BENGALURU: The garment workforce that stitches Bengaluru's apparel exports — overwhelmingly female, largely migrant, and central to an industry housed in a state officially designated India's garment capital — has been rendered structurally invisible by the very city it helped build. That invisibility has been engineered across four decades of policy, geography and public storytelling.
This is the central argument of Gone with the Seam: The Women Who Built Bengaluru's Garment Industry, a new book by journalist Subir Ghosh. Published by AuthorsUpfront, it is the first full-length book on garment workers anywhere in India.
Bengaluru does not hide its garment workers, the book argues. It has simply organised itself so that it does not have to see them. Four interlocking mechanisms produce that outcome. The global buyer-driven supply chain suppresses the supplier's name and gives factory owners no commercial reason to build a public identity. Karnataka's investment policy has treated IT as the city's productive core and garment manufacturing as its residue. Cinema, literature and theatre have not developed the language to see factory-floor migrant women as subjects of serious creative work. And planning is handled by non-representative parastatal agencies never accountable to the manufacturing workforce whose geography they were reshaping.
Gone with the Seam documents the physical form that invisibility takes on the ground. Garment factories in Peenya, Bommanahalli, Hosur Road and Mysore Road are closed buildings on peripheral industrial land — built for output, not for visibility. Inside, windowless shop floors, piece-rate discipline and calibrated turnover work together to foreclose the solidarity that sustained collective action would require.
The book also examines the recruitment arrangements that sustain the workforce. Young women are brought from within Karnataka and from Odisha, Jharkhand and Assam. They are housed in institutional hostels beside the factory. Contact with the outside world is permitted only against a photograph on an approved list. The workforce moves each day between two enclosed spaces, with no unescorted interval in the city outside.
The book treats the cultural absence as a distinct expression of the same condition. Kannada cinema has never depicted the garment factory as a site of politics. Its audience imaginary was formed around the old Mysore region's aristocratic self-image. It could not accommodate a heroine from a north Karnataka district, let alone a migrant woman from Jharkhand on an assembly line. Kannada literature, though it has produced powerful writing from Dalit and mill-worker households, has not yet produced writing from the garment factory itself. Theatre practitioners who might once have taken performances to the workers now find a workforce too exhausted at shift's end to come to them. And the institutions that govern the literary field have shown no inclination to reach for the worker narratives that already exist in union and NGO circuits.
The book returns to the April 2016 protests. Garment workers walked off the lines, blocked Bengaluru's highways over a proposed change to Employees' Provident Fund rules, and forced the central government to reverse the amendment within days. The book argues that the episode won its immediate demand, but the structural condition held. The wage floor, the turnover rate and the enclosure remained intact after the workers dispersed. When factories shut during the pandemic and women workers in Karnataka sustained a much longer protest, it drew less coverage. The earlier episode had revealed the pattern; the later one confirmed it.
Organised across nine chapters and three sections, Gone with the Seam opens in the pre-dawn buses of the garment belts and closes on the shop floor. It reaches back to the 1926 Binny Mills strike, then follows the export-oriented industry that grew on the ground the old mills vacated without inheriting their public visibility. The final chapters turn to the cultural, civic and political apparatus that has kept the workforce out of the city's story. It is both a history of how the condition was made and an account of what it now costs.
- Ghosh, who lived and worked in Bengaluru for ten years, is Co-Founder and Executive Editor of com, a digital publication about the global textiles-apparel-leather-footwear industry.
- On Amazon: https://link.amazon/B0hVpg8E3
- For a copy signed by the author: WhatsApp +91-9916816305
