Dhiraj Kumar Nite
Biographic Data
| ID | 116190 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dhiraj Kumar Nite |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dhiraj Kumar |
| FAMILY NAME | Nite |
| SIGNATURE | NITE D K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Johannesburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3307-9205 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Whatever happened to work-time? An enquiry into the manufacturing of industriousness in the Indian mines, 1895–1970
Decolonisation and the Management Movement
Classifying Occupational Hazards
This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and …
Skill, its agencies and institutions
This article advances an explanation for the dynamics of agencies and institutions responsible for the formation of skills in nineteenth-century western India. It shows that multiple agencies – artisanal apprenticeship, indigenous schools, new bazar schools, modern vernacular and English schools, and institutes for technical, industrial and practical instructions – played a limited but responsive role in skill-and-knowledge development. These est…
Occupational Disease, its Recognition and Classification
The compensation law and its antagonistic administration
This article elaborates on the stipulation and administration of the compensation law, in the Indian coalfield of Raniganj, between 1923 and 1971. It shows how enacting the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1923–24 formed a major social insurance scheme in colonial and post-colonial India. Notwithstanding this, the litigious and antagonistic administration became its defining feature. This feature lowered the utility of the compensation law as a rest…
The great agrarian conquest
Scholarship on the rural world in the Indian subcontinent has focused mainly on five aspects: agrarian economy, peasant labour, caste and gender features, rural ecology and rural development progra
Negotiating the Mines
This article explains the way mineworkers negotiated workplace hazards and articulated their ideas of safety. Mineworkers increasingly attained mining sense and made use of it, thereby surviving terrible working conditions and seeking to mend the accident-control mechanism. The formation and function of their mining sense were part of the industrialization process. It involved mineworkers’ particular ways of adaptation—quixotic and prudent—to the…
Employee benefits, migration and social struggles
During 1895–1970, in the Indian coalfield of Jharia, circular migration of the mineworker coexisted along with the fact that workers became regular over time. This article suggests that the development of employee benefits influenced the patterns of migration and settlement of workers. Employers, guided by a new industrial sensibility, came up with specific employee benefits, with an objective of continuous production from a group of settled work…
From fatalism to mass action to incorporation to neoliberal individualism
The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in South African mines. ‘Tacit knowledge’ evolved over time, is orally transmitted, learned on the job, and is central to worker safety; it lay behind acts of resistance and demands for a safer mining workplace which underpinned unionisation, and which won worker safety representation under apartheid. Under democracy, a modern consultative tripartite legislative s…
Consenting to Labour Appropriation? The Mineworker on South African Gold and Coalmines, 1951 to 2011
The argument of the moral economy of mines claims to illuminate the consent and associational power of mineworkers, and thereby the real foundation of social exchanges between management and black mineworkers. Our collection of life histories shows how the moral economy was fragile and its codes not widely accepted. As a tool of analysis it does not include certain facets of the workers' experience, feeling and human essence. The moral-economic r…
Worshipping the colliery-goddess
This article interprets the function of mine workers' observance of the colliery-goddess cult, described as the Khadan-Kali cult, for gaining access to divine power so as to secure safety, and explains its relationship with the new political and scientific accident-control emphases adopted by workers from the 1920s onwards. Some observers regard the workers' industrial-religious rites an expression of the pre-bourgeois customs. The latter is unde…
Familist Movement and Social Mobility
This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, human life for mineworkers in the Jharia coalfields in eastern India, in the early decades of the twentieth century, had some ‘unsought for’ results. These results included the vulnerability of women excluded from certain categories of work, school-dropout children and above all absence of a reproductive support system. Industrialists as well as the indu…
Sharing Life-History and Other Memory
This paper discusses the ways of studying life-history. Its methodology, as indicated here, cannot claim to produce complete and unvarnished life-histories. The interview method employed here acknowledged the autonomy and sensitivity of narrators. The preparation of transcripts only refracted through our empathetic professional approach. A two-pronged comparative reading of oral accounts – against each other and against other literature – reveals…
Reproduction Preferences and Wages
Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the sel…
Employee benefits, migration and social struggles
During 1895–1970, in the Indian coalfield of Jharia, circular migration of the mineworker coexisted along with the fact that workers became regular over time. This article suggests that the development of employee benefits influenced the patterns of migration and settlement of workers. Employers, guided by a new industrial sensibility, came up with specific employee benefits, with an objective of continuous production from a group of settled work…
Negotiating the Mines
This article explains the way mineworkers negotiated workplace hazards and articulated their ideas of safety. Mineworkers increasingly attained mining sense and made use of it, thereby surviving terrible working conditions and seeking to mend the accident-control mechanism. The formation and function of their mining sense were part of the industrialization process. It involved mineworkers’ particular ways of adaptation—quixotic and prudent—to the…
From fatalism to mass action to incorporation to neoliberal individualism
The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in South African mines. ‘Tacit knowledge’ evolved over time, is orally transmitted, learned on the job, and is central to worker safety; it lay behind acts of resistance and demands for a safer mining workplace which underpinned unionisation, and which won worker safety representation under apartheid. Under democracy, a modern consultative tripartite legislative s…
Skill, its agencies and institutions
This article advances an explanation for the dynamics of agencies and institutions responsible for the formation of skills in nineteenth-century western India. It shows that multiple agencies – artisanal apprenticeship, indigenous schools, new bazar schools, modern vernacular and English schools, and institutes for technical, industrial and practical instructions – played a limited but responsive role in skill-and-knowledge development. These est…
Worshipping the colliery-goddess
This article interprets the function of mine workers' observance of the colliery-goddess cult, described as the Khadan-Kali cult, for gaining access to divine power so as to secure safety, and explains its relationship with the new political and scientific accident-control emphases adopted by workers from the 1920s onwards. Some observers regard the workers' industrial-religious rites an expression of the pre-bourgeois customs. The latter is unde…
Reproduction Preferences and Wages
Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the sel…
Sharing Life-History and Other Memory
This paper discusses the ways of studying life-history. Its methodology, as indicated here, cannot claim to produce complete and unvarnished life-histories. The interview method employed here acknowledged the autonomy and sensitivity of narrators. The preparation of transcripts only refracted through our empathetic professional approach. A two-pronged comparative reading of oral accounts – against each other and against other literature – reveals…
Familist Movement and Social Mobility
This article offers an answer to the question as to why the movement to ensure a ‘civilised’, human life for mineworkers in the Jharia coalfields in eastern India, in the early decades of the twentieth century, had some ‘unsought for’ results. These results included the vulnerability of women excluded from certain categories of work, school-dropout children and above all absence of a reproductive support system. Industrialists as well as the indu…
Sharing Life-History and Other Memory
This paper discusses the ways of studying life-history. Its methodology, as indicated here, cannot claim to produce complete and unvarnished life-histories. The interview method employed here acknowledged the autonomy and sensitivity of narrators. The preparation of transcripts only refracted through our empathetic professional approach. A two-pronged comparative reading of oral accounts – against each other and against other literature – reveals…
Reproduction Preferences and Wages
Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the sel…
Worshipping the colliery-goddess
This article interprets the function of mine workers' observance of the colliery-goddess cult, described as the Khadan-Kali cult, for gaining access to divine power so as to secure safety, and explains its relationship with the new political and scientific accident-control emphases adopted by workers from the 1920s onwards. Some observers regard the workers' industrial-religious rites an expression of the pre-bourgeois customs. The latter is unde…
From fatalism to mass action to incorporation to neoliberal individualism
The article resurfaces ‘tacit knowledge’ to periodise developments in worker safety in South African mines. ‘Tacit knowledge’ evolved over time, is orally transmitted, learned on the job, and is central to worker safety; it lay behind acts of resistance and demands for a safer mining workplace which underpinned unionisation, and which won worker safety representation under apartheid. Under democracy, a modern consultative tripartite legislative s…
Consenting to Labour Appropriation? The Mineworker on South African Gold and Coalmines, 1951 to 2011
The argument of the moral economy of mines claims to illuminate the consent and associational power of mineworkers, and thereby the real foundation of social exchanges between management and black mineworkers. Our collection of life histories shows how the moral economy was fragile and its codes not widely accepted. As a tool of analysis it does not include certain facets of the workers' experience, feeling and human essence. The moral-economic r…
Negotiating the Mines
This article explains the way mineworkers negotiated workplace hazards and articulated their ideas of safety. Mineworkers increasingly attained mining sense and made use of it, thereby surviving terrible working conditions and seeking to mend the accident-control mechanism. The formation and function of their mining sense were part of the industrialization process. It involved mineworkers’ particular ways of adaptation—quixotic and prudent—to the…
Employee benefits, migration and social struggles
During 1895–1970, in the Indian coalfield of Jharia, circular migration of the mineworker coexisted along with the fact that workers became regular over time. This article suggests that the development of employee benefits influenced the patterns of migration and settlement of workers. Employers, guided by a new industrial sensibility, came up with specific employee benefits, with an objective of continuous production from a group of settled work…
The great agrarian conquest
Scholarship on the rural world in the Indian subcontinent has focused mainly on five aspects: agrarian economy, peasant labour, caste and gender features, rural ecology and rural development progra
Occupational Disease, its Recognition and Classification
The compensation law and its antagonistic administration
This article elaborates on the stipulation and administration of the compensation law, in the Indian coalfield of Raniganj, between 1923 and 1971. It shows how enacting the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1923–24 formed a major social insurance scheme in colonial and post-colonial India. Notwithstanding this, the litigious and antagonistic administration became its defining feature. This feature lowered the utility of the compensation law as a rest…
Skill, its agencies and institutions
This article advances an explanation for the dynamics of agencies and institutions responsible for the formation of skills in nineteenth-century western India. It shows that multiple agencies – artisanal apprenticeship, indigenous schools, new bazar schools, modern vernacular and English schools, and institutes for technical, industrial and practical instructions – played a limited but responsive role in skill-and-knowledge development. These est…
Decolonisation and the Management Movement
Classifying Occupational Hazards
This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and …
Whatever happened to work-time? An enquiry into the manufacturing of industriousness in the Indian mines, 1895–1970
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (5 works) · History (5 works) · History (5 works)