The crack of rifle fire in Srinagar’s Sher Garhi precinct on 21 July 1924, marked not merely the killings of 10 silk workers but the puncturing of a carefully maintained colonial facade.
These silk workers, casualties of a calculated military intervention by the Dogra State apparatus, became unwitting martyrs in a complex dialectic of subaltern resistance against entrenched socio-economic stratification and political disenfranchisement.
Sequence of Events
The labour uprising of 1924 in Kashmir's silk factory had its roots in earlier grievances dating back to 1920, when workers had approached the Dogra monarch, Maharaja Pratap Singh, seeking a wage increase.
The workers, predominantly Muslims, existed within a hierarchically segmented labour structure where their subordinate status was reinforced through economic deprivation (a meager daily wage of 4 annas per day) and institutionalised humiliation (forced servitude to corrupt officials).
But they received no response and thus, tensions continued to simmer for several years as workers faced poor working conditions, inadequate wages, and corrupt officials.
The immediate crisis began on July 12, 1924, when the Anjuman-i-Nusrat-ul-Islam organized a public meeting to pray for Maharaja Pratap Singh's health. Silk factory labourers took out a procession to join this meeting, which passed without incident. However, when a salary commission visited the factory, workers went on strike and sat in protest outside the premises, demanding immediate redress of their grievances. After consultations at Hazuri Bagh, the workers approached higher authorities at Gupkar on July 19, 1924.
The situation escalated dramatically when workers demanded the removal of a clerk running a protection racket. Factory managers reported to police that the laborers had gone out of control, prompting authorities to view the situation as threatening to public peace. The District Magistrate was informed that officials' lives and property were in danger due to assaults on sericulture staff. Fearing the workers would join a public meeting to be addressed by Khwaja Kamal-ud-din of the Ahmadiya community, the government decided to act swiftly.
On July 20, 1924, twenty-five workers were quietly arrested, with twenty-one sent to central jail and four held at Sher Garhi police station. The next morning, nearly 4,000 workers gathered outside the police station demanding the prisoners' immediate release.
When the crowd attempted to force entry, cavalry troops were ordered to disperse them, resulting in police opening fire. Ten workers were killed on the spot and twenty were injured, marking a tragic culmination of years of labour unrest and governmental indifference to workers' legitimate demands.
What the Protest & Killings Signified
The deaths of the silk workers crystallised the latent contradictions within the princely state structure, exposing the brutal mechanics of hegemonic control maintained through a symbiosis of feudal aristocracy and indirect colonial oversight.
At the same time, it demonstrated the intersectionality of class oppression, religious marginalisation, and systemic corruption. This structural violence was exacerbated by the asymmetric modernisation of Kashmir under Dogra rule, where educational and economic advancement remained disproportionately accessible to Hindu elites (mainly Pandits in Kashmir), fueling a dialectic of resentment.
The protest itself was a performative assertion of agency through processions, strikes, and mass assemblies which functioned as counter-hegemonic practices against the legitimised exploitation of the state.
The involvement of the Anjuman-i-Nusrat-ul-Islam illustrates how religious solidarity was instrumentalised for labour resistance, blurring the boundaries between sacred and secular dissent. However, the state’s response in deploying cavalry, mass arrests, and preemptive suppression revealed the carceral logic of colonial governance, where disciplinary power was wielded to re-territorialise control over insurgent bodies.
Socio-Political Antecedents: The Dialectics of Discontent
The uprising emerged within a milieu of profound anomie among Kashmir’s Muslim majority. Post-Khilafat and non-cooperation agitation across the Indian sub-continent had already catalysed a nascent political consciousness, fostering networks of solidarity and challenging the legitimacy of Dogra rule perceived as a foreign, exploitative imposition – a structural byproduct of the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar’s ignominious realpolitik.
This cognitive liberation, a psychological precondition for collective action, intersected with the material realities of industrial exploitation at the state-owned silk factory in Kashmir.
Workers existed in a state of relative deprivation; daily wages of approximately 4 annas constituted absolute immiseration amidst escalating inflation and the factory’s documented profitability. The systemic corruption, including officials brazenly skimming wages, demanding bribes, and enforcing de facto indentured servitude, exemplified institutionalised humiliation.
This was a psychological warfare waged upon the subaltern body and spirit. Seasonal closures without pay further weaponised precarity, rendering survival contingent on absolute subjugation.
The Strike as Praxis: Collective Consciousness and Contested Space
The 1924 strike represented a quantum leap in class consciousness. Moving beyond individual grievances (insufficiency of remuneration, tyrannical oversight), the labourers were engaged in organised praxis: work stoppages, factory occupation ("sitting in front of the factory"), processions, and public assemblies.
Their strategic timing during the Salary Commission visit was a masterstroke of political theatre, forcing a confrontation with the state’s bureaucratic machinery. The refusal to heed the Director’s appeals signifies a critical erosion of traditional deference, a psychological rupture with established power dynamics.
Their march towards Gupkar, the seat of administrative power (aiming to approach officials like Ashima Chargotra), was a deliberate spatial encroachment upon the symbolic heart of Dogra authority, transforming the cityscape into a terrain of contestation.
State Terror as Hegemonic Preservation: The Military-Industrial Complex Revealed
The Dogra state’s response was archetypal of authoritarian crisis management. Perceiving the organised labourers not as petitioners but as an existential threat to the bourgeoise state’s stability and the feudal order’s superstructure, it activated its repressive apparatus.
The deployment of infantry and cavalry under the District Magistrate’s authority was a preemptive manoeuvre designed to shatter solidarity and deter wider mobilisation, particularly the planned procession.
The characterisation of the gathering at Sher Garhi police station as a "breach of peace" served as the nominal casus belli for lethal force.
Ten fatalities and numerous injuries were not collateral damage but the deliberate outcome of state-sanctioned violence – a stark manifestation of class repression designed to instill terror (psychologically) and reassert control (politically/militarily). The subsequent military occupation of Srinagar underscored the regime’s reliance on coercive power over consensual governance.
International Reverberations and the Articulation of Anti-Colonial Demands
The massacre transcended local grievance, triggering transnational solidarity networks and exposing the fault lines of indirect rule. Kashmiri Muslims telegraphing the Viceroy, coupled with the Lahore Khilafat Committee’s mass demonstrations and demands for an independent inquiry, internationalised the conflict.
This external pressure leveraged the inherent tension within the imperial framework between the paramount power (Britain) and its subsidiary ally (the Dogra state). Crucially, the memorandum presented to Viceroy Lord Reading articulated a comprehensive decolonisation program far exceeding labour reform.
It included:
Economic Justice:
Demands for land redistribution, abolition of feudal begaar (forced labour), and dismantling state monopolies (e.g., the Shali Department) targeted the material base of Dogra and associated elite power.
Political Representation:
Calls for proportional representation in the State Council, proposed Legislative Assembly, and bureaucratic posts challenged the Hindu (Pandit) minority’s hegemonic control, demanding a renegotiation of the social contract.
Anti-Imperial Safeguards:
The insistence on European oversight in judicial processes was a strategic, albeit paradoxical, manoeuvre – utilising imperial authority as a counterweight against local aristocratic excesses, reflecting a sophisticated understanding of layered sovereignty.
Cultural Autonomy:
Demands for restored religious properties and community control over endowments asserted communal identity and self-determination against state interference.
Educational Reform:
Compulsory free primary education and affirmative action (scholarships, teacher appointments) targeted systemic underdevelopment, and the exclusionary policies identified as tools of subjugation.
Economic Nationalism:
Prioritising Kashmiri subjects in state contracts asserted economic self-interest against perceived external exploitation.
Philosophical Underpinnings and Enduring Legacy:
The Seeds of Epochal Struggle
The 1924 uprising was an ontological eruption against the prevailing order. It exposed the dialectical tension between the Dogra state’s autocratic superstructure and the burgeoning forces of proletarian and national consciousness mainly among the Muslim masses.
The workers' actions embodied a nascent understanding of their alienation – not just from the fruits of their labour, but from political agency and cultural dignity (Fanonian liberation).
The British Resident’s subsequent suggestion to co-opt educated Muslim workers into management was a classic strategy of hegemonic incorporation, attempting to defuse revolutionary potential by offering limited concessions within the existing structure. It failed.
While acknowledging some of the reforms under Maharaja Hari Singh (e.g., limited administrative modernisation, opening schools, tentative land revenue adjustments), their impact was constrained.
The fundamental structure of Dogra rule remained autocratic and feudal. Systemic disenfranchisement, economic extraction, and the denial of basic political rights to the majority persisted, fueling the deep grievances that culminated in various events with peoples’ demonstrations.
However, the killing of ten silk workers at Sher Garhi Srinagar became spectral figures haunting the Dogra regime.
Their sacrifice laid bare the brutal reality of princely rule under the Raj’s umbrella and catalysed a more profound, organised resistance. The uprising shifted the 'Overton window' of political possibility in Kashmir, transforming latent discontent into an articulated program for structural transformation.
It was a critical inflection point, proving that the "spirit of mobility" ignited by Khilafat could evolve into a potent, multi-front challenge to feudalism and its colonial enablers.
The blood spilled in the streets on 21 July 1924 irrigated the seeds of a much longer, harder struggle for emancipation – a struggle whose complex legacy continues to shape the political ontology of Kashmir. Their demand was not merely for annas, but for amanat – the sacred trust of dignity, justice, and agency usurped by the treaty of 1846.
The echo of that demand, born in the loom-sheds and paid for in blood, remains audible a century on.
"The shuttles cease, the weavers pay,
But weave the dawn of freedom's day.
Their silenced breath, a nation's call,
That shook the palace, shook the wall.
Where ten souls made the tyrants fall,
And wove the end of night for all.
Their peaceful plea, a stifled cry,
Beneath a harsh and heedless sky. "
References and Links
1. Kashmiris-Fight-For-Freedom by M Y Saraf, (2009) vol 1, (in 1920 & 1924)
2. Freedom Movement in Kashmir by Gh. Hassan Khan (2009)
3. Mridu Rai (4000 had fled the valley)
4. The silk industry and trade; a study in the economic organization of the export trade of Kashmir and Indian silks, with special reference to their utilization in the British and French markets by Rawlley, Ratan C
5. Kashmir Through Ages VI(a) Silk labour Agitation, July 1924 Dr. Eshraf Zainulabideen link https://www.kashmirpen.in/kashmir-through-ages-via-silk-labour-agitaion-july-1924/
6. Silk Factory Labourers had gone on strike on 26th March 1920 for demanding an increase in their wages. They assembled in the Hazuri Bagh, Srinagar and went in a procession to represent their grievances to the Residency in Kashmir, where they were intercepted by the police. These workers then sent a petition to the Chief Minister in which they complained that instead of being increased their wages had been decreased. The workers also demanded an increase in their wages. From Jammu and Kashmir Archives, File no. 26/1920
7. Muhammed Yusuf Ganaie, Kashmir’s struggle for Independence Srinagar, Delhi 2001
8. Om Hari, Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, A study in the spread of education and consciousness (1857-1925), New Delhi 1986,
9. The secret abstract of Intelligence for the year 1924, Jammu and Kashmir Archives, File no. B of 1924.
10. Kaur, Ravinderjit, Political Awakening in Kashmir, New Delhi 2001
11. Jammu and Kashmir Archives, File No-82/M-92of year 1924.
12. General Secretary, All India Muslim Kashmiri conference, Lahore to the First Assistant to the Resident in Kashmir, 18th August 1924.
13. File no-T/81 of 1924, State Archives Repository. Srinagar Riot Enquiry Committee Report, State Archives Repository.
14. File no-82/M-92 of 1924, State Archives Repository.
15. Geography of the State of J & K by Pandit Anand Koul Anand (1925)
16. Kashir by Dr GMD (D Lit France) Vol 2
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