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I Broke the

Glass Ceiling in
the Jute Mills of
Calcutta!
A Personal Story by

Amrit Baruah


I Broke the Glass
Ceiling in the Jute
Mills of Calcutta!
A Personal Story by

Amrit Baruah

Copyright © 2009 by Amrit Baruah

Also by the author:

“Assam, India: Valley of Tea and Temples”


http://www.scribd.com/doc/3664871/Assam-India-Valley-of-Tea-and-Temples

“My Childhood in Assam: Growing Up in the Last Days of the British Raj”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17523917/My-Childhood-in-Assam-Growing-Up-in-
the-Last-Days-of-the-British-Raj
Amrit Baruah was born and raised in the eastern part of
Assam Valley, in the heart of the tea-growing region. He
left at the age of sixteen to attend Presidency College in
Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he stayed on after gradua-
tion for employment with jute industry laborers during
the last few days of the British Raj in India.

In 1952 Amrit left for Boston, to study at Boston Univer-


sity and Harvard. He has been in the U.S. since then, one
of the earliest immigrants from India. He has worked in
the fields of mental health and community organization
(in pre-civil-rights-era South Philadelphia), and has
taught at universities. Currently he is a part-time writer,
psychotherapist, and organization consultant located in
Maryland.

http://www.scribd.com/baruah

baruah@starpower.net
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In 1946, towards the end of the British Raj, there was a


“glass ceiling” in the jute mills of Calcutta—an invisible
barrier that divided the Indians who worked as clerks from
the British managers. At the age of 22, I broke that ceiling.
I was looking around for a new job, when I spotted
an advertisement for the George Henderson jute mill. A
Scottish-managed company, it needed a labor officer at
Bally. I applied and was accepted. And suddenly I was part
of the jute industry. Just as New Castle had coal and Assam
Valley had tea, Bengal had jute. This jute came to the mills;
and as hessian cloth, it went to all corners of the globe to be
turned into bags and socks. The finer types went on to
become jute cloth.
As a person begins to see red cars everywhere once he
buys one himself, so did I become aware—soon after com-
ing to the Henderson mill—of the seventy or so jute mills
that lined both banks of the Ganges near Calcutta and then
spread out for miles. There were other types of factories: an
occasional paper factory, one or two cotton mills, and engi-
neering works here and there. However, these seemed to be
intruders in what was clearly jute land. Most of the mills
were staffed by people from Dundee, Scotland, which
seemed to have poured out her young men to come to the
banks of the Ganges; spend twenty or thirty years of their
work lives there, accompanied by their Dundee wives; and
then retire to Dundee with handsome gratuities and pen-
sions.
There was a building near my office where a few couples
lived. I remember Mr. Duncan and his wife with a nanny
pushing the pram with a little baby. The bachelors lived on
the other side along with a few married men who did not
have their wives with them for one reason or another.
These were suburban colonies with a lifestyle different
from that of the tea planters in Assam—a lifestyle that I had


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become aware of during my childhood in Assam. The tea
planters lived in huge bungalows with equally huge gardens
where gardeners constantly looked after the lilies and the
dahlias. The jute mill sahibs, on the other hand, lived inside
the confines of the mill, and socialized among themselves.
Once a month they went to the city; got escorted by a dur-
wan (a uniformed attendant) to the Bally train station; took
the train to Howrah; got into a taxi and went to a movie,
had lunch at Firpos, shopped in New Market. Then they
returned to the Howrah station, and at the appointed hour,
reached the Bally station where the durwan would be wait-
ing again to escort them back to their quarters. This route
and the table of activities were plotted out so that every
family followed it. Thus, there was no room or risk of indi-
vidual wandering.
These Scotsmen had brought a civic sense and it pre-
vailed; but it did not rise to the standards of the civilian
British government rules. A few of the managers cut corners
and advanced their favorite workers. And in one instance
that I suspected but could not prove, a departmental super-
visor shared bribes with the sardar, by recruiting someone
out of turn.
The sardar, sometimes called the jamadar, was the native
work-crew leader. He was the sahib’s favorite; and along
with the sahib, he was the law. But that was before labor
laws and young men like me, who were considered “wet
behind their ears,” and who—as Labor Welfare Officers—
started monitoring decisions about fines, firing, and recruit-
ing. There had to be some combustion when these match
sticks collided and there was.
It was not easy for the few old-timers. The main reason
was D. P. Johnston. He was a hearty, straight-forward
Scotsman manager who liked me and another young Indian
colleague, and who treated us as his sons, having lost his
only son in the war. I could take to him any paper with my
recommendations and he signed it. The other factor was the
head office in Calcutta. Being at a higher elevation than the
factory floor, they saw the signs of the times, the labor awak-


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ening and the march of progress. They knew that we were
their support services and not the enemy. After all, we were
employees of the company.
It was company policy to house the Scots people in quar-
ters in the mill compound. The Indian staff commuted
from their homes. At the start of the mill day in the morn-
ings there were rows of bikes bringing the clerks and junior
supervisors from their homes. But there were four of us new
creatures—not the traditional Indian staff, yet not as ele-
vated in salary and rank as the Scotsmen. What to do with
this new category called Indian Covenanted Officers?
The management could have said that, like the rest of the
Indian staff, it was up to us to manage our own housing. I
give them credit for not wanting to do that, and also for not
wanting to change the nature of the Scots village that the
place became in the evenings after work. On the other side
of the river, the company rented a huge mini-palace house
for Indian staff members like ourselves. It was on the other
side because a larger jute mill—the Barnagore Jute Factory,
belonging to the same George Henderson Company—was
on that bank; and there were a number of Indian officers
like me who needed to be housed.
This mini-palace was called a Bagan Bari. Bagan Baris
were garden houses. They were the places where wealthy
city men came for frolicking and parties, with female
dancers entertaining the master and his guests. Bagan Baris
had a reputation not only for fun and entertainment and
wealth, but also for tragedies that sometimes happened
because of jealousy and fights related to women.
Our Began Bari was true to the name. There was an elab-
orate garden tended by gardeners who were employees of
the company. The house was on the river and it was pleas-
ant. Soon it made sense to me to be here instead of inside a
Scottish island where the three of us would have been lone-
ly having only one another for company.
Things were looking up for me. On their own, the Head
Office decided to nominate me for a graduate diploma
course on Labor Welfare at Calcutta University. To be a stu-


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dent in this course, one had to be a working Labor Officer
and nominated in such a way. This line of studies was intro-
duced by the University as a way of elevating the profession
and giving working Labor Officers a body of knowledge.
Courses were carefully chosen. Many of the instructors
were from the regular faculty of the University, and a few
were working in fields related to industries.
There were two of us at the Labor Welfare Office in Bally
Mills—two young Indians appointed at the same time.
Himansu and I both moved into the Bagan Bari residence.
The mill gave us our bikes. Each morning at 6:30 we rode
them over a major bridge, the Bally Bridge, reaching the
other side at about 7:00 when the mill went into operation.
Our first task of the day was supervising the Budli labor
pool. Budli meant temporary. These were the people who
gathered every morning looking for jobs that might open
up on that day. We had a roster and the requisitions came
in from the different departments inside that factory of
4,000 workers.
People were matched according to their experience or
time on the roster. In the past, this had been the province
of the inside Scots supervisor and his sardar. Usually the sar-
dar would bring a friend or relative and the job would be
his. The friend or relative might continue as temporary, or
might even become permanent eventually. Now things
were different and the supervisor and his sardar did not
have the ultimate say.
There were about a dozen Scotsmen who manned the
different departments: batching, spinning, weaving, etc. I
soon found out that there were diverse feelings among them
towards our labor office. The Spinning Master, Glency, was
friendly, and even dropped by to joke. Frazier never came
by; but we felt that he was constantly watching us very crit-
ically and waiting to pounce on us for any perceived mis-
take. In the middle was Duncan, professional and correct,
who occasionally remarked that his father also used to work
for a factory in Dundee, Scotland. “He worked for thirty
years; he was never absent, never late.” He always said that


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with great pride. At first, I was very impressed; later I began
to wonder if it was true.
Then there was Cruikshank, who seemed to be open
when he first came, but changed as he went on. He had just
returned from a vacation in Scotland, and I asked him how
he had occupied himself there. His reply was that he had
hunted rabbits most of the time. This was such an odd
thing for an Indian to hear. I began to wonder about the
strange ways of vacationing in Scotland. It seemed particu-
larly odd because Cruikshank was a huge man; and the
image of this big hulk running with a gun after a tiny rab-
bit seemed weird. I had grown up knowing about tiger
hunting in the forests of Assam; my uncles had belonged to
that circle. Occasionally, these uncles would send some deer
meat our way after they had returned from deer hunting
excursions. But rabbit hunting? I had never heard of it till
now.
And then there was Johnston, who made work a delight.
Once he looked at me and said, “You are working very
hard.” He sent for the mill doctor and asked him to pre-
scribe a tonic for me. Tonics were the vitamins of those days,
so the company bought a bottle of tonic that supposedly
would give me vigor.
We were in the vanguard of young Indians who were
crossing beyond the colonial version of the glass ceiling, and
who found that we had to make the rules as we went along.
Before we came to Bally Mill, there was an accepted divide
between the dozen Scotsmen and about a hundred Indian
staff members.
There were the visible differences. The Scotsmen wore
white trousers and shirts, and in cold weather they wore
thick white coats buttoned to the top. The Indians, on the
other hand, wore dhotis and collarless shirts called pan-
jabis. Many of the Indians would stop and deferentially
bring their right hands to their foreheads when passing one
of the whites.
Both sides were confused by us. The Scotsmen saw that
we did not stop and salaam them. We would say good


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morning in a way that clearly showed that we expected
them to greet us back similarly. But at least it was clear-cut
with the Scots. It was more complicated with the Indians,
the ones who were called babus. By all of the Scots, we were
called Mister, and right there was the problem. Those sim-
ple words took on awesome implications.
The test came fairly early and it took all the assertiveness
that two youngsters could summon to handle it. During
coffee breaks the Scots would go to their quarters and the
Indians to their own “tiffin room.” A good part of the con-
versation in that room had to do with gossiping about their
Scots managers. Our predecessor, an Indian Labor Officer
who had come up from the ranks, used to join in that gos-
siping.
Himanshu and I decided that we would not be part of
the tiffin room crowd. So we had no place to go. Fine, we
said, we will have our tea and snacks brought in. We sent
an office attendant to the town restaurant; and we ate our
snacks right there in the office. This caused a minor sensa-
tion among the Indian staff, but that was short-lived.
We soon found that we had gotten everyone’s respect for
staking out our own ground. The jute mill community was
a small world and all day-to-day behavior was noticed. We
all worked in a glass bowl. I personally had no problem with
socializing with Indian clerks after work; in fact, I had by
then shed my old upper-class ways. But during office hours
I was adamant about maintaining a certain style that went
with my role.
Another test was the Barrababu (the chief babu). He was
a kind of patriarch of the Indian staff; and he looked
like one, with his white buttoned-down coat. Bhabatarn
Ganguli, the Barrababu, was an old employee and he had
considerable power. Management relied on him; and the
Indian staff did what the Barrababu instructed them to do.
He was the link, the conduit between the one hundred
Indian staff members and the mill manager.
The Barrababu had his desk positioned in the office so
that it faced the Indian staff. Behind him was the Scottish


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part of the office, with desks for the two Scottish office exec-
utives. And opposite those desks was the office of the man-
ager, Mr. Johnston. The Indian staff members stopped at
the desk of Barrababu; he was the arbitrator of their needs
and requests. But would Himanshu and I stop there?
I recall that first morning as we approached Barrababu’s
desk. Every Indian staff member would stop at Barrababu;
the Scots, on the other hand, would ignore him, turn left,
and knock on the manager’s door. All eyes were on us, the
two “boys.” We walked slowly and deliberately. We kept
clear in our minds that our business was not with Barra-
babu; it was with the manager.
Forty staff members were looking at us out of the corners
of their eyes, some pretending to work. We arrived at the
crucial spot; kept walking past Barrababu, with just a nod;
and turned left to knock at the manager’s door.
At that moment, our professional identity and status
were forged. From that time on, the Indians would envy us,
Barrababu would acknowledge our status, and some of the
Scots would resent us.

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