RECONFIGURING THE SOCIAL: TECHNOLOGY, LABOUR, AND CULTURAL POLICY IN LEFT FRONT’S WEST BENGAL

This paper revisits the widely circulated narrative of the Left Front’s resistance to computerisation by situating it within a longer history of technological transition in India. Rather than treating opposition to automation as ideological rejection of modernity, the paper argues that the trade union movements throughout the country during the 1960s and 1980s articulated a critique of the uneven social consequences of technology guided by import against export economic policies facilitating the historical shift from a protectionist state structure to a private sector–oriented model. Extending this argument to the cultural domain, the paper examines the crisis in the film industry in the mid–1980s due to the proliferation of television and video technologies. Focusing on West Bengal under the Left Front, the paper attempts to initiate a dialogue within three interrelated domains – labour, cultural policy, and the popular culture to examine how technology was negotiated rather than being resisted. Analysing the trade union movements, state policy shifts, and cultural debates surrounding events such as Hope 86, the paper aims to show how anxieties around computerisation and media technologies were embedded within broader transformations associated with liberalisation in India and the reconfiguration of the Indian state.