Those Were The Days: Wadia’s long journey from building warships to trade union pioneer

For a man born into one of the oldest business families in India, a Parsi dynasty that built a fortune through the deals it entered into building warships for the East India Company and then the British Empire, Bahman Pestonji Wadia was perhaps the last person one would expect to start a trade union to represent the working class. That was one of the many hats that Wadia wore.

The beginning of the Wadias’ shipbuilding empire can be traced back to 1736, when it obtained a contract from the East India Company for building warships, of which they built a hundred. These vessels created history all over the world. The poem the words of which would later become “The Star Spangled banner” – the national anthem of the United States – was written on board a Wadia-built British Royal Navy Ship, HMS Minden, in 1812.

In 1907, Wadia sailed seven miles out of the Bombay harbour to see the Elephanta caves. There he had a “vision” concerning the universal value of theosophy. Wadia left Bombay the next year and came over to Madras, which was the capital of theosophy by then. He joined the Theosophical Society in Adyar and began working as the manager of the Theosophical Publishing House. Later, he became the assistant editor of the daily, New India.

Wadia became active in Annie Besant’s Home Rule Movement and was arrested along with her and Arundale. They were interned in a cottage named Gulmarg (rose field), four miles away from Ootacamund (Ooty). The earliest industries of British India had started in Madras. In the course of his political activities, Wadia became aware of the struggles of the industrial workers who came to see him in the newspaper office. Looking closely at their working conditions, the scion of the noted business family found the management to be tyrannical.

In the early 1900s, Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in Perambur was the largest single employer in Madras. Such was the condition of the workers that any social organisation in the neighbourhood soon became a gathering space for them to vent their woes. One such sabha started by Selvapathy Chetty had regular religious discourses and bhajans. Soon, social workers started helping the workers who thronged there, guiding them on dealing with the working conditions at the mill. Inspired by the Russian revolution, people felt this organisation could be converted into a trade union.

The momentum picked up, and a public meeting was organised near the mills that attracted an audience of 20,000 despite intimidation from the British police. Wadia presided themeeting, with his speech in English translated by Thiruvarur Viruttachala Kalyanasundaram, the scholar and activist popularly known as Thiru Vi Ka.

Soon formed the Madras Labour Union (MLU), with Wadia as the first president. It recently completed its centenary, perhaps the oldest surviving trade union in India.

Learning about the increasing labour unrest in India, the British Parliament appointed a Commission to investigate it. Wadia, as the president of the Madras Textile Workers Union, was summoned to London to give testimony before a Parliamentary Commission. This Commission considered all matters which were to be addressed a yearlater and included in the Montford Reform Act of 1919. The Indian Government appointedhim a delegate to attend the First International Labour Conference under the League of Nations held at Washington DC.

But for somebody who had acquired so much prominence, Wadia faded fast from trade union movement and freedom struggle, and returned to his first love - theosophy. in 1921, for example, when Binny and Co. crushed the union’s strike with the assistance of the British government by stimulating communal rifts among the workers, Wadia wasn’t in the picture at all.

Things were not rosy at the Theosophical Society either. Anguished at the divergence of theosophy from its original principles, with the society seeming moving more towards psychism and sensationalism, Wadia tried to bring about some reforms. Wadia wrote an open letter to Annie Besant and also followed up with his letter of resignation. In response, the society issued ‘An open letter to Mr Wadia’ by Jiddu Krishnamurthy. As fate would have it, Jiddu, the man who wrote the stinging reply to Wadia, himself left theosophy a decade later for almost the same reasons.

Valuing his uprightness, his friends often urged Wadia to return to public life. But he firmly refused, saying that aspect of his life was over, and that he was working on something far wider and deeper. The now-dilapidated Madras Labour Union building on Strahans Road at Perambur is known as Wadia House and faces Wadia Park. On the parapet at the top of the two storied building, over the front door, a bust of Wadia was installed but has now fallen prey to the elements.