A Genuine Effort to Chronicle the Mughalpura Workers’ Movement

The last couple of decades had witnessed a renewed interest in labour history which has been marked by a range of writings on labour in South Asia. This resurgence in the writings about labour in South Asia, however, has been disproportionately focused towards studying the history of labour in post-partition India. In this renewal of labour history, writings on workers from Pakistan, in general, and Lahore, in particular, have received limited attention. In the nationalist historiography of Pakistan, which remained largely focused on the formation of Pakistan as a Muslim state, the history of Lahore and its diverse working population remained invisible. Ahmad Azhar’s book, Revolution in Reform: Trade-Unionism in Lahore, c 1920–1970, is an important attempt to address this neglect. The book narrates the history of railway workers employed at Lahore’s Mughalpura railway workshop from the early 1920s when labour emerged as a sociopolitical category up to the decade of the 1970s when the working-class movement faced isolation and subsequent decline.

Forging Plebeian Collectives