Madurai women staged the first recorded strike in the cotton mills of South India

Historic workplace: Madurai started industrialising in the 1860s. Madura Mills, a British-owned cotton spinning mill, began with 1,760 workers, and the number grew to 4,000. It is now called Madura Coats Private Limited.
| Photo Credit: R. ASHOK

In the 1860s, Madurai began embracing industrialisation. Weaving industries started flourishing in and around the region. By 1892, the famed Madura Mills, a British-owned cotton spinning mill, was established in the temple town. It began with 1,760 workers, and the number eventually grew to 4,000. About 28 years later, nearly 750 women workers went on a strike against patriarchal practices at the workplace. This strike, from April 14 to June 10, 1920, was the first recorded strike in the cotton mills of South India.

Contemporary newspapers described it as an action in defence of women’s honour. The Hindu, on April 13, 1920, reported a letter by George Joseph, president of the Madura Labour Union, addressed to the Labour Commissioner. “The repeated complaints against maistri Guruswami Naidu for obstructing the formation of a women’s labour union, bullying women, using objectionable language, and refusing to address their grievances led to the strike,” he wrote.

‘Policy violated’

In another letter dated April 30, Joseph said the mill’s opposition to the formation of a union contravened the policy of the Madras government, which had appointed a Commissioner of Labour to support — and not suppress — labour unions. In some ways, this mirrored the recent crisis at the Samsung India unit near Chennai, where workers demanded the right to form and register their union.

According to articles published in The Hindu, there were also attacks on workers attempting to unionise. Requesting protection for the protesters, Joseph wrote, “The government should interfere and prevent the management from inflicting injury on the labourers and the public by threatening to strangle the labour movement in Madura Mills.”

“The abuses and taunts faced by the women workers at the hands of supervisors and the administration were directly linked to their efforts to form a cangam (organisation),” notes researcher and academic M.V. Shobana Warrier in her work Women, Union, and the Strike Against Sexual Harassment in Colonial Madurai, 1920. She highlights the role of Mrs. George Joseph, wife of a Kerala-based lawyer, who supported the women workers locally.

In a letter to the editor of Madras Mail, George Joseph pointed out that the dismissal of over 67 workers by the mill manager, Gillespie, under the pretext of their being “undesirable”, was in fact due to their demand for forming a union. The original demand that prompted the strike was for the dismissal of the offending maistri.

In one of its editorials, The Hindu hailed the strike as a pioneering event in Indian history, in which women’s rights and workers’ rights merged in a collective demand for dignity at workplace. Ms. Warrier states that through their brave action, the women disrupted the dominant narrative in labour history that portrayed female workers as docile and invisible. “The instance demonstrates how women played an active, assertive, and militant role in trade union activity in the colonial Madras Presidency, even when both trade unionism and nationalist politics were in their infancy,” she argues.

The cotton mill industry, which first emerged in Madras and Madurai, grew around regions of cotton cultivation owing to easy access to raw materials and cheap labour. This growth also facilitated the entry of women workers in large numbers. “The influx of women workers from nearby villages led to reconfiguration of the workplace to accommodate their needs — not due to managerial benevolence, but as a result of grassroots pressure and top-down reform,” Ms. Warrier notes.

K. Swaminathan, former general secretary of the South Zone Insurance Employees’ Federation and member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Tamil Nadu executive committee, says such a historic labour movement is rare. “The protest was also to demand a safe and protective workplace. Though we now have Internal Complaints Committees under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, a retrospective understanding of such events could have resulted in better policies,” he adds.

Though led by women, the protest intersected with the broader labour rights movement. The formation of the Communist Party and the All India Trade Union Congress in 1920 further strengthened the demand for workers’ rights, Ms. Warrier observes.

Seamless transition

Writings in journals like Stri Dharma — established around 1918 by the Women’s Indian Association in Madras — along with direct activism, expanded the engagement with women workers beyond the mill gates. Ms. Warrier argues Madurai district, known for its sungudi (tie-and-dye work), offered women a relatively seamless transition from home-based craft to factory work. As the mills were often established close to their villages, there was no need for dislocation. By the early 20th Century, cotton mills in the region employed a significant number of women and children, as their rudimentary technologies allowed agrarian labourers to transition to mill work without training. “At its peak, the share of women in the cotton textile industry workforce in the region exceeded one-fourth,” Ms. Warrier records.