The Making of a Working-Class City: Housing and Labor Movements in Bombay

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay transformed from a cluster of seven islands into the cotton textile capital of the subcontinent. The engine of this transformation was not the mill owners or colonial administrators but the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who tended the looms and spindles. They built the city’s wealth, yet they were squeezed into some of the most cramped housing imaginable. Out of this contradiction-a prosperous industrial city resting on the labour of an impoverished and tightly packed workforce-emerged a distinct working-class identity, a powerful trade union movement, and a vibrant culture of resistance. Understanding how Bombay became a working-class city means looking closely at where these workers lived, how they organised, and the songs and stories they created along the way.

Chawls and the housing of mill workers 🔗

The textile mills were concentrated in central Bombay, in a belt of neighbourhoods that came to be known collectively as Girangaon, literally “the village of mills.” Areas like Parel, Lalbaug, Byculla, Tardeo, Sewri and Worli filled up with workers who had migrated from the Konkan coast, the Deccan, and beyond. To house this growing labour force close to the factory gates, mill owners and landlords built chawls-multi-storey tenement buildings that became the defining architecture of working-class Bombay.

A typical chawl rose four to five storeys, with rows of single-room dwellings called kholis opening onto a long common corridor. Each floor shared a single block of toilets. A single room of roughly 100 to 200 square feet often had to accommodate an entire family, and frequently several unrelated workers crowded in together to share the rent. These rooms were highly congested, unsanitary, and unsafe, and ironically more expensive than comparable housing in other Indian cities. The scale of the problem was staggering: by 1911, nearly 70 percent of the city’s population lived in chawls or one-room tenements.

The plague and the Bombay City Improvement Trust 🔗

The dangers of this overcrowding became impossible to ignore in 1896, when a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague swept through the city. The disease spread fastest through the squalid, poorly ventilated quarters where workers lived, and death rates in working-class neighbourhoods climbed as high as 12.5 percent. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled the city, crippling the mills that depended on their labour.

The colonial response was the creation of the City of Bombay Improvement Trust in 1898, charged with clearing slums, widening roads, and building sanitary housing for the poor. On paper, the Trust had an ambitious mandate. In practice, it largely failed the very people it claimed to help. The Trust demolished old tenements to lay out wide streets and drainage lines, but it rarely rehoused the people it displaced. When new chawls were finally built, their rents proved unaffordable for ordinary workers, so the government-built chawls stood unpopular and underused while the mill chawls grew even more crowded.

The verdict on this experiment was damning. When the Trust was dissolved in 1919 after twenty-one years of work, 74 percent of the city’s residents still lived in one-room tenements. A central reason was the divided responsibility between the Trust and the mill owners. Rather than rethinking popular housing as was happening in England, the Trust simply made minor improvements to the chawl model, while owners and the state blamed each other and deferred the cost of a real solution. The result was that the housing crisis at the heart of Bombay’s working class was never resolved during the colonial period.

The rise of labour consciousness 🔗

The dense, semi-collective life of the chawl had a powerful unintended consequence. When workers from the same mill, the same village, and the same caste lived elbow to elbow, sharing courtyards, festivals, food, and grievances, the boundary between home and workplace blurred. The chawl became a space where the shared experience of exploitation could be talked about, understood, and acted upon. This everyday solidarity laid the social foundation for organised labour.

Bombay’s mill workers were numerically dominant and increasingly aware of their collective strength. Industrialisation had brought social inequity into sharp focus, and the textile workforce found itself at the forefront of the struggle for better wages and working conditions. Disputes over wage cuts, the hated practice of fining workers, and the introduction of new machinery that demanded more output from each labourer pushed tensions toward breaking point.

The great textile strike of 1928 🔗

That breaking point arrived in 1928. The flashpoint was the millowners’ attempt to introduce systems that increased each worker’s workload alongside wage reductions. Beginning in April and gathering force into May, more than a lakh textile workers went on strike, demanding the cancellation of wage cuts, higher pay for the lowest-paid, and standardised wage scales. The strike engulfed the entire mill district and lasted for over five months, causing an enormous loss of working days before it was called off in October 1928 after negotiations.

The strike is remembered as one of the defining moments of the Indian working-class movement, and it produced a lasting institution: the Girni Kamgar Union. Formed during the strike by communist leaders who broke away from the older, more cautious unions, the GKU quickly became the largest textile union in the city, with a membership that swelled past 70,000. Crucially, the established moderate leaders of the older unions had opposed a general strike; the militancy came from the workers themselves and the new radical leadership that gave them direction.

The colonial state recognised the threat. The arrest of GKU leaders, later swept up in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, was meant to decapitate the movement. Yet the workers’ capacity to organise survived. Between 1928 and 1938, the city witnessed an estimated 460 strikes, very few of which succeeded outright, but which together kept the question of workers’ rights permanently on the city’s agenda. The 1938 Bombay Industrial Disputes Act, which gave compulsory recognition to unions, was in part a response to this sustained militancy. As the historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar observed, Bombay’s labour movement under communist leadership had acquired an explicitly political direction, and its influence radiated outward to other industrial centres such as Sholapur and Ahmedabad.

Cultural and social movements 🔗

The working-class movement in Bombay was never only about wages and strikes. It was carried forward and sustained by a rich culture that grew out of the chawls and mill neighbourhoods. Folk forms native to Maharashtra-the powada, a heroic ballad traditionally sung to celebrate warriors, and tamasha, a popular form of musical theatre-were adapted to tell the story of the worker’s own struggle. These were not abstract art forms but living entertainment that workers consumed after a long shift.

The theatre of Girangaon was sometimes described as the “poorest of poor” theatres, where playwrights often went unpaid and performances took place on makeshift stages during festivals. According to a study of the period, until the 1960s and 1970s there were as many as ten to twelve tamasha performances every day in theatres such as the Hanuman Theatre in Lalbaug, beginning in the evening as workers trickled in from the mills and continuing late into the night. This theatre was a tool of political education as much as entertainment, and its regional Marathi content helped forge community bonds among workers from different backgrounds.

Annabhau Sathe and the voice of the mill-hand 🔗

No figure embodies this cultural movement better than Annabhau Sathe. A self-taught writer from a Dalit background, Sathe came to Bombay and entered its working-class movements, where he absorbed both Marxist thought and the influence of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. He used traditional folk forms-powada, tamasha and lavani-to spread messages of equality, resistance and pride, blending the struggles of caste and class into a single body of work.

Sathe’s songs spoke directly to the city’s labouring poor. Two of his compositions, “Mumbai Chi Lavani” and “Mumbai cha Girni Kamgar” (Bombay’s Mill-Hand), portrayed the city as rapacious, exploitative, unequal and unjust. Along with fellow artists such as the powada singer Amar Sheikh and the writer D. N. Gavankar, Sathe was part of the Lal Bawta Kalapathak (Red Flag Cultural Squad), a cultural troupe linked to the communist movement, and he was active in the Indian People’s Theatre Association. Through these platforms, the grievances and aspirations of the mill worker were transformed into art that travelled from chawl to chawl and strengthened the bonds of solidarity that strikes alone could not.

Festivals, religion and everyday solidarity 🔗

Cultural mobilisation also worked through religion and public celebration. The mass solidarity of chawl dwellers was visible in shared festivals, and political leaders understood its power early. In 1893, Lokmanya Tilak defied a colonial ban on public assembly by organising a public celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi at the Keshavji Naik chawl near Charni Road, in the heart of the mill district. What began as a religious festival became a vehicle for collective gathering and political consciousness. This intertwining of festival, neighbourhood, and politics was characteristic of how working-class Bombay sustained its identity: the same spaces that housed workers also organised them, entertained them, and gave them a sense of belonging that the harsh economics of the mill could not erase.

A working-class city and its long shadow 🔗

By bringing these threads together-the chawl, the union, and the song-we can see why Bombay deserves to be understood as a working-class city. Its industrial wealth was generated by a population packed into housing that colonial reform never fixed. That very density bred a consciousness of shared exploitation, which crystallised in landmark actions like the 1928 strike and durable institutions like the Girni Kamgar Union. And that political struggle was animated by a culture that gave workers dignity and voice.

The story did not end happily. The Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982, lasting around eighteen months, marked the collapse of the industry, and most mills shut down in its aftermath. In the decades since, the mill compounds of Girangaon have been redeveloped into malls, offices, and luxury towers, while the families of former workers have fought long legal battles over the chawls they once called home. The working-class city was, in many ways, dismantled. But its history remains essential to understanding how Bombay-now Mumbai-was actually built, and by whom.

What do you think? Should the surviving chawls of Girangaon be preserved as part of the city’s heritage, even as redevelopment promises modern housing and economic growth? And what does the rise and fall of Bombay’s mill workers teach us about how Indian cities treat the labour that builds them?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parel
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chawl
3. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/mills-and-boom-mumbai-s-social-fabric-and-the-ubiquitous-chawls-magazine-210702
4. https://www.academia.edu/72847320/The_Bombay_Improvement_Trust_Bombay_Millowners_and_the_Debate_Over_Housing_Bombay_s_Millworkers_1896_1918
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_City_Improvement_Trust
6. https://scroll.in/article/829864/these-mumbai-crosses-show-why-raj-thackeray-is-wrong-about-citys-british-era-glory
7. https://metropolitics.org/Plague-and-Urban-Policy-in-Bombay-1896-1914.html
8. http://www.doccentre.net/docsweb/LABOURLAWS/labour-struggles-century.htm
9. https://workersoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/WoW_08_08.pdf
10. https://testbook.com/mpsc-preparation/annabhau-sathe-social-reformer
11. https://testbook.com/question-answer/______-novel-of-anna-bhau-sathe-is-based-on-the-li–6022956476a39533bc1f9a46
12. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/the-boom-and-bust-of-bombay-mills-news-211684