Caste pollution beliefs determined which jobs Untouchables held inside Bombay mills

Evidence

Logically, the direction in which Ambedkar was moving ought to have made him a natural ally of the Communist Party of India, founded in 1925, two years before the Mahad Satyagraha. Bolshevism was in the air. The Russian Revolution had inspired communists around the world. In the Bombay Presidency, the trade union leader S.A. Dange, a Maharashtrian Brahmin, organised a large section of the Bombay textile workers into a breakaway union—India’s first communist trade union—the Girni Kamgar Union, with seventy thousand members. At the time a large section of the workforce in the mills were Untouchables, many of them Mahars, who were employed only in the much lower paid spinning department, because in the weaving department workers had to hold thread in their mouths, and the Untouchables’ saliva was believed to be polluting to the product. In 1928, Dange led the Girni Kamgar Union’s first major strike. Ambedkar suggested that one of the issues that ought to be raised was equality and equal entitlement within the ranks of workers. Dange did not agree, and this led to a long and bitter falling out. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 336

Categorization

• XREF: The thread-in-mouth detail is the causal mechanism that kept Mahars out of weaving — caste as a production-structure force, matching the book’s argument that caste is division of labour.
• SEED: Article angle: caste as a hidden pricing mechanism inside the labor market — how pollution taboos operated as a wage-discrimination device no union leadership challenged.