REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS Economic & Political Weekly EPW july 30, 2011 vol xlvI no 31 65 I thank Subodh More, Chandan Reddy, Madhavi Murty, Lisa Mitchell and the two EPW reviewers for their suggestions and encouragement. All errors of omission and commission are entirely mine. Juned Shaikh ( juneds@gmail.com) is a graduate from the Department of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. Translating Marx: Mavali , Dalit and the Making of Mumbai’s Working Class, 1928-1935 Juned Shaikh Examining the Marathi translation of The Communist Manifesto published in 1931 and situating it in the socio-historical context of workers’ movements in Mumbai in the 1920s and 1930s, this paper argues that the so-called subordinated classes engaged with it and created a workers’ public that was in conversation with the elite public sphere. But it holds that the vernacular version had to navigate the structures of language and a social structure in which caste was an important feature to make itself comprehensible to other intellectuals, trade union leaders and workers. It was in this process that its strategy of obscuring caste subjectivities and creating a new identity of class found its greatest success and also its ultimate failure. T he economic and social histories of the working class in Mumbai have contended with a few key questions. Promi- nent among these have been how was labour recruited for the city’s textile mills? What was the structure of working-class politics and who were the important agents that shaped it? What identities were forged by the workers and how were these con- structed? Answers to these questions have shaped our under- standing of the labour histories in Mumbai. For instance, Morris (1965) and Chandavarkar (1981, 1994) argued that business strat- egies and the contingencies of capital shaped the labour market in the city. Chandavarkar convincingly showed that the labour recruitment policies of mill owners and the repressive apparatus of the colonial state played a crucial role in shaping the politics of millworkers. On the question of the millworkers’ social identities, Newman (1981) and Upadhyay (2004) pointed out that modern institutions like trade unions did not obliterate caste and reli- gious afinities and that Mumbai’s textile workers navigated com- plex subjectivities. One of the common concerns shared by these social histories of the working class in Mumbai is the authenticity of the voice of millworkers. Chandavarkar, Newman and Upadhyay acknow- ledged that the working class was silent and that their voices could only be discerned through the representations of lawyers, journalists, social workers, civil servants, trade union leaders and police reports. How then should histories of the working class depict workers? While engaging with this question, Chan- davarkar argued that it was crucial to highlight the assumptions undergirding these representations of the working class and focused on the implication of these representations on the social formation of class in Mumbai (1994: 8). While this essay does not delve into the question of the “authentic” voice of the workers or the accuracy of representations, it does share Chandavarkar’s interest in highlighting the assumptions underscoring the depic- tion of workers. It engages with this interest by considering how the notion of working class (kamgaar varga) was translated and made knowable to Mumbai’s workers in the early 1930s. It studies the Marathi translation of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) published by the Kamgaar Vang- maya Prasaraka Mandala (Society for the Propagation of Lite- rature of the Working Class) in 1931 and situates this translation in the socio-historical context of workers’ movements in Mumbai in the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the translation of this canonical Marxist text into regional idioms helps us understand the vernacularisation of modern notions of class. In other words, a study of how Mumbai’s intellectuals translated The Communist