Bengali Songs about Futures Past: Textile workers and Protest Cultures

This paper charts a history of how Bengali textiles workers have imagined futures since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. With the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) designing pathways towards ‘post-industrial’ futures, the large-scale industrial production of textiles has relocated from OECD countries to factories in some of the poorest regions of the world. In contemporary Bangladesh, an estimated 4-million workers - mostly women and girls - are employed in the ready-made garments industry in the Dhaka region alone. The employment of increasing numbers of Bengali women and girls in textiles industries has propelled deep changes to gender relations, transforming the terrain of workers’ movements in the region. As Western designs for ‘development’ have been refashioned from older narratives of imperial progress in the post-1947 period, the Bangladeshi garment worker has increasingly appeared in international public discourse as the universally subordinated woman.

Examining Bengali women’s song-poetry about textile production, this paper looks to the protest cultures of garment workers to explore alternative approaches to understanding changing gender relations. Starting from the premise that protest songs, like all discursive productions, are embedded within larger narratives about imagined futures, this paper examines the futures that South Asian factory workers have articulated in the so-called ‘post-colonial’ era. What can their imagined trajectories reveal about changing gender relations? If Bengali garment workers are not singing songs celebrating development, what alternative indices do structure their protests? What lessons can feminist historians learn from textile workers’ songs?