From textiles to tourism: mill work, deindustrialization and urban change in postcolonial Pondicherry

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My research reimagines the urban history of Pondicherry,a former French colony in South India, through a historicalstudy of deindustrialization and urban change as experienced by its working-class communities. I place analyticalfocus on the city's textile workers and ask how their social identity as workers shaped their relationship to the city,and what it means to live through the decline of this once thriving industry. Drawing on archival sources,ethnographic research and oral histories, my research will attend to reverberations of this industrial "past" within asupposedly post-industrial present.