Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870-1960

Small Town Capitalism in Western India This book charts the history of artisan production and marketing in the Bombay ...

Author: Douglas E. Haynes

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India

This book charts the history of artisan production and marketing in the Bombay Presidency from 1870 to 1960. Although the textile mills of western India’s biggest cities have been the subject of many rich studies, the role of artisan producers located in the region’s small towns has been virtually ignored. Based on extensive archival research as well as numerous interviews with participants in the handloom and powerloom industries, this book explores the role of weavers, merchants, consumers, and labourers in the making of what the author calls “small town capitalism.” By focusing on the politics of negotiation and resistance in local workshops, the book challenges conventional narratives of industrial change. The book provides the irst in-depth work on the origins of powerloom manufacture in South Asia. It affords unique insights into the social and economic experience of small town artisans as well as the informal economy of late colonial and early postindependence India. Douglas E. Haynes is associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928 (1991), and coeditor of Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (1992) with Gyan Prakash, and of Toward a History of Consumption in South Asia (2010) with Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanagisawa.

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This book is dedicated to the late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Ghanshyam Shah, and my past and present colleagues at the Centre for Social Studies

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Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society C. A. Bayly Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St Catharine’s College Gordon Johnson President Emeritus, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society publishes monographs on the history and anthropology of modern India. In addition to its primary scholarly focus, the series includes work of an interdisciplinary nature which contribute to contemporary social and cultural debates about Indian history and society. In this way, the series furthers the general development of historical and anthropological knowledge to attract a wider readership than that concerned with India alone. A list of titles which have been published in the series is featured at the end of the book.

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India Artisans, Merchants, and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960

DOUGLAS E. HAYNES Dartmouth College

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cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521193337 © Douglas E. Haynes 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Haynes, Douglas E. Small town capitalism in Western India : artisans, merchants, and the making of the informal economy, 1870–1960 / Douglas E. Haynes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-19333-7 (hbk.) 1. Artisans – India – History. 2. Cottage industries – India – History. 3. Textile industry – India – History. 4. Capitalism – India – History. 5. India – Economic conditions – 19th century. 6. India – Economic conditions – 20th century. I. Title. hd2346.i5h39 2012 330–dc23 2011027046 isbn 978-0-521-19333-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Images List of Maps, Chart, and Tables Preface List of Abbreviations

page viii ix xi xv

Introduction 1. The Historical and Global Contexts of Artisan Production 2. Artisanal Towns 3. Consumers, Merchants, and Markets 4. The Organisation of Production 5. Small Town Capitalism and the Living Standards of Artisans 6. The Colonial State and the Handloom Weaver 7. The Paradox of the Long 1930s 8. Weaver-Capitalists and the Politics of the Workshop, 1940–1960 Concluding Relections: The Making of the Informal Economy Appendix I Appendix II Bibliography Index

1 23 56 93 127 159 193 229 265 303 315 317 319 337

vii

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Images

1. Female Spinning Silk from Reel onto Bobbin in Western India, c. 1900 page 51 2. Cloth Printing, 1873 53 3. A Scene in the Bazaar at Sangamner Town, 1911 61 4. Jari Workers Drawing Silver Wire, c. 1909 67 5. Yeola Silks, c. 1909 113 6. Ilkal Silk Saris with Pure Jari Border from the 1930s 125 7. Weavers in Western Indian Town, c. 1873 135 8. Woman Stretching Warp on Street, c. 1930 137 9. Weaver at Loom over Pit, Sangamner Town, 1913 164 10. Special Famine Relief Camp for Weavers Organized by the American Marathi Mission, c. 1900 177 11. Churchill Loom, 1907 208 12. Pit-Loom with Dobby and Double Box Fly Shuttle Sley 210 13. Cottage Warping and Sizing Machine Produced by the Department of Industries, Bombay, c. 1924 214 14. Hattersley Loom Advertisement, 1904 217 15. Tikekar Patal Sari Advertisement, 1941 245 16. Advertisement for Butterworth and Dickinson Loom, 1904 250 17. Imitation Jari, Silver Gilding on Copper Wire, c. 1960 276

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Maps, Chart, and Tables

Maps 1. Map of Weaving Towns in the Bombay Presidency 2. Weavers’ Migration to Western India: 1860s–1950s

page 22 76

Chart 1. Rates of Labour – Daily Wages for Male Workers in Annas Per Day, Various Districts, 1882–5

169

Tables 2.1. Numbers of Looms in Key Handloom Centres of the Bombay Presidency 2.2. Number of Looms Compared to Total Population, Selected Western Indian Towns, c. 1910 2.3. Town Size in Major Weaving Towns of the Bombay Presidency, 1872–1911 3.1. Volume of Cloth Purchased Compared to Total Volume of Items Purchased per Week on Weekly Market Days in Several Markets of Khandesh (in Rupees) 3.2. Volume of Cloth in Rupees Sold at Maheji Fair in Three Selected Years (Providing Places Manufactured) 3.3. Population Growth of Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Poona 5.1. Rates per Day of Work in British Currency (Rupees-Annas-Pice)

ix

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57 59 60

101 102 107 167

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5.2. Women’s Wages in General Labour and in Cloth Production, 1882–1885 (in Annas) 7.1. Sari Prices in Sholapur, 1930–8 (Rupees-Annas) 7.2. Piece Rates per Sari, in Annas-Pice (Slightly More than One Day’s Work) 7.3. Wages Paid (to Asamis) for Weaving Three Types of Saris, 1933–8 (Rupees-Annas-Pice) C.1. Growth in the Population of Key Weaving Centres, 1951–91

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171 239 239 240 304

Preface

The idea for this book originated when I was working on the political history of Surat in western India. During the course of my research, I found that Surat had largely been a city of artisanal industries during the late colonial period. The discovery that the economy of an entire urban centre could depend on these kinds of industries surprised me, largely because I had been conditioned by discussions of “de-industrialisation” to assume that they must have dwindled into unimportance. The relative absence of studies on such industries at the time clearly constituted a major gap in the literature on India’s economic history. I decided that I would try to examine the history of artisan production in future research. Eager to broaden out from a study focused on a single place, I chose to look at artisan cloth producers in the Bombay Presidency as a whole. When I began my research, I saw little relevance of my project to an appreciation of India’s contemporary economy. During the early 1990s, Surat had become a city of considerable powerloom production, perhaps the largest textile centre in India; few obvious signs remained of the once signiicant manufacture of silk and cotton cloth by handloom. I originally assumed that the handloom industry had died out sometime late in the colonial period because small producers had lost the ability to compete with these new mechanized industries. A real change in my perspective took place when I started to search out people who had participated in the handloom industry as workers, workshop owners, or cloth merchants. To my surprise, some of these individuals or their offspring were now industrialists and cloth sellers in the modern textile economy; I discovered that the fathers, grandfathers, and uncles of many contemporary businessmen had once been involved in handloom manufacture and had xi

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adopted powerlooms in their workshops between 1925 and 1945. Some retired textile workers had once been wage labourers in the handloom industry. They often had entered employment in powerloom production when weaving by hand declined, sometimes inding their new forms of work better paying and less physically demanding. At the same time, they became subordinated within new kinds of capitalist structures. Initially, I was concerned that I was gathering more material from these interviews about the origins and shape of early powerloom production than I was about the handlooms, the main focus of my archival work. Yet gradually I came to recognize that the rigid compartmentalisation maintained in government policy and in scholarship between “handloom” and “powerloom” had long been responsible for creating major blindnesses about important patterns of change. Only when historians are willing to relax the limitations imposed by these categories can they begin to understand the processes involved in the construction of India’s contemporary textile industry. In effect, this study has become an examination of the origins of post-independence forms of industrial capitalism as well as an analysis of artisan production of cloth during the colonial period. Here, I can carry this study only up to about 1960; any discussion of later developments will have to be sketchy or reserved for later works. Carrying out a project based on oral history as well as archival research has brought with it considerable personal as well as intellectual rewards. I was invited into the homes, workshops, and ofices of the more than two hundred artisans, workers, merchants, industrialists, and tradeunion leaders that I interviewed. They not only recounted their personal and familial histories, but also they often offered me their hospitality, sometimes in ways that seemed to exceed their means. A few workers trusted me with accounts of their pasts that might have put their jobs or reputations at some risk if these accounts had become widely known. I certainly appreciate the concerns of a couple of individuals who preferred not to talk with me under such circumstances. I cannot thank all those I interviewed by name here; indeed, doing so might create dificulties for a few of them. I do want to single out some individuals whom I can name and who provided further help well beyond the interview itself: Khalil Ansari, N. Dikonda, Atmaram Hathiwala, Datta Karve, V. R. Madoor, and M.Y. Momin. I would also like to thank several special contacts in the weaving towns who became absorbed in my project and who went out of their way to facilitate my research by locating persons I might interview: Hasmukh Talia in Surat; Mansoor Ansari, Shankar Kane, and Sanjay Lahoti in Bhiwandi; and R. G. Mhetras in Solapur.

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Preface

xiii

For each town as well, local intellectuals and scholars shared their special knowledge of their cities and pointed me in directions that I would never have otherwise considered. These include Prof. Vilas Bet, P. J. Buwa, N. T. Punde, and R. G. Kakade for Solapur; Dr. Mohiyuddin Momin and Saghir Shaikh for Bhiwandi and Malegaon; and Biswaroop Das, Kiran Desai, Lancy Lobo, S. P. Punalekar, and Ghanshyam Shah for Surat. Aroon Tikekar and Durga Bhagavat provided valuable information about changes in Maharashtrian fashion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I also wish to thank those who provided research assistance at various stages of my work: Uma Arora, Shailendra Bhandare, Mallesh Boddul, Vishvanath Danure, Nurussaba Garg, Vikesh Pandya, Suchita Patel, and Clare Talwalker. Often they provided advice and intellectual input that cannot be adequately acknowledged in the academic footnote. Uma Arora deserves special recognition because of the length of the period she worked for me, the diversity of her assistance, and her willingness to share her valuable insights on Surat. At Dartmouth, Peter Sutoris, Kelsey Carter, Hannah Hoyt, and Kevin Mwenda provided valuable assistance with the inal stages of the manuscript, the maps, and the chart. This project has gone through many drafts, and I have received feedback at many different stages in its development. I would like to acknowledge a number of scholars in India for help with my project and for their reactions to my ideas: Iftikhar Ahmad, Vasanti Damle, Mariam Dossal, Arvind Ganachari, Raj Kumar Hans, Neeraj Hatekar, Manjiri Kamat, Ruby Maloni, Makrand Mehta, Shirin Mehta, A. Satyanarayana, Rusheed Wadia, and Terence de Lima de Souza. Outside India, I have beneited greatly from comments and suggestions in response to seminar presentations and to drafts of the manuscript from the late Burton Stein, David Arnold, Eric Beverley, Subho Basu, C. A. Bayly, Jan Breman, Judith Byield, Ronald Edsforth, Steve Ericson, David Hardiman, Michelle Maskiell, Ed Miller, Mattison Mines, Morris Morris, Geert de Neve, Nikhil Rao, David Roberts, David Rudner, Ajay Skaria, Leo Spitzer, Howard Spodek, Hein Streefkerk, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Clare Wilkinson-Weber. Subho has read the entire manuscript and provided comments; Steve has always been ready to offer comments on chapters, often on short notice, when I have needed them. I also thank many others who offered comments in seminars and conference panels. My greatest debts are to Tirthankar Roy and the late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, whose work, intellectual comradeship, and friendship have inluenced this work in too many ways to be enumerated. Some of the discussion of migration comes out of an earlier article on migration

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I co-authored with Tirthankar. He has never hesitated to provide comments and offer his collegiality, even as sections of this study offered criticism of some of his conclusions. I have no doubt that this book would have been a much stronger one if I had had a chance to get more of Raj’s feedback; his tragic death has impoverished the whole ield of South Asian social and economic history. Prasannan Parthasarathi, both through the intellectual inluence of his writings and through comments on the manuscript, has also had an important impact on the inal shape of this book. More recently, Abigail McGowan has offered a parallel source of friendship and intellectual inspiration and has provided comments on the entire manuscript. Funding for this project was provided by the American Institute of Indian Studies and by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars of the Fulbright Foundation. I thank both of these organisations for their generous support. I would also like to acknowledge the directors of various archives and libraries: the British Library, the Maharashtra State Archives, the Andhra Pradesh State Archives, the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, the National Archives of India, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Mumbai, Solapur City Library, Surat Municipal Library, and the Centre of South Asian Studies at University of Cambridge. I wish to thank the Cambridge University Press team for its role in preparing the manuscript for publication. As I count, at least eight different individuals (and probably signiicantly more) have played a part in this process, and some of them have devoted considerable time to my project. I greatly appreciate all of the team’s help, care, and seemingly inexhaustible patience. Chapter 4 is drawn heavily from my article, “The Labour Process in the Bombay Handloom Industry,” MAS, v. 42, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 1–45. I wish to thank the journal’s editors for allowing me to republish much of this article in a somewhat modiied form. I also wish to acknowledge the following publishers for allowing me to draw on sections of several other articles and essays: Oxford University Press (for Past and Present); Oxford University Press, Delhi; Sage Publishers (for Indian Social and Economic History Review); and Popular Prakashan. Finally, I must thank my family – Tommy, Rebecca, and Nien Lin – for accompanying me to India during the early stages of my research and making the many sacriices over many years that have been necessary for this book to reach completion. It may seem a commonplace to say this, but it is undoubtedly true that without their support, this book would not have been possible.

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Abbreviations

BEISC BPBEC JD MSA RD RSS Selections

Bombay Economic and Industrial Survey Committee Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee Judicial Department Maharashtra State Archives Revenue Department Revision Survey Settlement Selections from the Record of the Bombay Government

xv

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Introduction

Ever since Lord Bentinck reported in 1834 that “the bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India,” the fate of artisans has assumed a central place in discussions of the South Asian economy. Yet in a curious way, the history of artisans and artisan production during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has only begun to be written. Rich works on peasant agriculture during British rule exist for many parts of India, and a number of similarly valuable case studies of large industries and of industrial workers have now been published. To date, however, there have been no comparable regional histories of the artisanal economy and of small-scale production. This study seeks to examine artisan cloth manufacture in the Bombay Presidency – and the Bombay State of post-independence India – between 1870 and 1960. By following smallish actors and their creative attempts to adapt to the changing character of colonialism, the circumstances of World War II, and the environment of early post-independence India, it seeks to offer an alternative understanding of industrial change, one that better accounts for the shape of the contemporary economy. Rather than focus on factory production in major urban centres, I trace here the development of the capitalism of small towns. Any attempt to consider the history of South Asian artisans must encounter perceptions that survive from the colonial period and from the independence struggle.1 For Indian nationalists, the artisan – particularly the handloom weaver – was a powerful symbol of India’s 1

A particularly rich treatment of these perceptions can be found in Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

1

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2

Introduction

fate under colonialism. Crafts producers were viewed as emblematic of the self-contained, self-suficient society that was thought to have once existed. Their world, it was argued, was subjected to the disruptive effects of the Industrial Revolution and the competition of European textiles, especially from Lancashire. Nationalists conceived of artisans largely as igures external to capitalism, that is, as victims subject to its harsh impact, hardly as persons involved in shaping the structures of India’s regional economies themselves. In retrospect, most nationalist leaders, including Gandhi, appear to have been almost oblivious to the ways in which the actual economy of artisan production was changing around them. Weavers, dyers, printers, and gold-thread producers in early-twentieth-century India used different raw materials in manufacturing textiles than their pre-colonial counterparts; they produced different kinds of cloth for different kinds of markets; they frequently migrated over long distances to small weaving towns where they fashioned new forms of community; they often deployed novel techniques of production; and they became involved in subjecting wage labourers in their workshops to changing regimes of control. In short, they were not “traditional” igures carrying on their professions in a timeless fashion; they were participants in processes of change that characterised the larger sub-continent. The primary concern of this study is to capture the role of artisans (and merchants who traded in cloth produced by artisans) as social actors who played a vital part in shaping the character of the western Indian economy. It stresses the heterogeneity of the processes involved in the making of regional capitalism, both because the case of artisan production contrasts sharply with that of the large textile factories that have been the focus of most existing studies of industrialisation, and because the patterns of change within the artisan economy themselves were so diverse. At the same time, it highlights the growth of a rather unique social formation, which I term “weaver capitalism,” in the small manufacturing places of the Bombay Presidency. The need for such a study becomes clear from only a brief examination of the overall signiicance of artisan industry. However many small producers were displaced during colonial rule, handloom weaving and other forms of artisan cloth production remained major sources of employment in the irst half of the twentieth century. At the all-India level, one government oficer noted in 1935: “[F]or every worker employed in cotton mills there are ive employed in handloom weaving.” At least ten million

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Introduction

3

people at the time depended on weaving for their living.2 Despite the fact that the Bombay Presidency was the centre of India’s large-scale textile industry, artisan producers of cloth in the province far outnumbered those employed by the mills up to and after independence. In 1911, there were 290,000 “home workers” making cotton or silk textiles in the Bombay Presidency, a igure that would not have included many dyers, embroiderers, printers, and gold-thread makers; by contrast, the textile mills gave employment to 195,000.3 An estimate in the early 1920s indicated that more than 800,000 people depended wholly or largely on handloom weaving for their subsistence.4 Yet although the factories of Bombay and Ahmedabad and workers in those factories have received considerable scholarly attention,5 there have been no signiicant historical studies of handloom weavers, dyers, and other craftspeople in western India during this period, nor any book-length study about such artisans for any region of South Asia. The contrast seems even more striking when the literature on jute mills, railroad building, and coal mines is considered. Equally important, artisanal activity contributed signiicantly to the larger structures that have come to characterise the industrial economy of India in recent decades. Today, the manufacture of cloth by small producers using electric power in the old handloom towns, often in irms headed by descendants of the original artisan-entrepreneurs, has assumed massive proportions. The mills of western India have been in serious decline; they now make only a small portion of the country’s cloth requirements. By the 1990s, the centres of Surat and Bhiwandi each oficially possessed about 250,000 looms, most of which were located in workshops with less than thirty workers. This igure was greater than the number of looms 2 3

4 5

NAI, Department of Industries and Labour (Industries), 1935, File I-354 (6), p. 16. Census of India igures cited in Robert Ewbank, A Manual for Co-operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1914), p. 51. These igures almost certainly understate the relative size of those involved in artisanal production because of the large number of working dependents and of artisans employed in subsidiary occupations (dyeing, etc.). Annual Report of the Department of Industries, 1922–3, pp. 6–7. Just some of the more prominent studies are: Makrand Mehta, The Ahmedabad Cotton Textile Industry: Genesis and Growth (Ahmedabad: New Order Book Co., 1982); Sujata Patel, The Making of Industrial Relations: The Ahmedabad Textile Industry, 1918–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Morris D. Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1854–1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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in any of the great manufacturing towns of Britain at the height of its industrial dominance; unoficial estimates suggest an even larger industry today.6 Although there have perhaps been hundreds of studies on British textiles during the nineteenth century, the history of India’s small-scale powerloom industry is virtually unknown, even to specialists working on South Asia. In short, the obsession of historians with the irst phase of western Indian industrialisation – during which factory owners created the largescale textile mills that came to constitute a signiicant source of industrial growth – has caused them to ignore this second major phase associated with small producers, one that ultimately has proven more critical to the current contours of the Indian economy. Sociologists and anthropologists working on the contemporary period have long recognised the multiplicity of structural forms and labour arrangements that characterise Indian industry, arguing that small units based on “informal” principles of organisation should be seen as integral parts of India’s capitalist economy, not as relics of a pre-capitalist order.7 Their work, however, typically does little to explore the historical processes involved in shaping the informal or unorganised sector or the ways in which these industries have related to the “formal” sector over time.8 This gap in the literature 6

7

8

Estimates in 2010 suggest there may be more than 600,000 looms in both of these centres. For the decline of western Indian mills, see, for instance, Jan Breman, Working in the Mill No More (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004); Darryl D’Monte, Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and Its Mills (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). In 1916, the largest centre in Britain had 112,000 looms; Lancashire as a whole had 809,000. T. Worall, Cotton Spinners’ Directory, 32nd edition (Oldham, 1916), p. 13. My thanks to Douglas Farnie for this reference. For a small sampling of the literature, see Mark Holmström, Industry and Inequality: The Social Anthropology of Indian Labour (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (London: Zed Press, 1982); Anita Kelles-Viitanen, Invisible Hands: Women in Home-Based Production (New Delhi: Sage, 1987); Clare WilkinsonWeber, Embroidering Lives: Women’s Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry (Albany N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999); Manjit Singh, The Political Economy of Unorganised Industry: A Study of the Labour Process (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990); Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Internal Economy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Geert de Neve, The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2005); Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The best available studies are Chari, Fraternal Capital, written by a geographer but containing three substantial historical chapters, and Tirthankar Roy’s second book,

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Introduction

5

has led to incomplete understandings about processes of change, such as the tendency to attribute the proliferation of small irms and mechanisms of out-contracting mainly to “globalisation” and the policies of the neo-liberal state since the 1980s. Although such views have partial validity, the rapid growth of the powerloom sector in recent decades would not have been possible if central features of small town capitalism – the role of artisan and peasant entrepreneurs, patterns of accumulation at the local level, lexible methods for the deployment of new technologies and skills, and innovative approaches to mobilising pools of labour – had not been irmly in place before 1980. The political economy of the late colonial and Nehruvian periods was critical to fostering a climate conducive to the explosive development of powerloom production during the 1980s and 1990s. Thus this book in effect examines the early stages of the formation of what was to become the contemporary industrial order. The assertion that an artisan-based capitalism was growing even in the heyday of the large factory – a key conclusion of this study – runs counter to traditional understandings of industrialisation in South Asia. Historians inluenced by the modernisation school and by Marxist approaches once viewed factories as forerunners of the kind of society India either would inevitably build or should build, whether it was to be founded on the principles of capitalism or of socialism. As Rajnarayan Chandavarkar has pointed out, they saw industrial change largely as a product of diffusion from Europe. In their view, he suggests, “it [industrialisation] was a technologically determined process beyond the realm of social choice . . . it was a serial process whose imperatives were similar in each case . . . it was inevitably and inexorably progressive . . . lowing from the West, it constituted the only dynamic force acting upon a passive ‘indigenous economy.’”9 Although this view distorted our understandings of how large-scale industries developed, as Chandavarkar has argued, it

9

Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which includes a series of chapters on particular industries at the all-India level but stops in 1947. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives,” Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 30–73. Even Morris Morris, who did so much to emphasise the signiicance of artisans in his articles, chose in his seminal chapter on industrialisation in the Cambridge Economic History of India to relegate handloom production to a few pages, and left ambiguous whether the history of the handlooms should be considered an integral part of “industrial development.” See “The Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947,” The Cambridge Economic History of India, ed. Dharma Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 553–676.

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also left little room for appreciating the role of small producers in the larger history of the industrial economy. The failure to bring such actors into the study of modern capitalism was strongly affected by the binary categories informing historical research: handloom and powerloom, craft and industry, artisan and worker, and the informal and formal sectors. The irst element in each set of pairs was in effect often placed outside history. The boundaries established by these categories seriously discouraged research across their lines. A study of small producers centres an understanding of industrial capitalism squarely in the history of the broader structures of the regional economy rather than in Europe or the colonial ports of India. This study will emphasise the involvement of a variety of actors – merchants, weavers, and artisan-labourers – located mostly in the towns and small cities in the western Indian mofussil. The great mill cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad will receive comparatively little attention in this work. Instead, smaller places like Surat, Sholapur, Bhiwandi, Malegaon, Yeola, Ilkal, and Ichalkaranji will assume a more prominent place. Existing Approaches to the Artisan Economy This book departs from prevailing historical approaches to the artisan economy in a number of important ways. Discussion of artisans once was dominated by the debate over “de-industrialisation.” According to the classical paradigm, the rise of the textile industry in Britain (and later in India) during the colonial period brought about a massive displacement of handloom weavers. Lacking the capacity to undersell products manufactured in modern mills, Indian artisans eventually were unable to subsist; large numbers were driven into the rural economy, where they were forced to survive by agricultural labour. In other words, developments outside India, primarily in the form of global capitalism, had a destructive effect on the small producer, who could not resist their impact. Although the sympathies of scholars advocating this position undoubtedly lay with the handloom weaver, cotton spinner, and dyer, they usually viewed artisans as powerless igures who necessarily had to succumb to the factory. After the 1960s, a few economic historians began to criticise the de-industrialisation thesis, pointing especially to the large number of artisans who remained at the end of the colonial period. A spirited debate ensued in the pages of the ield’s best journals, with both sides mustering

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considerable statistical evidence to back their respective positions.10 Yet whatever the truth behind the de-industrialisation debate – and I certainly agree that considerable decline in artisanal manufacture took place in different periods and different regions after 1800 – this discussion did little to illuminate the circumstances of those artisans who continued to practise their professions or their contribution to major economic developments. Ironically, whereas a rich literature existed on relations of production in artisanal industry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,11 there was little such treatment of artisans during more recent periods. Those who contested the de-industrialisation thesis occasionally acknowledged some artisanal agency – for instance, the willingness of 10

11

For some of the important statements on this issue, see the debate prompted by Morris D. Morris, including Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History,” IESHR 5:1 (1968): 1–15; Toru Matsui, “The Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History – A Review of a ‘Reinterpretation,’” IESHR 5:1 (1968): 17–33; Bipan Chandra, “Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,” IESHR 5:1 (1968): 35–75; Tapan Raychaudhuri, “A Re-interpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History?,” IESHR 5:1 (1968): 77–100. See also Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “De-Industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications,” The Journal of Development Studies 12:2 (1976): 135–64 and Marika Vicziany, “The Deindustrialization of India in the Nineteenth Century: A Methodological Critique of Amiya Kumar Bagchi,” IESHR 16:2 (1979): 105–46; Michael J. Twomey, “Employment in Nineteenth Century Indian Textiles,” Explorations in Economic History 20:3 (1983): 37–57; and Colin Simmons, “‘Deindustrialization,’ Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850–1947,” Modern Asian Studies 19:3 (1985): 593–622; J. Krishnamurty, “Deindustrialization in Gangetic Bihar during the Nineteenth Century: Another Look at the Evidence,” IESHR 22:4 (1985): 399–416. For instance, K. N. Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” IESHR 11:2–3 (1974): 127–82; Hameeda Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers: Impact of the Conlict of the Revenue and Commercial Interests of the East India Company, 1750–1800,” IESHR 16:3 (1979): 323–45; S. Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom Industry in South-eastern India,” IESHR 17:3 (1980): 257–81; Frank Perlin, “Proto-Industrialization and Pre-colonial South Asia,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 30–95; Vijaya Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants, and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Rural Industry and Commercial Agriculture in Late Seventeenth-Century South-Eastern India,” Past and Present 126 (1990): 76–114; Lakshmi Subramanian, “Power and the Weave: Weavers, Merchants and Rulers in Eighteenth-Century Surat,” Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta, eds. Ashin Das Gupta, Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 52–82; Om Prakash, “From Negotiation to Coercion: Textile Manufacturing in India in the Eighteenth Century,” MAS 41:6 (2007): 1331–68.

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handloom weavers to adopt foreign machine-made yarn – but they did not confront the binary image of dynamic, large industry and stagnant “traditional” industry; they thus perpetuated the view of artisans as igures outside capitalism, at best as survivors withstanding processes of modernisation. After the mid-1980s, a number of studies began to address these limitations. A handful of historians have carefully examined the social circumstances of particular sets of artisans, explored the market for artisanal goods, and analysed relations of production.12 Some have complicated the model of de-industrialisation considerably without breaking with it; others have found the model too limited for their investigations. Tirthankar Roy in particular has brought to light the dynamism of goldthread producers, handloom weavers, carpet makers, and leather workers over wide parts of the Indian sub-continent during the irst half of the twentieth century.13 Roy treats artisan manufacture as being part of capitalist development.14 He has also recognised considerable diversity in the experiences of artisans, often juxtaposing dynamic entrepreneurs and industries, which adapted to twentieth-century circumstance, with more stagnant producers who struggled to survive.15 This study certainly locates itself within the revisionist approach in which Roy is the leading igure; the inluence of his scholarship will be self-evident to all familiar with it. Yet this book differs from Roy’s work in four signiicant ways. First, it delves more deeply into the household and workshop, and especially devotes signiicant attention to the 12

13

14 15

For studies on artisan cloth production, see Christopher Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1984), ch. 5; Douglas Haynes, “The Dynamics of Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry,” IESHR 23:2 (1986): 127–49; Konrad Specker, “Madras Handlooms in The Nineteenth Century,” IESHR 26:2 (1989): 131–66; Peter Harnetty, “Deindustrialization Revisited: The Handloom Weavers of the Central Provinces of India, c. 1800–1947,” MAS 25:3 (1991): 455–510; Sumit Guha, “The Handloom Industry of Central India: 1825–1950,” IESHR 26:3 (1989): 297–318; Haruka Yanagisawa, “The Handloom Industry and Its Market Structure: The Case of the Madras Presidency in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” IESHR 30:1 (1993): 1–27. Tirthankar Roy, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India. Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, p. 3. Tirthankar Roy, “Out of Tradition: Master Artisans and Economic Change in Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 66:4 (2007): 963–91; Roy, “Consumption and Craftsmanship in India, 1870–1940,” in Douglas E. Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanagisawa, eds. Toward a History of Consumption in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 268–98.

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circumstances of labour. Roy’s writings have certainly contributed to understanding structural relations within the artisan economy, and have especially highlighted the domination of merchants and karkhana (workshop) owners over household producers and wage employees. Roy’s emphasis, however, is clearly on the master craftsman and his adaptations to the twentieth century; this focus contributes to a narrative of change that stresses amelioration over time. In this work, I give more equal weight to such “weaver-capitalists” and to the artisan-labourers who worked for them. This approach certainly highlights many less positive aspects of the artisanal economy: Ordinary workers had to cope with severe poverty, radical economic vicissitudes, and social dependence on bosses. Second, this book analyses the speciic processes that gave rise to changes in the regional economy. Roy’s work has done much to elucidate some overall patterns of change, but given its all-India perspective, it cannot hope to explore the decision-making of entrepreneurs, the interactions between merchants and weaver-capitalists, and the contests between various capitalists and labourers that were critical to the forging of small town capitalism. A more microcosmic examination of one province in British India, with close attention to a small number of centres, permits an in-depth reconstruction of the agencies involved in the forging of the industrial economy. I examine here the “politics at the point of production”16 that shaped workshop relations, inluenced the adoption of new kinds of technology, and stimulated shifts in the kinds of cloth made and marketed. In effect, this study applies to smaller industries approaches taken by recent studies of textile factories, railroads, and coal and gold mines in examining both the ways capital has mobilised and disciplined labour and the ways workers’ actions have compelled capitalists to adapt their strategies of control.17

16

17

Tessie Liu, The Weaver’s Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 33; Paul Thompson, The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process (London: Macmillan, 1985) and Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London: Verso, 1985). For a work that stresses the politics of labour in contemporary informal industry in India, see de Neve, The Everyday Politics of Labour. Ian Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–1900 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India; Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Subho Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers’ Resistance in Bengal, 1890–1937 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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By focusing more closely on historical contingency, the regional economy, and the politics of the workplace, moreover, my analysis raises questions about the value of any straightforward transitional narrative inherent in the unfolding of capitalism. Although he certainly disagrees with the view that all signiicant change was in the direction of largescale industry, Roy still suggests that patterns of transformation within artisan manufacture relect a more general process of modernisation characterised by a steady commercialisation of the economy, a shift from custom to contract in production relations, the proletarianisation of the work force, and other parallel tendencies. In early sections of this book, I explore pre-colonial artisanal manufacture, showing that many of the features associated with capitalist production were already present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More critically, I question the view that western-Indian manufacture by artisans moved towards any kind of universal shape during the late colonial period.18 The implication that the organisation of production shifted from traditional to modern forms overlooks the ways in which the persistence and reproduction of noncontractual obligations based on caste, family and kinship, and social patronage were essential to the functioning of small town capitalism throughout the irst half of the twentieth century. Because production relations were forged through interactions in the regional economy and in artisan workshops, they came to acquire very particular shapes in the towns and small cities of western India. Finally, this study also relies on a chronological structure that cuts across conventional time frames. Works on artisan production, including Roy’s two major books, have commonly focused on periods determined by major political developments: the late pre-colonial period, the initial phase after the establishment of British power, and the early twentieth century up to independence. Once one leaves behind debates about the impact of colonialism and recognises that the colonial state and global developments associated with British ascendancy were only two factors among many inluencing change, the logic of a periodisation based on political chronology becomes increasingly tenuous. As I analysed some previously neglected patterns of change, such as the development of powerloom production, the year 1947 proved awkward as an ending point. Certainly most participants in local industries did not see independence as a crucial demarcation in their economic lives; indeed, it was 18

These concepts have been critiqued by a number of scholars of large-scale industries as well, most notably Chandavarkar, “Industrialization in India.”

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rarely mentioned in interviews. My rough ending point of 1960 allows me to analyse developments that continued across the line from the late colonial to the post-colonial and to understand better the making of India’s contemporary informal economy. Approach of this Study This study seeks to transcend the conceptual boundaries that have divided research on artisans and work on industrialisation. Its main focus is the small producer. Yet it insists that artisanal activity cannot be understood as operating by a special logic; it suggests that approaches that have recently been used in studying large-scale industry can be applied to smaller actors and smaller production units. It views handloom weavers and other artisan cloth producers themselves as participants in the creation of “small town capitalism” in western India, as well as key igures in a second phase of industrialisation that might be said to have begun in the region during the 1920s. It seeks to highlight how the social choices of a variety of actors connected to the artisanal economy, taken in the context of economic crises, political constraints, and workplace conlicts, came to inluence the character of industrialisation and production relations. In effect, then, the study challenges any unitary conception of the development of capitalism. It draws on theoretical models that see economic structures under colonial circumstances as shaped through the interplay of multiple, often contradictory motor forces, such as the European world economy, the strategies of local business families trying to advance their proits and their social position, and the actions of workers attempting to secure their own survival and to inluence the forms of exploitation from above.19 In other words, to use David Washbrook’s apt phrase, it seeks to construct a “multi-centred” approach to understanding the formation of twentieth-century India’s economic structure.20 At least seven kinds of such motor forces or sources of agency igure in the narrative that follows. First, global capitalism – the “capitalist

19

20

See the essays in Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, eds. Frederick Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia Mallon, William Roseberry, and Steve J. Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Particularly critical here is Stern’s essay, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Carribbean,” pp. 23–83. David Washbrook, “South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 49:3 (1990): 479–508.

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world system,” if you will – plays an important part in the discussion that follows, although its effects were hardly of a universalising character. Developments in the world economy affected artisans in three signiicant ways. First, as is most commonly acknowledged, the competition of British factories radically constrained the markets of South Asian small producers, compelling them to develop specialised niches where their products could generate demand. Second, the availability of new kinds of raw materials – such as machine-made cotton yarn, East Asian silk, and European dyes – frequently cheapened the costs of production for artisans, but at the same time made them more reliant on prices and availability in world markets. Third, the uneven character of commercial change – in part caused by shifting world prices for Indian agricultural commodities – contributed to pockets of prosperity and stagnancy in western India, and thus radically affected the demand for artisanproduced goods. Yet global impulses could never determine the cultural tastes that animated Indian consumers, nor could they directly shape the forms of control that local capitalists used to subordinate and discipline workers. The state was another factor inluencing artisan cloth manufacture. Colonialism certainly had signiicant effects on small producers. In displacing pre-colonial Indian kingdoms, which had been a major source of demand for indigenous textiles, the British regime disrupted many existing cloth markets. The colonial legal system’s willingness to back contractual obligations may have made possible tighter controls over artisan labour.21 But readers might be surprised at how little British initiatives and policies igure in many sections of this book. Agents of the colonial state did not see small producers as an important source of taxation, nor did they view them as signiicant contributors to the larger development of the economy. When the British did intervene to promote “crafts” after 1900, their impulse was too weak, their initiatives too torn by contradictions, and their ideas too limited by their perceptions of artisans as conservative igures unwilling to change, to have much of a signiicant impact. During World War II and afterwards, by contrast, the Indian state began to regard small producers as crucial to the working of the economy; they intervened dramatically, bolstering the role of co-operatives in the

21

The role of colonialism in enforcing contracts during the early periods of British ascendancy has been highlighted by Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy. I was able to ind only a few references to contracts between workers and capitalists during the period covered in this book.

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distribution of yarn, inluencing the allocation of development resources, and shaping the character of labour resistance. Yet in many cases, the big workshop owners (karkhandars) transigured government policies, often intended to aid only households of handloom weavers, into forms that enhanced their own economic and political dominance. The failure of the state to back workers’ protests during the 1950s and 1960s ultimately helped weaver-capitalists to consolidate their hold on artisan production in the smaller industrial centres. Weaknesses and internal contradictions of colonial and post-colonial states were crucial to the economic formations that emerged. Thus “outside” factors like global capitalism and government policy inluenced the nature of the artisanal economy but never in a deterministic manner. This account, however, primarily highlights the role of a variety of South Asian actors within the western Indian regional economy, operating mostly in the small towns and rural areas. First, it draws attention to Indian “consumers.” Rural folk and urban dwellers did not simply buy cloth that was the cheapest, although cost was certainly an important consideration. Their choices were constantly mediated by preferences; these preferences in turn were powerfully affected by region, gender, caste, and class. Change amongst certain rural populations, such as the Adivasis of western Indian hill tracts, heightened demand for women’s clothing in Maharashtrian styles woven by small town weavers. The extremely variegated character of demand made mass production of some kinds of cloth impractical and generally left considerable scope for the artisan. This study also seeks to examine how preferences in cloth may have changed over time, closing some opportunities for small producers but opening others. Traders and merchants were a second important kind of regional actor. “Trader” is itself a highly diverse category, containing both small hawkers who peddled wares in periodic markets and great urban merchants selling the inest kinds of cloth. Particularly notable, however, was the role of Marwari businessmen who migrated to western India to participate in the regional commerce in handloom goods. The role of these merchants was critical in three respects. First, they often carried the cloth of weaving centres widely around the countryside, in effect cultivating patterns of consumption for artisanal products. They were often purveyors of the cultural meanings that contributed to forms of urban and rural demand. Second, a number of them brought yarn, silk, and dyestuffs from the mills and ports to the small manufacturing places, making possible shifts in methods of production. Third, when circumstances were favourable,

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Introduction

some merchants developed tighter controls over the production process itself and created bonds of dependence that weavers often had dificulty escaping. In general, however, they were unwilling to take the risks that direct intervention in the manufacturing process would have entailed. A third critical category of actors were the artisan households, that is, families in which most members were engaged in production in their own homes using little or no extra-familial labour. In the towns, most of these were drawn from so-called artisan communities, that is, the castes and other social groupings long associated with weaving, dyeing, and other specialised professions. For many, the ability merely to sustain themselves as artisans was their most important goal. The evidence suggests that they often preferred the freedoms and status associated with their craft rather than employment in the general agrarian or urban labour markets. Often the need to secure raw materials, credit, and outlets for their cloth led them to establish multi-stranded linkages with mercantile capitalists that could be of long duration. Yet through small acts of negotiation and everyday struggle – pilfering bits of yarn, offering inished cloth to merchants other than those who originally provided their raw materials, and even absconding with loans and materials – they set limits on the character of the methods of exploitation used by those above them. This study also devotes considerable attention to the role of karkhandars, or “weaver-capitalists.” Such igures generally also came from weaving communities. In most cases, their families had once been engaged in the household production of cloth, but unlike the majority of artisans, they were able to strike out on their own and to establish weaving workshops with hired labour. Although most such irms remained small, several individuals in every signiicant weaving centre were able to accumulate capital and build larger establishments. A few gained greater control over the marketing process, circumventing merchants from trading communities. Weaver-capitalists were innovators. Frequently they succeeded because they came up with new designs of cloth or discovered new markets for specialised products. After the turn of the twentieth century, they began to invest in improved forms of technology such as the lyshuttle, Hattersley, and automatic looms, which all modestly raised levels of productivity. In the 1920s and 1930s, with the availability of used mill looms and access to cheap sources of power, some karkhandars established small powerloom workshops, laying the technological basis for the industrial transformation that would take place after independence. Wage labourers, the inal set of actors explored here, were also critical to the shape of small town capitalism. Like the karkhandars, they were

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mostly individuals drawn from weaving communities, at least until relatively late in the period covered here. Many were migrants who left the United Provinces or Hyderabad State when opportunities to weave there dried up. Others belonged to weaving households within the Bombay Presidency that found it impossible to ind buyers for their own products. They sought employment within karkhanas, often exhibiting a willingness to work for persons from their own communities when they were reluctant to seek wage employment with others. Even when they entered the wage relationship, they never became powerless igures. In urban centres where dozens or hundreds of workshops competed for labour during times of high demand, they often possessed the potential to transfer their services to alternative employers. Owners needed to develop mechanisms beyond the wage payment, usually in the form of patronage services, to tie labourers more securely to their workshops. The term “proletariat” seems inappropriate for such persons whose ties to karkhandars were based on caste, kinship, and patron-client relations and who sometimes hoped to establish their own irms. After the late 1930s, artisan-workers began to join trade unions and participate in strikes with the purpose of compelling owners to implement new labour legislation passed by the post-independence state. The response to this resistance by local bosses profoundly affected the scale and organisational form of workshops. Thus, the larger structures of the artisanal economy developed out of the interplay of world capitalism, the colonial and post-independence states, and at least ive kinds of regional actors, often in very speciic circumstances affected by place and time. Because local dynamics and historically contingent factors were involved, the outcomes of these processes were always multiple. There was no single ultimate “mode of production” towards which all artisanal manufacture was evolving. Indeed, the term “outcomes” is inappropriate because it suggests culmination in some inal form; production relations were always subject to re-negotiation when different power conigurations arose. Nonetheless, much of my study documents the ways in which the interaction of these forces strengthened weaver capitalism over time. Karkhandars in the small towns had signiicant advantages in the context of the early-twentieth-century economy and in workshop politics relative to other kinds of capitalist actors. As persons with strong preexisting craft skills, they were able to adapt their products and technologies lexibly to the rapidly changing character of demand (unlike merchant-capitalists who were not involved in production); they built on personal caste and community relationships to develop more reliable

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Introduction

work forces; they became big men in their localities by patronising community causes and by entering co-operative societies, and they used their expanding political inluence to their advantage; especially after 1940, they devised strategies to manipulate state policies to advance their economic positions and to short-circuit labour militancy. As igures who presided over structures with special resilience and adaptability, the weaver-capitalists in the towns and small cities of western India proved especially effective in coping with a series of economic crises from the 1930s to the 1950s. The karkhanas owned by substantial weavers never completely displaced other structures of production. Small irms, often based on family labour, continued to reproduce themselves in the midtwentieth-century small cities. By the 1960s, however, weaver-capitalists had achieved a kind of economic and political pre-eminence in many towns, sometimes by exercising new forms of power over smaller actors through out-contracting and by assuming positions of leadership in cooperative societies, community organisations, and urban politics. Some Methodological Considerations In this study, I have used a combination of approaches that allows me to discuss the intersection of larger regional structures with the micropolitics of the workshop; to reconstruct the agencies of speciic human actors while understanding larger patterns of development over wide territory; and to appreciate the diversity of change in artisanal economies. I speciically eschewed a study of the sub-continent as a whole, because such an approach would not permit me to explore the local processes involved in the construction of small town capitalism. An intensive examination of a single artisanal centre, on the other hand, would obscure the effort to develop a more general picture. I chose instead to focus on a level between these two, that of an individual province. Initially, the choice of the Bombay Presidency was highly inluenced by the fact that it was an administrative level at which colonial records were collected and maintained; the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai particularly possessed rich materials for the province. The Presidency, however, was hardly a regional unit that cohered culturally; it was an artiicial British creation. Three major linguistic groupings – Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, and Kannadigas – lived within it. Large territories peopled by each of these groupings, moreover, lay outside the Presidency. There was also a major contrast in agrarian conditions within the province, ranging from relatively prosperous regions in some parts of

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Gujarat and Khandesh in the north to the Deccan, which was characterised by poor soil, vulnerability to famine, and a larger number of peasants struggling to survive. The northern Kannada-speaking regions and coastal Konkan provided further variation.22 The distribution of artisans over the regional landscape by no means correlated neatly with areas of prosperity. With the exception of the city of Surat, there was a signiicant pattern of decline in the numbers of handloom weavers in British Gujarat in the late nineteenth century. By contrast, weaving in the Deccan districts of the Central Division and in the Kannada-speaking areas experienced a resurgence after 1870, in part because of increased demand for Maharashtrian saris. Finally, the artisans in the province afiliated with different political parties and movements, for instance, the Congress, the non-Brahman movement, the Muslim League, and the Communists. Although the diversity of the Bombay Province might appear at irst glance to be a serious disadvantage, a provincial-level study facilitates kinds of analysis that would not be possible with some other kind of territorial focus. First, it permits examination of economic interactions across linguistic and ecological zones. For example, many of the key markets for handloom cloth manufactured in what is now northern Karnataka (where Kannada is the main language) lay in Marathi-speaking districts. With a provincial focus, we can follow the movement of textiles into the areas where they were consumed. Much of the cloth made by artisans in poor Deccan areas made its way to places with more lourishing agriculture, such as Khandesh. Handloom weavers everywhere in the Presidency were connected to the port and mills of Bombay, which furnished yarn and other materials destined for manufacturing towns; the city then consumed much of what was made in the mofussil, and its factories later became a major source of used powerlooms purchased by the weavers. Second, a provincial study is valuable precisely because it allows comparison between areas characterised by such different patterns of change. This is crucial in a work that seeks to highlight the multi-structural character of the larger economy. Finally, this kind of focus makes it possible to bring out shared tendencies common to small producing centres, for example, the rise of the karkhanas as a form of production; the growth of co-operative societies and the ability of karkhandars to dominate their

22

Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 10–16. Also valuable is Sumit Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818–1941 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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Introduction

affairs after 1940; the development of powerloom production; and the emergence of trade-union activity after World War II. In short, studying a province makes it possible to understand the larger characteristics of the regional economy. Some discussion of sources is also warranted. The reader will notice that early chapters in this book are heavily based on evidence gathered from colonial archives: gazetteers, records of the Industries and Co-operative Societies departments, famine materials, government publications, and interviews before commissions. Because some oficials in the colonial government became increasingly interested in the fate of the artisan after the turn of the century, much of this material is quite rich. Colonial sources, however, suffer from three major shortcomings in addition to their usual ideological biases. First, they were pre-occupied with the household producers who used hand technology, as the government’s ostensible purpose in generating these documents was to improve the economic conditions of such producers. Government records rarely discussed the karkhandars who possessed a number of looms or the wage labourers who were employed in these workshops. They hardly touched on the adoption of electricity and power-driven machines, because it was precisely at the moment when artisans adopted such technology that they were deemed no longer to be craftspeople and thus became unworthy of the attention of the state. Second, these sources tended to give a rather unidimensional picture of artisans. That is, they often discussed ways small producers were victimised by various capitalists, particularly the sahukars (moneylender-cum-cloth dealer), but they gave little indication of the ways the actions of subordinated weavers and labourers affected the structure of production. Third, they provided a very limited picture of the subjective aspect of artisan experience. Several rich sociological studies by Indian scholars from the 1930s through the 1950s were extremely helpful in overcoming the irst limitation,23 but were less useful in addressing the second and particularly the last. 23

Such studies include N. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan (Poona: D.R. Gadgil, 1936); K. S. Venkataraman, “The Economic Condition of Handloom Weavers,” Journal of the University of Bombay 10, 4 (1942): 75–104; Raghunath Govind Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Sholapur (Poona: Oriental Watchman Publishing House, 1947), 11; S. B. Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,” M.A. dissertation, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1951; D. R. Gadgil and R. K. Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat (Surat: Shri Chunilal Gandhi Vidyabhavan, 1953); N. K. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Poona,

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Introduction

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For more recent periods, I was able to draw at times on local newspaper accounts in some places. Unfortunately, many developments within artisan enterprise were seldom deemed newsworthy. More importantly, during the course of research in India, I began to perceive interviews with ex-participants in the handloom and early powerloom industries as an important aspect of my study. I came to conduct more than two hundred interviews with weavers, merchants, workshop owners and industrialists, and labourers or ex-labourers.24 My main criteria for selecting persons to interview were that they be more than sixty years old (this was in the mid-1990s) and that they be connected in some way with handloom or powerloom weaving. I also talked with some younger industry experts, business people, and union leaders, but to a more limited extent. Reconstructing the history of this industry through interviews is, of course, fraught with dificulties. Because I was an outsider unconnected to their lives before our conversations, those I interviewed had little reason to talk with me except good will and perhaps curiosity (a few clearly had personal agendas about the past they wished to advance). Some wished to steer away from certain kinds of questions. Early in my research, it became clear that it would be dificult to bring up relevant issues connected to women’s roles among small producers. In Chapter 4, I have attempted to analyse gender relations within artisan workshops, but I was reluctant to press participants in the industry about this matter as well as other issues that appeared sensitive.25 Interviews were also often not very reliable in pinpointing precise historical information, especially speciic chronologies of events. Informants, for instance, gave me dates for a protest against the adoption of powerlooms in Bhiwandi that varied by at least eight years. There were contradictions in accounts of speciic events that could not be reconciled in some cases. No doubt, people refashioned their presentations of fact to inluence me or others present, although I suspect the amount of conscious distortion was rather limited. Recollections of the past are always

24

25

1959; M. K. Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Poona, 1960. Some of these were only brief conversations, although most were more extended interviews lasting one to two hours. There have been excellent ethnographies of artisan production by scholars whose projects are focused on gender, such as those written by Wilkinson-Weber and Mies mentioned in footnote 7, but as yet none of these studies has devoted serious attention to long-term historical issues.

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Introduction

coloured by present values and circumstances as well as by expectations for the future. For instance, as I have argued elsewhere, many workers, employers, and others tended to construct a romantic view of a distant past of warm, harmonious relationships – “we were like a family” was the common refrain – that they contrasted with the tense relations between labour and capital of more recent times.26 Faced with these kinds of problems, which affect any attempt at conducting oral history, I have tried to be quite conservative in determining what information could be utilised and how. I have checked oral accounts against each other and against written materials when possible. I have weighed possible motivations of those I interviewed. I have generally indicated when a rendition of events relects an individual’s personal recollection rather than a version of developments that could be corroborated. I have sometimes needed to place events in a general time period rather than assign speciic dates to them. I have been especially cautious in attempting to reconstruct perceptions of production relations that persons may have possessed many decades earlier. At the same time, an effort at such reconstruction should be made, because the alternative is to leave some kinds of actors invisible forever and to overlook major developments in the economy that are otherwise poorly documented. Still, this work is a study of economic and social change, not an attempt to understand contemporary perceptions of the past, and I bring interviews into the narrative only when they are relevant to my larger purposes.27

26

27

See my article, Douglas Haynes, “Just Like a Family? Recalling the Relations of Production in the Textile Industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, 1940–1960,” The Worlds of Industrial Labour, eds. Jonathan Parry, Jan Breman, and Karin Kapadia (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), pp. 141–69. For valuable discussions of historical memory, see Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). In Haynes, “Just Like a Family?” I engage in a discussion of those perceptions. I have also tried to be careful in this study about revealing the names of those who provided certain information. Some of the people I interviewed provided information that they did not want attributed to them. In other cases, I do not cite sources of information that could create discomfort for them personally. I have avoided all direct citations to individuals, whether workers, merchants, or capitalists, when the information pertained to production relations and participation in collective actions, except when these are very much part of public knowledge.

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Introduction

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This book is in effect divided into three main sections. The irst part, consisting of Chapter 1, charts the history of artisan cloth manufacture in western India from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, examining in broad fashion such factors as the urban location of producers, markets for cloth, relations of production, and labour mobility in an effort to dismiss any view of production before the colonial period as village-based, subsistence-oriented, or pre-capitalist. The chapter also discusses the changing global context of textile production after 1870, highlighting especially the “revolution in raw materials” used by artisans in the Bombay Presidency. The second part of the book consists of a series of chapters (Chapters 2 through 6) on the economy of small town textile production and marketing in western India from the late nineteenth century up through the 1920s. These chapters focus respectively on the development of artisanal towns and the role of migration; changing regional markets and patterns of consumption; the political processes involved in shaping the character of workshop relations; the economic circumstances of artisans; and the effects of state intervention. Each chapter highlights the role of different sets of actors associated with western Indian cloth manufacture. In the third part, Chapters 7 and 8, the organisation of the study shifts from a thematic structure to a chronological one, which allows a deeper discussion of historical contingency. Chapter 7 discusses the “long 1930s” (from the late 1920s up to circa 1940), and explores the paradoxical character of these years as a time of economic crisis for most participants in the industry of the region and as a period of considerable dynamism, when artisan-entrepreneurs expanded their markets, consolidated their dominance over labour, and began to shift their techniques of production. In Chapter 8, I discuss the 1940s and 1950s, demonstrating how “weaver capitalism” expanded in the small urban places of western India as artisan-entrepreneurs adapted their production constantly to the changing availability of raw materials and market conditions, took advantage of increasingly favourable policies of the Nehruvian state, and beat back collective resistances by organised labour. By 1960, these efforts had contributed to the development of the enhanced importance of smallish economic organisations, which were then positioned to challenge the role of large-scale industry in subsequent decades. Finally, in the concluding relections, I review the material in the book in order to make a more general argument for the importance of understanding the informal economy of contemporary India in historical perspective.

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Map 1. Map of Weaving Towns in the Bombay Presidency.

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1 The Historical and Global Contexts of Artisan Production

The igure of the village weaver – producing for people in the immediate vicinity, free from the control of capitalist actors, perhaps accepting compensation in kind rather than in cash – has often dominated colonial and nationalist imaginings of pre-colonial artisanal production in South Asia. Yet in western India at least, any such persons had historically been dwarfed in their economic signiicance by small producers who made cloth for distant consumers, obtained their materials in markets, were subject to various forms of merchant domination, and moved to new locales when economic circumstances changed. By the time the colonial period began, western Indian artisan families had long been participants in larger commercial networks that were regional, sub-continental, and global in scope. Recognition of this reality, however, has yet to be fully incorporated into the literature on artisans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Histories of the Indian economy under colonialism have often been predicated on the assumption that the impact of global inluences in the form of industrial capitalism brought about a radical shift in the universe of small cloth producers. According to the standard nationalist interpretation, this effect was profoundly disruptive: Handloom weavers, spinners, dyers, and other artisans, who had once made clothing largely in the context of self-suficient villages, were forced to compete at considerable disadvantage in world markets. According to revisionists such as Tirthankar Roy, artisans in the late colonial period were able to respond in creative ways to the changing global context. Yet Roy’s work seems to share two assumptions of the de-industrialization model: irst, a pre-colonial order in which artisans produced mostly for local consumers in contexts 23

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India

outside markets; and second, a subsequent transformation in that order as artisans were exposed to new regional and international forces after 1850. During the colonial period, he suggests, artisans were profoundly affected by the process of “commercialization,” which he deines as: “(i) a shift away from production for one’s own use, or for use as gifts and tributes, to production for the market, especially the non-local market, (ii) a shift from local to long-distance trades and (iii) the creation of infrastructure and institutions which aid such shifts.”1 In Roy’s perspective, therefore, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artisans were distinguished from their pre-colonial counterparts by the novel extent of their interactions with commercial networks. The notion of colonial commercialisation, whether destructive or creative, is rarely predicated on analysis of the actual nature of the economy of small producers before 1800. Writings on handloom weavers and craftspeople during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries make little attempt to construct any empirically grounded baseline. Most research on the colonial period, in fact, makes only limited reference to the rich scholarship on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which has demonstrated the highly commercial and dynamic character of pre-colonial cloth manufacture.2 As a result, generalisations about change in later colonial times are lawed, sometimes based as much on a master narrative about the spread of capitalism as they are on examinations of actual historical processes. This chapter treats such processes over several centuries. First, it uses secondary literature on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and primary evidence from the early nineteenth century – just after the imposition of colonial rule – to construct a kind of baseline for the rest of the study. Over the last three hundred years, it suggests, the manufacture of cloth by artisans in western India has been an activity largely geared towards markets. Whether or not it makes sense to view pre-colonial agriculturalists in western India as oriented primarily towards subsistence behaviour and exchanges in kind with other rural folk – a subject that has been disputed elsewhere3 – substantial numbers of cloth producers were highly 1 2

3

Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, p. 25. Conversely, the scholars who have focused on pre-colonial periods have tended to steer away from any attempt to follow their subject matter into the nineteenth century. The result is a radical disjuncture in historical analysis, one that permits the two sets of historians to argue for capitalist transitions in different periods without questioning the larger master narrative. See, for example, Neeraj Hatekar, “Farmers and Markets in the Pre-Colonial Deccan: The Plausibility of Economic Growth in Traditional Society,” Past and Present 178 (2003): 116–47.

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immersed in commercial manufacture well before the advent of British rule. The chapter ranges widely over issues of trade, urbanisation, and relations of production up through the mid-nineteenth century.4 Second, the chapter looks at the altered global context for cloth manufacture in the region after the imposition of colonial rule. Certainly, changes in the larger economic environment after 1800 were profound, but they spelled less the intrusion of commercial forces into a selfcontained world of artisan families for the irst time than a reconiguration of the commercial universe in which small producers of cloth participated. For some, this new context was initially destructive. No doubt many families involved in the making of cloth were displaced from their occupations; others who continued to ply their professions faced an unprecedented squeeze on their ability to survive. This situation altered, however, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and pockets of growth in artisanal production began to appear. A large number of artisans and merchants responded creatively to a shifting set of international pressures and opportunities, coming to rely on new sources of raw materials, new markets, and new methods of coping with the pressures on their subsistence. The later sections of this chapter primarily focus on how small cloth producers increasingly drew on supplies originating from outside India or from the Indian mills. World capitalism hardly proved to be a monolithic factor extending its tentacles in some uniform fashion over the region. Instead, most small producers interacted with new global impulses, reshaping the character of the artisan economy. The Artisanal Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries A substantial body of scholarship has convincingly thrown into doubt any view of the western Indian economy before 1800 as either static or localised.5 Frank Perlin has argued that: India, like Europe, was affected by profound and rapid change in the character of its societies and economies, and state-forms, from at least 4

5

Such a sweeping picture unfortunately cannot treat patterns of structural change within this broad period. For a rich treatment of changes from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century in south India, see Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy. My initial reading, however, does not suggest that the kinds of transformation discussed by Parthasarathi took place in eighteenth century western India. For some of the more important works that have challenged this older view, see Surendra Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, 16th and 17th Centuries: A Study in the Impact

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India the sixteenth century. . . . [A] fundamental aspect of that development was a local merchant capitalism which emerged independently of that in Europe, but within a common international theatre of societal and commercial changes.6

The commercial manufacture of textiles was a central feature of this development. Most artisan cloth producers in western India were participants in larger networks of trade and politics that stretched far beyond their localities long before the advent of British rule. Patterns of global exchange and processes of Indian state formation profoundly affected their activities. Contractual forms of transaction co-existed alongside “custom”-based practices; indeed, the two were not exclusive of each other. Mercantile actors were involved in the artisan economy not just as traders but as persons attempting to control labour processes. In many parts of western India, cloth producers tended to concentrate in towns where facilities for marketing were greatest. In short, many of the features believed to be associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries already existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth.7 In central and southern Gujarat, in Khandesh in western Maharashtra, and in parts of northern Karnataka, tens of thousands of artisans were extensively involved in production for a range of distant, often international, markets. These included the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa in the western Indian Ocean; the ports of Southeast Asia in the eastern Indian Ocean; the heartland of the Mughal Empire in northern India in the seventeenth century and various Maratha kingdoms in western

6 7

of European Expansion on Precapitalist Economy (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1975), chapters 1–3; Alexander Tchitcherov, India: Changing Economic Structure in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Outline, History of Crafts and Trade (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1998); David Hardiman, “Penetration of Merchant Capital in Pre-Colonial Gujarat,” Capitalist Development: Critical Essays: Felicitation Volume in Honour of Prof. A. R. Desai, eds. Akshayakumar Ramanlal Desai and Ghanshyam Shah (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1990) 29–44; V. D. Divekar, “The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century,” MAS 16:2 (1982): 427–43; Perlin, “Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia.” Perlin, “Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia,” p. 33. The large volume of production for commercial purposes, speciically export, has been discussed for Bengal; see, for instance, Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995); and “European Companies and the Bengal Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century: The Pitfalls of Applying Quantitative Techniques,” MAS 27:2 (1993): 321–40. Chaudhury challenges Prakash’s emphasis on the export trade to Europe, arguing for the importance of the Asian trade, but both authors agree on the huge dimensions of textile manufacture for commercial purposes.

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India during the eighteenth century; and the coastal regions of the subcontinent.8 With the expanding activity of various East India Companies after 1600, the trade of cloth to Europe also increased, although it never matched the most signiicant Asian components of the region’s international commerce. Clearly, markets located far from the producers, some far from India, absorbed much of western India’s manufactures. Circumstances in the western Deccan, excluding Khandesh, were no doubt different. Little cloth from these areas went to international markets, nor did much go to far-lung regions of the sub-continent. Yet the evidence clearly suggests that cloth consumption and manufacture there was nonetheless largely a market activity. Village weavers producing purely for local subsistence needs were relatively insigniicant in numerical terms, a fact that led the Japanese historian H. Fukasawa to conclude that weaving and dyeing in the region were almost entirely urban.9 In general, demand from rural consumers in the western Deccan was quite limited, perhaps in large part because of the low value of crops produced in the area.10 On the other hand, the courts of Maratha kingdoms, such as the Peshwa’s regime centred in Poona, fuelled substantial demand for textiles among the nobility and soldiers. The ability of the state to provide cloth to its retainers in appropriate quantities and qualities appears to have been critical to its legitimacy. Lists of cloth purchases from the Peshwa Daftar indicate that the government bought substantial amounts of textiles – sometimes on a truly grand scale – to supply its dependents.11 Yet only some of these textiles were produced by artisans in the western Deccan. Most were purchased from more distant locations such as Gujarat, Nagpur in central India, and artisanal centres of Hindustan.12 8

9

10

11

12

Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, chapters 1–3; T. T. Mahajan, Khandesh under the Mughals, 1601–1707 (New Delhi: Galaxy Publications, 1991), pp. 130, 138–40; A. R. Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (Poona: Deshmukh, 1969), p. 220. Fukasawa, “Non-Agricultural Production: Maharashtra and the Deccan,” The Cambridge Economic History of India: Volume 1. c.1200-c.1750, eds. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 249–60, 308. Divekar, “The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra,” p. 433; Perlin, “Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia,” p. 33. Divekar, “The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra,” p. 433; Balkrishna Govind Gokhale, Poona in the Eighteenth Century: An Urban History (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 146. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 206; Richard Jenkins, Report on the Territories of the Rajah of Nagpore Submitted to the Supreme Government of India (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1827), pp. 100–1; Gokhale, Poona in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 145–6.

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This pattern suggests two major conclusions. First, as Chris Bayly has shown for north India, processes of elite consumption associated with state formation were a central component of the pre-colonial demand for textiles. Second, the relatively low levels of production in the western Deccan were poor indications of overall commercial activity, because large purchases were made from external manufacturing regions. The distribution of production appears to be partly correlated with access to raw materials; the manufacture of cotton cloth, for instance, often was located close to extensive cotton tracts, whereas many dyers lived near places where indigo was grown or where forest products needed for making other kinds of dyes could be gathered. Pre-colonial western India was thus characterised by a regional, even international, division of labour, with areas of relatively high populations of producers in some places and pockets of little industrial activity in others. A signiicant concentration of artisan cloth production in urban places – from small towns to large cities – has also been a feature of large parts of the western Indian economy since at least the seventeenth century. During the seventeenth century, much of Gujarat’s output was produced in towns with signiicant numbers of weavers, such as Patan, Ankleshwar, Nadiad, Dholka, Dabhoi, Ahmedabad, Broach, Baroda, Cambay, and Valsad.13 No single centre was dominant, although Ahmedabad enjoyed a certain pre-eminence in silk weaving.14 Signiicant numbers of weavers apparently migrated to Gujarat from Sindh and other parts of South Asia to populate the region’s towns.15 Although it possessed a number of skilled Parsi weavers, Surat, the premier commercial port of western India, was a rather minor manufacturing place until the early eighteenth century. Its merchants contracted out much work to surrounding towns in south Gujarat.16 After 1720, however, weavers increasingly concentrated in Surat, some moving from upcountry centres as conditions for 13

14

15 16

Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 208; Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 141; Ghulam A. Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750–1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 210; Tapan Raychaudhuri, “Non-Agricultural Production: Mughal India,” The Cambridge Economic History of India: Volume 1. c.1200-c.1750, eds. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 261–307. Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 192. Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 207; Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat: c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979), p. 39; Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” pp. 140–1, 144.

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inland trade became more unsettled.17 In 1795, there were reportedly 15,777 looms in the city.18 Some decline took place in other centres where protection of commerce was not as assured.19 Undoubtedly, there was production of cloth in Gujarat’s villages as well. Rural weavers possessing Dhed caste background, for instance, often wove the coarse cloth that was the ordinary wear of agriculturalists.20 Yet given the modest nature of the cultivators’ consumption patterns, such production could not match in volume the manufactures of the region’s towns.21 In the western Deccan, cloth production was also commonly an urban occupation. Some important weaving places actually arose in the eighteenth century as the ruling courts of the regional Maratha states began to generate signiicant demand. Poona, for instance, was just a small urban place at the beginning of the century, with perhaps ten to twenty thousand people. By the end of the century, it had grown to a city whose population has been conservatively estimated at one hundred thousand.22 Of these, there were perhaps ive to seven thousand workers in the textile industry, although many were probably tailors who fashioned textiles made in other places into stitched clothing worn by the local elite.23 Weaving in the town of Yeola appears to have been started up through the sponsorship of the Bhil king Raghoji Naik, who granted Gujarati traders a monopoly over the profession. Merchants enticed artisans from Paithan specialising in weaving pitambars made of silk and gold thread 17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 144; Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, p. 39; Subramanian, “Power and the Weave,” p. 56. Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, p. 26; Nadri estimates that these looms would have given employment to more than 90,000 people, although there is no reason to assume that all the spinners involved would have resided in Surat. See, for instance, the case of Ahmedabad, from which weavers and other artisans migrated in extensive numbers to Surat and other western Indian places in the late Maratha period; see J. Forbes, Oriental Memoirs, Vol. I (London: 1913), pp. 257–8, cited in Kenneth Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 30–1. Monier Williams, Memoir on the Zilla of Baroche Being the Result of a Revenue, Statistical and Topographical Survey of that Collectorate in Selections from the Record of the Bombay Government [hereafter Selections], old series, no. 3 (Bombay: Calcutta Society Press, 1857), p. 46. The limited nature of rural consumption patterns, even in a relatively prosperous district of Gujarat in the early nineteenth century is discussed in Monier Williams, Memoir on the Zilla of Baroche Being the Result of a Revenue, Statistical and Topographical Survey of that Collectorate, pp. 53 and 55. Divekar, “The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra,” p. 442; Gokhale, Poona in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 38–40. Gokhale, Poona in the Eighteenth Century, p. 146.

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to migrate there.24 According to censuses taken in Khandesh at the very beginning of the colonial period, up to 10 per cent of the towns with populations exceeding ive thousand were involved in handloom weaving.25 There was a similar picture in northern Karnataka. When Thomas Marshall toured this region at the very onset of colonial rule, he found a number of signiicantly sized weaving towns and clusters of weaving villages located close to mercantile centres such as Belgaum, Bagalkot, and Badamy. These produced cloth largely for export from the region. He also noted that every large village contained a few weavers who made cloth for residents of the more immediate vicinity.26 Marshall’s characterisation probably relects a more general pattern that existed through much of western India: Most areas possessed a thin dispersal of rural weavers making rough cloth for local peasants, but there also existed more significant concentrations of town-based weavers who belonged to specialised artisan castes that manufactured textiles for more distant consumers. The artisan economy of pre-colonial western India thus stands out in contrast to the “proto-industrial” structure characteristic of eighteenth-century regions of Europe and Japan, in which dispersed rural producers, often cultivators, made cloth on a part-time, at-home basis for merchant capitalists involved in international networks of exchange.27 It also seems to contrast with the rural character of commercial production in other parts of India during pre-colonial periods.28

24 25 26

27

28

Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 50. Hatekar, “Farmers and Markets in the Pre-Colonial Deccan,” p. 128. Thomas Marshall, Statistical Reports on the Pergunnahs of Padshahpoor, Belgam, Kalaniddee and Changurh, Khanapoor, Bagulkot, and Badamy, and Hoondgooond (Bombay: Gazette Press, 1822), p. 145. Herbert Kisch, “The Textile Industries in Silesia and the Rhineland: A Comparative Study in Industrialization,” Journal of Economic History 19:4 (1959): 541–64; Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32:1 (1972): 241–61; Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The proto-industrialisation model itself has come under signiicant criticism, but the empirical reality of commercial manufacture in rural areas itself is beyond doubt. For Japan, see William B. Hauser, “The Diffusion of Cotton Processing and Trade in The Kinai Region in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 33:4 (1974): 633–49; Karen Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 81–5; Pratt, Japan’s Proto-Industrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gono (Cambridge: Harvard University Center, 1999). Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Subrahmanyam, “Rural Industry and Commercial Agriculture.”

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Another characteristic of the population of small cloth producers was its geographic mobility. Weavers and other artisans frequently moved to places where the prospects for international trade or state patronage were great. Khatri weavers living in Gujarat largely trace their ancestry to Champaner in the current Panch Mahals district or to Hinglaj in Sind. Community genealogists today preserve the memory of how Khatri families fanned out through towns in central and southern Gujarat during the late sixteenth century, a period of rapid expansion in the region’s foreign trade.29 In many cases, the impetus to move appears to have been an offer from a local ruler to provide patronage in the form of a guarantee of a monopoly, exemption or reduction of taxes, and, of course, extensive government purchases of cloth, although the state did not set up workshops itself. Weavers’ mobility was thus directly tied to processes of state formation and consolidation. Unsettled political or economic conditions, by contrast, could stimulate a substantial outlow of weaver-migrants. Nagpur owes some of its rise to pre-eminence as a production centre in central India to the ability of the Maratha ruler there to entice weavers from western Deccan centres such as Paithan and Burhanpur to move during the famine of 1803.30 Bombay became populated by weavers leeing turbulent political circumstances elsewhere in western India.31 Because they had migrated, weavers were frequently considered outsiders and often did not enjoy the traditional prerogatives and access to property that other town residents could possess.32 The Organisation of Production Available evidence on pre-colonial periods and the very beginning of the colonial period suggests that most textiles were produced in a multistep process involving many different sets of artisans working in different workshops or households. Even many of the simpler forms of cloth 29

30

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I was able to see a number of these volumes in Baroda. See also Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 186. Jenkins, Report on the Territories of the Rajah of Nagpore, p. 90: “The cloth manufacture was brought to its present state of excellence by the exertions of the late Raghojee, who, during the great famine that raged in the Deccan after the war of 1803, induced many of the best workmen at Pytum, in the Godavery, and Zynabad and Boorhanpore, on the Taptee, to come and settle at Nagpore. From these men, the Nagpore weavers learnt the art of weaving the beautiful silk and gold and silver borders, at the same time with the cloth, and which makes the sarhees,&c. so expensive.” For instance, see Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji, p. 220. Marshall, Statistical Reports, p. 53.

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required several sets of artisan families: spinners, warpers, winders, carders, bleachers, weavers, printers, and dyers.33 If jari (gold thread) was used, a series of other artisans were involved before the gold thread reached the actual weaver, and embroiderers often used the thread to stitch elaborate patterns into the inished cloth.34 Different caste groupings often specialised in distinct processes or in the weaving of different types of cloth. In some cases, they rigorously defended their professions from entry by outsiders.35 Historians have tended to agree that the artisan household utilizing familial labour was the basic unit of production in each of these processes.36 In northern Karnataka at the outset of colonial rule, Marshall reported that weaving households typically contained an adult male who did most of the weaving and several other family members, usually women, who prepared the warp and weft and repaired broken threads. The women also transacted “all the business of the house beside.” The head of the household unit, not its individual labourers, generally received payment for its work.37 There are, however, some scattered references that suggest more complicated gender divisions of labour and that indicate that some workshops may have involved wage workers employed under the supervision of capitalists. A report from 1734, for instance, mentions the existence of women and beginning weavers who worked on handlooms and who received lower payments than skilled weavers; such a report seems to indicate wage arrangements with individual artisans rather than with a family that could determine its own division of labour.38 Under pressure from the British in 1731, three merchants in Surat directly oversaw production at the looms every day and reported to the East India Company 33

34

35

36 37 38

Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, pp. 219–21; Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” pp. 147–8. See Haynes, “The Dynamics of Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry” for a treatment of this structure for a later period. Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, pp. 25–8. Nadri does ind instances when new castes broke into a profession, although this did provoke conlict. An especially valuable table showing the different specialisations by caste is provided in Lakshmi Subramanian, “Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795,” MAS 19:2 (1985): 221. Tchitcherov, India: Changing Economic Structure, p. 68. Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 51, 52, 146–7 (the quote is from p. 52) Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, p. 38. Das Gupta concludes that “such beginners doubtless assisted the heads of their families.” But the fact that such artisans worked on different kinds of cloth than skilled weavers suggests that they were probably working in different production units altogether, at least if contemporary evidence can be projected backwards in time.

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chief. In 1755, another report indicates, several local merchants gained an advantage over their competitors by virtue of the fact that they employed a large number of skilled weavers.39 Fukasawa suggests the existence of manufactories employing multiple workers in the medieval Deccan and in eighteenth-century Bombay.40 Such evidence seemingly points to the existence of a kind of mixed system, with most units organised on a family basis but with some workshops directly supervised by merchants who paid wages to individual workers. Whatever the range of structures involved in production, the evidence for the involvement of mercantile capital in the textile industry is clear cut. Merchants were essential in coordinating the different stages of manufacture, providing advances to producers, and ensuring quality standards. Few urban weavers seem to have marketed clothing on their own. In Gujarat, the East India Company relied over long periods on local middlemen who typically provided weavers with advances, sometimes in the form of cash, sometimes in the form of yarn.41 In some cases, the brokers had direct dealings with individual weavers; in other instances, they relied on “head weavers” who in turn served as sub-contractors to the actual producers.42 The advances provided by brokers allowed the weavers to purchase the raw materials they needed to continue producing cloth.43 Those who furnished capital were sometimes in a position to squeeze weavers by charging interest on the advances they had provided, requiring high commissions on sales, or delivering smaller payments than promised. On one occasion in Cambay around 1620, according to one account, a merchant “went with a whip in hand from house to house . . . compelling the weavers to supply the contracted commodity.”44 Such middlemen could often thwart the efforts of craftspeople to sell their product directly.45 There is also ample evidence for merchant roles in production farther to the south. Fukasawa discovered the extensive presence of putting-out systems in the eastern and western Deccan.46 At the very beginning of 39

40 41

42 43

44 45 46

Both examples are discussed in Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 159. Fukasawa, “Non-Agricultural Production,” p. 312. Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, pp. 229–35; Hardiman, “Penetration of Merchant Capital,” pp. 40–1. Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, p. 36. Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 155. Quoted in Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, pp. 233–4. Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 235. Fukasawa, “Non-Agricultural Production,” p. 312.

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colonial rule in the southern Maratha territory, Marshall found the trade of artisan cloth to be almost entirely in the hands of larger merchants. In Belgaum, for instance, virtually all cloth was manufactured on order for traders in Shahpur, who provided cash advances to weavers to buy thread and meet household expenses until the cloth was completed. Many of these worked on a contract basis, receiving a ixed payment or “wage” for what they produced. Some had debts that they had been unable to pay, and they continued to provide their cloth to the same merchants over long periods of time.47 In the area around Bagalkot, some artisans were employed by “master-weavers” serving as intermediaries in the trade, whereas others furnished cloth directly to merchants.48 Such accounts provide clear evidence that contractual relationships, debt, and efforts by mercantile capitalists to control labour tightly were not conined to those who had dealings with the East India Company. Still, artisan cloth producers often did have the ability to resist the most extreme demands made on them. To apply a concept borrowed from James Scott, such techniques included very small-scale “everyday acts of resistance.”49 In the southern Maratha territories, Marshall reported that weavers added to their incomes by “cribbing or cabbaging a part of the materials” provided to them. “Tho’ not exactly avowed, [it] is scarcely denied and is just as well understood as the former [regular payments] by those who have dealings with the Weavers.”50 Such embezzlement of materials has clear parallels to the behaviour of handloom weavers in England during the eighteenth century.51 In Gujarat, in part because of the very competitive nature of the market in the region, artisans often retained signiicant leverage in the selling of their cloth. A variety of commercial actors, including Europeans from several different companies and merchants dealing in the Gulf and western Indian Ocean, sought to obtain the region’s textiles. Thus alternative buyers were often ready to purchase the weavers’ cloth. In such situations, weavers sometimes decided not to provide the original contractor with the cloth promised, and needed only to return the money advanced. 47 48 49

50 51

Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 51–2. Marshall, Statistical Reports, p. 147. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 51, 147. See, for instance, John Styles, “Embezzlement, Industry and the Law in England, 1500– 1800,” Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory, eds. Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonescher (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 173–210.

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Without the weight of the state behind these contracts, buyers were in no position to compel compliance.52 In some instances, when market conditions turned favourable, weavers re-negotiated contracts not yet fulilled or supplied their products to rival traders.53 K. N. Chaudhuri, Ghulam Nadri, and others have argued that the prevalence of cash advances during this period is indication of a somewhat looser system of capitalist control than exists in the classical putting-out system, in which merchants advance raw materials and can demand that the inished product be returned to them and them alone.54 There was always the threat that if pressed too hard, weavers might migrate to other places where political or economic conditions were more favourable.55 In a few cases, artisans resisted through collective action. In 1622, weavers in Cambay refused to deliver goods to a local governor, and when some were imprisoned, the others led the city. This eventually prompted intervention by the emperor, who compelled local authorities to retract their policies. A similar action took place in Baroda in the 1630s.56 A general protest against English efforts to control supplies of cotton yarn occurred in Broach in 1630.57 Printers refused to supply the English with cloth in 1737, demanding that payments owed to them by the company broker irst be returned.58 Thus, despite the absence of trade unions, artisan labour had the ability at times to develop larger protests that could thwart dominant mercantile and state interests. During the late eighteenth century, merchants in other areas of India, most notably in Madras and Bengal, were able to tighten their hold over handloom weavers, using the power of the East India Company to enhance their economic control.59 English merchants seem to have made a similar effort in urban Gujarat and perhaps Bombay,60 but they 52 53

54

55

56

57 58 59

60

Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, pp. 37, 39. Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 155. Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 153; Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, pp. 29–33. Chaudhuri, “The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” p. 155. Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 201; Raychaudhuri, “Non-Agricultural Production,” p. 286. Raychaudhuri, “Non-Agricultural Production,” p. 286. Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, p. 39 fn. Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers”; Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchant and Company”; Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy. It is noteworthy that all of the examples cited of merchants hiring wage labour or exerting more direct control over workers do relate to merchants working under East India Company auspices after 1730.

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were signiicantly less effective in reducing the weavers’ autonomy and capacity for resistance. Lakshmi Subramanian has shown how artisans in Surat continuously frustrated the English by providing inferior goods, selling their products to other merchants such as the Portuguese, and even absconding with advances. The ability of the weavers, who were organised along caste lines, to inhibit the dissemination of skills to outsiders appears to have been a critical factor; the Khatris, for instance, relied on their collective organisation in the 1790s to negotiate terms with the Company. This allowed them to continue producing saris for Indian markets while under contract with the English, which in effect blocked Kunbi efforts to enter this arena of production.61 Also sustaining the bargaining leverage of producers was the continued dynamism of alternative markets in the western Indian Ocean and among other European companies. Given the comparatively weak political strength of the English in western India, the state was unable to intervene decisively on the side of capital. In several cases, weavers of Surat joined large-scale collective violence directed against merchants most closely associated with the British.62 In short, then, artisan labour in pre-colonial Surat was often enmeshed in unequal relationships with merchants who appropriated most of what was produced with limited payments. These relationships were not simply imposed from above, but rather were negotiated through everyday actions and even larger forms of collective resistance. Labour retained some of its agency in this context, even though it clearly was the weaker party at most points in time.63 The Colonial Transition Small Producers, 1800–1850 The irst three to four decades of the nineteenth century were marked by the disruption of pre-existing commercial networks and the radical re-orientation of the place of Indian artisans in the global economy. The quantitative evidence for western India conclusively proving a dramatic decrease in the size of the artisanal population apparently does not exist; 61 62

63

Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, p. 31. Subramanian, “Power and the Weave.” One might add that the English as well seem to have regularly broken contracts, often rejecting cloth at convenient times on the grounds of inferior production. Much of the foregoing analysis has been inluenced heavily by Prasannan Parthasarathi’s study, The Transition to a Colonial Economy, although my conclusions for western India sometimes differ from Parthasarathi’s for south India.

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however, more qualitative accounts from particular centres certainly suggest that signiicant de-industrialisation may have taken place. The standard of living among artisans who continued to engage in cloth production also seems to have dropped severely. There were several major trends that turned rather sharply and suddenly against western Indian artisans between 1800 and 1840, and few countervailing tendencies that worked in their favour. First, there was a signiicant drop in the importance of the international markets that had supported substantial levels of industrial activity in Gujarat, Khandesh, and the northern Kannada-speaking districts. The changing political circumstances in various regions in the Indian Ocean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combined with the increasing attraction of goods manufactured in England, caused overseas demand for the cloth of western India to contract. Consumption in the Gulf, Red Sea, East Africa, and Southeast Asia all suffered. In Europe, of course, interest in Indian textiles gave way to cheap industrially produced cloth, some of which appropriated Indian patterns and fashions.64 The East India Company moved out of the business of procuring Indian textiles for European and Asian markets. By about 1820, exports from Broach, once an important centre of production of goods destined for the Middle East, had already declined to roughly 425,000 rupees per year.65 Two decades later, cloth exports from the city had fallen to 10,000 rupees, and English cloth had taken the place of virtually all of Broach’s exports in Arabia and Persia.66 The market for piece goods exports from Surat also shut down. The collector of Surat reported in the late 1830s, “Formerly, I believe, upwards of three lacs [that is, 300,000 rupees] worth of this description of goods was taken by government and the purchases of the Dutch and Portuguese factories amounted to about as much more. These outlets for this description of goods are now closed, and I believe they are now completely driven out of the country market by extensive imports of cloths manufactured in Europe.”67 64

65 66

67

Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Maxine Berg, “From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Economic History Review 55:1 (2002): 1–30; and “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 85–142. Williams, Memoir on the Zilla of Baroche, p. 57. Rustom Dinshaw Choksey, Economic Life in the Bombay Gujarat, 1800–1939 (Bombay and New York: Asia Publishing House, 1968), p. 226. Letter from the Collector of Surat District, Dec. 1836, MSA, RD, vol. 64/822 of 1837 comp. 93, p. 278.

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At roughly the same time, European manufactures began to make serious inroads into internal markets. This effect was noticeable in some regions as early as the 1820s, just after the British conquest. These imports absorbed demand at the iner end of the spectrum of cloth, leaving local producers in many places to concentrate mainly on the manufacture of coarse cotton textiles. W. H. Sykes, noting the considerable quantity of European cloth in the markets of the western Deccan in 1826, remarked that local weavers now were restricted to the cheapest varieties: “The better kind of manufacturer if they ever existed in the Districts [of the Deccan] . . . have disappeared and nothing is done now [other] than producing some coarse cloth for the poor.”68 Any high-quality Indian cloth found in the markets of this area was imported from centres located in the princely states.69 In the Konkan and the Southern Maratha districts, too, imports absorbed most of the demand for iner cotton goods. By 1836, reported one British oficer, “this branch of manufacture has been nearly abandoned. At present the chief produce of their [the local weavers’] looms are sarries, doputtas, and the coarsest sorts of long cloth. The low prices these can be sold at enables them to compete successfully against similar English importations.”70 In Gujarat, foreign “dhotees and baftas” were sold during the 1820s at half the price of Indian goods.71 Here, too, local producers had come to concentrate on the production of coarse goods.72 Part of the reason for this trend was a radical shift in the nature of state patronage.73 Before the nineteenth century, as we have seen, state formation in western India had been closely connected to the sponsorship

68

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71 72

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“Colonel Sykes’s Status Report of the Poona Collectorate” in MSA, RD 1826, vol. 154b, pp. 212–14. William Henry Sykes, “Special Report on The Statistics of The Four Collectorates of Dukhun under the British Government,” The Seventh Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: 1838), p. 325. “Mohturfa Taxes: Mr. Langford’s Report on the Konkan and Southern Maratha Country, 5 July 1840” in MSA, RD, vol. 97/1181, comp. 134 of 1840, p.12. Choksey, Economic Life in the Bombay Gujarat, p. 219. These conclusions support the applicability to the Bombay Presidency of Konrad Specker’s arguments on Madras Presidency for the early nineteenth century in “Madras Handlooms in The Nineteenth Century.” For an exception to this pattern, see William Chaplin’s discussion of high-quality weaving in Yeola, A Report Exhibiting a View of the Fiscal and Judicial System of Administration Introduced Into the Conquered Territory About the Ghauts Under the Authority of the Commissioner in the Dekhan (Bombay: Courier Press, 1824), pp. 88–9. For a similar argument regarding northern India, see Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars, pp. 268–83.

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of textile production. Although not extensively involved in the politics of cloth exchange, the eighteenth-century East India Company purchased cloth to supply its buyers in Europe and in the country trade of Asia, and thus also attempted to encourage settlements of weavers as it emerged into a territorial power. The role of the state in encouraging industry, however, declined sharply during the early nineteenth century, bringing about a signiicant drop in elite consumption. This development took place in parts of western India even before British conquest, in some cases as various Maratha chieftains and other rulers put pressure on local populations to provide resources to meet the costs of military campaigns and administrative expenses. The failure of the Marathas to support crafts in Ahmedabad, for instance, prompted weavers, embroiderers, and other artisans to migrate from there to northern India.74 A similar movement of weavers from Khandesh and other parts of the Deccan took place in the early nineteenth century.75 High rates of taxation were placed on weavers in the southern Maratha territories in the years just before British rule was established, wreaking havoc on the industrial economy.76 The advent of colonialism inally ruptured the connections between the state and weaving populations. The new rulers no longer held any signiicant interest in promoting cloth production once the Company had shifted its focus to the collection of land revenue and facilitation of commerce in cotton and opium that could be sold in China.77 The members of the new ruling group, moreover, prided themselves as belonging to a racial community that needed to demarcate itself from the Indian population. Because clothes relecting European styles were a critical marker of this community’s social distinctiveness, the British largely abandoned any role as a major customer of small producers.78 Focused more on winning over scribal and mercantile groups than on gaining support of warrior

74

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76 77 78

Gillion, Ahmedabad, p. 31. There were similar pressures placed on weavers in Surat by the local Nawab, suggesting that an increasingly desperate search for resources to fund state expenditures was taking place throughout Gujarat as conlict with the East India Company increased. See Pamela Nightingale, Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784–1806 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 152–3. As noted earlier, this famine was partially responsible for this development, but many weavers who left did not choose to return when more normal agrarian conditions returned. Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 147, 150. Nightingale, Trade and Empire in Western India, esp. pp. 232–3. Bernard S. Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century,” Cloth and Human Experience, eds. Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), pp. 309–11.

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communities, the colonial state partially extracted itself from the politics of cloth exchange that had marked the relations between eighteenthcentury rulers and their military retainers. Uniforms to low-ranking government employees, one possible source of state demand, were no doubt fashioned mostly out of imported cloth. The drop in the purchases of the ruling classes was a radical one, clearly discernable to careful observers at the time.79 Said Marshall of the impact in the Karnatak region: The sale of ine Cloths at the Dusra alone, at which festival all wealthy and powerful Mahrattas are in the habit of making presents of Clothes to their dependants and connections, is said to have exceeded half a lack [lakh] of Rupees; of this there is not a vestige – 2,000 Brass and Copper vessels chiely imported from Ahmednugger besides others made in the town were annually consumed by the Court and Soldiery. . . . All in short that depended on the expenditure of people of rank, is nearly annihilated. . . . Even those who can still afford to purchase valuable goods content themselves now with the cheaper sorts; there are no occasions of shew or inducements for men without ofice or without trade to dress well; a greater number are bereft of the means.80

Richard Jenkins remarked similarly on the effects on the consumption of cloth from Nagpur produced by the demobilisation of Maratha armies and the dismantling of Maratha courts: The cloth manufacture also suffered severely by the extinction of the Poona state. . . . Formerly the exports of cloths (manufactured in the city and the country adjacent) to Poona alone, amounted annually to from twelve to fourteen lacs of rupees, at present, the exports to that place do not exceed three lacs, and about one and a half lac to Bitto, for the use of Bajee Rao and his adherents.81

Also depressing commercial manufactures were serious dislocations in the agrarian economy. These affected some parts of western India even before the actual colonial takeover, perhaps due to the extensive warfare during this period. Marshall noted that in the ive years preceding his report in 1821 that increases in the price of cotton in some districts of the southern Maratha territories had led to a doubling of the price of thread, thus greatly raising the costs of production. At the same time, a rise in the 79

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See Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 21–3 for an earlier discussion of these issues. Marshall, Statistical Reports, p. 150. Jenkins, Report on the Territories of the Rajah of Nagpore, p. 101.

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prices of food placed severe pressures on the weaving family, which was forced to subsist on inferior grains.82 Once British rule was established, much of western India was enveloped by two decades of agrarian depression, brought about by high levels of taxation and limited demand for peasants’ produce.83 Because this occurred at a time when other markets for cloth were shrinking, the effects of the limited purchasing power of agriculturalists must have been severe indeed. Artisan cloth producers of the early nineteenth century thus had to face a series of dificult obstacles in order to subsist, not because they were exposed to the pressures of international commerce for the irst time, but because circumstances associated with the colonial transition were causing pre-existing commercial opportunities to evaporate. Craftspeople who wished to persist in their professions often had to abandon the production of higher value goods and conine themselves to making cheap cloth for mostly local customers. If we use Roy’s deinition of commercialisation set forward at the beginning of the chapter, it seems reasonable to conclude that cloth production in western India was less commercialised in 1840 than it had been at the beginning of the century. As David Washbrook and others have argued, a case can be made for the “traditionalisation” of the economy under the conditions of early colonialism.84 Still, we should be wary about viewing small producers as people whose activities had come to stand outside markets. Textile production remained one of the occupations in the western Indian economy most intensely dependent on commercial exchange at a time when depressed agrarian circumstances greatly weakened the engagement of many cultivators in trade. For instance, in some parts of Belgaum Collectorate, where little grain was exported, cloth manufactures were the chief means of injecting cash into the rural economy. Local weavers and cloth dealers sold their goods outside the district and used the cash to buy grain and other requirements from agriculturalists. Cultivators in turn relied 82 83

84

Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 51–2. Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, ch. 2. Michelle McAlpin, Subject to Famine: Food Crises and Economic Change in Western India, 1860–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), passim and pp. 214–15; see also Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars, esp. 292–8, for a similar discussion of northern India. By this term, David Washbrook means that characteristics of the economy once associated with the image of pre-colonial India, such as the “self-suficient village,” were in fact often outcomes of changes during the early colonial era. See, for instance, his “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860,” MAS 22:1 (1988): 57–96.

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heavily on these purchases to raise the cash they needed to pay their taxes and to obtain other necessities. “Any dimunition of the numbers of manufacturing population [in these areas],” concluded one colonial oficial, “would pro tanto lessen the consumption of grain, and make it impossible for the cultivator to dispose of the whole of his surplus produce in district markets, which he has hitherto been able to do.”85 Not only is there evidence of declining numbers of weavers in many locations, but those weavers who did continue often struggled to make a living. Earnings igures from the irst half of the nineteenth century appear to show that the circumstances of weavers everywhere were dificult. Writing in 1822, Marshall indicated that the living conditions for weavers in Bijapur had declined considerably over the previous ive years: “[Earlier] Weavers must have had a very respectable proit, and . . . they accumulated a little property, but for the last two years they have fallen into a very opposite condition, powerful causes having at the same time reduced their gains, and greatly enhanced the price of their food.” In Belgaum, he reported, the standard wage ordinarily had been half a rupee (eight annas) for a weaver working together with two women doing preparatory work (such a sari took a “hard day’s work” to weave). By the time of his writing, however, weavers were earning just six annas for threerupee saris and a bit more than ive annas for two-and-a-half-rupee saris. Many weavers were subsisting on inferior grains.86 In the area around Bagalkot (later in Bijapur District), he reported that the wages for a family were three annas per day for coarse work, four annas per day for the cheapest work with patterns, and ive to six annas for the iner kinds of work of silk mixed with cotton.87 Another report indicates that earnings of hired weavers in the same region fell from about eight annas per day in the 1820s to two annas per day in the 1840s.88 Wages were reported to be “very low” in both Surat and Broach, where the industry of Gujarat had become concentrated in the early nineteenth century.89 Although the 85

86

87 88

89

Captain Wingate, Report Explanatory of the Revised Assessment introduced into the Talookas of Badamee and Bagulkote, in the Belgaum Collectorate in Selections, old series, no. 5 (Bombay: 1853), p. 20. Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 51–2. Seemingly he is referring to the proit the weaving family received for a sari (as opposed to the earnings of wage employees in karkhanas). Marshall, Statistical Reports, pp. 146–7. V. D. Divekar, “Western India,” The Cambridge Economic History of India, ed. Dharma Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 348. J. H. Pelley, Collector of Customs, Gujarat, Northern Division, 15 May 1837 in MSA, RD vol. 64/822 of 1837, comp. 93, p. 329

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earnings of most other skilled artisans increased, the evidence seems to suggest a substantial squeeze on the weavers’ subsistence. Small Producers from the 1850s to the 1880s The dire constellation of circumstances that worked against the artisan economy in the irst decades of colonial rule, however, gradually gave way to a somewhat more favourable environment. By 1850, stimulating factors began to counterbalance restrictive conditions. The colonial administration, convinced that taxes on small producers were hastening their disappearance, removed most cesses on weavers, creating a small bit of extra breathing room.90 The agrarian depression relaxed, and pockets of demand for handloom products developed hesitantly in the countryside, particularly in places where peasants were managing to generate some small surpluses of cash from selling their produce.91 The availability of cheaper sources of raw materials lowered costs of production. There even appears to have been a limited resurgence of demand in the Indian Ocean trade, which spurred the expansion of cloth manufacture in Surat during the late nineteenth century.92 By the 1860s and 1870s, the construction of railroads began to contribute to the limited reinvigoration of handloom weaving in the western Deccan. Although railroads facilitated the export of raw cotton for factory producers as well as the deeper intrusion of cloth imports into the countryside, they made possible the cheaper importation of machinespun yarn from abroad or from the mills of Bombay and Ahmedabad into regions where little cotton was grown or spun. They also facilitated the movement of inished cloth from weaving centres to consuming regions. A report from Ahmednagar in 1883 suggests that the opening 90

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The process by which these taxes were ultimately abolished is discussed in “Petition of the undersigned weavers of silk inhabitant of Kuturwadda in Tanna” in MSA, RD vol. 130/1214, comp. 104 of 1840, pp. 159–61; Letter of Revenue Commissioner, Poona, dated 6 Nov. 1837 (and other papers) in MSA, RD vol. 89/949 of 1838, comp. 78. pp. 297–300; “Mohturfa Taxes: Mr. Langford’s Report on the Konkan and Southern Maratha Territory, 5 July 1840” in MSA, RD vol. 97/1181 of 1840. See Chapter 3. For the expansion of the second half of the nineteenth century in western India, see Ravinder Kumar, “The Rise of the Rich Peasants in Western India,” Soundings in Modern South Asian History, ed. D. A. Low (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 25–58; Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule, pp. 125– 203; Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan. Charlesworth and Guha emphasise the modest character and unevenness of the effects of the late-nineteenthcentury expansion on the prosperity of western Indian peasants. See Chapter 2 for more information on Surat’s markets.

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of the Dhond-Manmad railroad cheapened and stabilised grain prices there while at the same time reducing yarn prices, with the result that the margin of subsistence for weavers widened signiicantly. This encouraged a resurgence of an industry that had been in serious decline two decades earlier; new participants entered into the profession of cloth making, including some who came from agricultural communities.93 This, however, must have been only a temporary effect, because there was a gradual rise in grain prices over the longer term during the 1870–1920 period. Accounts from individual production centres suggest real – albeit gradual and uneven – expansion in handloom weaving in the Deccan and Karnatak districts, the growth of artisanal towns, and a slow shift towards more highly valued products.94 Weavers from other parts of India began to migrate to the Bombay Presidency. Government oficials repeatedly expressed surprise about the resilience of handloom production, and began to question the old logic about the inevitable destruction of the weaving industry. Small town capitalists invested increasingly in cloth manufacture. This did not spell an era of prosperity for the weaving families involved. As Chapter 5 will show, artisan cloth production during the late nineteenth century remained a precarious activity that was poorly remunerated. Yet the numbers of artisans practising their craft in western Indian towns clearly increased. The “Revolution” in Raw Materials The process of industrialisation and the changing character of the global context no doubt did bring about a profound shift in the nature of production processes for virtually all cloth-producing artisans in the Presidency. Although many weavers and dyers of the pre-colonial era had made their goods for consumers located at great distances, they tended to obtain their raw materials mostly from local sources. By 1900, this was no longer true. Most small cloth producers relied on supplies that were manufactured in the mills of Europe or India or that were imported from abroad through Bombay. In other words, artisans had become reliant on the global economy to acquire the yarn, dyes, and other stuffs that 93

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See the case of Ahmednagar after the construction of the railways discussed in Chapter 5. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Ahmadnagar District, vol. XVII [hereafter Ahmadnagar District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), pp. 347–9. Railroads produced higher grain prices in some other areas, so these effects were very region-speciic. This will be discussed in more depth in Chapters 2 and 3.

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they needed to make cloth. Prices of these items on world markets seriously affected their well-being – even their survival. The completeness of this transition – the word “revolution” seems appropriate to describe it – deies absolutely the image of the small producer as a conservative igure incapable of change. The spinning of cotton into yarn certainly experienced a severe decline. In regions of western India where cotton was grown, spinning had long constituted an important source of cash income for many rural and urban people. Women had particularly gained employment from spinning cotton into thread: Of those counted as cotton spinners in the census of 1881, 90 per cent were female.95 In 1891 84 per cent of persons falling in the category of “cotton-spinners, sizers and yarn-beaters” were female.96 Spinning had played a role in the social and economic life of many hundreds of thousands of people living in western India. According to one report, spinning wheels had been ubiquitous in the homes of city dwellers in Ahmedabad City during the mid-nineteenth century. Women spun yarn when not engaged in household tasks, obtaining raw cotton from Sutarias (dealers in cotton thread) who set up shop in the streets. The Sutarias would later collect the inished yarn from the spinners, paying them small labour charges. Some women earned from twelve annas to two rupees per month for this work.97 In the region around Hubli, yarn was prepared by members of cultivating families, especially women, although higher qualities of yarn, up to 60s in ineness, were made by Dheds, who apparently specialised in this work.98 In Dambal Taluka of Dharwar District, cultivators regularly brought bundles of thread they had spun to markets in Gadag and Betgeri – both weaving towns – where they would obtain cash to buy their weekly requirements.99 In Bankapur Taluka of Dharwar, it was common at mid-century for agriculturalists to 95 96

97

98 99

Census of India, 1881, vol. 2, Bombay, lxxvii–lxxviii. Census of India, 1891, vol. 8, pt. 2, Bombay, p. 330. The difference between these igures probably relects differences in the inclusion of other kinds of work in the reported category, not a change in the gender structure of spinning. These payments would be signiicant less than they would have received for agricultural labour but presumably spinning was not full-time work. This account, from the essay, “Marun Balpan” by Vidhyabehn Nilkanth, is provided in Kunjalata Shah, “Ahmedabad: Pre-Industrial to Industrial Urban Centre (1850–1930).” Ph.D. dissertation, SNDT Women’s College, 1990, p. 407 R. E. Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: 1897), p. 10. The 1845–6 report of Mr. Francis (Assistant to the Collector) quoted in Papers Relating to the Revision of Rates of Assessment on the Expiration of the First Settlement in the Old Dambal Taluka and Old Mulgund Mahal of the Same Taluka of the Dharwar Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 154 (Bombay: 1881), p. 72.

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provide thread they had spun directly to weavers, whom they would pay to work it up into cloth for their consumption. According to the report, the result was that “a much better description of cloth, in accordance with the taste of the party, is manufactured.”100 Spinning was time-consuming work. Several persons were engaged in the activity for every full-time weaver. Because most who performed spinning did so only on a part-time basis, the total number of spinners in some cotton-growing districts could be very large. Even as late as 1872, there were 114,616 spinners in Dharwar District and 72,939 in Kaladgi, in both cases more than twenty times the numbers of weavers.101 The payments spinners received almost certainly were very small. Yet they could be a critical supplementary source of cash, especially when prices cultivators obtained for their crops were often so meagre. The pace of the displacement of spinners from their work during the course of the nineteenth century was unevenly distributed over western India. Its elimination as a profession probably had only a small impact in much of the western Deccan (excluding Khandesh), where soils were often not conducive to cotton cultivation, and where peasants had generally never had access to substantial amounts of ginned cotton that would have been needed to make thread. In northern parts of the Presidency, European yarn had clearly begun to replace locally spun yarn as early as the 1830s.102 By 1863, a British oficer at the Maheji Fair in Khandesh reported that almost all the cotton of Berar was sent on to Bombay (presumably for export) rather than sold on the spot for the purpose of making yarn. He observed that “with the exception of the coarsest and commonest goods and some of peculiarly ine texture, the whole of the piece goods brought into the fair [including handloom cloth valued at 800,000 rupees] were made from English yarns.”103 The yarn used by handloom weavers a few years later in Ahmednagar was also imported largely from Britain.104 In Kannada-speaking regions of the province, the introduction of European yarn was less abrupt. At roughly the same time 100

101 102 103

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Letter of J. Francis, Assistant Superintendent, Revenue Survey, Southern Maratha Country, 18 June 1846, in Papers Relating to the Rates of Assessment on the Expiration of the First Settlement of the Old Bankapur Taluka of the Dharwar Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 155 (Bombay: 1881), pp. 106–7. Census of India 1872, Bombay Presidency, vol. XX. “Minute” (no date) in MSA, RD 1836, vol. 43/730. Letter from Commissioner of Police, Northern Division, 16 June 1863 [Report on Maheji Fair] in MSA, JD 1864, vol. 12, comp. 73, p. 175. Papers Relating to the Revision of Assessment in Six Talookas of the Ahmednuggar Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 123 (Bombay: 1871), p. 82.

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as the Maheji report, a revenue oficer in the weaving town of Ilkal noted that the cotton yarn employed locally was mostly of native manufacture with “little English being used.”105 As I have already noted, some districts reported tens of thousands of persons involved in spinning in 1872. Ultimately, however, spinning ceased to be of great economic significance even in these areas. By 1921, there were only 1,685 women and 100 men engaged in spinning in Dharwar District, a bit more than 1 per cent of the levels that had been reported four decades earlier.106 A survey of Hubli Taluka in 1907 indicated that there had been a continuous decline of spinning over the previous decades “save perhaps some at villages some distance from large towns or from the railway.”107 Hand-spun yarn continued to be utilised only in very coarse cloth. The foot rollers that had once been used to gin cotton to meet the requirements of local spinners in Karajgi Taluka in the same district gradually disappeared during the last three decades of the nineteenth century; most cotton was now sold out of the district un-ginned, and the yarn used by local weavers was imported chiely from Bombay. The small amount of cotton processed in the old way was “spun and woven locally with great care, the cloth thus produced being considered much superior in wear to that made from imported yarn.”108 Spinning, however, was conined to ields that were of limited economic importance. The rise of machine spinning thus spelled a rather radical change in the economic activity of large numbers of rural and urban households in the Bombay Presidency. This change had more profound effects on the income-earning possibilities for women and persons from poor families than for men and more prosperous agriculturalists. In Ahmedabad, the effects were particularly severe for Muslim women who lived in purdah (seclusion), because hand spinning was one activity they had been able to do in the conines of the house.109 There is little evidence of any alternative new form of employment in the Presidency that could have compensated for the loss of earnings by women. As a result, even when wages for individual ieldworkers were rising slightly, total family income could remain stagnant. 105

106 107

108 109

Papers Relative to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessment into the Hoongoond and Part of the Uthnee Talookas, pp. 6–7. Census of India, 1921, vol. 8, pt. 2, Bombay, p. 242. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Survey Settlement of the Hubli Taluka of Dharwar Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 439 (Bombay: 1907), p. 10. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Karajgi Taluka, p. 10. Shah, “Ahmedabad,” p. 106.

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Although the eventual impact of mill production on spinners was almost uniformly negative, its effects on handloom weaving itself were more complex. On the one hand, factories did bring about further competition for small producers of iner goods before 1850, and for some of those who made coarse goods by 1900. Yet at the same time, the improved availability of machine-made yarn allowed handloom weaving to remain a viable activity. Yarn from the mills was often signiicantly cheaper than locally spun thread, and once it was adopted, weavers (and merchants dealing in handloom goods) could reduce their costs and thus sustain the competitiveness of their cloth.110 Machine-spun yarn, moreover, was often more standardised than yarn spun by cultivators using rough tools on a part-time basis; in some cases it allowed weavers to produce a cloth that was smoother and more uniform in character. In addition, because the mills manufactured a great variety of yarns of different inenesses and different qualities, the use of such yarn enhanced the weaving family’s ability to customise its product to buyers’ speciications, a necessity in an increasingly variegated and changing market. Once weavers gained access to supplies of machine-made yarn suited to their needs, they in most cases quickly abandoned the use of locally spun yarn. The adoption of factory-manufactured thread, combined with improved transportation facilities in the form of the railroads, seems to have stimulated a shift in the geographic distribution of weaving. Although there had never been a perfect correspondence between the spatial location of cotton cultivation and the manufacture of cotton cloth, it was no coincidence that artisan cloth producers had often lived near areas where cotton was grown. Machine-spun yarn was not nearly so bulky as raw cotton to transport, so its availability stimulated the relocation of production. By the late nineteenth century, weavers were increasingly settling in locales with little cotton cultivation and with low living costs, such as Ahmednagar.111 Of course, the reliance on more distant sources of yarn had its drawbacks. Weavers no longer could hope to buy supplies of thread from petty producers of thread living in their own localities. Instead, they now generally made their purchases from yarn merchants with connections to Bombay or other mill centres, persons who quickly learned how to manipulate prices and supplies to their own advantage. 110 111

Ahmadnagar District Gazetteer, pp. 347–9. Ahmadnagar District Gazetteer, pp. 347–9.

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The role of factory-made yarn in encouraging handloom production has igured signiicantly in the work of Morris D. Morris and others, but the countervailing positive effects of handloom activity on the mills has received somewhat less attention. The growth of the textile mill industry of Bombay itself was no doubt highly dependent on the demand generated by western Indian weavers.112 The spread of factories into the mofussil was even more directly correlated with handloom-weaving activity.113 After 1870, new mills were established in places like Sholapur, Hubli, and Gadag – all major handloom centres with thousands of artisans. These factories all tended to concentrate on producing yarn for handloom weavers and did relatively little weaving at irst.114 The effects of such mills were particularly noticeable in Sholapur. In 1890, the district oficer reported that the Sholapur Spinning and Weaving Mills was selling all the yarn it could manufacture locally, “and being unable to meet the demands, the Company is extending its buildings.”115 By 1910, there were several mills in Sholapur. According to one observer, “they all have a large market in Sholapur City and they supply most of the yarn used by the handloom weavers.”116 The fortunes of the two different organisational forms of cotton manufacture luctuated together from year to year, relecting their mutual interdependence. The reliance of artisans in the Bombay Presidency on large industries and international commerce for raw materials was not conined just to cotton yarn. Silk weavers, for instance, depended mostly on imports for the raw silk they used on their looms. By 1900, the weavers of Ahmedabad, Surat, Yeola, and Poona, the major centres of silk production in the Presidency, all employed Chinese silk. The yarn was imported through Hong Kong unbleached, un-dyed, and otherwise unprocessed by Khoja and Chinese merchants headquartered in Bombay. Much smaller amounts of silk were also imported from Persia to silk-weaving towns. In the last three years of the nineteenth century, an average of 1.8 million 112 113 114

115

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Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, pp. 246–7. Chandavarkar, “Industrialization in India,” pp. 57–8. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Sholapur District, vol. XX [hereafter Sholapur District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), pp. 270–1; Papers Relating to the Second Revision Survey Settlement of the Bankapur Taluka of the Dharwar Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 530 (Bombay: 1915), p. 6; Papers Relating to the Second Revision Survey Settlement of the Hubli Taluka, p. 10. Annual Revenue Administration Report for Sholapur District, 1890, in MSA, RD, 1891 vol. 12, comp. 1743, pt. 1, p. 30. Annual Revenue Administration Report of Sholapur District, 1910, in MSA, RD 1911, vol. 14, comp. 511, pt. XVIII.

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pounds was imported per year, of which 200,000 pounds was re-exported, mostly to other places in India.117 Handloom weavers in western India were thus using roughly 1.6 million pounds of imported raw silk per year. The amounts of Indian silk brought from Bengal and Bangalore was far less signiicant than the imports, and in some places had become almost negligible.118 At various points in the nineteenth century, colonial oficials in the Bombay Presidency experimented with the cultivation of silk, but because of the lack of funding, the scarcity of expertise, and an inhospitable climate, none of these projects developed into commercially viable enterprises or attracted investment from outside oficial circles. During most of the period covered in this study, sericulture was essentially moribund in western India.119 The use of imported silk, however, did not involve the same displacement of regional artisans involved in preparatory practices that took place in cotton spinning. First of all, although wild silk existed in some forested areas of western India,120 the region had never itself been a major centre for the production of raw silk. Second, the many stages of preparing the raw silk into yarn that could used on the loom – from sorting and reeling to bleaching, dyeing, and sizing – were still performed chiely by artisan specialists, who were usually located in the towns where the actual weaving was done. Women, often members of the weaving households, generally did this work.121 In 1891, women enumerated in the Bombay Presidency under the category of “silk carders and spinners” outnumbered men by more than two to one.122 In accordance with the varied needs of different sets of weavers, hundreds of different types of yarn were manufactured. Warping of silk yarn was also carried out by artisans living in the vicinity of the actual weavers. 117

118

119

120

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Stephen Edwardes, A Monograph Upon the Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1900), p. 7. H Maxwell-Lefroy and Eric Cecil Ansorge, Report on an Inquiry into the Silk Industry in India (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing India, 1917); Also see Shah, “Ahmedabad,” pp. 107, 408. Choksey, Economic Life in the Bombay Gujarat, p. 220; Edwardes, A Monograph Upon the Silk Fabrics, p. 2. B. A. Gupte, “Thana Silks,” Journal of Indian Art and Industry 1:5 (1885), p. 33. The role of women in silk-weaving households is further discussed in Chapter 4. Ibid., p. 34; E. G. Fawcett, Report on the Collectorate of Ahmedabad in Selections, new series, no. 5 (Bombay, 1862), p. 78; Shah, “Ahmedabad,” p. 408. Descriptions of these preliminary processes are contained in Gupte, “Thana Silks” and in Edwardes, A Monograph Upon the Silk Fabrics, pp. 8–11. There were 18,366 women and 7,643 men counted in this category in Census of India, 1891, p. 330

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Image 1. “Female Spinning Silk from Reel onto Bobbin in Western India, c. 1900” Source: S.M. Edwardes, A Monograph Upon the Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1900), p. 23.

Western Indian artisans also came to rely on world markets for dyes. This development happened only quite late in the century, and it was not yet complete in 1900. Until the 1880s, most dyers in the region used raw materials that were cultivated by Indian agriculturalists, such as indigo, or they relied on products derived from wild plants or insects associated with forest regions of the Presidency. Dyeing communities developed special knowledge of the techniques for preparing fast dyes, which they were often reluctant to share with outsiders. Dyers in the town of Faizpur in Khandesh, for instance, had mastered methods for making a dye out of the al root, which was primarily grown by Lodi cultivators in the United Provinces. They used the dyes to colour or print turbans, saris, and white cloth.123 In some cases, weavers relied on different sets of artisans for different kinds of coloured thread or cloth.124

123

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Papers Relative to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessment into Eight Talookas and Two Pettas of Khandesh Collectorate: Sowda and Yawal in Selections, new series, no. 93 (Bombay: 1865), p. 9. For instance, late-nineteenth-century weavers in the town of Ichalkaranji obtained their black thread from Nilari dyers who lived in the area; they had their red threads imported from a greater distance by Lingayat traders. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 3.

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In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, aniline and alizarine dyes manufactured in Europe, mainly in Germany, began to enter the Indian market in large quantities. They were available in small tins that were easily handled by dyers, and they rendered the dyeing process cheaper. They also yielded brighter, less subtle colours, which quickly came into demand. Their chief disadvantage at irst was that, unless used entirely according to speciications, they were less fast than the indigenous colours. Later, however, higher qualities of imported dye became available in the market.125 By 1900, foreign dyes had replaced the indigenous in many of the darker colours such as blue and purple, even among rural dyers; the use of indigo, for instance, radically declined. Country dyes still dominated in a few colours, such as red, pink, and yellow, as well as in much silk dyeing.126 By 1919, the cultivation of al roots had ceased in India, and reds were also almost all imported.127 In some cases, the methods of obtaining and using indigenous dyes changed signiicantly as well. Whereas dyers in Belgaum in the 1880s obtained their surang roots from nearby Sholapur district, by the turn of the century they were using tins of surang extract imported from Bombay.128 The inluence of imports on the social character of dyeing varied widely. In many cases where foreign dyes were adopted, artisan families traditionally associated with the profession apparently dropped their old work in preparing dyes but continued the job of imparting colour to yarn and cloth. By 1919, the Rangaris of Faizpur no longer made reds from the al root or blues from indigo; instead they imported their dyes from Bombay. This seems to have had some effect on the size or organisation of the dyeing units. Whereas about two hundred “families” did this work in the 1860s, only twenty “establishments” carried on dyeing in 1919.129 In some cases, small factories using wage labour took up dyeing. In Bombay, Muslim artisans from Kutch founded a number of dyeing works in which they used hired labour to dye cloth that was then exported to markets in East and South Africa. The Muslim Rangaris became one of 125

126

127

128

129

“A Short Account of Dyes and Dyeing in Poona City,” in MSA, GD 1896, vol. 25, comp. 196, pt. II, pp. 335–59; Indian Textile Journal, IV, May 1884, p. 102. Edwardes, A Monograph Upon the Silk Fabrics, p. 13. Recipes for the preparation of these dyes are even given in these monographs. See also the numerous accounts of dyeing in MSA, GD 1896, vol. 25, comp. 196. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Yawal Taluka of the East Khandesh District in Selections, new series, no. 562 (Bombay: 1919), p. 4. Letter from Acting Collector Belgaum, to Commissioner, Southern Division, 27 March 1896, in MSA, GD, 1896, vol. 25, comp. 196, pp. 178–9. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Yawal Taluka of the East Khandesh District p. 4.

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Image 2. Title: “Cloth Printing, 1873” Source: Narayen, Shivashanker; Photographic Print. 1873. The Archaeological Survey of India Collections. British Library. Photo 1000/52(4910). Published with the Permission of the British Library.

the wealthier Sunni communities in the city.130 No doubt, each of these processes resulted in some displacement from the profession, although many of those who continued the practice came from communities traditionally associated with dyeing. Different types of dyers dealt with very different types of material. At the turn of the twentieth century, most dyers in western Maharashtra and the northern Kannada-speaking regions gave colour to machine-made yarn. The dyed thread was then used by handloom weavers who made it up into saleable cloth. By contrast, some dyers in the northern districts of the Bombay Presidency imparted prints or dyes to coarse, hand-woven cloth. More commonly, however, dyers in Gujarat used Chinese silks or factory-made cloth imported from abroad or manufactured in the mills 130

See the account of dyeing in Bombay City in MSA, GD, 1896, vol. 25, comp. 196, pt. Il; pp. 547–770; Fawcett, A Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: 1896), p. 6

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of Ahmedabad, creating beautiful designs such as the block prints and tie-dyes for which the region is deservedly famous.131 By 1900, therefore, artisan cloth producers were closely associated with industrial capitalism. Very little cloth made in the Bombay Presidency could any longer be said to be some pristine item that was fashioned out of local materials and by “traditional” methods. Instead, most artisans now took products made in factories or imported from overseas – which were purchased in markets of their towns – and then imparted to those products the designs that gave the cloth its special characteristics. In this sense, a handloom sari made in Bhiwandi or Ilkal with Indian patterns and woven with imported dyed cotton yarn or silk, a Gujarati print produced by printers in Ahmedabad on mill cloth, and a European-style suit stitched in Bombay by urban tailors from imported textiles shared much in common. This similarity, however, was overlooked by observers keen on identifying and preserving India’s “crafts.” In effect, a new kind of “international division of labour” was developing, but it was one that often left room for skilled artisans at the end of the chain of production. Conclusion Artisan cloth producers in western India thus have been involved in commercial manufacture for at least several hundred years. It is hard to make the case that handloom weavers and other craftspeople at the turn of the twentieth century were any more market oriented than their counterparts at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yet the commercial conigurations in which they participated had altered greatly. Before the establishment of colonialism, large numbers of artisans in western India were involved in production for international markets; and the state also igured strongly as a consumer of artisanal textiles. Those who manufactured cloth in this context were mostly full-time igures who belonged to castes specializing in commercial manufacture; they worked and lived in towns; and they were subordinated in a variety of organisational forms to the merchants who sold their cloth. Over the course of the nineteenth century, external sources of demand for textiles contracted dramatically, as did state-based consumption; small producers increasingly catered to peasants and city dwellers living in western and central India. At the same time, the region’s artisans 131

Report from City Magistrate, Ahmedabad, 4 June 1896 in GD 1896, vol. 25, comp. 196, pt. II, pp. 915–920; Fawcett, A Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing, pp. 35–9.

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became more reliant on new international networks for the supply of their raw materials, which now linked them to large industrial producers and exporters in Europe, Asia, and the mills of western India. The factory production of yarn, dyes, and cloth and the cheapening of the costs of transporting these items profoundly affected the artisanal economy. These developments often displaced those who carried out preliminary processes of preparing raw materials, such as spinners. Yet artisans involved in the inal stages of making textiles, who still imparted to cloth the inal, unique qualities that made it appealing to consumers, were often able to cheapen their costs of production by utilising factory-made materials. In most cases, the places where their materials were manufactured were now located far away from the small producers, although in a few instances mill owners chose to locate new spinning factories in the actual handloom centres. The already complex social character of artisanal production in the period before 1820 and the fact that the economy of small-scale manufacture shifted from being enmeshed in one kind of global context to another renders any straightforward model of capitalist transition, whether nationalist or revisionist, impossible to sustain. This book, however, will also reject the easy alternative, that is, a thesis of continuity. This study will depict a set of diverse and subtle changes inluenced by a variety of forces. Factors clearly associated with “global capitalism” were no doubt important to the shape of artisanal manufacture. Yet more directly signiicant was the interaction between actors within the regional economy – consumers, merchants, and small producers – and the politics of small workshops located in the towns of western India. During the next ive chapters, we turn to the regional and local contexts in an effort to understand the changing character of the commercial production of cloth between the 1870s and the mid 1920s.

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2 Artisanal Towns

The commercial manufacture of cloth had long been associated with urban places in western India. At the outset of colonialism, many older centres declined as the indigenous textile industry contracted. By the late nineteenth century, however, with the revival of demand for handloom goods in the Presidency cities and in rural areas where the more proitable cash crops were grown, artisanal production again began to contribute modestly to urban growth. Thousands of weavers settled in towns and small cities of the Bombay Presidency, often migrating from other parts of India where the prospects in the profession were much weaker. They took up textile manufacture as their full-time work, settled in neighbourhoods alongside their fellow artisans, and forged communities whose identity centred in great part around their occupation. Mercantile actors, mostly from Gujarat and Rajasthan, dispersed into the producing centres of western India, taking up the sale of yarn, the marketing of cloth, and the control of production. The capitalism of small towns consolidated over the subsequent decades. In 1942, half of the Presidency’s looms were located in its largest twenty-six centres; total production was even more concentrated in these places.1 Some idea of the expansion of handloom weaving in small urban centres of western India can be gleaned from available igures for looms (see Table 2.1). Loom censuses are no doubt quite imperfect – they vary from quite close surveys of looms in use to rough estimates in which actual utilisation is unclear – but they point in one direction in most of 1

Government of India, Report of the Fact-Finding Committee (Handloom and Mills) (Calcutta: Government of India Press, 1942), p. 67.

56

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Table 2.1. Numbers of Looms in Key Handloom Centres of the Bombay Presidency Town District

Early Estimate (Year)

Sholapur Sholapur

NA

Hubli Dharwar

2263 (1843)

Estimate Time of Gazetteer, c. 1875–1882

1910 Estimate

Best Estimate 1929–1932 (Year)

6465

10,000

7500 (1932)

4982

8000

3512 (1929)

Malegaon Nasik

NA

2441

7019

5500 (1932)

Yeola Nasik

NA

2000

3425

3000 (1932)

2386

3150

3500 (1929)

Guledgud Bijapur

1800 (1851)

Bhiwandi Thana

NA

650–700

3125

2000 (1929)

Sangamner Ahmednagar

NA

1000

3015

2800 (1932)

Ahmednagar + Bhingar Ahmednagar

213 (1820)* 1322 (1850)

3000*

3500 (1929)

Ranebennur Dharwar

400+

2775

2060 (1929)

2390

3250 (1929)

1275

3025 (1929)

Gadag-Betgeri Dharwar

1507 (1844)

1800–2000

NA 1399

Ilkal Bijapur

500

NA

Dholka Ahmedabad

NA

2500 (1887)

400**

710 (1929)

* = Ahmednagar only (not including Bhingar) ** = Estimate for the whole of Dholka Taluka NA = not available

the signiicant weaving towns of Maharashtra and Karnataka: that is, towards growth in centres with signiicant concentrations of weavers.2 2

This table includes the ten largest weaving centres in 1910 plus two other important weaving places, Ilkal and Dholka. The data in the table has been gathered from the settlement reports of various talukas in the Bombay Presidency, from various district

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The growth of weaving in towns located in Marathi-speaking districts of the Bombay Presidency is especially striking. As we saw in Chapter 1, cloth producers had only lightly populated the Deccan regions of Maharashtra up through 1800; the various Maratha states had imported much of the cloth consumed by their nobility from elsewhere in India. During the late nineteenth century, urban places like Sholapur, Ahmednagar, Malegaon, Sangamner, Yeola, and Bhiwandi had become some of the largest weaving centres in all of India. There thus appears to have been a substantial regional realignment of petty production within western India. In northern parts of the Presidency, especially in Gujarat, there is less evidence of growth in artisanal centres. The town of Dholka in Ahmedabad district, where cheap khadi cloth had been made in large quantities as late as 1887, dwindled into insigniicance. Ahmedabad itself seems to have declined as a handloom centre, although much dyeing and printing continued. The real exception in the region was Surat, where various kinds of artisanal activity continued to thrive as a result of overseas demand. In Khandesh, where cloth manufacture was quite signiicant in the eighteenth century, production also stagnated under British rule, although Dhulia remained a signiicant manufacturing centre.3 Because Gujarat and Khandesh contained some of the wealthier agrarian areas in the Presidency, there was clearly no relationship between rural prosperity and small-scale commercial manufacture, suggesting perhaps that weaving may have lourished most where wages were lower.4 Artisanal production of cloth constituted a large portion of the economy in the weaving towns. The 1942 Fact-Finding Committee estimated that weavers made up 75 per cent of the population in Guledgud and “nearly all” of the population in Ilkal.5 Comparison of loom igures with total population in 1910–11 suggests that the ratio of looms per resident in many smaller towns ranged from one loom for every four residents to one loom for every fourteen residents. Because a family of three or four was usually needed to sustain an individual loom, these are high levels indeed. Many of these towns seem to have been weaving places pure and simple – they might be called “mono-industrial centres” – with

3

4

5

gazetteers; from information collected by P. N. Mehta in MSA, GD 1911, vol. 98A, comp. 820, pt. II; S.V. Telang, Report on the Handloom Industry in the Bombay Presidency, 2nd edn. (Bombay: 1933); Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan; and Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. I (Bombay: 1938–40), p. 59. I was unable to ind early loom statistics for either Surat or Dhulia, so neither appears in the table. In Chapter 3, I also suggest reasons why markets for handloom cloth might have been more limited in Gujarat. Report of the Fact-Finding Committee, p. 66.

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Table 2.2. Number of Looms Compared to Total Population, Selected Western Indian Towns, c. 19106 Town Malegaon Yeola Guledgud Bhiwandi Sangamner Ahmednagar Ranebennur Gadag-Betgeri Ilkal

Population, 1911

Looms, 1910

19,543 16,375 15, 349 13,292 14,269 42,940 10,981 30,429 10, 233

7019 3425 3150 3125 3015 3000 2775 2390 1275

relatively limited unrelated economic activity of any signiicance going on (Table 2.2). Even in the larger towns with more diverse economies, artisan cloth production was a dominant source of employment. In Surat, for instance, 47 per cent of the population depended on industry for their living in 1921; only about one-tenth of these were employed in the city’s few larger factories. The census indicated that 6,961 people depended on “home weaving” of cotton, 7,317 on home weaving of silk, 475 on dyeing, 2,131 on lace and embroidery, 8,999 on tailoring and embroidering on linen, and 3,962 workers in precious stones and metals (presumably most were makers of jari).7 In Hubli, a mill town, several times as many cotton weavers and spinners worked in homes as worked in factories.8 In Sholapur, 55 per cent of the population worked in industry – a higher proportion than any city in the Presidency – with 50,261 depending on employment on cotton textiles. Only a minority of these worked in the city’s large textile mills.9 In 1942, “weavers” (in this case, persons from weaving communities) constituted 41 per cent of the total population of Sholapur.10 6

7 8 9

10

Source MSA, GD 1911, vol. 98A, comp. 820, pt. II; Census of India, 1911, vol. 7, pt. 2. The loom igures for Malegaon were clearly inlated, because they are higher than the population igure could possibly support and are out of line with the numbers for the same town at other times. A igure of 4,000 to 4,500 seems reasonable. Census of India, 1921, vol. 9, pt. 2 (Cities of the Bombay Presidency), cli-clii. Census of India, 1921, vol. 9, pt. 2 (Cities of the Bombay Presidency), clxxi. The Census of India, 1921, vol. 9, pt. 2, p. clxii. Only 1,445 males and 4,102 females were listed as home weavers, but this would not include the many handloom weavers who worked in karkhanas as wage labourers. Report of the Fact-Finding Committee, p. 66.

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India Table 2.3. Town Size in Major Weaving Towns of the Bombay Presidency, 1872–1911

Town

1872

Surat 107,855 Sholapur 53, 403 Hubli 37,961 Ahmednagar, Bhingar 42,992 Gadag-Betgeri 19,035 Malegaon 11,064 Yeola 17,461 Guledgud 10,674 Sangamner 9,978 Bhiwandi 15,697 Ranibennur 11,633 Ilkal 10,107

1881

1891

1901

1911

109,844 59, 890 36,677 42, 598 17,001 14,402 17, 685 10,649 8,796 13,837 10,202 9,574

109,929 61,915 52,595 47,729 23,899 19,261 18,861 15, 481 11,365 14,387 13,761 11,216

119,396 75,288 60, 214 48,754 30,652 19,054 16,559 16,796 13,801 10,354 14,851 9019

114,868 61,345 61,440 49,291 30,429 19,543 16,375 15,349 14,269 13,693 10,981 10,233

Growth in artisanal production did not stimulate a more general expansion of these towns. Table 2.3 gives overall population growth trends in some of the major weaving centres in western India.11 Clearly there was only a weak connection during this time between the development of handloom weaving and urban population, with most artisan centres growing modestly and a couple even declining during the period of greatest expansion in production. Growth in places like Hubli seems to be attributable more to the consolidation of large-scale industries and to their central location in transportation networks than it was to handloom manufactures. Another interesting point is that rather limited artisanal activity went on in the largest cities of the Bombay Presidency: Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Poona. In the late 1930s, Bombay and Ahmedabad possessed only four hundred and two hundred looms respectively, and the numbers were clearly declining.12 Poona had several hundred silk weavers. No doubt, the higher costs of living in the Presidency cities often made it prohibitive for artisans to practice their professions there; the prices of land in Bombay, for instance, rendered it dificult for weavers to obtain the space to stretch out their looms or warps.13 Given the meagre margin 11

12

13

Census of India 1911, vol. 7, pt. 2 Bombay Presidency and Census of India 1921, vol. 9, pt. 2 Cities of the Bombay Presidency. Bombay. Economic and Industrial Survey Committee, vol. II, Ahmedabad District, p. 9; and Bombay City, pp. 8–9. Interview with Datta Karve, July 1993.

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Image 3. “A scene in the Bazaar at Sangamner Town, 1911” Source: Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University. Knight Collection, ref. 2.13c. Published with the Permission of the Centre of South Asian Studies.

that existed between payments weavers received and their expenses, even minor changes in costs must have put heavy pressures on subsistence. The enticements of the larger labour market were also greater in the larger cities. Artisan production was thus a phenomenon associated with smaller cities and towns. In sum, there was little correlation between cloth manufacture and “urbanisation,” if the latter is taken to mean the growth of urban places of a new order of size in population and greater complexity in occupational structure.14 How do we account for the concentration of artisanal production in towns? Clearly, artisan settlement was closely associated with the presence of mercantile capitalists. Here, however, there is a bit of a 14

Studies of growth patterns in towns – as opposed to large cities – are rare. For one interesting exception during the early period of colonial rule, see C. A. Bayly, “Town Building in North India, 1790–1830,” MAS 9:4 (1975): 483–504.

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“chicken-and-egg” problem. True, small producers located themselves in places where merchant irms made available services and resources artisan families needed to reproduce themselves. Yet cloth dealers, yarn sellers, and inanciers from Gujarat and Rajasthan were often attracted to live in towns already peopled by a large number of weavers and other artisans. The Karva family, Marwaris who created one of the biggest merchant irms in Bhiwandi, moved there from Kolaba district around 1920, after becoming aware of the commercial opportunities in the weaving centre, which had previously furnished much of its cloth supplies.15 The Rathi family moved to Sholapur around 1900 to become involved in the sale of yarn; at that time, Sholapur was already a major handloom centre, with eight to ten thousand weavers.16 Marwari merchants only began to arrive in Ichalkaranji around 1934, at a time when the place was beginning to establish a reputation for weaving saris.17 In other words, capital followed the supply of labour as much as the supply of labour was enticed by capital. The question thus needs to be rephrased: What larger forces in the economy of the nineteenth century encouraged merchants and artisans to cluster together in towns? Several factors seem to have been involved. First, as we shall see in Chapter 3, manufacturing centres in which many different kinds of cloth were available could attract buyers from the consuming regions, who toured producing places of western India several times a year. The willingness of local brokers in these places to provide these out-of-town buyers with credit was certainly an added attraction. Weavers in turn would be enticed to settle in such towns by the more regular prospects for selling their goods. Second, the need of artisans to obtain a wide range of kinds of yarns and dyes also promoted concentration. Weavers mostly made small batches of cloth geared to the needs of small sets of customers, and they regularly had to shift from one variety of yarn to another. Once locally spun cotton ceased to be available, weavers obtained their raw materials from shops that imported yarn of different inenesses in anticipation of changing requirements. Towns were places where a number of yarn shops became established, and where weavers could thus be assured of an ample supply of different yarns needed to sustain specialised production. In the 1930s, Sholapur had about ifty yarn shops; Malegaon about 15 16 17

Interview with Mohanlal Karva, Bhiwandi, March 1994. Interview with Lakshminarayan Rathi, Solapur, August 1994. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” pp. 16–17.

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one hundred; Ahmednagar-Bhingar from twenty to twenty-ive; Baroda twenty; and Sangamner ten.18 In towns, small producers could thus be strongly linked to the regional and global economy through intermediary igures such as cotton yarn traders and dealers in dyes and silk, who obtained supplies from the region’s mills and ports. Third, families involved in secondary aspects of production tended to settle in weaving centres. Wherever handloom producers congregated, artisans involved in dyeing, bleaching, and inishing usually were also present. In places where iner types of cloth were manufactured, a wider range of small producers would be present, such as calico printers (as in Ahmedabad), makers of gold thread (as in Surat, Yeola, and to a lesser extent Poona), and embroiderers and lace makers (in Surat). These artisans encouraged the presence of mercantile irms dealing in these products. Finally, there were important social reasons for the concentration of artisanal and mercantile populations. Both weavers and merchants who migrated into the Presidency were outsiders, without connections to local rural peoples. In towns, however, they found they could build networks with others from their own home region, persons who spoke their own language and who worshipped the same deities. Ultimately, these social reasons may even have outweighed economic factors, although of course both sets of causes reinforced each other. Case Studies The patterns of development in individual towns highlight the dynamic character of artisanal manufacture in western India. In no signiicant centre of the region was the economy of small producers simply a holdover from the pre-colonial past. In every town, weavers, dyers, and other artisans came to manufacture clothing quite different from that made by their counterparts a century earlier, often for very different markets and different sets of consumers. In many cases, those engaged in production and trade were themselves newcomers to the Bombay Presidency. The capitalists involved in industry were also themselves often migrants. Here I illustrate these points with three case studies: (1) Surat; (2) Sholapur; and (3) Bhiwandi and Malegaon (which will be considered together). 18

Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 100–01. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Baroda District, vol. VII [hereafter Baroda District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1883), p. 155.

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Surat Surat was the most important artisanal centre in the Presidency during the late colonial period. It was a place with a long history of industrial signiicance and with a large concentration of craftspeople. Before the colonial era, Surat had become a major manufacturing town, and it had served as a commercial outlet for a much greater set of producers in its immediate hinterland. Large numbers of artisans had migrated to the city from Sindh and other parts of Gujarat during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Surat, they had formed communities – such as the Khatris, Kanbis, Momnas, Ranas, and Tais – whose members saw themselves as urban people and who prided themselves on their skills as artisans. They lived together in particular neighbourhoods of the city and formed collective organisations to promote their ritual life and their economic interests. These artisan communities continued to constitute the main nucleus of the industrial labour force well into the twentieth century. Yet in many other senses, Surat’s artisanal economy had undergone a signiicant transiguration.19 The loss of many markets overseas in the Indian Ocean and in Europe, as well as a signiicant decrease in the demand of princely courts, had there as elsewhere precipitated a decline of production in the irst half of the nineteenth century, when the town had lost perhaps one-third of its size. The stabilising of the city’s population around 1870 owed itself in part to an expansion of industrial activity. Certain pre-existing lines of production, notably the manufacture of rich kinkhabs (brocades made with gold thread and silk) and calico prints showed continued deterioration.20 On the other hand, the production of some kinds of luxury manufacture consumed throughout urban India and abroad clearly expanded. In 1910, the collector of Surat District

19

20

My earlier study, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), Chapter III, clearly overstressed continuity rather than change in Surat’s economy. Compare Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Surat District, vol. II [hereafter Surat District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press), p. 179 with G. P. Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: 1932), p. 32 and M. C. Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” Journal of the University of Bombay, 12 (1943), p. 18. The decline of the production of kinkhab was slow, and Surat remained a premier centre for its manufacture. In the 1870s, domestic demand for kinkhab had declined signiicantly, but there was increased demand in Siam and China. In 1901, there were still 900 to 1,000 looms for kinkhab. By 1930, there were only 300 persons working in kinkhab production, and many who still knew the craft had turned to plain weaving in order to subsist.

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found the town a thriving centre characterised by busy small producers and dynamic entrepreneurs who specialised in the cloth business: Not only is Surat the world’s centre for the pearl trade, but it is also holds the premier position in all India for gold and silver wire [i.e., jari], and tinsel and brocade work and pre-eminently for the spangles and spirals of silver and silver gilt which it exports to Madras, Delhi, and many other centres. The Mahomedan population of Surat is very enterprising in foreign trade. Scarcely a family has not a branch establishment somewhere. From Tibet to South Africa, from Siam to Mombasa, everywhere the Rander and Surat Bohras penetrate and take with them silk and other goods manufactured in Surat. The wire and tinsel industry employs 10,000 persons while silk weaving employs another 10,000. Benares, once the chief competition, has now succumbed and it is said that at least 3,000 skilled artisans have migrated from Benares to Surat recently because the employment and the state of the industry is better here.21

Much of this impressive level of activity was a result of the manufacture of new kinds of products. The District Gazetteer reported in 1877 that one important line of production, the making of bodice cloth for women in the Deccan region, had only begun in the previous several years.22 By the early twentieth century, perhaps the most signiicant kind of weaving in quantitative terms was the manufacture of special silk saris, with splendid borders interwoven with gold threads and sometimes decorated with various geometric designs and lowers. These were purchased for use by middle-class women living in the biggest cities of the Presidency.23 Many producers shifted to focus on weaving silk coatings and shirtings for men.24 By World War I, manufacturers of these products had begun to mix in mercerised cotton and spun silk with pure silk, making their product affordable to wider sets of urban consumers.25 Particularly striking was the re-emergence of markets in the Indian Ocean, from the Persian Gulf to Burma, Thailand, and even China.26 In some cases, such as mashru, a mixed cotton and silk fabric used in coats, 21 22

23 24 25

26

“Collector’s Report, 1909–10,” in MSA, RD, 1911, vol. 11, comp. 511, pt. 10, p. 27. George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, Volume 2 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1880), p. 86; Surat District Gazetteer, p. 179. Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, p. 53. Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” p. 20. H. Maxwell-Lefroy and E. C. Ansorge, Report on the Inquiry Into the Silk Industry in India, vol. I, The Silk Industry, pp. 177–8. In some cases, apparently, such products were passed off as pure silk. See for instance Surat District Gazetteer, p. 179.

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domestic demand had almost disappeared, but this was made up for by the cultivation of overseas markets by Vohra merchants.27 If reports from later periods apply to this time, the entire production of mashru was absorbed by Arabia; substantial quantities of jari-embroidered cloth were also exported to the Gulf.28 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were thousands of workers involved in the manufacture of garam sut (watered silk) for sale in various parts of the Ottoman Empire; one irm came to employ 150 weavers for making this kind of cloth.29 Two dozen Surti Khatris had settled in Rangoon to sell local silk lungis and kinkhabs in Burma.30 During the famine of 1899, one oficial reported, local weavers “do not weave for local consumption but weave mainly for consumption in Mauritius, Zanzibar, Burma, Arabia, and elsewhere.”31 Surat no doubt had domestic markets as well, but the fact that this oficial could develop such an impression is testimony to the importance of exports. Overall, as one observer commented in 1943, Surat’s weaving had survived and grown because of its “adaptability to new conditions of production and demand.”32 Gujarati artisans managed to supply some of these various markets by shifting over from less lucrative forms of production. As the collector indicated, however, large numbers of skilled weavers who migrated from north India were also critical to Surat’s industrial expansion. Some of these may have circulated between Surat and Benares as the opportunities in these two leading silk-weaving centres waxed and waned. Yet by 1916, thousands of immigrants from established artisanal centres in north India had settled permanently in Surat.33 Interestingly, there is little evidence of entry into weaving by persons from communities with no special association with the profession before the 1930s. The dynamism of cloth weaving and the increased demand for textiles using gold thread in turn spurred the development of the local jari industry. 27

28 29 30

31

32 33

Ibid.; Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, p. 54; interviews with various merchants and weavers in Surat, especially Natwarbhai Mashruwala, April 1994. Interviews with merchants in Surat, April 1994. Maxwell-Lefroy and Ansorge, Report on an Inquiry Into the Silk Industry, vol. I, p. 31. Interviews with merchants in Surat, 1994; Surat District Gazetteer, p. 179; MaxwellLefroy and Ansorge, Report on an Inquiry Into the Silk Industry, vol. I, p. 177; Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Surat (Bombay, 1941), pp. 12–13. Letter from the Collector of Surat to Secretary to Government, Revenue Department (Famine), 24 Nov. 1899 in MSA, RD (Famine), 1899, vol. 59, comp. 193, p. 689. Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” p. 20. Maxwell-Lefroy and Ansorge, Report on an Inquiry Into the Silk Industry, vol. II, p. 32.

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Image 4. “Jari Workers Drawing Silver Wire, c. 1909” Source: Nissim, Monograph on Wire and Tinsel in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1903), after p. 13, Plate III, reprinted in Art in Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series on Bombay Presidency (New Delhi: Navrang, 1976).

Surat had been only one of several places in western India making jari and jari products during the 1870s and 1880s, with, according to one estimate, approximately 1,200 men employed in various phases of the industry. Local artisans, however, continued to improve their production methods, capturing markets from competitors in other cities. Jari capitalists, largely drawn from the Kanbi, Daudi Vohra, and Hindu Vaniya communities, fuelled this expansion by searching out new markets and by providing their artisan-clients with the capital to make small technological changes. By 1910, the city was the leading jari manufacturing centre in India, surpassing even Benares. A local survey taken around this time estimated that nearly 500 dealers and from 8,000 to 10,000 workers were involved in jari and its subsidiary industries; an estimate from around 1930 places the numbers around 20,000.34 34

Journal of Indian Art (April 1887) cited in Gadgil and Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, p. 4; Nissim, A Monograph on Wire and Tinsel, pp. 10–11 and Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, p. 51; Report of the Indian Tariff Board on Gold Thread Industry (Calcutta: Government of India, 1930) and Indian Tariff Board, Evidence Recorded During Enquiry Regarding Gold Thread Industry

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Such expansion was in part made possible by the entry of thousands of persons of Rana caste background (then known as Golas) into jari production. Until the late nineteenth century, many Ranas in Surat were involved in the occupation of rice pounding. Typically, they had patronclient ties to high-caste residents, who would call them into their homes every month or so to pound and clean rice and to do other menial work. In return for their services, the rice pounders received food and wages for the day and occasional presents of cloth during the year. By the 1870s, a few Ranas had moved into kinkhab weaving.35 Around the turn of the twentieth century, modern mechanical methods of pounding rice had begun to replace older manual techniques. Rather than succumb to unemployment, the Ranas moved into the business of jari winding, often sponsored by non-Rana merchant patrons. By the 1930s, they had developed a near monopoly of the knowledge of new techniques involved in lattening, winding, and gilding. A few even moved successfully into trade in jari products. In effect, the Ranas had created a new “traditional” occupation, which they controlled as effectively as they had rice pounding.36 The growth of the jari industry in turn was strongly associated with the businesses in embroidery and lace work, which again responded in great part to the demand from the urban middle class of western India, especially Parsis, and from overseas customers. Both of these professions involved working with jari and jari products. Estimates in the early twentieth century regularly placed nearly 10,000 people involved in embroidery with another 2,000 doing work with lace. Many of these were employed in workshops on a wage basis, but women working in their homes also made substantial quantities. Roughly 1,000 Vohra women, for instance, were involved in stitching embroidered patterns on caps worn by Vohras throughout the Presidency. Much of this embroidery was done with needle and thread, but Singer Sewing embroidering machines and other small hand machines were extensively in use by the late 1920s.37 In short, the

35

36

37

(Calcutta: Government of India, 1930); B. J. G. Shastri, The Gold Thread Industry (1923). For the jari industry in the late colonial period, see Haynes, “The Dynamics of Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry”; Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, chapter 4. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Gujarat Population, Hindus, vol. IX, part I [hereafter Gujarat Population, Hindus, Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1901), pp. 183–4; Surat District Gazetteer, p. 179 See Nissim, A Monograph on Wire and Tinsel; D. R. Gadgil, “Gold and Silver Industry of Surat” (written in 1930) in Gadgil and Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, pp. 3–5. I have discussed these developments in Haynes, “The Dynamics of Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry.” Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, pp. 55–7.

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city’s economy supported a diversity of high-value manufactures, most of which had experienced signiicant expansion under the circumstances of late colonialism. Sholapur Whereas Surat was peopled by a range of artisans practising a great variety of crafts, the largest concentration of weavers in the Presidency was in Sholapur. The city’s emergence as a major production centre was more recent than Surat’s. Apparently weaver migrants began to settle in the town during the late eighteenth century.38 In 1818, reports R. G. Kakade, some artisans took refuge in the local fort and others dispersed into local villages as the British army prepared to besiege the town.39 Sholapur’s economic signiicance continued to grow in the early years of British rule. By the 1850s, it was developing as a signiicant entrepôt for cotton passing from Hyderabad State through to Bombay, and the availability of plentiful supplies of the raw material encouraged further expansion of cloth manufacture. Cotton and woollen clothes from Sholapur were sold over wide regions of western India by the 1850s.40 By 1872, the city reported 6,425 looms – although strangely only 4,250 weavers – along with 310 dyers.41 In 1877, the Sholapur Spinning and Weaving Mills was established. More mills were founded in subsequent decades; by 1939 Sholapur had become the third-largest centre of factory production in the Bombay Presidency.42 Sholapur’s mills quickly became a major source of yarn for the weavers. A small set of yarn merchants and guarantee brokers emerged as intermediaries between the mills and handloom producers, developing elaborate and lexible networks of contracts and credit that allowed them to purchase yarn when local need was greatest.43 The mills also attracted workers with weaving skills to come to Sholapur. Apparently, some weavers circulated between the factories and handloom workshops as circumstances luctuated. Both handlooms and mills grew together. Exports of cloth from the town increased from an already 38

39 40

41 42 43

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 9; Manjiri Kamat, “Labour and Nationalism in Sholapur: Conlict, Confrontation and Control in a Deccan City, Western India, 1918–39.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1997, p.18. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 9. J. D. Inverarity and J. S. Inverarity, Report on the Collectorate of Sholapur in Selections, new series, no. 4, 1854, p. 3. Sholapur District Gazetteer, p. 270 gives the igures from 1872. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 15. Interviews with a number of weavers and merchants in Solapur, 1994.

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substantial 600,000 rupees in 1872 to 1,200,000 rupees in 1900.44 By 1910, records indicate as many as 10,000 handlooms were actively in use in Sholapur.45 A report from 1929 estimated the number of male weavers in the city at more than 16,000, with more than 40,000 people relying on the industry when dependents were included.46 The annual turnover during the mid-1930s – during a period of declining prices – was 10 million rupees.47 The nature of local production shifted as the character of the city changed. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, Sholapur produced a variety of cloths, including coarse saris, bodice pieces, turbans, dhotis, loor cloths, sheets, blankets for horses, and carpets,48 By the 1920s, local industry was almost exclusively engaged in sari manufacture.49 The city’s weavers shifted to making somewhat higher counts, and took up a whole new set of patterns including Maheshwari, Ilkal, and fancy patals with mercerised borders.50 There was considerable diversiication in the types of saris manufactured. Perhaps seven kinds of sari had been made in Sholapur in the closing decades of the nineteenth century; thirteen new types had been developed by the 1930s; and a total of nineteen types were made in all.51 The composition of the local artisan population was also transformed. Even before the advent of British rule, some weavers had moved from Telengana regions of Hyderabad State, and this migration continued thereafter. Through the irst three quarters of the century, the majority of those engaged in handloom production still originated in the immediate 44 45

46

47

48

49

50

51

Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 73–74. MSA, GD 1911, vol. 98A, comp. 820, pt. II; Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, p. 16. Notes by the Inspector, Weavers Co-operative Societies, 1 Oct. 1929, in MSA, BPBEC Files, File 30/14. “Testimony of Sholapur District Weavers’ Central Co-operative Union,” Special Tariff Board Written Evidence Recorded during Enquiry Regarding the Level of Duties Necessary to Afford Protection to the Indian Cotton Textile Industry, vol. II (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1937), pp. 338–9. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 12; Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, p. 16; Sholapur District Gazetteer, p. 270; Indian Textile Journal, vol. X (August 1900), p. 317. Testimony of L.V. Tikekar, pp. 7–11; Testimony of Sholapur District Weavers’ Central Co-operative Union, Special Tariff Board Evidence, vol. II, pp. 338–9. Notes by the Inspector Weavers Co-operative Societies, 1 Oct. 1929, in MSA, BPBEC Files, File 30/14. The shift in quality is also conirmed in the Testimony of L. V. Tikekar, p. 9. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 58. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 58–59, 70–75.

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region surrounding Sholapur. The Gazetteer refers to the main communities engaged in the industry as being Maharashtrian Koshtis, Salis, Khatris, and Momins; roughly three-eighths of the weaving population was Muslim.52 Enterprising Padmasali weaver-capitalists from Telengana, however, began to assume a dominant position in the industry by the turn of the century, often introducing the ly-shuttle loom in their workshops. These entrepreneurs hired extensively from among their Padmasali-caste fellows, causing a substantial in-low of weaver migrants from Telengana and the departure of local weaving communities from the profession. By the late 1930s, R. G Kakade reported that Padmasali dominance was near complete: “Kurhinshetty, Jyandra, Togati, Khetri and Momin weavers, all put together, may account for the plying of 6 to 7 per cent of the total number of looms in Sholapur. Swakul Sali, Sak Sali, Nirali and other weaving communities have almost deserted the industry.”53 Sholapur had become a huge centre of handloom activity, rivalling any weaving town on the sub-continent. This was hardly a traditional industry. It involved new sets of actors making new lines of cloth, using new kinds of raw materials, interacting in new ways with mills, utilising new methods of manufacture, and organising themselves into novel kinds of production units. Malegaon and Bhiwandi The transformation of Malegaon and Bhiwandi was as profound as that of Sholapur. Neither place was of great import as a production centre at the beginning of the colonial period. Seventeenth-century accounts mention weaving in Bhiwandi,54 a town only about forty kilometres from the fort in southern Bombay. In 1837, however, the district collector reported the presence of only 258 looms in the entire district of Thana, many of which were owned by silk-weaving Christians in Thana town. So weaving activity in Bhiwandi itself must have been quite limited.55 Malegaon, 52

53 54

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Sholapur District Gazetteer, p. 270. The Muslim weavers, called Momins, were apparently mostly converts from local communities of weavers such as the Koshtis and Salis, in contrast to the Momins of Bhiwandi and Malegaon, who were mostly migrants. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 13–14. Fukasawa, “Non-Agricultural Production,” p. 311; Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji, p. 221. Collector, Tannah to Revenue Commissioner, Poona, 10 August 1837 in MSA, RD, 1838, vol. 89/949, comp. 78, p. 303. There may have been as many as 4,000 Portuguesespeaking Christian silk weavers in Thana in the seventeenth century. On the silk weavers of Thana, see B. A. Gupte, “Thana Silks,” pp. 33–6, and Gazetteer of the Bombay

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in Nasik District, by contrast, was a more substantial weaving place by this time. In the early nineteenth century, local weavers supplied Arab armies that roamed the countryside of Khandesh with clothing.56 Most of these weavers appear to have been from local Maharashtrian communities, such as Salis and Koshtis.57 The character of both towns altered greatly after the mid-nineteenth century, when large numbers of Momin weavers began to migrate there. Malegaon and Bhiwandi offered especially attractive spots to settle because of pre-existing Muslim communities and Islamic shrines, as well as especially favourable circumstances for making cloth: in Malegaon, the conluence of two rivers with good water qualities, and in Bhiwandi, a moist climate well suited to the working of the loom.58 Access to the yarn markets of Bombay also appears to have been an important reason for moving to these two towns. Bhiwandi weavers were so close to Bombay that, by the 1880s, some regularly travelled there by train to stock up on supplies of imported English yarn.59 Weavers in Malegaon obtained coarse yarn made in the mills of Bombay from local dealers, who had it dyed red by dyeing specialists.60 The late nineteenth century was a period of expansion in both Malegaon and Bhiwandi. The number of looms reported in Malegaon in 1883 was 2,441. Settlement reports list 3,227 looms in 1899 and 4,045 looms in 1926, respectively.61 Famine reports estimate 12,000 Momin weavers living in Malegaon around 1900, a igure that surely includes dependents.62 Commercial statistics indicate at least a 25 per cent increase in local cloth exported from the district during the 1880s and 1890s, with an average annual volume of 465,000 rupees.63 In Bhiwandi, loomage igures

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57 58 59 60

61

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Presidency, Thana District, vol. XIII, part I [hereafter Thana District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1882), pp. 378–9. Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh [in Urdu] (Bombay: Momin Darusaqfa, 1994). Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh, chapter 29. Interview with Dr. M. Y. Momin, July 1992. Thana District Gazetteer, pp. 386, 388–9. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Nasik District, vol. XVI [hereafter Nasik District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1883), p. 167. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Malegaon Taluka of the Nasik District (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1929), p. 18. The entire population of the town was 19,543. See Indian Famine Commission. 1901, Appendix: vol. I: Evidence of Witnesses, p. 1195. 14,000 people were reported as being employed in the handloom industry of Malegaon in 1911. See Administrative Report of Nasik District 1911 in MSA, RD 1911, vol. 13, comp. 511, pt. XV, p. 21. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 73–74.

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increased from 650 to 700 looms in 1884 to about 3,125 in 1910.64 There was some levelling off or even decline after that point; 2,920 looms were reported employing 6,500 persons in 1927–8.65 Momin migrants came to control the production of cloth in Thana and Nasik districts as weaving became concentrated in these two towns. Already in 1883, more than two-thirds of the looms in Malegaon were worked by Muslims from north India.66 Momin dominance in Bhiwandi probably was as great. Meanwhile, there was a continued deterioration in the position of local artisan communities such as the Salis and Koshtis, who had historically been engaged in the production of cloth in these districts. By the 1880s, only seven families remained in Thana’s silk industry, which would disappear by the twentieth century.67 In both Malegaon and Bhiwandi the migrant weavers learnt to adjust their techniques and product to changing market requirements. In both places, weavers appear to have been particularly innovative in adopting the ly-shuttle loom, as well as new contraptions such as healds, dobbies, and jacquards for making more elaborate borders.68 Interviews with household heads more than eighty years old during the 1990s conirm a picture of handloom weavers as involved in constant experimentation.69 In Malegaon, a small number of supplementary industries began to spring up in town, such as the manufacture of new kinds of looms and the making of accessories such as dobbies and healds.70 Both places became focused on the production of coloured cotton saris with borders, but their clientele was quite distinct. Malegaon came to specialise in lowcount saris with yarn of 20s and lower, which were sent to various parts of the Deccan and the Central Provinces in the 1890s, then increasingly 64

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Thana District Gazetteer, p. 388; and the 1910 igures from MSA, GD 1911, vol. 98A, comp. 820, pt. II. Land Revenue Administration Report of Bombay Presidency, Including Sind 1927–8 (Bombay: Government Central Press), p. 36. This igure was 500 looms higher than two years previous, so these statistics mask considerable luctuation from year to year. Nasik District Gazetteer, p. 167. Gupte, “Thana Silks,” pp. 33–6 and Thana District Gazetteer, pp. 378–9. For instance, see Bombay, Department of Industries, Annual Report 1915–6, p. 17; Department of Industries, Annual Report 1921–2, p. 10; Interviews with weavers in Bhiwandi, Malegaon. For instance, interview with Haji Ali Ahmed (said to be 108 years old at the time), Malegaon, May 1994 and Abdul Hai Master (said to be about 100 years of age), Bhiwandi, April 1994. Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency (including Sind), 1916–7, p. 21.

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to Bombay and Khandesh in the twentieth century.71 A great variety of brands, using as many as ifty to sixty different colours of dyed yarn, were made in the town.72 Weavers in Bhiwandi, by contrast, gravitated towards higher counts of saris (typically of 60s to 80s), sometimes with gold thread borders, which were consumed mainly by the Bombay middle class. Speciic weaving families often customised their production more inely to distinct styles of particular micro-regions. Migration The foregoing account makes clear that the story of the development of artisanal towns in western India during the nineteenth century was very much a story of inter-regional migration. As was the case during the precolonial period, large sections of the weaving population in South Asia were highly mobile. Weavers circulated among handloom workshops, between these workshops and larger factories (where they often performed work in weaving sections), and between regions where prospects were bleak and those where new opportunities for employment arose. These paths of migration connected artisanal towns of western India strongly with other parts of the sub-continent. In effect, the capitalism of small towns, much like industrialisation in the major cities, was made possible by the large-scale movements of people from “labour catchment areas” characterised by poverty and narrowing employment opportunities to places that offered attractive possibilities for those with skills or valued kin connections.73 For many thousands of weavers in northern and south-eastern India, moving to western Indian towns appears to have been a means of resisting “peasantisation,” that is, reduction into de-skilled workers dependent on the agricultural economy. No doubt, many artisans did enter the ranks of agricultural labourers, especially before 1850. In the second half of the century, however, the changing market for cloth in western India sometimes offered new options for artisans who did not wish to leave their professions. In interviews I conducted in a variety of locations during 71

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Papers Relating to the Revision Survey Settlement of the Malegaon Taluka of the Nasik Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 392 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1899), p. 6 and Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Malegaon Taluka, p. 18. Interview with Haji Ali Ahmed; Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 102–3. See, for instance, Lalita Chakravarty, “Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in a Dual Economy: British India, 1880–1920,” IESHR 15:3 (1978): 249–327.

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the 1990s, elderly weavers born in northern and south-eastern India74 insisted that few or none of their community fellows had ever taken part in agriculture; the same individuals gave considerable testimony about their movements and those of family members to textile centres in western India. Although such oral accounts are undoubtedly imperfect,75 they do point at least to a powerful norm in many weavers’ communities that sanctioned long-distance migration as a preferable alternative to absorption into local agricultural labour. Interviews suggest that migration was often not a simple point-topoint phenomenon. Artisans moved between different weaving places, and back and forth between these places and their home regions. Yet the lows into western India were unmistakable. There is little evidence of the movement of large groups of people on single occasions. Indeed, local lore typically depicts an image of the migrant as a solitary male igure, making his way to western India with few possessions on his back. No doubt, most artisan-migrants did travel on their own or with a small number of friends or family members. Most, however, were encouraged by kinfolk and caste fellows already in the weaving towns, and when they arrived in their new locales they often sought out others with similar backgrounds who had gone before them. Often they came to forge an identity as members of artisanal communities. Here, I will examine two especially signiicant lows of peoples, that of the Padmasalis and that of the Momins. Padmasalis The Padmasalis originated primarily in rural, Telugu-speaking areas, particularly in dry regions of Telengana such as the districts of Karimnagar, Medak, and Nalgonda.76 Professionally, they had tended to concentrate

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In some cases, weavers returned to their own native places when they grew old or when conditions for production had improved, so I found a number who had once worked in places like Bhiwandi and Sholapur. Syed Siraj-ul-Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H.E.H. The Nizam’s Dominions (Madras: 1989), p. 543 mentions that some Padmasalis had moved into agriculture as landowning peasants, tenants, and farm labourers at the time of his writing. Contemporary Padmasalis tend to downplay participation by community fellows in the agrarian sector. Syed Siraj-ul-Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H.E.H. The Nizam’s Dominions, pp. 536–44; P. Swarnalatha, “The World of the Weaver in Northern Coromandel, 1750– 1850,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hyderabad, 1991, p. 79. H. V. Nanjundayya and L. K. Ananthakrishna Iyer, The Mysore Tribes and Castes (Bangalore: Mysore Government Press, 1931), p. 560; Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India, chapter 6.

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Map 2. Weavers’ Migration to Western India: 1860s–1950s.

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in the weaving of cotton cloth. They apparently sold their products to consumers ranging from the regional nobility to ordinary peasants. A few Padmasalis had moved towards western India even before British rule.77 But after the 1850s, the large-scale movement of Padmasalis from Hyderabad State towards the Deccan districts of the Bombay Presidency began in earnest. Handloom centres of western Maharashtra became the most common destinations. With its mills, Bombay also became a significant magnet attracting skilled weavers. During the 1930s, Padmasalis had begun to move in small numbers to weaving towns farther north, such as Bhiwandi and even Surat. A census report of 1951 noted that migration from Hyderabad to the Bombay Presidency had assumed vast proportions, that most of those migrating were non-agriculturalists, and that both handloom establishments and cotton-pressing factories were absorbing a major portion of the newcomers. More than 80,000 migrants from Hyderabad State had moved to Sholapur district alone.78 The migration of weavers to the Deccan centres continued into the postindependence period, rendering some of these places into “Telugu towns” that have elected Padmasali mayors and even members of parliament. The depressed economic conditions many weavers faced in Hyderabad State undoubtedly were a central factor prompting this movement. General accounts of weavers in Telengana reveal their circumstances as ones of great poverty and dependence on sahukars. Raghbir Sahai wrote in his survey of artisan cloth producers in Hyderabad: “The economic condition of our handloom weavers is far from satisfactory and despair is writ large on his [sic] face, wherever I found him.”79 He attributed their poverty to “the local sowcars and yarn dealers who rapaciously rob them of their legitimate wages and proits.”80 Another report observed, “their repaying capacity is very much narrowed by the small wages which they earn. Their individual assets are very often not more valuable than a small grass-thatched hut and one or two old hand-looms . . . with a rapidly shrinking market for their goods, their capacity for borrowing and the 77

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Ashanna Lachhamayya Irabatti, Notes From My Life: With Travelogue and a Biography of Markandeya [in Marathi] (Solapur: 1971) (inconsistent pagination). Census of India, 1951, vol. IX Hyderabad, part IA (Report), pp. 90–5. Many of the migrants were not Padmasalis. For numerous qualitative discussions of migration, see Irabatti, Notes From My Life; see also Census of India, 1931. H.E.H. Nizam’s Dominions (Hyderabad State) Part I. Report. Government Central Press, 1933, p. 66. Raghbir Sahai, A Report on the Survey of Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries in H.E.H Nizam’s Dominions (Hyderabad: 1933), p. 11. Ibid., p.12; see also S. M. Bharucha, Agricultural Indebtedness in H.E.H. The Nizam’s Dominions (Hyderabad: Government Central Press, 1937), p. 44.

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scope for developing their businesses are limited.”81 In addition, employment was very inconsistent, and lack of work during the monsoon and winter was commonplace.82 It was at those times when sahukars were unable to provide work and ties were thus at their weakest that weavers were most tempted to move.83 The poor market conditions faced by many weavers can be traced in part to the more general depression of living standards and the stagnation of the agrarian economy in the Hyderabad region;84 in part to a decline in the living conditions of the regional nobility;85 and in part to the inability of local artisans to compete effectively with more entrepreneurial producers of western and southern India. The Nizam’s dominions actually imported substantial quantities of handloom cloth from other areas of India, including centres where the primary source of labour was Padmasali workers. Raghbir Sahai observed in his report: “But in Hyderabad State it [the handloom industry] has declined, not so much from the effects of mill competition as from inability to stand up against the results of the adoption of improved methods by handloom weavers in British India. It will be seen that handloom-made piece goods to the value of Rs. 26,89,000 were imported into the state during the last year.”86 Sahai mentioned Nagpur, Malegaon, Amengudh, Ahmednagar, Poona, Salem, Ilkal, and Sholapur as some of the chief sources of handloom imports, with Sholapur saris inding the widest markets. Agents 81

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Hyderabad State, Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies of H.E.H. Nizam’s Government for the year 1338–9 Fasli, p. 9. B. K. Narayan, “Economic Development of Hyderabad State,” Ph.D. dissertation, Mysore University, 1958. This was also corroborated in a large number of interviews with weavers and others involved in the business. An exception to this general picture comes from the town of Narayanpet, which supported at least 9,000 weavers and possibly as many as 50,000 at its peak. See Hyderabad State, Report on the Working of the Department of Industries and Commerce for the Year 1343 Fasli, p. 13. Sahai, Report of the Survey of the Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries, p. 128. The markets for these goods are discussed in Sahai and in D. V. Rao, “Cottage Industries and Their Role in Hyderabad’s Economy,” Hyderabad Bulletin of Economic Affairs 1:9 (1948): 1098–102. D. N. Dhanagre, Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 180–212; V. Ramakrishna Reddy, Economic History of Hyderabad State: Warangal Suba, 1911–1950 (Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1987), pp. 169–200. For a discussion of the Hyderabad nobility, see Carolyn Elliott, “Decline of a Patrimonial Regime: The Telengana Rebellion in India, 1946–51,” Journal of Asian Studies 34:1 (1974): 28–30; Sheela Raj, Medievalism to Modernism: Socio-Economic and Cultural History of Hyderabad, 1869–1911 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1987), p. 99. Sahai, A Report on the Survey of Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries; See also Hyderabad State, Report on the Working of the Department of Industries and Commerce for the Year 1339 Fasli, p. 1.

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of centres in the Deccan and south India regularly visited Hyderabad and other major markets; some even set up shops in these towns to sell imports from their regions or provided credit to merchants who bought signiicant stocks.87 Those who emigrated obtained work through kinfolk and friends in the place of their arrival. Most commonly, workers reported in interviews that as new migrants they irst went to live with some person they had previously known, most commonly a relative. Weavers typically chose their place of destination on the basis of their well-established connections; those without these ties rarely risked migration. Often migrants relied on such contacts in order to ind them work in the handloom workshops. There appears to have been little direct recruitment of labour in Telengana by western Indian karkhandars. Rarely did the new migrants cut off ties with their native districts. Frequently they travelled home to visit families on festive occasions and for marriages. When business was slow in the western Indian karkhanas, they often returned to their villages, where they could wait out the slack season at lower costs to themselves. In some cases, the workers brought their families to Maharashtra after some years, frequently to work in the handloom industry itself. In other instances, however, family members remained in Telengana for decades while the men carved out a living in their new locales. The maintenance of these ties facilitated their return to home regions during old age and when work was not available. Gradually, however, the Padmasalis who stayed in the Deccan built up a new social fabric in western Indian towns. Momins, Julahas The migration of Momins from north India shares much in common with the experience of the Padmasalis. “Momin” refers to a rather diverse set of people who were spread widely over northern India but who shared their Islamic faith and an association with handloom weaving; most apparently had referred to themselves and been referred to by others as “Julahas” in the mid-nineteenth century.88 The names “Momin” and “Ansari” appear to have been adopted only gradually after that time, and this process of changing self-identity may be partly associated with

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Sahai, A Report on the Survey of Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries, p. 77. The diversity of Momins or Julahas is discussed in Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 94–6.

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migration. In practice, Momins of the United Provinces were dispersed over a fairly wide range of professions by the mid-nineteenth century. Many lived in rural areas, and involvement in agriculture was not uncommon, although there was often a signiicant degree of reluctance to work as rural labourers. They took great pride in their artisanal skills, and often regarded moving to other areas to remain as handloom weavers or to become mill workers as a superior alternative to the performance of unskilled labour. 89 By the late nineteenth century, a large number of Muslim weavers, especially from the eastern United Provinces, had begun to move to western India, mostly to places close to the Bombay-Agra highway, such as Indore, Dharangaon, Dhulia, Yeola, Malegaon, Bhiwandi, and even Bombay; there, a few took up handloom weaving, but many others obtained work in the mill industry.90 Initially they came on foot or by bullock cart, but later train became the most common mode of migration. The Momin myth attributes the cause of movement to catastrophic events in the mid-nineteenth century, such as the riots in Hanumangarhi (contemporary Faizabad-Ayodhya) in 1856, the Revolt of 1857, and a major famine during the 1860s. According to these accounts, Muslim weavers decided to leave under conditions of severe duress, even persecution.91 The Thana Gazetteer, for instance, reported that the “Julahas” led during the time of the 1857 Revolt, intending to travel to Mecca on pilgrimage. As the story goes, “on their arrival at Bhiwndi [sic], they found that robes [saris] were much in demand, and as they had no money to pay for a passage to Mecca, they settled at Bhiwndi and have from Bhiwndi spread into other parts of the district.”92 Although this account may contain an element of truth, it is far from a complete explanation for migration. Some Momins had begun to move towards western India well before the 1850s, and the number of migrants was greater towards the end of the nineteenth century than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Revolt. In effect, the migration myth provides an encapsulating memory around which group identity was sustained. The broader economic conditions facing handloom weavers in north India from the mid-nineteenth century onwards clearly provided much of the motivation to move. Gyanendra Pandey has argued that a signiicant 89 90 91

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Interviews conducted with Momin weavers in Allahabad district. Interviews with Mustaq Momin, July 1992 and Datta Karve, July 1992. This was brought up in numerous interviews I conducted in Bhiwandi but is also discussed in Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh, passim. Thana District Gazetteer, p. 245.

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decline in demand occurred across much of the eastern United Provinces; in some towns, the looms in use during the 1890s fell to a small fraction of those at work ifty years earlier.93 Certainly signiicant here was the decline of consumption by the old nobility both of the Mughal Empire and of the regional successor states.94 Mill-made goods from England and then from western Indian factories absorbed much of the demand for products of iner and middling quality.95 In addition, the low standard of living in the region meant that demand from local agriculturalists, who still used handloom products to ill a substantial portion of their clothing needs,96 was hardly suficient to sustain the pre-existing population of artisans. Handloom weavers of north India were also at a disadvantage relative to other regions because local mills generally provided only the coarser forms of yarn, with virtually none of counts higher than 20s.97 There was considerable unevenness in the fate of the weavers. A number of centres in the region continued to make cloth on a very large scale. In Azamgarh district, for instance, 13,000 looms were still working at the end of the nineteenth century, often on products consumed in other regions of India; little out-migration took place there.98 By contrast, Allahabad District no longer possessed handloom centres of much signiicance, and most of those were involved in weaving coarse cloth for local agriculturalists.99 Some members of the weaving communities responded both by diversifying into other professions 93

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Gyanendra Pandey, “Economic Dislocation in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Uttar Pradesh: Some Implications of the Decline of Artisanal Industry in Colonial India,” Rural South Asia: Linkages, Change and Development, ed. Peter Robb (London: Curzon Press, 1983), esp. pp. 96–104. C. A. Silberrad, A Monograph on Cotton Fabrics Produced in the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad: 1898), p. 46. On the drastic decline for the jamdani of Tanda, see Government of India, Report of the Indian Tariff Board (Cotton Textile Industry Enquiry), vol. III, Bombay, 1927, p. 125. Pandey, “Economic Dislocation,” p. 105; Silberrad, A Monograph on Cotton Fabrics, pp. 45–8. Handloom products constituted about one-third of cotton cloth (by weight) consumed in the United Provinces. Atul Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries of the United Provinces (Allahabad: F. Luker Superintendent Government Press, 1908), p. 12. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, p. 20. Azamgarh: A Gazetteer. District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Allahabad: 1911), pp. 61–2. Abdullah Ibn Yususf Ali, A Monograph on Silk Fabrics (Allahabad: 1900), pp. 102–4; Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, pp. 17–18; Mohammed Mushtaq, Report of the Industrial Survey of the United Provinces, Azamgarh District (Allahabad: 1923), p. 16; Final Report on the Seventh Settlement of the Azamgarh District of the United Provinces (Allahabad: 1908), p. 8. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, p. 16; Jagdish S. Valal, Report on the Industrial Survey of the United Provinces (Allahabad: 1923), pp. 55–7.

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whereas others chose to migrate.100 Weavers from the United Provinces became well known for their mobility. As one oficial stated, “In artisan or trading communities, the individual is far more migratory, and it is not unusual for a heavily indebted artisan or small trader to decamp, leaving no trace behind him.”101 Those who migrated to the Bombay Presidency found themselves under very new circumstances in their places of arrival. Often they became involved in the production of various kinds of high-quality cotton saris for middle-class residents of Bombay and low- and middlequality Maharashtrian saris for the peasants and agricultural labourers in the countryside. They also often came to work in different kinds of productive organisations. In the United Provinces, most had been household weavers who worked under contract for sahukars. Except in Benarsi silk weaving, there had been few larger workshops in the north.102 In the Bombay Presidency, new migrants generally worked in karkhanas run by wealthier Momins, who established reputations for high-quality products and who, in order to satisfy the demand for their goods, hired extrafamilial workers. As with the Padmasalis, Momin weavers generally found jobs through relatives and friends who preceded them. Also like the Padmasalis, most did not cut off their ties with their native places. Return for marriages, religious festivals, births, and deaths continued to be a feature of many weavers’ lives. In many cases, family members continued to sit on ancestral lands; remittances of monies from western India sometimes made new land purchases possible. Many weavers and textile workers came back to their villages upon their retirement, and the most prosperous individuals even gave money to build mosques and schools in their native places. Over the past one hundred years, there has been a continuous circulation back and forth between eastern Uttar Pradesh and northern Maharashtra. Some persons interviewed moved between the two regions several times during their work careers.103 For both the Padmasalis and the Momins, migration meant more than moving to a new location. It meant shifting from largely rural locales to 100

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In contrast to Azamgarh, the igures for those involved in weaving consequently fell far below the numbers of persons belonging to weaving communities. Note by Rai Bahadur R. Prasad 24/10/21, appendix to “Report of the Weaving School Committee, United Provinces, 1921,” in UPSA, Industries Department, File 407 of 1920. “Note Regarding Possibilities of Co-operative Societies,” in “Notes Required for the Industrial Commission,” in UPSA, Industries Dept., ile 430 of 1916. A Proceedings, Dec. 1914, no. 21 in UPSA, Industries Department, File no. 281 of 1914. This paragraph is based on interviews in Bhiwandi, Malegaon, and Allahabad District.

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places with thousands of other weavers and extensive facilities, such as yarn shops and stores for the sale of cloth. It often meant joining new kinds of enterprise based largely on wage labour, rather than continuing to work in households that relied on family labour alone. For some of the more adventurous, who were able to accumulate small amounts of capital and develop knowledge of the yarn and cloth markets, it sometimes provided the eventual opportunity to escape dependence on merchant intermediaries and to become entrepreneurs in their own right. In other words, it involved participation in structures of “weaver capitalism” that were growing increasingly characteristic of the towns of western India. The Creation of Weaving Communities As they congregated in urban places, artisans of western India gave shape to new kinds of community that were marked by their common “traditional occupation,”104 a shared ritual life, collective institutions, and leaderships recognised as authoritative. Notions of community were no mere holdover from a pre-colonial or rural past; instead, they were refashioned in the context of living and working in the small towns of the Bombay Presidency, and they met important needs of the urban artisans. Economically, the development and maintenance of group boundaries helped to limit the dissemination of special skills to outsiders. Socially, forms of collective life established networks of mutual support and patronage that sustained artisans in what might have otherwise been an alien environment. Community organisations regulated social behaviour and built places of religious worship that were important to most members. The forging of artisanal neighbourhoods was one of the chief markers of this sense of community. Wherever they settled, weavers, dyers, and jari workers came to live together with others who saw themselves as belonging to their collectivity. Their locales were differentiated from those of the higher-status merchants and Brahmans on the one hand and those of low-caste menials on the other. Khatris of Surat lived in Sagrampura, and Ranas lived mainly in the Golwad streets of Navapura; Momins in Bhiwandi concentrated in Bengalpura and Nizampur of that town. Neighbourhoods composed largely of Padmasali migrants and their 104

In no case, was weaving, dyeing or jari-making the sole occupation of all members of these communities, but a single profession nonetheless gave shape to their collective identity. This occupation could change, as we have seen in the case of the Ranas (Golas) of Surat.

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families sprang up in the Sakharpeth and Pachapeth areas of Sholapur. By the early twentieth century, there was a large and growing demand on the part of weavers for house plots there, and local notables feared that the expansion of these neighbourhoods was breaking loose of any regulated urban plan.105 Often the artisans’ quarters were among the poorest in town, and oficials worried about sanitary conditions there.106 Although these neighbourhoods were undoubtedly places of considerable poverty, they were also places where residents wove a tight social fabric that provided comfort and camaraderie. Newcomers to the weaving towns found networks of kinfolk and friends willing to welcome them and help them to stave off the dificult period until they found work. With time, new migrants were often able to build a rich range of relationships beyond this initial social circle, and forge friendships and other ties with persons who spoke their language and shared their forms of religious expression. Male migrants to Bhiwandi often found familiar kinds of food in the local bissee, or communal boarding place, usually run by some local Momin house owner from their own taluka in the United Provinces who collected fees on a weekly or monthly basis. As many as a hundred weavers would gather together twice a day at a single bissee.107 Shared forms of recreation were often available, such as the akharas, or gymnasiums, in Momin neighbourhoods, where young men shared a passion for wrestling.108 Among Khatris of Surat, the local liquor shop often was a place where male weavers gathered and socialised; the drinking of alcohol by small groups of men provided a similar social glue among Padmasalis in Sholapur.109 Local streets could also be places of communal gatherings and feasting. Because people were constantly circulating between the weaving towns and the native regions of the artisans, neighbourhoods were places where migrants could gather to hear news from their villages and of kinfolk left behind. Seeing friends and family off at train stations on trips back to native places was a major ritual observance among Momins in Bhiwandi and Malegaon.110 The neighbourhood, in other words, constantly served 105

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See a brief discussion of the neighbourhood of Sakharpeth, see Collector’s memo no. 508 of 1908, 5 July 1908, Huzur Collector’s Archives, Sholapur, 1908, no. 34, File A/864. See Chapter 5 for a number of oficial observations about the living conditions in artisanal neighbourhoods. Interview with Dr. Mohiyuddin Momin, Bombay, 1992. Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh. A wide range of interviews in Surat and Sholapur. This picture of social life has been gained through observation and through casual references in numerous interviews. Especially helpful in this reconstruction were conversations with Dr. Mohiyuddin Momin.

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to sustain the linkage of migrants with their homelands, sometimes over generations. The marking of urban landscapes by shrines and forms of worship associated with the artisanal communities certainly contributed as well to the development of group coherence. Often big men within the community played a key role in patronising such shrines or in organising artisan families to inance them. Before the nineteenth century, Surti Khatris had constructed a temple to their kuldevi (community goddess) just outside their neighbourhood.111 In 1894, leading igures among the Padmasalis purchased land for a temple to the community deity, Markandeya, and built (in several stages) a large shrine in his honour.112 R. G. Kakade noted interestingly that no such temples to Markandeya existed in the Telengana homeland.113 The migration of Momins southwards into the Bombay Presidency was also accompanied by the construction of sacred places. Angnu Sheth, the most prominent Momin karkhandar in Malegaon during the late nineteenth century, reportedly built three mosques there during his lifetime, and there were other igures in Bhiwandi who did the same.114 Among many artisanal communities, this was a period of collective religious ferment. Preachers who circulated between the small towns teaching more “puriied” faiths (whether Hindu or Islamic) gained an audience among petty producers, who seemingly were intent on lessening the indignities associated with their low social status. There appear to have been a number of such efforts in Gujarat during the early twentieth century. In 1906, headmen of the Khatris and Ranas made bandobast (enforcement of moral codes by threat of social sanction) against the consumption of alcohol.115 Four years later, a Rana leader organised a meeting to promote temperance, compassion for animal life, and general “improvements of morality” among his community. Those present at the meeting sang bhajans (hymns) composed by bhakti saints and listened to the preaching of holy men on abstinence and vegetarianism.116 The closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the spread 111

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“Some Information about the Moti Bahucharaji Temple on Ved Road in Surat,” Summary of testimony by 102 Khatris to Charity Court, Chief Charity Commissioner, Baroda, 1990–1. Document provided by Hasmukh Talia. Irabatti, Notes From My Life. The completion of this shrine in full form was slowed by internal conlicts among the Padmasalis and by funding dificulties – it was only twentyone feet tall in 1917. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 176. Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh, chapter 29. Gujarat Mitra, 16 Sept. 1906, pp. 2, 12. Gujarat Mitra, 20 Nov. 1910, pp. 10–11.

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of Muslim Wahhabi teachings among the Julahas, who increasingly rejected that nomenclature for themselves, preferring instead the title of “Momin” (faithful). The Thana District Gazetteer reports that in 1883 most of Bhiwandi’s “Julahas” had begun to take up Wahhabi practices over the previous ive years, and that this had put them at odds with local Konkani Muslims, who refused to allow Wahhabis into existing mosques.117 Publication in 1912 of Tarikh al-Minwal va-Ahlahm by Abdul Hadi Abdulsalam Mubarakpuri – a book that traced the lineage of the Momin community and weaving back to Adam, and which further insisted on the observance of puriied Islamic faith – reinforced community claims to self-assertion.118 Such developments were part of an Indiawide movement among Momins to claim respect as true Muslims.119 Among each set of weavers, institutions and leaderships emerged to regulate communal life and perpetuate the social boundaries of the community. The form of the panchayat (a word typically translated as “caste council”), almost ininitely lexible in practice, was adopted by weavers in a great variety of circumstances. In Surat, an interesting document written in 1906 reports an edict from the panch of Surti Khatris, who had gathered in the community building on the grounds of Hinglaj temple. Nagindas Kharwar, a prominent and wealthy Khatri whose family had built up an extensive business in Burma, headed the organisation. The body ruled that only Khatri weavers could work in the factories of Khatri employers; that Khatri merchants could only give out job-work to other Khatris; that merchants had to supply raw materials promptly to akhedadars (workshop managers), and that workers who sought to switch bosses had to pay off any debts they owed to their old employer. Those who violated these rulings, the edict insisted, had to pay ines (51 rupees is mentioned in one case); if anyone refused the ruling, the panch would then inform the main panchayat of the Surti Khatri community, a larger body regulating the social life of the Khatris, which then could outcaste the person involved.120 Although at irst glance this document appears to be simply the act of a caste guarding against the intrusion of outsiders into its “traditional occupation,” on closer inspection it also suggests adaptation to signiicant 117 118 119 120

Thana District Gazetteer, p. 246. Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh, chapter 12. See Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, pp. 85–9. Surti Khatri Jari Border Weavers, “Resolution passed by the Surti Khatri Jari Border Weavers, 26 Jan. 1906,” Handwritten Document Owned by the Firm of Bhukandas Natubhai Gotewala.

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forms of economic change. Most notably, the organisation’s rulings may have been a reaction to the growing importance of wage labour in the artisan workshops of Surat at this time. It provided Khatri weaver labourers protection against possible competition for jobs from non-Khatris in these workshops, but at the same time it protected the small capitalists from the possibility that workers might take advances from other employers and then leave without repaying.121 The fact that the panch had to issue edicts on these matters suggests that no ixed rules for employment had existed previously, and that the issues involved had recently become problematic. It seems quite possible that the panch itself was an ad hoc organisation formed entirely for the purpose of dealing with such problems, perhaps in the context of a crisis posed by the hiring of non-community workers. Panchayat-like organisations gave shape to a sense of group identity. In their homelands, both Padmasalis and Momins seem to have been loose categories of families, spread over wide geographic areas in their home regions, who shared an identiication with weaving.122 In their places of arrival in western India, however, they often forged new institutional forms, usually led by headmen whose authority was based on their business success and their prestige in the new locations. For instance, in Sholapur, leading igures formed institutions known as fands,123 which served to arbitrate social disputes and mobilise community resources for religious purposes. The fands were headed by prominent igures from among the Sholapur Padmasalis called peddamanishi, usually weavers who had established some degree of prosperity and who had acquired a special status because of their leading roles in the neighbourhoods. According to local accounts, fands were not organised around place of origin but rather on place of residence in Sholapur itself. People could move between fands, presumably as they changed their places of residence in the city. The Falmari family established the irst fand in the midnineteenth century, and this family continued to insist on its pre-eminence after 1900.124 By 1879, there were twenty-two fands, each organised 121 122

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This was a practice that two employers complained about in interviews I conducted. Though I have found evidence of smaller, more localised forms of social organisation, especially among the Momins. Sources in Solapur informed me that the term fand was an alternative for the word pundi. One of my informants insisted it was not related to the English word “fund,” though a relationship seems probable. Because the fands disappeared some time ago, I could not determine with certainty the word’s origins. The Falmaris claimed in 1906 that as the founders of the irst fands in Sholapur they should be given the title of Dharmadhikaris, a title that no doubt would have given them special authority as trustees of the local Markandeya temple. This claim was

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around a leading personality. In that year, Padmasalis decided that no further fands should be established.125 Near the end of the century, ive fand leaders were accorded special places in the community. These men would be periodically presented with honours beitting their recognised status, such as gifts of betel leaf on the occasion of engagement ceremonies. Fand leaders dealt with a wide variety of matters. They attempted to resolve marital conlicts and trade disputes, and they set rules for the observance of religious occasions.126 Among the Padmasalis, there was a strong norm discouraging internal disputes from being taken outside the boundaries of the community. Contending parties put their case to the fand leaders, who then would issue decisions. Those who went against the rulings of the fand leaders could be ostracised. Panch-like organisations called jamaats also formed among the Momin migrants of western India. The headmen of these organisations had different titles in different towns: chaudhuri, sarpanch, and sardar. They ruled on a host of family matters, including marriage, divorce, and husband-wife relations, and they levied ines on those who broke community codes. In some cases they collected a monthly fee on group members that helped pay for annual feasts and the holding of group dinners at deaths and marriages. The city of Bombay and its environs had twentyive Momin jamaats, deined largely by place of origin in Uttar Pradesh. In Bhiwandi, the most important of the Momin jamaats was clearly the Phulpuri jamaat, composed of weavers who had come from the tahsil of Phulpur in Allahabad district. Again, this was not a simple replication of a pre-existing rural organisation. There was no equivalent of the jamaat in Phulpur itself; there corporate bodies tended to form around small clusters of villages rather than on the colonial administrative unit of the tahsil. For much of the late nineteenth century, the sardar of the jamaat was Haji Lal Mohamed, an inluential weaver in town. He was succeeded by a relative, Mohamed Yunus Sardar. According to a history of the Momins, the sardar was known for the justice of his decisions, and even ruled against his own son on one occasion.127

125 126

127

denied when arbitrated by the Shankaracharya of a nearby religious shrine. The same family asserted that it should have license to sponsor a special religious procession of the Padmasalis in 1911, but this claim was apparently defeated in city courts. The material on fands is drawn largely from Irabatti, Notes From My Life. For instance, widows and those who remarried were not allowed to be present at certain religious observances. See Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari Ki Tehzibi Tarikh; Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency: p. 21 provides some rich material on the jamaats of Momins in Bombay.

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The discussion of panchayats leads us to a focus on the role of “big men” – such as Nagindas Kharwar in Surat, the head of the Falmari family in Sholapur, Angnu Sheth in Malegaon, and Haji Lal Mohamed in Bhiwandi – in constructing weavers’ communities. Here, I follow arguments made by Mattison Mines, who suggests the inter-connectedness of the processes of personal self-deinition among eminent individuals on the one hand and forms of community identity on the other. Such persons achieve their own reputations as leading men in collective contexts through the sponsorship of community causes and institutions. At the same time, the actions of such igures help to deine the form of collectivity itself. “What gives a caste its corporate form,” argues Mines, “are its big-men and their overlapping institutional constituencies.”128 If granted exclusivity, this kind of interpretation neglects the signiicance of subaltern agency in the creation of weaving communities. Khatri, Padmasali, and Momin identity was given shape by thousands of community members, often in the course of ordinary actions in their everyday lives: gossip, work, worship, and the sharing of food. Yet the role of “big men” was nonetheless particularly important. Community was constantly re-created as such igures reformulated their own social identities. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, as we shall see in future chapters, the potential for acquiring new forms of wealth through the handloom profession gave rise to the development of a small number of weaver capitalists in the towns of western India. These elite igures sought to translate their wealth into public reputations as respectable individuals, both among their community fellows and in the wider society. Their role in founding and sustaining panchayats was one critical aspect of this process, as was giving to mosques, temples, and educational institutions. These actions were also instrumental in creating a sense of corporate character in the small towns, one that was quite different from the principles of social organisation in the weavers’ place of origins. With the sharpening of community boundaries, not surprisingly, came conlicts with those outside the community. From the perspective of government oficials and local notables, weavers could be a troublesome set of people. Disputing the view that weavers were an enfeebled group unable to participate on famine-relief works, one colonial oficer stated: There is no class of people more robust physically, more healthy, and it might be added . . . more dificult to deal with than the Bombay weavers, 128

Mattison Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 201.

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India both urban and rural. Who were the most prominent and reckless rioters in Bombay in the plague riots? The Zulais (Julahas) or Mohamedan weavers of Byculla. Who have formed the bulk of rioters in the Yeola, Malegaon and Belgaum riots – to name a few? The weavers, [both] Hindus and Mahomedans. What class has given much trouble by feuds with other castes or creeds in the Bijapur district? The weavers. In all these disturbances they have been remarkable rather for their physical strength than for physical weakness.129

Obviously, this statement relects colonial stereotypes and overlooks the political motivations behind the weavers’ behaviours.130 Yet occasional participation in violence was relective of the tensions that could develop in weaving towns. In their state of impoverishment, artisans were often dependent on others for work, the raw materials of their trade, and the necessities of life.131 Migrants to western Indian towns frequently competed with established weaving groups who were trying to hold on to their trade. Conlict could develop not only with those in other religious groups, but also with co-religionists who resented their attempts to redeine their faith, as we have seen among the Konkani Muslims and Momins of Bhiwandi when the latter began to insist on Wahhabi interpretations of Islam. At the root of many of these conlicts were questions of self-respect as well as economic well-being. Weavers held a limited status in local society; their peripheral position could be heightened when they were newcomers yet to establish a certain place in the local moral fabric. Participation in movements of religious reform often relected efforts at self-assertion as collectivities.132 Often weavers had to earn their ability to use public space or to carve out their own sacred places, and their efforts to do so could be resisted by those who had previously dominated the urban landscape.133 A number of instances of violence were responses to perceived insults 129

130

131

132 133

Letter from J. W. Muir-Mckenzie, Secty. to Government of Bombay to Secty. Govt. of India, 5 Oct. 1899 in MSA, RD (Famine) 1899, vol. 59, comp. 193, pp. 636–7. For a rich discussion of such stereotypes in north India, see Gyanendra Pandey, Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 66–108. Chapter 5 discusses weavers’ participation in violence against grain merchants during periods of famine. This discussion is inluenced by Pandey, “The Bigoted Julaha.” For the role of disputes over space in collective actions, see Anand A. Yang, “Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the “Anti-Cow Killing” Riot of 1893,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22:3 (1980): 576–96; Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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to the weavers’ religious practice. In 1885, Muslims (almost certainly weavers) in Malegaon clashed with Hindus after a procession of a tabut on Muharram was stopped by persons about to celebrate Dassera. They apparently left the tabut on the road, and some Hindus brought it back to its starting point. Over the next couple of days, after a confrontation between some Muslims and local police, large crowds began to form, with some members vowing that they would not allow any Dassera ceremonies to take place; others were involved in attack on a local Hindu temple. The police opened ire, shooting two Muslims and arresting forty-two others.134 Oficials later blamed the “turbulent nature” of the Muslim population of the town. Another serious set of events occurred in Yeola in 1893 and 1894. The conlict may have relected underlying competition for work between Hindu Salis, presumably older residents of the town, and Muslim migrants. It apparently began in September 1893, when the Salis decided to take out a Ganpati procession on a route that apparently passed by a local mosque. Some Muslims gathered at the mosque in preparation. Eventually the Sali leaders were persuaded to take another route, but at an observance the next month, characterised by a crowd including villagers armed with sticks, was apparently an aggressive and threatening one. Rumours had spread that Muslims intended to take a cow in procession and slaughter it. The local district oficer called in troops for two weeks. Although no violence took place at that time, tensions were heightened by a Hindu boycott of Muslim traders and artisans. Then in February 1894, after some images were removed by an unknown person from a religious booth intended for entertainment of Hindu weavers, local Hindus and Muslims took a series of actions designed to insult each other. A dead pig was found in a mosque; a few Muslims responded by killing cows in a temple; some Hindus prepared to burn a mosque; Muslims set ire to a temple and attacked a party of police who had arrived to protect it; still later, at least two mosques were burned and destroyed and one Muslim was killed. Eventually armed forces arrived from Nasik and Ahmednagar, who shot at crowds participating in violence. Four people were killed before peace was restored.135 134

135

Letter from the Commissioner, Central Division, 30 Oct. 1885 in MSA, RD 1885, vol. 293, comp. 791, pp. 145–6. See documents related to the “Memorial from Certain Inhabitants of Yeola Praying for the Appointment of a Committee of Inquiry to Investigate the Circumstances which Led to the Riots at Yeola in Feb. 1894,” NAI, HD (Public) A, June 1894, Proceedings 337–340.

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Such incidents seem to have been inextricably tied to the process of identity formation in the context of small weaving towns. As artisans in both religious communities sought to deine themselves as members of groups worthy of a place in the towns where they resided, they asserted in effect that they were defenders of larger religious principles and sacred symbols such as the mosque, the temple, and the cow.136 Integration in the urban environment thus was hardly a smooth, straightforward process. Conclusion Thus the strong association of artisanal production of cloth with towns and small cities became strengthened during the late colonial period. A number of signiicant manufacturing centres emerged in the Bombay Presidency, each giving employment to thousands of small producers who found there signiicant marketing facilities for their cloth and access to supplies of yarn, dyes and other raw materials as well as to credit. Each place came to be known for the special qualities of its own products. The towns enticed a large number of skilled craftspeople from other parts of India, many who had found it dificult to obtain work in their native places. They also began to attract the settlement of small communities of merchant-entrepreneurs eager to make proits in the cloth and yarn trades. Urban craftspeople often shaped and reshaped notions of community in western Indian towns for themselves as they sought to achieve places of respect and economic security in the local social fabric. In no case was the character of the artisanal town a simple relection of the persistence of “traditional” craft activity. Each centre was the product of broad transformations in western Indian economy and society during the colonial period. The resources that lowed through these places may not have triggered a wider urbanisation characterised by rapidly expanding populations and a diverse occupational base; indeed, a monoindustrial structure was a striking feature of most centres of small-scale production during this time. But the conluence of weavers and merchants, cloth and yarn markets, work places and sources of capital did lay the groundwork for what I call in this study “small town capitalism.”

136

This discussion is inluenced by Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community, pp. 148–76.

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3 Consumers, Merchants, and Markets

The gradual reinvigoration of handloom weaving in small towns of the Bombay Presidency during the late nineteenth century was made possible in part by shifting forms of demand in both the cities and countryside. Whereas the irst decades of colonial rule had seen a sharp decline in most foreign markets for western Indian cloth and the virtual disappearance of the state as a customer of small producers, the later part of the nineteenth century marked the emergence of other sets of consuming groups that made substantial purchases of cloth. Between 1870 and 1930, the artisans of the small towns catered to forms of demand associated more strongly with economic expansion and profound shifts in the character of local society than with the simple persistence of old cultural patterns. Consumption has rarely assumed centre stage in efforts to understand the economic history of South Asia. Historians of colonial India have long privileged production at the expense of demand. In contrast to work on Europe,1 there have been only scattered attempts made to understand the marketing of consumer items to Indian buyers2 or the history of purchasing patterns on the sub-continent.3 The de-industrialisation argument 1

2

3

For instance, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and the essays in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: 1993). On cloth, see Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite. For instance, Anand Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars. For instance, Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); C. A. Bayly, “The Origin of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities

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shared the bias against serious analysis of consumption, as it generally carried the built-in assumption that cloth from Lancashire overwhelmed Indian products primarily because of the cost advantages associated with mass production. Yet if price were the sole critical factor determining consumption patterns, much of the continued demand for textiles manufactured by small producers would remain perplexing, because these clothes were often not cheaper than mill-made goods. Was this merely a case of some Indians stubbornly clinging to old clothing traditions? Or were new preferences and consumption patterns also responsible? This chapter, as part of a larger work focused on producers, cannot hope to rectify completely the gap that exists in the literature on the purchase and use of Indian textiles. Truly satisfactory histories of consumption will need to delve into the history of particular communities and localities and analyse the changing cultural factors that conditioned spending, the spread of regional styles of clothing, the forging of new public roles for men and women, and the formation of national, religious, and caste identities. My purpose here is to outline some of the main characteristics of western Indian markets for textiles, to suggest how these markets functioned, and to discuss the ways consumers and the merchants who carried cloth to consumers may have shaped the universe of opportunities in which weavers and other artisans operated. Overall, the chapter elucidates the changing nature of the markets for goods manufactured by small producers. The demand for these goods was not a sign of unyielding “social customs” and “conservatism,” as many colonial observers argued. Developments in the larger regional economy were crucial in shaping the nature of textile markets; changes in agrarian society and the emergence of new urban classes stimulated shifts in consumer preferences, and not always towards products manufactured in mills. In addition, merchants and even weaver-capitalists aggressively sought out new consumers for the products they carried. Other goods lost favour, and centres specialising in those forms of cloth had either to adapt their production or to suffer stagnation. Yet at the same time, the vitality of small-scale production also had much to do with limitations in the character of the markets that did in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 285–322; Yanagisawa, “The Handloom Industry and its Market Structure”; Michelle Maskiell, “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000,” Journal of World History 13:1 (2002): 27–65; Abigail McGowan, “An AllConsuming Subject? Women and Consumption in Late-Nineteenth and Early-TwentiethCentury Western India,” Journal of Women’s History 18:4 (2006): 31–54. See also Haynes et al., eds. Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia.

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develop. The full triumph of mill production in western India would have required the development of broad demand for standard goods across wide regions. In eighteenth-century England, the considerable diffusion of fashion on a national scale, to different regions and even to different classes, often preceded and conditioned the later adoption of the new technologies and new kinds of productive organisation associated with the factory. “This phenomenon,” Beverly Lemire has argued, “tied consumers of clothing to one impulse, which, as it radiated out, commanded all consumers to some degree. The impact of the rapid dissemination of styles through national publications centralized production of fabrics, while an improved distribution network resulted in unparalleled uniformity in tastes and consumption.”4 Lemire has emphasised the growing taste for ready-made cotton textile products, employing the term “mass market” to describe the character of eighteenth-century demand. Other scholars have disputed the appropriateness of the concepts of mass production and mass consumption in this period, pointing to the diverse and shifting range of inal products made by cloth manufacturers, yet they still acknowledge that cloth producers were responding to demand for more uniform products.5 John Styles, for instance, suggests that “much eighteenth-century manufacturing of consumer goods for distant markets was standardised, in the sense that products were produced in large batches to a range of standard or consistent speciications, determined in advance by a master manufacturer or merchants.”6 Although British historians tend to steer clear of arguing for any deterministic relationship between the character of demand and large-scale industry, the development of wider markets certainly facilitated the expansion of factory production. A striking characteristic of many cloth markets in western India, by contrast, was their fragmentary nature. Demand in the countryside grew hesitantly and was always constrained by the uneven character of agrarian growth. The market was tremendously variegated – segmented along the lines of gender, region, and social identity – and consumers often required clothes that distinguished them from others. Large-scale manufacturers,

4 5

6

Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, p. 185. John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-century England,” Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. Brewer and Porter, pp. 527–55; see also D. C. Coleman, “Textile Growth,” Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Julia de Lacy Mann, eds. Kenneth Ponting and N. B. Harte (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 1–21. Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design,” p. 533.

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perhaps overwhelmed by the variety of tastes and the diversity in patterns of change, did not attempt to develop marketing campaigns that might have led to the formation of more uniform tastes over wide territories; advertising of clothing, for instance, remained very limited.7 Instead, they left the dissemination of cloth primarily to smaller actors, mostly traders living in small towns. Those who dealt in textiles were diffused widely over the Presidency and possessed little homogenising power. As Rajnarayan Chandavarkar has shown, low levels of demand and the diverse, vacillating character of markets affected the willingness of investors in western India to commit large sums in ixed capital, and thus profoundly inluenced the types of technology adopted by the great mills of Bombay and Ahmedabad.8 There were also many lines of production that mills simply did not attempt to take up. Factory production required the preparation of warps of up to eight hundred yards, and managers often preferred to make multiple warps of the same quality. The weaving family or workshop, by contrast, usually prepared warps of twenty to forty yards – often suficient for two to four saris – and thus was well positioned to adjust its product to speciic requests from merchants. Moreover, until the 1920s, when mechanical dobbies and jacquards came into extensive use, large-scale manufacturers found it dificult to weave varied borders into the cloth – patterns that the artisan family, with its painstaking labour processes, could introduce easily.9 The narrow markets for some kinds of products dissuaded mill owners from devoting their energies to innovations that might have hastened their ability to enter market domains dominated by handloom weavers. Dyers, printers, embroiderers, and tailors also could create specialised designs, often on cloth originally manufactured in mills. The dynamism of small-scale cloth producers thus owed itself to a paradoxical situation. On one hand, it was stimulated by new sources of growth and expansion in the earning power of segments of the western Indian population; on the other, it stemmed from the dificulties of large-scale manufacturers in entering many limited and fragmentary markets. 7

8 9

See Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, pp. 259, 287. The history of mill owners’ approaches to marketing and of textile advertising during the colonial period has yet to be written. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, chapter 6. Introduction by F. E. Bharucha in R. D. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry with Special Reference to Hand Weaving (Bombay, Dept. of Industries, Bulletin #6, 1926), p. iii; see also Report of the Indian Tariff Board (Cotton Textile Enquiry), 1927 (Bombay, Government Central Press, 1927), vol. 3, p. 92; Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” pp. 22–3.

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Economic Change and Changing Patterns of Consumption There is some evidence that the “pie” of total cloth demand in India expanded somewhat during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making possible slow increases in production by handlooms even as the amount of cloth made in the mills of Bombay and Ahmedabad was growing signiicantly.10 Writing in 1926, R. D. Bell, Director of Industries in the Bombay Presidency, suggested that the total volume of cloth consumed in India had grown about 50 per cent between the late 1890s and the early 1920s.11 Such expansion did not merely relect population growth. All India igures suggest that per-capita consumption of cloth grew from slightly more than ten yards per person to about thirteen yards per person during the same period, and expanded further during the late 1920s; per-capita expenditures almost doubled over this time span.12 Handloom production in India as a whole participated in this growth, increasing roughly 40 per cent since the turn of the century; Bell estimated the handlooms’ share of the total market had actually grown from 27 per cent to 29 per cent.13 Based on his experience in the province, Bell believed that this general pattern held up for the Bombay Presidency.14 The fact that modest but real expansion in total production by artisans took place renders untenable any explanation for the continued presence of small producers based purely on the survival of pre-existing 10

11

12

13

14

Such an argument was made for the nineteenth century as a whole in Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Indian Economic History,” p. 9; Meghnad Desai explored this argument further in “Demand for Cotton Textiles in Nineteenth Century India,” Development and Nationhood: Essays in the Political Economy of South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 319–36. R. D. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 5. No doubt, the great western Indian famines of 1896–7 and 1899–1900 depressed the starting igure, but even if the irst iveyear period is thrown out, cloth purchases expanded about one quarter after 1901, with growth heavily concentrated in the period before World War I. M. Gandhi, How to Compete With Foreign Cloth: A Study of the Position of HandSpinning, Hand-Weaving, and Cotton Mills in the Economics of Cloth-Production in India (Calcutta: G.N. Mitra of the Book Co., 1931), pp. 14–17, 108–9. See also Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 245, for igures concerning a somewhat different period but relecting a similar pattern. R. D. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 6. Production in Indian mills had expanded by more than 400 per cent during the same period. Foreign imports, by contrast, had gone down, but overall consumption of cloth increased by more than 30 per cent. Bell based his estimates on igures of yarn consumption. R. D. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 7.

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tastes among well-established consuming groups.15 As we have seen, many older markets for Indian products outside the sub-continent and in the courts of various western Indian regimes contracted radically with the colonial takeover. Offsetting these developments, however, was new demand among sets of consumers whose economic signiicance had been comparatively small before 1870. Peasant Commodity Producers In the countryside, the extension of commodity production stimulated pockets of growth and a new buying power among segments of the peasantry. Take, for example, the case of Khandesh in northern Maharashtra, the rural region along with Berar (which fell outside the Bombay Presidency) most commonly mentioned in available sources as an outlet for textiles made by the region’s handloom weavers. According to some accounts, Khandesh during the late eighteenth century had been a thinly populated frontier region devastated by Maratha armies passing through on expeditions to the north, and subsequently by a major famine in 1803–4. Much of the countryside had been deserted and uncultivated, and roughly 30 per cent of the villages in the district had been abandoned.16 The insecurity of commerce discouraged the movement of goods as Bhil raiders from hill regions regularly harassed traders in the plains.17 After defeating the Marathas, the British brought Bhil armies in Khandesh under their control and encouraged or compelled shifting cultivators and bandits to take up sedentary agriculture. Brush was cut down, ields came under the plough, and markets were 15

16

17

This argument supports the position taken by Tirthankar Roy in many works, for example, “Consumption and Craftsmanship in Colonial India,” in Haynes et al., eds. Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, pp. 268–98. Arvind Deshpande, John Briggs in Maharashtra: A Study of District Administration Under Early British Rule (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1987), pp. 28–36; Sumit Guha, “Forest Polities and Agrarian Empires: The Khandesh Bhils, c. 1700–1850,” IESHR 33:2 (1996): 133–53; Captain Wingate, Report by Captain Wingate, Revenue Survey Commissioner, on the Plan of Survey and Assessment Most Suitable to the Province of Khandesh in Selections, old series, no. 1 (Bombay: 1852); Mountstuart Elphinstone, Report on the Territories Conquered From the Paishwa (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1821), pp. 4–7. Guha, “Forest Polities and Agrarian Empires,” p. 144; Neeraj Hatekar has suggested that the local economy may have only been temporarily disrupted by the unsettled conditions in the irst two decades of the nineteenth century; he points to the presence of considerable town populations, signiicant agricultural production, and extensive internal commerce just a few years after the establishment of colonial rule. Hatekar, “Farmers and Markets in the Pre-Colonial Deccan.”

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established.18 Cotton played a central part in this transiguration. As demand grew in Britain and then in industrial centres of the Bombay Presidency, Marathi-speaking peasants settled widely over the region, bringing large areas under cotton cultivation. The forest retreated towards the north and west of the district.19 Although the cultivation of commercial crops had irmly established itself in Khandesh by the 1850s, shifts in peasant purchasing power in the region became fully noticeable only decades later. Peasants at midcentury typically had little control over the disposal of their produce. Initially, high revenue rates set by the colonial administration, the need for credit for seed, other agricultural inputs and social requirements, and the absence of any alternative forms of security often necessitated that cultivators pledge their standing crops to local sahukars (moneylenders).20 The reliance of peasants on sahukars reduced their access to cash and limited their direct engagement in local markets. As Sumit Guha has shown, however, the character of these relationships changed after this point. As a market for land emerged with the increased value of cotton and the relative reduction of the revenue burden, sahukars increasingly looked to agricultural property rather than to the standing crop as security for loans. Increasingly agriculturalists retained control of their crops until they were harvested. They disposed of their cotton through petty traders from their villages or brokers in the larger towns, and they received direct cash payments in return.21 Because of the competition of Bombay irms and adatyas for the crop in the best seasons, the rewards of cotton cultivation grew.22 18

19

20

21

22

Guha, “Forest Polities and Agrarian Empires,” pp.150–3; Deshpande, John Briggs in Maharashtra, pp. 149–151. Administrative Report of Khandesh District, 1873, in MSA, RD, 1874, vol. 6, comp. 1173, p. 8. Sumit Guha, “Commodity and Credit in Upland Maharashtra, 1800–1950,” EPW 22:52 (1987): A-126 to A-140. A classic discussion of capitalist control over small peasants is found in Jairus Banaji, “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” EPW 12:33/34 (1977): 1375–404. Guha, “Commodity and Credit in Upland Maharashtra.” See also Guha’s “The Land Market in Upland Maharashtra c. 1820–1960,” IESHR 24:2 and 3 (1987): 117–44 and 291–322, and his book, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 129–31. David Hardiman disputes the general applicability of Guha’s argument for all of upland Maharashtra but accepts the characterisation of cotton-growing areas of Khandesh. See David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 273–309, esp. 283. Government of India. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India. Vol. 2, part 2, Evidence Taken in the Bombay Presidency, London, 1927, p. 390–1.

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By the end of the century, reports of colonial oficials regularly commented on the relative prosperity of the area, either compared to what it had been a generation earlier, or relative to the central Deccan districts. Wrote the collector of West Khandesh in 1907: “This great demand for land, the ease with which the land revenue is collected, the harmonious relations between landlord and tenants, the good clothing of even the poorer classes, the numerous ponies and tongas, and the large and substantial buildings in each village, all denote a high degree of prosperity and come as a pleasant surprise to one coming to this district from the Deccan.”23 A similar statement on south-eastern talukas came from a deputy collector in 1901: “There has been an appreciable change for the better in the mode and style of living and dress of some of the well to do cultivators and labourers, which the old thrifty Kunbi and labourer did not enjoy. They are better fed and clothed. They prefer buttoned coats and jackets to Dungree Angarkhas and Bundees, boots . . . to shoes and sandals, and European blankets to kamblees.”24 The Survey Settlement Oficer of Erandol wrote in 1890, “The condition of people is exceedingly prosperous . . . The number of well-built substantial houses, extensive threshing-loors and stack-yards, etc. and inally the clothes and ornaments of the people when compared with the number and condition of them as I remember them some 27 years ago, leave room for no doubt that the standard of comfort and contentment is cent per cent higher than the period of the irst settlement” (italics highlighting clothing-related consumption are mine).25 No doubt there was much hyperbole in such statements, as British oficers celebrated one of their more successful districts in western India and ignored in the process the poverty, vulnerability to famine, and social inequality that still persisted even in Khandesh. Yet the large number of such observations do suggest that peasants of the region were involving themselves increasingly in the market for consumption purposes, not just for the disposal of agrarian produce. Because labour was in especially short supply in this region, agricultural workers, often migrants from the central Deccan, sometimes shared in the beneits of the rural expansion, accumulating small amounts of cash to spend.26 23

24

25

26

Administrative Report of West Khandesh, 1906–7 in MSA, RD, 1908, vol. 22, comp. 511, pt. 9, p. 331. Report of the Assistant Collector from Pachora, Chalisgaon and Jamner, July 1891, MSA, RD 1892, vol. 16, comp. 1743, pt. 3, p. 309. Papers Relating to the RSS of 227 villages of the Erandol Taluka of the Khandesh Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 239 (Bombay: 1890), p. 9. Report of the District Deputy Collector, Southern Division, Khandesh, 20 July 1893 in MSA, RD 1893, vol. 21, comp. 67, pt. 6, pp. 241, 337; Administrative Report of

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Table 3.1. Volume of Cloth Purchased Compared to Total Volume of Items Purchased per Week on Weekly Market Days in Several Markets of Khandesh (in Rupees)27 Taluka (Year)

Total Volume

Volume of Cloth

Percentage of Cloth/Total

Bhusawal (1891) Jalgaon (1892) Yawal (1919) Chalisgaon (1896) Erandol (1890) Jamner (1891) Chopda (1888)

9590 38,168 9480 7532 13245 9311 4468

2501 5260 1820 2555 1200 2496 1343

26.1 13.8 19.2 33.9 9.1 26.8 30.1

Clothing made up a signiicant part of the consumption activity of agriculturalists in Khandesh. For instance, cloth constituted about onethird of goods sold during the 1880s at Maheji Fair, the most important commercial entrepôt in the region.28 In 1882 and 1883, nearly 1.9 million rupees worth of cloth was sold at the fair, the equivalent of perhaps 600,000 cheap saris. Similarly, evidence from periodic markets in the cotton-growing tracts of Khandesh around the turn of the twentieth century suggests that on average about one-ifth of the consumption goods sold at such markets were textile items. In the taluka of Jalgaon alone, cloth equivalent in value to more than 1,700 cheap cotton saris was sold on a weekly basis in local periodic markets during the 1890s (Table 3.1). Such igures would not include sales taking place in town shops, which were beginning slowly to displace periodic fairs as places of commerce around this time. As local agriculturalists developed more spending power, some traders came to settle in small towns in Khandesh, where they established shops open all through the week and year. Peasants travelling to these centres to sell their cotton and to meet with brokers, or simply to stock up on items they needed, sustained these shops with their

27

28

Khandesh District, 1903–4, in MSA, RD 1905, vol. 18, comp. 281, part 2, p. 19; Report of Deputy Collector, East Khandesh District, Southern Division 1906–7 in MSA, RD 1908, vol. 22, comp. 511, pt. 9, pp. 15, 261–3. Sources are the Revenue Settlement Survey reports found in Selections. I suspect igures vary widely not just because of differences in consumption behaviour, but also because many peasants may have travelled outside their talukas to marts known for textiles in order to make their cloth purchases. Again, it must be stressed that all these igures are quite rough. Papers Relating to the RSS of the Pachora Taluka of the Khandesh Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 266 (Bombay: 1893), p. 5.

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India Table 3.2. Volume of Cloth in Rupees Sold at Maheji Fair in Three Selected Years (Providing Places Manufactured) 1856

Khandesh Yeola Ahmedabad, Surat Sholapur Nagpur/Berar Poona Burhanpur Europe Ahmednagar Cotton thread Total

140,110 126,600 38,400 8125 329,466 NA 63,381 168,652 6,600 21,168 903,120

1860

1867

200,757 162,852 28,850 74,128 361,317 1,650 62,098 579,727 81,100 58,886 1,611,365

183,850 1,94,000 171,690 53,282 220,150 650 99,700 5,25,700 46,300 NA 1,507,700

purchases. Although no quantitative evidence exists, one suspects that purchases of cloth, which unlike grain and many groceries did not have to be replenished on a frequent basis, were often postponed for these occasional visits.29 Access to town shops improved with rail travel and then later motor transport. No doubt, much of the spending on cloth involved the purchase of mill-made products, both imports from abroad and textiles made in Bombay factories.30 As transportation networks linked Khandesh more closely to the central Deccan, however, the purchase of Maharashtrian handloom textiles made in distant artisanal centres, particularly women’s saris and cholis, became extensive. Records from Maheji registered that the sales of goods made in the weaving centres of western and central India outstripped those of European cloth, although the latter seems to have expanded considerably by the 1860s (Table 3.2).31 Clearly the table indicates a substantial regional trade in textiles, especially handloom cloth, during the 1850s and 1860s, that is, before the railways were built. Settlement reports later in the century mention saris and cholis, goods usually made by handloom weavers, as the items most commonly found in the periodic markets of Khandesh. Dhotis, coats, and “cloths of European manufactures” – all more likely to have been made 29 30

31

Interviews conducted in Jalgaon and Dhulia, 1997. For instance, see Administrative Report for Khandesh District, 1874, MSA, RD, 1874, vol. 6, comp. 1173, p. 21. Sources are the Annual Reports on the Mhyjee Fair in the MSA, RD for these years. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate comparable material for later years.

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in factories – were also noted, but less consistently.32 Handloom weavers in Ahmedabad, Ahmednagar, Sangamner, Sholapur, Bhiwandi, Guledgud, Ilkal, Malegaon, and Yeola all found extensive markets in Khandesh.33 When the region suffered a bad agricultural year or when cotton prices were depressed, the weaving industry in these towns suffered greatly.34 Only a small portion of locally consumed cloth was manufactured in Khandesh itself, perhaps because increased wage rates in agriculture and agriculture-related crafts induced rural weavers to leave their profession. The cotton-growing tracts of Khandesh, however, were hardly typical. Any signiicant growth in agricultural incomes and wealth was concentrated in several small regions of the Presidency: the cotton-growing districts of south Gujarat and tobacco farming areas of Kaira District; cotton regions of eastern Khandesh; newly irrigated areas producing sugarcane, especially in Poona and Nasik; and perhaps some parts of the northern Kannada-speaking districts, where cotton again was the main stimulus. Elsewhere, the pattern was more commonly one of stagnation and of depressed buying power among agriculturalists, a result of dependence on immigrant moneylenders.35 Increased prosperity itself

32

33

34

35

See lists of items purchased in Appendices C of various RSS Reports of talukas in Khandesh. Interviews with Gulabchand Jakotia, Malegaon, August 1997; Saraswati Bet, Solapur, August 1994; Mohanlal Karva, Bhiwandi, March 1994; M. A. Pingle, Bhiwandi, April 1994; and Haji Ali Ahmed, Malegaon, May 1994; Vittal Narsappa Jakkal, Solapur Shaharacha Itihas (Solapur: 1928), p. 116; Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, Volume 2; Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,” pp. 6–7; Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Malegaon Taluka of the Nasik District in Selections, new series(Bombay: 1941), p. 18; Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II Bijapur (Bombay, 1941), pp. 10–11 and Ahmadnagar, pp. 9–11, “An Enquiry into the Economic Conditions of the Weavers at Sangamner,” Memorandum Submitted to the Bombay Banking Enquiry Committee, in MSA, BPBEC Files, 1929–30, File 88, p. 4; J. Nissim, A Monograph on Wire and Tinsel in the Bombay Presidency, p. 9. For instance, Land Revenue Report, Nasik District 1914–1915, MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. VI, p. 10. There is a large literature on the agrarian economy of western India. All authors acknowledge considerable regional disparities within the Bombay Presidency, but there is some disagreement about the overall pattern. Whereas Charlesworth hazards the generalisation that a rich peasantry arose between 1880 and 1920, Guha suggests that any improved prosperity was largely conined in the Deccan to Khandesh and some sugarcane areas, and then only for short periods of time. There is also disagreement over the causes of stagnation. See Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan; Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule; David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917–1934 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Feeding the Baniya; Satish Chandra Mishra, “Commercialisation, Peasant Differentiation and Merchant Capital in Late Nineteenth-century Bombay and Punjab,” Journal of Peasant

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was no guarantee of expansion in the purchase of items made by small producers. For instance, there is comparatively little mention of districts in British Gujarat as signiicant markets for handloom goods, presumably because of the popularity of prints done on mill-made cloth. Thus, although the evidence seems to suggest that peasants in different regions devoted from 10 to 15 per cent of their income on cloth,36 different consumption patterns had very different kinds of stimulating effects on handloom production. The Rural Poor: The Case of Adivasis Yet there was some extension of consumption of artisanal products even among some groups in the countryside whose circumstances were most meagre. Western and central Indian adivasis from the forest belt in the current states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh, were often among the most important consumers of handloom cloth. A few manufacturing centres catered almost exclusively to adivasi markets.37 As Sumit Guha has shown, British rule spelled extensive disruption of pre-existing lifestyles, such as hunting, shifting cultivation, and banditry, among groups like the Bhils of western Khandesh. Faced with bleak economic circumstances and subordination to forest authorities, many migrated out to provide their services as labourers over wide parts of western and central India. Others settled into sedentary agriculture, eking out a living by growing inferior commercial crops on poor pieces of land. Most of the latter were heavily dependent on migrant moneylenders or on local landowners, who provided credit in exchange for control of the crop.38 As increased production of commodities for markets developed, styles of clothing altered in signiicant ways. Bhils in the forest areas

36

37

38

Studies 10:1 (1982): 3–51; Vasant Kaiwar, “Property Structures, Demography and the Crisis of the Agrarian Economy of Colonial Bombay Presidency,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 19:2 (1992): 255–300; Banaji, “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry.” For a rich study of Ahmednagar District, where agriculture was more precarious than in Khandesh, see David Hall-Matthews, Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). See family budgets in Census of India, 1921, vol. 8, appendix; Harold Mann, The Economic Progress of the Rural Areas of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1924), p. 49. Interview with V. S. Dikonda, Ahmednagar, August 1992; interview with A. D. Wasave, Dhule, August 1997. For instance, Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 130–49 and 164–81.

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of Khandesh had tended to wear more limited clothing, for example, a loincloth for men and a coarse robe without blouse for women. Those who came to reside in regions engaged in sedentary agriculture, however, seemingly developed new ideas of modesty as their involvement in commodity production grew. Men adopted the dhoti and turban, and women the sari and sometimes the choli (blouse).39 The mills supplied some of these textiles, but other kinds of cloth – especially those worn on ceremonial occasions – were manufactured by small producers in western Indian towns.40 Although the nine-yard Maharashtrian sari was the usual wear in places like western Khandesh, its adoption did not relect simple emulation of high-caste dress. According to interviews, Bhils commonly wore saris of darker colour, usually reds and greens, often with jari borders. A sari was often cut into two, with one piece worn over the head and the other around the waist almost like a dhoti. This way of wearing the sari exhibited different parts of the border than would have been the case among peasant women from the Deccan plateau.41 For many adivasi cultivators and labourers, access to material goods was mediated, controlled, or conditioned by sahukars. Peasants from marginal areas of western India often had only limited access to cash. They remained heavily in debt from year to year and had to pass over most of their crop to sahukars or landowners as a condition of continued credit. Some sahukars even paid the peasants’ revenue assessments.42 Adivasis who wished to obtain consumer goods often lacked cash and had to have the items furnished by moneylenders or landlords. One Bhil administrator who grew up in this region told me that in his youth, adivasis who needed a sari often approached their Marwari sahukar, who obtained the item through his connections in the handloom centres such as Dhulia. The sahukar simply entered the cost of the sari in his accounts of debt, heightening his claim to the peasant’s crop. In effect, 39

40

41

42

R. E. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: 1990); Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Khandesh District, vol. XII [hereafter Khandesh District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1880), p. 84. Ibid., passim, 160–3. Interviews with A. D. Wasave, Dhule, July 1997; V. S. Dikonda, Ahmednagar, July 1992. Interview with A. D. Wasave; Irawati Karmarkar Karve, Bhils of West Khandesh: A Social and Economic Survey (Bombay: Bombay University Press, 1957), p. 58. Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya, chapter 7. Hardiman sees this form of dependence as conined to some of the poorest tracts. For Khandesh, see Administrative Report of the Western Division, Pimpalner, 1892–3 in MSA, RD 1894, vol. 25, comp. 1087, p. 165; Administrative Report of West Khandesh, 1908–09, in MSA, RD 1910, vol. 17, comp. 511, pt. XIV, p. 131. Khandesh District Gazetteer, pp. 197–8.

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the ability of the sahukars to perpetuate their dominance in the countryside was related to their special access to the cloth markets in the towns, where small Marwari capitalists often exerted a similar sway over handloom weavers.43 In effect, this system worked to make adivasi cultivators into a signiicant market for cloth made in small towns. Yet the same time, their poverty and the constrained character of their access to markets limited their potential to engender any kind of rapid expansion of demand. Urban Consumers A further source of expansion in cloth consumption came from the large urban centres of the Presidency, especially Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Poona. As Table 3.3 indicates, each of these great cities grew signiicantly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting a variety of people. Commercial families migrated to take advantage of new possibilities in trade and moneylending that came with urban expansion; administrative jobs and educational opportunities attracted aspirants for employment in government service and the new professions; and industry drew rural migrants, who often hoped to translate earnings in the urban sector into an improved subsistence in the countryside. Numerically more important than all of these were the possibilities in the “informal economy”: hawking, casual labour, and work as small producers. What all these different kinds of employment shared was their ability to draw members of migrant families towards work remunerated directly in cash. With money incomes came an increased capacity for consumer expenditure.44 The great cities did not themselves become signiicant centres of artisan cloth production, but they did become major marts for cloth produced in smaller towns.45 Bombay in particular appears to have absorbed much of the output of the Presidency’s handloom weavers, particularly those from Bhiwandi 43

44

45

Interview with A. D. Wasave. The access of Bhil tenants and rural servants to cloth markets was similarly mediated by landowners, see Khandesh District Gazetteer, pp. 83, 197–8. The migration of different groups to Bombay and their occupational opportunities has been documented in a wide range of secondary literature. See, for instance, Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India; Frank Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), esp. chapter 8; Jim Masselos, “Spare Time and Recreation: Changing Behaviour Patterns in Bombay at the turn of the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia 7:1 (1984): 34–57. BEISC, vol. II, Sholapur, p. 9; Nasik, p. 11; West Khandesh, p. 10; Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, Volume 2, pp. 87, 95.

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Table 3.3. Population Growth of Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Poona46 City

1872

1881

1891

Bombay 644,405 773,196 821, 764 Ahmedabad 128,505 137,041 159,366 Poona 125,613 144,340 182,099

1901 776,006 199,604 175,463

1911

1921

1931

979,445 1,175,914 1,161,383 236,777 274,007 313,789 (est) 188,701 214,796 250,187

and Malegaon.47 Members of the Marathi-speaking middle class probably were the most important buyers in Bombay of cloth made by the region’s small producers. Here, new styles of public life and new forms of social expectations for women triggered new kinds of buying patterns. As family income rose, expenditures on clothing went up proportionately, remaining on average just more than 10 per cent of spending except at the very highest levels of income. By contrast, expenditures on food, more purely a subsistence item, shrank steadily with increases in spending power.48 The degree to which notions of “fashion” among individual buyers drove consumption patterns is a subject that requires much further investigation. Certainly, there were inluences that promoted rapid shifts in demand from one kind of cloth to another. The Bombay theatre, for instance, often set popular styles among upper- and middle-class women in the city. Particularly interesting in this regard was Bal Gandharva, a male actor who played female parts during the 1920s, and whose sari styles and ways of wearing them were often quickly adopted by educated women in the city.49 One cloth shop in Bombay regularly provided Bal Gandharva with his choice of saris free of charge in expectation that customers would lock to the store for those kinds after his performances.50 Later the cinema began to enjoy a similar inluence, as consumers imitated clothing worn by major female stars.51 Still, there were other factors that limited sudden luctuations in buying patterns. Perhaps most important was the degree of control men 46

47

48

49 50 51

Census of India. Cities of the Bombay Presidency, 1931, vol. 9, pt. 1, Bombay, p. 4; I have not included Karachi, the fastest growing city in the Presidency because of its limited importance as a market for the small producers discussed in this study. For instance, see the Testimony of the District Deputy Collector, Bhiwandi, MSA, BPBEC, File 30/7 (Thana); Interview with Mohanlal Karva, August 1992. Bombay (Presidency) Labour Ofice. Report on an Enquiry into Middle Class Family Budgets in Bombay City (Bombay: 1928); “Standard of Living of Indian Middle Classes in Bombay City,” Labour Gazette 4 (1924), p. 404. Interview with Durga Bhagavat, Mumbai, July 1997. Communication with Vijay Yashwant Shahade, Mumbai, February 2001. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” pp. 159–60.

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had over women’s consumption among the middle and lower classes. Male heads of the family (sometimes with senior female members) sometimes made purchases of women’s clothing. In line with cultural practises that militated against women’s participation in public spaces, they often bought the requirements of the whole household when they visited cloth shops.52 Although females in such contexts undoubtedly had means of communicating preferences, their lack of access to their families’ purse strings circumscribed their ability to determine purchases.53 Shop owners in Bombay attributed the advent of women’s “fashion” to the development of an educated women’s work force, which in their view irst made its presence felt in the 1930s.54 Members of the working class, especially those of Maharashtrian origin, also constituted an important market for cloth produced by artisans. Data on family budgets collected in the 1920s, although rough, indicate that workers spent from 9 to 12 per cent of their incomes on clothing, and that expenditure as a percentage of income either held steady as incomes rose or it increased slightly.55 Working class women, for instance, purchased approximately two saris and three cholis per year, and tended to buy more items and higher valued items as their incomes rose. In addition, families tended to include more adult female consumers as family incomes increased.56 According to one report, much of the production of Malegaon, where weavers made cheaper varieties of the same sari styles woven by their Bhiwandi counterparts, were used by “millhands and other labouring classes” in Bombay who “required the stuff for their daily use.”57 By 1940, workers were buying imitation forms

52

53

54 55

56

57

S. Gadgil (Mrs. Sulabha Brahme), “Distribution and Consumption of Cloth in India with Special Reference to Poona City,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Poona, 1957; Interviews with V. M. Kulkarni, Mumbai, February 2001 and Vijay Yashwant Shahade. Work by Abigail McGowan suggests a greater involvement of women in shopping than my oral sources, see “An All-Consuming Subject?” and “Consuming Families.” Further research is needed to resolve these contradictions, but it does seem that McGowan’s accounts focus heavily on Parsis and on Gujarati families whereas the shop owners were speaking mainly of Maharashtrian women. Interviews with V. M. Kulkarni and Vijay Yashwant Shahade. Bombay Presidency Labour Ofice. Report on an Enquiry into the Family Budgets of Cotton Mill Workers in Sholapur City (Bombay: 1928); Bombay Labour Ofice, Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Family Budgets in Ahmedabad (Bombay: 1928). Bombay Labour Ofice, G. Findlay Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Budgets in Bombay (Bombay: 1923), pp. 50–1. See tables on consumption from Bombay Labour Ofice, Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Budgets, pp. 90–1. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Malegaon Taluka, p. 18.

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of Ilkal, Maheshwar, and fancy patal saris, and many carried plain cotton saris back to home districts in the Konkan when they returned before the monsoon.58 The limited character of urban growth in western India, however, dampened the overall inluence of cities on cloth production. Although there were spectacular examples of rapid expansion in a few very large centres, there was little corresponding growth in secondary urban places. The percentage of the population of the Bombay Presidency living in towns with populations of more than ive thousand as late as 1931 was only 13.4 per cent if the four largest cities are excluded (20.9 per cent if those centres are included), prompting commissioners of the census in that year to conclude, “over the Presidency as a whole urbanisation is making little headway.”59 Widespread conditions of poverty and periodic unemployment in the big cities, moreover, meant that only a fraction of the population was in a position to spend signiicant amounts on clothes.60 The living standards of perhaps one-third of those typically deined as middle class (because of the nature of their education and occupations) were only marginally better than the upper sections of the working class.61 Those with employment used a signiicantly smaller portion of their incomes on attire than their counterparts in more industrialised countries.62 The Structure of Demand: Mills versus Handlooms No doubt, much of the demand associated with newly signiicant consuming groups was supplied by Indian mills, whose share of India’s cloth market grew steadily after the late nineteenth century. Yet two points about this expansion must be stressed. First, growth in the importance of the Indian factory sector after 1880 came more at the expense of imports than of handloom weavers; the share of imports in the total market declined signiicantly, whereas the handlooms held their own. Second, there were large areas of demand that the mills did not try to capture 58 59 60

61

62

BEISC, vol. II, Nasik, pp. 11–12. Census of India, 1931, vol. 8, pt. 1, Bombay, p. 9. Bombay, Labour Ofice, Report on an Enquiry into Middle-Class Unemployment in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: 1927). Bombay (Presidency) Labour Ofice. Report on an Enquiry into Middle Class Family Budgets in Bombay City. Bombay (Presidency), Labour Ofice. Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Family Budgets in Ahmedabad (Bombay: 1937); Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Budgets.

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before the late 1920s because of the limited prospects for proit. As mills overwhelmed the handlooms in some lines of textiles yet steered away from making other forms of cloth, markets in effect became divided between different kinds of goods made by different kinds of producers. The nature of this segmentation was captured well in testimony given to the Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry in 1929 by L.V. Tikekar, an entrepreneur who ran a handloom and powerloom workshop near Sholapur. Tikekar told members of the Enquiry that local weavers actually felt little competition from textile mills. The investigators, seemingly puzzled by comments that contradicted their understanding, pressed him repeatedly about the potential threat posed by mills to Sholapur artisans. Tikekar acknowledged that mills might start to manufacture some qualities of cloth then made by small producers, but he expressed conidence that local weavers could then shift into new kinds of products. “You don’t think the mills will be able to compete with them [the handloom weavers]?” asked one questioner. “No,” responded Tikekar, “because Sholapur is famous for its sarees. They require a mixed weaving which requires a special care to be taken.”63 As Tikekar’s testimony indicates, the amount of overlap in goods produced by both the mills and handlooms at any given time was relatively small. The kinds of cloth made by handloom weavers and those manufactured by mills usually were quite different, and they were often destined for different kinds of consumers.64 Yet the pattern of segmentation was not ixed. At different moments, manufacturers associated with foreign factories or Indian mills could try to enter speciic ields dominated by artisans. If such competition was effective, small producers might have to move out of that kind of business.65 Some artisans, however, adapted to such circumstances by shifting to forms of production in which mills were not involved, sometimes fashioning new products that the mills could not easily emulate. The lines along which the market was divided were many. Emma Tarlo, in her penetrating examination of clothing practices in contemporary rural Gujarat, found a number of distinct patterns of dress based on caste, education, and gender within a single village.66 Here, I will stress three very broad and especially critical ways in which demand was 63 64 65 66

Testimony of L. V. Tikekar, 4 Oct. 1929, MSA, BPBEC Files 1929–1930, File 29/SH, p. 10. Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, p. 114. See Chapter 7. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, pp. 129–283.

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divided in western India between 1880 and 1930: (1) by cloth qualities; (2) by gender; and (3) by region. Segmentation by Quality First, cloth made by artisans at the turn of the twentieth century tended to be concentrated on two ends of a spectrum of ineness. Weavers generally produced coarse cloth destined for ordinary rural folk or quite ine cloth for more prosperous consumers.67 Raoji Patel estimated in 1906 that 900 million yards of handloom cloth, more than half of all India’s handloom production, was conined to counts below 16s warp and 20s of weft. Indian mills and imports amounted to only 360 million yards in these qualities. In counts that Patel called the coarse medium range, handlooms produced only 150 million yards, whereas imports and millmade cloth amounted to ten times this much. Nearly 600 million yards of handloom cloth was in the medium and ine categories. Although there was considerable import of cloth in these categories, the Indian mills did not produce textiles in this range to any appreciable extent.68 Qualitative evidence certainly suggests this all-India pattern was replicated in the Bombay Presidency. Consumer preferences, not just price considerations, were responsible for the strong demand for coarse handloom cloth in the Bombay Presidency. Urban people sometimes readily adopted ine weaves of foreign-made cloth as their ordinary wear during the course of the nineteenth century. Rural folk, on the other hand, often felt that hand-woven cloth of coarse varieties was stronger, warmer, and more durable, in large part because of its greater thickness.69 Textile mills could potentially make coarse cotton cloth, but only by subjecting it to extensive sizing if it were to withstand the strains placed on it by powerlooms. Yet this gave the cloth an appearance and texture that many rural people did not desire for ordinary use. A commentator on Dharwar District observed: “Though cloth of foreign manufacture is commonly used for occasions 67

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Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, p. 114; Testimony of J. A.Wadia in Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1927), vol. 4, p. 81. Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, p. 14; Patel, “Handloom Weaving in India” in Report of the Second Indian Industrial Conference Held at Calcutta, Dec. 1906. For instance, Surat District Gazetteer, p. 178; N. S. Lokkar, “Cottage Industries and Co-operative Societies,” Proceedings of the Bombay Provincial Co-operative Conference (Poona: 1917), p. 113; Testimony of Director of Industries, Bombay in Government of India, Indian Tariff Board: Cotton Textile Enquiry, 1932 (Calcutta: Government of India, 1932), vol. V, p. 21.

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when appearance is of more consequence than utility, it can not compete for daily common wear with the heavy indigenous manufactures. I doubt not if English cotton goods contained a little more cotton and a little less size, they would be used to a much greater extent than they are, for in this part of the country, everyone is decently clothed and weaving qualities alone determine the fabric selected.”70 Finer forms of cloth, made largely for more prosperous buyers or for ceremonial uses of ordinary folk gave artisans a very different kind of advantage. Buyers often valued such cloth because it distinguished its wearer from others, projecting with it in design or texture qualities associated with prestige or social identity. Markets for these kinds of cloth were usually quite specialised, requiring the producer to customise the product to small sets of buyers. Indian mills often found it unproitable to design cloth for such pockets of demand. The handloom weaver thus was little threatened in these markets, especially those for cloth made from yarn of counts 60s and higher.71 Tikekar himself suggested that Sholapur weavers preserved markets in local forms of cotton sari with counts higher than 30s.72 In most kinds of silk cloth or cloth with mixed silk and cotton, small producers faced little competition. The mills in Bombay had the technical capacity from the late nineteenth century to produce cheap silk clothing, but the factories were unable to make anything equivalent to the highest quality of textiles employing fancy designs or material, such as the pitambar silks of Yeola and Poona, or the mashru of Ahmedabad and Surat.73 Cloth employing jari in the borders, which was consumed widely in varying forms in western India, also proved dificult for the factories to produce economically.74 During the irst three decades of the twentieth century, the overall structure of demand for handloom products changed signiicantly. There appears to have been some constriction of markets for small producers at the coarse end of the spectrum as mills entered these areas of manufacture 70

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Papers Relating to the Revision of the Rates of Assessment on the Expiration of the First Settlement in the Old Dharwar Taluka of Dharwar Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 161 (Bombay: 1883), p. 6. Report of the Indian Tariff Board Regarding the Grant of Protection to the Cotton Textile Industry (Calcutta: Government of India, 1932), p. 166. Testimony of L. V. Tikekar, p. 10. Edwardes, A Monograph upon the Silk Fabrics, p. 26; Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission 1916–18 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Ofice, 1919), vol. IV, Bombay, p. 557. Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, p. 13.

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Image 5. “Yeola Silks, c. 1909”. Source: Nissim, Monograph on Wire and Tinsel in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1903), after p. 13, Plate XV, reprinted in Art in Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series on Bombay Presidency (New Delhi: Navrang, 1976).

and as demand shifted towards iner products.75 Centres making coarse cloth often declined in signiicance, in some cases precipitously. Whereas two thousand looms making course khadi were engaged in Dholka in 1887, only ive families did a similar business in 1925.76 In Sangamner, a centre that mainly produced coarse saris for rural women, a large number of weavers were reported to be leaving the profession for agriculture, and the weaving population dropped by more than 20 per cent between 1911 and 1930.77 Although small producers in some places were unable to cope with these changes in taste, others adjusted their production. Between 1910 and 1930, weavers in Sholapur had shifted from the manufacture of 75

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For somewhat similar arguments, see Haruka Yanagisawa, “The Handloom Industry and its Market Structure”; Tirthankar Roy, “Size and Structure of Handloom Weaving in the Mid-Thirties,” in Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996). Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Dholka Taluka, p. 30. “An Enquiry into the Economic Conditions of the Weavers at Sangamner,” pp. 2–3.

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chargomi patterns using 20s and 30s yarn to a wide variety of patterns – Ilkal, Maheshwar, and fancy patals – using yarn of 30s to 60s in the body of cloth as well as mercerised yarn that gave a silk-like impression in the borders.78 Interviews provided numerous examples of the tendency for artisanal families to shift from cotton to silk79 or from coarser varieties of cotton to higher qualities of cotton or artiicial silk.80 Finally, there was a tendency to move towards the imitation of ine cottons or high-quality silks (such as the Ilkal or Maheshwar silks) that served as markers of high status.81 Segmentation by Gender A second line along which the market was segmented was that of gender. To put the case simply, men in western India tended to consume millmanufactured cloth whereas women tended to wear fabrics woven on handlooms. Changes in male styles often permitted a certain standardisation of production and thus made capture by factories possible. Men living in the cities and even in the countryside, in partial accommodation to the clothing styles associated with the British (as well as to earlier Muslim inluences), increasingly adopted certain kinds of stitched clothes – pants, shirts, coats, and jackets – that could be made up out of large runs of mill cloth.82 The use of such clothing rarely involved wholesale adoption of European styles or a complete discarding of Indian forms; often men struck some compromise between the indigenous and foreign in their total attire.83 Yet any customising of cloth to the male wearer often did not need to be imparted in the weaving or dyeing stage, but could be carried out in a inal tailoring of mill-made textiles. Factories also often took up the manufacture of dhotis, perhaps the standard wear of rural men

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“Notes by the Inspector, Weavers Co-operative Society on the Statement of the Sholapur Weavers on the Sholapur Hand Loom Industry, 1 Oct. 1929,” in MSA, BPBEC 1929–30, File 30/14. For instance, interview with N. Dikonda, Solapur, August 1992 discussing his grandfather in Ahmednagar. Interviews with Narsayya Bhumayya Gentyal, Solapur, September 1994; with Murlidhar Bhutada, September 1994; and with Prakash Bomdyal (discussing grandfather and father), September 1994; interviews with weavers in Surat and Bhiwandi also reveal that weavers concentrated in ine areas of production by 1930. See, for instance, Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of Bhiwndi Taluka of the Thana District in Selections, new series, no. 638 (Bombay: 1929), p. 5. This is discussed further in Chapter 7. Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, p. 3. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, pp. 45–61.

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until well into the twentieth century.84 At the same time, certain kinds of clothing generally made on handlooms, such as angarkhas (long-sleeved coats), lungis, and turbans, gradually lost favour among male consumers in the region or became conined to ceremonial occasions and private use in the home.85 Women’s clothing had to bear different kinds of symbolic burdens. Among middle-class women, for instance, patterns of change were associated with new notions of domesticity. As McGowan has argued, Indian housewives increasingly challenged the authority of elder women and other relatives, assuming control over family budgets. Yet at the same time, they were expected to serve as embodiments of national identity and to embrace virtues of modesty, devotion to family, and spirituality. Families often placed a premium on forms of consumption that represented modernity and a departure from outmoded customs but that still expressed the rejection of ostentation, individualism, and the frivolous emulation of Western styles. Dress, as perhaps the most obvious form of presenting personhood, was a particularly powerful way of projecting these values. Women adopted items of clothing – the blouse, the sari, the petticoat, and simple footwear – that could convey new gender ideals.86 Among upwardly mobile rural groups, new forms of women’s clothing suggesting modesty and respectability served to relect the abandonment of former kinds of lowly status and subordination. Often, artisan producers were those best positioned to make goods that were seen as carrying such meanings. Clearly, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artisans tended to gear their production to consumption by women. In western India, whereas men may have increasingly chosen cloth types that cut across social boundaries, female clothing often stood as a special marker of group differentiation, both in the countryside and the city. Through most of this period, preferences amongst women placed an emphasis on clothing with multiple colours, often with designs woven by handloom weavers in the borders. As Enthoven wrote in 1897, “saris and khans along with shelas and shalus, would seem virtually to be a monopoly of the 84

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Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 69 includes dhotis in a list of clothing from which handlooms had been largely ousted by 1910. More elaborate dhotis with designed borders, however, still were produced extensively on handlooms. Aroon Tikekar, Jana-Mana (Poona: Sri Vidhya Prakashan, 1995); S. Gadgil, “Distribution and Consumption of Cloth in India,” p. 24; Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, p. 3; Report of the BEISC, 1938–40 (Bombay: 1941), p. 16. The logic of this paragraph has been informed by early drafts of McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India. See also McGowan, “An All-Consuming Subject?”

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handloom, no doubt owing to the extent to which they are furnished with borders and ends of innumerable and elaborate designs.”87 In 1918, only ive or six mills manufactured saris in all of India, and these were mainly involved in making grey cloth without designs or borders.88 During the 1920s, mills of western India took up production of saris to a more signiicant extent, but mainly in the cheaper counts.89 Commentators at the time sometimes attributed the persisting demand for coloured saris to the conservatism of Indian women. Yet change in female attire was undoubtedly taking place, although not usually in the direction of more “Western” styles. At the all-India level, there is evidence that the sari became the dominant form of women’s dress in India only during the colonial period.90 In the Bombay Presidency, new sari designs disseminated widely. By the second decade of the twentieth century, small numbers of young women in urban centres in Maharashtra began to adopt six-yard saris rather than the nine-yard saris traditionally associated with the region.91 According to a report from Ichalkaranji, new kinds of saris known as patals made of art silk yarn, displaced the “oldfashioned lugade with monotonous and stereotyped borders” during the 1920s; this account indicated: “[T]he patal became an ever-changing and attractive thing capable of appealing to rapidly changing tastes in colours and borders.”92 Even more signiicant, perhaps, was the change in blouses known as cholis. Women in some low-status groups had not used a breast covering earlier in the nineteenth century, and others used a cloth tied in front that covered only half of the back. Yet changing notions of modesty eventually encouraged the spread of new forms of blousepiece.93 Large numbers of handloom weavers were involved in the production of this cloth, such as those in Guledgud, a town whose signiicance as a weaving place grew signiicantly after the mid-nineteenth century. 87 88 89

90

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Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, p. 4. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 551. Government of India. Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1927), vol. IV, p. 602; G. S. Hardy, Report on the Import Tariff on Cotton Piece-Goods and on External Competition in the Cotton Piece-Goods Trade (Calcutta: Government of India, 1929), p. 67. One report indicated that the proportion of women wearing saris in the United Provinces had gone from 5 per cent to 95 per cent in urban areas, and from negligible proportions to 60 per cent in rural areas. See M. P. Gandhi, A Monograph on Handloom Weaving Industry in India-1947 (Bombay: 1947), p. 57. Tikekar, Jana-Mana. See the discussion of the case of Lakshmibai Sardesai in McGowan, “An All-Consuming Subject?,” pp. 39–40. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 12. Tikekar, Jana-Mana; Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, Indian Costume (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1951), p. 163. The wearing of cholis was apparently off limits to many widows until the twentieth century.

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Segmentation by Region A inal important form of segmentation to be mentioned is that of region. Different styles of clothing diffused to different degrees over western India. One example of such unevenness in the regional distribution of consumption was in the extent to which designs were produced by printing or in the weaving process itself. Printing, like weaving, was potentially a means of imparting special patterns to cloth that could serve to demarcate the particular status or identity of the buyer. As with hand-woven textiles, printed cloth was often especially associated with women’s wear. Printing, however, could often convey such special qualities irrespective of whether the basic fabric had been manufactured by handloom or by factory. Most printing in western India was done by small-scale producers using mill-made cloth, usually of European origins in the late nineteenth century and increasingly of Indian or Japanese make in the twentieth century.94 The choice by consumers of printed or hand-woven cloth thus created different kinds of opportunities for different sets of artisans. In the Bombay Presidency, the use of printed textiles was concentrated in the Gujarat districts, where women tended to wear clothing with patterns that covered the whole cloth. George Birdwood observed in 1880 that Maratha people rarely wore printed goods.95 There were exceptions. Some people in the Deccan, for instance, did wear printed cloth ornamented with jari patterns; Muslims of the Deccan and Konkan purchased calico prints in signiicant quantities.96 In Gujarat, however, the desire for printed cloth was signiicantly higher, especially among women of high-caste background.97 Neighbourhoods of printers using a variety of techniques from block printing to tie-dyeing were scattered widely in the small towns of British Gujarat and in Kathiawar, and several thousand printers concentrated in the city of Ahmedabad. Even as late as 94

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Indian Textile Journal, IV (Sept. 1894), p. 284; Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1927), vol. I, p. 157. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, vol. 2, p. 89. Ibid.; Indian Textile Journal, IV (Sept. 1894), pp. 284–5. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, Volume 2, p. 89; Indian Textile Journal, IV (Sept. 1894), pp. 284–5. This regional pattern has been noticed by many observers of contemporary dress, for instance, Linda Lynton, The Sari: Styles, Patterns, History, Techniques (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1995). Of course, this stark comparison does not allow for the tremendous intra-regional variation as well as techniques of embroidery and the use of jari. Gujaratis, especially in the Saurashtra region, did still consume substantial amounts of handloom cloth. See especially Tarlo, Clothing Matters, chapter 5, esp. pp. 141–53.

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1938, more than 1,500 artisans, using stamps that they altered from year to year as styles evolved, participated in the calico-printing industry of Ahmedabad.98 Yet in Maharashtra, the dominant expectation was that women, at least from upwardly mobile groups, would wear multi-coloured sarees with hand-woven borders or attached borders using jari, especially for ceremonial occasions such as marriages.99 Members of the middle class rarely could afford the inest qualities of sari, which were often sent to Bombay from Benares, Hyderabad, Maheshwar, and Ilkal. But imitations of such products as the Ilkal and Maheshwar saris, using ine cotton yarn or art silk yarn instead of silk, were often within the budget of many middle-class families and were purchased increasingly by the 1920s.100 Textile qualities, gender, and region were only the broadest categories along which the cloth market in western India was segmented. Manufacturers in different centres concentrated in making specialised kinds of cloth destined for different sorts of consumers. The weavers of Ilkal made silk and mixed-silk fabrics with speciic designs associated with the town for destinations in northern Karnataka and Maharashtra; silk weavers of Guledgud produced khans (material for blouses) for sale in the Deccan, Khandesh, and Berar; artisans of Yeola made silk saris with gold thread borders for the middle classes of Bombay and turbans mainly for rich peasants in the cotton-growing tracts; weavers in Ahmednagar made coarse, coloured nagari saris of nine yards’ length for adivasis in Khandesh and Gujarat; producers in Bhiwandi fashioned high-quality cotton cloth of ine yarn, principally for buyers from Bombay and the Konkan. Different merchants and karkhandars specialised in products for more speciic narrow markets deined by region, caste, and gender. Within these general types, the demand for different designs appears to have been in continual lux, requiring producers to alter their patterns regularly. The limited, specialised and luctuating character of consumption in these kinds of cloth proved conducive to artisan manufacture, which required little capital investment and the ability to develop products to suit small groups of customers: In other words, the nature of cloth markets encouraged a kind of “lexible specialisation.”101 98 99

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Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Ahmedabad (Bombay, 1941), p. 11. Interview with Mohanlal Karva, August 1992; Jamila Brij Bhushan, The Costumes and Textiles of India (Bombay: Taraporevala’s Treasure House of Books, 1958). Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of Bhiwandi Taluka of the Thana District in Selections, new series, no. 638 (Bombay: 1929), p. 5. See Charlin Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past and

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Marketing Networks and Small Town Capitalism The active role of many hundreds – perhaps thousands – of mercantile actors spread over the landscape of western India was crucial to the creation and perpetuation of demand for goods made by small producers. “Spot” transactions, where weavers sold directly to the actual wearers of cloth, never were the dominant form of exchange even before the late nineteenth century. At the great fair of Maheji in the mid-nineteenth century, merchants dealing in products made in distant locales typically sold cloth to numerous petty dealers, who in turn took these goods to villages and periodic bazaars; few weavers appear to have been present.102 With the growing importance of production in small towns located far away from the actual consumers, the opportunities for craftspeople to participate in marketing directly became even more restricted. Weavers in the early twentieth century occasionally appeared in smaller rural bazaars to hawk their wares, but often were unable to compete with traders who carried a richer variety of goods.103 The ordinary producer was linked to networks of small towns spread over much of western India – and from there to rural consumers – by traders who possessed access to resources and credit, transport, and channels of commercial information. These businessmen were in effect the marketers of the textiles they carried, discovering the kinds of products that were in demand in different areas, but also attempting to shape consumer choices by addressing cultural values salient to their buyers. In consuming regions, the key igures were the traders who maintained shops in small towns, major fairs, and larger urban centres. Such upcountry buyers either provided goods directly to customers in shops located in their home bases, or they sold small batches of saris to petty dealers, some of whom circulated between periodic markets in the countryside. One merchant from Jalgaon in East Khandesh told me that before 1950 he bought cloth at various manufacturing centres around western India, then sold most of these goods to consumers at his shop, which peasants would visit when they came to town.104 The role of such town-based stores (relative to itinerant

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Present 108 (1985): 133–76. Here, I stress just one key feature of the concept, that is, the employment of general-purpose machines that made possible the customisation of products to small and changing markets by producers with craft skills. See the annual reports of this fair, for instance Annual Report of the Mhyjee Fair, 1863 in MSA, JD 1864, vol. 12, comp. 173, pp. 171–87. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Yawal Taluka of the East Khandesh District, p. 4. Interview with Chandu Rajkotia, July 1997.

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peddlers) seems to have grown during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.105 The key to the working of market networks was the interaction between these upcountry buyers and commercial actors in the producing centres, who seem to have generally fallen into two categories: adatyas (brokers) and sahukars (cloth dealers/yarn sellers/moneylenders). As Chapter 4 will discuss, these two types of merchant possessed very different ties to actual producers, but their relationship with the out-of-town buyers could be quite similar. In many cases, it had a social as well as an economic foundation. In Maharashtra, both upcountry buyers and adaytas/sahukars were typically Marwaris, and some kind of social connection between the two, based on kinship, marriage, and friendship was common. Upcountry buyers often stayed at the home of merchants in the producing centres and ate their meals there when they visited, which could be two to three times a year. As Jains with special dietary restrictions, Marwari cloth dealers relied on the network of their community fellows for their food and housing while on tour. Out-of-town dealers expected the merchants in producing centres to check the quality of cloth, to know which weavers were making what kinds of cloth, and to conirm the reputation and skills of individual producers. The merchants thus needed to be in close contact with artisans and to understand textiles and the processes of making it. One ex-adatya told me, “We were knowing every weaver [in Dhulia], his quality, his track record, so the customer [the out-of-town buyer] could not be cheated.”106 There were a number of adatyas or sahukars in every weaving town – perhaps a dozen in Dhulia, approximately twenty in Malegaon, and as many as one hundred in Nagpur in the Central Provinces – so the buyer could simply switch to some other agent if he were dissatisied. Many dealers gravitated to the biggest, most knowledgeable, and most reputable local igures, especially when placing orders between visits.107 Because the local merchant provided cloth to upcountry dealers on credit, he in turn had to be sure of the latter’s reputations. During part of the year, he, members of his family, or trusted employees would themselves travel around the countryside visiting the home shops of the upcountry merchants. Part of the purpose of these visits was to collect payments and to have conversations about any upcoming needs. Another part was 105 106 107

Haynes, “Market Formation in Khandesh, c. 1820–1930.” Interview with Jugal Kishore Gindodiya, Dhule, August 1997. Interview with Jugal Kishore Gindodiya. The discussion of the workings of the way weavers interacted with local adatyas is furthered explored in Chapter 4.

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to scope out the size of the upcountry merchant’s establishment and to solicit local sentiment about his reliability. A trader able to convince the visitor of his capacity to repay could ask for more extensive credit and make bigger purchases in the future.108 A new trader entering into the market, by contrast, would typically have to ind a guarantor to back his credit purchases.109 Such methods apparently worked quite effectively. One ex-adatya told me that his irm never had a single instance when a dealer failed to honour inancial obligations.110 In northern Gujarat and Saurashtra, somewhat different modes of marketing prevailed, ones that involved an extra layer of intermediaries. Handloom goods made in villages, towns like Patan and Bhavnagar, and far-lung centres as distant as Madras and Benares passed through the hands of larger dealers, called wholesalers or semi-wholesalers, located in Ahmedabad. Small traders who catered mostly to customers of Muslim, low-caste, or adivasi background in villages of Saurashtra, Kutch, Panch Mahals, and Mehsana would come to make purchases from these wholesalers in order to stock their own shops. In most cases, they relied on the mediation of local adatyas to arrange the sale. Unlike the adatyas of the Deccan, these igures did not live in the producing centres for handloom goods, and many had no contact with artisans. Yet they were similar in some other respects; they knew cloth and the appropriate prices that might be paid for it; they facilitated purchases by extending credit to the buyers; and they travelled around in consuming districts in order to assess the buyers’ trustworthiness and assets. Many specialised in dealing in saris from one particular micro-region. Buyers able to assess cloth without an adatya’s help and obtain supplies without his credit could make direct purchases, but the ability to do so was only established after lengthy periods of experience.111 Knowledge about the behaviour and expectations of consumers lowed in the reverse direction of the movement of cloth. The upcountry traders, being more closely in touch with actual consumers, were the critical igures in assessing the character of demand. They would relay information about changes in local preferences to the merchants from 108

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Interview with Ramchandra Lalchand Bhavsar, Malegaon, August 1997; Kishore Mundade, Dhule, August 1997; and Mohanlal Motilal Agrawal, Dhule, August 1997. Interview with Mohanlal Motilal Agrawal, Dhule, August 1997. Interview with Ramachandra Bhavsar, August 1997. Interviews with Girish Bhagavat Prasad, Dahyabhai Lavisi, Kaushal Shah, Amit Shah, Chaturdas N.Tanna, R. D. Patel, and Prabhudas Lallubhai Kothari, all of Ahmedabad, August 1997.

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whom they obtained their requirements, who would in turn communicate market requirements to the weavers, whether the weavers were under their control or more independent. One adatya told me that buyers (i.e., upcountry dealers) were always letting him know what customers wanted.112 Another cloth merchant who had goods manufactured on order told me that he was constantly asking his “clients,” that is, the out-of-town purchasers, what products were in demand: “Nowadays it would be called market research. Actually we were doing all these things but not using the scientiic language.”113 In effect, these kinds of market systems made possible a series of micro-adjustments of production to changes in demand in places far removed from the weavers. In response to input passing through the adatya or sahukar, small producers could shift the design of the borders they wove or the colours of yarn they employed, perhaps even the very kind of sari they made, as consumer tastes changed. The ability to ine tune what they made to it buyers’ desires gave them a considerable advantage over the factories in such tiny markets. Mill agents were hardly in a better position to inluence demand. If anything, they relied on a more complex system of intermediaries, one usually involving commission agents, wholesalers, and retailers, although a few had shops of their own in bigger cities.114 Relying on the social networks and channels of communication controlled by merchants, actors in the producing centres themselves often lacked any signiicant method for directly inluencing distant buyers to absorb what they made.115 Yet by the beginning of the twentieth century, a few larger artisan-capitalists or traders in production centres were able to re-shape the market and create wider demand for new products. The methods by which the earliest of these entrepreneurs built their businesses are now somewhat hazy, but it appears that the processes often shared some common features. First, they were initiated by persons with intimate knowledge of the production process, either as master weavers, who commissioned artisans to make goods on contract for them, or as karkhandars, who themselves supervised their own places of production. They were thus able to design new products in anticipation of demand. Second, their irms had to operate on 112 113 114

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Interview with Gulabchand Jakotia, Malegaon, August 1997. Interview with Mohanlal Karva, Bhiwandi, March 1994. For references on marketing systems of the mills, see Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1927), vol. 2, pp. 140–2, 242–7, 270, 400, 477–9; vol. 3, 260–5, 394–8. This point will be examined in more depth in Chapters 4 and 5.

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a suficiently large scale that some family members or employees could devote attention to cultivating an interest in their cloth outside the weaving towns. Smaller weavers could not afford to free up individual family members for the travel and business networking needed to forge new markets some distance away. Third, they were able to establish more direct access to consumers, sometimes in effect circumventing the existing chains of intermediaries in order to drum up business through contact with the owners of local cloth shops. One example of such a irm is that of the Irabatti family in Sholapur. Well before the twentieth century, members of this family had migrated to the city and had established positions as leaders of the Padmasali community. Lacchmayya Irabatti, the irst truly substantial igure in the family, developed a large karkhana in the late nineteenth century, and he apparently expanded it during the famine of 1899–1900, when the colonial administration relied on him to employ large numbers of weavers in making coarse cloth as a form of relief. Vithoba Irabatti, his son, took over the business in the early twentieth century. He made innovations in the style of sari known as Solapuri band, changing its dimensions, using iner yarns, and introducing a variety of designs. Helped by another local Padmasali, he cultivated new markets as far away as Bombay, Baroda, Indore, Nagpur, and Gwalior. He is reputed to be the irst weaver of Sholapur to advertise his saris through handbills. He continuously experimented with new techniques to accelerate the manufacture of handloom saris, even making an attempt to develop powerloom production late in his life. Just after World War I, his business was reported to possess more than ive hundred looms and to employ nearly 150 families, although one suspects many of these were asamis (sub-contractors) working in their own homes or in small karkhanas rather than workers in his own workshops.116 A second example is the dissemination of the Ilkal sari. Ilkal was a town in what is now northern Karnataka, where the water was especially well suited for imparting fast dyes.117 In the late nineteenth century, it was already well known for the quality of its silk, mixed cotton, and silk sarees, which found their way to south India and Maharashtra. About 500 looms were in operation in 1864, and by 1883 this number

116 117

Irabatti, Notes From My Life (inconsistent pagination). Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of Hungund Taluka of the Bijapur Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 566 (Bombay: 1920), p. 3. For the characteristics of Ilkal saris, see Lynton, The Sari, p. 147.

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had increased to 684.118 After 1900, local sari dealers, most notably Rajappa Yenni and Shankarappa Sakri, were able to build a wider popularity for the saris manufactured in the town. Rajappa’s in-laws lived in Poona, and he worked to build up a market for Ilkal saris there, often carrying batches of cloth with him in his travels. He also developed new border designs that won great popularity. Shankarappa similarly strove to win markets in Maharashtra. Gradually, the Ilkal sari achieved a reputation as a marker of social prestige, one that was adopted widely over the region for use on religious holidays and weddings. No doubt attracted by the demand from their customers, upcountry shopkeepers in Maharashtra travelled to Ilkal to make purchases.119 Local merchants in Ilkal continued to develop new designs in order to extend the range of buyers.120 By 1929, there were a reported 3,025 looms in the town.121 Merchant families such as the Muddbihal, Sapparad, and Kothariya families further extended the market for Ilkal saris in the 1930s and 1940s.122 Yet the story of Ilkal sari production does not end in Ilkal itself. Entrepreneurs in other towns such as Sholapur, Bhiwandi, and Malegaon began to develop “imitations” of the Ilkal sari for buyers who could not afford the original silk and mixed-silk products. They had Ilkal saris woven with cotton yarn, mercerised cotton, and eventually artiicial silk.123 They introduced individual variations on the general design, in effect creating their own unique sari forms. By the 1930s, the Ilkal pattern seems to have surpassed all other kinds of hand-woven sari. By that time, the type consisted of a variety of improvisations on a common theme. In the process, efforts by innovative cloth dealers to disseminate the Ilkal sari that at irst glance seem to have relected some standardization in demand actually were fractured into a variety of impulses. Large numbers of imitators introduced their own more modest changes 118

119 120

121

122 123

Papers Relating to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessment into the Hoongoond and Part of the Uthnee Talukas and Yadwal Mahal of the Gokak Taluka, all of Belgaum Collectorate in Selections, new series, no. 81 (Bombay: 1864), pp. 6–7; Administration Report of Kaladgi Collectorate, 1878, MSA, RD 1878, vol. 11, comp. 1090, p. 168. Interview with Vittappa Muddbihal, Ilkal, Feb. 2001. This account is derived heavily from Census of India. Handicraft Survey Report, part X, series 9, Karnataka: Ilkal Sarees (Delhi, 1989). S.V. Telang, Report on the Handloom Industry in the Bombay Presidency, 2nd ed., (Bombay: 1933). Interview with Vittappa Muddbihal, Ilkal, February 2001. Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of Bhiwandi Taluka, p. 5. Notes by the Inspector, Weavers Co-operative Societies on the Statement of the Sholapur Weavers on the Sholapur Hand Loom Industry, 1 Oct. 1929, in MSA, BPBEC 1929–1930, File 30/14.

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Image 6. “Ilkal Silk Saris with Pure Jari Border from the 1930s” Source: Census of India, 1981, Handicraft Survey Report, part X, series 9, Karnataka: Ilkal Sarees (Delhi: Custodian of Publications, 1989), p. 82a.

in design and quality. These secondary entrepreneurs were often much smaller traders in cloth or karkhandars who, no doubt prompted by upcountry dealers, tailored their products to consumers unable to afford iner kinds of silk sari. Thus, in the long run, broad shifts in consumption could take place without any tendency towards homogenisation of taste; this process continued to leave signiicant room for manufacture by small producers. The role of karkhandars in selling specialised goods outside their localities was critical to the development of what I will call “weaver capitalism.” In later chapters, I will focus on relations of production within workshops employing multiple labourers on a wage basis that constituted these forms of organisation. In order for such forms to develop, however, karkhandars had also to begin building up markets with a signiicant potential for expansion. In most cases, they did not simply respond to existing demand or rely on existing networks; they aggressively tried to cultivate new buyers for products they manufactured, innovating constantly to produce something that would get a response. In the early twentieth century, however, such weaver-capitalists remained one of many kinds of different actors engaged in the trade of artisan-produced cloth, and their importance remained secondary to adatyas, sahukars, and out-of-town merchants.

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Small Town Capitalism in Western India Conclusion

Any reconstruction of the forces that sustained demand for cloth made by artisans in the Bombay Presidency during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost by necessity must turn away from consideration of global developments; rather, such a reconstruction needs to maintain an appreciation of the characteristics of the regional economy and the role of a variety of actors spread widely over the western Indian landscape. Handloom weavers and other small producers lost their international markets, but by the late nineteenth century, they were making cloth for consumers who often lived hundreds of miles away from themselves. To reach these consumers, they relied on the mediation of large numbers of commercial igures who circulated between different locales to gather or distribute goods, money, and information. Consumers were usually people who had increasing access to cash during this period as a result of their involvement in peasant commodity production, agricultural labour, or paid work in cities. In many cases, they participated in forms of identity politics that found expression in dress, particularly women’s dress. At the same time, new commercial networks took shape, linking places of production with shops in consuming towns. Changes in small town capitalism were thus connected to broader processes of social and economic transformation. Western Indian markets changed in multiple ways during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but any tendency towards the development of more homogenous demand was limited. Pockets of consumer tastes for specialised products, especially among Maharashtrian women, reproduced themselves over time. The unevenness of processes of economic change and the continuous constitution and re-constitution of group identities inhibited any trend towards conformity or generalised fashions stretching across the Presidency. Mercantile actors sustained these patterns of demand through the information they gathered and then communicated across the western Indian countryside as well as through the techniques they adopted to market their goods. A tremendously diverse set of cloth markets were perpetuated, sometimes creating space for factory manufacture, but also leaving considerable room for the thousands of artisans who made cloth in small households or in larger workshops using wage labour.

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4 The Organisation of Production

The development of dynamic centres of small-scale manufacture in western India was made possible by complex forms of controlling and utilising artisanal labour. By the late nineteenth century, the great majority of artisans engaged in making textiles in the Bombay Presidency were highly dependent on merchants and other businessmen for the funds they relied on to sustain their subsistence, the yarn they required to supply their looms, and the access to distant markets they needed to sell their cloth. The possibilities for accumulation by merchants and artisan entrepreneurs, often achieved by depressing payments to craftspeople, fostered a variety of forms of small-scale capitalism in urban places like Surat, Sholapur, Malegaon, and Bhiwandi. Yet production relations were not simply imposed from above; they were constructed in the context of negotiations and contests between small capitalists and labourers in households and workshops. Serious discussion of labour in artisanal industry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a relatively recent development among social and economic historians. Assuming capitalist relations were characteristic primarily of large-scale enterprises, scholars working on the colonial period typically overlooked the subordination of labour in smaller productive organisations. Historians gave scant concern to issues relating to the organisation of work, processes of appropriation and exploitation, and the nature of workplace conlict, which under other circumstances might be expected to be the central stuff of social history. This oversight is profound, because without an understanding of production relations in artisan enterprise, there can be only a limited appreciation of the

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historical processes by which many of the most important structures of contemporary South Asian capitalism have taken shape. More recently, historians have begun to correct this oversight. Most notably, Tirthankar Roy has made relations of production a central theme, highlighting signiicant variations in organisational arrangements from place to place and industry to industry.1 As I have pointed out in the introduction, however, his work has often drawn its interpretative frameworks from the master narratives of capitalist transformation, positing, for instance, the reduction of “‘independent’ weavers to different kinds and degrees of dependence,”2 a movement from “custom to contract,”3 and a transition from family-based forms of production to the small factory.4 Ultimately, Roy suggests, handloom weavers came to form a “proletariat,” which in some cases “more and more resembled a class,” and which acquired a “proletarian identity from out-of-caste or familial afiliations.”5 Roy’s work thus places small producers squarely within a familiar framework of “proletarianisation,” that is, a model of change in which economic actors once located in stable and supportive traditional social matrices become reduced by the forces of capitalism into (often rootless) individuals who exist at the whim of market forces and who ultimately try to cope by developing ties based on class. Recent research on largescale industry in South Asia has in effect challenged the value of such teleologies by engaging in in-depth analyses of capital-labour relations.6 The idea that proletarianisation seems applicable to small-scale production may result more from the dificulty of inding source material that would permit similarly close analyses of the internal dynamics of the household and the workshop than it does from any special character in the nature of handloom production. 1

2 3 4

5

6

Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, chap. 3 and Traditional Industry in The Economy of Colonial India. C. J. Baker also takes up these issues in An Indian Rural Economy, chap. 5. Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, p. 74. Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, p. 30. Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, p. 233. Roy does suggest that the importance of the family often remained central in handloom production, but does not recognise how family often remained critical in “factories” (termed “workshops” in this study to distinguish them from mechanised mills). These quotes are from Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, pp. 80, 82, and 103, respectively. These challenges have ranged widely, from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s cultural approach in Rethinking Working-Class History to Rajnarayan Chandavarkar’s work, especially The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India and “Industrialization in India,” which stresses social conlicts at the level of workplace and neighbourhood.

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This chapter discusses the processes by which merchants, workshop owners, and labourers constructed production relations in artisanal manufacture, particularly in the handloom industry. It suggests signiicant dificulty with models positing the replacement of one kind of ordering principle by a categorically different one (from custom to contract, from family to factory, etc.). As we have seen, many small producers in western India were enmeshed in relations of subordination to and dependence upon capitalist actors well before the late colonial period. The major modes of organising production present in the nineteenth century continued to exist in the twentieth century, although important shifts in the mix of those forms did take place. Wage employment was no doubt growing among weavers and other artisans, although any transition before 1930 was gradual. The shape of capital-labour relations remained highly heterogeneous. At any given moment, artisanal production in the Bombay Presidency was characterised by a wide range of structures and practises, from households with one or two looms worked by family labour to larger workshops reliant on hired workers. Forms of production relations did change in the twentieth century, but they developed their particular shape out of a complex politics of the workplace and locality,7 in which artisan-workers were important participants. Everyday actions by workers, including small acts of resistance at the level of individual workshops, placed limitations on the kinds of disciplinary orders bosses could establish.8 Regional merchants and workshop owners certainly managed to appropriate most of the proits from cloth sales, often reducing artisans close to the margin of subsistence. Yet they had to adopt a set of localised mechanisms for overcoming the artisan family’s potential for independence, and they had to accommodate themselves to the cultural practises of their work forces. The role of the family economy, artisanal rhythms of work and leisure, the artisans’ high level of mobility, and the importance of community afiliation all inluenced the shape of domination by merchants and workshop owners. 7

8

This discussion has been inluenced by Thompson, The Nature of Work; Burawoy, The Politics of Production, and Liu, The Weaver’s Knot. Also critical have been studies that have looked at resistance in shaping capitalism in India, especially Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India and “Industrialization in India”; See also Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj; Washbrook, “South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism.” The concept of everyday politics of work stems primarily from the scholarship of James Scott and Benedict Kerkvliet, as discussed in the Introduction. It has been utilised with great effectiveness in Geert de Neve’s study of labour in small-scale productive units in southern India, The Everyday Politics of Labour.

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In general, the various bosses involved in the small-scale manufacture of cloth established more effective control over the products of handloom weavers than they did over the actual labour processes involved. The social character of the production organisations that developed out of contests in the workshop its awkwardly with any universal theory of change. Relationships in the twentieth-century handloom industry sometimes were partially based on formal contracts, although such contracts probably never became the norm. Non-contractual relationships based on family, kinship, caste, and patronage – social ties that were themselves in the process of construction in the small towns of western India – continued to be central to the maintenance of control and discipline over artisan labour. In some cases, the development of production ties along these lines was as much a product of the strategies of capitalists seeking to maintain their hold over workers as it was a sign of any kind of stable “tradition.” Any movement towards the formation of horizontal ties between workers was complicated by developments that sometimes strengthened the workers’ relationship with their bosses. The Diversity of Structural Forms The factors promoting the penetration of the artisan economy by mercantile igures were multiple. As we have seen, few weavers or other small textile producers in the late nineteenth century lived close to the consumers of their products. They typically relied on intermediaries who sold cloth through complex networks in which a great variety of commercial actors took part: inanciers, brokers, owners of cloth stores in consuming centres, and itinerant traders who took cloth to periodic markets. The sources of their raw materials were similarly distant. Artisans obtained cotton yarn, silk, dyes, gold and silver for gold thread and other supplies from merchants who had access to and knowledge of the sophisticated domestic and international markets for these materials. As small actors unable to obtain reliable information and with little staying power, most artisans were disadvantaged in these markets. The severe luctuations in demand through the year and over longer stretches of time also rendered artisans vulnerable to those who could provide cash or raw materials when times were tough. There was, however, no unilinear path towards some singular form of relationship of producers with merchants and workshop owners. The records indicate at least four general forms of production relations throughout the period studied here, although the lines between these types

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were blurred. First, there were “independent” weaving households that purchased yarn on their own, and that at least theoretically were positioned to sell to the highest bidder. Many of these households disposed of their cloth through adatyas who negotiated sales of manufactured items with visiting out-of-town merchants. Second, there were dependent weaving households, units that relied on merchants for the provision of inance or raw materials, and that in the process entered into arrangements giving the merchants control over the inal product. Third, there were the independent karkhanas, larger workshops containing multiple looms and employing signiicant amounts of extra-familial labour. Fourth, there were dependent karkhanas, in which workshop owners (known in Sholapur as asamis) did work on contract for larger karkhandars or for cloth merchants. All of these types existed at the beginning of the period studied in this chapter, and all existed at the end. At the turn of the twentieth century, purely “independent” weavers were already in the minority. P. N. Mehta, writing around 1909, estimated that 50 per cent of handloom weavers in the Bombay Presidency were persons “in debt,” who pledged their looms and their homes to moneylenders or sowkars (sahukars), and who were usually compelled to do the work these bosses demanded (the second type just mentioned). Another 20 per cent, “hopelessly in debt,” worked in the house of the sahukars (that is, they worked in karkhanas, the third type). Even the other 25 per cent not heavily in debt struggled to maintain their independence (the irst type).9 It is less clear whether the small number of weavers who could be deemed independent represents a signiicant deterioration after 1870. To review a discussion laid out in Chapter 1, putting-out systems and strong controls over labour by merchant capitalists had played a signiicant role in artisanal production well before the formal establishment of British rule.10 There is considerable evidence in the Bombay Presidency around the middle of the century of the existence of master-weaver or putting-out systems as well as of small karkhanas with multiple looms

9

10

Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, in IOLR, V/27/630/5, pp. 1, 6–7. The remaining 5 per cent were the sahukars themselves. Mehta clearly lumped all capitalists into the category of “sowkar,” whether they were involved in the production process or mainly in selling and commissioning goods. See Chapter 1; for a discussion, see Douglas Haynes, “Artisans and the Shaping of Labour Regimes in Urban Gujarat,” Development and Deprivation in Gujarat: In Honour of Jan Breman, eds. Ghanshyam Shah, Mario Rutten, and Hein Streefkerk (New Delhi: Sage, 2002), pp. 79–82.

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worked with wage labour. In Yeola, a small set of Gujaratis, who were in effect master weavers supplying silk yarn to the actual producers, enjoyed a monopoly over silk manufacture.11 Men referred to as master weavers held a similar place in the silk industry of Ahmedabad at mid-century.12 One report as early as 1840 mentioned a number of towns weaving cotton cloth in the southern districts of the Bombay Presidency, where there were “families with some little capital, the owners of several looms, and occasionally carrying on the joint trades of cloth merchant and master weaver, and when this is the case, employed as salesmen by their manufacturing neighbours.”13 In 1864, a revenue survey of Hoongood Taluka in Belgaum District stated that “most of the looms are owned by the weavers themselves; but there are some master-weavers owning up to 25 to 30 looms.”14 An 1865 report on Sampgaon Taluka unambiguously acknowledges the existence of small karkhanas. Although most weavers worked on their own account, this report indicated, a few had “as many as four or ive looms in their houses, worked by hired labour.”15 Until Mehta’s report, however, it is dificult to arrive at any quantitative estimate of the distribution of different organisational types. After 1910, the evidence suggests that the proportion of independent weavers remained relatively constant in the Bombay Presidency, but that there was a partial shift from dependent households to karkhanas. Roy provides igures for 1940 that 21 per cent of handloom weavers in the Bombay Presidency were “independent,” 24 per cent “on contract,” and 54 per cent “factory workers” (a term indicating employees in karkhanas).16 These igures seem to indicate the growing importance of karkhana labour (in types three and four) at the expense of family workers on contract (type two), but not a signiicant decline in the number of independent 11

12 13

14

15

16

“Petition to the Revenue Commissioner by 9 inhabitants of Mazeh Nagar, Purgannah, Suba Naggar,” 21st Sept. 1835 in Maharashtra State Archives, RD, vol. 52/739, comp. no. 33, pp. 283–4. E. G. Fawcett, Report on the Collectorate of Ahmedabad, p. 78. “Mohturfa Taxes: Mr. Langford’s Report on the Konkan and Southern Maratha Country, 5 July 1840” in MSA 1840, RD vol. 97/1181, comp. 134, pp. 10–11. Papers Relating to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessment into the Hoongoond and Part of the Uthnee Talukas and Yadwal Mahal, p. 6. The fact that most weavers owned their own looms itself is not evidence for their “independence,” because many weavers owning looms still were not free to sell their own cloth, the chief determinant of independence in the records. Papers Relative to the Introduction of Revised Rates of Assessments into part of the Uthnee Talooka, The Tasgaon and Samgaon Talukas, p. 40. Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, p. 79.

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weavers (type one).17 The igures are very rough, but any change over time relected a shift in the mix of organisational forms, not the replacement of one form by new forms that had not existed previously. For the most part, production structures predominated that allowed appropriation of the weaver’s product at very low costs and that simultaneously retained many structural features commonly associated with artisanal production. The ability of capitalists to impose entirely new forms of labour control was constrained by two factors. On the one hand, the instability of markets for textiles made by handloom weavers inhibited forms of investment that would have encouraged merchants to seek stronger roles in the management of production.18 On the other, artisans’ resistances compelled businessmen to make a series of compromises with their work forces. Relations of Production: The Artisan Household For much of the period studied here, the most common organisational form of artisan production was the family, whether “independent” or “dependent.” In the early twentieth century, there were many tens of thousands (perhaps 100,000) weaving households in the Presidency. In some respects, these households shared characteristics with European and Japanese artisanal production during the eighteenth century in that there was a close association between “household production based on the family economy on the one hand and the capitalist organization of trade, putting-out and marketing on the other.”19 Unlike those examples, artisan households in western India were not dispersed widely over the countryside but were concentrated in small towns, and most weavers specialised in weaving and did not divide their time between agricultural labour and the handloom. Some part-time weavers did exist. In Gujarat, 17

18

19

Similarly Joshi’s argument about the growing domination of capitalists from the 1870s to the 1930s in Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan seems on strong ground when it stresses the growth of karkhanas paying wages, but is somewhat less compelling when it argues for a pattern of decline in the proportion of independent workers. This tendency is examined further in Douglas Haynes, “The Logic of an Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and Technological Change in Western India, 1880–1947,” Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, eds. Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173–205. Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 1:3 (1976), p. 296; Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization.

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for instance, a number of Dheds (a low-caste category) split their time between weaving and work for wages elsewhere in the countryside.20 The quantities of cloth produced by such families, however, were relatively insigniicant in comparison to those made by weavers with little connection to agriculture.21 Where artisan households were production units, weavers carried out the manufacture of cloth in and around their homes, which served as both living quarters and workplace. Weavers generally owned their homes, their looms, and their other tools, although frequently these served as security against debts to moneylenders. Usually the loom itself occupied a central place on the ground loor near the entrance of the home. The space for weaving had to be at least eight feet by sixteen feet so that the warp could be stretched out for several yards behind the loom. The weaver left his position from time to time during the day to release the warp yarn after several yards were woven.22 In order to maintain proper levels of atmospheric moisture for the yarn, the loom was generally situated in a shallow pit dug into the home’s earthen loor, and the yarn was extended just a few inches above the ground, which was kept wet, sometimes by regular application of fresh cow dung. The weaver generally placed his legs into this pit for comfort. When a Dr. Hove visited artisanal homes in Gujarat during the late eighteenth century, he found the rooms where looms were located shut off from natural light and lit by lamps, which apparently made it easier for the weavers to detect defects in the yarn.23 At present, of course, electric lighting is used. The artisan household usually provided most of the labour it required, and it utilised the efforts of most members of the family. There appears to have been a strong normative tendency towards the development of a division of labour within the family based on age and gender. Typically, male adults worked the looms whereas females, young children, and sometimes the elderly helped with preliminary processes: winding yarn onto spindles for the weft, reeling, separating yarn threads in preparation 20

21

22 23

Annual Report Relating to the Establishment of Co-operative Credit Societies in The Bombay Presidency, 1912–3 (Bombay), p. 15; Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 7. I suspect that many town weavers did join the casual labour market in small towns when weaving work was not available; temporary migration was also an option. So the terms “full-time” and “part-time” may not be apt to distinguish the kinds of strategies they adopted. Annual Report of the Department of Industries, 1929–30, p. 23. Hove, Tours for Scientiic and Economic Research, pp. 140–1.

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Image 7. “Weavers in Western Indian Town, c. 1873” (note pit loom) Source: Narayen, Shivashanker; Photographic Print. 1873. The Archaeological Survey of India Collections. British Library Photo 1000/52(4905). Published with the Permission of the British Library.

for the warp, sizing, and even dyeing (in cases where this activity was not performed by separate families).24 As one perceptive observer pointed out, highlighting the relations of inequality within the household: “[J]ust as the weaver depends upon the sawkar, so a class of satellites often of his own family depend on the weaver.” The payments to family labour were usually realised in “the form of the price of the inished cloth,” and were provided to the male household head.25 Whereas outside specialists came to perform preliminary tasks such as warping and sizing in some locales during the course of the twentieth century, women of the households continued to do pirn winding almost everywhere. In general, young boys 24

25

Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 45, 103–4; Testimony from Sholapur District Weavers Central Co-operative Union, in Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1927), vol. IV, pp. 602–03; Thana District Gazetteer, p. 389; useful discussions of the processes taken up by women are found in the Poona District Gazetteer, pt. 1, p. 347 and pt. II, p. 198. “First Assistant Collector to Collector of Ahmednagar, 20 Oct. 1899,” in MSA, RD (Famine) 1900, vol. 72, comp. 215, p. 161.

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became apprentices of their fathers or uncles in their early teenage years before taking up the loom on their own.26 The labour performed by women and children was central to the productivity of the family and could hardly be termed “supplementary” (a word used in colonial sources). Women, for instance, often carried out warping through a laborious process on the streets and alleys in weaving neighbourhoods. Typically, they ixed two poles out on the street and stretched thousands of ends between them for every piece of cloth; the yarn was marked every nine yards (the length of a sari).27 This activity absorbed a very substantial amount of the family’s time. Although warping was usually carried out during the day, female family members would do winding late into the night. Women’s work appears to have been equally demanding amongst the producers of silk cloth. There women had to sort, reel, and twist the raw silk before the family sent out the yarn to specialists for warping; male members of the family did the dyeing and the inal processes of weaving.28 Women in virtually all artisan households did most of the domestic tasks as well. The household was best able to minimise its costs when unpaid family labour did all of these jobs and no outside workers had to be hired. In effect, an ideal family size to sustain a weaving household at the beginning of the twentieth century appears to have been about four to ive; this might mean a weaver, his wife, one or two children, and perhaps one elderly family member.29 When a market existed for its production, such a family could generally maintain a sort of balance between its subsistence needs, its requirements for preliminary labour, and the availability of labour time for weaving. Too many non-weaving family members might create consumption pressures that would be hard to meet; too few might mean dificulties in processing suficient yarn and the need to hire outside labour.30 Yet such a balance must have been impossible 26

27 28 29

30

Interviews gave a variety of ages from thirteen to eighteen for the time when boys began to learn weaving. Interviews conducted in Bhiwandi and Surat, 1994. Gupte, “Thana Silks,” p. 34. For instance, “First Assistant Collector to Collector of Ahmednagar, 20 Oct. 1899,” in MSA, RD (Famine) 1900, vol. 72, comp. 215, pp. 161, 167. The literature on “proto-industrialization” in Europe is extremely rich in its hypotheses about the kinds of demographic adaptations families might make to develop optimal equilibrium between labour and consumption. Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy”; Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York: Academic Press, 1977). Demographic evidence to support signiicant generalisations in the Indian case is limited.

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Image 8. “Woman Stretching Warp on Street, c. 1930” Source: S. V. Telang, Report on Handloom Weaving in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933), p. 28.

for many households to maintain due to mortality, variations in fertility patterns, and the maturation of male children. In such instances, the household could make other adjustments. One report suggested that if family size was more than four, “it is probable there will be either two weavers or one or more employed in other trades.” If there was excess non-weaving labour, “the women of the family work for any weaver who wants work done and by this distribution of employment the whole community inequalities [in terms of needs for weaving labour and those for preliminary labour] are levelled up.”31 Wage labour outside the family could thus be essential to the maintenance of the household economy when temporary or long-term “imbalances” existed. Hiring others from outside, working for wages in other artisan households, and even entering the general labour market in the small towns were all strategies that individual families could employ. Another adaptation families could make was the re-allocation of female labour within the household. Colonial records from the Bombay Presidency make little mention of female engagement in weaving itself.32 31

32

“First Assistant Collector to Collector of Ahmednagar, 20 Oct. 1899,” in MSA, RD (Famine) 1900, vol. 72, comp. 215, p. 167. One brief mention of weaving by women is found in Sholapur District Gazetteer, p. 270.

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Interviews, however, suggest that women did sometimes weave. Girls grew up in households where exposure to all the processes involved in making cloth was normal, and they often carried their knowledge over to the families into which they married. One can imagine a variety of circumstances in which artisan households might have drawn on female skills in weaving: for instance, when a large number of children meant that the family had excess labour available for preliminary processes, when illnesses or even death of male family members necessitated that women take up the loom, or when pressures to ill an order created strong incentives for women to weave when looms would otherwise be idle. Although norms that frowned upon weaving by women did exist, these hardly were so strong as to enforce a completely rigid division of labour. As Chapter 7 will mention, the skills of women in weaving proved critical in the early history of some entrepreneurial families that expanded their businesses successfully. The need to dispose of their cloth on a regular basis led weaving families into complex relations with mercantile actors.33 Two basic types of arrangement developed, which, following Mehta’s terminology, I refer to as “independent” and “dependent.” Independent Households In some cases, independent weavers sold their goods to cloth traders who had shops in their towns. In Poona, for instance, cotton weavers in the 1880s took their cloth to Shimpi merchants – who operated about ifty shops in the Budhwar ward of the city – receiving two to ten rupees per sari and one and a half to ive rupees per turban.34 Yet more commonly, independent weavers in the towns of the Marathi-speaking districts disposed of their textiles through a market system known as gujari.35 These towns generally had a special cloth market where the shops of adatyas were located. As discussed in the previous chapter, out-of-town buyers would visit the adatya quarters whenever they needed supplies. In the late afternoon, usually at a ixed hour, weavers would pass through these 33

34 35

For an exceptional case from the 1860s where weavers tried to hawk their goods directly in rural bazaars, see Papers Relating to the Second Revision Settlement of the Yawal Taluka of the East Khandesh District, p. 4. Poona District Gazetteer, p. 198. This system has largely been reconstructed from interviews in Dhule, Malegaon, and to a lesser extent in Bhiwandi. The gujari system is also mentioned in Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 44 and 107, and Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 11.

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markets, carrying their saris on their shoulders or on carts (and later on bicycles); in some cases they sent their sons, providing instructions about what price to expect.36 Hundreds of weavers would crowd together in the streets, moving from shop to shop in hopes of inding buyers. Cloth merchants from out of town would sit in the shops of the adatyas at this time. The brokers, knowing the kinds of qualities and types of saris different local households manufactured, would call into their shops the weavers whose production matched the buyers’ demand. If a weaver received an offer he could accept, he would sell to the buyer. The adatya would mark the cloth with his special stamp. The weaver then would take the cloth to another shop of the adatya elsewhere in town, where it would be packed and made ready for the buyer.37 The crucial igure in this marketing process was the adatya, who was formally an agent of the out-of-town buyer. Adatyas were key in negotiating the inal price of the cloth. When a transaction occurred, it was they who paid the weaver, in effect extending credit to the buyers at the same time. The weavers’ immediate need for cash meant they were hardly in a position to sell directly to out-of-town buyers, who did not expect to repay their debts for up to six months. Such a system placed the weaving family at a disadvantage. The weaver frequently came to market aware that he had to sell his cloth that day in order to purchase the yarn required for his next saris and to meet his subsistence needs, but with little knowledge about changes in market prices. During the slow seasons, when few buyers were around, the temptation of weavers to dispose of their goods at even lower prices was high. At such times, some of the adatyas themselves might try to stock goods, knowing they could make larger proits when prices rebounded. Weavers apparently sometimes asked or begged merchants to take their produce when buyers were few. Adatyas also might themselves become putting-out masters under such circumstances, providing yarn to weavers under arrangements that guaranteed them access to the inal product. The “independence” of the small weaving household thus was precarious. According to P. N. Mehta, ordinary weaving families were in a constant struggle to keep from falling into long-term dependent relations. Mehta stated of these weavers: “[T]heir slow and un-economical system of manufacture, domestic misfortune, bad seasons and 36

37

For instance, Khalil Ansari told me of the time as a teenager his grandfather irst sent him into the market to dispose of goods, recalling this as a proud moment marking his coming of age. Interview in Malegaon, 1997. This account is based upon extensive interviews in Dhule and Malegaon, Summer 1997.

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famine conditions gradually drag them down from independence to indebtedness and from indebtedness to serfdom under the clutches of sowkars.”38 The line between “independence” and “dependence” could be thin indeed. Dependent Weavers and Putting-Out Systems Dependent households differed little from independent ones in a number of respects. They too often controlled their own looms and other tools. Typically, the artisan family provided most of the labour it required. The division of work along gender and age lines appears to have been similar to that in more independent households. Most importantly, it was the weaving family that allocated work within the household, not some outside set of actors. Although such weavers possessed a certain autonomy over labour processes within the home, they lacked much control over the disposal of their goods. With limited resources of their own, they came to rely on merchant capitalists, who provided them with raw materials or inance and who purchased the inal products of the looms in return. During times of low demand, they often either borrowed from sahukars or they obtained small amounts of work by entering into arrangements that gave the merchants access to their cloth at low prices throughout the year. Through such arrangements, they lost control of their ability to sell their products to the highest bidder. Dominance over weaving households was assumed by the sahukars, often local dealers in yarn who acquired a privileged position in the regional yarn market as a result of their ties to Bombay or upcountry spinning mills. In the Deccan and Northern Karnataka, these individuals were usually persons from outside the weaving communities, especially Gujarati and Marwari Banias. Many of them migrated to local towns during the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries to take advantage of the regional trade in handloom goods. With time, they came to exert inluence over a number of weaving families by advancing money or yarn to artisans. Evidence from late-nineteenth-century Guledgud, a major handloom producing centre in Karnataka, suggests that sahukars typically served as master weavers for 25 to 125 weaving families.39

38 39

Telang, Report on the Handloom Industry in the Bombay Presidency, p. 6. “Report of H. M. Desai, 19 Dec. 1896,” in MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 35, comp. 49, 193–5, contains a list of local merchants in the Guledgud area and the number of looms under their control.

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Generally, a kind of putting-out system developed. A weaving household would get an advance of yarn from the sahukar, perhaps just enough to make one or two saris. In return, the weaver would agree to provide the merchant with the inished cloth at a given price. The merchant ultimately took on himself the burden (and proit) of disposing of the inal product. From the perspective of the merchants, there were a number of advantages to such forms of labour organisation. The amount of capital a merchant invested was generally rather small, equal only to the cost of the yarn he had purchased and any money he had extended to the weaver for performing this task. This mitigated somewhat the risks of participating in the cloth market, or rather, it meant that much of the risk was passed on to the actual weaver. If a sudden contraction occurred in the market, the merchant was usually able to pull back quickly without losing a sizeable investment. Moreover, he usually negotiated the terms of his agreement with the weavers during the slowest periods of the year, when the artisan family was in its most desperate situation, and when it was ready to engage in extensive self-exploitation to ensure the reproduction of family members. This structure thus was one well adapted (from the sahukar’s perspective) to the rapidly luctuating markets in handloom cloth. Merchants were often reluctant to invest in even the very simplest form of improved technology that would raise the level of the looms’ production but would make participation in the market riskier.40 There were, however, certain drawbacks to these structures for the merchants. Although able to reduce payments to labour to quite low levels, the sahukars, with little physical presence in the place of manufacture themselves, possessed only a limited ability to exercise any kind of regular supervision over production processes.41 The potential was always present for the weaving family to engage in “everyday forms of resistance” that limited the merchants’ control.42 Weavers could short-change the pickcount used in the product, and then use any excess raw material to produce cloth on their own account. One master weaver in Surat recalled in an interview that artisans sometimes used castor oil to increase the 40 41

42

Haynes, “The Logic of an Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy.” Such characteristics of putting-out systems have been discussed more generally in Stephen A. Marglin, “What do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,” The Division of Labour: The Labour Process and Class-Struggle in Modern Capitalism, ed. André Gorz (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976), esp. pp. 28–36. The concept of everyday forms of resistance is taken from Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

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weight of the product that they furnished back to him in order to give a false impression of the cloth’s quality; other weavers would cut a yard or two of cloth from the loom and try to sell it on their own. Another merchant mentioned catching weavers who cut yarn from the edge of the cloth, or who increased the weight of the cloth by adding water or exposing it to dew (such acts disguised the density of the weave, making it possible for weavers to sell the excess yarn or use it to make cloth independently). In such instances, he would normally admonish the weaver, but he had little means of ensuring that these acts did not take place again. “This kind of malpractice was going on [all the time],” he stated, “so you had to let it go.”43 These everyday actions seriously constrained the ability of merchants to ensure the quality of their products and to make certain that weavers used all of the raw material for the purposes for which it had been provided. The partial autonomy of artisan families could frustrate the objectives of the sahukars in other ways. Weavers might try to ind alternative buyers for their cloth. P. N. Mehta suggested that such efforts were commonplace amongst dependent artisans who wove in their own households: “In good times when the demand for manufactured articles is brisk . . . [they] are often tempted to get a loan from some other person and thus try to deal with more than one Sowkar on the sly.”44 A merchant in Surat reported to me that weavers sometimes cut from the loom cloth they were manufacturing for him and began doing other merchants’ jobs during busy times of the year, when such dealers might be willing to offer higher prices. He felt compelled to visit weavers’ homes regularly to make sure his work was on their looms. The fact that markets existed in raw materials pilfered by weavers or in cloth made from such materials of course is an indication that the merchants themselves hardly constituted an effective common front against such behaviours. These kinds of practises became extensive during times of crisis. During the famine of 1896–7, weavers in Guledgud, fearing that they would receive no further advances from Marwari merchants, began taking cloth made from yarn provided by the Marwaris directly to the local market, causing the merchants to refuse to supply the looms altogether.45 43

44 45

For such practises elsewhere, see D. Narayana Rao, Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries in Madras Presidency (Madras, 1929), pp. 26–7. Mattison Mines, who has studied handloom weaving in contemporary Tamilnadu, reports similar tendencies. Master weavers regularly complained about weavers reducing pick count or absconding altogether. Personal communication from Mattison Mines. Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 1. “Report of H. M. Desai,” p. 131.

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Clearly these actions have strong parallels to the European experience during the eighteenth century, where “embezzlement” of raw materials was commonplace and where it appears the practise was widely condoned in the culture of weavers.46 In the case of western India, however, it is impossible to reconstruct the system of values that sanctioned such acts. To the extent they are mentioned in colonial records, they are critiqued as evidence of the weavers’ insincere commitment to capitalist discipline. The general triumph of the businessman’s ethos in the weaving towns means that workers today are unlikely to defend such actions, especially to outsiders. In Bhiwandi, I interviewed a weaver who expressed general dissatisfaction about his relationship to his employer ifty years earlier, but who gave few particulars about the actual sources of friction. A local man who had introduced me to the weaver, however, told me that the man’s reluctance to mention speciics stemmed from the fact that he had once been caught stealing. Not surprisingly, merchants were less hesitant to talk about the practises of their workers than were the workers to admit to engagement in such behaviours themselves. To a great extent, weavers preserved control over the rhythms of their day, and generally refused to submit to attempts to regulate their work and leisure hours. As one observer of Indian artisans remarked, “[the weaver] is a fairly hard-working individual . . . if it were not so he would be starving, but he is accustomed to work at his own time and in his own home, and the regular hours obtaining in a factory are distasteful to him.”47 In the Madras Presidency, attempts by the Industries Department to set up government-sponsored handloom factories generally failed, because “caste weavers” would not accept a work day governed by the time clock.48 In his study of the Deccan during the 1930s, Joshi found both independent and dependent weavers in the Presidency working on loose timetables of their own making, sometimes stretching from early morning to very late at night, but including breaks for smoking or chewing tobacco and visits to the market.49 It was, after all, “the lavour of independence and ease”50 associated with the weaving household that frequently led artisans to persist in a trade that could barely sustain familial subsistence. Perhaps most signiicantly, merchants were

46 47 48

49 50

For instance, see Styles, “Embezzlement, Industry and the Law in England.” Chatterton, Industrial Evolution in India, pp. 214–8. Testimony of Subrahmanya Ayyar in Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission, Vol. III (Madras and Bangalore), pp. 175–7, 185. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 106–7. Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 9.

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sometimes unable to coerce more production during busy times, when the opportunities for proit were greatest. Weavers could simply decide to leave town when the pressures became too great.51 A weaver in Sholapur pointed out that artisans who were heavily in debt to a sahukar, and who could not ind an alternative patron to assume the debt, would in some cases just lee with their dismantled looms to their places of origin in rural Telengana. A relative of his did just that on one occasion. As we have seen in previous chapters, the weaving population was highly mobile, and emigration was a regular resort. Preventing artisans from leaving or working for other bosses when demand was high was a signiicant concern of many merchants. The continuing importance of community, too, placed constraints on the ability to control artisans. In most weaving centres, members of one or two castes monopolised the profession. Organisations within these communities sometimes made strenuous efforts to prevent the skills of weaving from becoming more widely disseminated. L. V. Tikekar reported in 1929 that his initial efforts to start a handloom enterprise early in the century were undermined by his inability to recruit artisans from local weaving communities, who felt that their skill would be stolen. Eventually, he was compelled to recruit unskilled labourers, whom it took up to two years to learn the kinds of weaving required in his workshop.52 Merchants unwilling to train their own work forces had no other recourse than to rely on labour from the existing weaving communities; there was little possibility of developing a “free” labour market unencumbered by caste afiliations. The Thana District Gazetteer reported in 1882 that the Momins of Bhiwandi had such “a strong class feeling,” that they joined “together so staunchly in thwarting efforts to court oficers that defaulting debtors seldom pay.”53 Pilfering yarn, selling cloth on the side, failing to respond when merchants sought to speed up production, absconding with advances and the like were small-scale stratagems designed to give the weaving household some extra breathing space in its efforts to secure its subsistence, leisure, and freedom. Although these acts may have been sanctioned by larger community norms, they did not assume a collective character. I am aware of only one incident of joint action of household producers against cloth dealers by artisans in western India during the colonial period; this is 51 52 53

Testimony of Subrahmanya Ayyar, Minutes, pp. 84–5. MSA, BPBEC, 1929–30 (Evidence), File 29/SH, p. C8. Thana District Gazetteer, p. 388.

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mentioned in a single reference of one sentence.54 This is perhaps not surprising in towns where local weavers worked for dozens – perhaps hundreds – of different small capitalists. The potential for small acts of resistance, however, was substantial enough that merchants often devised their own methods for checking the independence of their workers and for preventing these behaviours from making serious inroads into their proits. Most importantly, they fostered relations of indebtedness and dependence through loans on top of the advances they provided for production, including those for wedding and festival expenses of the artisans. Unlike the co-operative societies sponsored by the colonial regime after 1905, sahukars were willing to provide loans for such “non-productive” purposes. In some cases, they charged very little interest rate at all on these loans; in other cases, they assessed very substantial rates, as much as 24 per cent or higher. Yet more important than the earnings that such lending provided was the improved possibilities for control over the products of the looms that it allowed. Through debt, the sahukars cultivated relationships of personal obligation that artisan clients often found dificult to break. When artisans threatened to strike out on their own, the merchants would press for repayment of the debts or claim forfeiture of the weaver’s home. Unless the artisan family had somehow been able to accumulate some savings, it was unable to break away. Once a debt was contracted, concluded one source, “the weaver is likely to remain for ever in a state of want and dependence.”55 Manipulation of the methods of repayment of advances could also serve as a means of ensuring access to the product of the weaver’s looms. One especially detailed example of such methods comes from Gokak, a small weaving town in Belgaum District. There, 250 of the 300 weaving families in the town were under the control of the local sahukars, who provided them yarn purchased from a local Marwari yarn seller. While lending the dependent weavers yarn, the sahukars generally debited the account for two or three times the value of the yarn actually provided.

54 55

See page 191 for this incident. Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 7. In the European context, Marglin refers to the similar role of wage advances. “Wage advances were to the capitalist what free samples of heroin are to the pusher: a means of creating dependence. Both represent an addiction from which only the exceptionally strong-willed and fortunate escape . . . [they] helped to prevent the worker from circumventing his legal obligation to work for no one else (until his debt was discharged) by restricting the outlet for his production.” Marglin, “What do Bosses Do?” p. 26.

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When the weavers returned the cloth, they would be credited with an amount similarly exaggerated, thus erasing the yarn debt on paper. The purpose of this accounting procedure was to compel the weavers to deliver the cloth to the dealer who had furnished them the yarn. If they failed to do so, the weavers risked being held responsible for the total amount falsely debited. Local sahukars showed little reluctance to take to court those weavers who proved refractory in meeting their obligations. In Gokak, weavers also borrowed heavily from the sahukars, mortgaging their houses to them, and sometimes becoming permanently indebted.56 These systems of payments, I would argue, can best be understood as efforts to counteract weavers’ attempts to elude contractual agreements and to preserve their independence. Most probably because of past experiences or an awareness of artisan practises elsewhere, the merchants feared that weavers would either fail to return inished cloth promptly or would use the yarn advanced to them and then sell the cloth on their own for the best price in the market. In the early twentieth century, sahukars also became concerned in some cases that local co-operative societies might attract their weaver clients.57 By creating these substantial obligations, the merchants ensured their command over the products of local looms in a context where they could not dictate the nature of production process within the artisan family. In sum, merchants lacked the ability to exert regular supervision and discipline over weaving households, and were compelled to accept a degree of independence on the part of even those most in their debt. They instead tried to develop forms of domination that did not involve direct intervention in the production process, but ensured that they would retain control over the cloth for which they had provided yarn. Thus they could maintain their access to the weavers’ labour at low costs even when demand was high. Through these methods, they established vertical ties with their workers, overcoming at least in part the potential for the formation of horizontal solidarities across the larger class of artisan labourers. The Karkhanas Perhaps surprisingly, many of these same general characteristics of artisanal practise were present in the larger workshops. At irst glance, the 56

57

“A Note on Some Economic Aspects of Handloom Weaving Carried out in Gokak Town in the Belgaum District,” 31 Jan. 1930, in MSA, BPBEC Files 1929–30, File 88, pp. 1–2. See page 224.

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karkhanas seem to represent purely a system of factory organisation based on wage employment, places where supervision and discipline would have seemingly been much easier to accomplish. Most karkhanas were small units containing four to ten looms in which the loom owner employed much of the labour he needed from outside his family. A small number of bigger karkhanas with ifty or more looms emerged. In general, most karkhandars in the Bombay Presidency came from the local weaving communities. We have already seen that some workshops hiring labour existed in western India in the middle of the nineteenth century, and probably much earlier than this. Karkhanas clearly had become a signiicant organisational form in most of the weaving towns by the century’s end. R. G. Kakade suggests that the irst karkhana in Sholapur, with about ten looms, may have been started up by a Padmasali weaver around 1880.58 An account of weavers in the town of Guledgud during the famine of 1896–7 reveals that more than half the artisan establishments surveyed contained at least four looms, with some even possessing as many as ten to ifteen.59 The “family size” of one weaving irm was given as twentynine people, suggesting that either this census had counted labourers as family members or that large extended families functioned as work units.60 The edict issued by the local Khatri panch in 1906 against hiring non-Khatri jari workers certainly suggests the widespread character of wage employment in Surat around this time.61 There can be little doubt, however, that larger workshops employing workers on a wage basis became more widespread in the Bombay Presidency during the early twentieth century. The expansion of the karkhanas was particularly associated with the growth in the migration of skilled weavers into the region. Often migrants found jobs with weaver employers who had successfully accumulated small amounts of capital and who had purchased extra looms. By the 1930s, more weavers of Sholapur worked in karkhanas than in household irms, and there were a number of workshops with more than forty looms.62 There is less evidence of truly big irms in Momin-dominated weaving places like 58 59

60 61 62

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p.11fn. In the 1930s, weaving establishments with as many as four looms would almost always use some non-family labour. “Report of H.M. Desai,” pp. 171–95. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this document. For a brief history of the karkhanas in Sholapur, see Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 11–12.

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Bhiwandi, Malegaon, and Dhulia, but there, too, the majority of weavers were recent migrants who came to work in workplaces with multiple looms.63 The association between migration and the karkhana system alerts us to the limitations of seeing the development of larger workshops simply as an outcome of the owners’ efforts to tighten their control over labour.64 Rather, we must also recognise the social processes in catchment regions that released large numbers of skilled but loomless workers to the weaving towns. Without the availability of this pool of weavers, workshop owners might have had to devise very different kinds of arrangements for mobilising labour. The shape of productive organisations, in other words, was as much a result of the character of the available pool of workers as it was of the interests of the small capitalists. The vast majority of entrepreneurs who founded karkhanas were themselves drawn from weaving communities and had once been weavers, and many still retained a signiicant degree of weaving skill. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them successfully moved into the manufacture of higher quality saris that offered prospects for better proits, then slowly built up the scale of their operations so they could satisfy the growing demand for their product. A few actually became cloth dealers in their own right and opened shops in the weaving towns, where they competed with Marwaris and Gujarati Banias. In the smaller karkhanas, owners, their wives, and their children continued to do weaving and other tasks alongside hired labour. If a irm became large enough, however, members of the owner’s family gradually withdrew from the actual weaving process and began to engage in management and marketing activities. Wives of karkhandars also sometimes assumed a supervisory role over women doing winding work.65 In effect, a kind of weaver capitalism took shape, in which small entrepreneurs with origins in the weaving communities assumed roles as owners who hired wage labour, oversaw the workshop loor, sold cloth, and began to accumulate capital on a small scale. Karkhandars were not always independent businessmen “free” to sell their own product. Some workshop owners who hired labour were themselves bound by dependent relations with particular cloth merchants. In Sholapur, many karkhandars were known as asamis, or outworkers. 63

64 65

For instance, see Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 71. Interviews with members of old weaving families in Sholapur, Malegaon and Bhiwandi have also been helpful. In this respect, I depart from the analysis of Marglin in “What Do Bosses Do?” This discussion is based on a wide range of interviews.

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Under contract or bound by advances of yarn, they were obligated to provide all the cloth they produced to merchants or larger workshop owners. Some asami establishments were simply weaving households using family labour, but in a sample collected by Kakade in the 1930s, half of the owners of “factories” (workshops with ten or more employees) were in some kind of dependent position, and there was one owner with at least twenty-six looms in this situation.66 Kakade found several gradations of relationship between “independent” and “dependent” karkhandars; clearly many weavers moved between these two statuses over time.67 A similar system existed in Ahmednagar.68 Although dependent on their karkhandar patrons, they retained control over the allocation of their time and rarely attempted to impose the discipline of the clock on their workers.69 Often associated with the increased size of handloom workshops were changes in the division of labour. By the 1920s, karkhandars in Malegaon, Sholapur, and Sangamner tended to contract out warping work to irms specialising in these tasks.70 Apparently, the cost savings of these methods were extensive. Yet at the same time, some weavers in the same centres began to house dyeing processes within their workshops, eliminating their reliance on dyeing specialists and cutting their costs.71 As a form of organisation, the karkhana allowed owners to expand their production levels but avoid some of the risks of participating in an unstable commercial environment. When demand was low, the karkhanas could simply reduce the number of looms working (or cut back on providing outwork to asamis), releasing their workers to unemployment. When demand picked up again, they could re-hire labour to meet the new need. Some weaving establishments were impermanent entities that were dismantled and then reassembled as market conditions dictated. Joshi found in his study that karkhanas in Sangamner and Ahmednagar 66

67 68

69 70

71

Kakade concluded that there was no relationship between “the status of a unit of work and its size,” A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 41; See also Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 108–9. Oral interviews conducted in Sholapur. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 40–4. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 86; S. Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,” p. 16. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 109. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 103; Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 26. “Notes by the Inspector, Weavers Co-operative Societies on the Statement of the Sholapur Weavers on the Sholapur Handloom Industry,” 1 October 1929 in MSA, BPBEC Files 1929–30 (Evidence), File 30/14.

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owned by Padmasalis had become entirely seasonal by the early 1920s. Many were open only between December and April, when demand for cloth was at its highest. During this period, they hired Padmasali workers, perhaps men and women who tried to eke out subsistence through household production at other times of the year. According to Joshi, these seasonal karkhanas were able to outcompete “the permanent establishments generally owned by Deccani weavers, Salis, Koshtis, Khatris, etc.,” because their costs were lower.72 Although wage employment undeniably existed in the karkhanas, artisanal practises permeated their social organisation. For instance, the artisan family often retained much of its integrity as a productive unit as well as a unit of consumption. Often a karkhandar would hire the family as a whole, agreeing to employ female members to perform preliminary processes at the same time they engaged men for weaving. A sample of 551 female workers in the handloom industry of Sholapur conducted by Kakade found 203 belonged to the owners’ families and 348 belonged to the wage-workers’ families. There seems to have been no female employee in the entire sample without some kin connection to male workers in the same establishment!73 In some cases, a kind of family wage was paid to the male head of the family rather than to each worker.74 In the 1930s, a number of women in Sholapur, perhaps displaced by new processes of warping, began to take up wrapping bidis (cigarettes), but they generally performed this job as outworkers, and they sometimes did this task alongside their husbands, children, and other family members in the karkhanas.75 A few women probably became weavers, but the profession remained dominated by males; there clearly was much continuity in the gender division of labour. Children were also employed by karkhanas, although not all of these sought work in places where their parents were employed. A number of boys, for instance, moved from karkhana to karkhana as they attempted to gain the skills of weaving. These earned only token wages as assistants, usually after a period of six months to a year in which they received only room and board.76 72

73

74

75 76

Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 92; Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,” p. 16. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 50–1; see also p. 29 for the family connections of female workers performing preliminary processes. Interviews in Solapur, 1994 and Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 51. Of course, it is especially unlikely that female members of the karkhandars’ family would have been paid directly for their contributions. Interviews; and Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 49fn, 143. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 51; Also interviews in Surat, 1994.

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Despite the larger scale of operation, labourers within these karkhanas retained some of the same kinds of autonomy they possessed in the artisan households. This autonomy manifested itself primarily in two forms. First, the weavers carried into the karkhanas artisanal approaches towards time, work, and leisure, in effect resisting any attempt to be regulated tightly by the time clock and the calendar. Observers of the handloom industry in Sholapur reported that it was common for weavers to leave the karkhana during the day to smoke tobacco, then to work late into the night. Labourers generally stopped early on market days, and often took days off whenever some important occasion demanded.77 Such an approach to time could cause disgruntlement among karkhandars who had committed themselves to the sale of large amounts of cloth during busy seasons. The Sholapur Handloom Enquiry of 1948 would later report employer complaints that “even when the raw materials are made available, the weavers do not work regularly and the hours of effective work do not on an average exceed ive or six a day.” The enquiry concluded that these claims were exaggerated, but went on to state, “we cannot deny the fact with all the atmosphere of freedom and leisure the labourer would always ind it dificult to put in sustained work for a regular number of hours. We can not expect regular work when the place of work is also the place of residence.”78 Obviously, the language of the report relected the perspective of employers, who had an interest in establishing tighter forms of discipline and who were reluctant to accept the ways weavers spread their work over more loosely structured days, weeks, and years. Older employers I interviewed in several different cities mentioned that they had to accept these practises or risk losing their workers. Second, labourers remained a highly mobile set of people who retained strong ties with their home districts. Padmasali workers, for instance, travelled back to their native places in Telengana up to three times a year. In some cases, these trips allowed the workers to cope with slack periods of karkhana business. Costs of living in rural areas were lower than in the weaving towns, and out-of-work weavers could sometimes ind temporary employment in the countryside to supplement their incomes.79 Yet in other cases, social purposes were paramount. Weavers visited their 77 78 79

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 49–50. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee (Bombay, 1948), p. 30. Few weavers I interviewed, however, mentioned working as agricultural labourers during such periods. Migration from town to town was also a strategy of those unable to ind regular work. See Venkataraman, “The Economic Condition of Handloom Weavers.”

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villages to tend to property there, to attend weddings, to visit relatives and small children, and to pay homage to their village deities. They sometimes would leave when karkhandars in Sholapur needed their labour most.80 From the perspective of employers, many of the irst generation of weaver-migrants were, to use Arjan de Haan’s term, rather “unsettled settlers.”81 Even when labourers were long-term residents of a town, however, they possessed mobility in another sense. That is, they could seek to transfer to new owners who promised higher wages or more steady employment. Interviews conducted in several towns with both karkhandars and labourers suggest that a signiicant segment of the weaving population did not stay with any single employer more than a year or two. One Momna owner in Surat referred to workers of a slightly later time as being like “pigeons,” always lying from one employer to another. Retired workers indicated in interviews that they had been aware of wages paid in other karkhanas, and that they had been ready to leave (or least threaten to leave) when some other local establishments offered higher pay. Again, such behaviours may not have proved much of a concern during slow times of the year, but they could trouble employers seeking to meet heavy upsurges of demand. Keeping these potential forms of mobility in check, expressed as the value of promoting the workers’ “happiness,” was critical to owners that I interviewed in several different towns. Finally, weavers exerted a great deal of leverage in the recruitment process. Perhaps because of the low remuneration they offered and the unstable character of employment in this ield, owners were unable to entice signiicant numbers of persons from outside weaving castes and communities to enter the industry and thereby create larger pools of available labour. During busy times, karkhandars competed with each other to attract weavers to their workshops. Workshop owners from Surat reported that they sometimes tried to woo skilled weavers away from their rivals over drinks in the neighbourhood toddy shop. Yet most commonly, they relied on their own connections or those of their

80

81

This is reconstructed from interviews with both karkhandars and labourers in Solapur, Bhiwandi, and Malegaon as well as in Telengana and in Allahabad District in Uttar Pradesh. See also Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, esp. pp. 113–19. Kakade suggested that return visits to homelands declined for some workers during the 1930s. Yet clearly such returns, often for extensive periods of time, were important in the 1940s and afterwards. Arjan de Haan, Unsettled Settlers: Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta (Calcutta: K P Bagchi, 1996).

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existing workers to ind labour. The majority of the weavers I interviewed stated that they had obtained their positions through a relative or friend already employed in the same workshop. One worker even mentioned having been delegated by his boss to return to his home village to bring back a couple of weavers.82 In most cases, a karkhandar hired artisans from amongst the caste fellows of existing workers (who in turn were usually from his own caste).83 Such practises certainly had some advantages for the workshop owners. According to one report, it rendered the possibility of loss by the absconding of “fradulent weavers” far less likely. “The society of caste and trade honour,” this source suggested, “would sufice to make the risk negligible.”84 At the same time, they also made employers reliant on the social networks of their employees. Karkhandars thus were not able to create out of thin air precisely the kind of work force they might have wished for. Because the potential independence of their employees was so great, they attempted to develop mechanisms to tie labour to their weaving establishment, mechanisms quite similar in some respects to the means merchant capitalists developed for creating clients among weaving households. These mechanisms may not have relected a calculated strategy consciously conceived by each employer individually. More likely, they were created as the result of the experiences of the hundreds of owners seeking to overcome workers’ resistances, and they became part of a set of mutual expectations shared by employer and employee alike. When employers sought to structure relations outside of these expectations, they could ind themselves faced with considerable dificulties in retaining labour.85 The most important of these mechanisms in many localities was the system of advances. Karkhandars in Sholapur offered virtually all of their labourers a signiicant interest-free advance at the moment employment 82

83

84

85

The practise of utilising jobbers or professional recruiters appears to have been uncommon, at least during this period. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 36; Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, pp. 18–20. “First Assistant Collector to Collector of Ahmednagar, 20 Oct. 1899,” in MSA, RD (Famine) 1900, vol. 72, comp. 215, p. 165. Geert de Neve offers an interesting analysis of an advance system in contemporary south India. Initially designed as a means of securing labour, it now imposes strong constraints on capitalists, who ind they are unable to hire or hold workers without very substantial loans. Geert de Neve, “Asking For and Giving Baki: Neo-Bondage, or the Interplay of Power and Resistance in the Tamil Nadu Power-loom Industry,” The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour, eds. Jonathan Parry, Jan Breman, and Karin Kapadia (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), pp. 379–401.

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began, sometimes insisting that a bond of service be signed at the time. Without such advances, the owners simply could not hope to get access to the skilled labour they needed, as L. V. Tikekar discovered when he irst tried to set up his workshop. Recalling this situation in 1929, he commented: “Their [the workers’] way of doing things was quite a different thing from others. If I wanted to engage a weaver which meant in order to simply engage his services . . . I had to pay the wages before he did a certain amount of work. This was the kind of thing then.”86 The practise of advances persisted into the post-independence period. Karkhandars also made loans on the occasion of marriages within the labourers’ families and at the time of religious festivals. Finally, they provided advances for ordinary expenditures, such as the purchase of food and clothing. Interestingly, in Sholapur, these loans may have sometimes been paid in the money of Hyderabad State, where most of the Padmasali weavers originated, and not in the currency of British India.87 Clearly the workers expected to remit the money back to their home villages. In some cases, a non-weaving Padmasali told me, they used advances to pay off debts to village moneylenders, in effect transferring their dependence from a rural to an urban context. The advance system was not universal for all workers in some other centres, but employers everywhere tended to offer their most skilled and trusted weavers such loans. Karkhandars in Surat, for instance, indicated that they gave advances to those weavers whom they knew best (and whom, no doubt, they wanted to keep the most). The consequence of failing to do so is illustrated by the case of one weaver who mentioned that he left one workshop after many years when his employer refused to extend him an expected loan. Joshi found that in Ahmednagar and Sangamner advances ranging from twenty to one hundred rupees were often given to temporary workers, who were thereby “maintained as an emergency labour force by an agreement between the weavers and the masters according to which they were given preference by the karkhandars whenever extra labour was required.”88 Advances served to solidify the relationship between weaver capitalist and labourer in the context of very low wage payments. In effect, the 86

87

88

Testimony of L. V. Tikekar, C11–C12. Tikekar pointed out that the advance system was still prevalent in 1929, p. C15. Tikekar, a Brahman, himself ended up having to pay a higher wage rate than the Padmasali owners. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 161, indicates that most weavers kept accounts of their debts in the Nizam’s currency. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 92.

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karkhandar fashioned himself not just as an employer but as a patron of his workforce, an individual whose claims over labour were based on social as well as contractual obligations. The karkhandars took regular instalments out of the wages of their indebted workers, sometimes from 20 to 25 per cent of total wage payments, although these amounts were often negotiated at each pay period and could be reduced signiicantly. As R. G. Kakade pointed out, the condition of these advances was “that the debtor weavers should not give up the employment in their karkhanas unless and until the debts due by them [the karkhandars] were completely paid off.”89 Few labourers in such relationships managed to free themselves entirely from their debt to their employers. Indebted weavers wishing to leave a karkhana usually had to persuade some other employer to pay off their advance. In these cases, they generally transferred their loans and their allegiances to the new employer.90 No doubt, such arrangements constrained workers’ attempts to leave on short notice during peak business periods.91 In sum, debt appears to have been as important a mechanism of control of the karkhandar over the worker in the karkhana as it was of the sahukar over the small artisan household – this despite the existence of wage employment. In the absence of a formal wage contract, advances could guarantee access to labour when it was most needed. The allocation of housing to labourers’ families sometimes provided an additional means of exerting leverage over the work force. In Sholapur, weavers and their children lived in the karkhana itself, eating and sleeping besides the looms that supplied their sustenance. Few could afford to purchase their own homes, a necessary step if one were to strike out completely on one’s own. Workshop owners expected weavers who travelled to their home districts to leave their families behind in the karkhanas. In effect, these family members became “hostages” (the term is Joshi’s) when the weaver threatened to abscond without repaying his advances. Thus the development of wage labour in the karkhanas did not always bring about the de-linking of work space and living space that one associates with the transition from household to factory production. The provision of housing in the karkhana, too, became an expectation of employment in Sholapur.92 89 90 91 92

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 164. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 50. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 164. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 111; Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 50; Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, pp. 31–2.

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There were other means of ensuring observance of wage arrangements, whether based on contract or not. One such mechanism in Sholapur was a tobacco allowance. Employers in Sholapur gave workers who produced at least four saris a week a signiicant amount of tobacco for smoking during non-working hours. This provided a subtle pressure on labourers to maintain a certain level of productivity during busy seasons in a context where the employers’ ability to compel regular work hours was otherwise limited. The weavers could refuse to work for those who did not furnish such an allowance.93 Different forms of social patronage were prevalent in different localities. Sponsorship of communal feasting and drinking was common in many places. In Surat, karkhandars commonly held feasts at the temple of the Khatri goddess, or kuldevi, during the monsoon, when there was little weaving work. One ex-owner told me that his irm sponsored four out of the ive days of feasting on such occasions; the workers collectively were responsible for funding the remaining day. “If a sheth [owner] wanted workers to work,” he stated, “it was important to observe this.” A Vaniya workshop owner whose family employed Khatri weavers acknowledged that his irm also supported feasting at the kuldevi. Asked why his father would sponsor such occasions though he was not himself a worshipper of the kuldevi, he commented that “we learned from the Khatris [i.e., Khatri karkhandars],” thus clearly admitting a strategic element in this behaviour. All these mechanisms allowed the merchants to compensate to a great extent for their inability to coerce labourers into submitting to what one might call fully capitalist forms of work discipline. As with the weaving households examined in the previous section, however, what was accomplished was less the ability to dictate the shape of the labour process – for instance, karkhandars had limited means of speeding up production – than the capacity to secure inal control over the cloth produced. In Marxian terminology, this form of organisation relected the “formal” subsumption of labour to capital, in which much of the handicraft character of production is maintained, rather than “real” subordination of labour under capital, in which capitalists directly control the manufacturing process.94 93 94

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 148. Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. I, esp. pp. 510–12; Jones, “Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution,” pp. 45–7; Thompson, The Nature of Work, pp. 40–3. I reject of course the assumption that “formal” subsumption logically should give way to “real” subordination out of some inherent logic of capitalism, but I do see the term as a useful descriptive device.

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There is little if any convincing record of the kinds of consciousness and identity that labourers in the karkhanas formed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Before 1930, evidence of collective protest against owners does not exist, whereas we do have records of weavers being prominent participants in religious conlict and in violence against grain shop owners during times of famine.95 The absence of collective action cannot be taken as proof of the lack of class solidarities. As James Scott has argued, acts of everyday resistance can be founded in a dissident sub-culture amongst subordinate groups that is in effect a source of some unity; they cannot be taken simply as evidence of mere individual responses to exploitation.96 Yet the social links between owners and workers – based on patronage, debt, a life of shared ritual observances, and even kinship – could provide contrary pulls of a vertical character. Just as some everyday practises in the workshop gave rise to conlict, others could shape the formation of notions of mutual expectation and obligation between worker and owner. Conclusion Questions of labour were thus as critical a feature of artisan workshops of western India as they were in large-scale industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artisanal production was characterised by highly unequal relations between merchants or workshop owners on the one hand and those who performed labour on the other. Yet the forms taken by the capitalism of small towns were highly varied, including independent weaving families, weaver households working for merchants on a commission basis, and labourers employed in small handloom workshops owned by families from weaving communities. Changes in the global and regional economies had inluenced all handloom weavers, but these did not determine any particular form of production relations. The structure of manufacture in the handloom industry was instead shaped by the micro-politics of the artisan household and workshop. If the concept of proletarianisation is to indicate merely the spread of a system of wage labour, it clearly has some applicability in western India, where larger workshops hiring weaver employees did slowly become more prevalent than dependent households. If, on the other hand, it is meant to suggest a process by which impersonal forces of capitalism 95 96

See esp. Chapters 2 and 5. See Scott, Weapons of the Weak, but more extensively Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.

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dissolve a traditional social order and compel workers to participate in a new one based on radically different principles, the concept does not it neatly with the reality of small-scale cloth manufacture. Both small households and larger workshops sustained the importance of the family economy, the value of rural connections, artisanal attitudes towards time and leisure, caste afiliations, and the role of debt, patronage, and social deference. The reproduction of these features, however, was not due to the hold of tradition; rather, they were essential aspects of strategies developed by small capitalists as they attempted to exert control over labour in a context where contractual power was limited and wage payments extremely low. The capacity of merchants and karkhandars to re-mould the character of the workplace was constrained signiicantly by the fact that they could often not provide the work needed to keep all their employees busy throughout the year or to offer suficient inducements to pull significant numbers of new entrants into the handloom industry. In this kind of context, bosses primarily relied on “caste weavers,” that is, workers from communities already strongly associated with weaving. Such weavers were positioned to check the most heavy-handed intrusions into their work practises. Everyday actions, or the threat of such actions, often forced the bosses to limit their attempts to restructure the workplace even as they made alternative efforts to gain control over cloth as it was manufactured. In order to guarantee access to a supply of cheap labour when it was needed, they relied on rewards beyond wages, especially loans and patronage services. In effect, they created sets of workers who were dependent clients as well as employees. The forms of capital-labour relationships were many, relecting a variety of different accommodations in different local contexts. Only a decentred narrative, relecting the political interplay of a variety of actors in a great number of places, can capture how the speciic characteristics of production relations took the shape they did.

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5 Small Town Capitalism and the Living Standards of Artisans

The subordinate place of western Indian artisans within the structures of small town cloth manufacture left most of them poorly positioned to negotiate payments adequate for their subsistence. Bound by debt and client-patron ties as well as by the wage relationship, most small producers possessed little leverage in labour markets and were usually forced to accept levels of compensation far below those paid to others in skilled occupations. For much of the period before 1930, most weavers, dyers, gold-thread makers, and printers lived under conditions of considerable poverty and of extreme vulnerability to market luctuations. The material circumstances of their lives appear to have been strikingly similar to some of the poorest categories of people in the rural and urban economy of western India. Curiously, artisanal standards of living have occasioned little research. Historians have traditionally assessed the well-being of small producers in colonial India by measuring the level of “de-industrialisation,” that is, the extent of decline in the number of weavers and other artisans employed in cloth manufacture or in the amount of cloth they made. The degree of de-industrialisation, however, actually tells us very little about the circumstances of those families who continued to participate in smallscale textile manufacture. Whatever the pressures of competition with mill-made cloth, and however great the extent of weavers’ exploitation by various kinds of capitalist actors, there remained an attraction to the “lavour of independence and ease” in the artisan lifestyle as well as a certain status attached to it, especially for those belonging to communities that regarded the making of cloth as their traditional occupation. As a result, artisans often tried to resist being absorbed into the general labour 159

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market as landless workers in the countryside or as casual wage employees in the cities. When faced with dwindling demand for their cloth, they frequently sought alternatives to leaving their profession, such as shifting to the production of goods with more promising prospects, migrating to regions with expanding markets, and leaving household-based production for wage employment under larger karkhandars. Many struggled to survive in familiar kinds of work, even when faced with extraordinarily dificult circumstances. Changes in the number of artisans thus are a very imperfect yardstick of their living standards.1 This chapter argues that, despite all the evidence of the expansion of weaving in the small urban places of western India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most cloth-producing artisans experienced very harsh and deteriorating conditions. Large numbers of small producers were close to, or even below, subsistence levels; indeed, many must have died at young ages because of the inability to obtain the minimum nutrition necessary to maintain their health over extended periods. Artisans consistently received wages well below those earned by others with comparable skills, often little above what casual labourers were paid. The lives of small producers, moreover, were regularly subject to inancial trauma. Most artisans were exposed to serious seasonal lulls that left them hard pressed to survive; these uncertainties were built into the cyclical character of the local cloth market. On top of all this, most small cloth producers regularly experienced severe collective crises on average of about once a decade between 1875 and 1920. Although a small set of more prosperous igures did emerge from the artisan communities of many small towns, the increased wealth and visibility of these individual families was not representative of the general conditions faced by craftspeople. Artisanal Poverty and the Structure of the Economy The precarious character of the artisans’ existence was strongly linked to the larger structural developments in the western Indian economy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discussed in previous chapters: the emergence of modern industry, the expansion of commercial agriculture, and the consolidation of the economic power of sahukars and karkhandars in the small towns of the region. At the most obvious 1

Even leaving the occupation of cloth production would not be an indication of economic distress if artisans were motivated by higher levels of compensation in other ields.

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level, the availability of cheap European imports and textiles manufactured in the mills of Bombay and Ahmedabad exerted a downward pressure on cloth prices during the course of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the increased demand for agricultural commodities during the same period made grain more expensive. Weavers were thus pressured from two sides. The price of cloth realised at the moment of sale to the actual consumer, moreover, was a poor indicator of what artisans received. Most lived far from their buyers and were unable to market goods directly. As P. N. Mehta observed in 1909, weavers seeking to sell on their own had “to leave work and spend some hours in inding a suitable customer; and failing to ind one, they have to go to the local merchant who knows too well how they are situated and invariably strikes a bargain . . . in his favor.”2 In most cases, as we have seen, small producers in effect ceded the function of selling cloth to local capitalists and out-of-town buyers. Merchants and karkhandars who monopolised knowledge of market conditions were in a position to squeeze those weavers who often needed cash immediately to buy food or to purchase their next bundle of yarn. The weakness of the artisans’ ability to negotiate adequate payments for their work was compounded by the inherent instability of demand for the things they made. There is strong reason to believe that this instability was greater than it had been in pre-colonial times. Although handloom production had managed to perpetuate itself through the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly relegated to niches tied to the agricultural cycle and to the quality of the harvest; international demand and the consumption of Indian courts, which had previously provided more regular markets throughout the year, sharply declined. During the monsoon, interest in buying cloth always slumped; it rose once peasants had been able to sell their crops. The gendered character of consumption patterns, moreover, accentuated the exposure of artisans to cyclical luctuations. Peasants concentrated their purchases of handloom saris during the wedding season, which lasted for a few months every year. The demand for men’s clothing, which was more commonly made in textile factories, may have been spread out more evenly over the seasons. Fluctuations in world prices of the artisans’ raw materials, now coming mostly from outside India or from the mill towns, could also serve as sources of uncertainty. In a context of falling cloth prices and luctuating demand, small town capitalists often tried to position themselves so that they could realise 2

Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 2.

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the maximum returns during short periods of extensive activity without exposing themselves to losses during slow seasons. This often meant minimising any kind of extensive investment that would only be realised over the long term. Many kept their commitments of capital conined to consignments of small batches of textiles for which buyers could be found. They felt little need to keep artisanal establishments operating at full capacity when demand slumped, although they did often parcel out small amounts of work or other payments during slow times; they calculated that by buying cheaply during the off-season and then selling when market conditions improved, they would be able to increase their proits.3 By maintaining some kind of patronage relations and by negotiating implicit or explicit agreements with producers when market conditions were most dire, the bosses could hope to secure plentiful labour at low rates when conditions improved.4 For their part, many weavers and other artisans in western India, faced with the need to survive during the slack season, effectively abdicated their ability to ask for better prices during periods of peak demand, either by accepting advances that left them perpetually indebted, or by making long-term agreements under unfavourable conditions.5 When crises of more serious proportions loomed, many bosses had no hesitations about cutting their clients loose entirely, leaving them to fend for themselves in environments where work was not available. The inability or unwillingness of the colonial state to provide a safety net to protect workers in these circumstances only heightened the severity of these crises. Qualitative Indications of Poverty Qualitative evidence on the artisans’ living standards is not hard to come by. Often it issued from colonial oficials most committed to improving weavers’ conditions, persons who found the prevalent levels of poverty frustrating their efforts at reform. Their testimony provides some indication of the circumstances facing small producers, although their comments often relect the discourse of social and moral “improvement.” 3 4

5

Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1913–14, p. 18. Similar practises have been discussed for eighteenth-century England in John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century Industry (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 49–50, cited in Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India,” Past and Present 159 (1998), p. 85. Testimony of R. B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, pp. 545–6.

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“The weavers as a class live from hand to mouth,” stated W. T. Pomfret, head of the Textile Department at Victoria Jubilee Institute, “[and] they have little or no capital and their credit is usually low. Owing to want of capital and credit the weavers are unable to buy greater lengths of yarn . . . they cannot procure a further supply of yarn without selling the cloth made from the previous supply.”6 In his report on the handloom industry, P. N. Mehta commented that “their [the weavers’] earnings are poor in the best of times,” later noting that “the state of being constantly in want or dependence, kills all enterprise and activity in them.”7 Collector Maconochie of Sholapur, who had been especially involved in working with weavers of that city during the irst decade of the twentieth century, observed as he moralised: “I found [the weavers] in a miserably degraded condition, exploited by unscrupulous money-lenders, working day and night for the merest pittance, living from hand to mouth, robbed of their legitimate proits, trying to drown the thought of their miseries in drink, unhappy slaves of cruel taskmasters and of the vice to which they were driven by sheer despair.”8 There was also considerable discussion of artisanal living conditions by administrators concerned with urban health during epidemics. Their observations about the weavers’ circumstances were again coloured by colonial discourse, especially by the theory that urban diseases were caused by miasma pervading the atmosphere in residential quarters where the circulation of air was constrained and plentiful sources of light were absent.9 Nonetheless, their writings do relect an awareness that most weavers lived in quarters where poverty was ubiquitous and where unsanitary conditions were associated with high death rates. In a report on plague conditions to health authorities in 1898, the collector of Sholapur wrote: [T]he dwellings of the poor [especially weavers] were usually found to consist of small low thatched mud walled hovels with loors below the level of the ground, so crowded together that access and egress to even foot passengers were matters of dificulty. In such houses large families 6

7 8

9

Testimony of W. T. Pomfret, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 340. Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, pp. 2, 7. Letter from Collector Maconochie, 16 May 1906 in MSA, RD 1907, vol. 114, comp. 402, p. 52. For the nature of such theories, see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 26–38, 61–80.

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Image 9. “Weaver at Loom Over Pit, Sangamner Town, 1913” Source: Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University. Macleod Collection, ref. 15.19.2. Published with Permission of the Centre of South Asian Studies. were usually found living. The conditions of these dwellings were in fact entirely favourable to the propagation of epidemic disease. They were in many cases quite incapable of improvement and there was no alternative but to condemn them as unit for human habitation.10

Maconochie reported in 1906 that half of the weavers in the Sholapur Weavers Guild, a large organisation that would have been fairly representative of the artisanal population in the city, had either “died of plague or were ruined by it”11 during the previous decade. Similarly, writing about Bhiwandi, the collector of Thana reported: [T]he houses of the poor found in every quarter are huddled together as close as possible while all the lanes and roads away from the main bazaar are extremely ilthy since the municipality is unable to maintain a suficient scavenging population . . . add to this that a very large proportion of the population consists of Mohamedans [i.e., most of whom were Momin weavers] whose purdah system makes evacuation 10

11

Report by J. W. A. Weir, Collector and District Magistrate, 10 Aug. 1898 in MSA, GD (Plague) 1899, vol. 745, comp. 732, pp. 243–4. Letter from Collector Maconochie, 16 May 1906 in MSA, RD 1907, vol. 114, comp. 402, p. 51.

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and segregation extremely dificult, and it becomes clear that to check plague in Bhiwandi is no easy matter.12

From Surat, an oficial reported during the plague: We had to deal with the worst affected part of the city inhabited by a poor and almost starving population. . . . The people consisted of weavers, Gollas (or rice-beaters) and very poor Mahomedans. Their houses were small and ill-ventilated and situated in some of the most insanitary quarters of the city. . . . As these people were badly fed and had only one front door to their houses in a majority of cases, which was the only means of ingress and egress of it, they were most susceptible to the disease.13

What is particularly striking in many of these accounts is the repeated inclusion of small cloth producers in the ranks of the poorest residents in the small towns. A similar pattern is noticeable in those occasional records where there is some implicit comparison between weavers and other occupational categories. Reviewing the various classes in his district in 1887, the collector of Khandesh indicated that the “ryot [peasant] speaking generally and exempting Bhils is fairly well clad and well fed”; that there was no reason “to suppose that artisans [excepting weavers] suffer this year”; and that “unskilled labour is more dificult to obtain owing to the increased demand by factories and gins [with resulting upward pressures in wages].” He found, however, that “the only class of which I have any reason to doubt is the Musalman weaver – ever living from hand to mouth, ever squalid and underfed, and apparently ever working.”14 A report from the following year pointed to increased land values, improvements in the living standards for many cultivators, and even upward movement in the wages of agricultural labourers. At the same time, it indicated that “In Dhulia, Parola, and a few other towns, there are a considerable number of Momins, Salis and Koshti weavers, and some Rangaris [dyers]; they earn a livelihood, but few of them are well-to-do, and there are no signs of improvement in their trade.”15 In 1929, an observer in Bijapur, which 12

13

14 15

Collector of Thana to Secty. to Govt., GD (Plague), 30 April 1898 in MSA, GD (Plague) 1898, vol. 317, comp. 198, no page given. Evidence of Witnesses from Surat District, undated (late 1898) in MSA, GD (Plague) 1899, vol. 692, comp. 591, pp. 197–8. Collector’s Report, Khandesh, 1886–7 in MSA 1888, RD, vol. 15, pp. 33–4. Collector’s Report, Khandesh 1887–8 in MSA 1889, RD, vol. 31, comp. 1700, pp. 56–7.

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contained the growing weaving town of Ilkal, concluded: “But the weavers are in a worse plight than agriculturalists. . . . They are entirely at the mercy of sawkars and cloth dealers in the matter of inance and are eking out a bare livelihood.”16 Quantitative Evidence Unfortunately, it is dificult to move from these kinds of qualitative assessments to quantitative ones. Wages of weavers are only sporadically available until the 1920s, and they are often hard to interpret. The dificulties of constructing a baseline from which to observe trends in wages from the late eighteenth century onwards and to compare these to trends in grain prices in the same places also makes any straightforward delineation of shifts in living standards nearly impossible.17 One case that can be made from this data is that the earnings of weavers, which approximated those of the most skilled craftspeople in western India around 1800, began to converge downwards with those of unskilled labourers late in the century. Data from Khandesh District is the most complete. There, the wages of weavers and tailors at the beginning of the nineteenth century seem to have been roughly equivalent to those of other skilled labourers, were clearly higher than those of less skilled workers, and were double those of “coolies.” Immediately after the establishment of colonial rule in 1818, rates for most kinds of skilled and unskilled workers rose signiicantly. The wages of weavers and tailors, however, apparently remained stagnant. By 1820, payments to coolies, once half those of weavers, were now three quarters of weavers’ wages, and rates paid to bearers had passed those paid to weavers. The disruption of pre-colonial state systems, which had furnished much of the demand for cloth, was a major reason for this (Table 5.1).18 The level of wages earned by weavers relative to those earned by other categories of workers continued to deteriorate in Khandesh after 1820. The daily wage for unskilled labour in the 1870s (excepting the famine period of 1876 and 1877), for instance, was generally around four 16

17

18

Memoranda of Witnesses in Bijapur: Rao Saheb P. G. Halkatti, in MSA, BPBEC iles, 1929–30, File 29/BJ/3, p. 7. For a fascinating analysis of weavers’ standards of living in eighteenth-century south India, see Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness.” This is discussed at more length in Chapter 1.

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Table 5.1. Rates per Day of Work in British Currency (Rupees-Annas-Pice)19 Occupation

1788–1797

1798–1817

1818–1820

Carpenter Blacksmith Bricklayer Weaver Tailor Basketmaker Cooly Bearer

0–4–0 0–4–0 0–3–6 0–4–0 0–4–0 0–2–6 0–2–0 0–3–6

0–5–0 0–4–0 0–4–0 0–4–0 0–4–0 0–3–0 0–2–0 0–4–0

0–7–0 0–5–0 0–6–0 0–4–0 0–5–0 0–3–6 0–3–0 0–5–0

annas.20 Carpenters routinely earned from eight annas to one rupee per day around 1880, and most other forms of skilled labour earned roughly eight annas per day. Blacksmiths earned only four to eight annas, but they were, according to one account, “seldom without work and are better off than weavers, dyers and cotton-carders.”21 The District Gazetteer reports that most weavers were earning two to six annas per day; at another point, it states that “the margin of the wage left to the weaver has within the last ten years fallen from about 4 and 1/2 d to 3d [that is, from three to two annas].”22 The majority of weavers could not have been earning more than the level of ordinary casual labourers, and some were seemingly below this level. Because grain prices had risen substantially between 1820 and 1880, real wages for weavers seem to have fallen signiicantly. There is also some wage information over time from the districts in the northern Karnatak region, an area – in contrast to Khandesh – where signiicant artisanal production of high-quality cloth persisted during the 19

20

21

22

District Administration Report, 1878–9, in MSA, RD 1880, vol. 17, comp. 1218, p. 26. See also Khandesh District Gazetteer, p. 200. The original data came from a report by Captain Briggs, the key administrator in the original colonisation of Khandesh. District Administration Report 1879–80, Khandesh District, MSA, RD 1880, vol. 17, comp. 1218, p. 25. The general level of wages in the countryside comes from the annual administrative reports from these years. During the harvest season of 1879–80, unskilled labourers earned as much as nine annas per day plus food, but this was unusually high. Khandesh District Gazetteer, pp. 73 and 198. See also District Administration Report 1879–80, Khandesh District, RD 1880, vol. 17, comp. 1218, p. 25. Khandesh District Gazetteer, p. 229. The term “margin of the wage” probably means the earnings per piece of cloth (that is the difference between the cost of raw materials and the inal payment the weaver received). Because saris, the most common form of cloth, took at least one day to weave, this igure is a bit more than the daily earnings of the family.

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late nineteenth century. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Marshall reported that there had been a signiicant drop in weavers’ real earnings immediately after the assumption of British power. Wages typically averaged four to six annas depending on the quality of the cloth, slightly higher than those for carpenters, bricklayers, and blacksmiths and perhaps triple those of unskilled labourers (one to one and a half annas).23 Six decades later, at the time of the Gazetteer’s observations during the early 1880s, the wages of weavers in Belgaum District were reported to be ive to six annas daily. In Bijapur District, the average earnings of a family of weavers were four annas for coarse cloth and six to eight annas for waistcloths (dhotis) and saris.24 In other words, there appears to have been no appreciable increases in the actual level of payments in Belgaum and perhaps a slight increase in Bijapur District. Price increases, however, clearly had reduced the buying power of weavers in both places. In Belgaum, the available price series (which began only in 1824) suggests increases of at least 20 per cent in millet, more than 70 per cent in wheat and 100 per cent in rice from the 1820s to the 1880s. In Bijapur, prices of grain had increased on average around 20 per cent for millet and more than 100 per cent for wheat and pulses.25 By contrast, wages for other kinds of skilled labourers had increased signiicantly during this period, allowing them to keep pace with inlation in food costs.26 Wages for unskilled labour in agriculture had increased as well, to two to three and a half annas per day in Belgaum, and to two and a half to four annas per day in Bijapur. Many of the igures for weavers, moreover, were “family wages” (that is, payments made for the contributions of an entire family), whereas those for other workers were just for individual males. In short, much of the gap that had once existed between the earnings of ordinary labourers and those of skilled weavers had closed signiicantly.27 The British did not collect wages for weavers consistently at the outset of colonialism. Yet we can see the same pattern in late-nineteenth-century data: divergence of weavers’ earnings from those of other skilled artisans 23

24

25

26 27

See Chapter 1; Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Bijapur District, vol. XXIII [hereafter Bijapur District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), p. 350. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Belgaum District, vol. XXI [hereafter Belgaum District Gazetteer] (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), p. 137; Bijapur District Gazetteer, p. 370. These igures are derived by comparing the average prices in the two districts during the 1824–8 period to those during the 1880–2 period. Belgaum District Gazetteer, pp. 299–300; Bijapur District Gazetteer, pp. 351–3. Bijapur District Gazetteer, p. 350; Belgaum District Gazetteer, p. 298. Bijapur District Gazetteer, p. 350; Belgaum District Gazetteer, p. 298.

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12 S = Wages of Skilled Workers U = Wages of Unskilled Workers W = Wages of Weavers

10

Annas

8 6 4 2 0 S Sholapur

U

W

18

S = Wages of Skilled Workers U = Wages of Unskilled Workers W = Wages of Weavers

16

Annas

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 S

U

W

Poona 16

S = Wages of Skilled Workers U = Wages of Unskilled Workers W = Wages of Weavers

14 12 Annas

10 8 6 4 2 0 S

U

W

Nasik

CHART 1. Rates of Labour – Daily Wages for Male Workers in Annas Per Day, Various Districts, 1882–5 (the lower end of the wage range is in black, the upper end of the wage range is in grey).

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170 12

S = Wages of Skilled Workers U = Wages of Unskilled Workers W = Wages of Weavers

10

Annas

8 6 4 2 0

S

U

W

Ahmednagar 16

S = Wages of Skilled Workers U = Wages of Unskilled Workers W = Wages of Weavers

14 Annas

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 S

U

W

Dharwar

16

S = Wages of Skilled Workers U = Wages of Unskilled Workers W = Wages of Weavers

14

Annas

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 S

U

W

Thana

CHART 1. (continued)

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Table 5.2. Women’s Wages in General Labour and in Cloth Production, 1882–1885 (in Annas)28 Unskilled Female Labour

Wages to Women in Cloth Industry

Sholapur Poona

app. 2 As, ield labour NA

Nasik Thana

2 As 2 2/3 As

1 to 1 1/4 As Among Salis (involved in silk) 2 and 1/3 As-6As Warpers and reelers ½ As to 1 As Reelers 1 As to 2As

and convergence with those of general labourers in the countryside and in the towns (see Chart 1).29 Whole families of weavers often earned less than an individual skilled worker. Unfortunately, comparison of family earnings between categories is impossible. A small number of records indicate the earnings of women in the weaving industry when they sold their labour as individuals. When women wove cloth, these records reported no distinction between their earnings and those of men.30 Women’s work in non-weaving processes of cloth production, however, was rewarded in especially meagre terms, except among Poona silk weavers (Table 5.2). Overall, women received signiicantly less in weaving workshops than they did even in the general labour market for unskilled workers. There may have been a number of reasons for women’s lack of leverage in negotiating better wages. As noted in the previous chapter, women hired in the karkhanas almost always had some male relative (in most cases their husbands) working in the same place. Employers might have paid less in such circumstances because they viewed women as secondary contributors to family earnings. For their part, women in artisanal families may have preferred working in handloom workshops, where they could be free to attend to unpaid family tasks on their own schedules, such as taking care of children and preparing food. Hammocks, for instance, could be stretched out in the weaving workshop to accommodate sleeping babies as women engaged in winding yarn nearby.31 In some cases, concerns 28

29

30 31

See various district gazetteers. These wages clearly appear to be daily wages rather than piece rates. Most wages were given in daily terms. For wages given in monthly form, I have assumed a work month of twenty-seven to twenty-eight days, given that weavers took approximately thirty holidays per year. The chart is based on igures from the district gazetteers of the Bombay Presidency. Sholapur District Gazetteer, p. 270; Khandesh District Gazetteer, p. 229. This picture is based on descriptions weavers provided of handloom workshops in interviews.

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about the maintenance of female respectability may have also led to strong family preferences that women work near male relatives and not seek employment outside; these concerns might have been particularly strong among Muslim families. Information from the famines of the late 1890s conirms this picture of very low weavers’ wages. At that time, the Bombay government and local municipalities were considering schemes to offer relief to weavers, and they conducted investigations of various sorts to determine existing standards of payment in order to estimate the costs of such projects.32 One report on the Koshtis working in Tembharni (Sholapur District) found that the yarn needed to keep a family going for eight days cost ive rupees, and the weavers could turn this yarn into six rupees worth of cloth (for a proit of only one rupee). If this situation was typical, then weaving families in this place were earning only two annas per day, probably less than the agricultural wages for individual male labourers.33 Another report from Bijapur District is perhaps even more helpful, indicating that in “ordinary times [i.e., non-famine times] each family gets 7 annas/day. The proit of the shopkeeper and weaver excluded, it is clear that not more than 6 annas is the price of labour of each family per day in ordinary times” (italics mine).34 A family of ield labourers in the countryside with one working male, one working female, and one working boy would have earned a similar amount. Other reports from this period similarly report wages approximating those for unskilled agricultural labour.35 Appendix I provides detailed accounts from the famine records on all the costs involved in making two different types of cloth. These igures are indicative of very poor wages indeed. Finally, a small amount of wage data in P. N. Mehta’s report suggests that wages had not improved by 1910. Mehta provides a series of igures for different products made in different centres. Typically, these average about four to six annas per day. In Dhulia, for instance, sari weavers took a fortnight to weave twelve saris of 20s yarn and received four rupees, 32

33

34

35

There were a number of such reports, but several mention the payments weavers would realise from producing a particular kind of cloth without indication of the time it would take to make this cloth. Assistant Collector to Collector of Sholapur, 20 April 1906, in MSA, RD, 1906, vol. 378, comp. 402, p. 61. Report from Collector of Bijapur, no. 7/575 of 1896, 10th Dec. 1896 in MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 35, comp. 49, p. 219. Final Report on the Famine of 1896–7 in the Bombay Presidency, Sholapur 15 Jan. 1898 in MSA RD (Famine) 1898, vol. 15, comp. 107, pt. XV, p. 391; Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, p. 17.

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eight annas for the work, or about ive annas per day, slightly more if payments for warping, winding, and sizing, which often would be done by the weaver’s family, are included. In Parola, apparently, sari weavers received six annas per day in good times, but less than three annas per day in bad seasons.36 As we shall see in Chapter 7, wages for artisans improved in the early 1920s, only to fall dramatically after 1927. The Economic Vulnerability of Artisans In discussing one aspect of the weavers’ circumstances – the uncertainties and instability of their lives – we are entirely on solid ground. It is clear that the vast majority of weavers were buffeted by drastic changes in their circumstances from season to season and over the course of their lifetimes. Most artisan families would have been highly aware that times of relative comfort were likely to be ephemeral. Seasonal luctuations affected most small producers annually. As suggested earlier, demand was tied to the harvest and to the wedding season. In a good year, signiicant cloth buying might persist from October to June, that is, from the winter through the hot months. In the rainy season, however, agriculturalists tended to cease their purchases of cloth altogether. It was at this time that the weavers were most vulnerable, most likely to make a deal with moneylenders that would constrain their ability to improve their situation when buyers returned to cloth stores. These cycles inevitably depressed earnings during this period. Even the most highly skilled weavers in Khandesh found that their daily earnings fell to as little as two annas per day during the slack season, less than half their earnings during busy times.37 Weavers in Bhiwandi earned nine to seventeen rupees a month during the months when they found work, but because of the extensive lean periods in their business, their earnings averaged seven to twelve rupees a month over the course of the year.38 As we have seen, karkhanas in some towns regularly shut down during the slow season each year.39 These kinds of regular, almost predictable, annual luctuations, however, were often punctuated by more serious periodic crises that could render even the marriage season a time of want. Such crises could be 36

37 38 39

Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry; Mehta provides payments for a number of types of cloth but only indicates the time involved in weaving in several of these. Khandesh District Gazetteer, p. 198. Thana District Gazetteer, p. 389. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 92.

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caused by crop failures (which left agriculturalists unwilling to purchase cloth), by escalating grain prices (which left weavers unable to purchase all their food needs), and by dramatic changes in the costs of raw materials involved in making cloth. Every twelve years weavers faced a Sinhast year, when rural families believed it was inauspicious to arrange marriages, and as a result did not make their usual purchases of cloth. When severe crises struck, merchants might cease inancing artisans altogether. Evidence from Ahmednagar between the 1860s and the 1930s gives some idea of the volatility of artisanal existence. The late years of the American Civil War apparently were very dificult times for local weavers, in part because of the high costs of cotton (and hence yarn), and in part because of sharply escalating food prices. The margin between the earnings weavers obtained for their cloth and the amounts of their purchases of grain closed so greatly that many persons who did weaving during part of the year were compelled to shift to cultivation. Between 1865 and 1875, however, a fall in the cost of raw materials due to the increased availability of yarn from the spinning mills of Bombay coincided with a fall in grain prices, thus providing some breathing room for small producers. This period of relative stability ended in 1876 when a major famine struck, rendering much cloth un-sellable and grain prices skyrocketing. Many artisans were forced onto famine relief works. After the famine, the market rebounded, in part because of the demand among “poorer classes whose clothes were worn to rags by famine,” and in part because the building of railways reduced the costs of steam-spun yarn further, which led to a temporary cheapening in grain prices.40 The number of handloom weavers expanded, as even workers from outside hereditary artisan communities tried to enter the profession. The 1880s and 1890s were then marked by further ups and downs until major famine struck in 1896–7 and again in 1899–1900, years that also coincided with extensive plague. A further critical moment was experienced by local weavers between 1914 and 1917, when the prices of yarn and dyes rose dramatically in a time of general inlation in grain prices. And of course the worldwide Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s struck artisans very hard, as we will see. Thus any weaver who lived to the age of ifty in Ahmednagar during this period would have experienced three or more signiicant general crises over his lifetime, in addition to more speciic familial trauma produced by domestic misfortunes. Many did not 40

See Chapter 1.

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survive these calamities and life spans of more than ifty were probably in the minority.41 This account of Ahmednagar District’s history highlights the importance of two different kinds of crises: those produced by severe crop failures and those produced by high costs of raw materials. I now turn to each of these types in greater detail. Urban Weavers and Famine Three devastating famines struck the Bombay Presidency during the late nineteenth century: in 1876–7, 1896–7, and 1899–1900. These famines caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, the depletion of western India’s cattle stock, and the failure of agriculture over wide areas in the region.42 These famines, however, had a particularly drastic effect on small cloth producers. When faced with anticipated crop failures, one of the irst steps taken by agriculturalists was to cut back on their expenditures on non-food items such as clothing. Well before severe food shortages were certain, the market for cloth contracted severely. Textile merchants, fearing a collapse in prices for their existing stocks, stopped providing advances or supplies of yarn, effectively cutting their weavers loose into unemployment at a time of sharply escalating food prices. Large numbers of looms quickly ceased work. The reliance of artisans on bosses who provided them with yarn or wages became a major liability during a time when these bosses were trying to reduce their losses radically. Famines of food thus were brought about primarily by famines of work. Lack of employment affected not just the weaver himself but every member of the weaving family. Once merchants ceased to provide yarn, the preliminary jobs performed by women and children, notably the preparation of yarn for the loom, stopped as well. Most weaving families were thus left with no means of sustaining a livelihood in their localities. Reports from all three of the great nineteenth-century famines comment on the dramatic nature of weavers’ unemployment. During the famine of 1876–7, for instance, the collector of Kaladgi District remarked that cloth manufacture among the many weavers in the large towns had 41

42

See the Ahmadnagar District Gazetteer, pp. 347–9 for the account up to 1884. The later parts of this account are drawn from evidence that will be examined in more detail later. For a more complete overview of these famines, see B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, 1860–1965 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967); McAlpin, Subject to Famine.

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reached an absolute standstill, and that artisans and manufacturers had been “brought to penury due to cessation of trade.” The government had had to provide advances simply for weaving families to attain a meagre subsistence.43 The Collector of Nasik indicated that in Yeola, where a considerable business had existed in iner, often silk, cloths, “the demand so entirely failed that Government had . . . to advance materials to the weavers and buy up their work to save them from starvation.” “These people [the weavers],” his report went on, “have probably felt the scarcity more than any other class in the Collectorate.”44 In Sholapur, there were reports of many weavers abandoning their occupation due to the severe contraction of the market for coarse cloth.45 Similarly in the famine of 1896–7, reports of unemployment preceded the depletion of food stocks. In this case, the crisis for weavers was particularly acute because it coincided with a Sinhast year, and the market connected to marriage activity had already contracted severely. The monsoon rains began violently in 1896, washing away a large portion of the young plants in the ields. Then a drought followed, causing yields throughout the Deccan to fall to about one-third of normal, in some cases to less than one-tenth. Agriculturalists quickly stopped making cloth purchases. Fearing that they would not be able to ind a sale for their existing stocks, many merchants ceased commissioning new products, throwing tens of thousands of weavers out of work across Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. In Nasik, the collector reported in December 1896 that “a very large proportion of Momin weavers are really now in a state of destitution and require assistance.”46 In Sholapur, local reports suggested that thousands of weavers had lost their work by October 1896 and were leaving town. Many of these, the reports indicated, “did not even get a roti” at the time of Dassera.47 Seven to eight thousand additional weavers (of a total population of perhaps twenty thousand weavers) came to participate in the special relief works set up for artisans during the famine.48 43

44

45

46

47 48

Administrative Report of Kaladgi District, 1876–7, MSA, RD, 1877, vol. 14A, comp. 1287, p.15. Administrative Report of Nasik District, 1876–7, MSA, RD 1877, vol. 16, comp. 1151, p. 202. Administrative Report of Sholapur District, 1876–7, MSA, RD, 1877, vol. 19, comp. 1195, p. 303. Collector of Nasik to Commissioner, C.D., 11 December 1896 in MSA, RD (Famine), 1897, vol. 35, comp. 49, p. 82. Kalpataru ani Ananda Vritta [in Marathi], 25 Oct. 1896, p. 4. Fortnightly Famine Report from Sholapur, 8 Sept. 1900, in IOLR, Bombay Revenue Proceedings (Famine), 1900, P/5988, p. 5965.

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Image 10. “Special Famine Relief Camp for Weavers Organized by the American Marathi Mission, c. 1900” (Note presence of women, men, and children.) Source: The Report of the American Marathi Mission, 1900.

Less than one-third of the weavers in Ahmedabad and Ahmednagar were able to continue working.49 Perhaps the richest discussion of the weavers’ situation came from H. M. Desai, a revenue oficial travelling around Bijapur District during the famine. He reported in mid-December 1896 that food stocks in the market of Guledgud appeared to be plentiful, that there was no sign of traders withholding grain from markets, and that those artisans who resorted to the bazaar appeared healthy. He concluded, however, that large numbers of weavers would soon be in a very serious condition. Surveying several streets in the weavers’ area, Desai found that looms had stopped altogether in 40 out of 135 houses, and that 332 out of the 468 looms in these houses were not operating. In some houses, he discovered just a few pieces of half inished cloth, a clear indication of the inability to purchase suficient quantities of yarn. “Not even ive per cent of the houses we visited,” he reported, “contained more than a sack of grain, 49

Letter from Khan Bahadur Jahangir Pestonji Vakil, Chair, Ahmedabad City Famine Relief Committee, to Collector of Ahmedabad, 7 Aug. 1900 in MSA, RD (Famine) 1900, vol. 210, comp. 134, pp. 134–5; IOLR, Bombay Revenue Proceedings (Famine), 1900, P/5985, p. 1403.

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while in the rest none were to be seen. On enquiry I found they had all lived from hand to mouth, and made purchases of grain on the weekly market days.” He concluded, “all agree, and I have no reason to differ from them that by the end of January next from four to ive thousand people will be wanting means wherewith to support themselves.”50 Those producing ine goods were struck with special severity. Not all centres were affected equally by food shortages. Because many weavers of Surat supplied international markets not affected by famine, they did not require public relief during the great famine of 1899–1900.51 Reports from Yeola late in the 1896–7 famine indicate that a number of small producers found work in relief camps and others had migrated, but that there had been a certain revival of employment with the approaching end of the Sinhast year and the consequent increase in woven goods for wedding purposes.52 Yet the numbers of those struggling to subsist was clearly very large. The fate of ordinary weavers stood in sharp contrast to that of many peasants who owned their own lands. Holding food reserves and other resources from previous years, possessing credit in the form of their land and houses, and perhaps able to eke out a small crop, landowners and even tenants often had at least some capacity to survive. During the famine of 1896–7, for instance, the collector of Sholapur reported that the smallest property holders managed to last out the famine in their villages: Whenever a man had a small piece of garden land, he appeared to have no real dificulty in tiding over the scarcity. The fact that in a year when only about 1/10th part of the occupied area of the District have any crop at all, 82.4 per cent of the land revenue was recovered without recourse to any coercion except for the issue of notices, in itself proves that the landowners during a series of ordinary seasons had kept reserves for a year of famine.

Some cultivators paid their revenue in King William rupees, indicating that they had been saving for such an emergency for some time. In some villages, peasant cultivators opened up underground chambers

50

51

52

Report of H. M. Desai, 19–12–1896 in MSA, RD (Famine), 1897, vol. 35, comp. 49, pp. 128–41. The quote is from 141–2. Letter from Collector of Surat (Weir), 24 Nov. 1899, IOLR, Bombay Revenue Proceedings (Famine), 1899, vol. 5789, p. 1155. Survey Commissioner and Director, Land Records and Agriculture, Bombay to Chief Secretary to Government, RD (Famine), 14 May 1897 [report on famine in Nasik District] in MSA RD (Famine), 1897, vol. 27, comp. 167, p. 593.

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in which they stored grain. Landowners and “their regular servants,” meaning those who worked permanently for particular patrons, “can raise enough grain for a fairly comfortable existence.”53 Reports from elsewhere in the Deccan suggest that many small occupants and tenants were able to keep alive without having to enter famine relief works.54 The position of agricultural labourers, by contrast, was closer to that of the weavers. Individuals from the lowest castes, who commonly served as day labourers in the Deccan, were consistently represented in the relief camps in numbers far out of proportion to their percentage of the total population. The fate of handloom weavers during these three calamities illustrates in particularly acute form the value of the “entitlement approach” to famine developed by Amartya Sen.55 According to Sen, famines are not simply products of food shortage; indeed, he argues that during a number of famines, including the Bengal famine of 1943–4, no absolute unavailability of grain existed, but large numbers of people nonetheless died of starvation. Sen instead concludes that subsistence crises develop when particular groups within a society lack the ability to command food at critical moments, for instance, when they are unable to sell their services and have no money to make grain purchases. His approach suggests that long-term structural factors, for instance, social inequalities associated with the development of market economies, need to be taken into account in any examination of episodes in which large numbers of people starve. For the weavers, starvation was a product of the forms of inequality that characterised the handloom industry in western India. Unlike the Bengal famine, each of these major famines in western India during the late nineteenth century was undoubtedly precipitated by a serious failure of crops, which in turn was brought about by severe weather conditions. Food scarcity, however, does not explain why many weavers were reported to be in a desperate position well before most other groups in society, and why they suffered when grain shops still possessed ample supplies. Their vulnerability stemmed from their structural place of dependency in relation to sahukars and karkhandars as well as from the collapse of local cloth markets. It was the insecurity of their work that left them exposed 53

54

55

Administrative Report of Sholapur District, 1896–7 in MSA, RD 1898, vol. 21, comp. 67, pt. VI, pp. 52–8. See for instance, reports in MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 26, comp. 241 and MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 27, comp. 167. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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to famine conditions. The fact that an urban occupational group, the handloom weavers, was among the most severely affected during times of rural scarcity indicates the connectedness of changes happening in the small towns with those taking place in the countryside. Weavers’ Response to Famine Artisans attempted to cope with the crises posed by late-nineteenth-century famines in a variety of ways, including participation in collective protest. Their actions during these times, however, were strongly conditioned by their sense of entitlement to food and work, their notions of respectability, and their understandings about what was possible. Although unemployment was the immediate cause of the crisis among weavers, work relations became only a minor site of struggle during the famine. There is some evidence of resistance to yarn merchants and cloth sellers. In Guledgud, it was reported that Marwari merchants had ceased making cash advances to artisans or loans on the security of weavers’ homes, no doubt because of the uncertain prospects for future cloth sales. A number of handloom weavers responded by refusing to return the cloth they had manufactured from the yarn earlier provided by the merchants, and instead took it directly to market.56 In short, the weavers of Guledgud followed the well-established tactic of quietly withdrawing their services to those who failed to provide expected patronage. In general, however, such everyday forms of struggle occurred on a small scale; none relected direct confrontation with the men who dominated the cloth business. Collective action, as we shall see, was taken primarily against grain merchants who controlled food supplies. The search for alternative kinds of employment proved a more important form of response to subsistence crises than collective protest against employers. Often the closest source of work was a relief camp set up by the government to perform some public project like road building or tank construction. Many artisans did indeed enter public relief. Yet many others, especially those with the highest level of skills, hesitated to join.57 Municipal councillors in Sholapur in 1897 remarked that local weavers preferred to “be half-fed and stay at home rather than join the relief works.”58 Notions about the relative respectability of certain kinds of work may have played some part in these hesitations. Some regarded 56 57

58

Report of H.M. Desai, 19 Dec. 1896, MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 35, comp. 49, p. 131. Report on the Famine of 1896–7 in the Bombay Presidency-Satara District, MSA, RD (Famine) 1898, vol. 15, comp. 107, part XIV, pp. 283–4. Kalpataru ani Ananda Vritta, 10 January 1897, p. 2.

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breaking stones and carrying earth on relief projects as undigniied activities for craftsmen with high levels of skill.59 The sense of having mastery of one’s own time that came with the weaving profession may have also made some hesitant to submit to employment involving direct oversight and close forms of labour discipline in the camps, where evaluations were regularly made about whether inmates had put in a full day’s work. Colonial oficials reported fears that the weavers’ touch might be injured if they engaged in the kinds of heavy work required at the famine camps.60 All such attitudes may relect a deeper anxiety, that of being permanently reduced to a deskilled proletariat dependent on the casual labour market. For many weavers, migration over very long distances to ind employment seems to have been preferable to joining public works. In some cases, they travelled back along the already familiar paths that had brought them to western India. During the famine of 1876–7, hundreds of families in Yeola, a town whose weavers were largely Muslims from the United Provinces, were reported to have returned to the manufacturing centre of Benares. Several hundred others went to the princely state of Indore, situated along the Bombay-Agra highway, apparently attracted by reports they might receive patronage there.61 In Sholapur during the famines of 1896–7 and 1899–1900, large numbers of weavers went back to their home regions in Telangana.62 The local newspaper, Kalpataru, reported in October 1896 that because of the earlier famine, two thousand weavers had suddenly left the city: There was a continuous queue of such people [weavers and others like them] for three or four kilometres on the Boramani road. Some were bidding their last farewell to their friends, some embracing and crying loudly, some wiping tears from their eyes and walking with their eyes toward the ground, some were worried about their offspring – similar scenes were seen throughout the crowd.63 59

60

61

62

63

British oficials on at least one occasion referred to these hesitancies as relecting “caste prejudices.” Assistant Collector of Belgaum to Collector, Belgaum 19 April 1877 in MSA, RD (Famine) 1876–7, vol. 99, comp. 173, p. 381. See, for instance, Letter no. 242-Famine, 23 January 1897 in MSA, RD (Famine) 1897, vol. 160, comp. 73, p. 244. Revenue Commissioner to Secretary to Government, Famine Department (no date), MSA, RD (Famine) 1876–7, vol. 99, comp. 173, p. 343; and Assistant Collector, Nasik, to Collector of Nasik, 9th February 1877 in the same compilation, p. 447. For instance, see Indian Famine Commission 1901. Appendix, vol. II: Evidence of Witnesses, Bombay Presidency, pp. 1041–3. Kalapataru ani Ananda Vritta, 25 October 1896, p. 4.

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Paul Greenough has argued that family break-up associated with migration during the Bengal famine of 1943–4 relected a culturally patterned form of disintegration; members of the family who were most highly valued in local culture, especially adult males, were allowed to control resources that ensured survival; whereas less-valued members, women and children, were set adrift to fend for themselves.64 Migration behaviour of weaving families during famines in the Bombay Presidency, no doubt, relects a kind of cultural patterning based on gender and age differences, but perhaps one that represented less a form of disintegration than a strategic effort by the family to ensure its reproduction. Famine migration was largely a step undertaken by men who sought some way of maintaining family incomes without having to engage in forms of labour they deemed demeaning. Yet such men did not usually leave their dependents without hope of staying alive. In some cases, women and children were sent to the relief projects, where they could sustain themselves with food doles and wage payments on famine works. During the famine of 1896–7, for instance, most male weavers in Malegaon had left town, but one thousand Momins, mostly women and children, crowded the relief works, and an equal number had to be turned away.65 In effect, such weaving families coped by attempting to diversify their sources of subsistence. The population of weavers in most cloth-producing centres recovered soon after these famines, suggesting that many families were able to reconstitute themselves once the demand for cloth rebounded. Famine migration was in a sense not an extraordinary action, but one consistent with the social experience of most artisans. That is, it relected the fact that most handloom weavers were mobile labourers who enjoyed neither the social protection offered by village patrons nor any kind of contractual claims to employment that might be enforced by the state. For members of the weaving family, the willingness to uproot themselves from their places of residence and to live apart from each other over extended periods of time had long been essential to guaranteeing social reproduction in such a climate of instability.66 At the same time, temporary migration allowed the larger industry, which required signiicant amounts of skilled labour – but very unevenly over the course of the 64

65

66

Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Collector of Nasik to Commissioner, CD, 4 Dec. 1896, MSA, RD (Famine), 1896, vol. 9, comp. 62, p. 320. In this case, the Collector deemed the Momins’ approach as illegitimate, and eventually closed the works. See the discussion of migration in Chapter 2.

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year – to reconstitute itself after the famine. In short, famine migration bolstered key aspects of the economic order that was developing wherever signiicant numbers of weavers lived. In their participation in grain riots, however, weavers did challenge important aspects of small town capitalism. Such collective actions were a particularly prominent feature of the famine of 1896–7: They occurred in Sholapur, Karad (Satara District), Hubli, Dharwar, Ranebennur, Nargund (Dharwar District), and other towns. They nearly threatened to do so in other towns with signiicant weaving populations such as Ahmednagar and Malegaon. In Poona, government oficials took credit for preventing riots when they conveyed to grain dealers a “gentle hint” that the poor might be ready to begin looting local stores if prices continued to escalate.67 Weavers were at the forefront of many of these incidents.68 In attacking grain shops, weavers joined other town dwellers in responding to an abnormal rise in prices and to the commonly shared belief that local merchants were withholding stocks. In the initial stages of famine of 1896–7, many grain dealers through much of the Bombay Presidency hoarded food on the expectation that prices would continue to rise; others sent food to the Central Provinces and to northern India where prices were already at high levels. As prices rose and rumours of rioting spread, some dealers withheld grain out of fear of being robbed by the distressed poor. Government oficials sometimes tried to persuade merchants to make grain available in such circumstances, but they lacked the authority and the inclination to compel traders to lower their prices. The most serious grain riot occurred in Sholapur city in November 1896. A later report would comment that the incident “was not the outcome of any intense scarcity . . . but brought on by themselves by the grain dealers of Sholapur, who so wildly speculated on the chance of a serious famine occurring and drove the poor people to exasperation by the uncertainty and absurdity of their market rates.”69 Local traders had made large purchases of grain earlier in the season, intending to hold it until prices had risen signiicantly. Already, before the riot, there had been an increase

67

68

69

Final Report on the Famine of 1896–7 in the Bombay Presidency (Poona), MSA, RD (Famine), 1898, vol. 13, comp. 107, pt. XI, p. 268; See also MSA RD (Famine) vol. 21, comp. 43 for discussion of grain riots in the Presidency. Collector of Nasik to Commissioner, CD, 4 Dec. 1896, MSA, RD (Famine) 1896, vol. 9, comp. 62, p. 320; Representation of the Deccan Sabha Relating to the Present Famine, 3 December 1896, MSA, RD (Famine), 1896, vol. 9, comp. 85, p. 486. Final Report on the Famine of 1896–7 in the Bombay Presidency, Sholapur, 5 Jan. 1898, MSA, RD (Famine), 1898, vol. 15, comp. 107, pt. XV, p. 348.

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in reports of “dacoities, robberies and thefts” in the city; the district magistrate, L. G. Deshmukh, had convinced a few grain dealers to keep prices low for the poor, but he had also asked the district superintendent of police (DSP) to station armed men in the grain market. On 8 November, a crowd of local residents, many of them local Mangs and Mahars (persons from “Untouchable,” non-weaving castes), went to the magistrate’s bungalow, pleading to have their grievances against the grain dealers redressed. Deshmukh, having no legal authority to interfere with the operation of the market, was unable to satisfy the crowd with his response. After leaving the magistrate’s ofice, the crowd, now joined by many out-of-work Padmasali and Momin weavers, proceeded to a local basket shop, carrying away a large number of sticks to use as weapons. It then went on to the grain market, where its numbers grew to as much as twelve or ifteen thousand. Soon many of those present began to loot the stores of rice, juwar, and ghee. Most of those whose stores were attacked were Gujaratis or Marwaris. When part of the crowd found itself unable to break down the door of two storekeepers, some of its members climbed the house walls and opened the granary. A large number of sacks of grain were seized. Not one shop was touched where merchants had previously agreed to provide grain to the poor at reduced prices.70 By the time the DSP had arrived, the market was entirely in the possession of the crowd, and local police had lost control. Members of the crowd pelted some of the police with stones and made threatening gestures and insults to others. The DSP tried to calm those present and draw them out of the shops they were looting, but the riot continued unabated. Finally, he decided to order the police to ire. Four rioters were killed, and a larger number were injured. The district administration called in troops to maintain order, but for days rumours of further potential disturbances circulated.71 Total losses incurred in the rioting were estimated at 25,000 rupees. As the DSP himself would recognise, participants in the riots were weavers and others without work who had a “grievance against the 70 71

Kalpataru ani Ananda Vritta, 8 Nov. 1896, pp. 1–2. The most complete report of this collective action is contained in MSA, JD, 1897, vol. 251, comp. 178, esp. the letter of the DSP to the Commissioner CD, 28 Nov. 1896, 221–4. The episode is important historically in another sense because Deshmukh, one of the irst Indian ICS oficers, was censured for failure to take a stronger personal role during the actions and for dismissing British troops sent to the scene without consulting the British Superintendence of Police. Deshmukh himself pointed to the overconidence of local police and the removal of an armed guard in the market several days before the event.

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grainsellers for selling grain at what they consider to be an unreasonable high price.”72 Their actions relect their notions of what was fair market practise.73 Pre-colonial states in India had intervened in the market during times of food shortage by opening charities where grain would be distributed or by preventing grain exports from the kingdom.74 This practise was continued in some of the “native states” during the nineteenth century, including, interestingly, Indore, the territory to which many weavers had migrated in 1896. Yet the colonial government increasingly viewed such restrictions as interference with free trade, and insisted that the export of grain from localities be allowed, even in the worst shortages. In some cases, municipalities that opened cheap grain shops in times of distress were censured for unnecessary interference with the operation of the market. The crowd of weavers and others in Sholapur, on the other hand, clearly felt that interference with the market to ensure a fair price in times of dearth was justiied. Its members showed a high degree of purposefulness in their actions. In irst approaching the district magistrate, they gave voice to their belief that it was a responsibility of the government to prevent hoarding. Although weavers may not have expected the state to protect their work, they did expect it to intervene to ensure their access to food at reasonable rates. When oficials failed to take action, the crowd felt suficiently angered and emboldened to seize food itself. Participants in the crowd showed a high degree of selectivity in targeting grain shops owned by outside traders and in skipping the shops of merchants believed to be engaged in fairer trading practises. Shopkeepers themselves were not attacked, only their property. Interestingly, this episode and others probably had some inluence on the access of local people to food in the long run. The violence in Sholapur was followed up by efforts funded by local merchants and organised by Bal Gangadhar Tilak to develop a relief project that would put weavers to work in weaving sheds. After the government refused to provide 72

73

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DSP, to Commissioner, Central Division, 5 Dec. 1896, MSA, JD, 1897, vol. 251, comp. 178, p. 287. Obviously, there are strong parallels here between the values of participants in these acts of violence and the values of the poor in eighteenth-century Britain studied by E. P. Thompson in his classic article, Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. See Bhatia, Famines in India, p. 111; Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal, p. 50; David L. Curley, “Fair Grain Markets and Mughal Famine Policy in Late 18th Century Bengal,” Calcutta Historical Journal 2 (July–Dec. 1977), pp. 1–26 cited in Greenough, p. 50.

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funding for this project, local civic leaders formed a weavers’ guild with missionary sponsorship.75 The district magistrate did try to inluence merchants to reduce their prices. Local philanthropists also contributed to the opening of cheap grain stores. On one day, nearly four thousand migrants, many of them presumably weavers, were helped with funds.76 The local municipal council also attempted to pressure the colonial government to provide special relief to weavers.77 Such efforts were informed in part by the fear that rioting and other forms of social disorder might recur. Thus collective action was a potentially effective behaviour of people who lacked adequate channels for making their voices felt within the ordinary structures of the colonial state.78 Seemingly, the willingness of large numbers of people to engage in violence at such moments was sparked not only by strong feelings of frustration but also by a hope that such actions could inluence those with the power to make grain available. Crises of Supply Another major source of uncertainty in the lives of small producers were the luctuations in the costs of raw materials. To recapitulate an argument made in Chapter 1, artisans of western India had become wholly reliant on national and international markets for their materials. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps the majority used imported British yarn; by the late nineteenth century, a large portion had made the transition to yarn manufactured in Bombay, Ahmedabad, or Sholapur. By 1910, most used German dyes to colour their cloth. Silk, gold, and silver for jari products and other materials were imported. Over time, cheapening prices in some of these products, especially cotton yarn, did help weavers and other producers to carry on. Sudden changes in Indian or world markets, however, could drastically reduce the margin between the cost of production and the payments received by the artisanal family. The most dramatic crises brought about by these kinds of developments occurred during World War I. Although the war years have usually been seen as a time of economic expansion in India, the period 1914–17 was almost uniformly a traumatic one for small producers. On the one 75

76 77 78

For the role of the merchants and of Tilak, see MSA, Revenue Department (Famine) 1896, vol. 22, comp. 73. The Weavers’ Guild is discussed in Chapter 6. Kalpataru ani Ananda Vritta, 27 Dec. 1896, p. 3. Kalpataru ani Ananda Vritta, 10 Jan. 1897, p. 2. David Arnold makes a somewhat similar argument about the eficacy of grain riots in “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy.”

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hand, most artisans did not compete for markets with goods manufactured abroad, so the abrupt decline in imports provided little boost in sales. On the other hand, most small producers relied on imported raw materials. The costs of most of these materials shot up signiicantly. First of all, the price of cotton yarn rose steadily during the war. As European industry devoted itself to meeting war needs, imports of foreign yarn dropped. The resulting increases in yarn prices directly affected weavers in northern Karnataka, who used English yarn in their products.79 According to contemporary accounts, however, a wider impact was brought about by the fact that reduced cloth imports gave the modern textile industry unprecedented opportunities to sell cloth in the domestic market, and factory managers now utilised nearly all the yarn made in the mills themselves.80 As supplies available in the general market dwindled, prices of yarn rose signiicantly. By 1917, they were often 50 per cent higher than those that weavers had paid before the war.81 An even greater rise in the prices of aniline dyes compounded the weavers’ dificulties. With the onset of the war, the supply of German dyes was virtually cut off. The pre-war net consumption of dyes in India had been on average 15,351,000 pounds per year, valued at .645 rupees per pound. In 1915–16, imports had fallen to 693,000 pounds. Prices of dyes rose to about six rupees per pound, up to ten times higher than pre-war levels.82 Because dyes had constituted about 10 per cent of the value of most saris, this represented a substantial rise in the artisans’ costs. Weavers struggled to make coarse cloth without dyes or to use inferior colouring agents. Merchants at the time, however, often simply refused to buy the cloth without a guarantee that the colours would be fast, which the artisans were unable to provide.83 In reports that mention only one of the two factors, the changes in the cost of dyes are stated more frequently than the cost of yarn as a cause of weavers’ distress. By contrast with the handlooms, many of the mills held stocks of cheap dyes during the early years of the war and thus were not so strongly affected by these price increases.84 79

80 81

82 83

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Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 557. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 4. Annual Report Relating to the Establishment of Co-operative Credit Societies in the Bombay Presidency, 1916–17, p. 20. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 4. Land Revenue Report of Ahmednagar District, 1915–6, in MSA, RD 1917, comp. 511, pt. V, p. 97. Land Revenue Report of Sholapur District, 1915–6, in MSA, RD 1917, comp. 511, pt. V, p. 249.

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Cost increases of other materials had similar effects. The price of raw silk also rose during the war years. The largest importer of Chinese silk in Surat reportedly could now obtain only half of the quantities it had been importing through Bombay before 1914. At the same time, Surat’s export market in the Ottoman Empire had dried up as a result of wartime conditions. The number of workers employed by one local irm engaged in silk manufacture and commerce fell from 150 to roughly 20.85 Silk production dropped everywhere at the outset of the war. In Yeola, which manufactured silk saris for a domestic market and presumably had found substitute sources of raw silk from Japan or Bengal, the industry had rebounded signiicantly by 1917, a result of the prosperity of agriculturalists in the cotton growing tracts of Berar and Khandesh. Still, according to a local report, the condition of weavers was “not as good as before wartime.”86 The jari industry, which relied on imports of gold and silver, also took a blow due to controls on imports of precious metals.87 This had a profound inluence on the manufacture of high-value saris in places like Surat, which used gold thread extensively. Other calamities sometimes piled up on top of these economic problems. Major loods hit the small towns of Dharwar, Belgaum, and Bijapur in 1917, destroying weavers’ homes and places of work, and causing the handloom industry in some cases to come to a standstill.88 Epidemics of cholera hit weavers in some towns, and plague affected artisans throughout the Presidency.89 In 1918, these problems were compounded by rural famine through much of the presidency, when weavers were again unable to ind buyers for their cloth.90 In 1918–19 came the great world inluenza epidemic. The dificulties of subsistence under these conditions were considerable. In Khandesh, it was reported in 1915 that the prices of low-quality yarn had gone up 15 per cent and those of fast-dyed yarn by about 40 per cent, whereas prices of saris had fallen from three to two rupees and even lower.91 In the following year, prices of cloth in the Presidency still had 85 86

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Ansorge, Report on an Inquiry into the Silk Industry, Vol. II, p. 31. Land Revenue Report of Nasik District, 1916–7, MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. VI, p. 129. Land Revenue Report of Surat District, 1915–6, MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. IV, p. 103. Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20; Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency 1917–8, pp. 18–19. Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20; Land Revenue Report of Nasik District, 1916–7, MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. VI, p. 129. Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1918–9, p. 17. Land Revenue Report for East Khandesh, 1914–5, MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. V, p. 12.

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not risen to compensate for the increased costs of production because the mills were continuing to dispose of pre-war stocks of cloth. One oficial remarked, “At present, the margin between the cost of manufacture and the selling price is barely enough to keep the weavers and their families alive.”92 A report on the conditions in the Presidency from 1917 indicated that the prices of yarn had gone up 50 per cent from pre-war levels and those of dyes nearly 1,000 per cent, but those of cloth had risen only 38 per cent.93 The weavers were being squeezed from all sides, as grain prices had also risen signiicantly. Wage data from Pathardi in Ahmednagar District indicates that weavers there were earning only four annas per day. This was said to be “the rate an agricultural labourer earns,” but the same report in fact indicates that the wages of unskilled labourers and agricultural workers had gone up to six annas per day. Masons and carpenters were by then earning one rupee per day.94 By 1918, once cloth prices began to keep pace with inlation, payments to weavers clearly improved, and some in the Presidency were earning one rupee a day, albeit in a continued environment of escalating grain prices, famine, and inluenza.95 Weavers adapted to the crisis of World War I in a variety of ways. Those who chose to remain in their locales in many cases turned to merchant-capitalists for inancial support and became dependent artisans or wage workers.96 Dificult times, after all, were often an opportunity for bosses to tighten their controls over labour as long as they saw some future prospect for better markets on the horizon. A number of weavers tried to cope with higher dye prices by turning to the production of plain cloth, by importing cheap dyes from south India, or by trying to revive old, abandoned methods of manufacturing vegetable dyes.97 These latter efforts unfortunately met with only limited success, because the dyes were not fast and the range of colours limited, and because consumer 92 93 94

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Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1915–6, p. 15. Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20. Land Revenue Report of Ahmednagar, 1915–6 (Eastern Division), MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. V, pp. 21–23. Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1917–8, pp. 18–19. Land Revenue Report of Dharwar, 1916–7, MSA, RD, 1918, comp. 511, pt. VIII, p. 215; Land Revenue Report of Dharwar, Land Revenue Administration Report, Part II, of the Bombay Presidency, including Sind for the year 1915–16, MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. I, p. 235; Land Revenue Report of Ratnagiri, 1917–8, MSA, RD 1919, comp. 511, pt. III, p. 3. Land Revenue Report of Belgaum, 1915–6, MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. VIII, p. 13; Land Revenue Report of Belgaum, 1916–7, MSA, RD, 1918, comp. 511, pt. VI, p. 7; Land Revenue Report of Belgaum, 1917–8, MSA, RD, 1919, comp. 511, pt. III, p. 7.

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preferences had not adjusted to changes in the availability of goods. Yet they did allow some artisans to persist in their trades, albeit at very meagre standards of living. In other cases, small producers made more drastic adjustments. At one point, the “caste panchayat at Dharangaon” (presumably the organisation of the Momins) relaxed rules preventing begging among weavers, and nearly one hundred begged daily on the streets.98 The resort to begging itself might be seen as a strategy of artisans who were experiencing severe strains but who wished to position themselves to resume their activity once business rebounded. Exiting the industry or the locale was another option. Clearly thousands of artisans simply abandoned their profession during the war years, although many probably did so with the intention of returning to cloth production when the crisis ran its course. A few made their way into agriculture, but more entered the labour market in small towns; yet still others joined the army.99 Many chose to migrate in search of more stable work. In contrast to famine periods, moving to artisanal centres in other regions of India was not a very viable option, because rising yarn and dye prices were found everywhere. Migration to the bigger cities certainly offered brighter prospects. Because of their familiarity with yarn and cloth, weavers and other artisans often were attractive candidates for employment in the mills, which were experiencing considerable expansion. There are reports of signiicant numbers of weavers in Dharangaon migrating to work in the factories of Ahmedabad and Broach, and of weavers in Sangamner, Yeola, and Bhiwandi moving to Bombay.100 In Bhiwandi, 1,500 weavers and dyers migrated from the town in 1915–16 and another 1,000 in 1916–17, a result of the stoppage of the handloom industry. Collectively, this must have been about half of the total artisanal population of the town.101 98 99

100

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Land Revenue Report for East Khandesh, 1914–5, MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. V, p. 12. Land Revenue Report of Dharwar District, 1916–7, MSA, RD, 1918, comp. 511, pt. VI, p. 7; Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, pp. 548, 557; Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1915–6, p. 15; Land Revenue Report of Ratnagiri, 1917–8, MSA, RD, 1919, comp. 511, pt. III, p. 3. Resort to agricultural labour is mentioned only in Ratnagiri, an area where weavers were probably part-time cultivators involved in the production of only very coarse cloth. Land Revenue Report for the Bombay Presidency, 1915–6, MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. I, pp. 14, 19; and Revenue Report of Ahmednagar District, 1914–5, MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. V, p. 25; Land Revenue Report for East Khandesh, 1914–5, in MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. V, p. 12; Land Revenue Report of Nasik District, 1914–5, MSA, RD, 1916, comp. 511, pt. V, p.13. Land Revenue Report of Thana, 1915–6, MSA, RD, 1917, comp. 511, pt. IV, p. 225; Land Revenue Report of Thana, 1916–7, MSA, RD, 1918, comp. 511, pt. III, p. 12.

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That such large numbers of artisans moved during World War I is again testimony to the considerable mobility of this category of economic actors. Indeed, the records of some districts indicate that weavers were the only occupational category there to move in signiicant numbers during the war. Seemingly, they either already possessed information about potential prospects elsewhere or quickly gathered such knowledge once their circumstances turned for the worse. Subsistence in this profession almost required a certain readiness to move if economic conditions got rough. Collective action against merchant-capitalists, however, was a relatively minor method of responding to subsistence crises. I have found evidence of only one such incident, the brief mention of a strike of weavers for higher payments for cloth from local dealers in Hubli around 1917. Seemingly, these were actions taken by independent artisans at a time when demand for cloth was starting to revive and textile prices were beginning to rebound, and they relected an effort to share in the beneits of the improving commercial environment.102 A single sentence, unfortunately, is all the evidence we have on this episode. For the most part, small producers either did not see protest against bosses as either an effective or legitimate method of handling crises, perhaps because they were well aware that the insecurity of their circumstances made them especially vulnerable at such times. Conclusion Thus, despite all the evidence of the continued dynamism of small-scale production and of the agency of individual weaver-entrepreneurs, the ordinary artisan in western India lived under conditions of extreme poverty and insecurity. Sahukars and karkhandars in the small towns maintained their positions in great part by depressing the payments to small producers to levels signiicantly less than those of other skilled workers in the economy, as well as by sustaining their access to a pool of cheap workers who had little employment during part of the year but who could be mobilised during the times of highest demand. The circumstances of weavers, dyers, printers, and jari makers were remarkably similar to those of unskilled, casual labourers in the countryside or cities. Their earning levels were at best only marginally higher, they experienced the same kinds of uncertain access to work, and they lacked 102

Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20.

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the resources and reserves needed to withstand periodic economic crises. Like ield labourers, the artisans’ well-being was tied to the agricultural harvest: They could ind themselves in a dificult position while grain was ripening in the ields, and in conditions of great stress if the crop failed altogether or prices escalated sharply. We have little knowledge of the methods small producers used to cope with the more ordinary conditions of chronic poverty. They must have had a myriad of ways of economising on family expenses and scrounging out incomes that are invisible in the records. We do, on the other hand, have evidence of how they handled extreme crises. They developed a large repertoire of methods that allowed them to ight off absolute hunger and prevent their permanent absorption into the general labour market. Above all, they showed a willingness to move that may have exceeded almost any other set of actors in the western Indian economy. Moving did not just secure subsistence when times were toughest; it often allowed weavers to remain in a profession offering freedoms and leisure they could not ind elsewhere. For the most part, however, these strategies did not involve any direct collective confrontation with the merchants and karkhandars who provided work; the uncertainties of their employment seem to have precluded this except perhaps when demand for their services was the greatest. The straitened circumstances of artisans in the Bombay Presidency certainly attracted the attention of colonial oficials. By the irst decade of the twentieth century, government oficers were beginning to devote considerable time to studying local crafts. Dozens of reports began to be devoted to the topic, and at least two government departments in the Presidency began to focus on the problems of local industries. The next chapter turns to the policies of the colonial state and to the reasons its activities were so ineffective.

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6 The Colonial State and the Handloom Weaver

Once it had assumed power in western India, the colonial state, breaking from the precedents set by pre-colonial regimes and the East India Company, withdrew from the politics of artisan production. Although signiicant changes in the character of handloom weaving, dyeing, printing, and other forms of cloth manufacture during the later nineteenth century, these changes were not caused by any self-conscious administrative policy; rather, they were generated largely by various regional actors in the context of a changing international economy. In part because the peasant bore such a disproportionate share of colonial taxation and commercial extractive activity, agriculture constituted the main focus of government concern.1 The settlement of land revenue, the building of irrigation works, the construction of railroads to improve the low of raw materials to port cities, and efforts to encourage improved varieties of crops all were markers of an agrarian-centred regime. Besides a few measures such as providing protection for British commerce, removing minor cesses on local manufactures, and abolishing inland duties on trade – which were often in effect restored in the form of municipal octroi taxes – the colonial administration really had no signiicant industrial policy until the twentieth century.2 On the one hand, artisan cloth production seemed to offer limited scope for raising revenue; on the other, 1

2

A. D. D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–1933 (Canberra and New Delhi: Australian National University and Manohar, 1978), pp. 15–16. Neil Charlesworth, British Rule and the Indian Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 60–1; Morris D. Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History,” pp. 10, 13.

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colonial oficials believed that trade and industry would grow best if they faced a minimum of governmental intervention. No doubt, the fate of artisanal activity under colonialism made many British administrators uneasy. Concerned oficials often believed that Indian “crafts” were succumbing both qualitatively and quantitatively to the competition of the Lancashire mills and to the Westernisation of buyer preferences. As Abigail McGowan has shown, arts and crafts advocates of the late nineteenth century, most of whom were British oficials, were starting to feel that some form of state patronage was necessary if this trend were to be checked. Exhibitions were developed to popularise certain forms and methods of design, schools of art were established to teach craft techniques, industrial schools were created to spread improved methods, and journals and monographs were published to study and preserve existing methods of production. These early measures were highly insulated from the actual cloth producers of the Bombay Presidency, and were animated as much by a desire to preserve aesthetic forms as they were by an interest in improving the social circumstances of weavers, dyers, and gold-thread makers. The project suffered as well from a failure to recognise that small-scale production was thoroughly integrated into the capitalist economy of small towns and that signs of “decline” in artistic standards were often evidence of creative adaptation to the increasingly hybrid character of consumer tastes.3 The approach of the Raj began to change at the very end of the nineteenth century. Oficials in western India started to make serious efforts to study economic conditions prevailing in speciic Indian crafts; administrators held conferences devoted to industrial matters under government sponsorship; the Department of Co-operative Societies encouraged the formation of co-operatives among artisans; and the Department of Industries adopted measures to stimulate “indigenous industries.” These efforts at an industrial policy rarely devoted any signiicant attention to factory production, which oficials still viewed mostly as outside the scope of government. Instead they focused heavily on the small producer. Throughout the period up to 1940, the Department of Industries in Bombay, for instance, had little at all to do with modern textile mills or any other established form of large-scale manufacture. Rather, it concentrated on trying to start up a few stray pioneer industries and on encouraging artisans to adopt improved techniques. 3

See the rich discussion of these issues in McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, chapter 1.

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By 1930, however, after almost three decades of trying to help handloom weavers and other artisans, such colonial efforts had had little effect on the well-being of small producers. This chapter examines two key central activities of policy makers – the attempt to introduce new techniques of production and the effort to stimulate the formation of co-operative societies – in order to understand why these policies were so ineffective. Two broad factors stand out as causes of these limitations. At the most obvious level, the colonial administration was unwilling to commit the kind of resources and to muster the human effort necessary to achieve its goals. If the state was going to become a player in the politics of the workshops, it was going to have to throw signiicant weight behind the household and the wage worker in potential struggles with the powerful men who controlled artisan cloth production. In most locales, however, funds contributed by the government towards the promotion of industry never came close to matching the collective resources and local political muscle exercised by sahukars, merchants, and karkhandars. The Bombay government was reluctant to strain its budget to help handloom weavers or to cross the line between public policy and commercial endeavour for matters of little direct imperial import. As a result, it allocated only paltry sums to industrial matters. Nor did the Raj prioritise accumulation of the kind of knowledge about cloth production or textile markets necessary to make a signiicant practical difference to people who had devoted their whole lives to the business. The British Raj was for the most part a regime of clerks, not of technical specialists and experts about Indian consumer preferences. Second, the government never came to grips with the capitalist character of the artisanal economy. British oficials continued to retain an image, derived in part from Orientalist assumptions, of the artisan as a traditional and conservative igure, using simple techniques and working within the context of family production, but subject to the interference of rapacious outsiders. They sought to beef up what they saw as noncapitalist actors against the onslaught of the factory on the one hand and the sahukar on the other by attempting to induce artisans to behave in a more “scientiic,” “rational” manner.4 As we have seen in previous chapters, however, successful artisan production had always involved dynamic and lexible interaction with urban markets, innovativeness, and complex processes of disciplining and controlling labour. Even as oficials tried 4

McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India.

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to address the condition of small producers, they sought to reproduce the “craft” character of work and the semi-mythical notion of the independent weaving household. Government advocates often lost interest in artisans who adopted electric power to run their looms, who aggressively found buyers for their goods in far-lung markets, or who produced cloth that relected foreign designs. Above all, they were virtually oblivious to the reality of wage labour in the karkhanas. Colonial actions essentially overlooked the tens of thousands of workers who toiled for weaver-bosses in workshops with multiple employees. It would be mistaken to see the state’s policies as a project of modernity, because these efforts were so implicated in processes of inventing and preserving the “tradition” of the independent weaver. In the long run, the chief beneiciaries of colonial efforts at improvement were the “weaver-capitalists,” that is, the karkhandars. The bigger weavers were better positioned in the markets for credit, yarn, and cloth, and thus were able to take advantage of new techniques and the new possibilities offered by co-operative credit societies. Politically, state activity did nothing to challenge their role of dominance in the workshop. No policies emerged until the late 1930s to regulate labour practises in the karkhanas. As a result, work relations remained a product of negotiations and contests at the workshop level. At the same time, many smaller weavers were hesitant to chance adopting methods of business and manufacture whose beneits seemed to be uncertain. Overall, even this “impact” of government policy was very limited. Steps taken by the Bombay administration rarely affected the position of sahukars in any serious way. Adoption of new technologies and the generation of new forms of mobilising credit generally depended on previous structural developments in artisan society. The karkhandars’ use of facilities provided by the colonial administration after 1900 should be seen as one further dynamic adaptation to late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century circumstances, and not the crucial factor that made all other developments possible. Colonial “improvement” achieved hesitant and often unanticipated results, always depending on the initiative of those artisans best positioned to effect change.

The Origins of Colonial Policy State interest in crafts production owes its ultimate origins not to Gandhian reformers after World War I, but to a limited number of oficials

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and ex-oficials who began to take an interest in Indian industries.5 Some of these, such as George Birdwood and E. B. Havell, were men inluenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain. They became concerned with what they viewed as the decline and degradation of Indian “arts,” “crafts,” and “industries,” developments that they believed all to have been caused by exposure to European fashion and the pressure of European competition. They and others encouraged the government to open a small number of industrial schools, to sponsor industrial exhibitions in India and in Britain, and to publish a series of monographs on industries in different provinces.6 In Britain, the Arts and Crafts Movement had offered a radical critique of the existing social and political order; prominent igures associated with it, such as John Ruskin and William Morris, were advocates of socialism or various kinds of social utopianism. Many British sponsors of Indian crafts, although critical of the state’s failure to act to preserve Indian artistic traditions, were very much part of the imperial structure; most in fact were government employees who hoped to persuade the Raj to take a more active role in supporting their cause.7 And they perceived their objective of reviving Indian industry as part of the larger civilising mission of British rule to stimulate “moral and material progress” on the sub-continent. In the later nineteenth century, crafts advocates were visible igures, but they had only a marginal effect in bringing their concerns to a central place in colonial policy. Only after 1900, with the full-blown politicisation of the industrial question, did their call for greater involvement of the state in helping the artisan receive much attention. One signiicant reason for this shift was the rise of the Swadeshi Movement. The concept of swadeshi refers to the attempt by members of the Indian National Congress to persuade Indians to buy goods manufactured in India as way of stimulating economic development. Nationalist discourse gave a central place to the criticism that British rule and the competition of 5

6 7

McGowan provides a much more in-depth picture of these developments, which she traces to the middle of the nineteenth century in Crafting the Nation in Colonial India. See McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India. The critique of colonial policy on the arts offered by Havell and others is brought out in Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In my view, Guha-Thakurta insuficiently highlights the colonial character of arts and crafts advocacy. Guha-Thakurta brings out interesting differences between these advocates and discusses Havell’s later interest in “high arts,” but neither of these subjects is so central to the current argument.

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Lancashire had been responsible for de-industrialisation of the subcontinent. Moderate members of the Congress called on Indians to begin their own factories and demanded that the government provide tariff protection to promote infant industries.8 “Extremists” increasingly urged that Indians boycott foreign goods altogether. During the Bengal Anti-Partition struggle of 1905–8, the most widespread popular movement before World War I, the call for boycott assumed a form that seriously threatened colonial interests. Picketing of shops that sold foreign merchandise and bonires of foreign goods took place throughout urban Bengal.9 Imperial actors, including many crafts advocates, regarded the Swadeshi Movement as a dangerous development, one that offered a potential threat to the permanency of empire. In his writings and speeches, Havell himself openly voiced his scorn of the more radical nationalists, referring to the leaders of the Swadeshi Movement as individuals who sponsored a “thinly-veiled sedition” and who talked of Indian patriotism, “though it is as absurd to talk of patriots of India as it would be to talk of patriots of Europe.”10 Nationalist rhetoric on the industrial question clearly discomited colonial oficials. The argument that British rule had caused de-industrialisation, backed now by a formidable political movement, struck at the imperial pretension that the British were ruling India for its own good. Supported by evidence from government records, this argument could not be easily parried. Crafts advocates accepted highly critical assessments of the past impact of British rule on Indian industry but sought to undermine nationalist prescriptions for the future. They played a central role in countering the views of Swadeshi proponents. Havell and others argued that the nationalists, in seeking to follow the Western path of industrialisation, were promoting a form of development alien to India. Much of this argument drew on universal critiques of industrialism developed by the Arts and 8

9

10

For the moderates, see, for instance, Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1962) and Romesh C. Dutt, The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule From 1757 to 1837 (London: Kegan Paul Trench Trübner, 1908); for an historian’s overview of this perspective, see Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880–1905 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966). Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). E. B. Havell, Essays on Indian Art, Industry and Education (Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co., 1915), p. 159.

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Crafts Movement. In one essay, Havell remarked, “no friend of India could view with unconcern the prospect of a coming era of congested cities and depopulated rural districts, of unhealthy conditions of work, of struggles between capital and labour, uneven distribution of wealth, social unrest and all the attendant evils of the great industrial development in Europe and America.”11 “The only ideal the power-loom factory has in view,” he insisted, “is cheapness for the purchaser. But at what a frightful sacriice of the miserable humanity which is dragged behind the car of progress is this cheapness obtained.”12 Powerloom factories made mill hands “slaves of machines,” were “injurious to family life,” and had the effect of “unitting women to motherhood” and “causing people to deteriorate.”13 According to this line of reasoning, Britain should rescue India from the horrors of industrialism by sponsoring an alternative approach to development. According to Havell, state promotion of crafts seemed particularly well suited to the cultural character of the sub-continent, as the arts were in India “the voice of the people,”14 a characterisation he contrasted with Europe, where art and politics were supposedly not so closely intertwined. Such views were heavily inluenced by assumptions of Orientalism and cultural chauvinism. In Havell’s perspective, Western-style industrialisation was poorly suited to the Indian mentality: The self-reliant character of the Englishman and the traditional policy of England perhaps incline us to expect too much of private enterprise in India. . . . The Indian artisan . . . is unitted both by disposition and habits for entering upon such a struggle [to industrialise and to try to capture export markets], and generations must elapse before he could acquire, not only the technical knowledge but the business methods and business capacity necessary for success in an industrial struggle in European markets.15

Alfred Chatterton, a promoter of handloom weaving who became extensively involved in efforts to dismiss Indian calls for protective tariffs, drew heavily on cultural stereotypes in his arguments against modern industrial education. “I am doubtful if children [in India] are as active and restless 11

12 13 14

15

Havell, “Revival of Indian Handicrafts,” in Havell, Essays on Indian Art, Industry and Education, p. 28. Havell, “Revival of Indian Handicrafts,” p. 69. Havell, “Revival of Indian Handicrafts,” p. 62. Havell, “Indian Administration and Swadeshi,” in Havell, Essays on Indian Art, Industry and Education, p. 157. Havell, “Revival of Indian Handicrafts,” p. 28.

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as they are in more temperate climates and if they will take so kindly to a regularly prepared programme of manual work . . . it is practically certain that they do not exhibit the same eagerness to be always making something which is characteristic of European children.”16 Chatterton took a special interest in criticising the kinds of education that he felt had been responsible for producing the leaders of the Swadeshi Movement: Educated people of this country are singularly deicient in processes of observation and evince a fatal readiness to accept statements of facts, without any attempt at veriication for their own satisfaction, which renders them incapable of achieving marked success in practical matters. This is partly due to inherited tendencies and to the simple nature of their surroundings in early life, but is probably still more largely due to the bent which their minds have received by the purely bookish studies of their schooldays.17

“It seems futile,” he claimed, “to endeavour to establish an industrial system foreign to the habit of the people and inimical to their best interests.”18 The close link between attempts to promote handicrafts and efforts to delate Indian nationalism was often explicit. Havell accused Congress leaders of calling for a “false Swadeshi” with large-scale industries and heavy use of machines – not a “true” Swadeshi based on India’s own artistic traditions. In one writing, he argued that “Bengal, one of the most promising ields in all India for hand-loom factories, has been the province which has been induced by Swadeshi politicians to adopt the very unSwadeshi like system of power-loom mills, which carried to its logical conclusion, must severely cripple any prospect for raising the unfortunate village weaver from his present state of helplessness and ignorance.”19 Suggesting that he and other crafts advocates espoused a “true Swadeshi,” Havell indicated that the “false Swadeshi is just now the most conspicuous for it is noisy and self-assertive.”20 In the same spirit, Chatterton dismissed the ability of “mere political sentiment” to bring about the kind of change nationalists desired, suggesting that the Raj itself was most capable of stimulating Indian industry to follow the appropriate path.21 16

17 18

19 20 21

Chatterton, “Manual Training,” Agricultural and Industrial Problems in India (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1903), p. 145. Chatterton, “Manual Training,” p. 133. Chatterton, “Protection in India,” Industrial Evolution in India (Madras: Hindu Ofice, 1912), p. 55. Havell, “The Revival of Indian Handicrafts,” p. 63. Havell, “The Revival of Indian Handicrafts,” p. 159. Chatterton, “Agricultural and Industrial Development,” Industrial Evolution in India, p. 95.

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Havell, Chatterton, and others acknowledged that many Indian industries had been seriously damaged by the competition of factory-made goods, but they believed it possible to rescue many handloom weavers and other artisans if appropriate state action was taken. Their view was predicated on an awareness that factories had not been able to displace artisans everywhere. The crafts advocates attributed this survival largely to the conservatism of South Asian tastes rather than to the adaptive powers of the sub-continent’s artisans; often they overlooked the very considerable ways in which handloom production and other crafts had changed as a result of the efforts of Indian merchants, weavers, and labourers. The “colonial sociology”22 that saw India as made up by ixed, hereditary communities based on caste groupings that determine occupation clearly informed the policies proposed by the crafts advocates. They insisted that the Raj should attempt to preserve an industrial system founded on what they regarded as enduring Indian cultural realities: the prominence of the village in Indian economic life; the control of specialised skills by hereditary caste groupings; the centrality of males in the production process and the relegation of women to secondary and unskilled activities subordinate to their roles as mothers and wives; and ageless artistic heritages associated with the religious traditions of Hinduism and Islam.23 The goal of industrial policy in their minds was to immunise such traditional structures against the danger posed by the inlux of European goods. The hereditary rural male artisan, a type believed to possess an especially conservative personality, was to be taught how to produce goods that Indian consumers still wanted in a more eficient and cheaper fashion but without taking to power-driven machines. Focusing on those who belonged to weaving and other artisan castes, most early framers of government policy did not intend state efforts to spur a more general industrial advance accessible to the wider population (as the advocates of the Swadeshi Movement proposed), to provide supplementary forms of employment for villagers (as Gandhians were to propose), or to counter 22

23

The concept comes from the work of Bernard Cohn. For instance, see his essays “The Census, Social Structure and Objectiication in South Asia” and “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–54 and 632–82. This view obviously showed little awareness of the changes that have been discussed in the previous chapters of this study. Chatterton was rather contradictory in some of his statements. Whereas on some occasions he was critical of what he believed to be the closed nature of the caste system, on others he argued for the encouragement of “hereditary” crafts. McGowan has examined the assumptions of colonial administrators about women’s work in unpublished writings.

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changes that disadvantaged women. Instead, they designed colonial policy to prevent the disintegration of what they viewed as an essential Indian social structure from the advance of capitalism. This preoccupation coincided neatly with another emerging concern, the desire to rescue the artisan from the clutches of the “sawkar.” As Ian Catanach has shown, the control exercised by moneylenders over Indian peasants had been a concern among colonial oficials in Bombay since the Deccan riots of the 1870s. Worries about the moneylender’s role was heavily inluenced by the thinking of administrators in rural Punjab such as S. S. Thornburn and Malcolm Darling.24 British oficials came to view moneylenders as wholly parasitic igures who played no positive role in actual production, but who merely siphoned off resources that peasants might otherwise have employed to improve their own situations. The belief that handloom weavers were in an analogous relationship with yarn dealers-cloth merchants does not seem to have crystallised fully until around 1900. In Bombay, P. N. Mehta’s critical study of the handloom industry in 1909 especially focused its attention on this relationship. Mehta termed the condition of most artisans as “serf-like,” and estimated that only about 20 per cent of the artisans in the Presidency were not indebted to some sawkar (a term he used for karkhandars as well as for merchant-inanciers). Even the independent artisans, he argued, always ran the risk of becoming reliant on merchant-moneylenders.25 Mehta’s solution was the formation of co-operative societies in which “a caste of weavers, or a locality of weavers, or weavers manufacturing similar type of goods, should combine together and form a co-operative society and have a common warp-preparing depot of their own.”26 In recognising the pressures of international competition and the dominant position of the sahukar in the economy of artisan production, crafts proponents in western India showed awareness that contemporary economic change had profoundly affected the lives of handloom weavers. Having made this diagnosis, they offered a rather weak prescription for state countermeasures. They called on the government to collect information on methods of production and the social conditions faced by artisans in different crafts, and they urged government to teach new techniques to weavers and to encourage the formation of weavers’ co-operatives. 24

25 26

I. J. Catanach, Rural Credit in Western India, 1875–1930: Rural Credit and the Co-operative Movement in the Bombay Presidency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 6. Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, p. 11.

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Yet even as the colonial administration edged itself into the business of helping small producers, crafts advocates and other imperial oficials refrained from calling on the state to play a more extensive role, fearing that might smack of socialism. Ultimately, the Bombay government’s efforts proved to be very meagre. The most extensive attempt to improve the lot of handloom weavers before World War I was in fact a semi-independent effort in Sholapur that became known as the Weavers’ Guild.27 Two maverick collectors, J. W. A. Weir and A. F. Maconochie, both of whom developed unusually close relationships with local weavers during the plagues and famines of the late 1890s and early 1900s, played a role in the creation of the guild. The organisation was initially formed during the famine of 1899–1900. Responding to the impact of the famine, the Americo-Indian Relief Fund and a local businessman, Virchand Deepchand, inanced an extensive relief scheme that put several thousand weavers to work. Local industry recovered more quickly than anticipated, and the Charitable Relief Fund for the weavers was left with nearly 25,000 rupees. Although he faced considerable opposition in the Bombay government, Maconochie was ultimately able to gain approval for a scheme that would turn these funds over to an organisation that would devote its resources to helping weavers on an ongoing basis with their inancial and technical needs. T. J. Pitre, the secretary of the Sholapur Municipality, became the secretary and moving spirit of the guild for roughly the next ifteen years. Maconochie would say that he had found “his Raffeison” in Pitre, likening the municipal secretary to the famous pioneer of co-operative societies in Europe.28 Pitre was helped by Abansaheb Fulmandikar, a local master weaver and a member of the municipality, who handled business affairs such as the purchase of yarn and the sale of cloth. Within two or three years, the guild had become an independent organisation, supervised loosely by the government but with its own internal funding.29 27

28

29

For a longer history of this organisation, see my unpublished essay “A Note on the Weavers’ Guild,” 1997. This was reported by the Collector of Sholapur in 1906 in his letter no. 1029, 15 Feb. 1906, MSA, GD 1906, vol. 82, comp. 580, p. 191. See materials in MSA, RD, 1910, vol. 102, comp. 402, such as The Memorandum of the Commissioner of the Central Division, 30 March 1910, p. 33; “A Note on Handloom Weaving in India” in MSA, GD 1907, vol. 67, comp. 966, p. 37; Letter from A. F. Maconochie, 16 May 1906, MSA, RD, 1907, vol. 114, comp. 402, pp. 51–3. For a significantly less favourable earlier view, focussed mainly on the accounts of the organisation, see “Letter from the Collector, Sholapur, no. 1029, 15 Feb. 1906,” MSA, GD, 1906, vol. 82, comp. 580, pp. 109–11.

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The guild’s most important functions were to provide loans and yarn to local weavers at low cost; to some extent, the services it offered had strong parallels with those provided by modern day micro-inance institutions. Although its resources met only a fraction of the needs of the city’s artisans, it compelled local sahukars to reduce their interest rates in order to compete. It provided credit, especially during slow times of the year, when weavers were most tempted to enter into unfavourable arrangements with the sahukars. Weavers returned inished cloth to the guild as their security; when conditions improved, the cloth could be sold and the debts redeemed. Unlike the oficers of modern banks, the leaders of the guild knew local weavers and did not have to make extensive enquiries into their credit-worthiness. The guild also purchased mill-made yarn at wholesale rates and sold this yarn to the weavers with only a small price increase. After several years of operation, it also opened cloth shops to market the weavers’ goods.30 The guild was also involved in attempts to improve methods of handloom production. In about 1903, Pitre set up an experimental workshop in Sakharpeth, a neighbourhood in Sholapur where many of the Padmasali weavers worked. The workshop allowed tests of new methods to be conducted without risk to the income of the actual weavers. Well before the Bombay government had decided to sponsor the ly-shuttle loom, Pitre had developed an adaptation of the ly shuttle that was well adapted to the already existing pit-loom. Two large karkhandars, Lachhmayya Irabatti and L. V. Tikekar, were also instrumental in introducing the ly shuttle within their workshops. Because of their efforts and those of the guild, the loom spread widely within Sholapur. Pitre also devised an improved dobby and a new warping machine, and encouraged artisans to manufacture cloth using superior kinds of yarn, which yielded better prices for the weavers.31 In 1910, one colonial observer would remark that the guild had “saved many families from debt and is saving many more; it is freeing the weavers from the sawkars, and its services are availed of by all weavers up to the limit of our capital.”32 But its activities also seemingly strengthened the development of a class of Padmasali karkhandars who hired wage 30

31

32

Letter from Collector of Sholapur, 25 Feb. 1910, MSA, RD 1910, vol. 102, comp. 402, p. 32. The guild’s activities certainly have some parallels to contemporary micro-inance institutions. Letter from Collector of Sholapur, 25 Feb. 1910, MSA, RD 1910, vol. 102, comp. 402, p. 31. Ibid., p. 32.

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labour. By the 1920s, when the guild became defunct, the sahukars’ role was less visible than it had been; but a number of bigger karkhanas, hiring from ten to ifty or more workers, now played a dominant role in the city. Many smaller weavers now worked on a contract basis for these karkhandars in what was known as the asami system. The guild did little to address the situation of the wage labourers, whose signiicance in the local economy was clearly increasing. The provincial government failed to match the Weavers’ Guild in energy or resources anywhere in the Bombay Presidency. Until 1917, efforts to help weavers were handled by the Department of Co-operative Societies, founded in 1904. The department undertook both the effort to form co-operative societies among weavers and the attempt to disseminate improved techniques. These efforts, however, never comprised more than a tiny fraction of the department’s business, which concentrated mostly on agriculturalists. There were individual oficials, such as R. B. Ewbank, the Registrar of Co-operative Societies during most of the second decade of the twentieth century, who would take considerable interest in weavers’ societies. Yet without signiicant funds, he could accomplish relatively little. In 1917, for instance, the entire staff committed to activities among the weavers consisted of three weaving assistants and one weaving inspector.33 W. Pomfret, the man in charge of government efforts to disseminate the ly-shuttle loom in the Bombay Presidency in 1911 (apparently without any salary from the state), would defend his lack of success by comparing his resources directly to those of the Weavers’ Guild and of L.V. Tikekar, the karkhandar from Sholapur: “Mr. Pitre has a capital of Rs. 20,000 for working the factory and your store, Mr. Tikekar about Rs. 10,000. What capital have I had during the 18 months working?”34 The comparative closeness of the guild to local weavers and the duration of its relationship with the artisan population were also important reasons for its success relative to government-sponsored efforts. Only briely during World War I did prospects for a broader change in industrial policy seem possible. Prompted by the needs of the empire for manufactured goods of all sorts, colonial oficials considered ways to promote Indian industry more actively. The government seemed ready to offer initiatives that would beneit large industry as well as the handicraft

33

34

Testimony of R. B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 547. W. Pomfret to Ewbank, Registrar, 26–12–1911, MSA, GD 1912, vol. 84, comp. 820, p. 163.

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producer.35 Once the exigencies of wartime conditions had ended, however, pressures to provide genuine support for larger industries relaxed. Bombay’s Department of Industries was formed in 1917, but its purview really never extended beyond smaller enterprises and certain “pioneer industries.”36 The Department of Industries had little more money to pursue these concerns than had the Department of Co-operative Societies before the war. In 1922–3, the annual budget of the department was 239,000 rupees, much of which went to pay oficial salaries and the costs of a small number of weaving and dyeing assistants who toured the countryside in efforts to disseminate improved techniques. This was roughly equivalent to the total annual output of a single substantial karkhana with thirty weavers working from 250 to 300 days. The department was subject to radical retrenchment during the remainder of the 1920s; its budget fell to less than 78,000 rupees in 1929, and most of its programs to help artisans had disappeared.37 Improving the Techniques of Production Much of the limited attempt made by the government of Bombay to improve the condition of the province’s handloom weavers focused on the introduction of new tools, especially new kinds of loom. From about 1905 on, oficials began to concentrate on developing and disseminating more productive looms. They persisted in these efforts, however, only so long as the artisans continued to use “hand” methods. They ceased to take an interest in weavers who introduced machine power in their establishments. Given the grounding of government industrial policy in a moral discourse that issued from the Arts and Crafts Movement, the use of non-human power was an ethical boundary that could not be crossed without sacriicing the sense of mission at stake. The government’s initial activity centred on looms developed by various non-Indian inventors, especially missionaries associated with the Salvation Army in Bombay and the American Marathi Mission in Ahmednagar. Both sets of missionaries designed new kinds of “automatic 35

36

37

Ewbank’s concern that a new Department of Industries might focus on large industries, led him to suggest the formation of a second department focusing on village industries. Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, pp. 549–50, 557. Annual Report of the Department of Industries, Bombay Presidency for the years 1917–18, 1918–19, 1919–20. The annual reports of the Department of Industries provide budget igures every year.

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loom” that at least doubled the eficiency of weaving. Hopes for these looms initially ran high; the colonial government in fact allocated substantial grants for their development before World War I. Competition between the two missions for government support for their research became ierce, with both trying to undercut the claims of the other in correspondence with Bombay.38 The administration also conducted experiments with a Japanese loom. Ultimately, most of these machines proved to be too expensive for the ordinary weaver, too complicated for most artisans to repair without extensive training, and often unsuited to the manufacture of the kinds of cloth demanded in the market. The case of the “Churchill loom,” developed by D. C. Churchill of the American Marathi Mission in Ahmednagar, is particularly instructive.39 Churchill was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a kind of dilettante scientist who became committed to developing a new loom that would help handloom weavers in the Deccan. His earliest experiments had concentrated on the ly-shuttle loom, but he apparently abandoned these for work on more ambitious models. In approximately 1906, he developed a loom with an improved take-up motion driven by foot power that left the weavers’ hands free to change the shuttle without stopping the weaving motion. Churchill claimed that his loom was ive times as fast as an ordinary country loom and twice as fast as the ly-shuttle loom.40 After the Churchill loom won a competition against the Salvation Army loom and other looms in Madras in 1908, the Bombay government decided to reward the missionary’s experimentation.41 Churchill received funding at least until 1914, although by that time the loom’s failure to be adopted by ordinary weavers was clearly beginning to try the patience of the Bombay administration.42 Altogether the government allocated 38 39

40

41

42

For instance, see the correspondence in MSA, RD, 1910, vol. 63, comp. 1658, pp. 1–34. Churchill’s early efforts are found in the iles of the Marathi Mission’s reports, Report of the American Marathi Mission, from 1902 to 1910. An alternative account of the Churchill loom is found in McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, pp. 170–4. Memorandum, Registrar, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, to Collector, Ahmednagar, 26 March 1913, MSA, ED 1913 comp. 43, p. 1; “Note on Handloom Weaving in India,” MSA, GD 1907, vol. 67, comp. 966, p. 33. For the weaving competition see Weaving Competition, Madras 27 Nov. 1907 and Report of the Proceedings of the Conference Held in Connection with the All-India Weaving Competition Held on the Premises of the School of Arts, Madras, 2nd and 3rd March 1908, MSA, GD, 1908, vol. 70, comp 820, pt. I. Secty to Government, no. 7362, 14 Oct. 1913, MSA, ED, 1913, comp. 43, pp. 1–5; Secty to Government, no. 2357, 18 Mr. 1915, MSA, ED, 1915 comp. 43, pp. 1–3.

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Image 11. Title: “Churchill Loom, 1907” Bibliographic Info: Report of the American Marathi Mission, 1907.

many tens of thousands of rupees in grants to Churchill, much of its total expenditures on promoting handlooms during this period, without any direct beneit to the artisans.43 Weavers found the Churchill loom appropriate only for coarse and narrow khadi, and local carpenters lacked the tools to repair it when broken. Its expense, about one hundred rupees at irst, was usually too great for the small weaving family and could only be afforded by larger karkhandars, who generally did not weave coarse cloth but instead made bordered saris. By 1917, as Churchill continued with his tinkering, the cost of his loom had risen to two hundred 43

Figures ranging from twenty thousand to nearly a lakh of rupees are cited in the records.

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rupees. When the expenses of the necessary beaming, warping, and sizing machines were included, the total price increased much further. “If you are going to spend 700 or 800 Rupees on the loom and its accompanying warping machines and so forth,” Registrar Ewbank lamented, “you may as well get a small power loom,”44 highlighting his view of the absurdity of continuing with the experiment. The government eventually abandoned all hope for the Churchill loom. Churchill himself returned to the United States in 1922, starting a hand-weaving establishment in Berea, Kentucky, which continues to use his looms today.45 By this time, the Bombay government had decided to shift its emphasis completely towards the simple ly-shuttle sley developed by Pitre in Sholapur (who had apparently adapted it from an early model created by Churchill).46 Altogether, his invention cost twenty-ive rupees, about ive rupees more than the traditional throw-shuttle loom. Pitre would write in 1911: The loom I have found to satisfy the conditions and prejudices of the weavers of Sholapur is the ordinary ly-shuttle loom . . . with the only alterations that I have turned it into a pit loom. So that the hatta and thur . . . commonly used by the weavers are retained. My chief aim throughout the experiments I have made had been to provide a loom cheap in price, free from any elaborate mechanism and one that any [weaver] would introduce [with] very little additional change on his old loom.47

A device that the weaver propelled between two hammers on either side of the loom by pulling a cord, the ly shuttle improved the rate of weaving up to 70 per cent beyond the traditional throw-shuttle method. Seemingly, it suffered few of the disadvantages of the more complex automatic looms. Skilled weavers could usually master the new techniques in a short time; one workshop owner claimed that his labourers learned to work the shuttle at top speed within half a month. These advantages 44

45

46

47

Ewbank’s testimony is found in Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. VI, p. 196. Apparently, the reason for the conidentiality of this statement was that Ewbank did not wish Churchill to know he had testiied against the Churchill loom. The record of Churchill’s activity, including his plan to build a technical institute in the Deccan on the model of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, can be found in the records of the American Board of Commissioners: American Marathi Mission, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 16.1.1, vols. 25, 28. Letter from F.J. Pitre, 4 Jan. 1911, GD, no. 6407, 1 Nov. 1911, MSA, GD 1911, vol. 98, comp. 820, pt. I, pp. 605–6. Letter from Pitre, pp. 605–6.

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Image 12. “Pit-Loom with Dobby and Double Box Fly Shuttle Sley” Source: Telang, S. V. Report on the Handloom Industry in the Bombay Presidency, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Bombay Presidency Dept. of Industries, 1932), p. 29.

seemed so obvious that some oficials expected the majority of weavers to adopt the mechanism almost immediately.48 These expectations, however, were not fulilled. By 1928, two decades after it was irst introduced, the majority of handloom weavers in the Bombay Presidency still did not use it.49 Oficials repeatedly blamed this failure on “conservatism, prejudice and ignorance.”50 As we have seen in previous chapters, however, weavers had been actively altering their methods of production for decades, radically shifting over to machinemade yarn and foreign dyes and introducing new kinds of designs. As one correspondent noted, “Bicycles, cream separators and other fairly intricate machines are coming more and more into use among classes that

48

49 50

For a discussion of the ly-shuttle looms, see the letter of R. Ewbank to Govt., 23 Dec. 1911, MSA, GD, 1912, comp. 820, vol. 84, pp. 122–32; also see Proceedings of the Provincial Co-operative Conference Held in Poona, 1911, p. 28. See Telang, Report on the Handloom Industry in the Bombay Presidency, Appendix A. W. Pomfret to Registrar of Co-operative Societies, 26 Dec. 1911, MSA, GD, 1912, vol. 84, comp. 820, p. 162.

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could scarcely have been expected to adopt them . . . [the] example of the Singer sewing machine . . . is extremely relevant to the case.”51 Colonial documents themselves suggest that, rather than positing an intrinsic resistance to change as the explanation for the artisans’ decisions, it is necessary to consider a variety of other constraints. First, many of the methods used by the provincial government to disseminate the ly shuttle were poorly adapted to artisan production. One of the very irst plans to spread the loom involved bringing a small number of boys from weaving families to the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute in Bombay, where they would be instructed in a program supervised by Mr. Pomfret. Ewbank himself objected to such a plan, which took “poor country boys to Bombay where there is no room for them in the hostel” and would “let them pick up the vices and pleasures of the town.”52 The scheme failed to attract many participants largely because most weaving families could not afford to commit their boys to the program; this involved giving up a valuable source of labour for tasks such as pirn-winding and warping, and households might have had to make up for this gap by hiring workers. Boys who were trained also found it dificult to purchase looms upon leaving the weaving schools.53 The government soon turned to hiring a small number of weaving assistants to open itinerant schools in the actual weaving centres to demonstrate the working of the ly-shuttle loom. Unfortunately, an initial instructor for this program was unable to weave proiciently himself. According to one report, “he has not taken off his coat and worked the loom in the face of the village weavers until they have been bound to admit its superiority. He has contented himself with advice and suggestions.”54 The schools also suffered from the lack of a permanent centre in the weaving towns analogous to Pitre’s karkhana in Sholapur, where constant experimentation could be conducted. As long as the itinerant school was present, the weaving assistant could conduct this experimentation on local varieties of cloth (if he had suficient training and skill). Once the weaving school moved away, however, local artisans would have to risk 51

52

53

54

Memorandum, Registrar, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, to Collector, Ahmednagar, 26 March 1913, MSA, ED 1913, comp. 43, p. 1. Letter from Registrar of Co-operatives, Bombay, 23 Dec. 1911, MSA, GD, 1912, vol. 84, comp. 820, p. 124. The VJTI is now an important engineering school in Bombay. Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 549. Letter of Ewbank to Pomfret, 13 Dec. 1911, MSA, GD, 1912, vol. 84, comp. 820, p. 153.

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making the adjustments on their own looms and their own cloth without a guaranteed market for what they produced. In some cases, weavers gave up the ly shuttle as soon as they encountered problems, leaving the loom “standing in a dusty corner for the local wags to crack their wit upon.”55 Living from sari to sari, few household weavers could afford to take the time and resources to work out the kinks in the production process. Such problems emerged particularly in centres where weavers were engaged in the production of iner varieties of cloth. Artisans making such qualities repeatedly expressed their belief that the ly-shuttle loom could not handle superior kinds of yarn or weave the most intricate designs. Producers using lower counts of cotton yarn were undoubtedly quicker to take up the new techniques than those dealing in the inest kinds of cloth, especially silk. It was theoretically possible to apply the ly shuttle to higher counts of cotton and to silk. The weaving assistants, however, often did not have the technical ability themselves to suggest how artisans needed to alter their looms to do so.56 Another regularly recurring obstacle was the reluctance of merchantcapitalists to provide credit or yarn to those using the new looms. In Belgaum, local oficials reported that the sahukars disliked the various new kinds of loom and refused to provide yarn to those who used them.57 Some merchants were clearly hesitant about inancing innovations when the risks in the industry were so high; they had, after all, traditionally pursued a strategy of limited investment, hoping to achieve proits by the repeated number of times these investments were realised in the form of cloth rather than by trying to encourage higher productivity.58 There seems to have been a great degree of variability in the willingness of sahukars to provide the inancing needed by those using the ly-shuttle looms. Of course, any innovations were doomed if they responded by refusing to provide advances of yarn. Yet even when there was no apparent resistance from the sahukars, many weaving families were reluctant to take up the ly shuttle. One serious dificulty was the lack of a comparable technology in warping and winding. With the ly-shuttle sley, a male weaver could no doubt increase his output if he worked the same amount of time; but this could only be 55 56

57

58

Letter of Ewbank to Pomfret, 13 Dec. 1911. For instance, MSA, GD 1912, vol. 84, comp. 820, pp. 124, 146; Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1912–3, p. 14. Letter of Collector of Belgaum, 28th Feb. 1912, MSA, GD 1912, vol. 84, comp. 820, p. 199. See also pp. 162–3 of the same compilation. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. I, p. 99.

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achieved if non-weaving members of the family somehow could prepare considerably more yarn for the loom than they had done previously. If weavers chose to devote more of their time to the preparation of yarn, on the other hand, the goal of increasing the irm’s productivity would have been substantially undermined. By the 1920s, inventors in Bombay had developed new kinds of warping machines, but these technologies often did not prove useful to weaving households. The machines were too expensive to be purchased by individual families, and they proved to be of little advantage to weavers who obtained only enough yarn for weaving one or two saris at a time. Enterprises specialising in the preliminary processes adopted most of the machines. But for the small producers, who traditionally had had all preliminary work done by unpaid family labour, contracting out jobs to warping specialists meant a whole set of new costs and the displacement of women and children from productive activity. Very few weaving households in the Presidency utilised such warping irms, although such irms did become prevalent where karkhanas prevailed, as in Sholapur. The failure of the ly shuttle to achieve an improved standard of living by itself caused some colonial oficials to conclude that “if material improvement in the economic condition [of the weavers] is to be effected, attention must be concentrated on preparatory processes.”59 The objection to the ly shuttle most commonly stated by artisans, however, was fear of “overproduction.” Household weavers regularly expressed the concern that the demand for their cloth was too limited to be sure of a market for any enhanced output, and that increased production would cause a fall in prices.60 The smaller artisans rarely possessed the ability to cultivate far-lung markets themselves, and they feared they might alienate their sahukars if they sought to do so. To many weavers, the most likely consequences of the introduction of the ly-shuttle loom seemed to be that they might work shorter working hours to produce the same output, that they would produce an increased output that would realise lower prices, or that any increased value of their production would 59

60

Discussion of the dilemma in preliminary processes can be found in Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry, pp. 9–10; Testimony of W. T. Pomfret, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 339; Memorandum, Registrar, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, to Collector, Ahmednagar, 26 March 1913, MSA, ED 1913, comp. 43, p. 1; The quote comes from Report of the Director of Industries, Madras, 1927–8 (Madras: 1928), p. 3. Proceedings of the Bombay Provincial Co-operative Conference, 1919, p. 130; Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1912–3, p. 15; Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. I, pp. 98–9.

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Image 13. “Cottage Warping and Sizing Machine Produced by the Department of Industries, Bombay, c. 1924” Source: Government of Bombay, Department of Industries, Annual Report, 1924–5. Opposite page 14. Published with the Permission of the British Library.

be swallowed up by the sahukars; under none of these scenarios would family earnings increase signiicantly.61 These concerns may have been reinforced by social pressures from local weaving communities about displacing some of their members from their jobs. The ly shuttle also did not help with the most important dilemma of the weavers – that is, how to withstand the times of the year when demand was most limited. There was little reason to believe that more work would come their way during slow periods if they adopted the attachments. Indeed, it may have seemed possible to some weavers that higher productivity by each loom during good times might tempt the merchant-capitalists to depress piece rates and maintain fewer dependent weavers during bad times. Without more work during slack periods, the weavers would still be vulnerable and tempted to negotiate payments that would leave them a meagre subsistence. Thus the weak position of the weaving household in the market tempered its eagerness to embrace the ly shuttle. There is no need to attribute these hesitations to some kind of intrinsic artisan rationality. Weavers’ perceptions of the possible consequences 61

For instance, see Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1912–3, p. 15; Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. I, p. 98; Ewbank, A Manual for Co-operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency, p. 237; Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 105. This view is also discussed in D. M. Amalsad, Handloom Weaving in the Madras Presidency (Madras: 1925), p. 37.

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shaped their response to the availability of the ly-shuttle loom. But their structural situation undoubtedly conditioned these perceptions. As long as sahukars controlled access to the cloth market, few weaving families were in a position to imagine how they could cultivate the demand necessary to absorb any increased production. Of course, the whole effort could never inluence wage labourers in the karkhanas, who exercised no decision-making power in determining the technologies used. Despite all of these problems, many thousands of weavers did eventually take up the new kinds of loom. A closer examination reveals that the early adoption of the ly shuttle tended to concentrate in towns where larger karkhanas employing wage labour predominated. These karkhanas had many advantages over artisan families.62 First, they were generally able to raise capital and purchase raw materials at more favourable rates. Second, because they relied on extra-familial labour, a member of the owner’s family with special mechanical aptitude could sometimes be freed up to engage in experimental efforts without damaging the irm’s ability to sustain its production. Third, and most importantly, they were often better positioned in the market. Usually they possessed better holding power and could afford to stockpile cloth during slow periods. Members of the owner’s family, moreover, often developed a close understanding of market conditions. Some had direct contact with cloth merchants; many were able to cultivate demand for their products through shops they themselves opened. As production in their workshops expanded, they often were able to ind new customers or shift their production to new kinds of cloth.63 “Overproduction” thus did not appear to be as threatening a problem as it was for smaller households. As a result, many karkhandars enthusiastically adopted some of the technical innovations that weavers in dependent households accepted hesitantly if at all. Indeed, in the case of these irms, we must be careful about attributing too much of the credit for change to the impetus of government. At the time Bombay began to introduce new kinds of loom, processes of technological transformation were already under way in many centres where the karkhanas predominated. We have already seen how Pitre and several workshop owners in Sholapur had adopted the ly-shuttle loom before the government had decided to disseminate it. In 62

63

For a more detailed discussion of these advantages, see Haynes, “The Logic of an Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy.” The discussion there is heavily based on R. G. Kakade’s book, A Socio-Economic Survey. See Testimony of L. V. Tikekar. Most of these conclusions are drawn from interviews with karkhandars in Solapur, Bhiwandi, and Surat.

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Surat, where the karkhana system was widespread, local weavers largely abandoned the traditional throw-shuttle loom for the Hattersley loom, an imported metal machine that was worked by foot pedals, apparently without any encouragement from the state. These looms were particularly well suited to the kinds of silk weaving done in the city.64 Local artisans engaged in the manufacture of gold thread also altered their machines in major ways during the irst decade of the twentieth century.65 In centres where the colonial government was successful in disseminating the ly shuttle, it is clear that karkhandars – both small and large – were active participants in processes of technological change. In Malegaon, for instance, where a substantial number of Momin weavers had assumed roles as owners of small workshops over the previous decades, attempts to spread the ly shuttle were very successful. More than 1,500 looms were equipped with ly shuttles by World War I, and 3,400 by 1921.66 Local weavers had patronised a weaving school there in 1907; as a result, the weaving assistants from the Department of Co-operative Societies met an already receptive audience when they later opened their own school. Within a few years of its introduction, moreover, local artisans were making their own independent adaptations in the loom. By the 1920s, the manufacturers of Malegaon looms had begun to export them to the United Provinces; the Department of Industries was even beginning to use a modiied version of these looms in its efforts to spread improved methods.67 Carpenters in the town were making improved dobbies, English healds, and a number of other accessories for weaving.68 The processes of preparing yarn for the warp also improved.69 Yet many weaving households in the same towns did not take part in this process. Even in Malegaon itself, Maharashtrian weavers of Sali 64

65 66

67 68 69

The ascendancy of the Hattersley loom is discussed briely in Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” pp. 20–1; Colin Simmons, Helen Clay and Robert Kirk, “Machine Manufacture in a Colonial Economy: The Pioneering Role of George Hattersley and Sons Ltd. in India, 1919–43,” IESHR 20:3 (1983): 277–315. The Hattersley loom appears to have been unsuited to the kinds of cloth produced in other cities. For the reluctance of weavers elsewhere to adopt it, see Note of D. T. Chadwick, Secretary to Government of India, 29 May 1923, NAI, Department of Industries and Labour (Industries), 1924, File I-260 (1). Nissim, A Monograph on Wire and Tinsel, p. 11. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, pp. 548, 555; Annual Report of the Department of Industries, Bombay Presidency, 1921–2, p. 10. Annual Report of the Department of Industries, Bombay Presidency, 1921–2, p. 10. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency 1916–7, p. 21. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 103.

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Image 14. “Hattersley Loom Advertisement, 1904” (This kind of loom was used extensively in Surat by the 1930s.) Source: Indian Textile Journal, 1904, p. 243.

and Koshti background, who generally belonged to dependent weaving families, did not adopt the ly shuttle. A school that had opened to spread new techniques among the Salis around the same time simply failed to attract students.70 In part because of their dificulties in taking up the new methods, the Salis and Koshtis found it hard to compete and eventually left for other occupations. 70

Testimony of Pomfret in Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 343.

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The same pattern existed over the Presidency as a whole. By the early 1930s, Padmasalis and Momins, both migrant groups associated with the karkhana system, had almost universally adopted the ly shuttle.71 Where dependent artisan households subject to the control of non-weaving sahukars predominated, however, the shift to the ly shuttle was marked by hesitation. In Dholka in Gujarat, where the entire weaving community was in a “position of quasi-serfdom to a handful of big dealers,” oficials reported a sense of frustration about the results of the itinerant schools.72 Comparatively few Maharashtrian weavers adopted the mechanism. Joshi’s report in the 1930s even indicates that signiicant numbers of Salis and Koshtis abandoned the ly shuttle out of fear of overproducing when faced with Depression conditions.73 Karkhandars in Bhiwandi, Surat, Malegaon, and to a lesser extent Sholapur also took the initiative in introducing the powerloom, as I will discuss in the next chapter. When they did so, it was without any urging from the provincial government. If anything, colonial oficials regarded adoption of the powerloom as a pernicious tendency that threatened the handloom producers they were trying to protect; they overlooked the fact that the powerlooms were a development from within the pre-existing industry, generated largely by families from the weaving communities.74 Karkhandars adopted machines that were only incrementally more expensive than those they had previously used, not the most sophisticated techniques available at the time. They added new technologies slowly, building up demand for their products as they did so while avoiding heavy investments that would place their irms at risk in the small and rapidly luctuating markets for their products. This strategy allowed them to retain the lexibility that was so critical in these ields. Machines from the ly-shuttle loom to the used powerloom thus reproduced forms of labour process based at least in part on craft lines. Thus the conception government oficers often held of themselves as the sole signiicant agents of technological change among a class of people who were culturally conservative by nature was lawed for several reasons. First, what oficials took as essential characteristics of weavers 71 72

73 74

Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 105. See two reports ten years apart, Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1912–3, p. 15 and Annual Report of the Department of Industries, Bombay Presidency, 1922–3, p. 5. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 103. Douglas Haynes, “Artisan Cloth-Producers and the Emergence of Powerloom Manufacture in Western India 1920–1950,” Past and Present 172 (2001): 170–98.

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usually were products of the structural position they faced. Second, the colonial impetus for change was in reality often misguided, wasteful, and frequently very weak. Rarely did oficials bring to dependent family weavers the resources necessary to overcome structural hurdles, especially their dependence on sahukars and their lack of direct access to markets. Finally, where technological change did take place, it was highly conditioned by long-term developments that had been going on in the small towns of western India, such as the expansion of the karkhana system. Within karkhanas, signiicant changes in technique often pre-dated the introduction of new kinds of loom by the government. Karkhandars exposed to new techniques at itinerant weaving schools not only often adopted these methods but altered them to suit the particular kinds of cloth they manufactured. In some cases, the karkhandars’ efforts to introduce change surpassed the intentions of crafts advocates in the state, particularly when they began to utilise powerlooms. Co-operatives If anything, the founding of co-operatives was even more central in oficial thinking than the promotion of technical improvements.75 P. N. Mehta’s report had given this the highest priority, suggesting that the adoption of new kinds of loom would be ineffective as long as weavers were still bound to the sahukars.76 The Bombay government agreed with this assessment, and stressed the introduction of co-operatives above the promotion of technical improvements and other reforms. Stated Ewbank in 1915: “There is no class in the Presidency for whom Co-operation could do more than the hand-loom weavers. These men are accustomed to purchase their raw materials at exorbitant rates on credit from local Savkars to whom they are compelled to sell their inished goods at a ixed rate, and are thus cheated at both ends.”77 Co-operatives usually formed when oficials were able to convince a group of weavers in a town, often those belonging to a single caste or community, to come together in an organisation that would provide credit, yarn, or marketing facilities for cloth. Usually the weavers would have to offer initial start-up capital for the society, which government would 75

76

77

Another account of co-operative societies for artisans that is complementary to this study, is found in McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, pp. 138–45. Mehta, Report on Handloom Industry; see also Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1911–12, p. 11. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1914–5, p. 17.

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then match in the form of small grants and loans. Oficials expected the societies to be self-sustaining within several years and would usually provide no further inance. Generally, an oficial or local notable kept the accounts, which the government regularly reviewed. Whereas the ostensible purpose of co-operatives was to reduce or eliminate the role of moneylenders in the weaving economy, these bodies also involved the introduction of critical colonial values: “organisation,” “discipline,” and “loyalty.” Chatterton wrote in 1910 that “English experts . . . all agree that if anything can be done for hand weaving in India, it can only be accomplished by organising the industry, and rendering it possible for each unit to work in an eficient manner” (italics mine).78 Some oficials had a tendency to view “organisation of industries on the lines evolved by western nations” as “something which is altogether alien to the genius of the Indian people,” as Lord Ronaldshay once put it, but they regarded Indian weavers as an especially disorganised lot.79 What they meant by the term organisation, however, is not always easy to pin down; it often seemed to be something nebulous that Western industry possessed and Eastern economic forms did not. No doubt crafts advocates regarded large factories in Europe, where owners and managers themselves hired workers and exerted direct control over all the various processes in the factory, as organised. Yet of course most crafts advocates were not suggesting that smaller enterprises be replaced by big factories. Nor were they considering the formation of trade unions that would allow household weavers or wage labourers to carry out effective collective bargaining; they had no intention of adopting any policy that they believed would stimulate class tensions or impose government regulations on the management of labour. In practise, “organising” artisans seems to have involved promoting forms of co-ordination between weavers and between the weaver and the market that would render intermediate, non-productive classes less necessary. Ideas to improve organisation included the development of separate warping plants, the creation of central stores for the buying of yarn and the selling of cloth, and, occasionally, the development of small factories based on wage labour.80 Ironically, many of these steps involved reducing the importance of women’s work 78

79 80

Chatterton’s letter 24 Nov. 1909, G.O. no. 369, Rev. Department, quoted in Amalsad, Handloom Weaving in the Madras Presidency, p. 29. Quote from Lord Ronaldshay in Rao, Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries, p. 11. The failure of Chatterton’s handloom weaving factory in south India is discussed briely in Amalsad, Handloom Weaving in the Madras Presidency, p. 6; and D. Narayana Rao, Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries, pp. 29–30.

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in preliminary processes, the lexibility of handloom production, and the independence of artisan life, all of which were critical in different ways to continued sustenance of the weaving family. To achieve success, colonial oficials insisted, members of co-operatives “have still to learn hard lessons of discipline and loyalty” thought to be absent from the lives of most artisans.81 Societies served as means of disciplining weavers in several senses. Important objectives were to promote uniform standards of yarn and cloth and, to use Narayana Rao’s words, “to prevent slackness, evasion and other evil practices now prevailing among weavers . . . [as well as to] induce a higher commercial morale among them.”82 In effect, crafts advocates intended these organisations to undercut the techniques of everyday resistance, such as shortchanging yarn, that weavers commonly deployed against sahukars and karkhandars. Co-operatives were also intended to teach weavers the value of careful use of money; oficials believed that the organisations would thrive only if members cut down on wasteful expenditures and drinking. In entering co-operatives, weavers were to submit to the rigours of bureaucratic methods of bookkeeping. Co-operatives restricted loans to amounts for which artisans could offer suficient collateral and required borrowers to make timely repayments. As Ewbank pointed out, British oficialdom was opposed to schemes that would supply craftspeople “capital in excess of their credit, which they have fairly earned by their thrift and industry, their immovable property, chattels, and punctuality in honestly repaying small loans.”83 Rarely did co-operatives provide loans for social purposes such as weddings, where weavers were believed to spend their money extravagantly. If they proved effective, in other words, co-operatives would be part of a scheme to socialise weavers in behaviours that were regarded as “productive,” both inside and outside the context of work. Finally, the sponsors of co-operatives expected members of the societies to behave “loyally.” For a co-operative to survive, weavers needed to rely on it not only during slow business periods when merchants offered meagre payments and were hesitant to make advances of yarn, but also during busy times, when merchants might provide more favourable terms than the society. Co-operatives expected weavers to furnish uniform and 81 82 83

Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1920–1, p. 25. Rao, Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries, p. 48. Testimony of R. B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, pp. 549–50.

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marketable qualities of cloth, or the reputation of the individual societies could suffer. Weavers who had beneited from a society’s services needed to remain committed to the co-operative even if they became prosperous; if they broke away and competed against it, they could undercut their fellow members in the market. In short, the promotion of co-operatives was to contain individualistic efforts to maximise proit and minimise loss, despite the presence of a larger economy founded on capitalist principle. Oficials hoped to build a spirit of loyalty on a base of the pre-existing solidarities of caste and community. Yet their view of weaver society could be a romanticised one. In reality, weavers unleashed from sahukar control often competed against each other iercely at some times for proits, at others for mere subsistence. Available evidence suggests that weavers rarely viewed co-operatives as community organisations, but rather as agencies issuing from the outside, ones to which they could resort strategically when it was convenient, but which they would disregard or even resist when that better served their interests.84 In criticising such instrumentalist behaviour, Ewbank would complain: “[W]hen a weaver gets proit in the bargain [from participating in a co-operative], he undertakes the business in the next year and becomes a competitor to the society.” He also observed that struggling artisans would not hesitate to sell their cloth to sahukars if this seemed to provide temporary advantage.85 In short, the very philosophy of the co-operative movement often involved the imposition of values at odds with weavers’ social and economic practises. As long as the state could not provide alternative guarantees of their security, weavers were unlikely to embrace these values. Co-operatives were often founded on a conception of the sahukars as social outsiders, a view that weavers did not necessarily share. As we have seen, sahukars had often fashioned themselves as patrons of artisan families, providing money on social occasions and sometimes offering support in times of crises that helped tide weavers over until circumstances improved.86 These were services that co-operatives could not legally furnish. In many cases, no doubt, weavers regarded co-operatives as more alien than the sahukars, more unlikely to be a long-lived presence in their lives, and less able to help them in a social and economic pinch. 84

85 86

For dificulties in enforcing such standards of loyalty, see Proceedings of the Bombay [Provincial] Co-operative Conference, 1919, pp. 129–30; Rao, Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries, pp. 45–7. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 545. See Chapter 4. See Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya, for a rich examination of such attitudes amongst peasants.

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Crafts advocates in the administration, recognising the dificulties members had in submitting to the societies’ requirements for discipline, often suggested that cultural defects of the artisans were at fault, and that cooperatives would have to rely on external control and direction. According to Ewbank in his testimony before the Indian Industrial Commission: [I]lliteracy, suspicions, prejudice and low character make them [the weavers] unit to manage a society themselves on a co-operative basis. They make continuous mistakes and tend to be very slack about recoveries. They need constant and close supervision by a Government oficer for three or four years before they can carry on their own society successfully.87

Successful societies often depended on involvement by highly educated men who were at once conversant with the accounting procedures required by the government, knowledgeable about the intricacies of the market, and willing to serve with little or no compensation. Yet there were few individuals in western India who were up to the task, largely because most members of the educated middle class lacked experience of the markets for yarn and handloom cloth or knowledge of the techniques of cloth production. W. Pomfret found those delegated with the task of helping weavers hopeless in judging market requirements and in detecting fraudulent practises by merchants, such as short-changing yarn provided in the large bundles purchased from Bombay.88 He remarked: Advocating principles of co-operation no doubt can be done by the special mamlatdars of your department but the buying of yarn and the distribution of the same cannot be done well by such inexperienced men. . . . If they have to answer similar questions that the weavers have placed before me from time to time, I can imagine this set of men going about biting their ingernails as they will not know what to do. The weavers will be the irst to ind this deiciency of knowledge. One may state with conidence that these men will be going aimlessly about the Presidency. Conidence will soon be lost.89

One report concluded the main dificulty of co-operative societies amongst the weavers lay “in the absence of persons of intelligence and standing 87

88

89

Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 545. See also the discussion by V. M. Herlekar in Proceedings of the Bombay [Provincial] Co-operative Conference, 1912, pp. 46–8, for views of weavers’ incapacity in managing co-operation on their own. W. Pomfret to Registrar, Department of Co-operative Societies, 26 Dec. 1911, MSA, GD 1912, comp. 820, vol. 84, p. 167. W. Pomfret to Registrar, Department of Co-operative Societies, 26 Dec. 1911.

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acquainted with the business, whose businesses are not yet necessarily opposed to the success of the scheme.”90 Yet ultimately resistance from the sahukars to the creation of societies appears to have been the most important obstacle. The formation of co-operatives struck at the sahukars’ self-interest. In his testimony before the Industrial Commission, Ewbank remarked that “the sowcar will always embarrass us if he can.”91 Societies rarely could match the resources, knowledge, and local clout that the sahukars possessed. In general, co-operatives were ill-equipped for the battle. Oficial reports noted that there were at least three stages in the development of co-operatives.92 In the irst stage, a society would simply advance its members cash needed to purchase yarn. In the second, a society would participate in the yarn business, providing raw materials to its members at lower prices. In the third, the society would become involved in selling the cloth of its members. Local capitalists, however, could easily stymie societies that had reached only the irst or second stages. When sahukars felt threatened by a co-operative in the irst stage, they could stop providing yarn or ask for weavers to repay their debts, and the artisans would generally fall back in line.93 Or if the society was in the second stage, they could simply stop buying the weavers’ cloth, as did merchants of Dharwar when co-operatives irst began furnishing yarn there; the weavers, reduced to destitution, ended up selling to the merchants at considerable loss.94 In either case, sahukars still retained tremendous control over the artisan family’s ability to make a living. Most societies were not able to go beyond the irst two stages. In 1917, for instance, ten societies in all of the Bombay Presidency were merely furnishing cash credit whereas twelve others were providing yarn as well; only six had developed facilities for the marketing of cloth.95 The proportions who performed this last task appear to have deteriorated further in the 1920s.96

90 91

92

93

94

95 96

Indian Industrial Commission, 1916–8: Report, p. 169. Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 550. For instance, Proceedings of the Bombay Co-operative Conference in Poona, 1919, pp. 129–30; Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1920–21, p. 25. The actual characterisation of the stages varies slightly in different accounts. For instance, Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 545. Proceedings of the Bombay [Provincial] Co-operative Conference, 1910, p. 6. See also Proceedings of the Bombay [Provincial] Co-operative Conference, 1912, p. 46. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20. Bombay Co-operative News, vol. I, no. 4 (July 1924), p. 141.

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Lack of resources and knowledge of the markets for yarn and cloth seriously inhibited movement to more “advanced” stages. Because the market for cloth was seasonal, societies needed to maintain at least a three months’ supply of yarn to meet a potential upsurge in demand. In the rapidly luctuating market for yarn, however, a society could lose considerable sums by buying when prices were high and selling to weavers when prices were low. The specialised character of the cloth market also meant that weavers in different centres needed very different counts and colours of yarn. The demand for speciic kinds of yarn was often too small for the co-operatives to keep them in stock without losing money.97 The problems of disposing of cloth, which was often sold to distant parts of the Presidency, were often even more complex, because sahukars had traditionally monopolised the necessary kinds of market knowledge. Societies could encourage weavers to abandon making types of cloth that had little market for varieties that were currently in demand, only to ind consumer preferences shift again. Because of the limitations of their information, the co-operatives rarely possessed the lexibility of the sahukars. For all of these reasons, weavers’ societies grew slowly. In 1917, there were twenty-nine societies with a total membership of 2,269, and total capital was 139,330 rupees, a small fraction of the number of weavers and the total capital involved in the industry.98 Twenty years later, there were forty-seven societies serving only 1,457 looms, and the total working capital was 243,461 rupees.99 Thus, after more than three decades of co-operative society organisation, perhaps 2 per cent of the weavers in the Presidency were served by co-operative societies. Gender imbalances were particularly marked. A report from 1923 estimated that one in twenty-ive male artisans were represented; this fell to one in forty-ive once female workers were included.100 Not only was the coverage of co-operatives relatively small, but many societies that did form were short lived. In 1912, Padmasali weavers in Ahmednagar formed a society that forbade members from selling

97

98 99 100

Testimony of R.B. Ewbank, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, vol. IV, p. 548. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1936–7, pp. 51–2. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1922–3, pp. 30–1. Because the total number of weavers in societies during this year was listed as 2,717 and the total number of male weavers was certainly more than 100,000, both of these proportions seem too high.

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individually to local merchants unless the latter bought the cloth without collecting a commission they had previously charged. Though this effort appears to have achieved temporary success, the society soon became defunct, and no new organising effort took place until the 1930s. The Ahmednagar Society founded in 1935 initially covered many surrounding weaving centres. But it soon became focused on the city alone.101 In Sholapur, once Pitre was no longer able to play a leadership role, even the Weavers’ Guild disintegrated. Its immediate successor, formally a cooperative (unlike the guild), was apparently only a credit society and had given up the business of selling cloth.102 Of course, there were some exceptions. One of the earliest of these was in Dharwar, where a local oficial, V. M. Herlekar, had formed a society around 1906. Herlekar irst faced considerable dificulties, as the majority of weavers were indebted to a Marwari merchant.103 Eventually, he was able to persuade a small number to commit several thousand rupees to the co-operative; this amount was matched in the form of an interest-free loan by the government. The society, with only about forty weavers, proceeded hesitantly, because its members feared antagonising the sahukar. By 1912, however, they were “loosened from the clutches of the Marwari,” who ultimately gave up the trade. The society moved into the textile-marketing business and even began to sell the cloth of weavers from surrounding areas. During slack seasons, it took inished articles on pledge for three quarters of the usual price, well above the rate offered by the sahukar.104 A co-operative in Hubli founded by a local oficial, Mr. Basvanappa, was also reported to be a signiicant success around the same time. In 1917, it exercised so much local inluence that a strike amongst its members forced dealers to pay 12 per cent more for local cloth. In the same year, it sent a number of leading local weavers to Bombay to negotiate yarn purchases at an “extraordinary low rate of commission.”105 Success in forming co-operative societies, however, often required the support of large karkhandars, who then frequently came to dominate 101

102

103

104 105

Joshi, “Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan”; Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar.” In 1925, the Sholapur District Weavers’ Co-operative was reported to be engaged in yarn sale, but appears not to have been involved in cloth sale, Bombay Co-operative News, vol. I, no. 4 (July 1924), p. 141. Some of these dificulties are discussed in McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, p. 144. Proceedings of the Bombay [Provincial] Co-operative Conference, 1912, pp. 46–7. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1916–7, p. 20.

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their affairs. The Dharwar society, for instance, formed only after one particularly rich weaver provided about one-third of its local inances.106 Oficials reported in 1915 that the Hubli society did a “large business but is dominated by sawkar members [here probably referring to large weavers].”107 Registrar Ewbank lamented in one of his reports: “[T]o secure success, the members should all be working members owning two to three looms at most. But in many towns, there are well-to-do weavers owning as many as forty or ifty handlooms worked by hired labour to whose interest it is to keep their caste fellows in economic bondage. Such men sometimes succeed in joining a society and dominating it.”108 A 1924 account similarly observed that the societies’ leaders “are often themselves wholesale purchasers of yarn and inished articles, and come in the way of the successful working of a co-operative society.”109 Larger weavers sometimes used the societies very opportunistically. In some cases, karkhandars who became oficers of a co-operative learned how to make proit in the buying of yarn and the selling of cloth, then broke away from the society to set up their own shops, becoming a “hostile or implacable rival” of organisations in which they once had participated.110 The problem of “loyalty” was thus hardly conined to small weavers living on the brink of subsistence. That co-operatives ultimately served the interests of substantial weaver-capitalists better than those of smaller households is in retrospect not startling. Co-operatives asked artisans to give up many of their defensive mechanisms in a spirit of “discipline” and “loyalty” to serve the campaign to overcome the sahukars. Co-operatives usually did so without offering weavers the funds, the knowledge, or the access to the markets for yarn and cloth they needed to compete without risking their security. As a result, co-operatives lourished only if they were able to elicit capital and market information from local society. Generally, it was only the bigger weavers who possessed these abilities. Yet karkhandars did not enter societies in a philanthropic spirit, but out of a desire to improve their business prospects or to deepen their political support within the weaving communities. Finally, co-operatives offered little to employees working for wages in karkhanas, a fact that is easy to forget in reading over records of the 106 107 108 109 110

Proceedings of the Bombay [Provincial] Co-operative Conference, 1912, p. 46. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1914–5, pp. 17–18. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1914–5, p. 15. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1923–4, p. 32. Annual Report, Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency, 1920–1, p. 25.

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Department of Co-operative Societies, which only occasionally acknowledged that this class of people even existed. In 1909, as mentioned earlier, around 20 per cent of the weavers in the Bombay Presidency already worked for wages in the workshops of large weavers. This number grew in the following decades. Without looms or homes of their own, they did not possess the collateral they needed to get cash from the co-operatives. Mehta’s prescription of co-operatives was geared to an image of weaving family that controlled its own looms, and that could eventually hope to buy its own raw materials and sell its own cloth. In the early twentieth century, however, this image embraced a declining portion of the persons actually engaged in weaving within western India. Conclusion Thus, state efforts to inluence the politics of production in the Bombay Presidency appear to have had only a minor impact on the small weaving households they were intended to help. Instead, their main effect was to provide a partial, unintended boost in the position of some weaver-capitalists. Both the stereotype of the traditional weaver and the ideological reluctance of the colonial state to intrude within capitalist units of production (the karkhanas or even artisan households) led to policies that could not reach the majority of the Presidency’s artisans. Only a major commitment of inancial resources could have overcome the structural obstacles that inhibited weaving families from adopting new technologies and from breaking away from their sahukars. Moreover, only a speciic plan to address wage labour could have had much impact on the conditions faced by employees in the growing number of large karkhanas; colonial schemes addressed exploitative activities of non-producing capitalists but not the dominant position of producing weaver-bosses. The karkhandars, taking advantage of a certain desperateness of government oficials to get co-operatives off the ground in the Presidency, were sometimes able to bend state initiatives to enhance or consolidate their power. Because efforts of the government were so limited, their impact was also small. For most of the period between 1900 and 1930, any weakening of merchant capital and strengthening of weavers’ capital was slow, and took place only partly because of state policies. It would take the Great Depression of the 1930s to throw the balance more forcefully towards weaver-capitalists. The following chapter examines the Depression and its effects on the structure of the handloom industry.

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7 The Paradox of the Long 1930s

No crisis in artisan cloth production was as sustained or as severe as that occasioned by the Great Depression. The contraction of world prices for agricultural commodities and falling agrarian wages brought about a profound drop in demand for many kinds of cloth in the rural areas of the Bombay Presidency and beyond, a decline that actually began in the late 1920s. The general effects of the crisis were compounded by a sudden increase in the vulnerability of the handloom industry to competition from the mills. Prices of goods fell, leading to the collapse of production in some handloom centres. Many artisans appear to have left their professions and those who tried to hang on found their earnings deteriorating sharply. Yet ironically, the years from the late 1920s up to World War II – which I term here “the long 1930s” – were also a time of great dynamism in the small-scale textile industries of the Bombay Presidency. This period witnessed the growing prosperity of a set of artisan capitalists who were willing to adopt new product lines, to take up new kinds of raw material, and to experiment with new forms of technology. The emergence of the powerloom industry, that is, the production of cloth by small units using oil engines or electric motive power, in fact owes itself to the entrepreneurship of leading igures from within handloom communities. This period was also a time of important structural changes. In general, a shift took place in the balance of organisational forms in western India, with dependent households losing signiicance and the larger karkhanas gaining importance. Small-town sahukars who had inanced family producers tended to back away from investments in handloom production as the market climate became more dificult. By contrast, workshop owners 229

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who successfully took advantage of new kinds of demand were often able to expand their operations. We must be cautious about positing any notion of total transformation in the industry during these years. The Depression did, however, ultimately prove to be a critical moment in the development of weaver capitalism in the small towns. This chapter examines the paradox of the 1930s: as a period of serious deterioration in the circumstances of most artisans on the one hand, and as a time of the consolidation of an elite from within the weaving communities and the expansion of larger workshop structures on the other. Developments During the 1920s The period just after World War I had been a time of relative prosperity for artisans of the Bombay Presidency. Once the crisis of supply had eased by 1918, handloom weavers and other craftspeople participated in a market environment that was more favourable towards all kinds of cloth producers in India.1 The mills managed to capture the lion’s share of the increased demand for South Asian textiles, nearly doubling their output between 1915 and 1925.2 Yet artisans were able to expand their production as well. The handlooms remained largely free from mill competition in many lines of textile they manufactured. The closing of some Bombay factories and labour conlicts over wage reductions diverted factory owners from any aggressive attempt to enter into areas of production controlled by the western Indian weaver.3 Clothing intended for women’s consumption such as saris and khans largely remained the preserve of handloom producers. Wages of artisans apparently rose to keep pace with inlation, although not as fast as the price of cloth itself, so that most weavers earned from twelve annas to 1 rupee 8 annas per sari (usually a little more than a day’s work on a throw-shuttle loom).4 In many of the weaving towns, karkhana owners introduced new technologies, shifted to the manufacture of new kinds of products, and devised new market strategies for selling their goods. The small-scale accumulation of capital during the relatively prosperous early 1920s was no doubt critical 1

2 3 4

The prices of cotton goods relative to other commodities went up signiicantly between 1919 and 1923. See Bagchi, Private Investment in India, p. 246. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 15. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 91. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 87; in actual terms, this was more than 50 per cent higher than a decade earlier, but inlation had nearly matched this increase; for increases in Sholapur, see Venkataraman, “The Economic Condition of Handloom Weavers,” p. 95.

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to laying the foundation for the more widespread changes that took place during the Depression years. R. D. Bell, a government specialist on handicrafts, published an almost glowing report in 1926 on the prospects of weaving on the sub-continent. In India as a whole, he concluded, handloom cloth production had gone up more than 50 per cent from 1917–18 to 1922–3.5 Western India, he indicated, shared in this expansion. “The vitality of the hand-weaving is indicated by its survival in Bombay, the very fortress of mill-dom,” he wrote. “[H]undreds of weavers still ply the shuttles under the shadows of the Bombay mills, weavers are attracted even from the United Provinces by the money to be earned in handloom karkhanas of Bombay City. Sholapur, an important mill centre, has a very large and thriving handloom industry.”6 There were undoubtedly some major exceptions to this pattern. Changing tastes, for instance, had prompted a decline in the demand for Yeola silks and the brocades of Gujarat.7 One of the most impressive developments during the immediate postwar period was the rapid growth of Surat’s jari industry. Gold thread production had not been far from the point of collapse just before the war because of an inability to compete with imports mainly from France. Around this time, a local educator, B. J. G. Shastri, created a laboratory to explore improved processes of production and established a jari factory, Gauri Gold and Silver Works, where he applied many of these processes to commercial manufacture. In 1922, he and a local producer of artisancaste background, Jinabhai Kapadia, obtained a government grant to study jari manufacture in Europe. Upon their return, they introduced further new techniques in other processes of manufacture. A new method of gilding using electrolysis seems to have been particularly critical to local producers, because it radically cut the amount of precious metal needed to make gold thread. The company could make a much cheaper product, attracting new buyers as well as inducing old ones to switch to Indian jari. Shastri spawned many imitators among entrepreneurs within the Rana community.8 5

6

7

8

Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 7. Bell’s igures were based on statistics of the yarn utilised by the handlooms. Bell, Notes on the Indian Textile Industry, p. 7. Even at the time Bell wrote, Bombay would have been one of the smaller handloom centers in the Bombay Presidency. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 93; Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, pp. 13–17, 32–5, 82–5. Shastri, The Gold Thread Industry, Bombay, 1925; Evidence of Surat Gold Thread Merchants Association in Report of the Indian Tariff Board on Gold Thread Industry, pp. 25–50.

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This development roughly coincided with the founding of the Surat Electric Company (then Killick, Nixon and Co.) and the increasing availability of electricity in the Rana neighbourhood. A number of producers hooked up their workshop-homes to the electric supply. By 1930, most jari manufacturers had adopted the improved technology; perhaps one hundred artisans (with several thousands of employees) were involved in manufacturing and marketing gilded wire, and others had taken up the electroplating of wire. An additional factor boosting the industry was the establishment of a 30 per cent duty (later raised to 38 per cent) on jari imports. Surat’s jari quickly displaced the French product in wide areas of the Indian market and also outcompeted goods from other centres like Poona and Yeola. Production of jari, valued at around 500,000 rupees annually between 1916 and 1921, increased to around 2,000,000 rupees by 1924–5. In 1929, there were an estimated nineteen to twenty thousand people, many of them Ranas, employed in small irms in the various branches of the industry.9 The Crisis of the Long 1930s By 1928, however, the ground had shifted dramatically to the disadvantage of western India’s artisans. The crisis of the long 1930s was associated with two sets of factors: (1) changes in the political economy of India that favoured the mills at the expense of artisans; and (2) a drop in Indian demand for handloom cloth, both as a result of a decline in the peasants’ buying power and of signiicant changes in taste. The growing inluence of Bombay’s industrialists with the colonial state was a critical aspect of this situation. Increasingly, the rulers saw mill owners as a useful counterweight to Indian nationalists; they now tried to balance efforts to win the textile magnates’ support alongside attempts to satisfy the more long-standing interests of British manufacturers. Handloom weavers by contrast had at best a weak voice among isolated advocates in various provincial departments of industries. This was perhaps most noticeable in tariff policy. Before the war, the British had largely dismissed the possibility of protecting Indian industry. By the 1920s, however, the government of India reckoned that it needed to do 9

Oral interviews, Surat; Fernandes, Report on Art Crafts of the Bombay Presidency, p. 51; Evidence of the Gold Thread Merchants; D. R. Gadgil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat” [1930], Gadgil and Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, pp. 10–13. Census of India, 1961, vol. V, part VII A. Selected Crafts of Gujarat, Jari Industry of Surat.

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more to please potential allies within India, who were clamouring for tariffs to be raised.10 The government held a series of enquiries to determine what kind of duties might best promote Indian industry. In 1925, the excise duty on cotton manufactures was eliminated. Then in 1927, in a measure designed speciically to target Japanese yarn, the government imposed increased tariffs on imports of yarn above 20s in count. As they considered the new measures, oficials acknowledged the potential effect of duties on the prices paid for imported yarn by handloom weavers. Weavers had to bear the full burden of the increased yarn prices, because the simultaneous fall in cloth demand made it impossible to pass on the costs to consumers. Experts knowledgeable about the artisans’ condition argued that the impact of the policy had been profound. The Director of Industries in Bombay estimated in 1932 that the increased costs of yarn meant a drop of one and a half to two annas per day in wages for some producers, in other words, about 15 to 20 per cent of the earnings of an ordinary weaving family, although he suggested weavers would still have had a dificult time competing if the duties were entirely abolished.11 Silk producers in Surat complained that similar duties on raw silk had done great danger to their industry: “Surat now manufactures real silk in a limited quantity, due to the high prices of raw silk, and the weavers of raw silk are thrown out of employment and are deprived of their means of livelihood.” They also objected to the rate of 30 per cent placed on imports of artiicial silk.12 Ironically, nationalist activity also probably did more to harm artisans in the small towns than to help. Gandhi’s promotion of khadi (homespun cloth) probably contributed to the welfare of those rural people, mostly Adivasis and poor villagers, who adopted the production of coarse cloth to supplement their meagre incomes. There is little evidence, however, 10

11 12

Basudev Chatterji describes the complex politics of tariff and trade policy of British India in Trade, Tariffs, and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India, 1919–1939 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Sumit Sarkar, “The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism: Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 1930–1931,” Indian Historical Review 3:1 (1976): 114–46. Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), vol. 2, p. 51; vol. 5, p. 9. Testimony of Amichand Shah, Special Tariff Board, Written Evidence Recorded during an Enquiry regarding the Level of Duties Necessary to Afford Adequate Protection to the Indian Cotton Textile Industry against Imports from the United Kingdom of Cotton Piecegoods and Yarn, Artiicial Silk and Mixture Fabrics of Cotton and Artiicial Silk, Delhi, 1937, vol. II, p. 340. For further discussion of the effects of yarn duties on handloom weavers, see the proposed resolution in the Legislative Assembly by Pandit Nilakanta Das in NAI, Department of Industries and Labour (Industries), 1935, File I-273 (187).

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of any positive impact on established weaving families. Only a minority of these had been making khadi. Any decline in the use of foreign products caused by the cloth boycott movement did little to help handloom producers, who did not usually compete with imported textiles. At the same time, artisans who used foreign silk or cotton yarn could not satisfy the certiication boards of the Indian National Congress that their products were swadeshi, and were sometimes unable to ind buyers as a result. Some tried to switch to using Indian yarn but produced an inferior product that had little demand.13 To some western Indian weavers, it may have seemed fortunate that the economic effects of swadeshi were conined mostly to the 1930–2 period. The view that Gandhi and the Congress bolstered the position of existing small producers is thus largely a mythical one, at least in the Bombay Presidency. Perhaps the greatest challenge during these years came from the intrusion of large-scale industry into new types of production previously monopolised by handlooms. During the course of the 1920s, Japanese competition compelled the mill owners to search for new markets. One response was to produce more coarse cotton cloth, a range of textile that had been largely the preserve of handloom weavers. The increasing application of the jacquard and other attachments, moreover, made it possible for the mills to execute more complex designs, such as sari borders, that only artisans had made before. By the mid-1920s, a number of mills began to take up the manufacture of bordered women’s saris and bodice pieces on a signiicant scale. Especially noticeable was the role of smaller factories in upcountry towns, such as Amalner, Jalgaon, Chalisgaon, and Dhule in Khandesh District, as well as Sholapur and Warangal (nearby in Hyderabad State), which made low- and medium-count saris. These were cheaper than comparable handloom goods and often found buyers easily. In the late 1930s, annual production by these factories amounted to almost one million saris per year, often in styles that had once been exclusively made by handloom producers.14 Regional artisans were often compelled to lower their prices drastically in 13

14

Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), p. 175; Land Revenue Administrative Report of the Bombay Presidency, 1929–30, p. 30; Report of the Fact-Finding Committee, p. 15. Testimony from Sholapur District Weaver Central Co-operative Union, Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1927), vol. IV, p. 602; Report of the BEISC, 1938–1940, vol. II, Nasik, p. 15; Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 77–8; Annual Report, Co-operative Credit Societies, Bombay Presidency 1933–4, p. 29; Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), p. 166; Telang, Report on the Handloom Industry in the Bombay Presidency, pp. 11–12; Joshi, “Note on the Cottage and Small Industries in the Central Division (Bombay Deccan),” unpublished report, c. 1939, p. 40.

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response.15 Particularly hard hit were producers in the weaving towns in Ahmednagar and Khandesh districts and in Gujarat.16 The Ahmedabad mills, seemingly inluenced by Gandhian forces, announced that they would voluntarily refrain from taking up lines of coarse cloth production.17 Because the upcountry factories making these products, however, did not follow Ahmedabad’s lead, this kind of resolution was essentially meaningless in terms of its impact on handloom weavers. In other words, structural shifts in textile markets were beginning to take place, seriously disadvantaging tens of thousands of artisan producers. The patterns of market segmentation I have described in Chapter 3 broke down to a great extent, with the mills radically intruding into forms of production once under handloom dominance. Small producers did become far more visible in defending themselves against these changes. Leading igures in artisan society testiied before tariff commissions and lobbied those investigating conditions in their industry. They joined political associations that represented their interests in the public sphere, for instance, the Handloom Weaving Merchants’ Association in Sholapur and a province-wide organisation established around 1938. These associations advocated taxing the mills, reserving certain forms of production such as coloured saris for handloom producers, and providing subsidies to artisanal manufacture.18 For the most part, their pleas fell on deaf ears; the state did not yet view the handloom weavers as a group with any kind of political clout. Neither the British government nor the Congress provincial ministry after 1937 did much of signiicance beyond repeating the importance of establishing co-operatives and improving the weavers’ techniques and marketing skills. Co-operatives actually contracted in importance during these years. Whereas in 1929–30 there had been ifty-ive societies with 2,434 members controlling 274,494 rupees in capital, there were only thirtynine societies with 1,880 members controlling 163,380 rupees in capital in 1939–40. The chief governmental innovation during this period was the establishment of eight District Industrial Associations, which in 15

16

17 18

Annual Report of the Department of Industries, Bombay Presidency, 1929–30, pp. 29–30. Joshi, “Note,” p. 39. Also, see the BEISC reports for Ahmednagar, Khandesh, Ahmedabad, and Nasik. Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), vol. I, p. 166. See Solapur Samachar, 13 Nov. 1937, p. 3; 29 March 1939, p. 3; Kakade, A SocioEconomic Survey, pp. 87–9; Resolution, 6 Nov. 1939, presented at the Bombay Provincial Handloom Weavers Conference at Poona, Files of Ashanna Irabatti, University of Mumbai Library, File #41; See also the numerous district reports of the BEISC, vol. II.

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theory were to combine the functions of purchasing yarn, selling cloth and training weavers to use new technologies and to make the kinds of cloth currently in demand. Yet with the exception of the Sholapur association – which had some limited successes – these organisations failed to provide the kinds of services necessary to attract weavers to participate in substantial numbers.19 The contraction of rural demand strongly reinforced and broadened the effects of these changes. Even before 1930, declining world agricultural prices had begun to affect peasant buying power. The Depression itself then precipitated a further fall in cloth prices in almost every rural market. The cotton tracts in Khandesh, Berar, and the Central Provinces could no longer absorb the output of the looms of thousands of weavers in the region.20 Silk weavers in the southern districts, who still did not have to face any signiicant mill competition, also found their markets shrinking profoundly.21 Report after report brought up the correlation between falling agricultural prices and declines in peasant expenditures on artisan-made cloth. The problem was not simply that people of the Bombay Presidency were buying less; it was also that their tastes were changing.22 Until the late 1920s, peasants often had opted for handloom cloth even when the price of a factory product was lower, believing the former to be longer lasting or superior in design or material. With less income to spend on clothing, however, even relatively prosperous cultivators often stopped buying the higher qualities of handloom saris they had previously purchased for weddings. Often they turned to goods that imitated the iner kinds of cloth, but that factories in the region were making at substantially reduced costs. With machine sizing, calendering, and the application of colourful dyes, the mills could now manufacture textiles with a higher level of attractiveness and inish than the handlooms. Especially critical was the advent of new kinds of materials, such as mercerised cotton yarn, 19

20 21 22

This data comes from various Annual Reports for Co-operative Societies, Bombay Presidency from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. The Sholapur District Association had the advantage of relying on funds that were inherited from the Weaver’s Guild (discussed in Chapter 6). Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 121. Land Revenue Administrative Report of the Bombay Presidency, 1929–30, p. 41. These arguments follow to some extent those of Yanagisawa, “The Handloom Industry and Its Market Structure” and Roy, “Size and Structure of Handloom Weaving in the Mid-Thirties.” In developing a largely positive aggregate picture of handloom production, however, both Yanagisawa and Roy do not stress the devastating effects of demand changes on particular sets of artisans.

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which provided an alternative method of imparting eye-catching appeal to cloth, and at far lower prices than textiles made with real silks or ine cottons. Joshi argued in a report written in the late 1930s that there had been signiicant changes in the nature of demand “due to lower purchasing power and a desire for cheap things. … To the extent to which therefore the local cottage industry in any particular product is unable to sell in competition with cheaper products, the industry has decayed or disappeared.”23 In other cases, rural buyers began purchasing new kinds of styles and patterns altogether. Joshi reported that the Sholapur mills had started manufacturing short-length saris (presumably six-yard saris) for Berar, Central Provinces, United Provinces, parts of Gujarat, and the Konkan. Many of these regions had previously been key consuming areas for saris made by weavers from western Indian towns, so it seems likely that handloom centres were losing out as this shift took place.24 At the same time, some agriculturalists seemed to be up-scaling their wear, abandoning the coarsest types of saris, perhaps in response to movements of self-assertion among non-Brahmans and Depressed Classes in the region. One report concluded that Sangamner weavers were losing ground because there was a “change of taste coming over the people in having preference for the artistic and beautiful, over anything that is rather plain and simple,” and that the local weavers had failed “to read the sign of the time, and to adapt their production to the changed taste.” The report noted ironically that the weavers themselves, although struggling to maintain subsistence, “have a taste for imitating the manner of living adopted by people of the middle class,” and that a woman from the weaving community “would wear a sadi of iner texture and would turn her face away from a rough sadi which she herself with her husband and the family would make on the family loom.”25 Overall, rural consumers seemed to be gradually abandoning coarse and ine cloth qualities, where the handlooms had previous predominated, for coarse medium, medium, and non-cotton textiles. In the cities, other processes were at work that affected patterns of demand to the detriment of some sets of artisans. In some cases, the 23 24

25

Joshi, “Note,” p. 7. As Joshi put it in his “Note,” “in the absence of mill production this would have normally been met by Deccan handlooms or by handlooms in the area in which these sarees are consumed,” p. 40. “An Enquiry into the Economic Conditions of the Weavers at Sanganmer,” MSA, BPBEC Files, 1929–30, File 88, p. 3.

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nationalist movement encouraged a sort of simpliication of tastes, with plain white cloth replacing the bordered sari for everyday wear.26 Among the increasing population of women seeking education (and in some cases, work), the popularity of the six-yard sari (with undergarments worn beneath the sari) grew signiicantly, in large part because of the greater mobility it offered women and because of its associations with modernity.27 There was, however, a countervailing tendency towards the adoption of more elaborate patal saris with fancy designs, bright colours, and often art silk rather than conventional borders.28 According to Joshi, the handloom Ilkal sari disappeared rather suddenly from urban markets at some point in the mid-1930s.29 Polkas, once a style of upper body covering worn only by young girls, sometimes replaced khans, the traditional form of bodice piece.30 In many cases, the new products were introduced by western Indian mills or by powerlooms, putting handloom weavers at an immediate disadvantage. Signs of the Depression Each of these developments affected different sets of producers. Whereas the inluence of tariff policy on yarn supply was felt mainly by weavers using imported silk and cotton yarn, the challenge posed by mofussil mills to sari markets was experienced mostly by those manufacturing coarser cloth. The effects of changes in rural buying power may have been most profound for silk weavers and jari manufacturers who catered to the market of more prosperous cash-crop producing agriculturalists. Virtually all artisans, however, ultimately faced novel challenges. There were sharp declines in prices for almost all kinds of cloth. In Malegaon, a detailed list of prices from one merchant shows that most varieties of sari fell in price by more than 50 per cent, some much more, between 1928 and 1937, while the general price level declined only about 30 per cent (see Appendix 2).31 Silk-bordered Nagari saris produced in 26 27 28

29

30 31

Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Surat. Tikekar, Jana-Mana, pp. 77–83. For a discussion of patals, see Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” pp. 12–13. Joshi, “Note,” p. 7. I suspect Joshi was referring here to “real” Ilkal saris, that is, the bordered silk saris made in the Ilkal region itself. Handloom Ilkal saris made of cotton and art silk were winning wider markets during these years. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. I, p. 102. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Nasik, p. 12; price indices are for Bombay city and come from June listings in “Monthly Cost of Living Product Prices and Index in

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Table 7.1. Sari Prices in Sholapur, 1930–8 (Rupees-Annas) Year

Maheswari

Fancy Patals

Ilkal

1930 1938

Rs 2–12 to Rs 3–4 Rs 1–12 to Rs 2–0

Rs 4–0 to Rs 4–8 Rs 2–0 to Rs 2–8

Rs 4–8 to Rs 5–0 Rs 2–12 to Rs 3–4

Table 7.2. Piece Rates per Sari, in Annas-Pice (Slightly More than One Day’s Work) Year Aug. 1927 May 1932

Price Index Malegaon Dharangaon July 1914 = 100 152 107

12 As 7 As

18 As 8 As

Broach

Chikhli

14 As 5 As 9 Ps

21 As 4 Ps 13 As

Ahmednagar fell from about eight rupees in 1925 to three rupees, eight annas in the 1930s.32 Karkhandars in Sholapur reported substantial drops in prices during the 1930s, attributing most of the decline to “cut-throat” competition with the mills (Table 7.1).33 As prices of cloth fell, payments to weavers declined. Evidence on piece rates indicates serious drops in earnings in almost every location, though the timing of these declines could differ. R. D. Bell noted that in cases in the Bombay Presidency where weavers competed with mills and the industry was not “organised” – that is, where the household weaving system predominated – serious declines took place well before 1929. Earnings of a family per sari for weaving of coarse cloth in places like Bhingar and Dharangaon dropped from about one rupee in August 1927 to ten annas in November 1929, and to eight annas by May 1932. Rates often fell to levels less than half of those earned ive years earlier (perhaps 30 per cent lower on average in real terms) (Table 7.2).34 In other cases, where competition with mills was less severe, rates held up until 1929, but then fell precipitously with the collapse in the rural

32 33

34

Bombay, 1921–1940,” International Institute for Social History Web site, http://iisg.nl/ hpw/india.php. These igures in turn were compiled from the Bombay Labour Gazette from 1928–37. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Ahmednagar, p. 9. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Sholapur, p. 9. By contrast the cost of living fell about thirty per cent during these years. Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), vol. I, p. 165, vol. II, p. 50. These declines were steeper than the declines in yarn prices, which ranged in Bombay from 35 per cent in iner yarns to 65 per cent in coarser yarns; Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), vol. I, p. 161.

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Table 7.3. Wages Paid (to Asamis) for Weaving Three Types of Saris, 1933–8 (Rupees-Annas-Pice) Kind of Sari

Nipani

Maheswari

Ilkal

Cost of Living index July 1914 = 100

Rs-As-Ps

Rs-As-Ps

Rs-As-Ps

1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938

0–11–0 0–10–6 0–9–0 0–8–0 0–8–0 0–8–0

1–0–0 0–14–0 0–12–0 0–9–0 0–8–0 0–8–0

0–7–6 0–7–0 0–6–6 0–6–3 0–6–0 0–6–0

104 95 101 100 106 105

economy. Reports noted that in Belgaum, a silk-weaving town, earnings per sari dropped from a high level of one rupee, eight annas in 1929 to twelve annas in 1932, that is, a reduction of 50 per cent; in Dharwar they fell from fourteen annas to ten annas. In Sholapur, the superior marketing techniques of local karkhandars apparently held off signiicant wage declines before 1929, but then a substantial drop in earnings took place. Rates per weaver per cloth had been twelve annas per day in 1927, eleven annas per day in November 1929, and ten annas per day in November 1930. By November 1932, they had fallen to eight annas per day. According to different igures provided by Kakade, piece rates in Sholapur continued to decline steadily in the mid-1930s (over a period of relative price stability) (Table 7.3).35 Decreases in earnings led some weavers to leave the profession, especially where employment became very irregular. In Ahmedabad, the number of looms declined from 750 in 1927 to less than 200 by 1939; in Dholka, an industry with 700 looms had fallen to less than 350 looms at the end of the decade.36 A similar decline occurred in Bombay; artisans there complained that the costs of living were high and they had little work to do for much of the year.37 The picture of the weaver toiling under 35

36 37

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 49. Price indices are for Bombay city and come from “Monthly Cost of Living Product Prices and Index in Bombay, 1921–1940,” International Institute for Social History Website, http://iisg.nl/hpw/india.php. Venkataraman, “The Economic Condition of Handloom Weavers,” pp. 96–7, suggests that there was a 52 per cent decline in wages in Sholapur between 1929 and 1937, whereas the cost of living dropped 32 per cent. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Ahmedabad, p. 9. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Bombay City, pp. 8–9.

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the shadow of the mills, evoked by Bell in the previous decade, no longer bore any semblance to reality. In Ahmednagar, the volume of yarn used in town had fallen to less than 40 per cent of that used before the Depression. The picture there, reported one survey, was one of “unrelieved gloom.” Artisans were giving up their occupation to do casual labour in factories and ields, and the various weavers’ co-operative societies in the district all had failed.38 The Decline of Dependent Households Decreased earnings, however, did not translate to sharp reductions in the number of weavers everywhere. Many artisan families were reluctant to drop out of the profession altogether, in some cases because this meant attempting to struggle for subsistence without viable alternative skills in a dificult labour market. Survival rates varied sharply, with some centres shrinking to some small proportion of their size a decade earlier. Yet other places held on at old levels of employment. Many factors were responsible for the differential tendencies of artisan irms to survive. Some of these had to do with the characteristics of individual families and workshops: skill levels, demographic characteristics (such as the ratio between those able to work and non-workers), and consumption and savings behaviours. One structural pattern, however, does emerge. Where dependent households were the most important organisational form, artisans seem to have had a more dificult time holding on. Many karkhanas based on wage labour, by contrast, were able to persist with little deterioration in production. In these latter kinds of irms, in fact, small weaver-capitalists willing to take up new product lines and adopt new technologies were sometimes able to take advantage of changing opportunities during the Depression years to build expanding businesses. Dependent artisan households often lacked the lexibility necessary to adapt to the changing market environment. Report after report indicated that weavers failed to take up new designs even as their markets were disappearing. Although the common reason provided for this was again the “conservatism” of the weaver, this explanation overlooks the fact that dependent artisans families rarely made choices about what to make. The question then in effect becomes: Why were the sahukars so “conservative”

38

Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Ahmednagar, p. 9.

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that they did not encourage artisans to adapt their product lines to the new situation? Apparently the uncertainty of investment in deteriorating economic circumstances discouraged many sahukars. According to one report, “the middlemen do not seem to have much conidence in the future of cottage industries, and they are not prepared to put up a strenuous ight for their improvement.”39 Yet this in turn raises the question of why many large karkhandars were willing to take such risks. Future research on other areas of the economy may reveal that sahukars were attracted by alternative forms of investment. Yet it appears that the sharp divorce between marketing and production in the dependent household form was also critical. Sahukars stayed aloof from the processes of manufacture, preferring to let those who worked under them absorb much of the risk inherent in the unstable markets of handloom manufacture. The sahukars were sometimes outlanked by producers who could nimbly adjust to consumer tastes. Even the owners of small karkhanas, such as those of Malegaon, sometimes demonstrated more adaptability than much wealthier merchants around them. In a number of cases, the middlemen simply distanced themselves from the industry, leaving weavers to fend for themselves. In East Khandesh, the system of weaving on a contract basis completely broke down during the 1930s and artisans became “independent.”40 In Nasik, too, there were reports of dependent weavers losing outwork consignments and having to produce on their own, resulting in ierce competition between them in selling their goods. Outwork had totally ceased among the silk weavers of Yeola.41 In Gadag and Hubli, the sahukars were said to be reluctant to lend money to weavers, who had increasingly little to offer as security.42 Because of the retreat of merchant capital, many weavers no longer were subject to the kinds of subordination that characterised their situation before the 1930s. There may have even been an increase in the percentage of independent households in the Presidency as a whole. These now often had to search for buyers on their own, competing in some cases with thousands of other families in a similar position. This not only could be time-consuming, but it could also lead to the bidding-down of prices.43 Once left to their own devices, individual families engaged in 39 40 41 42 43

Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. I, p. 99. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, East Khandesh, p. 10. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Nasik, p. 10. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Dharwar, pp. 9–10. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Nasik, p. 10.

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little self-regulation, producing what they could in order to subsist even when the market could not absorb it. Ultimately, many seem to have reached the point where they had to abandon the profession or seek work as labourers in karkhanas. The Karkhanas As we have seen in previous chapters, karkhanas using wage labour were present in most of the major artisanal towns of the Bombay Presidency by the 1920s. These karkhanas were in essence irms engaged in the smallscale accumulation of capital. Often they had taken up and promoted the most highly valued forms of specialty goods for market niches not supplied by the mills or by other handloom weavers. They usually could obtain better conditions for securing credit and purchasing yarn than artisan households, and because of their size and resources, they were better able to wait to sell their cloth until prices became more favourable. Sometimes weaver-capitalists established special sales relations with merchants in cities like Bombay or even opened up their own cloth shops. In the process, they developed understandings of the market and adapted their products accordingly.44 At least in a few cases, what might be called the “super exploitation” of family labour contributed to the initial processes of business expansion. The Vakharias in Surat, for instance, were able to build a karkhana of about thirty looms by relying heavily on the members of an unusually large joint family. Whereas non-family labourers mostly did preparatory work (which received low remuneration), members of the family, including both men and women, did most of the weaving. The irm thus did not pay out wages to skilled workers but mainly had to cover food and household expenses. After this family divided during the 1920s and 1930s, the section headed by two brothers, Jayantibhai and Jaikishandas, soon built up one of the largest weaving establishments in Surat.45 One woman from Bhiwandi told me how she took care of ive children during the 1930s and performed not only warping work but weaving until late at night, with no holidays and only the most perfunctory appearances at wedding celebrations. Her family’s business grew from four looms to sixty looms, and eventually moved into powerloom production.46 In both 44 45

46

Haynes, “The Logic of an Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy.” Interview with Jaswantlal Vakharia, Surat, 1994. Because internal pressures to divide built up as family size expanded, such a large joint family was highly unusual. Interview with Khatoon Haji Sadruddin Momin, Bhiwandi, 1994.

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examples, the extensive involvement of women in weaving, rather than just in the preparatory processes to which they were ordinarily conined, was critical to the development of the family savings necessary to purchase more looms. The larger karkhandars made a number of successful adjustments to the dificult conditions of the Depression years. Whereas household weavers and even small karkhandars often could not afford to divert family labour from production processes, some family members in more prosperous irms shifted their attention to what might be called management functions. Frequently, one of the brothers in a joint family might specialise in sales; other brothers focused on acquiring raw materials and on overseeing production. Opening shops to sell cloth, developing special relationships with local merchants who found buyers for their cloth, and cultivating ties with out-of-town traders who sought stocks for their own shops were all strategies that became possible in families freed from the precarious daily struggle to subsist. “My uncle and father knew all the consumers [meaning out-of-town merchant-purchasers],” said one karkhana owner in Sholapur, whose family irm became quite substantial during these years. Some weavers developed quite far-lung markets in places like Calcutta and Dhaka. In general, larger karkhanas seem to have made products whose value was greater than those made by smaller producers, thus assuring a higher margin of proit.47 A major advantage of the karkhandars was their ability to develop new techniques as market conditions changed. Unlike most sahukars, they possessed strong craft skills and an intimate knowledge of the manufacturing process. As a result, when demand shifted, they were continuously able to make adjustments in the methods of production. The adoption of art silk and mercerised cotton was perhaps the most obvious of these changes. Big karkhandars introduced both of these kinds of yarn in their workshops during the mid-1920s; cloth using both types rapidly found expanded markets during the 1930s. Silk-weaving irms of Surat, including both handloom and powerloom units, were among the irst producers in India to introduce art silk. The mills, by contrast, took up art silk production to only a very limited extent.48 Contemporary industrial leaders in Surat attribute success in this endeavour to the pre-existing knowledge of single-ilament yarn associated with silk weaving.49 The 47 48 49

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 63. Report of the Indian Tariff Board (1932), pp. 168–9. Interview with Arun Jariwala, Surat, 1994.

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Image 15. Title: “Tikekar Patal Sari Advertisement, 1941”. Source: Stri 1941, p. 212.

introduction of new techniques of sizing, as well as the use of new kinds of German and Japanese dyes, the jacquard, the drop box, and wooden dobbies (often devised in the workshop), all disseminated widely during these years. In general, what each of these changes held in common was that it allowed the manufacture of more attractive varieties of cloth with the appearance of high-valued products but at prices much lower than pure silk or ine cottons would have cost.50 50

See, for instance, The Annual Report of the Department of Industries, Bombay Presidency, 1926–7, p. 9.

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Some workshop owners were also enterprising in their acquisition of these raw materials. Because of the size of their purchases and their ability to pay in ready cash, larger karkhandars in Sholapur often obtained their supplies of cotton yarn at prices much less than the rates paid by smaller dealers.51 In Surat, local weaver-capitalists developed contacts with Belgian silk dealers, German dye merchants, and Japanese traders in art silk and rayon, who sometimes gave them useful advice about cloth processing. A few local manufacturers even travelled to Japan during the late 1930s to do business. Finally, the karkhandars were able to take advantage of the deteriorating circumstances in the labour market. As we have seen, wages were dropping steadily during this time, and many weavers must have been desperate to ind work of any sort. In effect, the karkhandars were able to draw on these pools of surplus labour to supplement their more permanent workers during busy times of the year.52 When the market was glutted with goods, the karkhandars devised “their own means of restricting the production, such as dismissals, lower piece-rates, and the slackening of supervision over the work of the weavers.”53 In some centres, larger workshop owners contracted out work to household weavers and small karkhanas during the busy season. In effect, the outworking irms, or asamis, in Sholapur constituted a reserve work force for the bigger karkhandars. For household weavers, the option of disposing of labour was not so simple, because this meant releasing family members into the general market for casual work to fend for themselves. Karkhandars also capitalised on the cheapness of female labour, often from the weavers’ family, for jobs such as pirn winding, which could be remunerated with as little as one anna for the yarn required for four saris.54 Of course, many karkhandars, especially smaller operators, succumbed to Depression conditions. A report on Malegaon, where workshops with ive to ten looms were commonplace, indicated that “there has been a decline in the number of karkhandars, and that some of the wageearners who have lost their jobs as a result … have become independent artisans.”55 There was deterioration in Poona and Yeola karkhanas as well.56 Kakade found in one sample that less than half of the smaller 51 52 53 54 55

56

Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 55. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 110, 112. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 49. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 29. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Nasik, p. 10. Despite this comment, many small karkhanas did remain in Malegaon. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, p. 119.

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workshops he surveyed in Sholapur had existed more than ive years, and many of these were declining or stagnant in their prosperity.57 Even some rather big irms went under at the time. One branch of the Bet family in Sholapur, which employed 150 to 200 people making cheap Ilkal saris, lost most of its business at some point during the later 1930s. Yet when we ind signs of dynamism during these years, it stemmed chiely from the workshops using wage labour. The Powerlooms In Sholapur city, the largest of artisan centres, signiicant processes of accumulation took place without a shift away from handlooms. In a number of other towns – Surat, Bhiwandi, Malegaon, and Ichalkaranji – the adoption of machines driven by oil engines or electricity was critical to the strengthening of weaver capitalism. The emergence of powerloom manufacture was largely a development within the pre-existing artisanal industry. A few high-caste individuals, such as Vyankatarao Datar in Ichalkaranji and L. V. Tikekar in Sholapur (both Brahmans), set up powerlooms from scratch earlier in the century,58 but these men were not immediately emulated by other residents in their towns. Most entrepreneurs who took up powerlooms in the 1920s and 1930s were drawn from families of craftspeople belonging to artisan communities: Khatris and Momnas in Surat, Momins in Bhiwandi and Malegaon, and Koshtis in Ichalkaranji.59 As they invested in powerlooms, they continued to rely on craft skills, to draw most of their workers from their own social groupings, and to utilise their pre-existing modes of controlling labour. Their decision to use power-driven machinery was often just one step in a series of technological changes, not a unique moment in history that departed from all others before. The few powerloom pioneers during this period who came from high-caste background, such as S. V. Dhamankar in Bhiwandi and Amichand Shah in Surat, relied heavily on persons from the weaving castes for technical know-how as well as labour.60 57

58

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Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, pp. 42–43. Kakade found that the larger karkhandars generally managed to survive much longer than smaller irms and were continuing to grow. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” ch.1; Testimony of L. V. Tikekar. Ichalkaranji appears to have been a partial exception to the pattern I am describing. Although Koshtis played a signiicant role in the introduction of powerloom production, at least half of powerloom manufacturers in the late 1950s came from non-weaving backgrounds. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 66. Interviews with S. V. Dhamankar, Bhiwandi, 1992, and Prakash Shah, Surat, 1994.

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In the 1920s, a small number of karkhandars, like Abdul Samad Sheth in Bhiwandi and leaders of the Hathiwala family in Surat, decided to install powerlooms in their workshops. During the 1930s the spread of the powerlooms began to acquire real momentum. Two key factors facilitating the adoption of powerlooms were: (1) the development of cheap forms of power supply, notably electricity; and (2) access to relatively cheap looms that could be purchased by those weavers who had been able to develop some savings or who could mobilise credit in excess of their subsistence needs. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the Surat Electric Company began to make electric connections for industrial purposes to artisanal neighbourhoods in Surat during the 1920s; jari manufacturers took advantage of the availability of electricity before weavers. A public electric supply became extended to Bhiwandi in the early 1930s and to Malegaon during the late 1930s. A major advantage of electric power for the small karkhandars was its decentralised character. Electricity could easily be dispersed into the weaving neighbourhoods; it did not have to be generated and consumed in some central location as was the case with power from the coal-fuelled plants in the early textile mills. According to accounts of older Surat residents, once ive families on a street had agreed to use electricity, the company would connect the street to the power supply.61 Each family thus could run the looms in its own house without having to construct some larger plant, an act that would have required new investment in land, buildings, and machinery. Virtually all the earliest powerloom weavers began by installing looms in their homes. Only later, when expansion required larger facilities, did the more substantial artisan entrepreneurs buy land and build sheds to house their weaving operations. In Surat, weavers in some artisanal neighbourhoods continue to conduct much production on the ground loor of their residences today. In places where electricity was not available, powerloom production could be started up with the purchase of a small diesel generator. By hooking the generator to a system of shafts and pulleys running above the machines, a weaver could provide power to a dozen looms with a single motor. Whereas some of the larger karkhandars used generators, smaller weavers sometimes could not afford to run them.62 61

62

Interview with Nur Mohammad Peer Mohammad Killedar, Surat, 1994. In some cases, the Surat Electric Company directly pleaded with weavers to introduce the powerlooms and did the itting of the machines itself. Interview with Jaswantlal Vakharia, Surat, 1994. The cheapness of electricity compared to diesel was mentioned to me on number of occasions, for instance, in an interview with Ibrahim Nazir Momin, Bhiwandi, 1994.

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The second critical factor stimulating technological change in the weaving towns was the low cost of purchasing used powerlooms or of altering existing looms so that they could be run by electricity or oil. In Surat, a number of local artisans simply transformed their Hattersley looms by adding a belt and some other small contrivances that made it possible for electricity to drive the weaving action. A converted Hattersley typically cost about sixty rupees.63 The more common source of cheap machines, however, was the mill sector. Handloom weavers bought used powerlooms from factories in Bombay and Ahmedabad that were either upgrading their machinery or going out of business. Weavers I interviewed in Bhiwandi, Ichalkaranji, and Surat generally estimated that used looms cost 50 to 150 rupees during the period between 1925 and 1935; 150 to 350 rupees between 1935 and 1950; and 300 to 600 rupees during the 1950s.64 For the period before 1935, in other words, a used powerloom cost only about two to ive times the price of a handloom with ly-shuttle attachment. Abdul Samad Sheth, the irst and most famous powerloom operator in Bhiwandi, reportedly purchased his looms from the Bombay mills as scrap metal, paying by the ton rather than by the machine. One powerloom producer in Malegaon claimed that used Platt looms could be obtained from Bombay for 75 rupees as late as 1940; new looms, by contrast, would have cost 1,200 to 1,500 rupees.65 The cheapness of these machines was critical. Most karkhandars still had limited capital of their own, no contacts with the managers of modern banks, and little support from the colonial government, so they could hardly hope to invest in the most modern technology of the age. The initial investors in powerlooms were weavers who were certainly better off than most of their peers, but they were still small igures relative to the mill owners and piece-goods merchants of Bombay and Ahmedabad. They generally began by purchasing two or four machines at a time, adding new looms slowly as they managed to accumulate savings.66 The ability to purchase more expensive equipment and signiicantly larger facilities came only after many years of production. Indeed, it was only a small minority of weavers who ever developed this capacity.67 The adoption of powerlooms contributed to a signiicant increase in productivity. In interviews, weavers estimated that a powerloom could 63 64

65 66 67

Interviews with Surajram Bachkaniwala, Surat, 1994; Arun Jariwala, Surat, 1994. Interviews with a large number of weavers and industrialists in Surat and Bhiwandi; Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 12. Interview with Aziz Bluebird, Malegaon, 1994. Looms were usually purchased in multiples of two. Interviews conducted by the author.

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Image 16. “Advertisement for Butterworth and Dickinson Loom, 1904” (Looms made by this manufacturer from around this time were still in use in Surat in the 1990s.) Source: Indian Textile Journal, 1904, p. 281.

make around thirty metres of cloth per day, whereas handlooms could make only around eight metres.68 This increase occurred despite the fact that powerloom production of coloured saris at the time still generally required one weaver per loom. Assignment of a weaver to multiple looms was usually a later development, sometimes associated with a shift from the production of saris to grey cloth. 68

Interviews with Abdul Jalil Mohammad, Bhiwandi, 1994 and Shabbir Hakeem, Malegaon, 1994. This latter igure would presumably been associated with ly-shuttle looms, because it was higher than igures collected from the nineteenth century.

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In general, the looms karkhandars purchased were European or Japanese brands. Even during the 1990s, early-twentieth-century looms made by irms such as Platt Brothers and Butterworth, which might qualify as museum pieces elsewhere in the world, continued to turn out cloth in the weaving shops of Surat, Bhiwandi, and Malegaon. An Indian industry to manufacture such machines did not emerge until after World War II.69 Processes of Innovation and Adaptation Handloom weavers exhibited considerable ingenuity in adapting powerlooms to the kinds of cloth that they wished to make. The mills and the government provided no instruction on weaving by power, so karkhandars had to rely mostly on their pre-existing expertise. In many cases, artisans deduced the techniques they needed through a process of trial and error. Interviewed weavers all suggested that they experienced a few small problems at irst, but managed to run their looms at nearly full eficiency after a couple of months. Relatives or neighbours often helped them to solve mechanical dificulties posed by the new machines.70 In some instances, previous participation in a mill stimulated the processes of skill acquisition necessary to set up powerloom production. In Bhiwandi, it was common for retired Momin mill workers to move from Bombay, just 40 kilometres to the south, to work as mechanics in powerloom workshops.71 The Alashe family in Ichalkaranji started its weaving enterprise when one member, who had served as a jobber in a mill, began to invest part of his wages in handlooms during the mid-1930s. He then purchased two used powerlooms around 1940 from a non-weaver who had been unable to operate them, and taught his brothers how to use the new technology.72 The opportunity to set up one’s own family enterprise, freed from forms of supervision present in factories, often proved attractive to skilled wage workers. Hiralal Bachkaniwala, a member of a weaving family that had gone bankrupt in the 1920s, took up a position in Surat Silk Mills, where he acquired knowledge of machine loom production. Around 1938, he decided to set off on his own, purchasing three or four converted Hattersley looms at a cost of about sixty rupees 69 70 71

72

Interview with Munshi Mohammad Hanif Momin, Bhiwandi, 1994. Interview with Nur Mohammad Peer Mohammad Killedar, Surat, 1994. Interview with Jameel Khurram, Bhiwandi, 1994; also interview with Mohammad Yunus Waliullah, Bhiwandi, 1994. Interview with Ragunathrao Alashe, Ichalkaranji, 1997.

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per machine.73 Movement of people and skills from the “formal” sector to the “informal” appears to have been quite common. The adoption of powerlooms thus was a case of secondary industrialisation, one that depended both on the prior existence of machines and skills from the textile mills. In using cheap power-driven machinery suitable to the manufacture of small batches of cloth, textile makers in the weaving towns were able to lower their costs of production yet still retain many of the advantages of artisanal manufacture. In some cases, they continued to make the same product they had been weaving previously by hand methods. They steered away from less specialised forms of cloth, which were manufactured largely by the mills. In Surat, saris and suiting of silk and art silk were the most common forms of manufacture; in Bhiwandi, iner varieties of cotton sari continued to be produced; in Malegaon, most powerloom weavers were involved in making medium-count Maharashtrian bordered saris; and in Ichalkaranji fancy multi-coloured patal saris made from imported yarn were the norm.74 Weavers adapted their products continuously to the changing nature of the market. According to R. S. Gandhi, a local historian of the industry in Surat: Each family [i.e., the pioneering families in the Surat powerloom business] specialised in a single product which was made by that family alone. When preference and demand changed, they switched over to another product, again on a more or less exclusive basis. This product standardisation and specialisation must have paid off rich dividends in getting insight into the technology requirements and perfecting the skills necessary to produce the selected fabric in the best quality and at the lowest cost.75

Such “lexible specialisation” was essential to industrial vitality in the small weaving towns during this period of depressed economic conditions and intensifying competition with western Indian mills. Markets for the powerloom producers still tended to be especially small, localised, and unstable. The superior ability of the karkhandars to create special kinds of iner cloth and to shift to new products as demand changed allowed some of them to expand their businesses, even at a time of general trade 73 74

75

Interview with Surajram Bachkaniwala, Surat, 1994. Interviews conducted by the author; Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry;” Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji.” R. S. Gandhi, Report of the Survey of Powerloom Weaving At Surat, Gujarat (Surat: c. 1987), p. 9; a similar point was made in 1943 by Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” p. 20.

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depression. The adjustment of the weaver-capitalists to art silk and viscose yarn, which sometimes came before the adoption of power and sometimes after, is yet another example of this lexibility. Despite the adoption of power-driven machinery, the industry continued to require the kind of craft skills that had been associated with handloom production. The Powerlooms and the Handloom Weavers The use of the powerlooms had a profound effect on handloom weaving in centres where they were adopted. In Bhiwandi, the impact was particularly dramatic. The town, which had 3,000 handlooms employing nearly 7,000 people in the late 1920s, had only 300 handlooms in 1940.76 By that time, there were about 600 powerlooms in town. Most of these were concentrated in ifteen units run by karkhandars with more than 10 powerlooms; two workshops had more than 100 looms.77 Total employment of the handlooms and powerlooms together could not have been more than 2,000 workers. Many persons clearly had been displaced from their jobs by the powerlooms. In Surat during the early 1940s, there were 3,645 powerlooms but only 325 Hattersley looms and 138 pit looms.78 In some towns, handloom weavers resisted this development. The most dramatic case of protest came in Bhiwandi, where many hundreds of handloom weavers, fearing their profession was in danger, grouped together and marched to the district headquarters in Thana about ten miles distant to protest the adoption of powerlooms by Abdul Samad Sheth. The weavers appealed to the district collector, complaining that the powerlooms made three saris in the time they could make one, and that they no longer could earn enough to feed themselves. The collector reportedly replied in an unsympathetic manner, telling them either to send a written memorial or to return home and consider using powerlooms themselves.79 Some Muslim weavers at the time referred to the powerloom as “satan’s wheel.”80 I also heard vague reports of a conlict over the introduction of powerlooms in Ichalkaranji but could discover 76

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78 79

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Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Thana, p. 16; see Land Revenue Administration Report of the Bombay Presidency, various years. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Thana, p. 17. One unit had as many as 450 looms, although the inconsistency of the statistics in this report make this igure suspicious. See Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” p.18. Interview with a participant in this protest, Munshi Mohammad Hanif Momin, Bhiwandi, 1994. Several other individuals provided similar accounts, although they gave various dates for the incident. My best estimate is that the incident took place about 1931. Interview with Abdul Khaliq Haji Mohammad Yusuf, Bhiwandi, 1994.

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no speciics about this incident. In Surat, some weavers who installed Hattersley looms in their karkhanas worked behind closed doors, fearing social sanctions from other community members, although there is no record indicating the transition to power itself provoked resistance.81 Those conducting the Bombay Industrial Survey in 1938 were deluged with requests that the powerlooms be legally prevented from producing saris or other kinds of cloth that had been the preserve of handlooms. There was, however, no machine wrecking or violent protest associated with the adoption of powerlooms anywhere in western India. The relatively tame character of conlict between handloom weavers and powerloom weavers stems in part from the fact that these were conlicts within local groupings of weavers, rather than clashes between persons belonging to different moral communities with distinct social institutions and ethical outlooks. The same families who introduced the powerlooms were acquiring leading social roles in the weavers’ society as a result of symbolic investments in temples, mosques, or community education. Displaced handloom weavers might hope to ind employment in powerloom establishments and eventually, with the patronage of weavercapitalists, establish small power-driven workshops of their own. They thus could rarely afford to cut their links to the big karkhandars entirely. Thus, despite the sudden expansion of the powerlooms at the expense of handloom weavers, any tensions created by this process were contained within relatively narrow limits. Weavers’ Politics and Identity The circumstances of the Depression, the extension of wage labour employment associated with the karkhana system, and the development of powerloom production also affected the kinds of consciousness and identity that artisans were shaping during the 1930s. These were not evolving in some straightforward trend towards class consciousness and a proletarian identity. The spread of wage labour certainly promoted new kinds of solidarity between those in similar positions in the economic hierarchy. Yet horizontal allegiances criss-crossed with vertical ties between workers and their bosses, ties based on forms of social patronage and economic dependence, which I have explored in previous chapters. In some instances, kin, neighbourhood, and caste coincided with and reinforced horizontal linkages, yet these same social institutions could 81

Munshi, “The Surat Weaving Industry,” p. 24.

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also bolster ties to karkhandars, who could be kinfolk or social leaders in weaver localities. In discussing the politics of labour during this period, it is important to remember the limited character of the changes that had taken place. In general, there was a shift in the mix of organisational forms during the 1930s, with a weakening of the position of dependent households and a strengthening of that of larger karkhanas. All the major organisational forms of production, however, persisted to signiicant degrees, just in different proportions. Within karkhanas weaver-capitalists continued to exert only loose control over workers, who resisted tighter forms of work discipline by everyday, often individual, forms of struggle. The development of powerlooms appears to have had limited immediate effects on the shape of the workplace. Many displaced artisans in the small industrial towns were simply absorbed into the powerloom workshops. Because the skills involved in handloom weaving (such as knowledge of the properties of yarn and the ability to adjust weaving mechanisms) were invaluable in the powerloom workshop, powerloom karkhandars often hired workers with previous background in artisan manufacture. Most workers came from the artisan communities, and they continued to be recruited primarily through personal networks in these communities. Interviews suggest that most obtained their jobs with the help of friends and kin who were existing employees in the karkhanas. Because the advent of the powerloom did not occasion an increase in the overall demand for labour (and probably resulted in some decline), there was no need for karkhandars to seek workers from outside existing pools of labour. Women workers, too, often did the same tasks in the powerloom workshop as in the handloom workshop, and were usually drawn from the weavers’ families. There is also no reason to believe that work within a powerloom unit was initially more onerous than it had been in the handloom karkhana. Wages of powerloom weavers were less than those earned by mill labourers, but more than those of handloom workers. One survey in Surat during the late 1930s found powerloom weavers earning from ifteen to thirty rupees a month, perhaps 30 to 50 per cent more on average than the wages of handloom weavers making comparable goods in the same locality. The same report mentioned that the average wage of workers in local mills was thirty-ive to forty-one rupees a month.82 The notion 82

Another source indicated handloom weavers received about twenty rupees a month, with powerloom workers getting “somewhat more,” but the former igure seems much higher than the other wage information cited earlier in this chapter. See MSA, Textile Labour Inquiry Committee, 1937–40, File #78-A, pp. 3337–39, 3347 and 3363.

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of machinery dictating a relentless work pace does not appear to be particularly apt in the case of the initial powerlooms. At irst, many weavers supervised just one loom at a time.83 One report even spoke of two workers receiving employment per day for each powerloom, although it was not clear whether both of these were weavers, whether they worked together, or worked in two shifts.84 If there was breakage in the yarn or weavers wished to rest for a short time, they could simply stop the looms. Powerloom karkhandars had usually not made huge outlays of capital in buying their machines, so perhaps they did not feel a need to squeeze every last bit of production out of their equipment, except perhaps when demand was at a peak. To expect that shifts in technology alone would trigger wholesale transformations in the consciousness and politics of workers is therefore unfounded. Research on industrial labour, moreover, has also shed considerable doubt about positing direct relationships between the character of work and the identities formed by workers.85 Developments in the artisans’ politics to a great extent relected changes in the politics of the neighbourhoods.86 Evidence concerning weavers’ consciousness is scanty and problematic. There are two main kinds of sources for reconstructing this consciousness. First, there are the recollections of old weavers of their relations with their bosses, which can be recovered in oral interviews. These recollections do have some shortcomings. When I did my interviews during the 1990s, there were relatively few weavers alive who had been adults before 1940, and recollections of later periods (the 1940s and 1950s) were inevitably sharper than those for earlier periods. Memories of the past, moreover, were strongly coloured by more recent experiences, such as the labour disputes of the 1950s and 1960s. Some tended to regard earlier times with an uncritical nostalgia. Workers provided me no single version of the past.87 Some concurred with owners’ recollections that strong bonds existed between employer and employee. Production relations in those days, I often heard from 83

84 85

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As I observed during a visit to a powerloom workshop in Dhule, where one weaver tended just one machine. Most powerloom units today, however, produce art silk or grey cloth, and are run continuously by weavers supervising multiple looms. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, vol. II, Thana, p. 16. This position is most strongly advocated by Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India. For similar arguments in the context of Bombay and Calcutta mill workers, see Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India; Basu, Does Class Matter? These arguments are elaborated in Haynes, “Just Like a Family?”

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workers and karkhandars alike, “were just like familial relations.” They evoked metaphors of father-son or even brotherly ties to describe these relations. Some recalled the many patronage services provided by bosses. Yet in other cases, labourers stressed their conlicts with owners and remembered incidents of unfair treatment, even physical beatings. Few recollections, however, seemed to suggest some strong sense of solidarity among workers at the time. One jari weaver, clearly remembering with some pain some personal mistreatment, indicated that he had to suffer by himself. If there had been a union at the time, he lamented, “I would have had to join.” Some stressed the divided loyalties of workers in their irms, mentioning that the ties of a minority to owners inhibited collective activity by the workers in those units as a whole. Some of the strongest criticisms of owners included the charge that they did not listen fairly to complaints against other workers.88 The second kind of source on consciousness concerns collective action. There is sporadic evidence of signiicant conlict between weavers and local businessmen in different places. About ive hundred unemployed weavers in Ilkal raided goods from three local shops in 1941.89 Conlicts that did occur took a form strongly inluenced by larger political currents in the locality. Protests by artisans in Yeola, where silk weavers had found it dificult to get work, bolstered popular support for the Civil Disobedience Movement there during the early 1930s.90 Similar tensions fuelled conlicts between Hindus and Muslims in Sangamner. As the town’s economy deteriorated during the late 1920s, some local Muslims became involved in acts of violence at the time of local Ganapati and Maruti celebrations. On one occasion, Sangamner’s Marwaris resolved not to have any dealings for three months with the Muslims, who in some cases may have been their dependent outworkers.91 In each case, the lack of work seems to have prompted social conlicts, but these conlicts were expressed in different idioms and across different political fault lines in each place. 88

89 90

91

See Haynes, “Just Like a Family?” for a more in-depth discussion. Most of the detail in that article deals, however, with the transitional phase between handlooms and powerlooms and the period after powerlooms were established. Sakal, 20 Aug. 1941 in Irabatti iles #41, p. 95. “Daily Report of Tues, Jan. 12, 1932,” in “Civil Disobedience Movement 1932: Daily Reports, Nasik District,” MSA, HD (Special) File (800) (73) (12) of 1932. “Disturbance: Sangamner” in MSA, HD (Special) 1930, File 355 (59), AXII. See also MSA, HD (Special) 1929, File 329. This ile indicates that the Hindus may have begun celebrating a Hanuman festival since 1927 and that Muslims too may have been newly assertive about their religious expression at mosques.

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In most weaving towns where the karkhana system was prevalent, there appears to have been very little strike or trade-union activity until the 1940s, when political parties began to compete very aggressively for workers’ votes.92 In Bhiwandi, there is mention of a strike for an increase in wages by two hundred weavers in the workshop of Abdul Samad Sheth in the early 1930s, although reports suggest this was settled amicably.93 Although Samad Sheth’s workshop became the focus of extended strike activity and sharpening conlict after independence, there appears to have been little trade-union activity there or elsewhere in Bhiwandi through the remainder of the 1930s and early 1940s. One exception to this general pattern was Sholapur, ironically a handloom rather than a powerloom centre. Much of Sholapur’s distinctiveness in this regard owes itself to the sizable foothold Communists had gained in local society and politics. To a great extent, the strength of the Communists was an outgrowth of collective activity in the Sholapur mills, where they had developed a following among Padmasali weavers.94 Led by R. G. Karadkar and Mrs. Minakshi Karadkar, they organised an impressive strike against wage cuts in the factories in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and maintained a consistent presence there during the remainder of the decade.95 The support gained by the Communists among the Padmasali mill workers appears to have been essential to the quick spread of unions to the bidi industry, where women of the community provided much of the labour. When women struck against the cutting of wages from six to eight annas per 1,000 cigarettes in local bidi factories in October 1937, the Communists, joined by educated Padmasali youth such as Vithalrao Falmari and V. N. Madur, rallied the community further. The women took out processions daily with up to six hundred participants. Some stone throwing occurred and the strikers brought to bear profoundly strong pressures on those who refused to join. After one and a half months, the strikers reached a compromise with the bidi dealers that restored some of the wage cuts and provided amnesty (from the

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For Surat, see Kiran Desai, “Suratman Kamdar Sangathanni Pravruti: Surat Textile Kamdar Sanganthanno Samajshastrya Abhayas,” M.Phil dissertation, South Gujarat University, 1990. Weekly Reports to Secretary, HD 15th Sept 1932 and 22nd Sept. 1932 in MSA, HD (Special), File 800(74) (8) of 1932–4. The development of unions more generally is covered in Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City”; Kamat, “Labour and Nationalism in Sholapur.” See Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City;” MSA, HD (Special) (800)(74) (15) I and 543 (53) D of 1935.

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danger of dismissal) to those who took part in the strike. At one point, some wealthier Padmasalis offered to open bidi workshops to hire the women.96 Building on these foundations, Madur and others formed a trade union of handloom weavers, the Lal Bavta Hatmag Kamdar Union, and it rapidly gained membership among Padmasali workers in the karkhanas.97 By this time, local Congress leaders had already founded the irst union for weavers in about 1936. That organisation made efforts to settle disputes between workers and karkhandars. But by 1938 or 1939, this organisation seems to have been eclipsed by the Communists.98 In the context of severe wage cuts and employer attempts to withdraw traditional practises such as the tobacco allowance, the unions fought a series of strikes in different individual workshops. They also worked to implement the provisions of the Bombay Factory Act, which theoretically applied to workplaces with more than ten employees. In 1940, there was a widespread strike affecting 185 karkhanas and more than 1,600 workers for twenty-one days, which centred on cost-of-living allowances and the reduction of the tobacco allowance for steady employees.99 The Communists also attended to individual grievances of workers.100 The nature of these conlicts, however, was always of a strikingly different character than it was in the local mill industry. Labour leaders and karkhandars were usually drawn from Padmasali society and were prepared to negotiate settlements without extended battles. In some cases, the unions left resolution of disputes to caste big men.101 In one case for which there is evidence, Ashanna Irabatti, “sarpanch” of the Padmasalis, heard a dispute in 1940 centring on the demand for a cash allowance for 96

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For the bidi strike, see issues of Solapur Samachar, 11 Oct. 1937 to 2 Dec. 1937; Conidential Weekly Letters of the Collector of Sholapur for Nov. and Dec. 1937 in MSA, HD (Special) 800 (74) (15 I of 1935). The exact date this organisation began is unclear. R. G. Kakade in his Socio-Economic Survey suggests that it started “7 to 8 years previous to his survey” (pp. 90–1), which would have placed the beginnings around 1933–4, which is probably too early. Pandhe, writing in 1960, mentions 1940 as a starting date, which seems too late. See Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” pp. 72–105. An interview with V. N. Madur placed this development in the late 1930s. The best estimate might be 1938. For some of this organisation’s activities, see Conidential Weekly Report, of the Sholapur Collector, 10 Dec. 1937; MSA, HD (Special) File 800 (74), (15 I); Solapur Samachar, 29 April 1938, p. 2; 7 June 1938, p. 2. It is possible that Madur was involved in this organisation because he appears on the list of speakers at one of their meetings. Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” pp. 72–105; Interview with V. R. Madur, Solapur, 1992. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 90. Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” p. 107. Interview with V. R. Madur.

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tobacco against a local asami. Madur argued the case for the workers. Irabatti eventually ruled that those weaving more than three saris a week should be granted an allowance and that all strikers should be taken back by the employer, but that workers were liable for the sanitary tax and water tax charged by the town (from which they had sought exemption).102 Irabatti also considered wrongful dismissal complaints submitted by the union.103 The union itself addressed grievances of karkhandars against workers, such as non-payment of debt, and also dealt with concerns that were purely those of wage labourers.104 The structures of caste organisation among the Padmasalis seemingly constrained class-based tensions, keeping them within bounds that did not threaten community solidarity. No doubt, Communist activity had a signiicant effect on the landscape of workplace relations in Sholapur. By 1941, in part because of its role within Padmasali society, the union clearly had gained recognition as a legitimate actor in the politics of the community, unlike other places where Communists were often labelled as dangerous outsiders. The wage cuts that characterised the early and mid-1930s were halted, and when the cost of living began to rise, the union was able to win improvement in nominal earnings. The union won implementation of two aspects of the Factory Act against the objections of the karkhandars: a formal limitation on the number of work hours per day (a ruling apparently not enforced in practise) and a weekly holiday. Yet the karkhandars had fought off the full-scale implementation of the Factory Act; no other sections of the act were made applicable.105 In general, the workshops remained places where controls based on debt and informal ties between owner and worker were more important than formal relationships established in the civic sphere and labour courts. Sholapur Communists employed the rhetoric of class conlict when discussing mill owners, the Bombay government, or the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution. But they and their worker followers do not seem to have identiied the karkhandars as class enemies to be opposed in all circumstances. Owners and workers were at times perceived as jointly being members of a larger class who were oppressed by the colonial 102

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Documents pertaining to a strike in the factory of Venkayya Biru, 2–5-40, ile #41, in the iles of Ashanna Irabatti. Presumably, the workers paid some portion of these taxes to the karkhandar because they lived in his home. Other sources indicated that karkhandars paid a tobacco allowance when four saris per week were produced. Complaint submitted to Ashanna Irabatti, as Sarpanch, 1–4–40. In File #41, Files of Ashanna Irabatti. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 90. Kakade, A Socio-Economic Survey, p. 52.

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government and who were exploited by a common third party, that is, big businessmen. All joined together, for instance, in calling for the government to prevent the mills from producing kinds of saris made by handloom. As we will see in the next chapter, not long after the Communists fought their struggle for workers’ wages in 1940, they tried to organise the asamis – that is, the karkhandars working on contract for larger businessmen – to pressure the government to provide adequate supplies of yarn during World War II. V. N. Madur recalled that they viewed the handloom industry as involving chains of exploitation rather than simple worker-capital conlicts. “Just as a small ish [the worker] is eaten by a big ish [the asami],” they would explain to the asamis, “the big ish is eaten by the biggest ish [the large capitalist].” Even when they pressed asamis for wage increases, he explained, the Communists knew that the asamis could sometimes not grant these increases without getting higher prices from their buyers. The Communist Vithalrao Falmari (himself a master weaver) even organised the master weavers who gave work to the asami employers.106 The presence of Communist trade unions among handloom workers was thus not a straightforward indication of intense, sustained class conlict within the karkhanas. Finally, neither the Communists nor the unions were able to sustain the commitments of workers over long stretches of time. After the upsurge of 1940 and 1941, strikes were sporadic and usually conined to speciic workshops.107 Many workers recalled that they never joined the union or participated in struggles against employers during this period. Ties of dependency, debt, and patronage between labour and weaver-capitalists thus worked in contradiction to horizontal solidarities and workers’ resistances.108 Thus, even in Sholapur, where Communist unions were strongest, it is dificult to speak of the formation of a “proletarian identity” during the 1930s if such an identity is to be conceived in exclusive terms. Throughout the Bombay Presidency, handloom weavers in karkhanas possessed many different afiliations, including ones that joined them with employers and with caste elites. Each workshop might employ workers with a range of different kinds of linkage to the karkhandar, from kinship and tight dependence to very loose, more ephemeral, and perhaps antagonistic 106

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Interview with V. R. Madur, Solapur, August 1993; Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” pp. 105–7. See, for instance, Weekly Conidential Letters, Sholapur for 14 May 1941, 27 May 1943, 8 July 1943, 7 October 1943 in MSA, HD (Special), File 74 (15) III of 1941–3. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 37.

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ties. In short, a variety of kinds of consciousness, some appearing to be “traditional” and some seeming quite new, all acquired their shape in the changing environment of the weaving towns. Conclusion The 1930s thus spawned a crisis for the vast majority of artisans throughout the Bombay Presidency, but they also occasioned structural shifts in the small-scale production of cloth in the region. The depressed economic conditions prompted many sahukars to step back from their investments in artisanal production, and caused some small artisans to withdraw from the industry altogether; at the same time, some karkhandars were able to take advantage of the new commercial climate to expand their work forces and build up their businesses. In short, this chapter has outlined the growing importance of “weavers’ capital” in western India. Although I have used this concept earlier in this study, this chapter illustrates particularly well the multiple meanings that I intend to evoke by deploying it. First, weavers’ capital is to be distinguished from merchants’ capital, where the functions of exchange and the functions of production are sharply distinguished from one another. The successful karkhandars of western India belonged to families that were beginning to take an intensive interest in marketing, but who already had long histories of involvement in production and who transmitted craft skills and a commitment to the profession from generation to generation. Second, the term highlights the social origins of the karkhandars. Industrial capitalists in Bombay and Ahmedabad came from the ranks of government servants and traders in cotton and opium, some of whom sought new outlets for investment when older economic options dried up. Weaver-capitalists, by contrast, were members of artisan communities whose families had been involved in handloom weaving on a small-scale basis for some time. They had accumulated capital, not by pooling funds from other lucrative enterprises, but by the slow tedious process of saving from the sales of cloth produced by the family. And they brought to the larger workshops skills and knowledge based on personal involvement in small-scale production. Finally, I mean to say something about structure of the workshop. The karkhanas that emerged during the 1930s were almost exclusively family enterprises, where management was concentrated among male relatives in joint families (female family members could on occasion play important roles as well). There was no notion here of public joint-stock

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offerings or partnerships between unrelated persons. Moreover, although they were organised on the basis of wage employment, they retained the loose system of labour discipline that had been associated with artisanal manufacture. Workers kept a great deal of control over their time and their pace of work. Mechanisms of debt and patron-client relations, as well as community bonds between owner and worker, were as important as contractual ties to the functioning of the workshop. Most karkhanas remained small; units possessing ten to ifty looms were most common (although there were a handful of larger establishments). The amounts of capital invested could stay relatively limited because of the cheapness of the machines that were in use. In other words, many characteristics of artisanal manufacture remained, despite the fact the karkhandars had introduced electric power. The strengthened position of weavers’ capital owes itself not to some intrinsic superiority in this form of organisation or the inevitable unfolding of principles of capitalist development, but rather to the karkhandars’ ability to adapt to the particular historical circumstances associated with the crisis of the long 1930s. The contraction of demand brought about by the Depression and the intrusion of mill-made goods into the sari market placed a premium on lexibility, speciically on the ability to develop new products, to cultivate demand for these products, and to deploy new techniques of manufacture that would cheapen production. As members of business families who both possessed an intimate familiarity with processes of production and who were developing contacts with the market, karkhandars devised methods for maintaining and expanding their capacity to cater to specialised sets of consumers. The availability of new kinds of raw materials – mercerised cotton and art silk yarns – and the development of new techniques in dyeing and jari manufacture allowed them to make cheaper versions of products (especially saris) that carried with them meanings of high status at a time when buyers were seeking to lower their expenditures on cloth. Access to low-cost powerlooms and other machines as well as to public electricity supplies made possible higher productivity. The karkhandars also clearly took advantage of the desperation of household weavers, who were struggling to survive under Depression conditions and who were ready to enter employment at wages far less than the rates that had prevailed in the 1920s. The connections they had developed within artisan communities allowed them to recruit and retain labour easily under these circumstances. Sahukars, who lacked the same kind of knowledge of manufacturing processes, proved unable to develop products suited to the shifting market circumstances

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or to ind ways of deploying newly available machines and materials, and they increasingly exited the industry. The karkhandars were not destined by some inherent logic of capitalist development to achieve ascendancy, but many of them were better able to take advantage of an environment characterized by rapid change and new technological possibilities.

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8 Weaver-Capitalists and the Politics of the Workshop, 1940–1960

Despite the changes that had taken place during the 1930s, handloom and powerloom karkhanas still occupied a subordinate position in the industrial economy of western India. During the inter-war period, the textile mills of Bombay, Ahmedabad, and a few other centres had made major inroads into the demand for European imports during the early twentieth century, and had begun to intrude seriously into realms of production once controlled by handlooms. The Great Depression may have cut into proits, but it did not stop the continued trend towards the strengthening of the mills’ position. Weaver-capitalists no doubt had managed to carve out niches for themselves in the western Indian economy, largely by cultivating new kinds of markets, using new kinds of raw materials such as art silk and mercerised cotton, and taking up new kinds of machinery. Yet these forms of production faced a series of handicaps that kept artisan-entrepreneurs conined to specialised market pockets: the cheapness of mass production methods for textiles with widespread demand; the limitations of artisanal processing techniques such as sizing and dyeing; the artisans’ lack of access to larger pools of capital needed to inance rapid expansion; and their inability to crack open some of the market networks controlled by the dealers in mill cloth. Between 1940 and 1960, however, the commercial environment for small-scale production changed radically. Weaver-capitalists strengthened their own position, expanding their role at the expense of household producers and the sahukars on the one hand and entering some ields of production that the mills had once dominated on the other. The karkhandars broke their old reliance on sari manufacture, diversifying into textiles used in making shirts, suits, dresses, and bed sheets. Large numbers 265

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of the smallest artisan irms succumbed to the stresses of the post-war environment, but many of the karkhandars, particularly those using electric or oil power, were able to expand their activities, especially during upswing periods in economic cycles. The capitalism of small towns began to spur signiicant urban growth, largely through the proliferation of the karkhanas rather through the development of big factories. There were a number of reasons for these developments. First, karkhandars showed considerable agility in adapting to the conditions of World War II and its aftermath. The more entrepreneurial workshop owners possessed skills and small pools of capital that allowed them to adjust to the special economic strains of this period. Most important was their capacity for “lexible specialisation,” that is, their ability to draw on their special craft skills and knowledge of cloth in order to take advantage of changing market conditions and luctuating supplies of raw materials. Second, they capitalised on shifts in the character of the state. After 1940, the British Raj and then the early post-independence Indian government intervened extensively in the artisanal sector. Motivated in part by a desire to regulate large factories and non-productive merchant actors, and in part by Gandhian notions of rescuing handloom production from competition with the mills, the government of India adopted a host of policies that bolstered the position of the larger karkhandars, sometimes inadvertently. Third, the development of weaver capitalism was a product of struggles with labour. Artisan-workers, often inspired by trade-union leaders who sought the application of Indian labour legislation in handloom and powerloom units, engaged in extensive collective activity in many of the weaving towns. Karkhandars fought against these efforts using a wide range of stratagems: avoidance of the law, struggles in the courts, lockouts, the iring of workers who joined unions or strikes, and the total disregard of legal rulings. Critical in the arsenal of techniques they used was the partitioning of their workshops into multiple smaller units so that factory regulations would no longer be applicable. On the whole, the karkhandars proved to be masters of the new kinds of politics that characterised the post-colonial era. The Context of the 1940s and 1950s Economic conditions for smaller producers continued to be highly volatile during the 1940s and 1950s, although the sources of volatility were quite different from those associated with earlier periods. World War II, for instance, brought about conditions that in some ways were the inverse

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of the circumstances associated with the Depression. The war created considerable market opportunities. Suddenly, the competition of cloth imports from Europe and Japan evaporated. Although demand for artisanal products in the Middle East and Burma was severely damaged as a result of wartime conditions,1 this development mainly affected Surat, the only centre with sizable foreign markets. The British asked mill owners to make khaki and other clothing for their soldiers, leaving much of the civilian market open to small producers.2 Huge pockets of unsatisied consumer demand for textiles opened up in the domestic economy. Yet artisans in western India initially were unable to take advantage of these new opportunities because the war also occasioned a crisis of supply. Imports of ine cotton and silk yarn were dramatically reduced, and weavers found it dificult to procure their supplies even when they were willing to pay much higher prices.3 Art silk and mercerised cotton yarn, which had especially come from Japan, became scarce.4 At the same time, the mill sector reserved most of its spun cotton thread for its own production.5 The costs of yarn made in Indian mills rose dramatically until the government of India established price ceilings in August 1943; even after this point, yarn merchants engaged in hoarding of supplies, and many weavers had to resort to the black market for their yarn.6 There were also serious shortages of dyes, which had been mostly manufactured abroad.7 Gold and silver imports declined, with profound effects on jari producers. On top of this, restrictions were imposed on the use of railway transportation, creating obstacles to the movement of yarn to the producing centres and of inished cloth to districts where consumers lived.8 1 2 3

4

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Interviews with weavers in Surat, 1994. Interview with Datta Karve, Bhiwandi, August 1992. Solapur Samachar, 16 August 1941, p. 2; 21 August 1941, p. 3; Gujarat Mitra, 28 April 1945; Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency, 1944–45, p. 40. Solapur Samachar, 21 Aug. 1941, p. 3; Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 27. Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” p. 39. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee; Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency, 1944–45, p. 40. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 27. Solapur Samachar, 12 Sept. 1945, p. 1; 27 Sept. 1945, p. 1; 16 Aug. 1941, p. 2; 10 June 1945, p. 2; “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State with Special Reference to Marketing Dificulties,” unpublished report by the Sub-Committee of the Marketing of Handloom Products Committee, The Provincial Industrial Co-operative Association, Bombay, Oct. 1950, pp. 68–9.

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Many producers struggled to persist in their professions during these years. Interviews with weavers in Bhiwandi, for instance, indicate that the local industry – both handloom and powerloom – was at a near standstill during the early years of the war. One weaver reported that Bhiwandi had been nearly emptied of its workers, who had departed for Bombay and other places in search of work. He himself had employed forty-three workers in two shifts in his powerloom karkhana. More than half of those now left town.9 Similarly, many looms fell idle in Sholapur, again largely because of the problems of yarn supply.10 According to one report, starvation was threatening more than twenty thousand participants in the local industry. Weavers became restive, and turned to political organisations, such as the Bombay Provincial Handloom Weavers Association, to articulate their demand that yarn supplies be made available at reasonable prices.11 In Ilkal, the unavailability of silk and the stoppage of dye imports also led to the closing of looms.12 The government took steps to stop hoarding and to make yarn available to small weavers by 1944, freeing signiicant yarn supplies and helping to stimulate a recovery of artisan production. Some accounts during the last year of the war and the immediate post-war years characterise this phase as a boom period.13 In Bhiwandi, handloom production, which had nearly disappeared during the early war years, seemingly enjoyed something of a revival.14 The jari industry in Surat, now in effect protected from the exports of France and Japan, was able to dominate the Indian market. Allied soldiers stationed in India temporarily provided a boost to the industry by purchasing signiicant quantities of jari goods.15 Artisanal wages rose in many towns, although different accounts dispute whether they kept pace with the considerable inlation of the period.16 9 10 11

12 13

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Interviews with weavers in Bhiwandi, 1994. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 7. The president of this organisation was N. M. Joshi, whose earlier reports on handlooms have been a major source of evidence for this book. For political activities by participants in the handloom industry of Sholapur, see Solapur Samachar, 22 May 1945, p. 4; 23 May 1945, p. 2; 10 June, 1945, p. 2; 12 Sept. 1945, p. 1.; 13 Sept. 1945, p. 1; 27 Sept. 1945, p. 1. For Surat, see, for instance, Gujarat Mitra, 28 April 1945. Census of India. Handicraft Survey Report, part X, series 9, Karnataka: Ilkal Sarees, p. 4. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 1; Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” pp. 25–7. Interviews with weavers in Bhiwandi, 1994; the written evidence is not suficiently clear to corroborate this. R. K. Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, Part II,” Gadgil and Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, p. 45. “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State with Special Reference to Marketing Dificulties,” p. 11; Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 1.

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There was much variation in the fate of artisan cloth manufacture from place to place, but the size of the overall weaving population had clearly increased. One report estimated that the numbers engaged in the handlooms in Bombay State rose from 470,000 in the early war years to 650,000 for handlooms and powerlooms combined in 1950.17 As the industry grew during the late 1940s, however, cloth manufacturers in western India were experiencing new uncertainties. Cotton growers simply could not keep up with Indian demand, and imports of yarn were highly regulated by the government of independent India. Spinning factories often failed to provide artisan-producers with adequate supplies, sending much of what they made to the mills or abroad.18 Prices of yarn escalated, so that in 1949 they were about four times those of 1938.19 Markets also were shifting. Among the urban middle classes, the demand for the traditional coloured-bordered cotton sari, which had been the mainstay of handloom weavers, declined whereas that for printed and plain white saris rose signiicantly.20 The mills began to advertise their saris in Indian newspapers on a signiicant basis, hoping to capture wider markets.21 At the end of the 1940s, a new recession in cloth consumption set in, spurring the government to take strong actions to insulate producers from factory competition. In 1953, there was another serious downturn in economic conditions; the mills suddenly looded handloom co-operatives with large quantities of yarn that had been ordered at earlier, higher price levels; these stocks of yarn accumulated with little use.22 The jari industry was particularly hard hit after 1948 because of new government rules on export of the product, the disappearance of the Pakistan market after Partition, and the decline of demand in territories that had previously 17

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20 21

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“Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State with Special Reference to Marketing Dificulties,” p. 9. Because the number of workers in powerloom units could not have been more than ten thousand in the early 1940s, this would suggest a signiicant increase in the numbers who gained livelihoods from small-scale cloth production. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee indicated in 1948 that the yarn available to the average weavers provided employment only for thirteen to eighteen days per month (p. 7). A Department of Co-operative Societies report estimated that the supply of yarn met only 66 to 75 per cent of demand. “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State with Special Reference to Marketing Dificulties,” pp. 28–9. “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State with Special Reference to Marketing Dificulties,” p. 25. Interview with Mustaq Momin, Bhiwandi, August 1992. Advertising by mills pitched to individual consumers was relatively limited until the 1940s. By the later 1940s, the mills were advertising regularly in newspapers such as the Times of India and vernacular newspapers. Bombay State, Dept. of Co-operative Societies (?), “Handloom Industry in Bombay State,” cyclostyled draft, c. 1954.

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been princely states (which had been signiicant consuming regions).23 If there was a golden age during the 1940s in which artisan-producers were able to prosper as a whole, it was a very short-lived one. Small Producers During the 1940s and 1950s These conditions affected different sorts of producers differently. Powerloom karkhandars often developed superior methods of adjustment. The numbers of powerloom weavers in Bombay State, mostly concentrated in Surat, Bhiwandi, Malegaon, and Ichalkaranji, rose from 2,568 in 1939 to 14,719 in 1946.24 Expansion continued after that. By 1956, there were 45,380 powerlooms in Bombay State. In 1964, there were about 18,000 looms each in the three biggest centres of Surat, Malegaon, and Bhiwandi.25 Handloom manufacture essentially closed down in the big powerloom towns after the brief revival at the end of the war. My interviews also suggested the disappearance of jari weaving by hand, an industry that I might have been unaware of if I had had to rely only on published documentation. New jari machines did the work of weaving at many times the rate of older methods.26 Some of the displaced weavers, who possessed skills valued in the powerloom workshops, simply took up employment under new bosses.27 Many household weavers made the shift to the new technology without altering their structural position as clients of merchants and karkhandars. Most of the smallest operators did not possess the capital to purchase looms or motors on their own, and they continued to need loans to obtain their raw materials. In Surat, many had to provide all of their cloth to Vaniya or Daudi Vohra merchants or to larger karkhandars on a job-work basis. The Killedar family, for instance, made considerable efforts to save and re-invest part of its earnings, but even in the early 1950s, perhaps ifteen years after its initial conversion to powerlooms, 23 24 25

26 27

Gadgil and Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, pp. 45–8. “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State,” p. 6. Report of the Powerloom Enquiry Committee; Government of India. Powerloom Enquiry Committee (Government of India, Ministry of Industry, 1964). The re-organisation of Bombay State into Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka makes it impossible to provide exact igures for the whole of what had been the Bombay Presidency, but igures from individual towns indicate a doubling from 1956 to 1964, thus making ninety thousand a reasonable estimate for the latter year. Interviews in Surat, 1993 and 1994. My interviews were of course a very imperfect method of measuring this change, because I was best able to locate persons who had largely maintained ties to the industry.

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it still possessed only about sixteen looms and did most of its production as job-work for merchant-patrons.28 In Ichalkaranji, Marwari merchants supplied working capital to weaver-clients “on condition that karkhandars sold their production to them at prices ixed at the time of supplying capital.” These conditions, according to N. K. Kulkarni’s report, rendered the weaving family open to exploitation by merchants who “invariably paid lower prices for goods so purchased than independent weavers were able to earn.”29 In Bhiwandi during the early 1960s, nearly 80 per cent of the powerloom owners worked on a job-work basis for master weavers, who were sometimes agents of the Bombay mills.30 Small powerloom weavers still lived a precarious existence, surviving during the slack monsoon season by producing tiny amounts of cloth that they could sell only at low prices; in such contexts, they often relied heavily for support on the yarn merchants.31 Handloom production still persisted outside the major powerloom towns. Sholapur, still the largest artisanal centre in Bombay State, remained predominantly based on handlooms, employing more than ten thousand weavers. Karkhandars continued to contract out much of their work to large numbers of asamis, who in turn employed wage labour. A small powerloom industry developed; perhaps two thousand powerlooms were present in Sholapur in 1964, many run by ex-factory workers who purchased used looms from local mills that had gone out of business during the 1950s.32 In general, weaver-capitalists in the city, whether handloom operators or powerloom producers, managed to adjust successfully to the volatile environment of the 1940s.33 Overall, by 1960, many of the most prominent positions in the weaving towns were assumed by families from artisanal communities who pioneered the adoption of new kinds of looms, who possessed extensive market connections of their own, and who managed to build substantial workshops or factories with twenty or more employees. A handful of the biggest operators in each town ran 50 to 120 looms in their 28

29 30 31 32

33

Interview with Nur Mohammad Peer Mohammad Killedar, Surat, 1994. By contrast, during the 1990s, the Killedars controlled as a joint family more than three hundred looms. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 127. Powerloom Enquiry Committee, 1964, p. 19. Kulkarni, “An Economic Survey of the Weaving Industry of Ichalkaranji,” p. 135. Powerloom Enquiry Committee, 1964, p. 17. According to the report, these were often unemployed weavers who lost their jobs due to repeated labour conlicts and mill closures. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, pp. 4–5.

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workshops.34 Underneath such manufacturers were the small owners, who hired from ive to twenty workers. Some of these were “independent” operators; others were dependent on merchants or big karkhandars for their supply of yarn. Still less powerful were the household producers, also drawn from the weaving communities, who ran one or two handlooms or four to eight powerlooms in their homes by electricity or oil, who relied chiely on family labour, and who usually worked on a putting-out basis for speciic merchants or karkhandars. Because the number of karkhanas was increasing, it seems probable that the proportion of workers employed on a wage basis in these workshops relative to the number of household weavers was greater than it had been before the war. The industry as a whole, however, maintained its multi-structural character. Flexible Specialisation Part of the reason for the karkhandars’ success during the post-war years was their considerable creativity in adapting to dificult circumstances. Workshop owners met problems posed by shortages of raw materials, changing markets, and new state policies with an unprecedented innovativeness, relying on their used looms to take up new methods of production and to manufacture new kinds of cloth.35 While they drew on skills their families had developed as artisans, they built up enterprises that would have been unrecognisable to the small producers of a generation earlier. To borrow a phrase from an American context, they began to enter a phase of “endless novelty” that to a certain extent characterises the industry today.36 The most immediate dilemma was that of raw materials. Facing shortages of cotton, as well as government restrictions on the manufacture of 34

35

36

In the late 1940s, for instance, the Garden Silk Mills ran 56 looms, the Prabhat Silk and Cotton Mills had 72, and the Surat Silk Goods Works ran 112. Report of the Panel on Artiicial Silk and Rayon Industry (Delhi: Government of India, Department of Planning and Development, Department of Industries and Supplies, 1947). Similar igures are not available for workshops in Bhiwandi and Malegaon, but Samad Sheth’s karkhana clearly had more than one hundred looms. See, for instance, Survey of Silk and Art Silk Industry: Final Report (New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research, 1961), pp. 11 and 70–1. In a sample taken of Bhiwandi art silk looms, 6 per cent were new (the rest were second-hand); in Surat, the igure was 9 per cent. Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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coloured cotton saris and on the import of raw silk, many of the larger weavers shifted to alternative forms of raw materials, especially synthetic ibres.37 In Surat, this at irst meant reviving the importation of art silk after 1945 and re-activating links with Italy and Japan, where weavers had once obtained their supplies.38 The adoption of man-made ibres spread to the whole city; cotton and silk were mostly abandoned. Over the next ifteen years, local weavers – led by the larger karkhandars – shifted from one kind of artiicial yarn to others, including types of yarn they referred to in interviews as viscose, polyester ilament, staple, rayon, and nylon. In Ilkal, Sholapur, and Malegaon – places where weavers had relied mainly on silk or cotton before the war – use of art silk became routine.39 Informants insisted that this shift was due less to a change in consumer tastes than to the dificulties of obtaining yarn. New processing techniques also arose in the weaving centres. Powerloom production placed greater stress on the cotton threads, increasing the likelihood they would break in the weaving process. Before 1939, powerloom weavers in western India sometimes coped with this problem by using mercerised cotton yarn, which could better stand up to the strain. When the import of mercerised yarn from Japan, however, ceased at the beginning of the war, most of these producers returned to using ordinary forms of cotton yarn. Other karkhandars responded to these circumstances by developing new techniques for sizing. In Malegaon, for instance, local weavers such as Aziz Bluebird (his trade name) developed new chemical processes for treating yarn.40 A specialised sizing industry, controlled by members of the weaving community, emerged in Bhiwandi, Malegaon, and Ahmednagar, where cotton remained the essential raw material.41 By the early 1950s, there were dozens of small sizing irms in these towns. In Bhiwandi, this development proved critical to the shift from the production of saris, which had apparently required limited 37

38

39

40 41

On the shift in raw materials due to cotton shortages, see Gujarat Mitra, 17 Jan. 1950; 9 May 1950. Interviewees also repeatedly stressed this point. An indigenous industry did develop during the 1950s, so that by 1960 70 per cent of all art silk cloth made in India relied on Indian-made artiicial yarns. See Survey of Silk and Art Silk Industry, p. 17. Census of India. Handicraft Survey Report, part X, series 9, Karnataka: Ilkal Sarees, p. 4. Much of Bhiwandi’s cloth continued to be made from cotton. Interview with Aziz Bluebird, May 1994. Interviews in Bhiwandi and Malegaon, 1993 and 1994, especially interview with Khalil Ansari, Malegaon, May 1994; S. B. Kulkarni reported that sizing “has become a specialized industry in Ahmednagar.” See Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar.”

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sizing, to the manufacture of grey cloth, where sizing was essential. Sizing units in Bhiwandi now began to supply large beams of processed yarn, which were transported to the karkhanas through the streets of the town on carts pulled by men. Similarly, local artisans developed new techniques of dyeing. Some producers responded to the disappearance of German colouring agents from the market by importing napthol dyes from Britain, the United States, and Switzerland. Others played a role in developing new dyes themselves. In Malegaon, Abdul Rahim of the irm of Haji Babu Abdullah Hakia, at that time engaged in weaving and in the business of commission agent, already had acquired experience in dyeing through training with a German irm in Bombay. Once the imports stopped and the German agents of the irm were arrested, he started experimenting with new napthol colours, including rich greens and yellows. The development of cheaper dyeing processes gave Malegaon an advantage over Bhiwandi, long its major competitor in the manufacture of saris.42 V.S. Dikonda, a Padmasali from Ahmednagar and a leader in the local co-operative movement, told me that he had travelled to Sholapur during the war to learn new dyeing techniques when the Rangaris in Ahmednagar raised charges for their work. He learned the new processes, brought them back to Ahmednagar, and taught them to a host of local weavers. Many of the local karkhandars installed small dyehouses in their workshops, in effect displacing the Rangaris.43 In 1951, S. B. Kulkarni wrote that the dyeing industry in the city “had been taken over by the communities that were not traditional dyers,” mainly Padmasalis.44 By the early 1950s, key karkhandar families from the Khatri community in Surat – irst the Vakharias, then the Hathiwalas and the Dhamanwalas – set up substantial processing houses to do dyeing and other jobs involved in the preparation of yarn. The Vakharias travelled to Japan, where they had considerable business networks before the war, and purchased a range of equipment needed to start up their plant. The Hathiwalas apparently did much the same in Belgium. The establishment of these plants in turn stimulated larger numbers of weavers to adopt synthetic yarns. Exercising control of the critical steps in processing yarn for much of the city gave the three families special leverage over the weaving 42 43 44

Interview with Shabbir Ahmad Hakim, Malegaon, May 1994. Interview with Prof. V. S. Dikonda, Ahmednagar, July 1992. Kulkarni, “The Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Ahmednagar,” p. 32.

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community. Local dhobis, who had done many of these processes previously, were displaced. These developments shared much in common. First, they were initiated by key members of the weaving communities, usually the large karkhandars. The new opportunities posed by expanding demand combined with frustrating bottlenecks in the supply of raw materials prompted the larger artisans to engage in extensive experimentation. Second, smaller igures emulated some of the bigger actors, who actively promoted rapid dissemination of the new techniques. Third, these developments came not only at the cost of rival cloth manufacturers in other places, including the mills, but also at the expense of other artisan-specialists such as washermen, dyers, and printers. Artisan-entrepreneurs also began to enter into the manufacture of new product lines. Until this time, the vast majority of small producers outside of Gujarat had been engaged in making coloured Maharashtrian saris with borders. The demand for those saris, however, was not suficient to sustain signiicant expansion, especially with changes in consumer preferences taking place. Sari weavers in Bhiwandi, who had been losing market share to Malegaon, started making plain cloth known as mull or malmal that could then be processed further to make printed saris, shirts, and other kinds of cloth in demand. Although this change may have been a response to dificult circumstances, the transition opened up vast possibilities for Bhiwandi producers, who had to this point been involved in a niche market. Weavers in Ichalkaranji gradually took up dhotis and other forms of white cloth, leaving sari manufacture behind. In Sholapur, weavers shifted to higher classes of saris, gearing their production increasingly to middle-class buyers in the cities of Bombay, Kolhapur, and Poona.45 Use of jacquard looms also made it possible for local producers to make chaddars (woven bedspreads with designs), which eventually became a mainstay of the local handloom economy. One of the most signiicant innovations came in Surat with the introduction of “imitation” jari. After 1948, a year of special crisis resulting from the loss of markets for real jari, a large number of local manufacturers began to introduce an imitation product in which copper and art silk replaced silver, gold, and silk. The new product put jari saris within the price range of rather ordinary consumers. Copper drawing factories (pavathas) emerged in the city. By 1956, the vast majority of irms in Surat had converted to imitation jari or altered between making real 45

Interview with Prof. V. S. Dikonda, Ahmednagar, July 1992.

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Image 17. “Imitation Jari, Silver Gilding on Copper Wire, c. 1960” Source: Census of India, 1961, vol. V, part VII A, Selected Crafts of Gujarat, Jari Industry of Surat.

and imitation goods.46 Hiralal Ranchhodas Jariwala reported in 1961 that he owned one wire drawing machine for real jari and one for imitation; six machines for drawing real jari into iner threads and twenty-ive for imitation; as well as some other machines needed for both kinds of products.47 46

47

In a sample taken by R. K. Patil in 1956, eighteen irms were exclusively engaged in real jari production, forty-two in imitation, and ninety-nine alternated between the two. See Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat,” in D. R. Gadgil and R. K. Patil, Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat, pp. 48–9. See also Report of the Jari Industry Enquiry Committee (Delhi: Government of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, All India Handicrafts Board, 1959), p. 7 and Selected Crafts of Gujarat: Jari Industry of Surat, p. 43. Selected Crafts of Gujarat: Jari Industry of Surat, p. 43.

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By 1960, the range of textiles manufactured by small producers in western India was much wider than it had been in 1940.48 The looms of Sholapur, Ahmednagar, Malegaon, and Ilkal still devoted considerable amount of their capacity to saris, although they each focused on wear for different classes of women, and each of the towns had signiicantly changed the range of saris it produced. Moreover, with the shift towards art silk, new kinds of chemical dyes, and imitation jari, artisan-producers could make cheaper versions of high-quality goods that consumers with modest incomes could afford. Some powerloom producers entered into ields of production once controlled by the mills, many with national markets. The Changing Role of the State The position of weaver-capitalists during these years was reinforced by state interventions that were primarily intended to help the smallest producers working by hand methods. State actions after 1943 represented a major break from the past. As we have seen in Chapters 6 and 7, the real effects of colonial policy in the arena of small-scale production had been limited before the war. No doubt the pressures to change course were building in the late 1930s. In 1938, investigators commissioned by the Bombay government conducted a wide-ranging survey of industries in the province. Unlike previous studies, this survey seriously registered the opinions of artisans about what steps government should take.49 At the all-India level, the central government appointed a fact-inding committee to look into the conditions of handloom weavers. After an exhaustive investigation – which has provided much data for this book and other histories of handloom weaving – the committee reported in 1941. It concluded that the small artisan was beleaguered by competition with the mills, uneconomic methods, and reliance on parasitical middlemen. At the same time, it suggested, artisanal production was too important to employment levels in India and too much a part of the cultural makeup of the country to be allowed to disappear. The report advised much more substantial state involvement in promoting the handloom sector, including encouraging mills to reserve yarn for weavers, restricting the mills from producing certain kinds of sari traditionally made 48

49

By this point, Bombay State had been divided up between the new states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Karnataka. Report of the BEISC, 1938–40, Vol. II, reports for various districts.

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by handloom, prohibiting factories from using dobbies and jacquards (which had “enabled the mills to encroach upon the ield of ‘specialty’ fabrics produced by the handlooms”), and developing a system of yarn control. It recommended the establishment of an All-India Handloom Industry Board that would become involved in the inance and marketing of artisan production. The report also suggested raising funds to help handloom producers through a cess on the yarn used by the mills in making cloth. Finally, the report outlined a signiicant role for co-operative societies in the promotion of handloom weavers.50 Such recommendations might have been buried deep in the bureaucracy if not for exigencies of the wartime situation. The fact-inding committee argued that the decentralised character of handloom production made it especially critical in a time of war. Although the enemy could bomb factories in the big cities, handloom weaving was dispersed throughout the country, and could continue to contribute to meeting India’s clothing requirements if the Japanese attacked by air.51 More critically, with the mills concentrating on the fulilment of military necessities, consumer wants were going largely unmet, creating dissatisfactions that could lead to social unrest. Shortages of raw materials, hoarding of yarn supplies, and the development of black markets in yarn all meant higher prices for cloth across the country. The government of India wanted to free up supplies of cloth to defuse the political danger. State actors seem to have regarded weavers and other artisans as the best hope to meet the pent-up demand for cloth. A central pre-occupation of government policy was to channel yarn to persons who would use it immediately in the manufacture of textiles. Small producers, who could hardly afford to hoard yarn in hope of some future gain, seemed ideal for this purpose. The Cotton Cloth and Yarn (Control) Order under the Defence of India Rules (1943), along with several subsequent regulations, sought to guarantee that a substantial portion of manufactured yarn made its way at controlled prices to actual weavers.52 The order created a Textile Commissioner’s Ofice, which was charged with regulating the distribution and prices of yarn and cloth. Under an all-India scheme for yarn distribution, district collectors allocated supplies of yarn from the spinning mills in their districts. In most cases, they chose to distribute 50 51 52

Report of the Fact-Finding Committee, the quote is from p. 226. The Fact-Finding Committee, p. 206. S. R. B. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles: The Indian Cotton-Mill Industry and the Legacy of Swadeshi, 1900–1985 (London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993), pp. 164, 167; See also Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” p. 40.

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their allocation to local co-operative societies and other organisations of local producers, who would then provide the yarn to the societies’ members. Usually, the government required societies to collect information on the number of looms in the district and to register each under the new scheme.53 As government oficials started to view artisanal enterprise as critical to state priorities and not just to state welfare measures, they also relaxed any hesitations they might have held about including weaving capitalists in state efforts to bolster artisan production. In effect, a new kind of cooperative movement was forged, one in which the larger weavers were an integral part. For similar reasons, the government gave up its exclusive pre-occupation with handloom weavers; powerloom weavers were incorporated into state efforts. Because the co-operative movement among small producers was virtually moribund at the outset of the war, these procedures often either meant reviving old societies that had been languishing or stimulating the formation of new ones. Yet the explosive growth of the societies that followed was not merely a product of government initiatives. Instead, the big karkhandars, sensing that the state was ready to provide the societies with real power and resources, quickly formed organisations to take advantage of the new opportunity. Weaver-capitalists had long been frustrated by the powerful hold exercised by yarn dealers, and the wartime hoarding of supplies amidst escalating yarn prices must have lustered them further. The new policies gave the karkhandars a chance to gain supplies of their raw material while bypassing the yarn merchants. Moreover, because no weaver could do without yarn, and because co-operative societies often exercised exclusive control over yarn allocations, leadership in these organisations gave the karkhandars a new way to enhance their political clout within artisan communities.54 In some cases, competition developed between different factions of local big men, prompting the formation of rival co-operative societies. One government survey noted ironically in 1950, “it was amusing to see some well-to-do weavers … some yarn dealers and such other interested people availing themselves of 53

54

Interview with Shankarrao Lathore, Bhiwandi, March 1994; where no such societies existed, authorities often dispersed yarn through syndicates of master weavers. A detailed picture of Sangli’s scheme for distribution of yarn comes from a report by N. M. Joshi, Cotton Cloth and Yarn Control in Sangli State, Sangli State Publicity Series, Bulletin no. 1 (cyclostyled), 1946. A report that was fairly critical of this development is “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State,” esp. p. 52.

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this opportunity [access to yarn controlled by co-operatives] and entering the ield of co-operation for which they had very little love formerly. It was complained to us at many places that the co-operative societies there were either dominated or captured by such people with some ulterior motive.”55 In the big weaving towns the main societies came to be led by the biggest karkhandar families. In Surat, the Hathiwalas, Dhamanwalas, and Vakharias ran the most important societies in the city during the 1940s.56 In Malegaon, Abdul Rahim Hakim and Moulvi Abdul Razak Sheth ran rival organisations.57 In Bhiwandi, the Bhiwandi Momin Weavers Co-operative Society was renamed the Bhiwandi Weavers Co-operative Society,58 presumably because the collector of Thana could not allocate the district’s yarn quota to an organisation deined on a “communal” basis. Nonetheless, big Momin weavers such Abdul Samad Sheth and Sikandar Sheth played a central part in the new organisation.59 In Sholapur, the biggest organisation, the Hatmag Kapad Vinkar Sahakari Sangh, was led by Nagayya Bet and Narayana Irabatti, both karkhandar-merchants with more than one hundred handlooms each. A number of weavers joined a rival organisation composed of dependent weavers, the Asami Sangh (there was a third society about which I have little information). Most of these organisations hired a secretary or manager from outside the weaving community to keep the accounts of the organisation, administer its affairs, collect information on the number of looms in the district, and record and publish society by-laws.60 Yarn and cloth price controls were maintained until 1948, when they were briely relaxed for a matter of months. When rapid inlation in cloth prices ensued, however, the government put new controls in place and again stepped in to guarantee supplies of yarn. The Cotton Textiles (Control) Order of August 1948 required composite mills to devote much of their yarn to the “decentralised sector” (i.e., handlooms and powerlooms), whereas spinning mills had to commit all of their yarn to such

55 56 57 58 59

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“Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State,” p. 34. Interview with R. B. Modi, Surat, March 1994. Interview with Khalil Ansari, Malegaon, July 1997. Interview with Shankarrao Lathore, Bhiwandi, March 1994. Samad Sheth, for instance, was the President of the organisation, see Mohanlal Karva, “Speech to the Bhiwandi Textile Manufactures Association, Ltd.,” 25 May 1980. The by-laws of one society in Surat ran to thirty-eight pages of small type. See The Surat Weavers’ Co-operative Producers Society Limited, Surat Peta Kayda [By-Laws], Surat, 1944.

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units.61 In Bombay, the Provincial Industrial Co-operative Association became responsible for distributing yarn to societies in the province. All these policies reinforced the newfound role of co-operative societies and their karkhandar leaders. The impact of yarn-distribution schemes was dramatic. In 1943, there were forty-four weavers’ societies in the Bombay Presidency, with 2,791 members and 483,412 rupees in capital, igures roughly comparable in real terms to the situation in the mid-1930s. By 1948, there were 211 weavers’ societies in Bombay State, with 27,628 members and 3,259,560 rupees in capital. Proits listed by these organisations were up by more than one hundred times.62 By 1952, as new resources were provided to co-operatives, the numbers of societies had grown to 482, their members to 65,101, and their capital to 10,850,941 rupees.63 The societies were now institutions that controlled substantial patronage. In the larger towns, it was dificult to do business without them. One of the intended effects of government action was to weaken the position of the sahukars. According to one long-time leader of cooperatives in Sholapur, smaller weavers who had relied on merchants for yarn processing and for marketing of their goods, could now call on co-operatives to carry out these same functions.64 A yarn dealer in the city clearly recalled that the yarn-distribution system led to a decline in his family’s business, which did not rebound until rationing was eliminated.65 In some places, the system of putting-out production entirely disappeared.66 The same report indicated, however, that yarn merchants sometimes maintained their position by providing loans to weavers, which would allow the latter to buy yarn from co-operative societies but created other forms of dependence. Under the 1948 control measures, mills could dispose of one-third of their production destined for handlooms through private markets; in practise, this actually could become as much as one half. These measures, the report argued, “restored the private yarn dealers to their former position. The only difference is that weavers who have wherewithal to make cash purchases of yarn can now resort to the

61 62

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64 65 66

Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, p. 168. Supplement to the Annual Report of Industrial Cooperative Societies and Village Industries in the Province of Bombay for the Year Ending 30th June 1948. Annual Report of Industrial Cooperative Societies and Village Industries in the State of Bombay for the Year 1951–52. Interview with N. Dikonda, Solapur, August 1992. Interview with Murlidhar Butada, Solapur, September 1994. “Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State,” p. 12.

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yarn-distribution machinery that has come into being in each district and thereby maintain their independence.”67 Because nearly 50 per cent of the yarn was moving through such “machinery,” this was a rather large exception. Overall, there were tendencies towards the weakening of merchant capital and the strengthening of both independent weavers and karkhandars, but these were only trends. Whereas the wartime yarn controls had their biggest effect on yarn traders, state measures after 1945 were most directly concerned with weakening the dominant place of the big mills. In May 1946, the government issued a resolution requiring that mills keep at least 25 per cent of the output of new yarn spindles uncovered by new looms in order to increase supplies of yarn for non-mill producers.68 More important restrictions followed at the very end of the decade. In 1949, the government decided to prevent the mills from making the kinds of cloth that oficials believed were necessary for the survival of the handlooms. In the lower counts, the government of India restricted dhotis with borders using coloured yarn, jari, art silk or silk, as well as saris with wide borders or jari.69 Later, the government expanded these reservations to higher counts and to certain kinds of dyed saris. An even more drastic step was the decision under the Second Five Year Plan to freeze the loomage allocated to mills. After 1956, the larger factories could add looms only for export production.70 In theory, such measures were designed to help handloom weavers compete against the mills; in practise, they strengthened the position of larger powerloom producers. Some karkhandars chose to respond to reservation policy by shifting to the production of grey cloth, where they found they could be competitive with the mills. Yet others avoided enforcement of the new regulations and continued to make dhotis and saris. Legally, the new regulations did not apply to units with fewer than four looms. Some artisan-producers larger than this found ways to skirt the laws; many apparently did not register some of their looms.71 In Ichalkaranji, 67

68

69 70 71

“Report on the Handloom Industry in Bombay State,” p. 12. The report suggested that in practise, yarn merchants were able to increase this portion to about half. M.P. Gandhi, Handloom Weaving Industry in India-1947: Its Past, Present and Future (Bombay: Gandhi and Co., 1947), i.; Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, p. 165. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, p. 171. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, pp. 178–9. In a sample of 1,038 units in Surat in 1959–60, the Survey of Silk and Art Silk Industry found 172 units with only partly registered looms and 271 whose looms were completely unregistered; in Bhiwandi, of 251 units, 90 were unregistered or had partly unregistered looms.

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dhoti production remained a mainstay. The prohibition against mills making coloured saris apparently was not applied in the powerlooms of Malegaon and Dhulia until 1966. Even in the 1970s, ten thousand weavers in Malegaon and two thousand in Dhulia continued to make coloured saris, prompting wide-scale protest by handloom producers in Nagpur (by then in Maharashtra).72 In practise, powerloom weavers shared the beneits of protection from the mills. The development of excise policy made an equally important contribution to the growth of small-scale production. The Indian government established excise taxes on the highest qualities of mill-made cotton cloth before 1949. In 1952, a depression in the handloom industry set in, and the mills in effect dumped large stocks of yarn on co-operative societies. The government responded to this by raising the cesses on mill cloth. It utilised funds from this cess to sponsor research and marketing to aid the handlooms. Government oficials conceived of this measure both as a way of raising revenue and a means of protecting smaller producers.73 In 1956, excise rates were raised again, although the rates were slightly reduced in subsequent years.74 The government released large sums of money to provide relief and inancial support for handloom weavers during the crisis period. It also agreed to fund the purchase of supplies of cloth by co-operative societies and to develop market facilities. A substantial bureaucracy, administered by the All India Handloom Board, was established to promote handlooms. No doubt, this provided some stimulation to handloom activity in Bombay State. One igure in the weaving community of Ahmednagar referred to the policies adopted around this time as a “turning point” in an industry that had been beleaguered by mill competition. With funds provided by the Handloom Board, handloom manufacturers in places like Ahmednagar and Sholapur were able to improve techniques and shift to more proitable lines of production. Excise policy, however, also allowed considerable room for powerloom producers to expand their operations during the 1950s. Although they did not usually obtain government grants, they did in effect receive a degree of protection from mill competition. Both handlooms and powerlooms were exempt from the levies until 1955. After that point, 72

73 74

Secretary, Industries and Labour Dept. to District Collector of Nasik, 29 Dec 1971, MSA, Maharashtra Agriculture and Co-operative Department, PLM 1071/8-C of 1971. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, p. 171. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, pp. 172–5. Leadbeater provides a detailed schedule of rates that were applied.

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powerloom producers with more than four looms were taxed, although at a signiicantly lower rate than in the mills. Throughout the latter 1950s, the tax rules gave signiicant concessions to units with twenty-four or fewer looms. Powerloom owners, moreover, were often able to avoid the new taxes by not registering some of their looms or by partitioning their workshops and listing relatives and friends as owners.75 In effect, government tax policy prompted some weaver-capitalists to opt out of the formal economy, in which they would be subject to a variety of forms of legislation, and to return to the informal economy. These were options simply not available to the mills, where large investments of capital made sub-division impractical. Collectively, these measures seriously weakened the mills as an independent source of expansion in the economy, and they ensured that any growth in the textile industry would come from the informal sector. Cloth output by the textile mills in India during the Second Five Year Plan was effectively stagnant, whereas production in handlooms and powerlooms increased almost 50 per cent.76 The chief recipients of the beneits of these policies were not the smallest household producers but the larger handloom karkhandars and powerloom owners who had been making adjustments in their products and methods of production, and who were thus positioned to take advantage of changing markets. After this point, the mill share in the market went down steadily, the handloom share remained relatively stable, and the powerloom share grew signiicantly. Of course, in the early 1960s, the textile mill sector remained the largest of the three. In trying to understand why the most substantial karkhandars were able to take the greatest advantage of policies designed to go to the poorest artisans, one needs to consider their growing political power. These entrepreneurs were not simply successful businessmen; they were individuals who were entering politics on a new scale: as the heads of co-operative societies, as members of municipalities (sometimes very highranking members), and as important igures in political parties, including the Congress Party. Within their communities, they increasingly exercised roles as philanthropists, patrons of educational institutions, leaders of social organisations, and trustees of community shrines.77 They were 75

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This issue came up in numerous interviews with trade-union leaders in Surat and Bhiwandi. See also Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, pp. 173–5. For the trend towards the partition of units, see the inal section of this chapter. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles, p. 179. These roles came up in a large number of interviews as well as in written material provided by local igures. I hope to analyze these roles in future publications.

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strengthening their status as “big men” who could exert special inluence in their towns that might prove useful at voting time. As a result, they were always consulted when government considered the adoption of new policies. Indeed, because so many of these new plans involved working with the co-operatives, the government was effectively channelling its resources through the dominant members of artisan society. When the state did consider policies that impinged on their interests, the karkhandars mobilised public meetings and organised political associations to represent the views of artisan-members. In short, then, the dynamism of weaver capitalism was stimulated in great part by a new political climate associated with democracy and Nehruvian socialism.78 In the context of new state policies, the karkhandars were able to build up their positions vis-à-vis once-powerful mercantile actors and even challenge the dominance of the mills in important lines of cloth manufacture. Although this change was gradual, the karkhandars clearly became a major force to be reckoned with, both in the economy and in political life. Weaver Capitalism and Labour Resistance The growing assertion of labour during the late 1940s and 1950s no doubt had signiicant potential to constrain the expanding power of weaver capitalism. Changes within the industry promoted increasing collective activity by workers near the end of the war. Some larger irms were developing in the weaving towns, and the intimacy of worker-owner relations seems to have been less close in those workshops; most of the strike activity between 1947 and 1960 was concentrated in the largest units that had emerged from artisanal production. For a time, industrial growth may have created shortages of labour, heightening the leverage of workers. Workshops increasingly recruited labour outside the established weaving communities. Certainly, many participants in the textile industry would later recall the family-like relationships between owners and workers as declining during these years.79 All of these changes were incremental; labour organisers continued to see the tight-knit character of the workshops as a factor that impeded their efforts. 78

79

This argument provides considerable support at the micro-level for the indings of Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles. In emphasising the role of state policy in weakening the position of the mills and neglecting other issues examined in this chapter, Leadbeater’s analysis seems too single-stranded. See Haynes, “Just Like a Family?”

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Changes in the political context were another factor promoting collective action. The advent of independence stimulated a new era of activity among trade-union organisers, many of whom were young educated men from outside the ranks of workers. Convinced that the end of British rule meant a renewed possibility for achieving social justice in the workplace, and perhaps feeling that the cause of workers marked a new frontier for activism now that independence for India had been achieved, they aggressively tried to mobilise support in the karkhanas. The labour activists possessed considerable faith in the transformative power of the law; most of their struggles centred around pressuring owners to implement legal requirements in the karkhanas, where regulations such as the Bombay Industrial Relations Act, the Bombay Shop and Establishments Act, and the Bombay Factories Act were routinely ignored. The Bombay government had passed all these regulations right around the time of independence and had created an infrastructure of industrial courts to oversee their application. The central government also adopted laws that promised to bolster the power of workers by acknowledging the legitimacy of trade unions, strikes, and collective bargaining as weapons they could use to improve workplace conditions.80 Labour advocates believed that the state was obligated to intervene on the side of workers wherever owners failed to comply with the law. In retrospect, this legislation left much to be desired. There were three main limitations. First, as Vivek Chibber has pointed out, it left unions “largely without the power to insist that employers bargain in good faith.” The laws gave incentive to bosses to prolong disputes until they were referred to arbitration, where the party with greater inluence and funds was likely to gain better terms. In the meantime, employees were generally expected to return to work.81 Second, the state’s ability to enforce terms concluded through collective bargaining or in arbitration proved to be weak. In some cases, employers simply disregarded rulings because no strong punishments were levied; in others, they dragged out cases in court until decisions were reversed or workers and their defendants became exhausted. Third, and most importantly for the industries explored in this study, legislation exempted establishments smaller than a certain size; the actual size varied in different laws. Not only did this 80

81

Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 120. Chibber, Locked in Place, p. 121.

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render unions powerless in the smallest units, but also karkhandars could seek to avoid recognising unions and eschew collective bargaining by cutting the size of their workshops or disguising the numbers employed there. Labour advocates perceived some of these weaknesses in the laws at the time. Yet in the fervency and optimism of the moment, they viewed the advent of the new legal order as a chance to improve workers’ lives in an unprecedented fashion. It is more dificult to reconstruct the outlook of actual workers in this environment. Speculatively, one might apply the model put forward by Sumit Sarkar in reference to the years of Non-Cooperation, and posit the view that subaltern groups regarded the end of the Raj as a moment of “breakdown,” when the old social order had clearly ended and a new one had arisen whose content could be imagined in a variety of liberating ways.82 Workers could now believe that the ideas of “freedom” and “justice,” put forward both by the new Indian leadership and by trade-union organisers, might have some relevance to their lives; they could picture new kinds of work relations and a new polity in which they might have a voice. The cynical perspective that the post-independence state would inevitably be a vehicle for the interests of the powerful and wealthy had not fully taken hold. Weaver-capitalists developed a number of approaches for combating the new spirit of assertion in the artisan towns. A critical part of these efforts, however, was the strategy of keeping their workshops small or actually reducing workshop size to escape legal requirements. Until the 1940s, the number and size of large units was increasing in places like Surat and Bhiwandi. Once karkhandars began to perceive collective activity as a real threat, however, the logic for small workshops became stronger. In many cases, workshop owners partitioned their factories, allocating ownership to multiple members of their family, perhaps even friends. They increasingly refrained from expanding old workshops, fearing that doing so might encourage union activity and invite government regulation. Eventually, they beat back the workers’ efforts and undermined union organisation. By the end of the 1960s, most of the unions had been rendered empty shells, unable to mobilise sustained strikes. By that time, small workshops dominated the industrial landscape of artisanal towns. 82

This analysis draws on and modiies an argument made by Sumit Sarkar in “The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to NonCo-operation, c. 1905–22,” Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian Society and History, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 305–20.

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Surat Collective activity by workers in Surat’s textile workshops began around 1940. There were isolated strikes in local mills during the early period of the war, and a workers’ union, organised by the Communists was formed around 1942. The Communists remained the dominant igures in organising workers until around 1945, when the Congress and Socialists began to devote serious attention to developing unions, in part out of concern about the possibility of displacement by the Communists. A key igure in the Congress unions was Ishwarlal Gulabhai Desai (hereafter I. G. Desai), a Gandhian committed to the concepts of ighting for workers’ causes without engendering class conlict and arriving at compromises with owners that would not leave a legacy of bitterness. He came to lead the Majoor Mahajan in Surat; this was a branch of the Gandhian union that had represented mill workers in Ahmedabad for decades before this. The union was afiliated with the Indian National Trade Union Congress, a Congress party organisation.83 In the jari industry, Desai and other leaders founded the Jari Kamdar Mandal in 1947. The industry at that time had become quite large, with perhaps as many as thirty thousand employees. Some big units had emerged, one with 120 workers. All of these units were characterised by conditions that existed in clear violation of the newly adopted labour laws. In 1947, as the market for gold thread declined sharply, jari merchants cut payments to akhadedars (small workshop operators), who in turn decided to reduce wages. Both akhadedars and workers went on strike in response. Soon after its formation, the Jari Kamdar Mandal made a series of demands of the jari merchants, in principle based on standards set out as an “irreducible minimum” by the International Labour Organisation, including a weekly holiday from work, an eighthour working day (work hours could be twelve hours or more), compensation during periods of unemployment, and a bonus for the year 1947. It submitted these demands to the Bombay Labour Ministry, but received no response. After the merchants tried to undercut the union by harassing employees in their workshop, the workers launched a strike. Up to twelve 83

These issues have been discussed briely in Desai, “Suratman Kamdar Sangathanni Pravruti.” For the Majoor Mahajan in Ahmedabad, see Patel, The Making of Industrial Relations. According to one interview with a participant in a rival organisation, I. G. Desai married the daughter of Khandubhai Desai, the leader of the Ahmedabad union, and became involved with the Majoor Mahajan as a result.

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thousand workers ceased work on 17 November 1948.84 According to two persons I interviewed, small episodes of violence did occur, including stone throwing and punching of workers who did not join. Other informants, however, insisted this was not the case. No doubt workers put heavy pressures, including the organisation of social boycotts on those who continued to work. One trade-union organiser reported that the owners themselves did their best to disrupt the workers by a variety of methods, including throwing hot water on those gathered at a meeting. Yet most of those interviewed characterised the general relations between workers and owners during this period as peaceful. Certainly, the union’s leadership hoped to conduct the campaign in a spirit of Gandhian nonviolence. As the strike went on, the Bombay government decided to intervene, and the workers’ grievances were submitted to an arbitrator of industrial disputes. Consequently, on 18 December, the union called off the strike. In early 1950, the arbitrator ruled, awarding to the workers an eight-hour day and a bonus of ifteen days pay, as well as ixing piece rates for small workshop owners. The workers awaited the implementation of the decision.85 The merchants, however, were not ready to accept the ruling and iled a series of appeals in the courts, apparently in an effort to tie up the case in legal proceedings.86 At one point, reported one activist in an interview, ifty-six lawyers were working for the jari merchants. In the ensuing months, merchants harassed active participants in the union by demanding repayment of loans, reducing some to destitution; other union members were dismissed from their jobs. Wages were actually reduced, in part because the economic situation in the industry continued to decline signiicantly. The union iled more than three hundred complaints in court against merchants for unfair labour practises. The courts, however, responded slowly, and two years later, no decisions had been rendered. Ultimately, the manufacturers ignored the court’s indings. “Right up to the present,” one worker told me, “it [the arbitrators’ decision for an eight-hour day, the bonus, and holiday] has never been followed.” 84

85

86

The narrative of the strike is derived primarily from Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat.” Oral interviews in Surat during 1994 were also important in this reconstruction. Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat,” pp. 61–3. Gujarat Mitra, 19 March 1950, p. 3. See Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat”; for one case, see Gujarat Mitra, 14 April 1950.

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Merchants appeared ready to do anything, including taking serious shortterm losses, to undermine the process of unionisation.87 Key to the merchants’ efforts to combat workers’ demands was the strategy of partitioning work units by building walls within the workshops and parcelling out machines to different “occupiers.” The units that resulted, each employing ive to six workers, would not have to be reported and would not have to observe legislation such as the Factory Act. The small bosses who came to manage these establishments paid rent, and they also had to turn over whatever they produced to the merchants. The jari capitalists justiied such actions by claiming partitioning was actually in accordance with the government policy favouring decentralisation and small-scale industry. R. K. Patil, writing in the 1950s, noted: “[E]ven a casual visitor to the Jari Industry Area cannot but be struck by the installation of partitions between different machines.” By 1953, only six larger workshops that came under the Bombay Factories Act remained, down from about ifty a few years earlier.88 Employers, regarding those who had been signiicantly involved in the strike as goondas (bad characters), ensured that such workers would be unable to ind jobs in the industry. These actions effectively thwarted the union, which dwindled into insigniicance. Wages declined in the period between 1948 and 1952, on average about 30 to 40 per cent.89 Resistance in the jari industry was also undercut by the development of the multi-tiered structure in the industry’s organisation. As intermediaries between the merchant-owners and the workers, the akhadedars were igures with contradictory interests. Much of the breadth of the 1948 strike lay in the support of these petty producers, who had their own organisation and who were pressing merchants for higher payments for what they made. Indeed, some workers said in interviews that they were not aware of the issues involved in the strike, and that they ceased working largely because their immediate bosses had closed up shop. When the workshop operators themselves had little to gain from further collective action, however, they stopped supporting strikes whose purpose was to demand better conditions for their employees. And once they backed away from unions, workers often became fearful that their continued employment was at stake. 87 88 89

Interviews, Surat, 1994; Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat,” pp. 63–8. Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat,” pp. 40–3. The quote is from p. 41. Patil, “Gold and Silver Thread Industry in Surat,” p. 64.

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After 1951, collective activity in Surat shifted to the weaving workshops. There the mobilisation of workers was led by Ishwarlal Chhotubai Desai (hereafter I. C. Desai), an activist who had grown tired of the patient methods of the Majoor Mahajan and the Congress. He had founded the Textile Mazdoor Panchayat and aligned himself with the Socialist Party and its Ahmedabad leader, Indulal Yagnik. The organisation soon gained a strong following among workers in the bigger karkhanas. The largest of these workshops, like the Dhanamal Mills and Garden Mills, had become true factories, employing perhaps one hundred workers each. Inside some larger karkhanas, pressures on workers to step up production were becoming greater; workers were increasingly asked to maintain multiple looms. Whereas some workers recalled their relationship to owners as still being “like a family,” others complained of being treated “like donkeys” and pointed to oppressive acts by owners, including sexual harassment.90 Owners also sometimes commented that relations had deteriorated, attributing this change in great part to the development of the unions. Of course, the vast majority of units remained small, and here, where relations based on caste, kinship, and patronage prevailed, unions often found it very dificult to muster support. Nevertheless, I. C. Desai and his followers were able to build up a considerable movement within a short time. Armed with the view that workers were entitled to rights under laws adopted by the Bombay government, Desai and his followers organised a series of actions focusing on such matters as wage rates (to relect increases in inlation), the payment of a bonus, and the right to holidays one day a week. Perhaps ten thousand workers participated in the largest actions.91 In late 1947 and early 1948, the unions organised actions against thirty-four speciic workshops in Surat large enough to come under the rules of the Bombay Factory Act. Workers reached a settlement with three larger mills in the city in 1949.92 But the case continued in the “34 factories,” entering the Bombay High Court as the union repeatedly called its members out in the streets to support its efforts. The struggle went on for four years, with the courts ruling in the union’s favour; the factory owners appealed court decisions on several occasions.93 In April 1952, the four-year struggle seemingly had ended when an agreement 90 91

92 93

Haynes, “Just Like a Family?” The fullest account of these struggles is Hakumat Ray Desai, Kumudbehen Desai and Harendra Patel, Ananam Yoddho (Surat: Sahitya Sangam, 1976), pp. 76–81. Gujarat Mitra, 5 Sept. 1949, p. 6. Gujarat Mitra, 8 Sept. 1950, p. 2.

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between two parties over wages was reached in court. I. C. Desai hailed the decision as marking the end of the era of workers’ exploitation.94 Within a matter of months, however, a new, more serious dispute had emerged. Since around 1950, karkhandars had begun building partitions in their workshops, in some cases using little more than a curtain, and allocating ownership rights in the resulting units to different family members. If the resulting units held less than ten employees, they would escape the Bombay Factory Act; less than twenty employees, the Bombay Industrial Relations Act; and less than ifty employees, the requirements of the Provident Fund.95 Because such partitioning threatened to undermine organised action, the union protested to the Labour Commissioner of Bombay State. The partitioning slowed temporarily, but the government showed little interest in enforcing a ban on the practise. In early 1952, the process of partition building again accelerated. Some workshops, seeking to avoid the new requirements, changed their names and hired new workers.96 In June, I. C. Desai and other key igures in the Mazdoor Panchayat decided to launch a movement against the partitions. This became known as the Bhagla Satyagraha (the anti-partition movement), a name that seemingly evoked memories of the great struggle against the partition of Bengal at the beginning of the century, and relected the commitment of the workers to principles of Gandhian non-violence. The union demanded that partitioning cease, that the pay scale agreed upon be adopted uniformly in the industry, that ired workers be rehired, and that workers retain the right to choose union representatives. Otherwise, the workers threatened to go into twenty-ive larger workshops and tear down the partitions. They announced that this would begin on 15 July and identiied Begampura Hathiwala Mills as their irst target. The district authorities responded by issuing orders that anyone coming within one hundred yards of one of the twenty-ive factories would be arrested. In the eyes of the union leaders, the government had now taken sides with the owners. Workers began taking out processions through the streets in anticipation of launching the Satyagraha.97 When I. C. Desai and his followers approached the Begampura Hathiwala Mills on the 15 July and refused to leave, local authorities quickly had them arrested. In all, ifty-four supporters were taken into 94 95 96 97

Gujarat Mitra, 24 April 1952, p. 2. Gujarat Mitra, 20 June 1952, p. 1. Gujarat Mitra, 3 July 1952, p. 1. Gujarat Mitra, 3 July 1952, p. 1; 13 July 1952, p. 1.

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custody, including Desai. The district oficials took their prisoners to Baroda. Further arrests followed. From prison, Desai announced that he would launch a “fast to the death” against owners and the government. A larger struggle in support of Desai was started in early August, attracting volunteers from nearby towns and even Adivasi villages (where the Socialists had been mobilising villagers around agrarian issues). Nearly two hundred people were arrested when protests took place at the Surat Fort. Two leaders of the movement were given two years’ imprisonment, and a number of ordinary followers received one month in jail.98 The struggle continued until Jayaprakash Narayan, the national Gandhian socialist leader, intervened, calling on Desai to give up his fast and to halt the Satyagraha, and requesting owners to give up their partitions. The Labour Minister for Bombay, Shantilal Shah, also played a role in ending the Satyagraha.99 A temporary labour calm returned to the city, and partitions in some larger units were destroyed. A new round of partition building, however, emerged after the establishment of the excise tax on larger units in about 1955. I. G. Desai would launch another campaign against the practise, but gave it up after several years.100 Much of the effort to stop partitions shifted to the courts, where owners apparently claimed that the right to divide up their workshops in this fashion was an aspect of the Hindu joint-family system, and that government therefore had no right to interfere with the practise. Most new units that formed remained small and could avoid the need to build internal walls to escape labour laws. Owners often dismissed employees who had openly participated in the Satyagraha. At the time I did interviews in Surat in the mid-1990s, a palpable fear existed in the minds of some workers that participation in union activity would result in their losing all chance of employment. Owners increasingly turned to migrants from outside Gujarat for workers. With more limited social networks to fall back on in times of unemployment, these workers were often hesitant to join trade unions and participate in strikes. By the 1960s, collective action was effectively broken, although unions remained on as providers of social and legal services for individual workers, and the new employees no doubt were able in some cases to devise new forms of more subtle, everyday resistance. 98

99

100

Desai, Desai, and Patel, Ananam Yoddho, pp. 77–8; Gujarat Mitra, 10 August, 1952, p. 1; 13 August, p. 1; 22 August, p. 1; 15 Dec. 1952; 21 Dec. 1952, p. 2. Desai, Desai, and Patel, Ananam Yoddho, pp. 79–80; Gujarat Mitra, 4 Sept. 1952, p. 3; 28 September 1952, p. 2. Desai, Desai, and Patel, Ananam Yoddho, p. 98.

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By this time, the main features of the labour regime that would later prevail in the city had been established. Faced by increased conlict with workers and growing government regulations, weaver-capitalists had reduced the scale of their workshops, effectively using loopholes to evade legislation that was ostensibly intended to institute fairer labour conditions for the workers. Increasingly, they relied on migrant workers from outside Surat District, who often readily accepted the increasingly rigorous forms of work discipline that manufacturers wished to impose in return for wages that far outstripped what they could obtain in the rural districts from which they came. The new regime allowed the owners to maintain the low-cost labour force so well described in the work of Jan Breman.101 Returning to the small scale of artisanal enterprise, local capitalists were able to maintain a more pliable work force without fear of collective protest. Thus the effort to bring textile production under the supervision of the law – the deining feature of the formal economy – had been defeated. Bhiwandi Parallel developments took place in Bhiwandi. There most textile units remained small after the war, with a large number using four to eight looms and perhaps two non-family workers. According to one union organiser, only the workshops of Samad Sheth, Ramzan Nabu, and Sikandar Sheth were large enough for labour to organise (another suggested that ive such “factories” existed). By about 1955, however, the number covered by the Bombay Industrial Relations Act had increased to several dozen; many of these had only ten or twelve employees.102 Even in the largest units, the organiser reported to me, one quarter of the workers were under the “control” of the maliks (bosses), in some cases because of kin relationships and in others because they had been personally recruited by the owners. Many workers continued to look to the bosses as patrons and were very reluctant to do anything that might be regarded as a challenge. When unions sought followings in the workshops, owners could appeal to the religion they shared with workers (Islam) or their common social community (Momin). Two signiicant union organisations apparently formed in Bhiwandi before 1950; the irst was a Communist union associated with the

101 102

Breman, Footloose Labour. The minimal igure for being covered under the act had been reduced, apparently to nine employees.

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All-India Trade Union Congress and led by a young Konkani Muslim from a landed family, Ibrahim Madoo, who had studied at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay and who had been arrested on several occasions for his political activities; the second was the Textile Mazdoor Sabha, which was associated with the Congress Socialist Party. Initially, the Communists appear to have been more successful. A Socialist leader reported to me that the Textile Mazdoor Sabha had little membership as late as 1953 and was constantly frustrated by the dificulties of gaining support in smaller units, where the government would not recognise the right to organise. Both unions ultimately focused on forcing bosses to honour legal provisions of labour legislation, such as minimum-wage laws, bonuses, the right to take leave without pay, and the Provident Fund. This usually required a combination of strikes with applications in court. Collective actions were restricted to individual units; trade-union leaders did not attempt to organise industrywide actions during this time.103 To date, I have found very limited written records on these strikes, and oral accounts sometimes seemed contradictory. There were apparently some minor strikes in small units, but it seems clear that most of the activity was concentrated in the very largest workshops, particularly that of Samad Sheth. According to some former workers, relations in this particular unit had deteriorated signiicantly. In recalling their time of employment in the factory, some workers suggested that Samad Sheth had violated norms of appropriate behaviour for bosses. One weaver criticised the sheth for being proud and rude and for acting like a “Raja of Bhiwandi,” and reported that the sheth sometimes would catch workers by the shirt and throw them around. Another indicated that Samad Sheth would sit silently on a raised seat in his factory, and watch the workers, in order to see whether anyone left the loor. According to this worker, some who did go out were ired. If the sheth came in the morning, he would carefully look over the cloth produced, checking to see whether there were any defects. If a mistake had been made, he would call in the worker responsible and scold him. Workers were very afraid of Samad Sheth, my source indicated, because they believed they would lose their jobs if they erred in some way. Not all workers shared these impressions. Some reported their relations with the sheth were good. One Maharashtrian labourer told me that Samad Sheth did not give dificulty to workers, paid workers on time, and provided advances for weddings. This worker nonetheless told me that he “had to strike” when the union 103

Interview with Chandrakant Bhise, Bhiwandi, May 1994.

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called for collective action; he felt that workers would get something valuable out of it. Apparently, there were two major strikes in Samad Sheth’s workshop. The irst, taking place in the early 1950s, was led by the Communists. According to recollections, the strike went on for twenty-two days before the issues involved found their way to the legal system. It seems possible that there was a public show of support among other workers throughout the town, with processions going through the street, but the strike itself was conined to Samad Sheth’s unit. The strike seems to have come to an abrupt end. According to one worker and one rival union member, the leaders did not show up in court at a crucial hearing, and there was a strong suspicion they had been bribed. Today, of course, it is impossible to determine the truth of these allegations, and they may represent the assertions of those embittered after the strike or the inluence of the views spread by competing unions that wished to discredit the Communists. The workers were ordered to give up their strike, and some of those who had taken conspicuous roles never returned to their jobs. One ex-weaver reported that it took him another two years to ind work because he had been labelled a troublemaker. There seems to have been another strike in Samad Sheth’s karkhana during the late 1950s led by the Socialists; the factories of Ramzan Nabu and Sikandar Sheth may have also been involved. According to two workers, this strike was successful, and the workers received an increase in pay and shorter working hours. Despite this development, union organising proceeded only with dificulty. Workers were reluctant to join and some owners made life dificult for those who did, for instance, by withholding pay. Some owners – Ramzan Nabu was speciically named by my informants – apparently coped by partitioning their workshops among their sons. After the imposition of the excise tax, this strategy became widespread. The unions challenged the legality of this approach in the courts, but lost a major case there.104 When new laws reduced the minimum size of irms in which such policies as bonuses and insurance schemes became relevant, owners sub-divided their units further. This had a major effect on the capacity of unions to organise. According to one leader, all the major unions were effectively “closed down” by 1962. There does seem to have been a major strike in the city around 1967, led by a union organised outside the major political parties and covering many different workshops. Yet the strategy of partitioning factories persisted. Few large workshops with 104

Interview with Suryakant Wadhavkar, Thane, July 1994.

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more than ifty looms or twenty employees remained by the end of the 1960s. According to one union organiser, there were very few “genuine” small units in Bhiwandi (in other words, most units were small because of the building of partitions to circumvent application of the law). He indicated that union organisation ultimately became almost impossible, and workers lost all their rights. When I visited Bhiwandi during the mid1990s, workers sometimes spoke to me with some trepidation about the consequences for their employment if their comments became known. Local residents told me that those who joined unions would quickly lose their jobs. Sholapur In Sholapur, the weakening of worker militancy played out very differently. Sholapur’s labour regime was characterised by two unique features that differentiated it from that in Surat and Bhiwandi. First, the Communists had consolidated their support among weavers in the town before the war, and they had a long history of negotiating agreements with workshop owners and asamis, who often shared a Padmasali identity with their employees. Second, Sholapur was a handloom rather than a powerloom centre, and for much of the period studied here, the handloom industry was simply struggling to stay on its feet. A considerable amount of labour activity was focused on pressing government to take steps to ensure that handloom manufacture survived. This was a goal that workers, asamis, and karkhandars shared, and they often joined together in efforts to inluence state policy. In fact, unions oscillated between actions that relected class conlict and those that united participants in different levels of handloom production to defend the industry as a whole.105 The peak of collective activity on behalf of workers in the handloom industry actually came in 1940, when there had been strikes in 185 karkhanas involving 1,633 workers. By 1943, there were only nineteen actions involving 380 workers. The Communists themselves retreated from advocacy of strikes as a result of their position in support of the war. In addition, they temporarily gained control of the chief organisation of the small karkhandars, the Sholapur Hatmag Asami Sangh, in 1945. The workers’ union and the Asami Sangh together pressed the government for more yarn at reasonable prices. In 1945, they rallied 105

This account is based largely upon Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” as well as interviews.

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behind the Bombay Provincial Handloom Weavers Association’s meeting in Sholapur, which demanded that the state provide a series of protections to the handloom industry, especially the guarantee of larger supplies of yarn. In the last two years of the war, the Sangh and the Kamdar Union reached an agreement that the two organisations would mutually discuss wage demands in the hopes of reaching agreements in individual karkhanas without strikes.106 In about 1945, the Congress formed a rival trade union among handloom weavers, the Rashtriya Hatmag Mazdoor Sangh, which seems to have advocated a Gandhian approach based on the principle of compromise in dispute settlement. The Congress also captured the Hatmag Asami Sangh. The Communists for their part took a more militant turn in an effort to gain wage raises relecting price increases and possibly proits for workers. They launched a number of small strikes in 1946 and 1947, mostly calling for increased wages in the context of rising cloth prices. Eventually, this activity caused the government to appoint the Sholapur Handloom Weavers’ Enquiry Committee to look into labour conditions. The committee itself was very critical of workers’ low productivity, acknowledged that wages in the industry were poor, and essentially blamed the asamis for the ineficient character of their organisation. It called for greater stress on co-operative activity, the establishment of a more formal collective bargaining procedure, the enforcement of labour laws on a selective basis, and the development of social-welfare activities. In effect, it became one more voice in a chorus clamouring for greater state intervention.107 The recommendations of the Committee themselves became the subject of some tension. Initially, the Labour Department proposed that workers would be represented equally by the Congress and Communist unions on an informal joint committee that would start discussions on bargaining procedures. The Lal Bawta Union, however, complained that this was unfair because the vast majority of weavers supported the Communists, and argued that the Rashtriya Hatmag Mazdoor Sangh was nothing but a “stooge of the employers.”108 Eventually, a deal was brokered that set out a plan for the election of union representatives at a meeting of handloom weavers. On the day of the planned meeting, however, far more workers 106 107 108

Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City,” pp. 103–5. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee. Letter from the Government Labour Oficer, Sholapur to the Secretary to the Government of Bombay, 6 Nov. 1948, MSA, Labour Department, ile no. 918/46, dated 8/11/48, no. 27162.

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appeared than could it into the meeting hall, and the Communists argued that many of the Congress union’s supporters present were not handloom weavers. Employers, the Lal Bawta Union complained, were threatening their workers with dismissal if they did not vote in the approved manner. Coming as this did at a time of general government repression against Communists – union leaders were being arrested, union ofices raided, and union organisers threatened with beatings – the Lal Bawta Union eventually decided to withdraw its support from the process of setting up the bargaining structure, claiming it should nominate all representatives on the committee.109 The government fell back to much more modest proposals conined to larger units. Despite the serious conlicts between Congress and the Communists during these years, the degree of strife within karkhanas remained rather limited. Many workers in the 1990s recalled that they never joined a union or participated in struggles against employers during this period. Many workers continued to weave cloth until the disputes were resolved.110 Patronage and kinship ties linked worker and asami, asami and karkhandar in the industry. As the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Report suggested in 1948: The relations that exist between the weavers and their employers are very often of a personal character and naturally the weaver is unwilling to join hands with any force seeking to curb the power of the employers to whom he is always indebted, and sometimes related. This precludes the possibility of a general strike, and stands in the way of developing trade unionism on the principle of collective bargaining.111

Second, as we have seen, various actors in Sholapur had a history of informal negotiation over disputes. Often the asamis’ organisation was willing to discuss issues with both the Congress and the Communist unions, who after all, were also headed by men from Padmasali-caste background. Owners tended to pre-empt the spread of collective actions throughout the industry by promising their workers that they would be awarded any wage increases won in karkhanas where strikes were taking place. Strikes thus tended to be conined to a few units at any given time.112 In addition, all participants shared a general interest in pressing 109

110 111 112

Letter of Secretary, Lal Bawta Hatmag Kamgar Union, 16 Nov. 1948, MSA, Labour Department, File 979/46, dates 25/11/48, document no. 28882. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 39. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 37. Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, p. 39.

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government for more favourable treatment of the handloom sector as a whole. They co-operated in sending delegations to Bombay that would call for controlled rates and ample supplies of yarn, reservation of certain cloth types for the handlooms, and greater inancial resources to be provided through co-operatives and other local organisations. The number of participants in strike actions during the later 1940s never exceeded a few hundred in any given year.113 As a result of the poor conditions in the industry, strikes in the handloom industry after 1949 tended to be defensive measures designed to preserve workers’ wages against cuts. When a general crisis struck handloom production in the early 1950s, the Communists increasingly gave up collective action by workers. Organised efforts tended to shift away from conlicts based on class towards attempts to gain greater concessions for the handloom industry from the government. This is of course understandable; the Communists could perceive that weavers and asamis alike were struggling just to maintain themselves in the unfavourable climate, and that workers’ actions would do little good if owners were on the verge of closing down their karkhanas. Their choice to refrain from large-scale strikes, however, left intact a structure of power dominated by the larger weaver-capitalists. I found limited evidence in Sholapur of a movement towards partitioning larger units into smaller ones in order to evade the law. Yet neither does there appear to have been any signiicant trend towards the development of large-scale production. A structure with three levels – workers, asamis, and merchant-karkhandars – with large numbers of small units headed by asamis in the middle, continued to prevail. Nonetheless, the continued presence of Communist unions, combined with the straitened circumstances of the handloom industry, seems to have discouraged investment in Sholapur by outside capitalists. After local mills went out of business, making thousands of used looms available on the market, Sholapur became a powerloom centre. Yet this shift was not associated with the same kind of rapid growth experienced by some other weaving towns, where the labour climate had been tamed by the conlicts of the 1950s. Sholapur, once the largest cloth-producing centre in the old Bombay Presidency, would slip well behind Surat, Bhiwandi, Malegaon, and Ichalkaranji. 113

Pandhe, “Labour Organization in Sholapur City, pp. 249–50”; Report of the Sholapur Handloom Weavers Enquiry Committee, pp. 37–8.

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Conclusion In the labour conditions of the present, it is easy to forget that Surat, Bhiwandi, Sholapur, and other artisanal towns were once witness to large-scale collective activity involving thousands of workers and seemingly formidable trade unions. These actions were motivated by a promise associated with independence: that social and economic justice would accompany political freedom, and that law could be an agent of social change if combined with the mobilisation of workers. The success of such ventures depended strongly on an alliance with the state, an alliance that seemed a reasonable expectation to many in 1950. Weaver-capitalists, however, learned to use the intricacies of the law together with repressive measures such as the dismissal of workers who took a prominent part in trade-union activity, against labour resistances. By the early 1960s, working-class militancy had largely disappeared.114 Such efforts had profound consequences for the structure of industry itself. The “informal” character of economic organisation in the weaving towns – with its emphasis on small-scale production – owes much to the efforts of karkhandars to contain labour resistances during the later 1940s and 1950s by reducing the size of local workshops. By the 1960s, political actors supportive of labour were too weak to promote any signiicant resurgence of collective activity. In effect, what had happened was not just the consolidation of a system of economic production but also a political regime that supported it. Workshop owners were able to expand the realm of their economic activity in great part because of the new power they had acquired in the artisanal towns of western India. Politicians depended on them to win elections and to generate support for projects of economic development. The informal economy, in short, depended in part on the emergence of the Nehruvian political order and the efforts of weaver-capitalists to carve out a place within it. 114

See Chibber, Locked in Place, for an analysis of the process by which this took place at the all-India level. Of course, workers, including migrants drawn from non-artisan communities, have been able to deploy everyday forms of resistance, including escape and non-compliance with the discipline of their bosses. These are examined to some extent in Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 230–244, an overview of wage labour in the informal economy of South Gujarat. Unfortunately for the purposes of this study, Breman for the most part does not draw his examples of these modes of struggle from the textile industry.

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In arguing for the ascendancy of weaver’s capital, I do not mean to suggest the displacement of one mode of production by another. Certainly, each town now possessed a number of larger workshops with ten, twenty, or ifty or more employees owned by the biggest karkhandars. But these irms had not become an exclusive kind of producing organisation. There existed many other smaller units in the weaving towns, some which relied on family labour or small amounts of wage labour. Many of these were dependent on the larger karkhanas for their income; some of them worked on sub-contract for more substantial weaver-owners, at least for part of the year. Others were reliant on non-producing merchants. The economy of “small towns,” many of which were becoming substantial cities, was still a multi-structural one. Yet in this order, a small number of big karkhandars had achieved special positions of wealth and political inluence that were far more substantial than those held by their fathers and uncles a generation earlier.

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Concluding Relections The Making of the Informal Economy

At the end of the twentieth century, the landscape of western India’s weaving centres had been so transigured that it would be easy to overlook the roots of their economies in the capitalism of small towns one hundred years or more earlier. After several decades of rapid growth, Surat, Bhiwandi, Malegaon, Sholapur, and Ichalkaranji had all become large urban places (see Table C.1); together they housed millions of looms, perhaps one hundred times more than the numbers present in 1900. Cloth manufacture in these centres had mostly moved from tight enclaves in residential neighbourhoods to expansive industrial suburbs. Hundreds of thousands of workers from impoverished areas of eastern, northern, and southern India had migrated to these centres; many had come to live in slums close to their places of employment. Female labourers worked in a variety of low-status occupations in the textile industry; on the other hand, women from karkhandars’ families had largely disappeared from the shop loors and now exercised roles primarily within middle- or upper-class households or in professional ields. The men who owned the largest workshops and who engaged in the textile trade had often become powerful igures in the political life of these cities. The regular, churning sound of powerlooms throughout the weaving towns served as an indicator of the technological changes these places had experienced; except for Sholapur, the handlooms had virtually disappeared in the biggest weaving centres (although large numbers remained in smaller production centres elsewhere). Yet the powerloom towns also possessed less immediately obvious structural features that at irst glance might seem to be straightforward indicators of continuity. Most of these places remained mono-industrial 303

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Table C.1. Growth in the Population of Key Weaving Centers, 1951–91 CITY

1951

Bhiwandi Ichalkaranji Malegaon Sholapur Surat

25,764 27,423 55,022 277,087 237,394

1961

1971

1981

1991

47,630 50,978 121,408 337,583 317,519

79,576 87,731 191,847 398,361 493,001

115,298 164,026 245,883 514,860 923,865

392,214 235,979 342,595 620,846 1,518,950

centres, highly reliant on one or two forms of textile production; they possessed little of the cosmopolitan character of India’s older “megacities,” and their economies were highly vulnerable to luctuations both in the demand for cloth and the prices of raw materials such as yarns and dyes. Members of artisanal communities played central roles in the textile industry; in many cases, the descendants of handloom karkhandars were the owners of signiicant powerloom workshops and factories. Caste, region, and workers’ social networks remained crucial to the recruitment of labour, even if the communities involved had changed. Relations of production in the industry sometimes possessed the character of mercantile capitalism in that larger businessmen contracted out jobs to intermediary igures who typically hired labourers in their workshops. Collective activity by workers was minimal; trade-union organisations, for instance, were extremely weak. Finally, most industry in these cities was organised on a small-scale basis. The economy had expanded more through the proliferation of many small units than through the development of giant enterprises.1 Any impression of continuity, however, would be almost as lawed as that of total transformation. Local economic structures were not survivals from the past, but had been produced through interactions among participants in the regional economy and through political conlicts within workplaces over the course of the twentieth century. The small scale of productive organisation, for instance, was much more a response of capitalists in the weaving towns to changing state policies and growing labour resistances during the 1940s and 1950s than it was a simple inheritance from the past. The relative absence of collective activity was not an inherent characteristic of an industry organised on a small scale 1

See Breman, Footloose Labour, and Garrett John Menning, “City of Silk: Ethnicity and Business Trust in Surat City, India,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1996, for two contrasting but rich treatments of industry in Surat during the 1990s.

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with roots in artisanal manufacture, but was rather a result of the effective crushing of signiicant trade unions and strike activity. The merchant capitalism of the 1990s was very different from the merchant capitalism associated with the sahukars of the late nineteenth century. Big traders in western Indian textile centres were often relative newcomers, men who were attracted to these cities by the conditions of “labour peace” and who frequently fashioned business partnerships with prosperous karkhandars from the weaving communities. Many of the dependent artisans who relied on job-work from master weavers did not belong to the urban poor, but were upwardly mobile members of a lower middle class who possessed television sets and motorcycles and who hired small numbers of employees in their workshops. Although they had developed contractual relations that obligated them to supply what they produced to the more substantial businessmen who furnished their raw materials, they still managed to build up a modest degree of prosperity in the process. A wide variety of irms, both small and large, increasingly came to rely on pools of casual labourers from non-artisanal backgrounds who could be hired on a short-term basis. In short, the structures of powerloom industry of western India, like other components of India’s contemporary “small-scale,” “informal,” “unorganised,” or “decentralised” economy,2 were products of historical processes that had been going on over the course of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there were strong connections between artisanal manufacture in the small towns of western India during the colonial period and the industries of the post-independence period in the same places. On the other, these connections were not merely ones of continuity. As this study has shown, actors in the weaving towns have been shaping and reshaping the industrial economy over many decades in the context of periodic crises of markets and supplies, shifting demand of consumers, availability of new technologies, changing policies of the state, and conlicts between labour and capital. Contemporary scholarship, however, has implicitly tended to deny informal industry this history. To a great extent, history in its fullest sense 2

By using the term “informal economy” here, I do not depend on legal deinitions, which rely mainly on a very speciic threshold of employees (typically ten) or the kinds of technology used, but instead indicate irms that, to use Mark Holmström’s words, “escaped a whole range of laws [enforced on bigger industrial units] about dismissals, social security, taxes, union recognition and labour disputes; offering a new kind of employment, worse paid and less secure but easier to get; and with its [their] own needs and problems, to be remedied by special policies, government agencies and assistance,” Industry and Inequality (p. 76).

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has been associated primarily with large-scale productive organisations; historians have come to depict industrial capitalists as making choices about technology, responding to characteristics of the market, negotiating with the colonial state, and developing strategies for coping with the resistances of labour. Historians of India who have worked seriously on smaller or “traditional” industries, by contrast, typically have not explored the agency of the different kinds of actors involved in the creation of what would become the post-independence industrial order. Most have been hesitant in going beyond 1947 in their analyses. Sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists who have examined the informal sector in recent times usually have not engaged in serious historical research to back up their conclusions.3 In his otherwise magisterial study of work processes in south Gujarat, Jan Breman goes so far as to say, “more than the persistence of the informal sector economy, the emergence of formal sector employment calls for explanation.”4 He then indicates what he means by “explanation” by including a brief treatment of the history of factory production, while abstaining from a similar discussion of the smaller industries that are otherwise the main subject of his investigation.5 Much sociological analysis treats informal industries as forms of organisation that persist from the past and that are somehow present to take up the slack automatically when wealthy businessmen have backed away from investments in the formal sector. Understanding the making of the informal economy, this study indicates, requires a multi-centred analysis. For the most part, I have treated global forces here not in terms of their determining impact on small producers, but as establishing a set of changing constraints and opportunities that conditioned the choices of regional actors after the late nineteenth century. I have also suggested that state policies during the late colonial 3

4

5

The major exceptions are Chari, Fraternal Capital; Meenu Tewari, “Intersectoral Linkages and the Role of the State in Shaping the Conditions of Industrial Accumulation: A Study of Ludhiana’s Manufacturing Industry,” World Development, 26:8 (1998): 1387–411; and Hein Streefkerk, Industrial Transition in India: Artisans, Traders and Tribals in South Gujarat (London: Sangam Books, 1985); Mark Holmström certainly recognises the importance of historical investigation in his survey of the rise of “small-scale industries” in India in Industry and Inequality, pp. 76–109, but most of his data there belong to the very recent past. Breman, Footloose Labour, p. 5. Of course, Breman has been interested in issues of change, particularly in agrarian relations, that have motivated workers to move into new forms of employment in the city and the countryside, but he has not extensively engaged in historical research on informal industry itself. See also Harriss-White, India Working; Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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period only weakly inluenced artisanal production, although this contrasts with the role of government after 1940. The main motor forces examined in this study thus have been the practises of participants in the western Indian economy – consumers, merchants, artisan-owners, and labourers. Because changes in industry were products of contests and interactions among many different kinds of actors who were balanced differently at different points in time, these changes were not unidirectional, and narratives of capitalist transition cannot neatly capture their character. Western India was already involved in extensive commercial activity long before the advent of colonial rule, and various types of manufacturing organisation were present from the seventeenth century onwards. The mix of these kinds of structures and their more speciic character shifted over time. The discussion in this book has focused primarily on two types of formation: (1) the dependent artisan household enmeshed in puttingout relationships with sahukars; and (2) the karkhanas, which employed small numbers of artisan-labourers in workshops with multiple looms. Both types were present in the 1870s, the beginning of the main period studied here. And both types existed in the 1960s, at the ending of my study. Although it rejects a straightforward account of transition, this work does ind a general strengthening over time in the position of the weavercapitalists, that is, the owners of the larger workshops. The karkhandars were igures who proved to be critical to the expansion of the informal economy. The most successful among them demonstrated considerable creativity in taking advantage of the economic and political conditions around them. The fact that dozens of such igures in different towns were able to build up their businesses suggests the importance not just of the personal genius of individual entrepreneurs, but also of the adaptive capacity of the karkhana as a structural form, one that uniied the functions of consumption, production, management over labour, and marketing in a single decision-making body: the artisan joint family. In initial stages of expansion, large families of karkhandars provided opportunities for the accumulation of capital, in some cases by the “super exploitation” of unpaid family labour. As karkhanas grew and became involved in adding looms and hiring non-family workers, different brothers (and more rarely, female members) came to perform specialised management functions, with perhaps one taking up marketing, another overseeing the workshop, and yet another devoting himself to the techniques of the loom. With more resources and superior access to credit at low costs,

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karkhandars could wait out the annual slumps in markets and thus did not have to sell their products at low prices simply to ensure subsistence. The dependent weaving household, by contrast, rarely could free up its members to engage in the search for customers and typically had to rely on advances provided on onerous terms, so any accumulation of capital was dificult. In the context of the twentieth century, which was characterised by repeated crises of supply or demand, the availability of new kinds of raw materials, and shifting markets for different products, karkhandars often exhibited considerable lexibility. The advantage of the larger workshop, in contrast to the dependent household, lay in the uniication of sales and production functions in the karkhandar family. During the twentieth century, larger artisanal irms aggressively sought out new market possibilities; the craftsmen’s intimate knowledge of the loom and of the properties of yarn and dyes often made it possible for them to devise new methods of production necessary to manufacture kinds of cloth that consumers wanted. In particular, they developed products from such raw materials as mercerised cotton, artiicial silk, and imitation jari that addressed the demand of newly mobile groups for cheaper versions of textiles conveying meanings of prestige and respectability. The karkhandars also were able to take advantage of the availability of new tools ranging from the ly-shuttle loom to the powerloom. One of the predicaments of the dependent weaving household in considering any new technology was its uncertainty about whether there would be significant demand for any enhanced output. It also could not usually afford to divert family labour to engage in experimentation with new techniques or designs that might not yield any immediate new sales. Because weavercapitalists were often directly involved in searching out customers, by contrast, they became aware of the possibilities for cultivating markets that might absorb increased production. In many families, moreover, a brother with special craft expertise or an interest in design frequently dabbled with new machines, new techniques, and new products. By the time cheap used powerlooms from the mills became available in signiicant quantities during the 1930s, and public companies began to extend electricity supplies into artisanal neighbourhoods, some karkhandar families had long been engaged in introducing small technological improvements in their workshops. The adoption of the powerloom into the karkhana proved to be just one step in an ongoing process of introducing “endless novelty” that still continues. Because artisan entrepreneurs often carved out places in specialised market niches, and because their access to capital

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309

remained limited, they tended to add machines and new techniques incrementally, often purchasing used equipment from which they would try to squeeze out enhanced production rather than obtaining the most up-to-date, labour-saving devices. Interactions with labour also shaped weaver capitalism. Karkhandars were never simply able to implement in some straightforward way the kinds of labour process that they might have wished to fashion, but had to adapt the structure of their workshops to the characteristics of the available work force. The early expansion of the karkhana system in some towns was possible in great part because of the migration of large numbers of artisan-workers from depressed areas of northern and southeastern India, men who came to the weaving towns without looms of their own and with little capital. Workers resisted the imposition of the most rigorous forms of discipline by a variety of everyday actions: going slow on the job, stealing small amounts of raw material, and even moving to other workshops or leaving town. The karkhandars often successfully maintained their access to extremely cheap forms of labour by fashioning themselves as social patrons of their workers. As “big men” who held leading places in the ritual and social lives of artisanal neighbourhoods and communities, the karkhandars were often well positioned to develop culturally grounded roles in the lives of their workers. After World War II, as the textile industry expanded in the weaving towns, as workers from outside the weaving communities began to ind employment in powerloom irms, and as trade unions began to gain a foothold in local society, the intensity of social bonds within the karkhanas often loosened to some extent. Increasingly, artisan-labourers were willing to join collective actions and ight for workers’ rights as set out in legislation passed by Bombay State and the government of India. Karkhandars sometimes reacted to the growth of working-class militancy by taking labour disputes to court, ignoring rulings that had been issued, dismissing workers who supported the unions, hiring outsiders to the weaving communities in larger numbers, and, perhaps most signiicantly, choosing to partition their workshops among family members so that these establishments would be too small to come under the purview of labour laws. In the period just after independence, many large karkhandars may have had plans of turning their workshops into big factories. Labour resistances, however, often prompted owners to limit or even reduce the size of their establishments, to hire more casual workers, and to contract out their work to small irms, often ones located in the homes of families belonging to the weaving communities. The structure

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Concluding Relections

of the textile industry after the 1960s, with its stress on small-size units, lexible workforces, the role of community in employment, and the relative absence of unionised labour was to a great extent a product of conlicts between labourers and various kinds of capitalists during the post-independence era. The karkhandars’ dealings with agents of the state during World War II and afterwards were also crucial both to their success and to the shape of local industry. Before 1940, the colonial state took little real interest in the artisanal economy. The British Raj launched a co-operative movement designed to undercut the role of the sahukars, but because this effort was backed by very limited resources it had little inluence on social practise. After 1940, by contrast, the colonial wartime regime and then the post-independence government of India adopted a host of measures whose purpose was to strengthen the position of the small producers visà-vis sahukars and the mills: the promotion of co-operative societies that made available substantial yarn supplies; reservations of certain kinds of cloth production to handloom weavers; and forms of excise taxation that weighed heavily on the mills and other large establishments. The leaders of independent India intended these measures mainly to beneit handloom weavers. In part because of their small size, however, powerloom irms managed to manipulate this legislation to evade the implementation of regulations, and karkhandars drew on their positions as heads of cooperative societies and as inluential igures in local society to gain access to greater resources and power. Again, a crucial aspect of these efforts was frequently the choice by workshop owners to maintain or reduce the size of their manufacturing units. Under pressure from the increasingly powerful karkhandars, moreover, oficials of the state often backed away from enforcement of labour legislation. Dependent households, too, played a signiicant role in these developments. These units did not constitute a ixed universe of organisations. Many household irms disappeared, forced by dificult economic circumstances to dissolve their economic functions; members of such families often joined the regular work force as wage labourers. Other dependent producers, through good fortune and the painstaking efforts of their members, managed to develop independent karkhanas. At the same time, ex-workers, especially those drawn from the artisan communities, sometimes entered the ranks of dependent small producers. Often inanced by their previous bosses, they invested in powerlooms, installed these in their homes or small workshops, hired small numbers of workers, and, in many cases, came to produce cloth on a job-work basis for bigger

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manufacturers. The weaver-capitalists increasingly contracted out much of their work to these smaller karkhandars, providing them yarn on the expectation of receiving the inal product in return. The multi-structural character of the textile industry thus persisted, although its shape relected very different combinations of organisational forms than it had at the beginning of the century. The decline of the Indian mills after the 1980s and the increasing absorption of labour into the informal economy, particularly into the powerloom sector, is a familiar theme for scholars of contemporary India. What is less recognised is that by this time, weaving towns had already developed structural characteristics that made them attractive targets of investment. Weaver capitalism had expanded considerably in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; karkhandar families had developed the business acumen, the technological skills, the marketing networks, the relations of production, and the political connections that would position them well for an accelerated expansion after this point. Of course, between 1960 – when this study ends – and the 1980s, many further changes took place that would make rapid expansion possible. The advent of the “neoliberal” regime in the 1990s would bring a set of new factors to bear, one that seemingly was less favourable to weaver capitalism, by opening up Indian markets to foreign exports and by removing some of the regulatory constraints on textile production by big irms. Yet karkhandars have exhibited new forms of resilience, managing to sustain a production regime built on small workshops and the use of so-called antiquated technologies such as the used powerloom. The example of the powerloom industry in Bombay Presidency before 1947 and Bombay State afterwards thus demonstrates the importance of looking at India’s smaller industries in historical perspective. The evidence discussed here, taken alongside a very small number of case studies on other industries, does suggest it may be possible to hazard a few generalisations about the making of the informal economy. First, it points to the signiicance of long-term processes of accumulation and skill formation among “intermediate classes” positioned between big capitalists and labour.6 These included market-oriented peasants who decided to diversify 6

For the discussion of the concept of “intermediate classes,” see Michael Kalecki, Essays on the Economic Growth of the Socialist and Mixed Economy (London: Unwin, 1972); Prem Shankar Jha, India: A Political Economy of Stagnation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980); Harris, India Working, pp. 45–72; and Chari, Fraternal Capital, pp. 279–80. For the small number of historical case studies on such groups, see the sources cited in footnote 3.

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Concluding Relections

into industrial activity; craftspeople who relied on technical abilities they had acquired within late colonial workplaces to establish new enterprises; skilled factory workers who invested savings from their wages into businesses of their own; and small traders who ploughed proits derived from commerce into manufacturing concerns. Second, the family irms created by such entrepreneurs showed considerable lexibility and innovativeness in developing new products for the expanding ranks of upwardly mobile rural and urban Indians who demanded low-cost consumer items to make their lives easier or to serve as signs of their new status. Structural characteristics and experience that these enterprises had acquired in their economic activities during the early twentieth century often proved crucial in the new ields they adopted in more recent times. Third, these irms were developing lexible forms of access to cheap, organised labour in ways that distinguished them from larger enterprises. Processes of rural change that in some cases encouraged labourers to leave in large numbers from their homelands, forms of conlict that weakened workers’ capacity for collective organisation, and the emergence of many smaller irms willing to work on a sub-contracting basis all contributed to the formation of new kinds of labour regimes. Fourth, these irms took advantage of new state structures associated with Nehruvian socialism, which regulated factory production intensively while giving smaller actors much room for manoeuvre, and which often allocated more inluence to the leaders of big voting constituencies than to big businessmen whose position was based primarily on the large-scale accumulation of wealth. Finally, these enterprises sometimes attracted resources from businessmen external to these localities eager to invest in areas of the economy unencumbered by labour and regulatory constraints, and who thus sustained the mobility of their capital. No doubt, other cases will relect trajectories quite different from the ones that have been examined in this study. The industrial economy of the sub-continent is a multi-structural one; the categories of “unorganised” and “organised” are hardly suficient to capture its complexity. Understanding the histories of different industries in the informal sector can only be achieved through close examinations of regional economies in different parts of the sub-continent. This understanding will often require shifting the focus of analysis from metropolitan centres to small towns and to the countryside, and abandoning chronological structures deined strictly by political criteria, particularly those that divide the colonial from the post-independence period. It will also involve venturing into areas where archival source material is often thin, and where

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historians must resort extensively to oral history and family records. Yet because the “unorganised” sector provides 88 per cent of India’s employment,7 and because industries within this sector are all products of signiicant processes of change over many decades, the task of exploring the constitution of informal industry should ultimately become as critical to the discipline of history in the future as the study of large-scale organizational forms has been in the past.

7

A igure used extensively by Barbara Harriss-White in India Working and in other works.

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appendix i Costs Involved in Manufacturing Two Types of Saris, Ahmednagar

The following account is derived from famine records in 1900. The document indicates all the costs of production involved for a family of ive to six people for weaving twelve lugadas (saris), a task that the source indicates took ive to six weeks to complete.1 Prices in Rupees (Rs.), Annas (As), and Pice (Ps.) Type A: Superior fast red coloured Lugadas Projected Raw Material Costs for 12 Lugadas

Rs

As

Ps

One half bundle 5 lbs. white yarn for lengthwise threads 1 Bundle 5 lbs red yarn for lengthwise threads Black colouring indigo for dyeing white yarn Oil, gum, etc. Yarn of different colours for border White yarn for cross thread Yarn (white and red) for end piece Colour indigo for colouring yarn for cross threads

1 3 0 0 1 3 0 1

13 1 9 5 15 13 6 10

0 0 0 3 0 6 0 3

13

9

0

Total Raw Materials

The source for this table is Letter, Vice-President, Ahmednagar Municipality to Collector, Ahmednagar, 13 March 1900 in IOLR Bombay Revenue Proceedings (Famine) 1900, P/5985, pp. 1405–7. 1

Most of these jobs would have been performed by separate artisans. However, with the exception of weavers, we cannot estimate their wages, because we do not know how long it took them to perform each task listed. The time estimates for weaving twelve lugadas provided in the table do seem somewhat high, given estimates in other sources, but of course each kind of sari took different amounts of time to complete.

315

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Appendix I

316

Projected Raw Material Costs for 12 Lugadas

As

Ps

Rs

As

Ps

Dyeing lengthwise threads Dyeing cross threads Passing threads through ovi comb Opening and measuring threads Sizing threads Arranging threads in the comb, reed Preparing border yarn Weaver’s labour for weaving, and for various preliminary Work done by weaver’s family

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6

3 5 5 9 9 5 4 12

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Total Labour

9

7

9

Rs

As

Ps

1 2 0 0 1 3 0 1

8 9 6 5 11 8 6 5

9 6 9 3 3 0 0 0

Total Raw Materials

11

12

6

Labour Costs

Rs

As

Ps

Dyeing lengthwise threads Dyeing cross threads Passing threads through ovi comb Opening and measuring threads Sizing threads Arranging threads in the comb, reed Preparing border yarn Weaver’s labour for weaving, and for various preliminary work done by the weaver’s family

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6

2 7 5 8 8 5 4 0

6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Total Labour

8

7

6

Labour Costs

Rs

Type B: Lugadas of inferior quality and lighter weight Projected Raw Material Costs for 12 Lugadas 17/40 bundle white yarn for lengthwise threads 17/40 bundle red yarn for lengthwise threads Black colouring Indigo for dyeing white yarn Oil, gum, etc. Yarn of different colours for border White Yarn for cross thread Yarn (white and red) for end piece Colour indigo for colouring yarn for cross threads

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appendix ii Sari Prices, 1928–19371 Price Index 1914 = 100

317

Year Price Index

1928 146

Type of Sari

Rs As

Children’s 7 Yd Sari 8 yd cotton sari 8 yd chargomi sari 8 yd sangamneri sari 9 yd ilkal sari 8 yd salothi sari 9 yd patal sari 9 yd maheshwari art silk sari Theengomi sari Maheswari cotton sari

2 5 5 3 4 2 4

1

0 4 0 8 2 5 4

1929 147

1930 141

Rs

As

Rs

As

1 5 4 3 4 2 4 6

13 2 10 6 0 4 0 8

1 4 3 3

12 2 10 0

1 3 4 1

14 12 8 8

1931 109

1932 107

1933 104

1934 95

1935 101

1936 100

1937 106

Rs

As

Rs

As

Rs

As

Rs

As

Rs

As Rs As Rs As 0 14

2

12

2

4

2

0

2 0

0

4 2 11 0 9 0 4 8

1 2

1

4 4 2 4 1 4 4 1

1 3 1 3 4 1 2

10 10 9 4 0 10 2

1 4 1 2 3 1 1

14 0 5 12 10 4 12

2 3 1 2 3 1 1

0 8 5 8 5 6 10

2

3 3 10 2 6 8

0 8 2 5

1 14 3 10

1 1 3 1 1

2 3 1 1 1 1

2 6

2 8 1 4 1 10

Source for the table is Report of the BEISC, 1938–1940, vol. II, Nasik, p. 12; price indices (to relect costs of living) are for Bombay city and come from June listings in “Monthly Cost of Living Product Prices and Index in Bombay, 1921–1940,” International Institute for Social History Website, http://iisg.nl/hpw/india.php. These igures in turn were compiled from the Bombay Labour Gazette from 1928–37.

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Bibliography

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319

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Index

Abdul Hadi Abdulsalam Mubarakpuri, 86 Abdul Rahim Hakim, 274, 280 Abdul Samad Sheth, 248, 249, 253, 258, 280, 295–96 adatyas, 120–22, 131, 138–39 Adivasis, 13, 104–06, 118, 233, 293 cloth demand among, 104–06 advances by cooperative societies, 224 refusal of merchants to provide, 175, 180, 212 role in creating dependence, 33, 34, 35, 141, 145, 149, 153–55, 162, 281, 308 agrarian conditions in western India, 16, 43, 99, 103–04, 165, 173–75 Ahmedabad, 39, 47, 291, See also textile mills:Ahmedabad as market for cloth, 106, 121 printing in, 54, 63, 117 weaving in, 28, 49, 58, 60, 103, 112, 132, 177, 240 Ahmednagar, 40, 43, 46, 48, 58, 63, 78, 103, 118, 149, 154, 174–75, 177, 183, 206, 207, 225, 235, 239, 241, 273, 274, 277, 283 akhadedars in jari industry, 288, 290 Alashe family, 251 All-India Handloom Board, 283 All-India Trade Union Congress, 295 American Marathi Mission, 206, 207 Angnu Sheth, 85, 89

art silk, 114, 116, 118, 124, 233, 238, 244, 246, 252, 253, 263, 265, 267, 273, 275, 277, 282 artisan communities. See weaving communities artisan households, 14, 32, See also weaving households; family labour artisans numbers of 59, See also handloom weavers:numbers of Arts and Crafts Movement, 197, 199, 206 asamis, 123, 131, 148–49, 205, 246, 261, 271, 280, 297, 298, 299, 300 Bachkaniwala family, 251 Banias (Vaniyas), 67, 140, 148, 156, 270 Baroda, 63 Bayly, Chris, 28 Belgaum, 30, 34, 42 Bell, R.D., 97, 231, 239, 241 Benares, 65, 67, 82, 118, 181 Bentinck, Lord William, 1 Bet family, 247, 280 Bhagla Satyagraha, 292 Bhils, 98, 104–05, 165 Bhiwandi, 62, 71–74, 77, 80, 84, 85–86, 88, 90, 106, 143, 144, 148, 164, 173, 190, 248, 249, 251, 273, 275, 280, 300, 303, See also Momins; powerlooms: in Bhiwandi cloth manufacture in, 58, 71, 103, 243, 253, 268

337

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338

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Bhiwandi (cont.) collective activity in, 253, 258, 287, 294–97, 301 handloom weaving in, 268 types of cloth made in, 54, 74, 108, 118, 124, 252, 275 big men role in weaving communities, 89, 227, 255, 284–85, 303 Birdwood, George, 117, 197 bissee (communal boarding place), 84 Bohras (Vohras), 65, 66, 67, 68, 270 Bombay, 17, 31, 33, 49, 52, 60, 72, 107, 108, See also textile mills:Bombay as market for cloth, 74, 106–07, 118, 275 handloom weavers in, 90, 231, 240 Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry, 110 Bombay Provincial Handloom Weavers Association, 268, 298 Breman, Jan, 294, 306 Broach, 35, 37, 42 brocades. See kinkhabs Burma, 66, 86 Catanach, Ian, 202 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, 5, 96 Chatterton, Alfred, 199–200, 220 Chaudhuri, K.N., 35 Chibber, Vivek, 286 China markets in, 65 Chinese silk, 49, 53, 188 cholis (bodice cloth). See khans Christian weavers in Thana, 71, 73 Churchill loom, 207–09 Churchill, D.C., 207–09 cloth demand at all-India level, 97 cloth merchants, 119–25 coarse cloth, 38, 46, 70, 73, 111, 113, 208, 234 collective activity of weavers, 35, 89–92, 157, 180, 183–86, 191, 253–62, 285–300, 309–10 colonial policy toward artisans, 12–13, 38–39, 193, 194, 205–28, 277–80 colonial sociology, 201 Communists role in labour politics, 259–62, 288, 294, 296, 297–300

consumption, 13, 105, 236–37, 269 early nineteenth century declines in, 40 European context, 95 of pre-colonial elites, 28, 40, 64, 98 of rural population, 29 in urban areas, 106–09, 237, 269, 275 co-operatives, 17, 194, 202, 219–28, 235, 298, 310, See also karkhandars (workshop owners):role in cooperative societies role of educated men in, 223–24 sahukars’ resistance to, 224 underlying philosophical assumptions of, 220 cotton cultivation, 28, 99 cotton yarn, 12, 17, 62, 69, 72, 118, 130, 225, 226, See also European yarn; mill yarn effects of price rises, 187, 189 crafts advocates, 12, 196–203, 221, 223 cyclical character of handloom markets, 161–62, 173–75, 214 Darling, Malcolm, 202 Datar, Vyankatarao, 247 de Haan, Arjan, 152 Deccan, 17, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 58, 65, 73, 77, 79, 100, 102, 105, 117, 118, 140, 143, 150, 176, 179, 202, 207 Deepchand, Veerchand, 203 deindustrialization early nineteenth century, 36–41 deindustrialization thesis, 2, 6–7, 23, 94, 159, 201 Department of Co-operative Societies, 205, 206, 216, 228 Depression effects on handloom weavers, 236, 238–43 Desai, H.M., 177 Desai, I.C., 291–93 Desai, I.G., 288, 293 Deshmukh, L.G., 184 Dhamankar, S.V., 247 Dhamanwala family, 274, 280 Dheds, 29, 45, 134 Dholka, 58, 113, 218, 240 dhotis, 70, 102, 105, 114, 168, 275, 282, 283 Dhulia, 58, 80, 105, 120, 148, 165, 172, 234, 283 Dikonda, V.S., 274

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Index dyeing, 27, 28, 32, 50, 51–54, 58, 59, 63, 72, 135, 136, 149, 263, 274–75 tie-dyeing, 54, 117 dyers, 14, 44, 51, 52, 69, 190, 275, See also Rangaris dyes, 55, 63, 123, 130, 187, 189–90, 277 imported, 12, 44, 51, 52, 186, 187, 210, 245, 267, 268 indigenous, 28, 51, 52, 189 East Africa, 26, 37 electricity use of by artisans, 232, 248 embezzlement of materials by handloom weavers, 34, 141–42, 143, 221 embroidery, 68 English East India Company, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 193 Enthoven, R.E., 115 entitlement approach to famine. See Sen, Amartya European textile imports, 2, 12, 38–40, 44, 81, 94, 102, 112, 117, 161, 234, 265, 267 European yarn use of by weavers, 44, 46–47, 72, 186, 187, 252, 267, 269 everyday forms of resistance, 14, 34, 129, 141, 142, 144–45, 157, 180, 221, 255, 309 Ewbank, R.B., 205, 211, 219, 221, 222, 224, 227 Fact-Finding Committee (Handlooms and Mills), 58, 278 Falmari family, 87, 89 Falmari, Vithalrao, 258, 261 family labour, 32, 134–37, 140, 141, 175, 213, 244, See also karkhanas (workshops):division of family labour in famine, 188, 203 conditions of weavers during, 123, 172, 174, 175–80 effects on rural population, 175, 178–79 relief works for weavers, 176, 178, 180–81, 182 weavers’ response to, 186 fands, 87–88 female labour. See women:labour of lexible specialization, 252, 266, 272–77 ly-shuttle loom, 14, 204, 207, 209–19

339

Fukasawa, H., 27, 33 Fulmandikar, Abansaheb, 203 Gadag, 45, 49, 242 Gandharva, Bal, 107 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 2, 233 Gandhi, R.S., 252 Gokak, 145 Golas. See Ranas grain riots, 183–86 in Sholapur (1896), 183–86 Greenough, Paul, 182 Guha, Sumit, 99, 104 Gujarat, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 42, 53, 56, 58, 62, 64, 103, 104, 110, 117, 121, 133, 218 consumption patterns in, 104, 117, 237 gujari system of cloth marketing, 138 Guledgud, 58, 103, 116, 118, 140, 142, 147, 177, 180 Haji Lal Mohamed, 88, 89 handloom cloth demand for, 109–18, 161 handloom weavers. See also collective activity migration of, 28, 44, 56, 66, 69, 70–71, 74–83, 151–52, 190–91, 192 notions of time, 143–44, 151 numbers of, 3, 56, 58, 59, 69, 70, 72–73, 253, 269 resistance to powerlooms, 253–54 rural connections of, 74, 82, 151–52 social networks among, 75, 79, 84 standard of living among. See standard of living; wages:of weavers technological innovations by, 73, 247–53 traditional views of, 23 handloom weaving. See also organization of production during the 1950s, 271, 297, 300 effects of powerlooms upon, 253 global context of, 25, 44–54, 186 preliminary processes involved in, 63, 243 spatial location of, 48 urban character of, 27 Hathiwala family, 248, 274, 280 Hattersley looms, 14, 216, 249, 251, 253, 254 Havell, E.B., 197, 198, 199, 200 Herlekar, V.M., 226 Hove, Dr., 134

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340

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Hubli, 49, 59, 60, 183, 191, 226, 227, 242 Hyderabad State, 15, 69, 70, 77, 154 conditions of handloom weavers in, 77–79 Ibrahim Madoo, 295 Ichalkaranji, 62, 116, 247, 249, 251, 253, 270, 271, 275, 300, 303 Ilkal, 47, 54, 58, 78, 103, 118, 123–25, 166, 257, 268, 277 Ilkal saris, 70, 109, 114, 118, 123–25, 238, 247 Indian National Congress, 197, 234, 235, 284, 291 trade unions associated with, 288, 298, 299 Indian National Trade Union Congress, 288 Indian Ocean, 26, 34, 36, 37, 43, 64, 65 indigo, 28, 52 informal economy, 4, 11, 106, 301, 305–04, 312–13 intermediate classes, 311–12 International Labour Organization, 288 Irabatti family, 123, 204, 280 Irabatti, Ashanna, 259 Islam among Momin weavers, 72, 79, 85–86, 294 jacquard looms, 73, 96, 234, 245, 275 jamaats, 88 Japan cloth manufacture in, 30, 133 weavers’ connections to, 188, 246, 273, 274 Japanese textile imports, 117, 234, 267 jari (gold thread), 32, 59, 63, 65, 66, 105, 112, 130, 147, 186, 263, 268, 282 imitation forms of, 275–76, 277, 308 technological change in, 231–32 jari industry, 188, 231–32, 248, 263 conditions in, 238, 267, 268, 269, 270 employment in, 68 labour disputes in, 288 numbers employed in, 67 technological change in, 270 workers in, 257 Jari Kamdar Mandal, 288 jari weaving, 270 Jariwala, Hiralal Ranchhodas, 276

Joshi, N., 143, 149, 154, 155, 237, 238 Julahas. See Momins Kakade, R.G., 69, 71, 85, 147, 149, 150, 155, 240, 246 Kanbis (Kunbis), 36, 64, 67 Kapadia, Jinabhai, 231 Karadkar, Minakshi, 258 Karadkar, R.G., 258 karkhanas (workshops), 9, 14–15, 52, 123, 131, 241, 243–53, 297, 300, 302, 307 collective activity in, 254–62, 285–300 dependent, 131, 148–49, 261, 270–71, 305, See also asamis division of family labour in, 148, 150, 215, 243–44, 262, 303, 307–08 recruitment of labour in, 79, 152–53, 255, 304 social organization of, 146–57, 215 karkhandars (workshop owners), 9, 13, 14, 15, 18, 118, 122, 132, 147, 149, 160, 191, 195, 196, 227, 228, 240, 242, 243–53, 260, 261, 262, 265, 266, 271–72, 295, 297, 302, 304, 305, 307–10, 311 efforts to counteract labour resistances, 153–56, 260, 287, 292–93, 294, 296–97, 301, 305, 310 entrepreneurial activities of, 71, 148, 266, 272–77 patronage activities of, 153–56, 284, 309 political activities of, 279–85, 301, 303, 310 role in co-operative societies, 18, 226–27, 279–80, 310 role in marketing cloth, 122–23, 125, 161, 244–45, 308 role in technological innovation, 14, 123, 204, 208, 215–16, 229, 247–53, 256, 272–77, 308–09 Karnataka, 17, 26, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 103, 118, 123, 140, 167–68, 176, 187 Karva family, 62 khadi, 58, 113, 208, 233, 234 Khandesh, 17, 26, 30, 37, 39, 46, 51, 58, 72, 102, 103, 104–05, 118, 119, 165, 166–67, 173, 188, 234, 235, 242 agrarian conditions in, 98–100, 188 as market for cloth, 74, 100–04, 236

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Index khans, 102, 105, 115, 116, 230, 234, 238 Kharwar, Nagindas, 86, 89 Khatris, 31, 36, 64, 66, 83, 84, 85, 86–87, 89, 147, 156, 247, 274 Killedar family, 270 kinkhabs, 64, 66, 68 Konkan, 38, 109, 117, 118, 237 Koshtis, 71, 72, 73, 150, 165, 172, 217, 218, 247 kuldevi (community goddess) among Khatris, 85 Kulkarni, N.K., 271 Kulkarni, S.B., 274 labour. See also wage labourers; family labour; weaving households; women:labour of in artisan industry, 9 labour activists, 286 labour catchment areas, 74, 148 labour legislation, 259, 260, 286–87, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295, 296 Lal Bawta Hatmag Kamdar Union, 259–62, 298, 299 Lemire, Beverly, 95 loom statistics limitations of, 56 lungis, 66, 115 Maconochie, A.F., 163, 203 Madur, V.N., 258, 260, 261 Maharashtra, 53, 57, 77, 79, 82, 98, 118, 120, 124, 283 consumption patterns in, 104, 116, 118, 124 Maheji fair, 46, 101, 102, 119 Maheshwar saris, 70, 109, 114, 118 Mahomed Yunus Sardar, 88 Majoor Mahajan, 288, 291 Malegaon, 58, 62, 71–74, 78, 80, 84, 103, 107, 120, 124, 148, 149, 182, 183, 216, 218, 238, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 270, 273, 274, 275, 277, 280, 283, 300, 303 collective violence in, 91 types of saris made in, 73 Marathas, 26, 31, 39, 40, 58, 98 cloth consumption of the, 27, 29 Markandaya, 85 Marshall, Thomas, 30, 32, 34, 40, 42, 168

341

Marwaris, 13, 56, 62, 106, 120, 140, 142, 145, 148, 180, 184, 226, 257, 271 master-weavers. See putting-out system; weaving households:dependent McGowan, Abigail, 115, 194 Mehta, P.N., 131, 139, 142, 161, 163, 172, 202, 219, 228 men’s clothing, 114, 115, 161 mercerised yarn, 65, 70, 114, 124, 236, 244, 263, 265, 267, 273 merchant capital role in textile production. See organization of production; putting-out system; sahukars merchants. See Banias (Vaniyas); cloth merchants; Marwaris; sahukars migration, 15, 31, 35, 44, 56, 66, 70–71, 74–83, 106, 144, 148, 151–52, 303, 309, See also handloom weavers:migration of as response to famine, 181–83 mill cloth demand for, 109–18, 234–35 mill yarn, 210 use of by weavers, 47, 48, 55, 174, 204, 246, 269 Mines, Mattison, 89 Momins, 72, 73, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 144, 147, 165, 176, 182, 184, 190, 216, 218, 247, 251, 280, 294 migration of, 79–83 Momnas, 64, 152, 247 mono-industrial towns, 58–59, 303 Morris, Morris D., 49 Morris, William, 197 Mughal Empire, 26, 81 Nadri, Ghulam, 35 Nagpur, 27, 31, 40, 78, 120, 283 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 293 neighbourhoods of artisans, 56, 64, 83–92, 163–65, 248, 256, 308, 309 organization of production, 127–58, 254–55, 309, See also weaving households; karkhanas (workshops); putting-out system; wage labourers seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 7, 127–58

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Index

342

Padmasalis, 71, 83, 84, 85, 87–88, 89, 123, 147, 150, 151, 154, 184, 204, 218, 225, 258, 259, 260, 274, 297, 299 migration of, 75–79 Paithan, 29, 31 panchayats, 86–89, 147, 190 Pandey, Gyanendra, 80 Parsis, 28, 68 partitioning of workshops, 287, 290, 292–93, 296–97, 300, 301 patal saris, 70, 109, 114, 116, 238, 252 Patel, Raoji, 111 Patil, R.K., 290 periodic markets, 101 Perlin, Frank, 25 Persian Gulf, 26, 34, 37, 65, 66 Phulpuri jamaat, 88 Pitre, T.J., 203, 204, 205, 209, 211, 215, 226 plague, 163–65 politics of workshops. 9, 127, 129, 146–57, 254–62, 285–300, See also collective activity; everyday forms of resistance Pomfret, W.T., 163, 205, 211, 223 Poona, 27, 29, 40, 49, 60, 63, 78, 106, 112, 124, 138, 171, 183, 232, 246, 275 Portuguese, 36, 37 powerloom industry, 3, 4, 5, 10, 18, 247–51, 255–56, 270, 272–77, 311 preliminary processes involved in, 273, 274–75 powerlooms adoption of, 14, 17, 218, 229, 247–53 in Bhiwandi, 19, 218, 247, 248, 249, 251, 268, 270, 271 numbers of, 3, 269, 270 resistance by handloom weavers to, 253–54 in Surat, 3, 218, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253, 255, 270 prices, yarn and dyes effects on weavers, 174, 278 printers, 275 printing, 32, 54, 58, 63, 64, 117–18 proto-industrialization model, 30, 133 putting-out system, 33–34, 35, 131–32, 140–46, 272, 281, 307 Ramzan Nabu, 294, 296 Ranas, 64, 68, 83, 85, 165, 231, 232

Rangaris (dyers), 52, 165, 274 Rao, Narayana, 221 Rashtriya Hatmag Mazdoor Sangh, 298 Rathi family, 62 raw materials sources of, 44–54 Red Sea, 26, 37 revisionist approach to history of artisans, 8, 23 Revolt of 1857, 80, 265 Roy, Tirthankar, 8–11, 23–24, 41, 128, 132 rural weavers, 23, 30, 134 Ruskin, John, 197 Sahai, Raghbir, 77, 78 sahukars, 18, 77–78, 82, 120, 135, 140, 141–43, 160, 166, 191, 195, 196, 204, 205, 215, 218, 222, 224, 225, 226, 229, 241–43, 281–82, 305, 307 attitudes toward technological change, 77–78 British views of, 202–03 role in agrarian economy, 99, 105 Sakri, Shankarappa, 124 Salis, 71, 72, 73, 150, 165, 216, 218 Salvation Army, 206, 207 Samad Sheth. 294, See also Abdul Samad Sheth Sangamner, 58, 63, 103, 113, 149, 154, 237, 257 saris. See also Ilkal saris; Maheshwar saris; patal saris; women’s clothing; women:cloth consumptions patterns of commerce in, 102, 119, 121, 139 demand for, 17, 78, 80, 118, 161, 237, 269 high count, 70, 74, 82, 118, 148, 212, 236 with jari, 74, 118, 188, 275 low count, 70, 73, 82, 108, 113, 118, 234, 237 manufacture of, 36, 38, 51, 62, 70, 102, 113, 115, 116, 123, 124, 156, 208, 231, 234, 250, 252, 253, 263, 265, 273, 274, 275, 277, 282 silk, 65, 118, 124, 188 six yard, 116, 237, 238 Sarkar, Sumit, 287 Scott, James, 34, 157 Sen, Amartya, 179

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Index sericulture, 50 Shah family, 247 Shah, Shantilal, 293 Shastri, B.J.G., 231 Shimpi merchants, 138 Sholapur, 59, 69–71, 78, 87–88, 110, 123, 131, 144, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156, 163, 164, 176, 180, 181, 183, 203, 209, 211, 213, 215, 218, 226, 236, 240, 246, 247, 271, 273, 280, 281, 283, 303, See also asamis; textile mills:Sholapur collective activities in, 183–86, 235, 258–62, 297–300, 301 handloom weaving in, 49, 58, 62, 69–71, 103, 147, 231, 239, 247, 268, 271, 275, 297 numbers of weavers in, 59, 69, 70, 271 Padmasali migrants in, 71, 77, 84, 87, 184, 204 role of Communists in, 258–62, 297–300 types of cloth made in, 70, 110, 112, 113, 124, 277 yarn merchants in, 62 Sholapur Handloom Weavers’ Enquiry Committee, 151, 298–99 Sholapur Hatmag Asami Sangh, 297, 298 Sholapur Weavers Guild, 164, 186, 203–05, 226 Sikandar Sheth, 280, 294, 296 silk, 50, 63, 65, 125, 130, 136, 188, 233, 267, 273 imports, 12, 49–50, 53 silk cloth, 112, 114, 118, 123, 231, 252 silk weaving, 28, 49–50, 65, 66, 82, 132, 171, 188, 212, 216, 233, 236, 240, 244 preparatory processes involved in, 50, 136 Singer sewing machines, 68, 211 small town capitalism, 1, 5, 11, 56, 74, 92, 126, 127, 157, 266 small towns, 6, 15, 28, 56–74, 83, 89, 93, 96, 101, 106, 117, 119, 130, 133, 160, 180, 188, 190, 191, 194, 219, 230, 233, 302, 303, 305, 312 Socialists, 288, 293, 295, 296 spinners numbers of, 46, 47 spinning, 32 of cotton yarn, 45–47

343

standard of living among artisans, 37, 42–43, 44, 159–64 state policy toward artisans. See colonial policy post-independence, 280, 282–84, 310 stitched clothing, 54, 114 strike activities, 285, 288–89, 290, 291, 292–93, 295–98, 299 Styles, John, 95 Subramanian, Lakshmi, 36 Surat, 17, 36, 37, 42, 64–69, 83, 86–87, 141, 142, 152, 154, 156, 165, 178, 188, 216, 246, 249, 254, 267, 270, 273, 274–75, 280, 300, 303, See also jari (gold thread); jari industry; powerlooms:in Surat cloth manufacture in, 28, 32, 43, 49, 58, 59, 63, 64–69, 87, 147, 243, 244, 252, 274–75 collective activity in, 36, 287, 301 labour politics in, 288–94 migrant-weavers in, 65, 66, 77 numbers of weavers in, 29 types of cloth made in, 65, 112, 252 Surat Electric Company, 232, 248 Swadeshi Movement, 197, 198, 200, 201, 292 Sykes, W.H., 38 tariffs effects on artisans, 232, 233, 238 Tarikh al-Minwal va-Ahlahm, 86 Tarlo, Emma, 110 taxation of weavers, 12, 31, 43, 283–84, 293, 296, 310 Telengana, 70, 71, 75, 77, 79, 85, 151, 181 Textile Mazdoor Panchayat (Surat), 291, 292 Textile Mazdoor Sabha (Bhiwandi), 295 textile mills, 2, 3, 4, 44, 81, 109–10, 114, 116, 187, 190, 230, 234–35, 236, 238, 239, 249, 261, 265, 267, 269, 278, 280, 281, 282–84, 291, 311 Ahmedabad, 3, 43, 54, 96, 97, 161, 186, 190, 235, 249, 262, 265, 288 Bombay, 3, 17, 43, 49, 72, 77, 80, 96, 97, 112, 161, 174, 186, 190, 230, 231, 249, 265, 271 Sholapur, 49, 59, 69, 186, 231, 234, 237, 258, 300

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Index

344 Thornburn, S.S., 202 Tikekar, L.V., 110, 112, 144, 154, 204, 205, 247 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 185 trade unions, 15, 18, 258, 259–60, 261, 266, 285–300, 301, 304, 305, 309 turbans, 51, 70, 105, 115, 118

United Provinces, 15, 80, 84, 181, 216, 231 conditions of handloom weavers in, 80–82 urban character of cloth manufacture, 26, 27, 28–30, 56–74 Vakharia family, 243, 274, 280 Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, 211 wage labourers. See also karkhanas (workshops) in artisan industry, 14–15, 32, 52, 83, 87, 129, 132, 137, 146, 157, 196, 205, 215, 220, 227, 228, 254, 260, 271, 310 wages. See also women:wages of in jari industry, 289, 290 of weavers, 42–43, 166–73, 189, 230, 233, 240–241, 246, 255, 260, 268 of weavers, compared to other artisans, 166–73, 189 warping, 32, 50, 60, 96, 134, 135, 149, 150, 173, 202, 209, 211, 213, 243 new technologies of, 204, 212, 213, 216, 220 Washbrook, David, 11, 41

weaver capitalism, 2, 15, 21, 83, 125, 148, 230, 243, 247, 266, 285, 302–276, 309, 311 weaver capitalists. See karkhandars (workshop owners) weaving communities, 63, 64, 83–92, 144, 153, 254, 280, 304 weaving households, 133–46 dependent, 131, 140–46, 241–42, 270, 272, 307, 310–11 independent, 131, 138–40, 272 Weir, J.W.A., 203 winding yarn, 32, 134, 135, 136, 148, 171, 211 women cloth consumption patterns of, 65, 105, 107, 108, 114–16, 161 labour of, 32, 45–47, 50, 68, 135, 136–38, 140, 148, 150, 171–72, 175, 213, 221, 243, 246, 255, 303 role in cooperative societies, 225 strike of bidi workers in Sholapur, 258 wages of, 171–72 women’s clothing, 13, 108, 115, See also saris; khans; women:cloth consumption patterns of World War I, 186–91, 205 responses by artisans, 189 World War II, 266–69, 309, 310 Yagnik, Indulal, 291 yarn control policy, 267, 278–79, 280, 282 Yenni, Rajappa, 124 Yeola, 29, 49, 58, 63, 80, 103, 112, 118, 132, 176, 178, 181, 231, 232, 242, 246, 257 collective violence in, 91

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