Set against today's context of globalization and the decline of large-scale industry, Lost Worlds is a detailed exploration of the world of labour in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia. Using a wide range of oral and archival sources as well as popular literature, Chitra Joshi reconstructs working class lives, exploring their everyday worlds at the workplace and within community life, as well as their moments of conflict and struggle. In its analysis of the complex relationship between past and present, memory and history, culture and practice, community and nation, everyday life and moments of upheaval, this book represents a very significant academic contribution to labour history in South Asia.