The Legal Profession and Colonial Bombay

The structure of colonial law in India was thoroughly overhauled after direct crown rule was announced in 1858. Major codification projects long gathering dust in colonial offices were quickly implemented as the colonial state sought to reconstruct authority in the aftermath of the Uprising of 1857.Footnote ¹⁰ Working in tandem with the High Court Act of 1861, the previously disparate legal systems of the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Presidencies were brought under a newly centralized, bureaucratized, and broadly unified legal order that functioned across British India.Footnote ¹¹ The legal profession was also revamped during this period. The Legal Practitioners Act of 1879, in conjunction with the earlier High Courts Act, divided practitioners into six grades. The first tier, composed of advocates [barristers], vakils, and attorneys, was qualified to work in the High Court and every subordinate court within its jurisdiction.Footnote ¹² Advocates/barristers completed their studies in the Inns of Court in London. Given the costs involved, this class was predominantly European or wealthy Indians.Footnote ¹³ Vakils were educated and trained in India. They were less well paid and initially faced restrictions in practice.Footnote ¹⁴ Solicitors managed cases and many earned lucrative salaries, but they did not appear in court.Footnote ¹⁵ Pleaders [legal professionals entitled to appear in court], mukthars, and revenue agents constituted the lower rung of legal professionals. They could not practice in the High Court, and even their admission in lower courts was precarious, shifting with ever-changing rules and procedures.Footnote ¹⁶

Bombay’s extraordinary growth into India’s largest industrial metropolis in the late nineteenth century led to a large expansion in court business. By the 1920s, the Bombay High Court handled thousands of serious civil and criminal appeals from across the province. An even larger number of local civil and criminal disputes were heard in the lower courts within the city, including the Court of Small Causes, the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors, and Police Courts.Footnote ¹⁷ The promise of good pay, social prestige, and political influence saw students flock to law. The number of vakils in Bombay almost tripled between 1901–1921.Footnote ¹⁸ By the 1930s, law had become by far the most popular professional degree in Indian universities and colleges.Footnote ¹⁹ This dramatic increase drove professionalization. When the BLAS began its work, Bombay was already home to thriving bar associations, law libraries, regularly published law journals, and had established itself as a key node in India’s law conference scene. This period also saw significant institutional reforms. Nationalist pressures on the colonial administration had led to the removal of most of the restrictions on vakil practice, while the 1926 Indian Bar Council Act granted Indian advocates greater authority over the governance of the profession.Footnote ²⁰ Who were these lawyers? As the legal community grew in strength and size, its character remained consistently elite and hierarchical. Professional entry demanded education, English literacy, and money. Professional success was heavily determined by personal connections, whether through caste, family, or class. Brahmins, Parsis, and other traditional elites retained a dominant grip over the profession throughout.Footnote ²¹

The colonial context informed the development of India’s legal profession in notable ways. Given India’s size, the colonial government quickly became reliant on Indian legal practitioners for its courts and bureaucracy to function. Dependency bred neither intimacy nor did it weaken colonial difference. Colonial administrators regularly regurgitated denigratory tropes that depicted Indian lawyers as unprofessional, poorly trained, and cunning. The tenacity of these racially charged discourses directly affected the availability of legal aid. When proposals for greater government investment in legal help for the poor in criminal trials were debated in the early 1900s, the idea was rejected. The government rationalized this decision in part by arguing that the colonial judge was a better friend of the poor than the alternative, an Indian lawyer acting as defense counsel.Footnote ²²

While the relationship between the Indian lawyer and the colonial administration demonstrated tension, the legal profession also had a strained relationship with anticolonial politics. Lawyers dominated leadership positions in the nationalist movement, and their training had shaped its ideas and strategy.Footnote ²³ Yet if lawyers were influential in the anticolonial struggle, the broader legal profession was by no means radical. Many had become wealthy under British rule, charging large fees and winning prestigious judicial appointments.Footnote ²⁴ In 1920, when Gandhi led the Non-Cooperation Movement, he called on lawyers to suspend practice in support of the boycotts of colonial institutions. James Jaffee has calculated that only roughly 1.5 percent downed tools in solidarity.Footnote ²⁵ As the next section explores in greater detail, the complicated political position of the legal profession in the colony would be a major factor in the early historical development of the BLAS.

Pandia, Bradway, and the Birth of the BLAS

Influential Indian figures were quick to recognize the grave challenges facing Indian litigants unable to afford counsel. Some tracked reforms in England, such as the Poor Prisoners Defense Act of 1903, and petitioned for equivalent measures in India. While the colonial government remained reluctant to intervene in this sphere, individual lawyers, including Manmohan Ghose and later Dr B.R. Ambedkar, volunteered their services freely to indigent defendants in criminal trials, earning themselves reputations as celebrated “barristers for the poor.”Footnote ²⁶ Cornelia Sorabji, the first female law graduate from Oxford University, went further still. In 1903, she wrote to the government about the difficulties women observing purdah suffered when pursuing marital and property suits. In 1904, the government of Bengal created a new post attached to the Courts of Wards, tasked with liaising between vulnerable women and the courts. Sorabji was the first appointee and worked with hundreds of women during her term.Footnote ²⁷ Her careful attention to the specific challenges women endured accessing justice would be notably absent from later male-run legal aid societies.

If legal aid thinking in India did not begin in 1924, the emergence of the BLAS still marked a significant departure from earlier individual efforts. It is relevant to first ask why Bombay became the site of this venture. Minimally, the formation of a legal aid society requires a critical mass of lawyers infused with a commitment to public duty. With the creation of the Bombay High Court in 1861, Bombay’s central importance for legal practice in India was cemented. As noted above, a large and dynamic legal community rapidly followed.Footnote ²⁸ Equally importantly, as a globally connected port with an influential educated middle class, the city was also at the forefront of Indian led campaigns of “social uplift” and philanthropy directed towards the economically marginalized.Footnote ²⁹ The existence of a strong network of civic associations and charities provided the BLAS a hospitable environment to begin its outreach.

Bombay possessed another important condition for legal aid—massive inequality. The city’s sprawling mill districts had ensured a consistent flow of inward migration from neighboring areas since the 1850s. Migrants arriving hoping for better pay and prospects often found industrial work unrelenting. Factory work involved long working hours, dangerous conditions, low wages, high debt, and poor job security.Footnote ³⁰ Housing presented further challenges. Workers lived in badly maintained and overcrowded chawls, tenements, and slums prone to collapse. Tenants enjoyed little protection and were vulnerable to last-minute evictions and rent hikes.Footnote ³¹

These issues worsened after the economic fallout of the World War I, leading to inflation and stagnating wages.Footnote ³² Under pressure from nationalist agitations and the powerful trade union movement, the colonial state passed a raft of new laws. This included rent control measures, factory safety regulations, maternity benefits, debt relief, greater protection for trade unions, and compensation for workplace injuries.Footnote ³³ The assembly of a legal skeleton to expand and protect rights, however, lacked teeth, and landlords and employers generally continued their exploitative practices.Footnote ³⁴ It was within this complex economic, political, and legal context that Nayan H. Pandia began thinking seriously about establishing a legal aid society in Bombay.

Modern organized legal aid was shaped by several interlinked economic and political developments. The stark inequality, widespread precarity, and dangerous working conditions that characterized industrial capitalism spurred fears among the liberal political class about the spread of socialist and anarchist ideologies among the urban working classes. Governments across Europe and North America responded, passing legislation that promised new rights and protections, which included statutory compensation for workplace injuries, sick leave, and, in some contexts, maternity benefits.Footnote ³⁵ As the bones of welfarist states were assembled, a small group of reform-minded lawyers stressed the key role required of law, and particularly legal aid, in the reconstruction of state-society relations. They posited that the widening of access to justice would evidence the state’s commitment to the principle of equality under the law, and in the process, dull the seductive allure of radical politics.Footnote ³⁶

By the early twentieth century, institutionalized legal aid had gone global. As a legal transplant, the implementation of legal aid schemes and the organization of legal aid societies demonstrated a broad commitment to political liberalism shared by lawyers from diverse backgrounds. Its mobility also reflected its flexibility, with local actors injecting their own ideas and politics into legal aid practice as it travelled.Footnote ³⁷ Marianne González Le Saux, for instance, has shown how Chilean lawyers in the 1930s imagined legal aid as a means of remaking the profession’s identity as the early welfare state was being assembled and amidst rising leftist militancy.Footnote ³⁸ In a different context, Jin Dong has demonstrated how connections between China and the USA, largely through university training, encouraged the creation of early legal aid societies in Republican China.Footnote ³⁹ Like their contemporaries in Chile and China, leading BLAS members looked to legal aid to improve the profession’s weak public reputation and were also inspired by American lawyers and institutions. What made the BLAS distinctive was the specific challenges of British colonialism and popular anticolonial nationalism, which forced novel thinking around the question of legal aid.

Nayan Pandia was central to this project, serving as the Honorary Secretary for the Bombay Legal Aid Society for over four decades.Footnote ⁴⁰ Though South Asian historians have written widely on social service, philanthropy, and welfare, neither Pandia nor legal aid has yet received scholarly attention.Footnote ⁴¹ Pandia was born into an upper caste Gujarati family from the small city of Nadiad in western India. After studying in Ahmedabad, he moved to Bombay to train with a European solicitor’s firm. In 1912, he started independent practice. Across his career, Pandia wrote and spoke prolifically on a wide array of legal issues, and alongside B.G. Kher, the future chief minister of Bombay state, co-founded the Bombay Law Journal.Footnote ⁴²

When he began planning the BLAS, Pandia turned to the USA for support. In June 1924, he posted letters to law schools in Harvard and Northwestern University and legal aid societies in Boston, New York, and Chicago. The letter explained that a small group of lawyers had resolved to establish a Legal Aid Society in Bombay. He asked for copies of relevant literature, a list of existing legal aid associations in the USA, the rules and regulations used by these societies, and any reports that outlined the nature of their work.Footnote ⁴³ Recipients answered positively, sending transcripts of relevant conference proceedings, academic papers, and several books. One respondent, the General Superintendent of the United Charities of Chicago, connected Pandia with John S. Bradway, the Secretary of the National Association of Legal Aid Organizations.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bradway held global ambitions for the legal aid movement, which he strongly believed had relevance well beyond the USA. Pandia’s work immediately piqued his interest. Over the following years, the two established a strong working relationship built upon their shared conviction that they were participating in an intertwined and universal struggle.Footnote ⁴⁵ A letter Pandia penned to Bradway in 1929 captured this sense of connectedness. He described themselves as working for “the cause of Justice to the World Brotherhood of the Poor and the Oppressed.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Bradway’s assistance proved vital for Pandia’s work. The USA was the most vibrant site of legal aid thinking during this period and had already formed a vast network of legal aid societies across the country. Bradway ensured Pandia had access to this world, regularly sending him new publications and literature. Pandia leaned on this material heavily. The BLAS constitution and its byelaws, for instance, lifted much from existing American models.Footnote ⁴⁷

The USA also offered the BLAS a respectable origin story. In an early appeal published in the Bombay Law Journal, Pandia charted this history. He began with the first legal aid society organized in New York in 1876 by a small group of German immigrants seeking to fight exploitative employers and landlords. Their success led to the rapid spread of the movement across the country. Pandia then pointed to similar ventures in Britain, including the Poor Man Lawyer’s Society in London and legal dispensaries in Edinburgh.Footnote ⁴⁸ Felice Batlan has recently pointed to the exclusionary nature of these histories, which purposefully marginalized the long-standing work of lay female legal aid practitioners in this field.Footnote ⁴⁹ If masculinizing legal aid was central to legal aid history-writing in the USA, lawyers in colonial India tacked themselves onto these stories for other ends. Framing the birth of legal aid in Bombay as a whiggish outgrowth of developments that had begun elsewhere, the BLAS distanced themselves from the agitational popular politics coursing through Bombay’s streets at this time, linking the society instead to respectable, influential American lawyers, elite universities, and longstanding legal associations.

Bradway’s experience also helped Pandia prepare for the fraught politics that doing legal aid often entailed. By focusing on the exploitative practices of landlords and employers, legal aid lawyers had long been vulnerable to accusations that they secretly harbored radical political sympathies, something Bradway warned Pandia about.Footnote ⁵⁰ Pandia recognized this was even more likely in the colonial context. Along with colleagues, he attempted a delicate balancing act. One hand to provide a justification for institutionalized legal aid that could underscore the serious flaws afflicting the existing colonial legal order, while on the other, remaining safely within the bounds of palatable, uncontroversial public discourse. Pandia’s position was most clearly articulated in a lengthy article entitled Justice and the Poor, published in 1935. The title borrowed from the American lawyer Reginald Heber Smith’s influential text, a book Pandia had fulsomely praised and helped circulate across India. Pandia’s version located the same three major problems with colonial justice as Smith found in America: delays, court costs, and lawyers’ fees. Without resolution, he explained that the poorer classes would become more disillusioned with the political and legal order, warning his readership that “Nothing rankles more in the human heart than the feeling of injustice.”Footnote ⁵¹ Bombay’s recent experience with civil disobedience and industrial action would have given these remarks weight. Amidst this wider unrest, Pandia pointedly stated that the “greatest services” of legal aid would be the promotion of law-abiding citizens and the improved public reputation of the legal profession.Footnote ⁵² He concluded that the substantive colonial law was fair. It was only the “machinery of justice” that demanded reform.Footnote ⁵³

Though much of this rhetoric could be traced back to Smith, Pandia was not in the business of simple mimicry. His writings blended American legal aid thinking with Indian ideas of social service and active citizenship. The heavy emphasis on legal aid’s non-sectarian outlook was a case in point. In an early publication, the BLAS firmly stated that its work would “not encroach on vested interests. It is non-sectarian, non-religious, and non-political.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The outward presentation of BLAS religious inclusivity was further bolstered by statistics. Annual reports divided caseloads by the religious background of applicants to offer evidence that all communities benefited from the society.Footnote ⁵⁵ This was in keeping with wider discursive shifts in social service work in India. Unlike late nineteenth-century social reformers who spoke through a religious vocabulary and focused on reforming Indian customs and religious practices, by the 1920s, social service organizations forwarded schemes that targeted the welfare of the poorer classes through more generalizable campaigns, issues like improving sanitation and education.Footnote ⁵⁶ Legal aid fitted comfortably within these shifts, promising to harness the power of modern state law to address universally recognizable problems like access to justice.Footnote ⁵⁷

As Pandia drew from American legal aid and Indian social service organizations, in important ways, he then departed from both. This was especially apparent in the political relationship the BLAS cultivated with the state. Carey Watt has argued that social service associations like the Social Service League and the Servants of India Society imbibed a “latent” patriotic politics. By providing a network of welfare, leisure, and educational services, Indian associational culture was effectively “hollowing out” the colonial state.Footnote ⁵⁸ Legal aid societies’ dependence on colonial institutions made such latent politics impossible. Rather than weaken colonial authority, Pandia promised government officials and the judiciary that legal aid work would deepen the legitimacy of colonial courts and foster loyal subjects.

Pandia’s differences with Smith were equally telling. In Smith’s opening chapter of Justice and the Poor, he argued that legal aid would help deliver on the promises of America’s founding constitutional ideals, pointing to the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Pandia’s opening section, titled “The Path of Service,” linked economic and social conditions to crime and talked movingly about the dire consequences of prison on the convict and their family. Pandia promoted legal aid as a pressing issue that should operate alongside the improvement of literacy and better access to vocational training. This was in many ways a socially liberal and progressive vision with the idea of equality at its heart. Conspicuously absent from Pandia’s writing, though, were Smith’s other grounding political concepts, those of freedom and democracy. These remained marginal from BLAS writings until the 1940s when independence neared.Footnote ⁶⁰

The distancing of legal aid from more potent political ideas had an obvious pragmatic logic. It also imposed strict limits on this project and risked confusion. Pandia, for instance, spoke with impressive knowledge and expertise about the inequalities of legal procedure and access to justice but steadfastly avoided the issue of racial discrimination. He wrote powerfully about rights, justice, and legal reform, but did so without serious engagement with the political demands of the anticolonial nationalist movement. These tensions spoke to a fundamental problem for legal aid in the colony. Readying for battle against the deeply entrenched injustices of colonial law, the BLAS armed themselves with a restricted and highly moderate vocabulary. As a result, BLAS writings often appeared strikingly detached from the world they were published.

If this wider context led the BLAS to distance itself from politics, in other areas, the political backdrop of colonialism and nationalism appears to have alleviated major challenges impacting legal aid elsewhere. The self-image of legal aid in the USA underwent a major transformation in the early twentieth century. Newly established male-run legal aid societies sought to professionalize and masculinize legal aid, a process that made peripheral the longstanding participation of female lay lawyers in legal aid work. Across the 1920s, male legal aid practitioners fought to bring about a firm separation of legal aid from social work, the latter considered a feminine activity too closely aligned to charity.Footnote ⁶¹ John Bradway was a key architect of this demarcation, and only softened his position on social work in the 1930s.Footnote ⁶² The gendered dynamics of legal aid and social work operated differently in the colony. With access to public office and formal political life heavily restricted in colonial India, men had long participated actively in social service, which was considered patriotic work that helped legitimize claims to leadership positions within the nationalist movement.Footnote ⁶³ While men continued to dominate both the legal profession and legal aid, the boundaries between charity, legal aid, and social work were left porous and overlapping.

The BLAS representative at the 1925 Bombay Social Service Conference articulated this closer relationship succinctly when he helped to pass a resolution that stated that legal aid “fills a distinct place in Social Service.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In BLAS reports and literature, Pandia expounded the position in greater detail. In Justice and the Poor, he explained that legal aid existed within a “social welfare field” that included medicine and other “co-operating social agencies.”Footnote ⁶⁵ For Pandia, lawyers and social workers possessed knowledge and expertise that benefitted one another and should be actively shared.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Pandia explained bluntly, “Legal aid is a branch of social service. Both have fundamental common aims.”Footnote ⁶⁷ With the boundaries between professions less heavily policed, BLAS reports regularly encouraged legal aid lawyers to build bridges with charities, women-led associations, and other social service organizations. This position was mutual. In 1936, Clifford Manshardt offered the opening remarks to the inaugural batch of students enrolled in the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work in Bombay, the first of its kind in India. His speech to the male and female students attending stressed that social work and legal work were interdependent pursuits.Footnote ⁶⁸

Whether in relation to social work or politics, BLAS discourse on legal aid spoke to its transnational and local influences. While leaders like Pandia sought to naturalize legal aid in India, efforts to present a coherent story of legal aid in a colonial context had remained challenging. In large part, this was an unavoidable outcome of circumstance. To succeed, the BLAS needed to win patronage from colonial officials, the Indian legal profession, and the urban poor. Compounding an already complex task, it needed to do so during unprecedented popular political unrest. As the next section shows, the tensions that arose from this awkward positioning extended beyond the struggle to present convincing explanations of legal aid to divergent audiences. They also flowed back into BLAS workings on the ground, informing what type of cases the society took on and how successfully it was able to reach out to different groups.

Doing Legal Aid in Interwar Bombay

The inaugural meeting of the BLAS was hosted in the Servants of India Society Hall, situated in Girgaon, a mill district in south Bombay. Members approved their recently drafted constitution, accepted the terms of membership, and discussed the types of cases they were to pursue.Footnote ⁶⁹ They agreed that meetings would be regularly scheduled, sub-committees organized and tasked with different work, and budgets published and circulated widely. Small membership fees would cover printing costs and the postage of reports detailing the society’s work. Existing scholarship focusing on other regions has pointed to a conservative impulse that often ran through legal aid practice, generally manifest in the exclusionary nature of how lawyers determined the “deservingness” of different applicants. As this work has shown, legal aid societies inserted themselves comfortably within capitalist economic orders, protecting and prioritizing the figure of the male breadwinner, and in the process, further entrenching ideas of female dependency.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this section, I consider how these ideological impulses played out in India.

In its early years, application forms were distributed by Pandia from his office between 7–9 in the morning.Footnote ⁷¹ The applicant was required to explain their complaint and provide personal details (employment status, rent, number of dependents, and salary). Applicants also submitted two references, presumably acting as a screening mechanism.Footnote ⁷² Applications were then assessed by a sub-committee tasked with assessing “deservingness,” while a “searching inquiry” investigated the financial means of the client.Footnote ⁷³ These committees were staffed from BLAS membership, composed of male lawyers.Footnote ⁷⁴ When cases were taken on, the BLAS clients only covered court fees. When this was not possible, the BLAS arranged the submission of in forma pauperis applications. This was a noteworthy feature of BLAS practice. American legal aid societies generally took small fees from legal aid applicants. This was rationalized to prevent pauperizing legal aid applicants, further distancing masculinized legal aid from femininized charity.Footnote ⁷⁵ Greater comfort with charity and social work appears to have reduced these fears in India.Footnote ⁷⁶

The BLAS published annual reports that summarized their activities. These were reprinted in shorter form across newspapers with large circulations and law journals in Bombay.Footnote ⁷⁷ While these are useful historical documents, they require scholarly caution. The BLAS were cognizant of the suspicions legal aid often provoked, and these reports were carefully crafted to shield themselves from potential controversy. The stringent attention paid to the applicant’s financial resources was regularly touted to prove that only the “deserving” were assisted, and that the BLAS were not stealing fee-paying clients from the bar. To demonstrate that legal aid did not encourage unnecessary litigation, reports regularly highlighted failed applications and publicized examples in which society had mediated disputes outside of court.Footnote ⁷⁸

If these reports were partially publicity exercises, they still offer an important window into BLAS work. Most began with a short paragraph detailing the range of legal issues tackled during the year. Although most cases related to civil law issues, criminal cases were engaged from the beginning and grew in number towards the final years of colonial rule.Footnote ⁷⁹ The range of legal matters tackled each year could be dizzying. A summary included in the 1940 BLAS report offers a representative example:

The applications dealt with by the society related to recover[y] of wages, obtaining compensation for injuries, custody of minors, effecting partition of joint family properties, maintenance, dissolution of partnership, divorce, recovery of claim in respect of life insurance, setting aside fraudulent sale of minor’s property, damages for defamation, and for breaches of contract. On the Criminal Side, the work consisted of defending persons accused of cheating, forgery, assaults, etc.Footnote ⁸⁰

From the late 1920s, reports expanded on these summaries with a breakdown of the number of different types of cases handled, alongside a series of “specimen cases.” Specimen cases provided summaries of individual cases to offer readers representative examples of legal aid work.

While cases were diverse, the BLAS predominantly worked in two spheres: the workplace and the home. In the former, the recovery of wages and provident funds from employers was the most common issue, amounting to roughly twenty percent of cases in most years.Footnote ⁸¹ Over time, unfair dismissals and compensation for workplace injuries became growing areas of work, the former likely a result of the economic downturn after the great depression. Though mill hands appear most frequently in reports, specimen cases included actors injured from wrestling matches during shooting, long-serving clerks dismissed without pension after developing writer’s cramp, and domestic servants fired and refused wages after being accused of theft.Footnote ⁸²

If professional backgrounds and circumstances differed, three major narrative arcs were common across reports. The first involved cases involving rogue employers unwilling to engage with the worker or the BLAS when withholding wages, refusing compensation, or refusing to reconsider unfair dismissals. These examples appeared in dry, short summaries. In each instance, the BLAS took the employer to court and forced them to accept their legal obligations. A second narrative involved mediated settlements between workers and employers. In such instances, employers appeared misguided or simply confused about their legal obligations. In the BLAS telling, the appearance of the lawyer delivered clarity, benefitting both parties. A 1928 example captures this type. In this example, a clerk from a “highly respectable import and export firm” fell sick for two weeks. After recovering, he returned to work to find he had been dismissed. The society approached the firm to discuss the case. The BLAS report explained that “The proprietor was thoroughly satisfied with the explanation given and he not only paid the clerk the salary due but offered to reengage him at any time he desired to join the service.” He further noted that he had not heard of the BLAS but was “greatly pleased with the objects of the society and the work it was doing.”Footnote ⁸³ A third narrative framed legal aid as something close to miracle work. In these instances, victims of injustice in highly precarious circumstances approached the society. These applicants had been denied access for various reasons, including the applicant lacking documentation, funds, or because of legal illiteracy. BLAS intervention at a crisis point empowered these figures to win otherwise impossible legal battles.Footnote ⁸⁴

Each explained legal aid as a means of widening access to justice, but more powerfully, a demonstration that legal aid could sand down the sharpest edges of industrial capitalism and embolden the liberal order. Legal aid ensured that bad employers were punished, ignorant employers were enlightened, and the downtrodden but hardworking worker was rescued. By prioritizing wage laborers, the BLAS aligned its work with the politics of contemporary industrial welfare legislation that had excluded informal workers from its protections.Footnote ⁸⁵

Although men accounted for most legal aid applications, women appeared across reports and specimen cases. Like the politics of privileging wage labour, the provision of legal aid to women was tied to ongoing shifts in the gendering of work and labor. Responding to growing concerns about infant mortality and the difficulties women faced in juggling childcare and factory work in the 1920s, the colonial state introduced maternity pay and more firmly regulated women’s working hours. Welfare measures intended to protect female labor undermined their employability as factory workers, contributing to the growing consensus that female labor was “secondary” and “supplementary.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The provision of BLAS legal aid worked in tandem with these developments.

Though fleeting references were made to female millhands and maid servants, women most commonly appeared in BLAS reports in relation to matrimonial issues, child custody cases, or as dependents seeking to recover of provident funds or compensation after husbands had been injured or died in workplace accidents.Footnote ⁸⁷ In these cases, the BLAS underscored the importance of their work by highlighting the huge obstacles that poor women might face when seeking justice. One extended example was presented in the 1929 annual report. The case involved a sixteen-year-old woman whose husband had died while employed in a local tramway company and was subsequently owed 325 rupees from his provident fund. The company refused to pay until she showed proper documentation. The Legal Aid Society intervened, investing considerable time and resources into the case. After over eight months of correspondence, the funds were released to the widow. The case was presented as a salutary lesson in the annual report, noting, “It is hardly necessary to state that if the Society had not taken up the matter, the widow would not have recovered the amount due to her deceased husband.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The second major area of BLAS work involving female clients related to matrimonial disputes, ranging from applications for legal separation through to maintenance payments and divorce, which appeared in almost every report. The prominence of such cases is striking. Divorce had been one of the most sensitive and thorny issues for legal aid practitioners in other contexts. Though the first generation of women-led legal aid practitioners in the USA had offered help for women seeking divorce, they tread carefully, keen to avoid the idea that legal aid was a threat to the family unit. The second wave of male legal aid societies in the twentieth century hardened their position on divorce further, some refusing to take any cases on and in some instances pressuring women to return to violent husbands.Footnote ⁸⁹

The extent to which the BLAS should engage in divorce cases was discussed in the second meeting of the BLAS in 1925. Though the content of this debate was not recorded, the presence of divorce in early BLAS annual reports points to a broad agreement that divorce cases would be engaged.Footnote ⁹⁰ What should be gleaned from this decision, and the strong presence of matrimonial disputes in BLAS reports? It seems clear that a willingness to engage marital disputes and divorce did not point to a proto-feminist streak running through the BLAS. Padma Anagol has shown that a surprisingly large number of women went to civil and criminal courts to seek remedies from unhappy conjugal relations in the late nineteenth-century Bombay Presidency. In pursuit of better domestic lives, they demanded maintenance payments, dissolution of marriage, divorce, and the restitution of conjugal rights. This assertion of female agency through recourse to colonial institutions, Anagol argued, provoked deep anxiety in Indian men who protested colonial reform and judicial and legislative intervention in family matters.Footnote ⁹¹ BLAS work in marital disputes makes some sense within this context. With women already demonstrating a readiness to use courts, legal aid work offered male lawyers an opportunity to claw back control over how the law was developed in marital disputes.

The broader gender politics of BLAS work were obvious from the specimen cases published. Whether in helping women win legal separations or divorce, cases chosen for elaboration in BLAS reports almost always involved husbands who had already left their wives, some had taken on second wives, and evidence of violence and abuse was commonplace.Footnote ⁹² The need to justify legal aid for divorce in specimen cases often led to examples chosen that demonstrated extreme cruelty and pointed to the high bar that needed to be met for women to exit from marriage. In 1939, for instance, the BLAS described a case involving an “Anglo-Indian woman.” The report explained that she had been “brutally illtreated and with her small child deserted by her husband” and was now so poor that “she did not even possess any wearable clothing.” The applicant claimed that her husband had already begun cohabiting with another woman and had also fathered several other illegitimate children. To strengthen their position, the BLAS employed an investigator to collect evidence of the husband’s behaviour. The society prepared a pauper petition, and once in court, succeeded in delivering their client a divorce and permanent maintenance for herself and her child.Footnote ⁹³ The case was unusual in the level of detail provided, but it spoke to common themes in other domestic disputes. Examples of estranged husbands who refused to pay maintenance, for instance, regularly portrayed women as “stranded” or “in great difficulty.”Footnote ⁹⁴

As the BLAS reports sought to demonstrate how legal aid saved women from the brink of destitution, the society was also keen to show that legal aid could also save family units from breakup. At times, this led to extraordinary claims about the power of legal aid to rekindle fraying relationships. As one newspaper report stated, the very presence of the legal aid lawyer in court had resulted in an “estranged couple left the court hand-in-hand and were happily married.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In other examples, mediation between couples involved reuniting abused wives with violent husbands.Footnote ⁹⁶ These reports also indicated a quiet Hindu politics informing BLAS work in the home. Whether in maintenance payments, legal separations, or divorce cases, annual reports routinely stipulated the religious background of the families involved in domestic disputes. While references were commonly made to Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Parsi families, I have found none describing a Hindu family.

The BLAS thus operated along relatively conservative social and economic principles even as it promoted progressive principles of widening access to justice. In domestic issues, it presented itself as a chivalrous institution, picking up the work otherwise expected of good, respectable husbands while reaffirming the notion of female dependency.Footnote ⁹⁷ Chivalry helped legal aid enter this sphere of law and establish its terms of engagement. In the process, the BLAS naturalized the basic principle that law might be a legitimate recourse for some women, but only as an absolute last resort. Considering these ideological impulses, the next section examines the successes and the struggles of the society. I argue that the cautious nature of BLAS helped build horizontal ties with like-minded legal professionals across India but undermined its capacity to establish similar vertical bonds with the working classes.

Successes and Struggles

By the 1930s, the BLAS could proudly claim to have surpassed the “experimental” stage.Footnote ⁹⁸ The society had expanded its institutional presence in various working-class districts, and by 1942 had opened offices in Worli, Delisle Road, Love Lane (Mazagoan), Byculla, and Vitalbhai Patel Road.Footnote ⁹⁹ As the society grew, it integrated itself fully within Bombay’s constellation of social service associations and charities. The society had also won friends in high places, earning praise from influential nationalists, high-ranking colonial officials, and High Court judges.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The BLAS wielded its growing credibility to lobby the government to consider reforms to the law. It asked for draft legislation and offered revisions, strategically took on cases to establish precedents, called for action against “loan-sharks, ambulance-chasers, confidence tricksters,” and demanded stricter regulation of moneylenders, pawn brokers, and insurance companies.Footnote ¹⁰¹ On occasion, these campaigns brought real success. The most impactful example is related to the eligibility for court fee waiver via the in forma pauperis application mechanism. After petitioning the High Court of Bombay in 1929, this was raised from individuals owning 100 rupees of property to 300 rupees.Footnote ¹⁰²

There was also demonstrable progress in efforts to launch a pan-Indian legal aid movement. Pandia and Kher worked especially hard in this sphere. Both travelled widely, speaking at newly established local bar associations, law libraries, and law conferences to encourage participation in the movement.Footnote ¹⁰³ Pandia also used his writings to raise awareness, publishing regular columns in law journals and newspapers, calling for new societies to be started. When lawyers evinced interest, he provided support, sent relevant material, and at times put individuals in touch with Bradway for further advice.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Across the interwar period, legal aid societies sprouted up in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Karachi, Madras, Rajkot, and Surat.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Nonetheless, in the most important aspect of their work, the BLAS were enduring serious difficulties. The Society conceived various strategies for advertisement and promotion to attract clients. Articles were hung up outside courtrooms, welfare departments, and hospitals in multiple languages.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Newspaper advertisements and opinion-pieces were published, radio appeals broadcast, and public speeches given outside University Halls and in the High Court. Senior figures from the society travelled across the city’s chawls and asked trade unions for help in encouraging individuals to approach the BLAS.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In spite of these efforts, the BLAS caseload grew at a glacial pace. In its first year, the society dealt with twenty-one applications.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Caseloads peaked at 111 in 1936, before declining in the 1940s. Given Bombay’s size and the huge challenges facing its large working population, these were tiny numbers. By comparison, between 1876 to 1930 in the USA, legal aid applicants had grown from 212 in 1876 to over 200,000 in 1930.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1910, the Boston Legal Aid Society alone dealt with caseloads of over a thousand, a figure deemed lower than its counterparts in Chicago and New York.Footnote ¹¹⁰ From the BLAS’s own reporting, there appeared surprisingly little appetite for their help.Footnote ¹¹¹

The BLAS offered various explanations. A common response was to point to the legal illiteracy of the working poor. After one year that had yielded very few cases, the BLAS, for instance, explained that this was due to “ignorance and helplessness of our poor people.”Footnote ¹¹² In a language familiar to other elite Indian social reformers, the society called for better education, greater exposure, and more funding. A second problem is related to the poor public image of the legal profession in India. In 1924, Pandia wrote that “whenever a movement, however innocent looking, was engineered by lawyers, there must be a sinister object behind.”Footnote ¹¹³ A decade later, another prominent BLAS member suggested that little had changed. He noted that in theatre and literature the lawyer was “almost always a knave of the lowest orders, and novelists delight in portraying [a] rogues’ gallery of them.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Negative popular conceptions of lawyers translated into general mistrust in the BLAS’s work and intermittent criticism in the press. In response, Pandia defended the BLAS doggedly, constantly submitting letters to newspapers rebutting false or misleading information published about the society.Footnote ¹¹⁵

If Pandia articulated irritation when correcting falsehoods, he did not absolve the profession from responsibility. In public forums, BLAS leaders commonly delivered stinging rebukes to the Indian bar for privileging personal profit over public duty.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These speeches and writings often ended with a plea to lawyers to reconsider their relationship to legal aid. He stressed that legal aid was not simply about helping the poor. It was also about salvaging their profession’s reputation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The size of the BLAS membership suggests these calls fell on deaf ears. After rising from 29 members in 1924 to 83 in 1931, the membership stagnated.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Strategies to attract new members, whether by lowering the annual membership fee in 1935 or creating a new “associate” membership for non-lawyers, struggled to attract new blood.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The ability of the BLAS to encourage small legal aid societies across towns and cities in India pointed to the presence of a nascent and nationally networked group of philanthropically minded lawyers who embraced the importance of social and ethical responsibility in professional life. The muted wider interest in this work suggested that this class remained small and relatively unrepresentative.

Figure 1: Membership (Select Years) Numbers collated from reports in The Times of India, Bombay Law Journal, Bombay Chronicle and Full reports held on file.

The small membership of the BLAS, combined with the reluctance of the government to invest in welfare schemes, contributed to one of the BLAS’s most serious challenges—funding.Footnote ¹²⁰ When compared to legal aid associations and societies elsewhere, the BLAS operated on a shoestring budget. To underscore these difficulties, BLAS publications compared themselves with their counterparts abroad. In one example published in 1928, the BLAS reported that the American Bar Association had recently dedicated any income accrued from its existing funds to legal aid. In the same year, the New York Legal Aid Society celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. During a dinner to mark the occasion, 50,000 dollars was raised from a new endowment and support from the Charter of the City of New York. Neither strategy proved successful.Footnote ¹²¹ The BLAS report’s own financial statement for the year revealed a balance of 467 rupees.Footnote ¹²² Appeals for private donations were subsequently placed in newspapers, and articles were published in the Bombay University College magazine, encouraging law students to volunteer for free.Footnote ¹²³ Neither approach achieved significant results.

From the explanations presented by the BLAS for their problems, the lack of funding was the most convincing. It reduced the society’s funds for publicity and prevented the employment of full-time investigators, lawyers, or permanent administrative staff.Footnote ¹²⁴ It also impacted the scale and quality of its services. Difficulties were reported in covering the fees involved in litigation and ensuring adequate office space to conduct interviews in privacy.Footnote ¹²⁵ In one instance, the BLAS explained how their ambitions to render assistance to the families of prisoners were halted due to limited funding.Footnote ¹²⁶ In 1936, B.G. Kher summarized the situation grimly. He noted that the BLAS had “no separate office, or paid secretary or staff to assist and no regular organization devoted solely to the furtherance of this movement.”Footnote ¹²⁷

The argument forwarded by the BLAS concerning working-class ignorance, by contrast, was far less persuasive. Recent scholarship has debunked earlier depictions of Bombay’s working classes as illiterate, helpless, and apolitical actors. This work has underscored that the key districts targeted by the BLAS, areas like Worli and Delisle Road, were intensely politicized spaces. Workers and residents joined unions and local associations, frequented libraries, and attended after-work schools and local theatre.Footnote ¹²⁸ Juned Sheikh has argued that by the 1920s, vibrant working-class public spheres had grown across Bombay, shaped by strikes and the circulation of socialist, anti-casteist, and Gandhian-inspired writings and cultural performances.Footnote ¹²⁹ Experience with the law had been a crucial part of this politicization. Themes relating to the illegal practices of mill-owners and landlords had been frequent themes in popular culture, while millhands had long attended street protests in large numbers against the conviction of popular political leaders.Footnote ¹³⁰ Perhaps more relevant still, legal professionals were embedded in working-class neighborhoods. Pleaders’ offices were often centrally located, and many acted as a meeting point for political organizing and social gatherings.Footnote ¹³¹

BLAS low caseloads, therefore, demand more interesting explanations. In the final sections, I consider how the history of BLAS might offer evidence into a Bombay working-class legal consciousness. This consciousness was shaped by the political and economic conditions of the city, the migratory character of the workforce, and the influence of nationalist and trade union politics.

When Workers Don’t Go to Court

The BLAS’s difficulties in attracting workers, many with very real legal problems, unintentionally presented evidence that contradicted the oft-repeated colonial myth that Indians were especially litigious.Footnote ¹³² It also forced legal aid lawyers to forward an alternative explanation for how Bombay’s poor related to the law. No less paternalist, BLAS leaders suggested this class was unaware of their legal rights and too easily misled by popular political leaders. While these positions differed, neither colonial official nor BLAS lawyer took particularly seriously the possibility that Bombay’s working classes possessed a legal culture grounded on lived experience. To move beyond these views, it is helpful to pose questions familiar to law and society scholars: What factors might have informed Bombay’s workers’ decision to seek professional legal advice or not? How did workers’ conceptions of rights and justice develop under colonial rule? When wronged workers opted against using the resources of the BLAS, what other options and strategies did they pursue? And ultimately, what might a Bombay working-class legal consciousness look like?Footnote ¹³³

Recovering the agency of legal aid users poses serious challenges. BLAS reports were managed by legal aid lawyers, leaving applicants’ experience largely restricted to documents mediated by the pen of the professional lawyer.Footnote ¹³⁴ Beyond the selective reprinting of thankful letters written by former clients, legal aid users’ voices were restricted to scattered references in annual reports and Pandia’s private correspondence. These snippets are still suggestive and offer insights into how applicants’ and legal aid lawyers’ ideas of justice and rights could differ. In one letter, Pandia sent to Bradway, he described a client refusing the advice of his attorney to agree to the settlement offered by the other side, demanding that the lawyer prosecute the case.Footnote ¹³⁵ The BLAS responded by seeking to discipline future clients’ behavior and expectations, inserting a new clause in applications that read: “I agree to abide by the advice of Vakils or attorneys and Counsel, assigned to me by the Society and authorize them to compromise the suit, action or matters or refer it to arbitration on such terms as they think to be in my interest.”Footnote ¹³⁶ In other examples, BLAS reports noted how applicants displayed irritation when help was not available at short notice, complained about being assigned junior lawyers and instead requested more senior representation, or demanded a lawyer from their own religious community.Footnote ¹³⁷

The BLAS explained these episodes with frustration, gesturing towards a perception of ungrateful applicants. When positioned in their wider context, other interpretations are possible. Mitra Sharafi has studied the extremely high use of colonial courts by the Parsi community. For Sharafi, Parsi readiness to use courts was partly explained by the large number of Parsi lawyers. As she explains, “having so many Parsi lawyers in the state courts must have made the “outside” forum of the courts feel more like an “inside setting for many Parsis.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Not discounting the real possibility that communal prejudices motivated demands for lawyers from specific religious backgrounds, the huge social gulf separating the classes needing legal aid from the BLAS lawyers appears relevant here, the latter generally wealthy and Anglicized upper caste Hindus and Parsis. Given that colonial courts were characterized by an unfamiliar legal etiquette, language, and physical architecture, it is likely that many workers would also have preferred representation from legal professionals with connected backgrounds.Footnote ¹³⁹

Perhaps more telling still was the demand for established lawyers. As earlier noted, legal aid lawyers generally held an idealized view of the legal system. Its failings, they argued, could be fixed by making lawyers more available, lowering courtroom costs, and tweaking legal procedure. It is unlikely workers were so optimistic. In his study of labor in colonial Bombay, Aditya Sarkar details the negative experiences many workers endured in the city’s courts. From the late nineteenth century, money lenders had turned Small Cause Courts into effective weapons to pressure indebted mill workers to repay loans. Many could not, leading to millhands becoming heavily overrepresented in debtor prisons.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Troublesome encounters with the law extended to workers’ own attempts to use courts in this earlier period. In wage disputes, courts regularly sided with employers, at times leading to large protests outside courtrooms.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Experiences of courts as unreceptive to workers were compounded by another issue. To go to court meant risk. Though rarely acknowledged by legal aid lawyers, this generally required workers to sacrifice their daily wages and risked damaging relations with recruiters, employers, family, or community members. In this context, it is unsurprising that some might have thought experienced legal counsel was important.

Low caseloads were also evidence of another fact: Bombay’s working classes had options. The districts that BLAS targeted largely housed migrant workers from rural western India. An important characteristic of the Bombay worker was the strong ties most maintained with their villages. Workers regularly visited for celebrations and remitted salaries home.Footnote ¹⁴² In return, the village offered an exit route during periods of trouble, unemployment, or sickness.Footnote ¹⁴³ With employment, housing, and credit ordered through caste and kin networks, informal and community-based methods of dispute resolution were thus readily available for workers in Bombay and operated in tandem with state institutions. Dadas (neighborhood toughs) and rent collectors arbitrated disputes between tenants, caste associations and panchayats met to arbitrate intra-community issues, and chawl committees composed of influential residents resolved disagreements between tenants and landlords.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ These forums, at times, even mimicked formal legal procedures, holding public trials.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In contrast to backlogged courts, these were accessible mechanisms to resolve disputes predicated on structures of authority that residents were already deeply entangled within.

Workers’ enthusiasm for state justice was further impacted by the seismic political developments coinciding with the birth of the BLAS. After World War I, the Gandhi-headed Congress party decisively broke from earlier constitutional methods of nationalist protest, leading mass popular agitations against colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ As political parties deepened their support among the public, the bustling mill districts became home to India’s rapidly expanding trade union movement. Unlike the elite and small membership model of the BLAS, the union’s strength lay in its large membership. The most popular union, the communist Girni Kamgar Union, boasted over 50,000 members in 1929.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While strikes were not new to Bombay, unions oversaw coordinated industrial action on an unprecedented scale. Historians have connected the rise of communist politics in Bombay to the marginalization of social service organizations during this period.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ These dangers were recognized by BLAS leaders at the time. Some drew direct links between union work and diminished caseloads. In 1940, Narshinha Acharya, a BLAS representative in Worli reported a significant decrease in his casework. He pointed to an ongoing strike, writing that “The poor labourers, under the influence of a tremendous propaganda, were led to think that the strike, if it were a success, would usher in a new era of prosperity for them in all respects.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The idea of naïve workers led carelessly into industrial action by clever political leaders elided a more complicated reality.

Before the rise of trade unions, Bombay workers resorted to industrial action to fight wage cuts, workplace rationalization, and job cuts. Deployed alongside petitions and other modes of protest, strikes had also been crucial to the gradual expansion of workers’ rights, whether in relation to holiday leave, protections against the withholding of wages, or regulated working hours.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The success of these strategies resulted in their redeployment in other spheres of working-class life. Vanessa Caru has shown how tenants in low-cost housing responded to rent hikes, eviction notices, and poor living conditions by blending legally worded mass petitions with threats of a rent strike. These methods often worked, winning concessions from landlords.Footnote ¹⁵¹ What Acharya blamed on labor leaders was likely evidence of a pragmatic working-class legal consciousness that had long recognized that strike action could often bring better results than colonial courts.

The Competition

When seeking to resolve problems in already challenging circumstances, Bombay’s working classes tapped various sources of authority, resorted to collective protest, and, when necessary, left the city. This partially helps explain why workers might have looked beyond the courts when experiencing injustice. Workers, however, did not fully eschew courts. In the right conditions, and in the right hands, many appeared ready to use colonial law.

Though trade unions were the key drivers of the militant industrial action in Bombay, they also could, at times, encourage workers to engage state institutions, offering members legal representation and advice. In this guise, unions presented direct competition for the BLAS. While more research is required to gauge the nature and amount of legal assistance provided by trade unions in colonial India, it is noticeable that the Bombay Taxi Drivers Union, a relatively small union, recorded providing legal assistance to roughly fifteen members a month in the 1930s, surpassing the BLAS in scale.Footnote ¹⁵² These numbers are suggestive when considering what factors might have convinced workers to approach legal aid societies or go to courts.

Two tentative conclusions are posited here. First, it is conceivable that unions simply articulated their legal aid and assistance more persuasively. The Bombay Textile Labour Union included legal assistance in its constitution’s objectives, nestled alongside promises to better organize the workforce, prevent the reduction of wages, render aid during strikes, and protect sick leave and retirement benefits.Footnote ¹⁵³ Unlike the paternalism of legal aid societies, unions linked legal aid to a political programme connected to broader ideas of economic and social justice. Second, it is possible that union membership cultivated more assertive members. In Sally Merry Engle’s study of the American working classes’ legal consciousness, she noted that compared to non-court users, court-goers commonly accessed other government services, reflective of a broader sense of positive entitlement.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Unions may have inculcated a similar culture of entitlement and trust by providing legal services alongside wide-ranging services, including medical relief schemes, unemployment funds, educational opportunities, and access to libraries, schools, and gyms.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

If structural and political differences between trade unions and the BLAS might explain why some workers were more comfortable with the former, the success of other forms of competition was harder to explain. In 1923, the GOI passed the Indian Workmen’s Compensation Act. It provided for the payment of compulsory accident compensation for workers in select industries. The Indian law was modelled on an earlier English Act, albeit less generous in the scale of compensation and eligibility.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The Act set terms for compensation settlements between the employer and the injured party. When disputes were not settled privately, the claimant could then file an application to a commissioner who was appointed by local governments and tasked with resolving disputes. To assist workers, the Act was crafted to operate at “a minimum of expense” for claimants.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ This included a presumption that lawyers were unnecessary. The Act, therefore, included a provision for illiterate workers to have applications prepared under the direction of the commissioner.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

While seeking to reduce the importance of lawyers, the Act did not prohibit the use of pleaders. The value of professional representation became apparent quickly. The Act lacked clear definitions for key terms such as “accident” or “dependent,” and claimants often found it challenging to definitively attribute occupational injuries or diseases to employer negligence or workplace hazards.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Even more problematically, as the law developed, robust arguments for compensation increasingly relied on citing earlier cases. In these circumstances, deep-pocketed employers with expensive legal representation easily overpowered undefended claimants.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Though the BLAS recognized the Act lent itself to legal aid work, only a handful of workers requested help.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Unions were involved in these cases, but also appear to have done small amounts of work.Footnote ¹⁶² The BLAS believed the bigger problem was claim agencies, which had mushroomed across Bombay’s mill districts in the interwar period. Claim agencies assigned pleaders to workers to represent them in disputes and collected evidence to support their cases. Unlike the BLAS, they took a share of the claimant’s award as payment. Their success begged the question, why would workers give away a portion of their compensation rather than approach a legal aid society? The BLAS claimed to have been outmaneuvered on the ground. Claim agencies built close ties with both jobbers (labor contractors) and factory managers. While the BLAS waited for applicants to approach them, claim agencies used their contacts to approach workers when learning about workplace accidents.Footnote ¹⁶³ Tips and referrals were then repaid through a share of the claim agencies’ profits.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

There was undoubtedly exploitation involved in profits accumulated from workplace injuries and deaths, something the BLAS attacked the agencies for. Nonetheless, the claim agencies also exposed BLAS limitations. The role of the jobber illustrates this point. Jobbers performed key roles in the recruitment, supervision, and disciplining of factory labor in Bombay. If jobbers commonly resorted to coercive practices to maintain workers’ obedience, their authority also rested on their ability to mediate between managers and workers, facilitate rural migrants’ adjustment to the city, and provide access to credit, grain, housing, or work opportunities during bouts of unemployment.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The value of approaching claim agencies with close ties to jobbers becomes apparent when the risks of court battles are taken seriously. As Hatice Yıldız has argued, workers were keenly aware of the uphill battle they faced when seeking compensation from wealthy mill owners and their expensive lawyers.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Bluntly put, injured workers who used the Act risked “losing [their] job on top of losing a limb.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ By working alongside the jobber and integrating themselves within neighbourhood economies, claim agencies naturalized themselves within existing networks of patronage and trust that workers relied upon for survival.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

For all their good intentions, legal aid lawyers positioned themselves firmly outside and above these worlds, parachuting into disputes, providing their support for the strict duration of the case. Their positionality had led to a myopic view of everyday working-class life and agency and an inability to recognize the type of calculations and experiences around which a working-class legal consciousness had developed. Far from being ignorant of their rights, the working classes were acutely conscious of their weak position in a highly stratified economic and social order, as well as the limited capacity of the law to deliver them justice. Workers did not simply require better education and access to lawyers to become more willing court-users. They needed greater confidence that the law was not stacked against them, and greater security for the possibility that their pursuit of justice might fail.