ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a larger exploration of the regional historical and geographical processes that have enabled certain subaltern men to accumulate capital in provincial India. It argues that work in Tiruppur is forged through a regional configuration of power, meaning, and practice. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamil-nadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. The chapter shows how Gounder toil draws from a specific agrarian labor regime forged in the 1930s, and how Tiruppur became a specialist town through regional processes of agrarian transition and geographical specialization.
