1
M
Maxine Berg
Material Culture for Global Markets: the Craftspeople of Eighteenth
and Twenty-first Century India
1.Introduction
The subject of my lecture is the people who once produced and those who
now produce fine luxury goods for local and global markets. It compare the
periods of global history of eighteenth-century India and globalization in
twenty-first century India. I focus on artisans, skill and markets in one area of
India – the region of Kachchh in Northern Gujarat, even now considered a
remote part of the new global India.
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The research I am telling you about today arises from a large team-based
history project entitled ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830.
It also reports on a recent oral history project which I have conducted with
others among the craftspeople of Kachchh in Northern Gujarat.
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 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.1
Sisters Hanifa and Jamila Sumra 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 R.
per month. (roughly £20-24). Their work and the work of 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
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their goods, Neelam Khanna counts the tied bandh. She is welleducated 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). Shabana, tying by the side of
Neelam, had been practicing the trade for ten years, and explained that
the cloth was tied first in white, then in its dyed form.2
My lecture reflects some of my own New Directions in history
writing in turning to study of a part of the world I had never researched
before. My background is that of an economic historian of Europe. It
reflects a shift in the types of research we might practice as global
historians, moving beyond those titles which first inspired our turning to
global history: ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations’ and ‘The Great
Divergence’. After over ten years there are now many variations on a
the theme filling our shelves, on why the West Ruled or got Rich and
Asia did not or does now, other books on power and wealth, plenty and
peoples, empires and world history, and all the globals and Indian
Ocean worlds in many varieties. We are still dominated by the
developmental models that lead us to ask why was China not first;
Pomeranz’s recent advance on this has been to ask why China wasn’t
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second. We might indeed well ask what region or nation was second –
allowing ample opportunity for a quip from Joel Mokyr at the last AHR
conference – it was Belgium. Rather than trying to write about the whole
world, I choose to write about a place that some of us may consider
remote, and how it connected to the wider world. I also choose to write
about the production processes whose histories we abandoned in the
early 1990s in our quest for consumer revolutions.
2. The Local and the Global
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.’ Yet this was the region that produced many of the over 1200
pieces of printed cotton textiles in the Ashmolean’s Newberry Collection,
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most of these dated between the 10th and 15th 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. Understanding the history of this production centre
demands that we talk to its people now; this brings to us a sense of the
cycles of production in the long course of industrial development and the
adaptation of skills and products to local and global markets.
My colleague at Warwick, Anne Gerritsen has developed a local
study in global context of the great porcelain centre of China,
Jingdezhen. Her study of the local production contexts of its products
traded all over the world from the 14th C. onwards demonstrates the
unevenness and complexities of global history. I follow her example in
seeking the history of the global in the local history of Kachchh. We see
through her study that local histories are not just for local inhabitants.
They challenge the linearity and universalism of our global histories.
They also bring us access to the places of production, now too
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commonly neglected by global historians focussed on shipping and
caravan routes.3 Local contexts also demonstrate the deep historical
roots of the materials, skills and product designs that made these global
products possible.
Finally I am pursuing new directions in methodologies. Like
archaeologists I found myself with extensive evidence of the material
culture of the region – for example those c. 1200 pieces of textile in the
Newberry Collection. These pieces are in Oxford; others are in the V&A,
and in the South Asia collections in museums around the world, as well
as in the textile collections of India’s museums such as the Chhatrapati
Shivaji Museum in Mumbai. They are not in the museums of Kachchh
destroyed in the earthquake; only rarely can they be found as fragments
in archaeological excavations, unlike the indestructible porcelain shards
found in excavations not just in Jingdezhen, but around the world. The
production processes for these products were, and are, embedded in the
skills of the region’s artisans. There were few archival or printed records
of the experience of these artisans, their organization of production, their
acquisition of skills, or their access to markets. To learn of these I have
followed the practice of some archaeologists in speaking to inhabitants
in the region today. Part of my evidence, therefore relies on a series of
interviews and oral histories of current crafts people
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3. Luxury Goods and the Global Economy
Why do luxury goods from Asia matter to global history? Luxury goods
have always been of obvious significance to historians of the prehistoric,
ancient and medieval worlds. Andrew and Susan Sherratt followed
those mundane bronze age beakers that travelled in the slipstream of
the gold, silver and precious jewels that traversed Eurasia in 2000 B.C..
But Immanuel Wallerstein dismissed these luxury goods as mere
preciosities on the route to modernization from the early modern world,
and few economic historians of the 18thC to modern world give them
any regard at all. My subject looks back to a global shift from a world
provided with fine manufactured goods from Asia to a world of European
industrial revolutions. And it considers a contemporary global shift of the
late 20thC. and early 21st Century which sees a new Asian ascendancy
now providing the world with many of its manufactured consumer goods.
I have argued elsewhere that the first phase of long-distance maritime
trade from Asia to Europe in tea, silk, cotton and porcelain transformed
European consumer and material cultures, in turn stimulating the
product imitation and innovation that led onto Europe’s own
industrialization. The exotic luxury goods associated with long-distance
sea voyages and East India Companies continued, for many Europeans,
to depict the meaning of Empire through the nineteenth century.
8
Arindam Dutta in his The Bureaucracy of Beauty has written ‘Economists
may bristle, but empire is about taste: gold, silver, spices, silk, tea,
textiles, the view, furniture, opium, coffee, bananas, paisley,
arabesques....’ 4 In the 21st Century, globalization has been about China
as the world manufacturing power, about India’s industrial and IT
ascendancy, but also about a global luxury trade that includes fine craft
goods from India.
4. Skills, Useful Knowledge and Export Ware
My own work has long focussed on what was entailed in making
goods for distant markets; how was an exotic ornament transformed into
an export-ware good? How was it manufactured; how were skills
accessed and adapted to the designs sought in world markets? Few
now study manufacture, but this is central to the themes of material
culture and consumption which inspire us today. Part of that
consumption in early modern Europe was of goods from Asia, and
shortly after of the goods manufactured in Europe to imitate these.5
How those imitative goods were made in Europe is one story
which I have pursued along with other European historians. This is a
history of technology and skills, recently highlighted as ‘useful
knowledge’ and declared by Joel Mokyr to be at the heart of the ‘great
divergence’.6 It is also a history based in ‘local knowledge’; the special
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‘nodes of craft skill’ which the late Larry Epstein followed through early
modern Europe.
Neither Mokyr nor Epstein, however addressed Europe’s engagement
with local knowledge nodes in Asia, specifically for my talk today with
those in Gujarat and Kachchh India.
5. Theoretical Background
Social scientists, from Michael Polanyi in 1966 to Richard
Sennett in 2008 have devoted extensive theoretical and empirical
research to the ‘knowledge economy’, investigating local skills, craft
and talent, and the vital components of ‘tacit knowledge’. 7 Many years
ago in The Tacit Dimension (1966) Polanyi drew a distinction between
‘tacit’ and ‘codified’ knowledge, arguing the special place of skills and
ways of doing in transmitting technologies. Mokyr in his 2002 book, The
Gifts of Athena, and most recently in The Enlightened Economy: an
Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (2010) defined this tacit and
codified knowledge as ‘useful knowledge’ which played a fundamental
role in the industrialization of the West.8
Recent historical research on ‘useful knowledge’ has in the main
been confined to Europe. We need to turn to the ‘local knowledge’ in
Asia. We have huge collections of Indian textiles in our world museums;
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we have extensive and especially quantitative research on the trade in
these textiles to Europe, the Atlantic world and Japan, and some
research on that trade to Africa. But we still know little of the skill
centres producing these textiles. There is a recent turning to some
discussion of ‘useful knowledge’ and skill among some of India’s
historians, notably Tirthankar Roy, David Washbrook and Prasannan
Parthasarathi, who have pointed to India’s deep history of tacit skills and
her dynamic culture of technical knowledge.
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 they also collected their 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.9
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
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European textiles. Gandhi’s khadi campaign epitomised the turning of
these discourses into a craft critique of Empire. The discourses also
informed the writing of Indian economic history for the generations after
Independence.10 Economic historians of India debated the deindustrialization thesis and the fate of India’s artisans from the later
1960s into the 1980s.11 Comparing the course of artisan production in
Gujarat and Kachchh over its early modern global history and its recent
framework of globalization allows us to engage in larger debates on
industrialization and on India’s industrial history over the pre-colonial,
colonial, nationalist and recent global periods.
6. Gujarat, Kachchh and Long-distance Trade
Gujarat’s reputation from ancient times for its trade and fine
manufactures, especially its printed textiles, took on new dimensions
under the Mughal empire. The region was annexed by the Mughal
Emperor Akbar in 1573, and its ports became linked into a global trading
network; its textiles renowned. European trade extended rapidly with the
Portuguese ports in Diu from the sixteenth century, and with the Dutch in
Surat and in Mandvi in the seventeenth century, followed by the British
from the mid eighteenth century. Surat in Southern Gujarat, by the late
seventeenth century provided Europe with indigo, printed cloth, quilts
and fine Mochi embroideries. It was a vibrant centre of trade and
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manufacture; trading to the East India Company alone over 30 different
fabric types in 1708.12 This was also a period of expansion of European
trade with the northern part of Gujarat, the region now known as
Kachchh.
The old Kachchh port of Mandvi in the mid eighteenth century
was a cosmopolitan place, attracting many Indian Ocean merchants
especially interested in cotton and textiles. The main destinations for
these were the coast of Africa, Zanzibar, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf
and the Malabar Coast, and on from there to South East Asia. With the
coming of the Dutch these goods entered into the VOC’s extended intraAsian trade network with markets in Bengal, Malacca and Batavia and
China, and also in the Dutch Republic.13
James Tod perambulated about the town in 1823,
encountering’groups of persons from all countries: the swarthy Ethiop,
the Hinki of the Caucasus, the dignified Arabian, the bland Hindu
banyan, or consequential Gosén, in his orange-coloured robes, half
priest, half merchant.’
‘Hides of rhinocerous, semi-transparent, resembling immense
cakes of glue, were hanging up in the streets, prepared for being
fashioned into shields; elephants’ teeth for female bracelets and other
ornaments, dates, dry and fresh, raisons, almonds, pistachios all spoke
13
the names of lands with which Mandvi still maintained commercial
intercourse. Cotton, however, is perhaps the staple article of trade…’
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
surrounding rural communities; there has been much rebuilding in the
years since.14 The remains of the Aina Mahal palace, which according to
folk history was built and decorated in the early 1750s under Maharao
Lakho by the engineer and architect, Ram Singh Malam, 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.15
Bhuj was also long a ‘knowledge node’ of the crafts including
bandhani (silk and cotton tie dye), ajrakh (resist cotton printing),
embroidery, batik prints, cotton and woollen weaving, lacquerware,
enamelling, woodcarving and cutlery, and silver and gold jewellery work.
Local production served the particular demands of the Jat, Ahir, Harijan
14
and Rabari tribes, and the nomadic cattle herders of Banni in Northern
Kachchh 16 and provided 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.17
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. But 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 broad areas of India over the period 1870-1930.
Increased commercialization after the opening of the Suez Canal
fostered more production for non-local markets. In the period since
1947, he demonstrates, small-scale industrial production increased its
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share of waged employment. In the last fifty years 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.18 Indeed he argued that artisan industry ‘has not just
survived, but shaped the character of industrialization both in colonial
and post-colonial India.’19
Douglas Haynes, in his recent book, Small Town Capitalism in
Western India, focused on an overlapping, but extended period of 1870
and 1960, and researched in depth the textile economies of Western
India and Gujarat. His analysis of the cycles of the craft economy over
this long period charts not the great decline of the textile economy, but a
resurgence of small producer capitalism. 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 the
karkhanas diversified their output, adopted electric or oil power and
power looms, and explored their capacities for flexible specialization.
They sought plant and equipment in Japan and Belgium, built new
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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. The resurgent cycles of small producer
capitalism over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had deep
historical roots in a wide Indian Ocean and global trade, and in 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.20
8. Methodologies
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 relies 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 ‘ethnoarchaeology’; others simply seeking another way of accessing local
material cultures and technologies. Archaeologists have used analogical
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reasoning observing and interrogating living communities in the regions
where they seek to reconstruct material cultures of pre-historic
production centres. Archaeo-botanist, Martin Jones, Professor of
archaeology in Cambridge is currently researching the globalization of
grain crops: wheat, millet, and barley between Southwest Asia and
China, and others between South Asia and Africa by the 2nd millennium
BC. He combines archaeological digs in Kazakhstan with interviews with
local hill farmers on their memories of technologies before and after
collectivization.
I follow similar methodologies to understand production processes
for global markets in eighteenth-century Kachchh and Gujarat by
interrogating those processes today. The methodologies of oral history
also have another purpose: with digital technologies they can be
archived in a virtual museum on a website accessible to the peoples of
Kachchh and to world museums, the Ashmolean, the V&A, and the
Chhatrapati Shivaji[Prince of Wales] Museum in Mumbai among others.
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 there faced a decline in traditional domestic markets
with the competition of factory goods, synthetic fabrics, screen printed
prints and mass produced bandhani.21 The state and NGOs have played
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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.
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. Bhuj is 865 kilometres from Mumbai, now a 14 hour
train journey; there is an airport, and it is a two hour flight from Mumbai.
There was no road system until the Indo-Pakistan wars between 1965
and 1971; prior to this much of the transport was by ox and camel cart,
and some buses on very limited roads.22 The railroad was extended to
part of the region at the beginning of the 20th Century, 36.5 miles of track
from the coast (Tuna) to Bhuj; by 1951 this had extended to 72 miles.23
Even now the 60 km from Bhuj to Mandvi is a slow journey along twisty
roads not infrequently interrupted by herds of cattle or goats. 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.
The seventry artisans and their families interviewed during the past
six months show deeply-embedded craft communities, some going back
many generations, but several with fluid work histories, with some
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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 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. Continuing
to produce for the local sumptuary codes of the tribal people and local
communities also means an anchor in local markets, but these are
under threat from the impact on rural communities of recent land sales
and industrial development, and of cheaper imitative fabrics brought
from elsewhere.
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,
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national award schemes, NGOs and design institutes. The Khatri family
of printers sell to Maiwa in Canada, to Fab India, a social enterprise
company in which L Capital, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy now has an
8% stake, 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 back to migration from Sindh in the sixteenth century. 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.24Bandhani, or tie dye, 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.25
21
The Batik craftspeople of Mundra date their artisan practice back
five generations; they have taken part in the design courses run by one
of the NGOs, supply the wholesaler Kantibhai and Fab India, but they
have not accessed foreign markets. 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
struggling include very highly skilled specialist crafts such as Mochi
embroiderers and the Rogan workers; the high levels of skills involved
and length of time each piece of work takes requires access to specialist
high value international markets.26 Those experiencing much greater
difficulty are those who have little access to these markets, such as the
cutlers of 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 appear in international exhibitions
and sell for ceremonial use in Kachchh and the Punjab.27
International markets, NGOs and government schemes have
created opportunities in this craft sector for many small businesses.
They 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 by deploying groups of labourers specialised to
one task. Unless connected through business or family to sources of
22
capital they are wage and piece workers confined to one 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.28. 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. 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. Shamji 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
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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.
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 and products for globalized markets. The
region provides a unique setting 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
24
range of specialized labourers, uneducated and with no access to the
capital that might raise them in time to master craftsmen themselves.
The descriptions we do have left by eighteenth-century travellers convey
as much. But the context and elaborations of those divisions are
different. The opportunities and challenges of new national and global
markets now are helping some; others seek these. But the historical
parallel we see is a remote part of the world with highly localized skills
and knowledge which have survived and been passed on in this and
closely adjacent areas from ancient times, and an area which was also
intensely connected through its ports to global trade networks that took
its textiles at least to wide world markets. Through these trade networks
localized knowledge embedded in fine craft products had an enduring
impact on the material cultures of widely diverse parts of the globe.
1
Eiluned Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, (London and Ahmedabad), pp. 118-22.
Interview with Neelam Khanna, Mandvi, Kachchh, 16 Feb. 2012
3
See the discussion of local and global in A.T.Gerritsen, ‘Local Production of Ceramics and the Writing of
Global History’, Unpublished paper, 2012; A.T. Gerritsen, ‘Scales of a Local: the Place of Locality in a
Globalizing World’ in Douglas Northroped, A Companion to World History (Oxford, 2012); Also see Roland
Robertson, ‘Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and
Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities, London: Sage Publications, 1995, pp. 25-44; Arjun Appadurai,
‘How Histories make Geographies: Circulation and Context in Global Perspective’, Transcultural Studies 1,
2010, pp. 4-13.
4
Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty. Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility (London, 2007), p.
39.
5
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution:Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy (Cambridge, 2008);
Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods,’ Past and Present, 182 (2004),
pp. 85-142.
6
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New Haven, 2010)
7
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, 1966); Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy; Richard Sennett,
The Craftsman (London, 2008).
8
Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); Mokyr, The
Enlightened Economy.
2
25
9
Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York, Palgrave, 2009); Arindam Dutta, The
Bureaucracy of Beauty. Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility (London, Routledge, 2007), pp 136-144.
10
See Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘The History of Indian Economic History’,
11
See Morris D. Morris, ‘Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History,2, IESHR,
5 (1968), pp. 1-15; Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘A Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History?’
IESHR, 5 (1968), pp. 77-100; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ‘De-industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century:
Some Theoretical Implications,’ The Journal of Development Studies, 12 (1976), pp. 135-164; Colin Simmons,
‘”De-industrialzation,” Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1947,’ Modern Asian Studies 19
(1985), pp. 593-622.
12
Order Lists of the English East India Company: E/3096/18, IOR, BL. Derived from Europe’s Asian Century EIC
trade database, unpublished.
13
Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘Exploring the Gulf of Kachh’, pp. 462, 466,468-9,478-9.
14
Azhar Tyabji, Bhuj. Art, Architecture, History (Mumbai, 2006), pp. 9-16.
15
L.F. Rushbrook Williams, The Black Hills. Kutch in History and Legend (London, 1958), pp. 136-147; Tyabji,
Bhuj, pp. 34-35.
16
Christopher London, The Arts of Kutch (Mumbai, 2000).
17
Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, pp. 28-30; Eiluned Edwards, ‘Contemporary Production and
Transmission of Resist-dyed and Block-printed Textiles in Kachchh District, Gujarat’, Textile, 3, pp. 166-189, p.
170.
18
Roy, Traditional Industry, pp. 3-6, 232-5.
19
Ibid., p. 7.
20
Ibid., pp. 24-36.
21
Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, pp. 126-7.
22
Edwards, ‘Contemporary Production and Transmission’, pp. 170-1.
23
Wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutch_Gujar_kshatriyas_contributions_to_the_Indian_railways;
Wikipedia.ord/wiki/Cutch_State_Railway. Consulted 23 September, 2012.
24
Interviews with Ismail Khatri, Ajrakhpur, 15 Feb., 2012; Kantilal Vankar, Sarli, 26 May, 2012; Shamjibhai
Visram Siju(Vankar), Bhodjodi, 27 May, 2012
25
Interview with Hanifa Yusuf Sumra and Jamila Ramju Sumra, and Hawabai Sumra, Mandvi, 16 Feb. 2012;
Interviews with Abdullah and Mohmedhusain Khatri, 3 July, 2011.
26
Interview with Kasam and Juma Adham Sangar, Mandvi, 26 May, 2012; Interview with Sumar Daud Khatri
and Abdul Gafur Khatri, Nirona, 26 May, 2012.
27
Interviews with Abdul Rashid, Mustaq and Suleman, 17 Feb., 2012.
28
Interviews with Imtiaz Araby Khatri and Haddu Babubhai, Ajrakhpur, 27 Feb. 2012; Interviews with Shakeel
Mohammed Qasim Khatri, Mundra,