ABSTRACT
This essay compares twentieth-century work conditions and workers’ lives in the two deepest-level gold mining regions in the world: the Witwatersrand in South Africa and Kolar mines in Mysore, India. Despite very different geological formations, labour processes in both regions were very similar, with low-wage workers using very hands-on mining skills. The most striking contrasts had to do with different levels of proletarianization and resistance to proletarianization in the Indian and South African socio-cultural contexts. Issues of class struggle also manifested themselves differently in each locale and changed over time. Nonetheless, repertoires of resistance in both locales were similarly ‘plebian’ (in E.P. Thompson’s sense) for much of the period under consideration.
