ABSTRACT
When capitalist plantation production fi rst made in-roads into southern India in the mid-nineteenth century, it necessitated a mass of labour which had been made ‘free’ in a double sense: free of any means of subsistence and free to sell their labour power. This was, in fact, the process of proletarianisation – the capitalist process which increases the dependence of the poor, for survival, on wage labour. It involves a simultaneous loosening of the pre-capitalist extra-economic subjugation and an increasing control of power over means of production by the capitalists. It has been our endeavour to trace the sources of plantation labour and to explore the nature of its mobilisation to the effect of making the workers captive in the sense that they were trapped in the plantations with their families having been disarticulated from the pre-existing sources of living. This will be discussed in the fi rst section of this chapter while the social composition of the workforce with regard to gender and caste will be dealt with in the second section.
