Chibaro, p. 67.
139
RCIMM, 1939-40, p. 10.
140
Caplan, ’Heat exhaustion in KGF’
141
RCIMM, 1936-37, p. 26.
142
Todhunter to Mirza, Dewan of Mysore, 8 September 1937, File no. 31-37, Sl. no. 1-5,
Geology, KSA.
143
RCIMM, 1936-37, p. 10.
144
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 68.
145
KGF Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 3, June-December 1932, p. 74.
 44

Britain for instance developed a rich brogue that has yielded important
glimpses of the well-honed skills of miners. Thus ’pitsense’ refers to ’a kind
of instinct and intuition coupled with actual experience of many under-
ground happenings. An ability to take notice of minute warning signs,
sounds and smells’. 146
In colonial situations, pervasive myths about the poor skills of workers
and the division of work on ethnic lines have suppressed from view the
equivalent of ’pitsense’. But the silence of an archive can by no means be
taken as a historical absence, as recent investigations of ’pitsense’ among
South African miners undertaken both by union officials and historians
have clearly shown.&dquo;’
So relentlessly and with such conviction did the company/state blame the
_
child-like qualities of the labourers for accidents, that the historian must
necessarily strain her ear to hear a word of praise for the ’extraordinarily
small number of blasting accidents in proportion to the number of holes
drilled’, words, we are told, that could well have come from ’anyone who
rides much in skips’.&dquo;R Such sensitivity to the ingenuity of miners labouring
in difficult conditions was considered misplaced, and even an obstacle to
the process of producing manageable docile workers. who deserved super-
vision at work as well as in their neighbourboods.149

The Closer ’Penal Mapping of the Social Body’

In addition to accidents, there were some disruptions of the production
process that the formidable barrier of fines and punishments failed to
prevent. The bubonic plague virus, for example, showed scant respect for
barracks-like disciplinary codes, and in 1898, not only took away the lives
of several hundred workers, but led to mass exodus from the area by those
who felt the effects of plague as much as those who resented anti-plague
measures.150 The periodic visitations of cholera and smallpox similarly
defied surveillance, stealthily devastating workers’ lives and homes, while
threatening to flare up into full-fledged epidemics. Even the most scrupulous
watch on the activities of workers in the mines could be undone in those
neighbourhoods where the viruses harboured by the labouring people
escaped detection. Surveillance measures therefore had to reach beyond
the workplace into the residential areas, in order to supervise, reorganize
146
Dave Douglass, ’Pit talk in county Durham’ in Raphael Samuel, ed., Miners Quarrymen
and Saltworkers, History Workshop series, London, 1977, pp. 297-348, esp. 334-35.
147
Jean Leger and Monyoala Mothibeli, ’Talking rocks: Pit sense amongst South African
miners’, Labour: Capital and Society, Vol. 21, No. 2, November 1988, pp. 222-37.
148
Pringle, ’Efficiency and economy in underground work’, p. 136.
149
Pringle’s complimentary remarks were sharply challenged by C.N. Keith, (p. 145). Not
surprisingly, we do not hear from the likes of Pringle again, since the KGF Bulletin thereafter
scrupulously avoided publishing such articles in its pages.
150
RCIMM, 1899, pp. 16-17.
 45

and sanitize, where necessary, the daily lives of workers. But here too,
there were aspects of the workers’ lives that simply could not be transformed:
malnutrition, for example, was dismissed as ’a problem not confined to
KGF or even India’ and therefore ’beyond our control’ .151 The nutritional
status of KGF workers only once became a serious concern for mining
authorities: in 1919, a severe epidemic of gastroenteritis broke out as a
result of post-War increases in foodgrain prices that forced workers to use
Burmese rice of inferior quality which fermented too soon.&dquo;’
When the plague broke out in 1898, 714 people lost their lives, and
nearly 5,000 fled KGF.111 The illness seemed to thrive in the primeval ooze
of workers’ colonies, and obstructive attitudes of mining labour did little to
help. ’The septic nature of the first case’, the Chief Inspector complained,
’Its termination fatally before the development of the bubo, the facilities
the cooly had with his number of aliases to_ escape observation and the
tactics followed by the people of Marikuppam bazaars of secretly disposing
of dead bodies helped the infection to take root. ’154 The evidence provided
on the very same page of that report that ’there was not a single case [of

plague] among the scavengers of Mysore Mines’ did not urge the authorities
to revise the belief that unsanitary conditions inevitably led to plague;
instead, some people were merely classified as ’plague proof155
One possible response to such recurrent scourges was to provide well-
ordered housing for mining labourers that would lend itself to periodic
inspections, disinfection, even destruction if the need arose. Although
woefully inadequate in meeting the needs of the nearly 30,000 workers who
were then employed, by 1904-5, 1,485 huts were built in 11 colonies, to
house 5,400 people who would otherwise have ’swarmed into villages
carrying with them the necessary attendant rowdiness and evils of over-
crowding’. 151 Yet even in 1930, only 100 of the 10,500 houses in the mining
area were of masonry; most ordinary labourers lived in what became
notorious as ’aeroplane huts’, so called since the bamboo and thatti they
were made of barely withstood the rigours of the windy season.157 Indeed

151
Anthony Caplan,’Heat exhaustion on the KGF’, KGF Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 48, December,
1939, p. 124. Referring to jute mill labour in Bengal, Dipesh Chakrabarty has explained why
there were certain ’blind spots’ in the employer’s vision of labour conditions: ’the workers’
health became a question of epidemics and not one of nutrition; in this connection sanitation
became a matter of interest but not the workers’ general standard of living.’ Chakrabarty,
Rethinking Working Class History, p. 95.
152File no. 6-19, Sl. no. 38, 1919-20; Palace Papers, KSA.
153 RCIMM, 1899, p. 30.
p. 29.
Ibid.,
154
155
Ibid., p. 36.
156
RCIMM, 1904-5, p. 19.
157
The term was used by local KGF people and reported in M.A. Sreenivasan’s report of
1931; however, the Mining Board, raised strenuous objections to the use of the term in the
report, and it was dropped. File no. 369-30, Sl. no. 1-3, 9, Industries and Commerce, KSA.
Contrast Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 51.
46

the flimsiness of the thatti huts was rather brazenly defended in 1930 and
even as late as 1945 as a necessity to ensure that they could be torn down
and burnt during an epidemic, 151 forcing even a Mysore bureaucrat, Sreeni-
vasan, to remark that ’the next logical step would be for everyone to live in
happy immunity under the trees’ .159
Every marginal investment in the construction of workers’ lines yielded
high returns, greatly enhancing the surveillance powers of the sanitary
overseer. For their part, the labourers paid a heavy price for such pathetic

protection from the elements; they iost their domestic treedom.’&dquo;&dquo; Their
floors were periodically dug up to catch and exterminate rats.’6’ Failure to
demolish houses that were condemned as ’infected’ became a punishable
offence.’62 Small kitchen gardens that were carefully tended by workers’
families failed to inspire the zealous sanitary overseer who unhesitatingly
destroyed them as potential mosquito breeding grounds. 163
The sanitation bye-laws that were included in the Mysore Mines Regula-
tions invested the KGF Sanitary Board with powers to prosecute for any
breaches* For failure to report smallpox in their families, David and
seven others were convicted in 1901.’65 Chowriappa was sentenced to two
months RI for failing to report that his sister had smallpox. The Mysore
Chief Court, to which Chowriappa appealed, struck down the conviction as
not only illegal, but ’unnecessarily severe and harsh’.&dquo; But since the
District Magistrate did not forward the case- in time, the sentence had
already been served and correction of illegalities was therefore made
impossible.
Through the combined invasive efforts of the rat gang, the prickly pear
gang, and the incinerator gang, the KGF lines were kept free of major
infectious diseases. Meanwhile, other afflictions that arose directly from
the conditions of work on the mines were given short shrift. The existence
of heat stroke, common in the South African Gold Mines was strenuously
denied and only ’heat exhaustion’ or collapse underground was admitted as
a problem.’6’ Indeed, so uniquely equipped was the Kolar miner to work in

158 Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 53; the argument was repeated by the mining authorities in
1945, when the Labour Investigation Committee conducted its enquiry. Deshpande, Report
on the Gold Mining Industry, Delhi, 1946, p. 14.
159
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 54.
160
Michele Perrot draws attention to the uses served by company-built workers’ colonies in
controlling strikes. Workers on Strike: France 1871-1890, New Haven, 1987, p. 254.
161
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 44; RCIMM, 1909-10, p. 25; J. Fitzmaurice, ’Sanitation’
KGF Bulletin Vol. 4, No. 23, January-June 1928, p. 171; Administration Report of the KGF
Sanitary Board, 1934-35, KSA, p. 8.
162
Administration Reports of the KGF Sanitary Board, 1924-36, KSA.
163
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 55.
164
Mysore Mines Act, 1906, in Mysore Law Codes, Vol. I, pp. 539-40.
165
6 Mys CCR., 1901, pp. 98-99.
166
In re Chowriappa, 6 Mys CCR, p. 100, (1901).
167
Caplan, ’Heat exhaustion on KGF’, p. 119.
 47

high temperatures underground that ’conditions considered hot and

oppressive in the average mine in Britain may be pleasant to the acclimatized
worker of the tropics Although some concern for the ’inadequacy of
sanitary arrangements underground’ was voiced as early as 1903 when the
prevalence of hookworm infestation was discovered, a detailed investigation
of the disease was not undertaken until 1937-38.’69 Finally, although by
1930, at least 100 employees were annually invalidated and sent home for
miner’s phthisis,170 the existence of silicosis on the mines was suppressed
from public view and excluded from the list of compensated diseases in the
Mysore Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1928. Only when M.A. Sreeni-
vasan detected the cover-up attempt in 1930 did official investigations

begin, in the face of threats from the mining authorities that they would
have to close shop if the disease was compensated. 171 Silicosis became
compensated only in 1940, a full twelve years after the Mysore Workmen’s
Compensation Act was passed.&dquo;2
If the microbes that threatened to disrupt work on the mines were
weakened by the relentless activity of the officials of the Sanitary Board, so
too were other ’undesirables’. The ordered coolie lines that enabled sani-
tation of the biological kind were also handy in weeding out unsavoury
characters who could lurk undetected in the mining area. These were
professional thieves and squatters and, especially after the 1920s, those
who were willing to charge worker discontent with a new and directed
energy. If mere microbes were conquered and subjugated only by the
sternest of measures, how much more difficult to control or diffuse were
strikes and riots!

Evicting the ‘Undesirable’

The detection and eviction of ’undesirables’ received the attention of the
framers of the mining regulation right at the outset. Section 17 of the
Mysore Mines Regulations authorized the Superintendent of Police at
KGF to ask those considered undesirable to acquire police permission or
else quit the mining area within 24 hours. &dquo;3
The sharp drop in thefts in 1907 was immediately attributed to the
removal of ’dangerous characters from the field who have been warned off
as undesirables and have not returned’.&dquo;4 This section was pursued most

168
A. Caplan and J. Lindsay, ’An experimental investigation of the effects of high temper-
atures on the efficiency of workers in deep mines.’ KGF Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 65, September
1946, p. 87.
169
W.B. Rowntree, ’Hookworm infestation’, KGF Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 49-53, p. 94.
170
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 76.
171
p. xii.
Ibid.,
172
RCIMM, 1939-40, p. 27.
173
Mysore Mines Act, 1906.
174
RCIMM, 1906-7, p. 45.
 48

vigorously and appeared to produce dramatic results&dquo;5 unencumbered by

legal procedure and uninterrupted in its effects.176 Combined after 1913
with strong measures against the criminal tribes, the obvious success of
Section 17 in scaring away ’bad characters’ was evident in the fall in
number of cases, registered under its provisions
Armed with a newfound power to declare any person ’undesirable’, the
company/state could guard against the possible reinscription of popular
illegalities within a broader political framework. In 1923-24, the Chief
Mining Inspector reported, not without satisfaction, that relations between
employer and employee were cordial because ’known bad characters and
habitual offenders are liable to be served undesirable notices’.118 The thief
thus became rabble rouser by a slight, almost imperceptible, shift since
economic crimes could, and frequently did, shade into political activity
especially when isolated illegal practices were brought into a unified frame-
work during a riot or a strike.&dquo;9 ’Undesirability’ in KGF was a quality that
could be ascribed to actual or potential thieves, political troublemakers,
and also mestris or blasters who had been discharged from a particular
mine for negligence or recklessness. Mestris and blasters travelled with
ease between mines, even after they were dismissed, and, despite identi-
fication checks, succeeded ’in obtaining employment in another mine
under an assumed name’. What was more, ’with natives it is not likely that
such men will be easily detected Section 17 helped the mining authorities
immobilize such artful dodgers.
By and large, even liberal judges were willing to interpret the law
relating to undesirables in favour of the mining authorities.’8’ Not content
with the scope of its application, the Mining Board soon requested that it
be ’invested with the power to issue notices which will be operative through-
out the field’ as opposed to the mining area alone.’8z In 1916, the ever-
obliging Mysore state permitted the provisions of Section 17 to be extended to
Robertsonpet, Andersonpet and other areas enabling the police to deal
more firmly with the thieves and receivers.’83

175
RCIMM, 1909-10, p. 20.
176
RCIMM, 1910-11, p. 17.
177
RCIMM, 1913-14, p. 14.
178
RCIMM, 1923-24, p. 26; File no. 12-11, Sl. no. 1 and 3, Legislative, KSA.
179
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 275.
180
RCIMM, 1901-2, p. 2; see also PMRA, 1907, p. 9; PMRA, 1912, p. 194-5.
181
Thus judge Chandrasekhara Aiyer commenting on Ramanna’s return to the mining area
to collect money he was owed said that ’Section 17 is plainly intended to prevent bad
characters (or more correctly, persons directed to quit a mine) not merely from congregating
together ...but even from setting their foot upon what is mining property. It may be the
provision is a very stringent one, but then it is only one of several stringent provisions
contained in a regulation which is itself an exceptional piece of legislation’. Ramanna alias
Koilan vs. GOM, 13 Mys CCR, 1908, p. 124.
182
PMRA, 1907, p. 99; PMRA 1912, pp. 194-95.
183
PMRA, 1916, p. 6.
 /49

Yet even such a muscular provision as Section 17 could not entirely

prevent various forms of subterfuge. Besides, by a very strict reading of the
term ’residence’ at KGF, the administrators of the law sometimes argued
that mere re-entry of a person who had been expelled as undesirable could
not constitute an Beginning in the 1920s, after all, a new spectre
offence
had begun haunting KGF, the spectre of political activists and labour
organizers who, under the aegis of a fledgling Congress party, were warmly
received by workers and students elsewhere. In KGF, thanks to the prompt
ejection of political and labour ’agitators’ by repeated recourse to the
provisions of Section 17, there was much less success.115
Yet it was only when the police, under orders from the mining author-

ities, swung into action against political undesirables that the Mysore
intelligentsia chose to raise its voice in protest. A measure that should have
long provoked outcries from those committed to ’democracy’ and the
rights of labour only now gripped their attention.&dquo; In 1922, T.M. Rama-
chandra Rao and K. Rame Gowda complained in the Representative
Assembly that the mining regulation was very drastic. ’Undesirables’ they
said, ’are evicted without an enquiry and there is no right of appeal. The
term undesirable is also not defined.&dquo;’ Government response was predictable,
and dropped even the pretence of disinterestedness by admitting that
’exceptional cases require exceptional remedies
Pressure began to mount once more to clearly define the range of people
who could be classed ’undesirable’ and then externed. In June 1925, a
resolution moved in the Mysore Legislative Council sought safeguards
against the misuse of Section 17.189 No revocation of the offending section
was being demanded, no stirring speech was made for the rights of labourers.
What was being sought was a freshly defined Section 17, one that would be
more discriminatory in its targets. The amendment would provide for show

cause notices to be issued to ’undesirables’ and additionally ’for such

orders having effect in the case of subjects of His Maharaja paying Kandayam
(revenue) only for six months’,&dquo; a concession that Mohommed Abbas
Khan wished to have extended to merchants as well.’9’ Besides miscreants,
184
Ramanna alias Koilan vs. GOM, 13 Mys CCR, p. 64 (1908); GOM vs. Annamalay alias
Gundal, 20 Mys CCR, p. 292 (1915); Nadamuni vs. GOM 12 Mys CCR, p. 64, (1907). When
enhanced vigilance could so easily be thwarted by judicial quibbles about the meaning of the
term ’residence’, the demand was immediately made to replace ’residence’ with the word
’presence’. PMRA, 1916.
185
) for the fortnight ending 15 February 1922, Crown
Fortnightly Report (hereafter FR
Representative Records (hereafter CRR), KSA.
186
The early indignation that was expressed in the Kannada press against the indiscriminate
deployment of the Mysore Mining Act had all but evaporated by the 1910s.
187
PMRA, 1922, October, p. 29, emphasis added.
188
Ibid.
189
PMRA, October-November 1928, p. 53.
190
Ibid.
191
Ibid., p.55.
50

those classed as undesirables were the ’disorganisers of labour’ and others

whose very presence in the field was considered ’dangerous’192 The legislators
hoped to urge the government to keep the labour organizer out of the
purview of the law.’93
Though the amendment was not passed, the total strike at KGF in 1930
produced fresh anxieties among the authorities and the fledgling Congress.’9’
The question of amending the mining regulation was revived in order to
clarify who came under the ambit of ’undesirable’. This time, there was a
forceful opponent in the Assembly, K. Chengalraya Reddy, who spoke out
in defence of ’the fundamental rights of citizens’.&dquo;’ Not only did the act
lead to the ’victimisations of butlers, peons and honest women’ he said, but
the very definition of ’disorganiser of labour’ as ’undesirable’ was odious
and decidedly partisan. ’What from the labourer’s point of view would be a
perfectly legitimate organisation of labour’ he thundered, ’would perhaps
from the capitalist’s point of view be a disorganisation of the same.’ This
did not shake the belief of government members that KGF labourers, from
the lowest strata of society, ’required stiff punishments’. 11 Section 17
continued to have its uses well into the 1940s. Even when mine labourers
could no longer be insulated from the activities of organizers in 1940-41,
mining authorities found it easy to issue notices to eight labour leaders,
who were forced to function from a union office across the border at
Kuppam in Madras Presidency
Until the 1940s, the KGF workers had few sympathizers in other parts of
Mysore who would work to guarantee them a measure of dignity in their
daily working lives and relied largely on their own meagre resources. What
notion of justice after all could be upheld when laws flagrantly violated the
principle of equality and operated on the rule of colonial difference? Even
when it was acknowledged that European millhands would ’not submit as
the natives to be searched’ and thereby enjoyed ’excellent opportunities’
for secreting gold out of the mines, little was done to stop them.’98 The
(superbly documented) actions of the police in suppressing subaltern
192
Ibid., p. 54.
193
Interventions of D.S. Mallappa, B. Narasinga Rao, PMRA, June 1929. Others who
were harassed under Section 17, however, fully deserved their fate: one legislator remarked
that people only went to KGF for ’trade or theft’ so the police deserved all help in thwarting
criminality rather than being restrained. PMRA, June 1897, p. 20.
194
Janaki Nair, ’Representing labour in Old Mysore’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.
25, 28
195
July 1990.
File no. 30-31, Sl. No Notes, Legislative, KSA.
196
Ibid., Note of the First Member of Council. In 1946, Deshpande found that a good 70
per cent of the KGF labourers had served for more than 5 years in the mines, and of this, 40
per cent had served more than 10 years. Deshpande, Report, p. 6.
197
FR for the fortnight ending 15 January 1941, CRR, KSA; interview, Savaridoss, 5
January 1995; Devanbu, 4 January 1995.
198
Secret Notes on Mysore, September 1903, Resident of Mysore, CRR, KSA.
 51

criminality were paralleled by the massive undocumented criminality of

European officials and employees. Evidence of such organized crime was
amply available in the disproportionately large number of goldsmiths who
opened shop in a poor area. The illicit trade in gold was managed by
several intermediaries who frequented the houses of officials such as butlers,
barbers, tailors and bakers whose rise in fortunes within short spans of time
became part of the folklore of KGF, and is remembered to the present
dray. 199
The decline in the number of cases of theft must surely have impressed
the shareholders in Britain, but it also testified to the ingenuity with which
gold continued to be smuggled out of the mines. Given the almost complete
control that the management had over the flow of information from the
mines, only the memories of residents and visitors serve as testimony to
this sphere of illegality. 200 P. Srinivasan who came to KGF as a communist
organizer in 1943-44 describes the nexus between the police, Marwari
moneylenders, goldsmiths and European management who employed
certain workers to do their dirty work, with the police often arresting
certain workers in order to show that they maintained the law, while
making sure that the men who had served time were rehabilitated in the
elaborate machinery for disposal of stolen gold.2~’ Indeed, the repressive
regime clearly engendered its own traffic in illegalities, so that even a
sanitary overseer, Atkinson, who accepted_a bribe from a man in whose
house incriminating materials were found, could not be prosecuted since
he was the administrator of the sanitary laws!&dquo;
The arbitrariness of the law was the cause of bitter complaint well into
the 1940s,~ and the Court frequently commented on the illegalities of
procedure that vitiated many trials.204 In the case of a mestri who was
prosecuted for having failed to prevent a blast that led to the death of his
workmen, the prosecution produced just one witness, whose evidence was
’mostly hearsay’. 205 Where foreign overseers and engineers could abuse,
even threaten the Indian mine worker with impunity where lower penal-
ties for assault were inflicted on Europeans than Indians2l there was little
199
Communication from I. Loganathan, 22 May 1995. Smuggling of gold continues to be a
problem to the present day and for the most part occurs with the active connivance of the
senior officers. Interview with Savaridoss, Trade Unionist, 5 January 1995.
200
K.S. Seetharaman, Kolar Thangavayel Varalarai, 1956 Varai, KGF, 1989, pp. 58-59.
201
Maraimalainagar, 1991, p. 281.
P. Srinivasan, Ennathu Varkay Varalaru
202
File no. 3, Sl. no. 1 and 4, Legislative, KSA; File no. 3, Sl. no. 2, 3, 5, Legislative, KSA.
203
Thus, the workers of Champion Reef Mines complained in 1920 against the arbitrary
fines imposed on sinkmen who came to the surface when they felt faint underground. File no.
111-20, Sl. no. 1-10, CB, KSA; RCIMM, 1940-41, p. 24.
204
Mohammad Mastan vs. GOM, 12 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 57; In re Chowriappa, 6 Mys
CCR, 1901, p. 100.
205
Venketa Reddy vs GOM, 10 Mys CCR, 1905, p. 80.
206
FR for the fortnight ending 30 September 1934, CRR, KSA.
207
RCIMM, 1941, p. 25.
 52,

to convince the Indian labourer that the law protected his interests as well.
The law functioned as yet another reminder that under colonial rule, the
migrant, lower caste and propertyless Tamil labourer was certainly not a
candidate for any privileges enjoyed by Europeans or the richer class of
Indians.
Despite this, there were also frequent reminders that the dense network
of punitive regulations, administered by a formidable phalanx of supervisors,
overseers, and magistrates, could not always guarantee the docility of
labour. The KGF labourer recognized the severely circumscribed limits
within which he could defend his dignity, and built up a small but spirited
repertoire of actions that he could deploy to his advantage: occasionally
working the ’due process of law’ to his advantage, skilfully evading detection
through the widespread use of anonymity, and occasionally appealing to
the supra-power of the Dewan as the representative of the Maharaja to
tame the intemperate force of colonial repression. At other and more
unexpected times, the indignation of the workers found more direct and
violent expression in riots and strikes, in which the agents of surveillance
were targeted for attack.
.

II ,

The ’Due Process of Law’

The KGF workers had no reason to expect justice in the District Magistrate’s
court when the laws were weighted so heavily against them. But the
outcome of the court case could not entirely be predicted, for how else
could the persuasive power of law manifest itself except through vestiges of
’impartiality’? There were moments when the law held ambiguous possibil-
ities even for those prosecuted under it: as early as 1905, J. Bourdillion, the
Resident of Mysore complained that ’local magistrates put obstacles in the
way of convictions for theft of gold’.’ The superintendents of mines also
frequently expressed their impatience with the slow, tedious turns of the
law and often favoured departmental punishments which could be meted
out more summarily than the procedures of the court,’ chafing at obstacles
placed in their efforts to check the epidemic of crime.2lO In 1937, Charles
Todhunter, private secretary to the Maharaja of Mysore, attributed the
prevalence of accidents in the gold mines to the overall failure to convincingly
and effectively convict those committing breaches of mining rules.211 ’The

208
R1/1/1066, Foreign Department Confidential, B Internal Branch, Section A 1905, India
Office Library, London.
209
RCIMM, 1906-17, p. 45.
210
PMRA, 1923, p. 72. The Inspector General of Police spoke in 1929 of the difficulty of
producing evidence before magistrates, PMRA, 1929, June, p. 205.
211
File no. 31-37, Sl. no. 1-5, Geology KSA.
 ’53

man responsible will frequently plead guilty before the Inspector [of mines]
who knows the facts and figures surrounding circumstances but if put on
trial will engage a vakil to do his best to confuse a magistrate who has never
been underground’ and thereby obtain an acquittal. 212 Worse yet, Todhunter
complained, the fines levied by the courts or superintendents were too mild
to prevent repetition or deter carelessness.
No doubt, the fears of a paralysis in the administration of the law were
vastly exaggerated: had the judicial system in the KGF been as unproductive
as these statements suggest, the Mining Board would have more than

amply armed itself with other sterner measures. On the contrary, not only
was the conviction rate consistently high, the Chief Inspector of Mines had
occasion as late as 1928 to report that ’prosecutions for breaches of mining
rules in connection with accidents have been successfully conducted in
criminal courts’ .21’ But there were early indications that the due process of
law to which the mining authorities paid scant attention, could be a
stumbling block to achieving even higher conviction rates. Subbachari, a
goldsmith, was acquitted by the Chief Court, despite being in unlawful
possession of Golhally sponge gold because ’Golhally was not included in
the notified area’. 211 Silversmith Subbachary was able to convince the
Magistrate that the provisions of the mining regulation were strictly applic-
able only to goldsmiths. 211 In the case of Abdul Rahim, a tailor who was
found in possession of 30 pink stearine candles, the prosecution could not
prove that they were ’in his exclusive possession’ .216 Some were acquitted
on the grounds that what was found in their possession was not ’mining

material&dquo; 211 others for having been prosecuted in areas that fell outside the
jurisdiction of the mining regulation/18 or sometimes simply because the
proper legal procedures had not been followed in bringing the accused to
trial.2’9
Even the smallest number of cases that were decided in favour of the
accused person under the mining regulation therefore had its uses in
maintaining the illusion of a ’disinterested’ law. But the wheels of the law
moved too slowly and told too heavily on the meagre resources of the

212
Ibid.
213
RCIMM, 1927-28, p. 20, (emphasis added).
214
Subbachari vs. GOM, 3 Mys CCR, 1898, p. 124.
215
GOM vs. Subbachary 3 Mys CCR, 1898, p. 141.
216
Abdul Rahim vs GOM, 9 Mys CCR, 1904, p. 100. Also Abdul Razack vs GOM, 5 Mys
CCR, 1900, p. 185.
217
Annama alias Mari vs. GOM, 12 Mys CCR 1907, p. 56. Mohommed Mastan vs GOM 12
Mys CCR, 1907, p. 156.
218
In Re Vadavelachari 10 Mys CCR 1905, p. 156.
219
In re David 6 Mys CCR, 1901, p. 98; In re Chowriappa 6 Mys CCR, 1901, p. 97; In the
matter of Nadamuni 12 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 64; Venketa Reddy vs GOM, 10 Mys CCR, 1905,
p. 80; Munisamachari and 2 others vs GOM 12 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 75; Chennappa alias
Chengachari and another vs GOM 12 Mys CCR, 1907, p. 78.
54/J

impoverished labourer. Most cases that went on appeal to the Chief Court
were cases involving a better endowed class, men of means, who could

’find a purse and a lawyer’:2~° goldsmiths, contractors and shopowners.

Even so, cases concerning goldsmiths came to the High Court on appeal
with drastically reduced frequency after the 1910s, signifying that they had
made their peace with the suppliers of gold and other intermediaries such
as the police, settling into a comfortable and profitable network of illegalities

by this time.
In contrast, a low caste coolie such as Murugesham could be speedily
dismissed from his job and even ’extradited’ to British India.&dquo; Others,
such as Chowriappa, who were too harshly punished under the sanitary
byelaws, had already served their sentences when they were acquitted by
the higher court.222 It was not surprising then, that workers sometimes
chose to express their resentment in more direct ways, through riots and
strikes against those who were seen as the very embodiment of the vicious
regime of surveillance on the mines.
Attacks on the Agents of Surveillance
In 1907, riots broke out in the Mysore mines coolie lines following the
molestation of a woman named Palliam by four Punjabi watchmen. The
watchmen dragged off the protesting husband, Madurai, to their quarters
and when several of Madurai’s mates came to his rescue, went on rampage
through the coolie lines, dragging away two other men in order to prevent
them from filing any complaints Even after these two men were released,
the indignant coolies came as a large crowd the next day and attacked the
Punjabis with stones, leading to a full-scale riot. The task of placating the
enraged coolies was not easy since they ’could not name any Punjabis and
had to identify them’.’ They only dispersed when they were assured that
the Punjabi lines would be moved away from the coolie lines.
Two days later it became obvious that general resentment against all the
watch and ward staff was growing and spreading to new sites instead of
subsiding. Presuming, and not without reason, that the Punjabis had been
treated too leniently, the coolies of Ribbensdale shaft refused to go down
to work on 28 December 1907, when they saw several Punjabis taking their
place at the shaft heads in the afternoon. Instead, ’stones began to be
thrown first at the Punjabis and the picking floor and at the Taylor’s and

220
p. 26.
The phrase is from E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters,
221
File no. 84-02, Sl. no. 1-4, Courts, 1902-3, KSA.
222
In re Chowriappa, 6 Mys CCR, 1901, p. 100, (1901).
223
File no. 125-07, Sl. no. 1-17, Police, KSA.
224
S.M. Pritchard to Deputy Commissioner, Kolar District, ibid.
225
Judgement, Criminal Case number 360 of 1907-8, 2 January 1908.
 /55

Crocker’s Shafts, and later at the police and the Europeans’. 226 This continued
until police forces swung into action in the coolie lines, arresting a few and
marching them off to the police station. The restive crowd finally began to
disperse due to the intervention of the Deputy Commissioner of Kolar, and
after the KGF Rifle Volunteers ’advanced upon the crowd in extended
order’.&dquo;
The court’s investigations, in cases filed against the Punjabis for the first
riot and against the coolies for the second, revealed that Tamil workers
clearly resented the molestation of the woman Palliam. However, there was
also ’a feeling of resentment generally for the way in which they [the
Punjabis] had been conducting the search of coolies at the shaft heads in
the various mines for some time past’, 228 especially since the ’Panjabis work
well’.229 Indeed the latter worked too well, for Tamil workers said that

when they were absent from their huts on such hazardous tasks the
Panjabis went after and molested their women, assaulted old and young
in their huts, trumped up false charges against therm, annoyed and
teased them in so many ways and that when the Panjabis were caught
assaulting them instead of punishing them they themselves were set
against the worker
The Deputy Commissioner assured the workers that although ’their charges
against the Punjabis in general were unreasonable’ all specific complaints
would be carefully investigated and the culprits brought to justice
Some efforts were made to put a greater distance between the Punjabi
residential lines and the coolie lines, thereby reducing the undue and
offensive interest that the watchmen, separated for long periods of time
from their families, took in the women from Tamil coolie families. Yet
there was no significant change in the composition of the watch and ward
staff for the next three decades. Not surprisingly, in 1935, when more than
3,000 men struck work to protest against the introduction of new bonus
rates, the strikers attacked the Punjabi lines and tried to ’disable those
guarding mining property’, injuring as many as eleven Punjabi watchmen.
The mining authorities instructed the police to open fire on the agitating
workers, resulting in the deaths of tWO.232
226
Judgement, Criminal Case number 372 of 1907-8.
227
Ibid.
228
Ibid. , District Magistrate to Officiating Secretary, Government of Mysore, 17 January 1908
(emphasis added).
229
Criminal Case no. 360 of 1907-8, p. 16.
230
DM Kolar to Officiating Secretary, GOM, 5 January 1908.
231
Proceedings of the Government of Mysore, No. J 2855-57-Pol, 125-07, 18 March 1908.
232
File no. 981-35, Sl. no. 1-3, Residency Files, NAI; FR for the fortnight ending 15 August
1935, CRR, KSA.
56

Any occasion for resentment against the Company could turn against the
Punjabi watch and ward staff, who were among those whose very appear-
ance, so distinct from the mass of Tamil labouring people, heightened the
hatred that the working population harboured against the daily search
routines, and against the menacing attitudes of the security staff even when
off duty. In any case, the Punjabi was identified in workers’ songs as part of
the chain for smuggling gold, a ’half thief’. 233 At such moments, the naked
hostility of the labourers to the deployment of power in the mines revealed
itself with a force that was alarming, and remained undettered by pleas of
the company/state to seek other, less violent, channels of protest, and
unmindful of the consequences. When the heavy hand of the law appeared
to strike against the labourers with such consistency, so that they took the law
into their own hands, the persuasive powers of the mining authorities
reached their limits, forcing them to turn to pure repression, as they did in
1907, when they indiscriminately arrested people from the coolie lines.
Over the years, the long-suffering labourer himself recognized the power
of collective action in extracting concessions, and in restoring a sense of
justice to life on the mines. In 1941, a partial strike affecting the Mysore
Mines and the Champion Reef mines began when a European miner who
had assaulted an Indian workman, and another European agent who had
abused an Indian underground coolie, were fined lightly; the striking
workers demanded dismissal of the Europeans. 114 Repeated assurances
from the District Magistrate and the Chief Inspector of Mines who ’explained
to them that there were courts of law to prosecute the European miner’
failed to impress the Indian workers, who remained on strike for eight
days, resuming work only when they were assured of justice.235
These were but occasional challenges to the operations of the law in
KGF. For the most part, the machinery of justice, though formally in the
domain of the state, was kept well-oiled in the interests of the mining
company and left little room for illusion among the workers. As a pamphlet
brought out in 1947 for the AITUC session at Calcutta pointed out, there
was little to distinguish the autocracy of the Company from the despotism
of the state.236 There were some rare moments when the miners appealed to
the supra-power of the Dewan, the representative of the Maharaja, who
alone, it was felt could loosen the excessively tight grip that the companies
kept on the workers. The most spectacular instance of such intervention
was during the 1930 general strike, which was called off only after the

Dewan assured workers that he would effect immediate changes in company

policy.2&dquo; By 1940, when strenuous efforts were being made to establish a
233
Sreenivasa Dass, Vazhinadai Nondichindu, pp. 10-11.
234
RCIMM, 1940-41, pp. 25-6.
235
Ibid. FR for the fortnight ending 15 May 1941, CRR, KSA.
236
’The Kolar Gold Miners Speak’, N.D. Shanker Private Papers, KSA.
237
File no. 159-29, Sl. no. 1, 20, 21, Confidential Branch, KSA; FR for the fortnight ending
30 April 1930, CRR, KSA.
 57

union in the face of severe repression, even the Dewan’s intervention

failed to produce the desired result of workers calling off a strike which
lasted twenty-eight days&dquo;’ that finally ended only when all demands had
’

been met.239

The Uses of Anonymity

By the 1920s, there were few sites that the long arm of the law did not
reach in KGF. A vast accumulation of men and their families densely
packed into a small geographical space, made it easy to detect and quell
popular illegalities. In the 1920s, the Mysore state, ever ready to oblige
Company demands for near total power in the region, found fresh reasons
to make common cause with the companies. The irresistible attractions
that democracy held for many sections of Mysore society were as threaten-
ing to the princely order as to the mine management.
In such repressive circumstances, could subterfuge be far behind? We
have already noted the frequency with which the mining management
complained about the ease with which mestris and blasters switched between
mines, prosecuted and dismissed from one, while finding a foothold in
another. There was frequent movement of coolies between mines on
assumed names .21 Even the metal discs that were issued to qualified
mestris and blasters had a pawn value, and may well have helped some
unemployed men gain entry into the mines.241 Perhaps the practice of using
aliases which so frustrated the mining authorities was poetic justice given
that in KGF, as in all colonial situations, the colonized were destined to
wear the ’mark of the plural’, for as Albert Memmi says, ’The Colonized is

never characterised in an individual manner; he is entitled to drown in an

anonymous collectivity’. 242 Indeed, so useful was the notion of an ’anonymous

collectivity’ and so jealously did the mining labourer protect it that the first
attempt made in 1930 to introduce a system of identification was unanimously
resisted.
Under the harsh glare of the mining regulation, anonymity had several
other uses as well. Anonymous notices pasted on rocks, trees and in the
coolie lines were not merely cathartic but threatening communications,
fearless speech on behalf of that amorphous mass of mining labour in a
situation where other avenues of communication were quickly stifled or
traced to their sources. Although it lacked the power of the political
meeting, the strike pamphlet or the union office, anonymity unnerved the
mine management and set state apparatuses on guard, brazenly defying the
regime of surveillance by parading as the unmediated voice of the workers.
238
FR for the fortnight ending 30 July 1940, CRR, KSA.
239
FR for the fortnight ending 15 August 1940, CRR, KSA.
240
File no. 73-33 Sl. no. 1-10, Geology, KSA.
241
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, p. 31.
242
Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, p. 151.
58

There can be no doubt that the anonymous tradition must have been part
of a robust political subculture in the KGF, yet it was only during moments
of generalized unrest that it was noticed and reported (and thus became
visible to the historian). The heightened alert of the police in the politically
uncertain days of 1942, for example, has provided us a rich sampling of the
traffic in anonymous messages.
In 1930, an anonymous notice pasted on a rock in the Oorgaum coolie
lines exhorted workers not to permit the mining companies to take thumb
impressions, which led to a general strike that lasted eighteen days, and
achieved its object.z’3 The leaderless strike of 1930 broke through the calm
surface of untroubled employee-employer relations, giving the state and
mining authorities an alarming glimpse Qf what the organized power of the
labourers could achieve, even without an identifiable leadership. How
much more troubling this force could become if irresponsible labour agitators
were allowed free reign in the Fields!2&dquo; Yet identifiable labour leaders
were still preferable to this dark anonymous force that mocked the disci-

plinary efforts of the company/state: one of the notices found in the mines
during the strike was signed by ’Danda Sothu Dadi Raman’, one who eats
but does not work, a metaphoric reversal of the drive for increased efficiency
and profit, and an ironic acceptance of the constitutional laziness to which
mining labour was condemned.
Nor was such anonymity threatening only to the authorities. In the early
1940s, when several labour leaders began to express interest in starting a
formal trade union at the KGF, anonymous notices were aimed against ’cut
throat’ union leaders who had received bribes from the companies .211 Notices
sometimes exhorted workers to participate in strikes and be united
warned chit fund collectors not to collect dues when workers were on
strike, and urged strikers not to pay. 241 Scheduled caste employees of the
mines were warned against leaders who paid lip service to the language of
non-Brahmanism: thus ’Oh! You Brahmin who say that &dquo;Aryan get out
and Aryapurana get in&dquo; you must remove all these ... [indistinct] of
Aryans and work for your adi-Dravidas. ’248 ’Friends interested in the welfare
243
File no. 171-29, Sl. no. 1, 2, 3, 6 to 9, 11, 14, 17 to 19, Confidential Branch, KSA.
244
There were clear indications of the mining administration’s fear of the gradual infiltration of
labour organizers into the KGF area in the 1920s. C.N. Keith, ’Presidential Address’, KGF
Bulletin, Vol. 5, no. 26, April-December 1929, p. 38ff, said ’I would like to see the professional
labour leader banned at least from such comparatively primitive societics as those we have to
deal with.’ p. 40.
245
These anonymous notices, available to us in English translations invariably done by
policeman in the Fields, are only distinguishable by the date on which they were submitted to
the office, which may or may not have been the date on which they were discovered.
5 October 1942, Collection 42 of 1942-43, Confidential 147-42-19, KSA.
246
Ibid., 6 October 1942.
247
Ibid., 8 October 1942.
248
Ibid., 10 September 1942.
 59

of Champion Reef labourers’ shrewdly asked, ’Is our union a labour

union? Or a political one? Or a capitalistic one?’ In the concealed violence
of these messages, the questioning spirit of the worker briefly flared into
view, while remaining undetected and therefore unattached to any single
individual. 249

. , m
~

The brief glimpses that we get of the fighting spirit of the KGF worker
could well tempt us into constructing a narrative of subaltern protest that
flew in the face of almost certain repression. That would be as unjust to the
triumphs of the surveillance systems of company/state as it would be to the
daily struggles of the KGF workers, for whom deaths of previous generations
from silicosis or rockbursts are as much markers of memory as strikes, riots
and other collective actions.&dquo;° But neither can the monotonous list of rules
and punitive measures be the sole concern of the labour historian. Instead,
the focus here has been on the specific ways in which capitalist production
processes organized’and disciplined its workers, through the deployment of
a conception, however flawed, of law.

What becomes quite clear in KGF is the novel function of the law,
which, in its very zeal to mark, quantify and prosecute subaltern ’criminality’,
served to suppress from public view another set of illegalities in which the
colonial masters were implicated. The active deployment of racial difference
in the administration of Law provided the rich soil in which such illegalities
flourished. So artfully disguised.was this subterranean sphere of activity, so
successfully did it cover its tracks, that it nearly escapes the eye of the
historian.
On the other hand, if the supervision and control of the mining population
was conveniently effected through the instrumentalities of the law, the

mining authorities studiously averted their eyes from those illegalities

prevalent on the Fields that called for regulation and intervention if on a
much smaller scale. The illegalities of moneylenders, for example, were for
the mining authorities too convenient a form of labour control to warrant
action on the part of the company/state until 1938. In 1930, M.A. Sreenivasan
drew attention to the possibility of controlling professional moneylending
through Section 7 of the Mining Regulation, but his suggestion was ignored
Considering the large numbers of KGF workers who were steeped in
debt,211 only on rare occasions did the law come to the rescue of the
249
See also E.P. Thompson, ’The crime of anonymity’ in Hay, et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree, p. 306.
250
Interview with Swekin, 6 January 1995, KGF, who lost his father to silicosis and his
grandfather to a rockburst.
251
Sreenivasan, Labour in India, pp. 36-37.
252
Ibid., pp. 29-42; also Deshpande, Report, p. 21; File no. 6-38, Sl. no. 2-3, 1938,
Legislative, KSA.
60

labouring poor; so exceptional was the conviction of the moneylender

Heera Lall, who was sentenced to 15 days Simple Imprisonment and a fine
of Rs 100 for refusing to return a poor KGF woman’s gold chain, that it
made its way into a nationalist newspaper.z53
In such a context, Foucault’s insistence on the dual nature of systems of
penalty-to discipline as much as to punish-is more persuasive than
Thompson’s invitation to appreciate the ideological uses of the rule of
law. But Foucault’s formulations also lead to something of an impasse.
For while,the disciplinary mechanisms which were forged in Europe could
be conveniently deployed in the colonial setting, they were without the
same effects. The capitalist enterprise in colonial India was but one of the

many forms of economic exploitation that willingly adapted to the forms of

power and authority that already existed, instead of transforming them.
When such forms proved inadequate to the task, new disciplinary appara-
tuses were introduced, but they too remained exceptional, and were not
part of wider disciplinary society. Colonial rule did not usher in a ’combined
and generalised’ universe of various techniques of discipline, mutually co-
operating in the production of knowledge and reinforcing the increase of
power
Far from representing a shift away from absolutist forms of power to
more abstract forms of legality, the complex of laws and regulations that
were instituted in the KGF represented negotiations between two kinds of

despotism, the despotism of the princely state and the despotism of the
colonial enterprise. As we have seen throughout, princely state authority
was weak, defensive, and clearly subordinated to British rule. The powers

sought by the mining authorities and so readily conceded by the princely

state did not have to be concerned with the aspirations of the labouring
poor at all. In that sense there was little dissonance between the Company
and the state in the governance of the KGF. When critical words about the
mining authorities appeared at all, it was when individual officials such as
M.A. Sreenivasan in 1930, K. Mathen in 1940, and S.R. Deshpande in
1945-46, conducted independent investigations that showed more sensitivity
to the needs of KGF’s labouring poor.
Yet it is striking that even these three men did not consider the systemized
terror that operated in KGF worthy of comment or reform. Although the
Sreenivasan and Mathen reports in particular expressed severe disapproval
of several arrangements on the Fields, they stopped short of commenting
on the draconian law. It was here that the liberal critique of gross injustices
met its limit, for the independent officials, like the Mysore state itself,

253
The Hindu 27, 1938.
254
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 224.
 61

recognized only too well that the severely repressive conditions in KGF
were a small price to pay for economic development. Critiques of the
indignities to which the labourers were subjected did find expression in
collective protests at KGF, particularly after 1930, and by 1940 there were
also some political leaders willing to shape such protests in more meaning-
ful ways.