Ahmedabad's Alienated Textile Workers

India's textile industry can be said to have an 'ABC' of urban centres — Ahmedabad, Bombay and Coimbatore —which have coincidentally developed in chronological order as well. It was the British who first began to manufacture cotton in the country. The first mills were set up by East India Company employees or colonial administration officials in the 1820s, a good 30 years before either British or Indian entrepreneurs began to invest in them. While the mill set up in Bombay by Indian businessmen had British partners, "the first centre of Indian entrepreneurial initiative was Ahmedabad, where the early mills were financed by local capital and managed exclusively by Indians," according to S.R.B. Leadbeater, author of a recent book on the swadeshi legacy in the Indian textile industry.1 The first mill began functioning in Ahmedabad in 1861 — seven years later than Bombay —and the city earned itself the epithet 'Manchester of India'. Writes Leadbeater: "The cotton mill initiated in