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Producing Material Culture for Global Markets:
The Craft Economy of Eighteenth and Twenty-first Century India
Introduction
Manufacturing is once more on the world stage as we have watched the
numbers of the dead in Bangaladesh’s recent textile factory disaster mount to
nearly 1000. Today a global story of industry and manufacturing presents us on
the one hand with China’s huge factory regions where whole cities manufacture
buttons or zips, or with unregulated clothing factories such as Bangaladesh’s,
feeding the cheap clothing consumer cultures of the West.
When I wrote my first book, The Machinery Question – manufacture was
perceived as a history of factories and machinery,.
Its depiction in the early nineteenth century was not so different, but included
the role of sweated labour. Cruikshank’s ‘A Tremendous Sacrifice’ showed
cheap female labour being ground up in a mill, while women in shopping
emporia not so far away declared ‘I don’t know how they can possibly make
them so cheap’.
What went before this factory labour was assumed to be craft and artisan
manufacture with some household domestic industry.
Historians in the 1970s and 1980s debated the rise of the factory system, protoindustrialization and flexible specialization, and other alternatives to mass
production. They did so in their separate fields of European history, Asian
Studies and Colonial and Imperial History.
The rise of globalization from the 1990s demanded we turn to the resurgence of
Asia as a manufacturing power house as we watched manufacturing in Europe
and the US decline. It also demanded that we rethink our own histories of
industrialization – they were not a separate European miracle, but connected to
wider world trade and Asian industry.
Today I want to discuss craft and other small-scale manufacture not as an art
form, but as a part of manufacture and industry.
2
I want to address concepts of craft, artisanship and skill as these have been
bound up with cycles of production across the long chronology of India’s
history, and especially in the area I discuss today, Gujarat and Kachchh, its
northern province.
The people in the region today maintain strong craft traditions, but their lives
are changing in face of the markets of the new global India. They carry
important historical parallels with their forebears of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries who produced for pre-colonial Indian Ocean and colonial
world trade.
In Mandvi, the celebrated ancient port of Kachchh, best known for its
boatbuilding of dhows made from teak and acacia wood, boats that sailed the
Arabian Sea to Zanzibar and beyond, we also find a long history of bandhani
making. Bandhani, or tie dye, is widely practiced in Bhuj, Mandvi and many
other towns and outlying villages across Kachchh. It is a classic outworking
occupation. Organized by men, especially in the Khatri community through
family networks, these prepare the cloth in workshops where they stencil the
designs onto fine cotton or silk. The tying is done mainly by women but also by
male outworkers; the fabric is then dyed by men who have passed their
knowledge on through generations.
Sisters Hanifa and Jamila Khanna and all other members of their family
combine tying with agricultural and domestic labour. It takes them 5 days to
complete a piece of work and they might earn 1500-1800 Rs. per month. The
work for them and for all the women who practice it is also like a habit; they
never sit empty-handed. In a small darkened house across from the putting out
shop where they bring their goods, Neelam Khanna counts the tied bandh. She
is well-educated with a second year of a BComm, but unmarried and the carer
for her mother after the death of her father. She is widely trusted by contractors
and workers, and with steady work; she earns 3,000 Rs. a month. The counting
is intricate, but logical – she takes 15 minutes to count 1,000 kadi (or chains of
4 ties each).
Their stories are part of an oral history project I have led and conducted among
the craftspeople of Kutch. The work, the organization of production and the
challenges of local and world markets revealed in these interviews has given me
insight into past frameworks of industry in the area, and into the survival of
small scale production in face of the large economic shifts of globalization.
3
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Craft and Small Scale Production: Historical Frameworks
Craft and small scale production in India today needs to be placed in its
historical context, and in the context of the ways historians have written about
industrialization. Few now study manufacture, but it is central to the themes of
material culture and consumption that inspire us today.
Early historical analysis of industrialization compared a dynamic capitalintensive and mechanized factory sector with unchanging pre-industrial
handicrafts. India in particular was seen as embedded in age-old practices that
were not part of a changing wider world.
The debate on proto-industrialization during the 1980s turned to examine the
commercial reorganization of rural manufactures, especially in seventeenth and
eighteenth-century Europe. Analysis of mixed agricultural and industrial
occupations, of the division of labour, and of advanced putting out systems that
yielded a surplus for merchant manufacturers appeared to offer a possible path
to industrialization. But extensive research on individual regions yielded equal
possibilities of paths to sweated industry and eventual industrial decline.
Historians of India during this period engaged in a debate over deindustrialization and the colonial control of India’s textile industry. A few, such
as Frank Perlin, connected India’s commercial manufacture in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries to European developments.
He compared
manufactures in Bengal and the Coromandel coast to those described by Witold
Klima in Bohemia. In both places Dutch and English merchants penetrated
textile regions, controlling markets and production networks, and gaining
greater supervisory control over spinners and weavers. He showed us how that
phase of protoindustrialization was entangled in large-scale inter-regional
connections and world commerce.
Some of Europe’s and North America’s regions, however, had stronglyembedded nodes of crafts and skills. These yielded many externalities, and
such regions seemed for sociologists and historians of the 1980s to offer an
alternative historical path to the large factories and mass production which
seemed at the time to have had its day; they sought a real possibility of flexible
specialization.
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Debate first centred on the persistence of small firms; they were clearly
evidence of ‘industrial dualism’, where craft sectors and small units of
production responded to surges of demand or provided the varieties tacked onto
main production lines.
But, asked Piore, Sabel and Zeitlin, had there once been and indeed was there
still a real possibility of a craft alternative to mass production? To answer this
question they sought out industrial districts – such as Emilia-Romagna – which
appeared to offer an alternative of a dynamic region of many small producers.
Their historical enquiries turned to the Lyon silk and hardware industries; to
cutlery & specialty steels in Solingen, Remscheid and Sheffield; to calicoes in
Alsace, woollens in Roubaix, textiles in Philadelphia. There small scale
producers had used multi-purpose machines and skilled labour to make a
changing assortment of semi-customised products. Their eventual decline, these
historical sociologists argued, was not due to their model of technological
development, but to political, institutional and economic factors.
The backdrop for these histories was a utopian vision of alternative economic
development, based in regions, in co-operative institutions and small in scale.
The widespread transfers of industrial production with the onset of globalization
swept away the prospects for many of these vaunted European specialist
manufacturing regions.
We have not, as historians, focussed much on this world of work and of making
things during the past three decades since these debates; many turned instead to
histories of consumerism.
Yet this older historical interest in craft, skill and artisanship has returned to
historical agendas more recently in the form of Jan de Vries’s ‘industrious
revolution’, in which household connections of production and consumption
generated consumer and industrial revolutions. Likewise, the role of technology
has re-appeared in debates on the ‘great divergence’ in development paths
between Asia and Europe, and in discussions of particular ‘East Asian
development paths’. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Tirthankar Roy and David
Washbrook have debated the extent and direction of an Indian dynamic culture
of technical knowledge. Kaoru Sugihara and other Japanese economic
historians have contrasted an East Asian Development path with the West’s
capital- and resource-intensive path. A labour-intensive, resource- and energysaving path was part of Japanese and wider Asian economic development.
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Not just labour, but skills have returned to a central place in discussion of
industrialization. Skill and the ‘tacit knowledge‘ underlying it have been central
to the concept of ‘useful knowledge’ as developed by Joel Mokyr; likewise
‘local knowledge’ and ‘nodes of craft skill’ were vital to the artisans that the
late Larry Epstein followed across Europe as they carried and reconfigured
knowledge sets, and brought technological leadership to new regions of early
modern Europe.
Craft has been a particularly potent political issue in India’s industrial history,
and discussion of India’s craft economies today and in the past takes us to the
heart of the debates on colonialism and de-industrialization.
Recent books by Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India
(2009) and Douglas Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (2012)
address the political potency of craft in modern India. The artisan became a
political symbol of India’s fate under colonialism. For British colonizers the
crafts demonstrated India’s economic backwardness, but Europeans also
collected India’s unique and beautiful products in museum collections that
orientalised not just the goods, but the artisans themselves. In these discourses
artisans were traditional, ossified, homogenized, subjects to be archived and
preserved in museums and art schools.1
For nationalists craft producers represented the remains of the self-sufficient
society that they thought India had once been before the disruption of
colonialism, industrialization and the competition of European textiles.
Gandhi’s khadi campaign epitomised the turning of these discourses into a craft
critique of Empire. These historical perspectives were as utopian as were those
of the flexible specialists; in this case the artisan and her craft represented
autonomy. The discourses also informed the writing of Indian economic history
for the generations after Independence.2 Economic historians of India debated
the de-industrialization thesis and the fate of India’s artisans from the later
1960s into the 1980s.3 Comparing the course of artisan production in Gujarat
and Kachchh over its early modern global history and its recent framework of
globalization thus allows us to engage with these larger debates on
industrialization and on India’s industrial history over the pre-colonial, colonial,
nationalist and recent global periods.
Gujarat, Kachchh and Long-distance Trade
I now turn to Gujarat and Kachchh.
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Kachchh, in a remote area between Northern Gujarat and Sindh, now modern
Pakistan, became known in the wider world in the wake of the 2001 earthquake.
NGOs converged on the region, and the Indian government developed the area
leading north from Ahmedabad into Southern Kachchh as the Kandla Special
Economic Zone. Today trucks, cars and camels jostle on a four-lane highway
leading past many factory developments.
In 1809 Alexander Walker, the British Chief Resident at Baroda travelled
through the region and described it as a country whose ‘independence over a
series of centuries altho’ situated between powerful and ambitious empires, is a
sufficient proof that it has yielded nothing to gratify ambition, or to compensate
the expense of conquest.’4 Yet this was the region that produced many of the
over 1200 pieces of printed cotton textiles in the Ashmolean’s Newberry
Collection, most of these dated between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, and
traded to Egypt, up the Red Sea ports through the Middle East, out across the
Arabian Sea to East Africa, and down the Malabar coast and on to present-day
Indonesia. Its textiles were soon to fill the cargoes of Portuguese, Dutch, then
British ships trading from Diu, Mandvi and Surat, and pass on to European
consumers. Today it remains a knowledge node of the crafts, its people
responding to the challenges and opportunities opened in the wake of the
earthquake and globalization.
Gujarat was celebrated from an early period for its extensive Indian Ocean
trade, especially in the textiles of the region. Surat by the late seventeenth
century provided Europe with indigo, printed cloth, quilts and fine Mochi
embroideries. The East India Company traded over 20 different fabric types
from Surat in 1708 in 53 different colours, patterns and lengths. 5 Recent
research emphasises the continued strength of trade at the end of the eighteenth
century among the English, other European Companies and many European and
Asian private traders. This was also a period of expansion of European trade
with the northern part of Gujarat, the region now known as Kachchh. The
English East India Company was already well aware of its textiles by 1710,
directing its officials in Surat to give special attention to the trade.
Mandvi in the mid eighteenth century was a cosmopolitan destination of many
Indian Ocean merchants especially interested in cotton and textiles. With the
coming of the Dutch in the early eighteenth century these goods entered into the
VOC’s extended intra-Asian trade network with markets in Bengal, Malacca
and Batavia and China, and also to the Dutch Republic.6 The expansion of trade
from the region was led both by the Dutch initiative in the region between 1750
and 1758 as well as by the pro-merchant policies of the rulers of Kachchh and
their ‘large degree of independence from British interference in their domestic
affairs.’7
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Well known for its agricultural products of indigo and cotton, and even of rice
in the areas close to the Sindh frontier, it lost major sources of irrigation first
in the mid-1760s, when the ruler of Sindh blocked a branch of the Indus, and
later in the wake of the 1819 earthquake which changed the course of the
Indus.8 Yet even in the 1820s the town was a by-word for ethnic diversity and
an exotic luxury trade, especially from Africa. James Tod, Political Agent of
Rasputan, and later author of Annals and Antiquities of Rajas’han
perambulated about the town in 1823, encountering ‘groups of persons from
all countries: the swarthy Ethiop, the Hindki of the Caucasus, the dignified
Arabian, the bland Hindu banyan, or consequential Gosén, in his orangecoloured robes, half priest, half merchant.’ 9 On the streets he found
rhinocerous hides being prepared for shields, elephants’ teeth, dates, almonds
and pistachios from the Africa and Arabian Seas trade, but cotton, he noticed,
was still the staple trade.10
The crafts developed under the patronage of the royal courts, for long distance
trade, and for local ceremonial use. The Kutch dynasty ruled from Bhuj from
1549 until the merger with the Indian Union in 1948, but was marginalised
from the later eighteenth century as a princely state under British rule. The
city now has a population of 133,500; the earthquake of 2001 killed 13,000 in
the city and in the tribal and rural communities in the surrounding region; there
has been much rebuilding in the years since.11 The remains of the Aina Mahal
palace, which folk history relates was built and decorated by the engineer and
architect Ram Singh Malam in the early 1750s under Maharao Lakho, show a
significant integration of Dutch and other European arts and crafts. Design and
architecture there and in Mandvi reflect the period of expansive commerce in
the mid-eighteenth century, the Dutch presence and openness to European arts
and crafts.12
Bhuj was also long a ‘knowledge node’ of the crafts including bandhani (silk tie
dye), ajrakh (resist cotton printing), embroidery, batik prints, cotton and
woollen weaving, lacquerware, enamelling, woodcarving, and silver and gold
jewellery work. Local production served the particular demands of the Jat,
Ahir, Harijan and Rabari tribes.13 The craftsmen of this remote region also
supplied both the sumptuary and ordinary dress of the nomadic cattle herders
of Banni in Northern Kachchh, fine fabrics for the court in Bhuj, and
merchants trading from Mandvi to Diu and Surat, and from there to markets
in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South East Asia. Many of its
craftsmen came from Sindh, groups invited by the king of Kachchh, Rao
Baharmalji 1 (1586-1631), including dyers, printers, potters and
embroiderers. Skills and design connected further to the Persian Empire.14
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Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century Accounts
of Kachchh and Gujarat
British and other European travellers left some accounts of the region, its
castes and craftspeople between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth
centuries. How was the industry and craft culture of the area between Surat and
Kachchh described in the eighteenth century? A remarkable survey of weaving
in Surat, The Chief’s Minute to the Commercial Board of the East India
Company in 1795, found c. 15,800 looms worked by specific weaving groups.
The Chief’s Minute gave a detailed account of the contracting system, and
proposals for a new system of direct access to the weavers. It also provided an
intensely detailed account of the production process, virtually a census of
products, looms and the peoples who worked on each type of cloth. The EIC
faced fierce competition from native and Portuguese, French and Dutch private
merchants, and could not control the quality of the products it wanted to
access.15
Western India was then already of great interest to European investigators.
Gujarat was a widely-recognized source of fine cotton and skilled manufacture.
Anton Hove, a Polish doctor and naturalist sent in 1787 by Joseph Banks to
investigate cotton cultivation in Gujarat, and to collect plants and seeds, also
attempted to gather information on manufacture.16 Travelling from Bombay to
Surat, he noted exports including fine cotton, indigo, Ahmedabad carpets, silks,
kinkobs, Ilachu or satin and cotton cloth and imports of coffee, sugar, spices,
and of iron, copper and ivory. Continuing on to Broach, present day Bharuch,
he found a place where ‘every street swarms with different casts - Arabs,
Moguls, and the many tribes of Gentoos…Their manufacture is of cloth of
various kinds, as Bafta, Daria, Czarhany. Bafta is the finest of all, coming near
the muslin of Bengal; Czahany and Daria are the striped muslins which the
ladies wear in England. Duty comes near the Madras long cloth, and is
exported to different parts of India to great advantage.’17 Hove then went on to
investigate spinning and weaving in Senapur, present day Sinor, where he could
gain no access to report on female spinners, but did find a highly specialized
division of labour among the weavers which he recommended to English cotton
manufacturers.18
Several Scottish East India Company officers went on to provide more
extensive travel and reporting on history and peoples of Gujarat and Kachchh.
Alexander Walker (1764-1831) came to India in 1780 as an EIC cadet; he
served in Bombay, Malabar and Mysore. He was sent to Gujarat in 1800; he
became political resident at Baroda in 1802, and led a campaign into Kutch in
1809. He kept detailed records of local practices, and collected Arabic, Sanskrit
and Persian manuscripts.19 Walker wrote an extensive report on the region to
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his superiors in Bombay in April, 1809. ‘The little principality of Kutch under
its own Rajas, could never become a rival to the Company’ but it might either
be a useful barrier against the designs of our enemies’..., it might form an
Emporium for the transit of the Company’s goods thro’ that Country…20 Some
months later on a march through Kachchh Walker advised against full military
intervention.
Though Walker discounted the military significance of the region and gave little
credit to its manufactures, in the years he spent there he gathered materials for a
history of Gujarat and notes on the customs, religion and manners of the
peoples, and these included material on Kachchh. He put together some of the
materials into a two volume manuscript, ‘An Account of Castes and Professions
in Guzerat’ in 1823. He described this as compiled from notes of conversations
with natives who came to him on business, and included short accounts of crafts
including weavers, dyers and printers, gold and silversmiths, ironsmiths, paper
makers and stone cutters.21 The Scots who followed him, James McMurdo, and
Alexander Forbes wrote even less about the manufactures and artisanal skills of
the people.
A closer, though still limited account of the towns, customs and crafts of
Kachchh was left by Marianna Postans in 1839 in her Cutch or Random
Sketches.22 The wife of an army officer, she spent five years in Kachchh. She
noted that the principal manufacture of the region was its cotton cloth, ‘woven
of various colours, and eminently fanciful designs’.23 Her short chapter on the
Workmen of Cutch praised craft abilities of ‘imitation’ and ‘the fame their
beautiful work has acquired, both in England, where it is now well known, and
also in all parts of India. The diversity of their talents has classed them as
brass-founders, embroiderers, armourers, and cunning workmen in gold and
silver.’24
Small Scale Industry in Western India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries
What happened to these vibrant craft and textile regions with their long histories
of global trade as they passed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
Their histories have been those of colonialism and de-industrialization in India
more broadly. Indeed Postans already in 1839 put it eloquently for the region of
Kutch.
The annals of India present, indeed, a dark page in the history of nations.
Her commerce, which was once of sufficient importance and magnitude
to excite in the Tyrians, Egyptians, and Venetians, a desire for traffic, is
now confined to the export of a few natural productions of comparatively
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little value; and the produce of her far-famed looms once so highly
coveted by the rich and the fair, is exchanged for a manufacture of coarse
cloths; whilst the raw cotton which her fields produce is sent to England,
to be manufactured into a fabric designed for exportation to the Indian
market.25
Yet recent studies of the late colonial and nationalist periods have found not just
a survival of craft economies, but a resurgence of small producer capitalism in
the interstices of colonial constraints and economic underdevelopment.
Tirthankar Roy’s study, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India
(1999) focused on the late colonial period, and covered broader areas of India
over the period 1870-1930. He found 10-15 million industrial workers in the
mid 19th Century, and amongst these were producers known worldwide for their
craftsmanship. Increased commercialization after the opening of the Suez Canal
fostered more production for non-local markets. In the period since 1947 smallscale industrial production increased its share of waged employment; indeed
there was staggering growth in the towns and informal industrial labour in the
crafts he studied: handloom weaving, gold thread, brassware, leather, glassware
and carpets.26 Roy concluded that artisan industry ‘has not just survived, but
shaped the character of industrialization both in colonial and post-colonial
India.’27
Douglas Haynes, in his recent book, Small Town Capitalism in Western
India (2012) focused on an overlapping, but extended period from 1870 to
1960, and researched in depth the textile economies of Western India and
Gujarat. His analysis of the cycles of small scale industry over this long period
charts not the great decline of the textile economy, but a resurgence of small
producers. He argues a case for the rise of ‘weaver capitalism’ in small
manufacturing centres; the old handloom towns renewed their cloth
manufacture with small producers using electric power. A small-scale power
loom industry in karkhanas or workshops with multiple looms, radically
changed a textile economy which by the 1930s was dominated by the
disjuncture of large-scale mills and declining handloom manufacture. From the
1940s these karkhanas diversified their output and adopted electric or oil
powered looms. They sought plant and equipment in Japan and Belgium, built
new dyeworks and developed innovative product lines.
At the end of the twentieth century Western India’s small weaving towns
became large urban agglomerations with millions of looms, the cloth
manufacture located in tight enclaves. Late twentieth-century structures
included a wide variety of small and large firms, and skilled artisans work
alongside pools of casual labour from non-artisanal backgrounds. An informal
economy has been reshaped, he argues, out of long historical change and
struggles over trade unions and labour legislation over the course of the
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twentieth century.28 One side of that informal sector consisted of firms seeking
locations and ways where they could avoid India’s tightening factory
legislation; precisely the kind of legislation that was not enforced in
Bangladesh’s clothing sector.
Haynes thus deconstructs the binaries that inform the historiographies of
India’s de-industrialization: handloom and powerloom, craft and industry,
artisan and factory work, and informal and formal sectors of the economy. 29
Western India’s textile history is, furthermore, not one of simple transition from
artisan-based production for local markets in the pre-colonial period to one of
commercialization in the nineteenth century, and on to globalization in the late
twentieth century. The factory textile industry of Bombay and Ahmedabad that
disappeared, did not mean the end of the textile industry. [Haynes recognizes
that the cycles of small producer capitalism he charts over the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries had deep historical roots in a wide Indian Ocean and global
trade, and versions of the mixed workshop and family economy embedded in
networks of middlemen and sub-contractors in eighteenth-century Surat and
other textile towns of Gujarat.30]
A Global History of Craft and Small Industry in the Twenty-first Century
Haynes’ investigation of the industrial cycles and recent economic development
of the textile manufacture of Western India relies on many local gazetteers,
reports and industrial surveys. It also draws on over 200 interviews with
artisans, workers, merchants, industrialists and industry experts. Interviews and
oral histories also provide a way to connect the globalized world the crafts and
small industries now inhabit with that eighteenth-century world of Indian Ocean
and global trade in luxury goods.
Interviews and oral histories take us into the methods of archaeologists, some of
whom see themselves practicing ‘ethno-archaeology’; others simply seeking
another way of accessing local material cultures and technologies.
Archaeologists have used analogical reasoning, observing and interrogating
living communities in the regions where they seek to reconstruct material
cultures of pre-historic production centres. Other archaeologists practice a
method of ‘experimental archaeology’, reconstructing technologies from site
findings. Likewise, historians of science have reworked historical experiments
to understand the ‘tacit’ aspect of the experimental process.
Similar methodologies help to connect understandings of current production
processes with those for global markets in the eighteenth century. Haynes and
Roy have charted not just the long continuity of small-scale manufacturing over
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but a reshaping of informal sectors in
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response to local, national and more recent global markets, technologies and the
state. Liebl and Roy’s assessment for India as a whole in 2003 found a large
dynamic handicrafts sector, employing approximately 9 million, and gaining
under freer markets, but needing sophisticated adaptation to new consumers.31
The crafts and small producer sectors of Kachchh are a part of a new story of
global history and craft production. As in other parts of India, producers faced a
decline in traditional domestic markets with the competition of factory goods,
synthetic fabrics, screen printed prints and mass produced bandhani. 32 The state
and NGOs have played a part, especially since the 1980s, in building
infrastructure, information exchange, and business aid as well as a programme
of national craftsman awards and support for travel to international exhibitions.
There is some limited access to international outlets, such as Vancouver,
Canada’s Maiwa.33
My research in the area has given me some sense of the great difficulty in
accessing these goods for world trade during the early modern period.
Distances are great, and travel is not straightforward; even by 1951 the railroad
only reached 72 miles into the region. Yet in the eighteenth century fine
European mirrors, glass and china ware were brought via Mandvi over this land
area to the royal court of Rao Lakhpatji at Aina Mahal in Bhuj, and the fine
manufactures of Kachchh were traded out from there and other ports on its
coast.
I have led a project to collect the oral histories of a number of craftspeople and
their families during the past year.
Working with two assistants,
Mohmedhusain Khatri in the region, and Dr. Chhaya Goswami Bhatt of
Mumbai, herself a historian of Kachch, we have deposited the interviews on a
website, and summarized these in written English and Gujarati. This web
resource provides not just a source for my own and other historians’ research,
but a public record of the family histories of the region’s skilled workforce, one
to which they can continue to add.
Interviews with nearly seventy artisans and their families show deeplyembedded craft communities, some going back many generations, but several
with fluid work histories, with some generations or parts of families leaving the
craft, and subsequently returning. Many tell migration stories from other parts
of Gujarat, from Rajasthan and from Sindh. They show a number coming from
farming backgrounds, or continuing to combine their work as artisans with
farming or coolie work. They show us high levels of specialization and division
of labour, and adaptation to new materials and technologies. High success rates
in international markets for some contrast with extreme struggles for survival
among others. Even within the most successful businesses craftsmanship sits
with low wages and alienated labour. The resilience of this craft node relies on
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its local as well as its global markets; producing the quality luxury goods
adapted to the designs of world trade provides a possible competitive edge. But
continuing to produce for the local sumptuary codes of the tribal people and
local communities is also crucial.
Among the most successful of these artisans are the ajrakh printing artisans
from the villages of Ajrakhpur and Damadka near Bhuj, and a group of woollen
and cotton weavers from the village of Sarli. Both are well-integrated with
international markets and exhibitions, national award schemes, NGOs and
design institutes. The Khatri family of printers sell to Maiwa in Canada, to Fab
India, and to many other international buyers through exhibitions. The weavers
get bulk orders from exhibitions and sell to Malaysia, Brazil, Milan, Paris,
London, Colombo and Singapore. Some trade through a large wholesaler,
Kantibai, or agents from Mumbai and Delhi. Both also continue to supply
traditional local tribal markets, the Rabari, Ahir and Patel communities. The
Khatris of Damadkha date their residence from the sixteenth century, with
ancestors coming from Sindh. Some of the older weavers of Sarli and Bhojodi
date their families’ work in the craft back four generations; others have entered
more recently out of farming communities, and some migrated in generations
past from Rajasthan.34
Bandhani, practiced for many generations across Kachchh provides the
sumptuary codes of many communities, especially for marriages, and also now
for wide national and international markets. Centres in Mandvi, Mundra and
Bhuj supply the Kadarbhai firm; the finest work goes to international
exhibitions, NGOs and buyers such as Maiwa. Some families have returned to
the craft after some generations in other occupations, and women practice it as
part of the daily routines of their lives.35
Access to international and wider national markets is key to craftspeople in the
region, especially in cases where there have been recent dislocations in local
markets. Those experiencing much greater difficulty are those who have little
access to these markets, such as the cutlers of Mota Reha who have also worked
for generations in their trade, selling their knives through agents taking them to
local markets throughout Gujarat. Their fine swords, celebrated back to the
early modern period, appear in international exhibitions and sell for ceremonial
use in Kachchh and the Punjab
International markets, NGOs and government schemes have created
opportunities in this craft sector for many small businesses. Some are like the
later twentieth-century weaver capitalists described by Douglas Haynes. But all
of these crafts contain a division of labour either within families, or deploying
groups of labourers specialised to one task. Unless connected through business
or family to sources of capital, they are wage and piece workers confined to one
14
task. The women working in bandhani tie and dye and batik workers never
learn the exclusive skills of dyeing.
The ajrakh printers pound their blocks, never missing an alignment day in and
day out for years to come from the age of 10 or 12. A washer, Haddu Babubhai,
has spent 25 or 30 years in the washing vats, making all the hidden colour
sparkle to the surface.36 All the processes of cutlery making are divided into
seven or more separate processes, workshop by workshop; Abdul Rashid has
made wooden handles for knives for 35 years.37 Women are closely engaged in
many family crafts, in mochi work, bell making, and weaving, and more
recently in rogan and batik work.
Haynes found new opportunities opened by technological change as well as the
well-known histories of the decline of the handloom sector. Technology has
brought diverse experiences to the craftspeople of Kachchh in the later
twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The weavers have adopted the hand fly
shuttle over the past forty years, and have greatly increased their productivity.
Samji and Ramji ~Visram Siju, weavers of Bhojodi improved their markets by
shifting during the 1960s to a softer weave, but were deeply affected from 1995
by competition from power loom cloth from the Punjab which flooded their
markets.
Cutlers have kept their ancient forging technologies, but have adapted all their
processes to small electrical motors. Printers and batik workers debate the
impact of chemical and natural dyes. Chemical dyes introduced into ajrakh
printing in the 1960s met local demands for brighter colours, but high quality
international market demanded a return to natural dyes, and investment in
training and skills in the use of natural dyes. The focus of international
customers on natural dyes has closed off markets for batik workers who cannot
yet adapt their techniques to these dyes.
The craft groups of Kachchh know the long histories of their families in their
trades. Some know of a deeper history of trading their fine craft goods in the
pre-colonial Indian Ocean World. Some such as the textile printers are adapting
the product designs of museum collections.
Conclusion
Interviews and oral histories among the craftspeople of Kachchh today convey
to us a world of high quality goods produced within strong craft communities
and providing both goods for local sumptuary and everyday use in the region as
well as products for globalized markets. The region provides a unique setting
15
for investigating the impact of globalization and new technologies on embedded
craft skills. The deep history of this craft economy also makes it a place for the
use of analogies between the present and the past. The things carried out of the
region as fine art objects by merchants and the East India Company into
Europe’s domestic interiors and later museums were most likely made in small
village workshops or in outwork or proto-industrial settings. We can suggest
that craft work, then as now, was a divided process involving merchants and
master craftsmen/designers and a range of specialized labourers, uneducated
and with no access to the capital that might raise them in time to become master
craftsmen themselves. The descriptions we do have left by eighteenth-century
travellers convey as much. The opportunities and challenges of new national
and global markets now are helping some; others seek these.
What will the future hold for these people? Will they go the way of Europe’s
protoindustrial workforces into the chemical factories setting up nearby, or to
cheap garment factories such as those of Bangaladesh, or will its young people
leave for Mumbai’s streets, seeking that exciting metro life. Or will the variety
and quality they can produce contribute to enlarged global markets which seek
differentiation as well as standardized goods? We don’t yet know.
But thus far, these crafts have survived over our long world history of
industrialization, and of India’s colonial, national and global transitions. They
challenge our models of industrialization; they have survived because they have
innovated and adapted to new markets.
Manufacture is something that many European historians have lost interest in.
But our own histories are now global histories. We wear those clothes made in
Dhaka; just as we bought those textiles made in Gujarat in the eighteenth
century. How it is made is not just a question of Asian economies and histories;
it is our history, and it is a global history.
1
Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Dutta, The
Bureaucracy of Beauty: 136-44. Also see the discussion of displaying and collecting Indian craft skills in silk
manufacture in international exhibitions from the mid-nineteenth century in Brenda M. King, “Exhibiting
India.” In Silk and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), chap. 6.
2
See P. Parthasarathi, ‘The History of Indian Economic History’, unpublished paper, 2012.
3
See M.D. Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History.” Indian
Economic and Social History Review 5 (1968): 1-15; T. Raychaudhuri, “A Reinterpretation of Nineteenth
Century Indian Economic History?” Indian and Economic and Social History Review, 5 (1968): 77-100; A.K.
Bagchi, “De-industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications.” The Journal
of Development Studies 12 (1976): 135-64; C. Simmons, “‘De-industrialzation’, Industrialization and the Indian
Economy, c. 1850-1947.” Modern Asian Studies 19 (1985): 593-622.
16
4
Alexander Walker Papers, The National Archives of Scotland.
Order Lists of the English East India Company: E/3/96/18, India Office Records, British Library. Derived from
Europe’s Asian Centuries EIC trade database, unpublished.
6
Nadri, “Exploring the Gulf of Kachh”: 462, 466, 468-9, 478-9.
7
Ibid., 473. Also see C. Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks Outside India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries: A Preliminary Survey.” Modern Asian Studies 33 (1999): 883-911, esp 899.
8
Nadri, “Exploring the Gulf of Kachh”: 470.
9
J. Tod, Travels in Western India embracing a visit to the sacred mounts of the Jains… (London: Wm. H. Allen
& Co., 1839):449.
10
Ibid., 453.
11
A. Tyabji, Bhuj: Art, Architecture, History (Mumbai: Mapin, 2006): 9-16.
12
L.F. Rushbrook Williams, The Black Hills: Kutch in History and Legend (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson,
1958): 136-47; Tyabji, Bhuj: 34-5.
13
C. London, The Arts of Kutch (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2000).
14
Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat: 28-30; E. Edwards, “Contemporary Production and Transmission of
Resist-dyed and Block-printed Textiles in Kachchh District, Gujarat.” Textile 3.2 (2005): 170.
15
See IOR G/36, Surat Factory Records 73, Surat Proceedings 11 September 1795: The Chief’s Minute. The
Commercial Board, 453-4. Detailed discussion based on the Enquiry can be found in Nadri, Eighteenth-Century
Gujarat, 146; L. Subramaniam, Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West
Coast (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1966); L. Subramaniam, “The Political Economy of Textiles in Eastern
India: Weavers, Merchants and the Transition to a Colonial Economy.” In How India Clothed the World: The
World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850, eds G. Riello and T. Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009): 258-280.
16
A revised and edited version of the Journal kept by Hove on his expedition was published as Tours for
Scientific and Economic Research made in Guzerat, Kattiawar, and the Conkuns in 1787-88 by Dr. Hove
(Bombay: Selections from Records of the Bombay Government, no. 16, 1855). Passages used here where
possible are from the extracts to Hove’s journal in the India Office Records collection in the British Library:
‘Extracts from Dr. Hove’s Journal’, BL, IOR, Home Miscellaneous 374: 591-665.
17
Tours for Scientific and Economic Research: 176-8; Extracts from Dr. Hove’s Journal, 642-4.
18
Extracts from Dr. Hove’s Journal, 625, 642-4.
19
Williams, The Black Hills: 182-8.
20
NLS, Walker Papers, Ms. 13841: ‘Letter to Francis Warden, Chief Secretary to the Government, 25 April,
1809’, 494, 513,514.
21
NLS, Walker Papers, Ms. 13861-3: ‘An Account of Castes and Professions in Guzerat’, with two draft
volumes, compiled c. 1823.
22
M. Postans, Cutch or Random Sketches taken during a Residence in One of the Northern Provinces of
Western India interspersed with Legends and Traditions (London: Smith, Elder and Co. Cornhill, 1839). Edition
by Asian Educational Services, New Delhi and Madras, 2001. On Postans see R. C. Raza, “Young, Marianne
(1811-1897).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/48646,
accessed 3 January, 2013.
23
Postans, Cutch or Random Sketches, 14.
24
Ibid., 173.
25
Ibid., 257-8.
26
T. Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999): 3-6, 232-5.
27
Ibid., 7.
28
D. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants, and the Making of the Informal
Economy, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 265, 272-7, 311.
29
Ibid., 3-5.
30
Ibid., 24-36.
31
M. Liebl and T. Roy, “Handmade in India: Preliminary Analysis of Crafts Producers and Crafts Production.”
Economic and Political Weekly 37 (27 December 2003), 5366-76.
32
Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat: 126-7.
33
http://www.maiwa.com/home/documentaries/. Interview with Charlotte Kwon, Director, Maiwa, Vancouver,
9 July, 2012.
34
Interviews with Ismail Khatri, Ajrakhpur, 15 February 2012; Kantilal Vankar, Sarli, 26 May 2012; Shamjibhai
Visram Siju (Vankar), Bhodjodi, 27 May 2012.
35
Interview with Hanifa Yusuf Sumra and Jamila Ramju Sumra, and Hawabai Sumra, Mandvi, 16 February
2012; Interviews with Abdullah and Mohmedhusain Khatri, 3 July 2011.
5
17
36
Interviews with Imtiaz Araby Khatri and Haddu Babubhai, Ajrakhpur, 27 February 2012; Interview with
Shakeel Mohammed Qasim Khatri, Mundra.
37
Interview with Abdul Rashid, cutler, Mota Reha, 17 February, 2012; Interviews with bellmakers Luhar
Janmamad Sale Mohammed and Kanji Devji Maheshwari, Zura, 26 May 2012; Interviews with Rumar Daud
Khatri and Abdul Gaful Khatri, Rogan makers, Nirona, 26 May 2012.