Unheard Voices: The Migrant Workers of Mumbai’s Cotton Mills and Narayan Surve’s Poetic Legacy

Migrants play a key role in Mumbai’s dynamics, shaping its identity through cultural fusion. This paper shifts focus from the city’s colonial legacy and Dharavi to overlooked cotton mill workers, mostly migrants from nearby villages. Recruited by ‘jobbers’ and housed in cramped chawls, their lives mirrored subaltern destitution. Narayan Surve, an orphan poet raised by mill workers, captures their struggles in his Marxist poetry, giving voice to the marginalised and highlighting the socio-economic and cultural challenges faced by Mumbai’s migrant labourers.