Of peripheral labour: Trajectories of the dalit labour in southern Indian plantations, 1820s-2001

As the penetration of global capital accentuates so does the process of peripheralisation and resistance, as has been empirically informed by the lives of plantation workers - mostly the dalits - in southern India as they evolved from the mid-19th century; an integrationist perspective of the World System approach and the Subaltern Studies, too, points towards this theoretical premise. The paper argues that peripheral labour might be better understood as subject people subordinated at multiple levels such as class, caste/race and gender in the local production site but within the larger world capitalist economy. Not only has the labour process of the plantation work-world been structured by the larger world system but their day to day struggle too is complexed with the state and the local specificities. Further, the transfer of periodical crises by capital onto the local labouring poor continues while, as always, prosperity remains guarded. With resistance being endemic to this process, the workers did not hold back on spontaneous protests, but, of late, the transformation of militancy to collusion appears to have become the overarching reality; capital thus proceeds with new modes of surplus appropriation.