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Maxine Berg
Locations of Global History:
Manufacturing Diversity in 18th and 21st Century India
[Please do not quote without permission]
New Directions in Global History Conference
Oxford 27-29 September
1.Introduction
The subject of my paper is the people who produced and now produce fine
luxury goods for local and global markets. I 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.
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
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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. 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 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). 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 paper reflects my own New Directions in the 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 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
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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, 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
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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 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 d 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 Maharajvastu Sangrahalaya 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
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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
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 21 st 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 longdistance 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. 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 It was
this empire that J.R. Seeley, that Victorian exponent of imperial federation, called to
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his contemporary historians’ attention. When they wrote their histories of the
eighteenth century they needed to consider that wider world the British had
‘conquered and peopled’ ‘ in a fit of absence of mind.’ English historians still wrote of
‘a race inhabiting an island off the northern coast of the Continent of Europe.’ ‘They
do not perceive that in that century the history England is not in England but in
America and Asia.’5 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.6
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’.7 It is also a history based in ‘local knowledge’;
the special ‘nodes of craft skill’ which the late Larry Epstein followed through early
modern Europe. In a series of remarkable articles, Epstein found artisans travelling
across trades and spaces in early modern Europe; they combined knowledge sets,
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replicated and reconfigured, building an ‘economy of imitation’ that led to a selfsustaining process of improvement.8
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’. 9 Nurturing local skills and knowledge have become key parts of the
agenda of development projects. Yet simultaneously, globalization, as Sennett has
argued, has fragmented craft, jobs and skills.10 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.11
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; 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
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discussion of ‘useful knowledge’ and skill among some of India’s historians, notably
Tirthankar Roy, David Washbrook and Prasannan Parthasarathi.12 Parthasarthi’s
challenged Mokyr’s view that the source of the ‘great divergence’ was Europe’s
deployment of ‘useful knowledge’, ‘the unique Western way that created the modern
material world. ’13 Parthasarathi faces the limitations of India’s historical evidence,
but argues that the ships, guns, cannons and other commodities that were made in
India suggest a sophisticated and dynamic culture of technical knowledge.’14 David
Washbrook, however, provides an alternative scenario of a textile economy of precolonial and early colonial South India which produced unique forms of quality
through extreme specialisation by caste and subcaste. Global markets tapped into
the facility of Indian textile producers to make quality goods in great variety, but
innovation remained embedded in skills, and ultimately the result was not a path to
‘industrious revolution, but ‘luxury in a poor country.’15 Useful knowledge in the
context of India demands that we turn to discussion of artisans and industry in India’s
history.
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.16
For nationalists craft producers represented the remains of the self-sufficient
society that they thought India had once been before the disruption of colonialism,
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industrialization and the competition of 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.17 Economic historians of India debated the de-industrialization
thesis and the fate of India’s artisans from the later 1960s into the 1980s.18
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 precolonial, 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 manufacture; trading to the East
India Company alone over 20 different fabric types in 1708.19 Recent research
emphasises the continued strength of trade at the end of the eighteenth century. The
English East India Company increased its investments in export goods at Surat after
1765, and there was severe competition among European companies and private
traders, both European and Asian. Parts of Gujarat flourished in the eighteenth
century, including merchant networks operating from Diu.20This was also a period of
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expansion of European trade with the northern part of Gujarat, the region now known
as Kachchh.
The Dutch established a new factory at the old Kachchh port of Mandvi in
1750, responding both to their declining commercial fortunes in Surat and to the
prospect of a growing trade potential in Kachchh. Merchandise coming out of the
Gulf of Kachchh was much sought after by Indian Ocean merchants, especially
cotton and textiles. The English East India Company was already well aware of this
in 1710, directing its officials in Surat to give special attention to the trade:
‘you likewise say that you have assurances of the Large quantitys from Cutch
and Patan of the same Sorts with what you buy in and about Suratt but at easier
rates and that you will make advances therein since their People and Vessells trade
yearly to your Port.’ 21
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. With the coming of the Dutch these goods entered into
the VOC’s extended intra-Asian trade network with markets in Bengal, Malacca and
Batavia and China, and also in the Dutch Republic.22
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
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since.23 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.24
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 and Rabari tribes, and the nomadic cattle herders of Banni in Northern
Kachchh 25 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.26
[7. Eighteenth-Century Accounts of Kachchh and Gujarat
British and other European travellers left some accounts of the region, its
castes and craftspeople in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries. I have
written about these in my paper, but will not discuss these today.]
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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 the late colonial and post colonial periods, and covered broader 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 small-scale industrial production increased its 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.27 Indeed he argued that artisan industry ‘has not just
survived, but shaped the character of industrialization both in colonial and postcolonial India.’28
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
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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 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. Skilled artisans work alongside pools of casual
labour from non-artisanal backgrounds. An informal economy has been reshaped
out of long historical change over the course of the twentieth century.29
One of those towns, Surat, went into decline in the early nineteenth century,
but from the 1870s industry expanded to meet new markets for luxury products in
urban India and abroad. New type silk saris and mixed silk and mercerised cotton
versions attracted urban buyers. Markets revived in the Indian Ocean from the
Persian Gulf to Burma, Thailand and China. Surat once again sold silks to the Gulf
and the Ottoman Empire. 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 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.30
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.31 Western India’s
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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
and factory production in the nineteenth century, and on to globalization in the late
twentieth century. 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 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.32
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 ‘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. There has been considerable
debate over ethno-archaeology; but with a critical historical approach such interviews
can suggest possible interpretations of the past. 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
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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
technologies before and after collectivization.
I follow similar methodologies to understand production processes for global
markets in the 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.33 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.
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.34 The railroad was extended to part of
the region at the beginning of the 20th Century, 36.5 miles of track from the coast
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(Tuna) to Bhuj; by 1951 this had extended to 72 miles.35 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 forty-five 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 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
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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, 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.36Bandhani, 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. 37
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
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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.38 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.39
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 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.40. 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
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the twenty-first centuries. The weavers have adopted the hand fly shuttle over the
past forty years, and have greatly increased their productivity. The 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 crafts 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 precolonial Indian Ocean World. Some such as the textile printers are adapting the
product designs of museum collections. The mochi embroiderers know of the East
India Company trade in their craft goods from Cambay in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The East India Company also exported batik prints from the
region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.41
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
20
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 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. 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
J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883), pp. 8-9.
6
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.
7
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New Haven, 2010)
8
S.R. Epstein and Maarten Prak, Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2008).
2
21
9
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, 1966); Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy; Richard Sennett,
The Craftsman (London, 2008).
10
Sennett, The Craftsman; Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Oxford, 1993); Adrian
Wooldridge,‘Special Report: The Battle for Brainpower’, The Economist, Oct.7, 2006, pp. 3-20.
11
Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); Mokyr, The
Enlightened Economy.
12
Tirthankar Roy, ‘Knowledge and Divergence from the Perspective of Early Modern India’, Journal of Global
History, 3, 2008, pp. 361-87; David Washbrook, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy: Modes of
Production, Reproduction and Exchange’, Journal of Global History, 2, 2007, pp. 87-112; Prasannan
Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge, 2011).
13
Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena, p. 297.
14
Parthasarthi, Why Europe Grew Rich, p. 187.
15
Washbrook, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy’, pp. 87-112.
16
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.
17
See Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘The History of Indian Economic History’,
18
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.
19
Order Lists of the English East India Company: E/3096/18, IOR, BL. Derived from Europe’s Asian Century EIC
trade database, unpublished.
20
Ghulam A. Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat. The Dynamics of its Political Economy, 1750-1800 (Leiden,
2009), p. 125; Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘Exploring the Gulf of Kachh: Regional Economy and Trade in the Eighteenth
Century’. Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient. 51 (3) 2008, pp. 460-486; Machado, ‘Awash in a
21
Order Lists of the English East India Company,EIC: E3/096/26. Letter 28 March, 1710, IOR, BL.
22
Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘Exploring the Gulf of Kachh’, pp. 462, 466,468-9,478-9.
23
Azhar Tyabji, Bhuj. Art, Architecture, History (Mumbai, 2006), pp. 9-16.
24
L.F. Rushbrook Williams, The Black Hills. Kutch in History and Legend (London, 1958), pp. 136-147; Tyabji,
Bhuj, pp. 34-35.
25
Christopher London, The Arts of Kutch (Mumbai, 2000).
26
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.
27
Roy, Traditional Industry, pp. 3-6, 232-5.
28
Ibid., p. 7.
29
Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, pp. 265, 272-7, 311.
30
Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy, ‘Handmade in India. Preliminary Analysis of Crafts Producers and Crafts
Production’, Economic and Political Weekly, xxxvii (Dec. 27, 2003), pp. 5366-5376.
31
Douglas E. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India. Artisans, Merchants, and the Making of the
Informal Economy, 1870-1960. (Cambridge, CUP, 2012), pp. 3-5.
32
Ibid., pp. 24-36.
33
Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, pp. 126-7.
34
Edwards, ‘Contemporary Production and Transmission’, pp. 170-1.
35
Wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutch_Gujar_kshatriyas_contributions_to_the_Indian_railways;
Wikipedia.ord/wiki/Cutch_State_Railway. Consulted 23 September, 2012.
36
Interviews with Ismail Khatri, Ajrakhpur, 15 Feb., 2012; Kantilal Vankar, Sarli, 26 May, 2012; Shamjibhai
Visram Siju(Vankar), Bhodjodi, 27 May, 2012
37
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.
22
38
Interview with Kasam and Juma Adham Sangar, Mandvi, 26 May, 2012; Interview with Sumar Daud Khatri
and Abdul Gafur Khatri, Nirona, 26 May, 2012.
39
Interviews with Abdul Rashid, Mustaq and Suleman, 17 Feb., 2012.
40
Interviews with Imtiaz Araby Khatri and Haddu Babubhai, Ajrakhpur, 27 Feb. 2012; Interviews with Shakeel
Mohammed Qasim Khatri, Mundra,
41
Interviews with Ismail Khatri, 27 Feb. 2012; Kasam Adham Sangar, 26 May, 2012. Shakeel Ahmed
Mohammed Qasim Khatri, 28 May, 2012.