Heat, Half-Days, and Holidays: Fixing the Hours of Work in Early 20th Century Kanpur

This talk asks an age-old question: Why did colonial India spend decades resisting the International Labour Organisation’s convention to regulate hours of work? Through the lens of the North Indian industrial city of Kanpur during the first few decades of the 20th century, I posit that simple economic explanations do not give the full answer top this question. The clues, instead, lie in a rather curious set of ideas about heat, laziness, and time that the colonial labour regime grappled with. In order to prove this, I trace two discourses regarding the hours of work debate. First is the relationship between the climatic rationale behind the colonial fiction of the ‘lazy native’ and turn-of-the-century discourse about worker efficiency and productivity. Second is the turn away from the working day as the centre of the hours of work debate and towards what can be called temporal margins: the far more contested ideas of halfdays, Sunday labour and holidays. Reading the evidence against the grain of EP Thompson’s model of linear industrial modernisation, I draw on theories of temporal pluralities to question the relationship between Capital and Labour in Colonial India.​