STORY OF A STRIKE
Story of a Strike
Revisiting the Bombay Mill Strike of 1982-83
The cotton textile industry had formed the backbone of Bombay’s industrial economy since the late 19th century.
Up to the 1980s, around 2,50,000 workers were employed in the textile industry in the Central Mumbai area known as Girangaon. The majority of the workforce was made up of migrants from outlying districts of Maharashtra, including Satara, Sangli, Kolhapur, Ratnagiri, and the Konkan coast, with a smaller number migrating from United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) and Bihar.
Navigate this timeline to know how the events in the textile industry in Bombay (now Mumbai) transformed the city, the lives of workers, and the nature of politics in the last three decades of the 20th century.

In the years that have followed, there has been a large-scale but often unnoticed migration of ex-textile workers and slum dwellers from the central areas of Mumbai to North Mumbai and the outlying suburbs. Meanwhile, the erstwhile mill area, Girangaon, has transformed into a hub of white-collar workers, with high-rise residential and commercial structures burgeoning on the very land that once gave Mumbai its distinctive working-class character.

Curated by Sohnee Harshey and Kieran Lobo
Designed by Gulal Salil and Vishnupriya Bhandaram