The purpose of this study to document and criticaly analyse decline of Working-Class literature in India. Historically, this literary tradition took root in the struggles of workers during industrialisation and the anti-colonial movement, functioning as a powerful medium for voicing the everyday realities of labourers in factories, fields and informal employment. The tradition was nurtured by an ecosystem of progressive political movements, trade union patronage, and vernacular publishing infrastructure that collectively sustained its production and ensured its circulation among the communities it represented.
This study is based on narrative based extensive literature review. Methodologically, the paper draws on Marxist political economy, Foucauldian power analysis, Nancy Fraser’s theory of the public sphere, and Cultural Materialism.
The study is guided by interconnected research questions: firstly, how the fragmentation of organised labour, the consequences of economic liberalisation, and the rise of digital media brought about socio-economic and cultural changes that have together undermined working-class literature; secondly, how these same forces have redirected publishing and readership towards middle-class tastes and aesthetics; and thirdly, how this literary decline amounts to an epistemic loss that carries enduring cultural consequences for Indian democracy and social consciousness.
This paper examines the underlying causes and evaluates the normative consequences of the steady erosion of working-class literature in India. The paper analyses the processes that have marginalised working-class narratives, traces the erasure of social memory that follows from their disappearance, and examines how the absence of such literature reinforces cultural privilege and deepens existing structures of inequality.
