But though in many cases the ryot had become little better than a labourer in the employment of a landowner or money-lender, there was still a recognized class of landless labourers below him. In the villages near the relief works the labourer (who is always paid in kind) got 2½ lbs. of grain for a day’s work from dawn to dark with two hours off, and he could count on work most of the year if the rains were good. He also received one pair of shoes, one cloth, and ground for his hut, which he built himself. Some of the labourers told me of a further gift of three rupees a year (4s.) which seemed to be a kind of Christmas-box. If the wife worked she got 1⅛ lb. of grain a day. Turned into money, at the village price of grain, the labourer’s wage would thus be about 2d. a day, apart from his wife’s earnings (say 1d.) and the extras I have mentioned.[59]
Swadeshi Weavers, Bombay Mills.
Swadeshi Weavers, Madras Hand-looms.
[Face p. 284.
Beside the money-lender, the landowner, the cultivator, and the labourer, I found in every village one or two artisans, though the division of industry was not exact, and some of the artisans did a little agriculture as well. Nearly all villages seem to have a barber, a potter, a carpenter, “sweepers” or scavengers, and one or two priestly families to perform the common rites that mankind wants, to bless the harvest, foretell the weather, and control the local ghosts. In some villages I also found the hand-loom weaver, and in a Mohammedan village near Lahore the weaver told me he could make ten yards a day, which he valued at five annas, his wife spinning the yarn by walking to and fro as on a rope-walk. In the same village the carpenter was specially employed on making water-wheels. But the village artisans, as a rule, are not paid by the job but are allowed a fairly regular income by the village, each family contributing so many measures of grain at each of the two harvests for their support. For instance, the village priest gets about 5 lb. of grain per plough at harvest, but the potter gets 20 lb. per plough and the carpenter 50 lb.[60]
As far as mere money-value goes, it is not very hard to compare the earnings of village labourers and artisans with the earnings of workpeople in the towns. In the eighty or ninety cotton mills of Bombay, for instance, the average man’s wages are 18 rupees a month, or a little over 10d. a day; a woman’s highest wage is a fraction under 7d. a day, and half-time children, nominally over nine years old and under fourteen, get 2¾d. a day, which is more than the average labourer’s wage in the village. At a mill in Delhi I found the wages were less—12 rupees a month instead of 18 for men, and 6 rupees instead of 8 for boys; but the hours of labour were twelve with one hour off instead of thirteen with (nominally) only half an hour off. In reality, I think it would be quite impossible to get Indians to do what Lancashire people would call work for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch, with only those little breaks. At all events, it is not done.
By the measure of money, then, the Bombay mill-hand would seem to be about five times better off than the village labourer of the United Provinces. In so far as most people enjoy living in swarms rather than in isolation, he is better off; but otherwise the lot of both is perhaps almost equally unenviable. The hours in a Bombay mill are spent in monotonous labour, among hideous noise, and in a fluffy atmosphere, where there are no fans to decrease the dust, the heat, or the smell. All round the factories, workmen’s dwellings, or “chawls,” have sprung up, usually in galleries of single rooms along the first floor above a row of open shops. The average rent is one rupee (1s. 4d.) a week for a room, and the whole family lives in one room, in which, as a rule, there is no window but the door. Most families are saved a lot of dusting and breakages by having no furniture except a metal cooking-pot for the rice and dal—a sort of split pea. These are cooked in cocoanut oil, and form the almost invariable food, though in one black hole I did see a woman cooking something that smelt like the ghost of a fish, and sometimes a family launched out into a maize pancake. In one or two rooms there were real decorations—portraits of Rama, of Krishna, or the King—and for a week every doorway was hung with a string of dry leaves, ears of rice, and little crimson flowers like knapweed, in memory, I suppose, of some old village festival. All night long, under a waning moon, the mill hands sat in the verandahs of these wretched homes, beating drums, and chanting their barbaric scales—“praising God,” as they said when we asked them; but what form of God, or for what reason they praised Him, they could not explain.
