Dignity above gold: Revisiting the KGF workers’ strike of 1930 Premium

It was a serendipitous discovery for historian Janaki Nair when she came across a report about the general strike of mine workers at KGF in The Hindu newspaper dated April 6, 1930, the same day Gandhiji broke the salt law. Nair, who has extensively researched and written about the general strike of 1930 at KGF, recently spoke at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) as part of a series of lectures on subaltern struggles in the princely state of Mysore.

A mention of the year 1930 might remind most Indians of the Civil Disobedience Movement and the Dandi March. But down south, in the princely state of Mysore, in the deep, dark and dangerous mines of Kolar Gold Fields (KGF), the flames of a very peculiar proletarian struggle were being kindled around the same time. 

It was a serendipitous discovery for historian Janaki Nair when she came across a report about the general strike of mine workers at KGF in The Hindu newspaper dated April 6, 1930, the same day Gandhiji broke the salt law. Nair, who has extensively researched and written about the general strike of 1930 at KGF, recently spoke at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) as part of a series of lectures on subaltern struggles in the princely state of Mysore.

The 21-day long strike by an 18,000-strong workforce against a new system of fingerprint registration introduced by John Taylor & Sons has a special place in the list of labour movements given how the workers mobilised under no obvious leadership and succeeded at bringing the company to meet their demands. 

The first news report on the strike appeared in The Hindu on April 4, 1930, under the headline “Kolar Gold Field – The Oorgaum Mine Strike.”

The events, however, started unfurling on April 1, 1930, says Nair, when an anonymous notice was found attached to a rock in KGF urging the mining workers to stop providing their fingerprints.  

The company’s explanation for introducing the new registration was that it needed to register all workers and be able to identify them to fulfill obligations under the Workman’s Compensation Act introduced in Mysore in the previous year in 1929.  

“The anonymous notices which sprang up in different parts of this 75 square mile area were asking workers to simply stop work from April 8 until the new registration system was withdrawn,” Nair notes.