In 1879, Bombay (today Mumbai) saw the opening of the workshops of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIPR) in Parel, the single largest industrial complex in the city at the time. On a site of roughly sixty acres it employed thousands of workers to maintain the locomotives and wagons that facilitated passenger travel and the exchange of mail between the centres of British rule on the subcontinent, as well as the transport of goods, especially cotton, to and from the city’s harbour. This circulation of people, information, and commodities was dependent on the smooth running of the trains, which in turn could only be assured if the staff employed at the workshops kept them in proper condition.1
In my PhD project, I investigate the arrangements within and around these workshops that ensured that workers continued to maintain the company’s trains during the colonial period. In order to analyse the specific combination of social relations and institutions that perpetuate the relationship between employer and workers, Michael Burawoy coined the term ‘factory regime’. He mapped out the specific arrangement of elements, such as work processes and apparatuses of production, that provide for a certain degree of stability in industrial relations.2 I use and build upon his concept to address a considerable gap in South Asian labour history.
Railways came to South Asia with the expansion of the colonial state. Initial experiments took place in the late 1840s and the first line was opened for passenger traffic in 1853. It connected Bombay with Thane, a distance of roughly twenty miles. The company that constructed and ran it was the GIPR. Just twenty years later the company had built a considerable railway network, connecting Bombay to the other centres of British rule in South Asia, namely Calcutta (Kolkata) and Madras (Chennai).3 From the very beginning, locomotives and wagons had to be regularly maintained and repaired. This task was initially carried out by the company’s workshops in Byculla (also in Bombay), but as the network and traffic grew, so did the need for larger workshops. The new complex was built in Parel between 1874 and 1879.4 Despite considerable alterations, it still operates today. There were multiple other railway workshops in South Asia at this time. Many companies had gained concessions to build railway networks over the years and the colonial state began to construct lines itself. The Parel workshops, however, stand out. New machines, production methods, and arrangements between capital and labour, such as trade unions, institutionalized worker participation, and company welfare, can be observed here from an early stage.

The Factory Regime
The long history of this industrial complex and the considerable archives produced by railway companies and the colonial state allow me to follow continuities and shifts in the workshops’ factory regime very closely. The way in which the workshops are run has changed significantly ever since their opening. While some of these alterations are obvious to observers, like the expansion of the site over time or the switch from coal to alternative sources of energy, others remain hidden to outsiders. The organization of production becomes visible only when one enters the workplace, and can vary tremendously, even within the same industry. There are also different ways to retain a workforce and make sure enough employees with the necessary skills show up to work every day. Offering wages is one basic method, but salaries are available in other factories as well. Bonus payments, prospects of rising through the hierarchy, and company-based welfare can be other inducements for workers to remain at a particular factory. Throughout the history of the Parel site, workers were also forced to come to and/or stay at work. Coercion could be direct and physical, but also economic, such as the levying of fines for a whole range of infractions.

My project aims to fill a significant research gap in South Asian labour history. The maintenance of rolling stock in large workshops has not attracted much attention from historians, who more often focus on the textile industries of the subcontinent. I argue that analysing the changing organization of production and the methods used to retain the large workforce at the workshops from their inception around 1879 to the 1930s significantly complements and complicates South Asian labour history. Developments that played a minor role in the textile industry were rather more important in the railways. These include changes to production under the auspices of ‘scientific management’ in the 1920s, and the considerable extent of company-based welfare throughout the history of the GIPR.
The Archives
The GIPR had its official headquarters in London and its South Asian headquarters in Bombay. As a result, the company’s records are today divided between India and the UK. The Bombay records are found mainly in the Jaipur branch of the National Archives of India, while those of the London headquarters are part of the India Office Records held at the British Library. The scholarship awarded by the German Historical Institute in London allowed me to thoroughly engage with the latter and to present my research during the GHIL colloquium, where I received valuable suggestions and criticism. I also investigated further India Office Records beyond those of the GIPR. Because the colonial state guaranteed the GIPR a 5 per cent return on capital, the company in turn allowed its activities to be closely supervised by the state5—first by the Public Works Department and later by the Financial Department of the India Office. The central records of these organizations can also be found in the British Library and offer a virtually endless supply of files, as well as magazines and books on railways in South Asia.
The GHIL scholarship also gave me the chance to visit other archives in the UK. The records of a number of managers and engineers who were deeply engaged in the changing face of the railways and workshops in South Asia are held by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London. The 1924 issues of the GIPR’s magazine (see title image) are held by the National Railway Museum in York, and records of UK trade unions, who were loosely connected to their colleagues in South Asia, can be found in the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick.
These records, along with those in India, offer insights into the fundamental changes in the Parel workshops during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Production was reorganized in Parel according to Taylorist principles in 1924, and the alterations there later spread to many other workshops in South Asia. This development was extensively worked out in the technical papers of the India Office, written by the managers of the various railway companies. Work operations were timed and processes automated to reduce the size of the workforce. This reorganization was the culmination of a long-term shift in the factory regime. As a result of one of the most militant phases of industrial action in South Asia, the company also introduced staff councils in the same year. Institutionalized worker representation was thus permitted for the first time in the company’s history. This can be traced through the considerable consultations between the railway companies and the various levels of the state, now preserved in the archival records in London, New Delhi, and Mumbai.
These far-reaching changes in the 1920s were, however, not only sparked by industrial disputes after the First World War. The factory regime, which was constructed in the nineteenth century and rested to a considerable degree on the racial management of the workforce, came under pressure much earlier. The first trade unions pressed for a say in the company from the 1870s onwards and their efforts intensified during the 1890s. The company’s management tried to rein in unruly workers and avert disruptions, resulting in concessions to the staff in some cases and fierce disputes in others. This meant that the production regime kept changing—at times rapidly, like in the 1920s, and at others more slowly, as in the 1880s. It is possible to detect long-term trends here. The factory regime shifted to accommodate workers’ demands for higher wages, representation, and social security, while keeping management in control of an increasingly authoritarian institutionalization of industrial relations. This process did not end with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, but gained momentum, and significantly shaped industrial relations on the subcontinent beyond the railway industry.6
Featured image: Masthead of The G.I.P. Railway Magazine, 11/4 (1924). Photo by Lukas Rosenberg from a copy held in the National Railway Museum, York.
- Questions of maintenance have recently attracted more attention from historians, who acknowledge its centrality despite its invisibility to most observers. See e.g. Martin Meiske, ‘How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and Colonialism’, German Historical Institute London Blog, 31 July 2025. [↩]
- Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1985); see also Elena Baglioni et al., ‘Introduction: Labour Regimes and Global Production’, in Elena Baglioni et al. (eds.), Labour Regimes and Global Production (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2022), 1, 4–5. [↩]
- Ian Johnstone Kerr, ‘Bombay and its Hinterland(s): Railways and the Making of Colonial Western India, 1853–c.1900’, in Ralf Roth and Paul van Heesvelde (eds.), The City and the Railway in the World from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 2022), 155–69, at 159–60. [↩]
- ‘The Workshops of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway’, The Indian Railway Gazette, 5 (1911), 202; W. S. Trevor, Administration Report on the Railways in India for 1880–81 (Simla, 1882), 29–30, 154; ‘The Locomotive History of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway’, The Locomotive, Railway Carriage and Wagon Review, 32/405 (15 May 1926), 144. [↩]
- Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India (Westport, CT, 2007), 25. [↩]
- One example is the spread of staff councils through Indian industries following the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947. This form of worker participation was adopted directly from the railway industry. [↩]
The text only may be used may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lukas Rosenberg (January 12, 2026). The Changing Face of Factory Regimes in South Asia: The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Workshops in Parel, Bombay, between 1879 and 1939. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved February 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15hfp
