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M

Maxine Berg

Material Culture for Global Markets: the Craftspeople of Eighteenth

and Twenty-first Century India

1.Introduction

The subject of my lecture is the people who once produced and those who

now produce fine luxury goods for local and global markets. It compare the

periods of global history of eighteenth-century India and globalization in

twenty-first century India. I focus on artisans, skill and markets in one area of

India – the region of Kachchh in Northern Gujarat, even now considered a

remote part of the new global India.

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The research I am telling you about today arises from a large team-based

history project entitled ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830.

It also reports on a recent oral history project which I have conducted with

others among the craftspeople of Kachchh in Northern Gujarat.

In Mandvi, the celebrated ancient port of Kachchh, best known for

its boatbuilding of dhows made from teak and acacia wood, boats that

sailed the Arabian Sea to Zanzibar and beyond, we find a long history of

bandhani making. Bandhani, or tie dye, is widely practiced in Bhuj,

Mandvi and many other towns and outlying villages across Kachchh. It

is a classic outworking occupation. Organized by men, especially in the

Khatri community through family networks, these prepare the cloth in

workshops where they stencil the designs onto fine cotton or silk. The

tying is done mainly by women but also by male outworkers; the fabric is

then dyed by men who have passed their knowledge on through

generations.1

Sisters Hanifa and Jamila Sumra and all other members of their

family combine tying with agricultural and domestic labour. It takes them

5 days to complete a piece of work and they might earn 1500-1800 R.

per month. (roughly £20-24). Their work and the work of all the women

who practice it, is also like a habit; they never sit empty-handed. In a

small darkened house across from the putting out shop where they bring

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their goods, Neelam Khanna counts the tied bandh. She is well-

educated with a second year of a BComm, but unmarried and the carer

for her mother after the death of her father. She is widely trusted by

contractors and workers, and with steady work; she earns 3,000 Rs. a

month. The counting is intricate, but logical – she takes 15 minutes to

count 1,000 kadi (or chains of 4 ties each). Shabana, tying by the side of

Neelam, had been practicing the trade for ten years, and explained that

the cloth was tied first in white, then in its dyed form.2

My lecture reflects some of my own New Directions in history

writing in turning to study of a part of the world I had never researched

before. My background is that of an economic historian of Europe. It

reflects a shift in the types of research we might practice as global

historians, moving beyond those titles which first inspired our turning to

global history: ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations’ and ‘The Great

Divergence’. After over ten years there are now many variations on a

the theme filling our shelves, on why the West Ruled or got Rich and

Asia did not or does now, other books on power and wealth, plenty and

peoples, empires and world history, and all the globals and Indian Ocean

worlds in many varieties. We are still dominated by the developmental

models that lead us to ask why was China not first; Pomeranz’s recent

advance on this has been to ask why China wasn’t second. We might

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indeed well ask what region or nation was second – allowing ample

opportunity for a quip from Joel Mokyr at the last AHR conference – it

was Belgium. Rather than trying to write about the whole world, I choose

to write about a place that some of us may consider remote, and how it

connected to the wider world. I also choose to write about the

production processes whose histories we abandoned in the early 1990s

in our quest for consumer revolutions.

2. The Local and the Global

Kachchh, in a remote area between Northern Gujarat and Sindh,

now modern Pakistan, became known in the wider world in the wake of

the 2001 earthquake. NGOs converged on the region, and the Indian

government developed the area leading north from Ahmedabad into

Southern Kachchh as the Kandla Special Economic Zone. Today

trucks, cars and camels jostle on a four-lane highway leading past many

factory developments. In 1809 Alexander Walker, the British Chief

Resident at Baroda, travelled through the region and described it as a

country whose ‘independence over a series of centuries altho’situated

between powerful and ambitious empires, is a sufficient proof that it has

yielded nothing to gratify ambition, or to compensate the expense of

conquest.’ Yet this was the region that produced many of the over 1200

pieces of printed cotton textiles in the Ashmolean’s Newberry Collection,

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most of these dated between the 10th and 15th Centuries, and traded to

Egypt, up the Red Sea ports through the Middle East, out across the

Arabian Sea to East Africa, and down the Malabar coast and on to

present-day Indonesia. Its textiles were soon to fill the cargoes of

Portuguese, Dutch then British ships trading from Diu, Mandvi and Surat,

and pass on to European consumers. Today it remains a knowledge

node of the crafts, its people responding to the challenges and

opportunities opened in the wake of the earthquake and globalization.

Understanding the history of this production centre demands that we talk

to its people now; this brings to us a sense of the cycles of production in

the long course of industrial development and the adaptation of skills

and products to local and global markets.

My colleague at Warwick, Anne Gerritsen has developed a local

study in global context of the great porcelain centre of China,

Jingdezhen. Her study of the local production contexts of its products

traded all over the world from the 14th C. onwards demonstrates the

unevenness and complexities of global history. I follow her example in

seeking the history of the global in the local history of Kachchh. We see

through her study that local histories are not just for local inhabitants.

They challenge the linearity and universalism of our global histories.

They also bring us access to the places of production, now too

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commonly neglected by global historians focussed on shipping and

caravan routes.3 Local contexts also demonstrate the deep historical

roots of the materials, skills and product designs that made these global

products possible.

Finally I am pursuing new directions in methodologies. Like

archaeologists I found myself with extensive evidence of the material

culture of the region – for example those c. 1200 pieces of textile in the

Newberry Collection. These pieces are in Oxford; others are in the V&A,

and in the South Asia collections in museums around the world, as well

as in the textile collections of India’s museums such as the Chhatrapati

Shivaji Museum in Mumbai. They are not in the museums of Kachchh

destroyed in the earthquake; only rarely can they be found as fragments

in archaeological excavations, unlike the indestructible porcelain shards

found in excavations not just in Jingdezhen, but around the world. The

production processes for these products were, and are, embedded in the

skills of the region’s artisans. There were few archival or printed records

of the experience of these artisans, their organization of production, their

acquisition of skills, or their access to markets. To learn of these I have

followed the practice of some archaeologists in speaking to inhabitants

in the region today. Part of my evidence, therefore relies on a series of

interviews and oral histories of current crafts people

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3. Luxury Goods and the Global Economy

Why do luxury goods from Asia matter to global history? Luxury goods

have always been of obvious significance to historians of the prehistoric,

ancient and medieval worlds. Andrew and Susan Sherratt followed

those mundane bronze age beakers that travelled in the slipstream of

the gold, silver and precious jewels that traversed Eurasia in 2000 B.C..

But Immanuel Wallerstein dismissed these luxury goods as mere

preciosities on the route to modernization from the early modern world,

and few economic historians of the 18thC to modern world give them

any regard at all. My subject looks back to a global shift from a world

provided with fine manufactured goods from Asia to a world of European

industrial revolutions. And it considers a contemporary global shift of the

late 20thC. and early 21st Century which sees a new Asian ascendancy

now providing the world with many of its manufactured consumer goods.

I have argued elsewhere that the first phase of long-distance maritime

trade from Asia to Europe in tea, silk, cotton and porcelain transformed

European consumer and material cultures, in turn stimulating the product

imitation and innovation that led onto Europe’s own industrialization.

The exotic luxury goods associated with long-distance sea voyages and

East India Companies continued, for many Europeans, to depict the

meaning of Empire through the nineteenth century. Arindam Dutta in his

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The Bureaucracy of Beauty has written ‘Economists may bristle, but

empire is about taste: gold, silver, spices, silk, tea, textiles, the view,

furniture, opium, coffee, bananas, paisley, arabesques....’ 4 In the 21st

Century, globalization has been about China as the world manufacturing

power, about India’s industrial and IT ascendancy, but also about a

global luxury trade that includes fine craft goods from India.

4. Skills, Useful Knowledge and Export Ware

My own work has long focussed on what was entailed in making

goods for distant markets; how was an exotic ornament transformed into

an export-ware good? How was it manufactured; how were skills

accessed and adapted to the designs sought in world markets? Few now

study manufacture, but this is central to the themes of material culture

and consumption which inspire us today. Part of that consumption in

early modern Europe was of goods from Asia, and shortly after of the

goods manufactured in Europe to imitate these.5

How those imitative goods were made in Europe is one story

which I have pursued along with other European historians. This is a

history of technology and skills, recently highlighted as ‘useful

knowledge’ and declared by Joel Mokyr to be at the heart of the ‘great

divergence’.6 It is also a history based in ‘local knowledge’; the special

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‘nodes of craft skill’ which the late Larry Epstein followed through early

modern Europe.

Neither Mokyr nor Epstein, however addressed Europe’s engagement

with local knowledge nodes in Asia, specifically for my talk today with

those in Gujarat and Kachchh India.

5. Theoretical Background

Social scientists, from Michael Polanyi in 1966 to Richard

Sennett in 2008 have devoted extensive theoretical and empirical

research to the ‘knowledge economy’, investigating local skills, craft

and talent, and the vital components of ‘tacit knowledge’. 7 Many years

ago in The Tacit Dimension (1966) Polanyi drew a distinction between

‘tacit’ and ‘codified’ knowledge, arguing the special place of skills and

ways of doing in transmitting technologies. Mokyr in his 2002 book, The

Gifts of Athena, and most recently in The Enlightened Economy: an

Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (2010) defined this tacit and

codified knowledge as ‘useful knowledge’ which played a fundamental

role in the industrialization of the West.8

Recent historical research on ‘useful knowledge’ has in the main

been confined to Europe. We need to turn to the ‘local knowledge’ in

Asia. We have huge collections of Indian textiles in our world museums;

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we have extensive and especially quantitative research on the trade in

these textiles to Europe, the Atlantic world and Japan, and some

research on that trade to Africa. But we still know little of the skill

centres producing these textiles. There is a recent turning to some

discussion of ‘useful knowledge’ and skill among some of India’s

historians, notably Tirthankar Roy, David Washbrook and Prasannan

Parthasarathi, who have pointed to India’s deep history of tacit skills and

her dynamic culture of technical knowledge.

Recent books by Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial

India (2009) and Douglas Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western

India (2012) address the political potency of craft in modern India. The

artisan became a political symbol of India’s fate under colonialism. For

British colonizers the crafts demonstrated India’s economic

backwardness, but they also collected their unique and beautiful

products in museum collections that orientalised not just the goods, but

the artisans themselves. In these discourses artisans were traditional,

ossified, homogenized, subjects to be archived and preserved in

museums and art schools.9

For nationalists, craft producers represented the remains of the

self-sufficient society that they thought India had once been before the

disruption of colonialism, industrialization and the competition of

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European textiles. Gandhi’s khadi campaign epitomised the turning of

these discourses into a craft critique of Empire. The discourses also

informed the writing of Indian economic history for the generations after

Independence.10 Economic historians of India debated the de-

industrialization thesis and the fate of India’s artisans from the later

1960s into the 1980s.11 Comparing the course of artisan production in

Gujarat and Kachchh over its early modern global history and its recent

framework of globalization allows us to engage in larger debates on

industrialization and on India’s industrial history over the pre-colonial,

colonial, nationalist and recent global periods.

6. Gujarat, Kachchh and Long-distance Trade

Gujarat’s reputation from ancient times for its trade and fine

manufactures, especially its printed textiles, took on new dimensions

under the Mughal empire. The region was annexed by the Mughal

Emperor Akbar in 1573, and its ports became linked into a global trading

network; its textiles renowned. European trade extended rapidly with the

Portuguese ports in Diu from the sixteenth century, and with the Dutch in

Surat and in Mandvi in the seventeenth century, followed by the British

from the mid eighteenth century. Surat in Southern Gujarat, by the late

seventeenth century provided Europe with indigo, printed cloth, quilts

and fine Mochi embroideries. It was a vibrant centre of trade and

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manufacture; trading to the East India Company alone over 30 different

fabric types in 1708.12 This was also a period of expansion of European

trade with the northern part of Gujarat, the region now known as

Kachchh.

The old Kachchh port of Mandvi in the mid eighteenth century

was a cosmopolitan place, attracting many Indian Ocean merchants

especially interested in cotton and textiles. The main destinations for

these were the coast of Africa, Zanzibar, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf

and the Malabar Coast, and on from there to South East Asia. With the

coming of the Dutch these goods entered into the VOC’s extended intra-

Asian trade network with markets in Bengal, Malacca and Batavia and

China, and also in the Dutch Republic.13

James Tod perambulated about the town in 1823,

encountering’groups of persons from all countries: the swarthy Ethiop,

the Hinki of the Caucasus, the dignified Arabian, the bland Hindu

banyan, or consequential Gosén, in his orange-coloured robes, half

priest, half merchant.’

‘Hides of rhinocerous, semi-transparent, resembling immense

cakes of glue, were hanging up in the streets, prepared for being

fashioned into shields; elephants’ teeth for female bracelets and other

ornaments, dates, dry and fresh, raisons, almonds, pistachios all spoke

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the names of lands with which Mandvi still maintained commercial

intercourse. Cotton, however, is perhaps the staple article of trade…’

The crafts developed under the patronage of the royal courts, for

long distance trade, and for local ceremonial use. The Kutch dynasty

ruled from Bhuj from 1549 until the merger with the Indian Union in

1948, but was marginalised from the later eighteenth century as a

princely state under British rule. The city now has a population of

133,500; the earthquake of 2001 killed 13,000 in the city and in the

surrounding rural communities; there has been much rebuilding in the

years since.14 The remains of the Aina Mahal palace, which according to

folk history was built and decorated in the early 1750s under Maharao

Lakho by the engineer and architect, Ram Singh Malam, show a

significant integration of Dutch and other European arts and crafts.

Design and architecture there and in Mandvi reflect the period of

expansive commerce in the mid eighteenth century, the Dutch presence

and openness to European arts and crafts.15

Bhuj was also long a ‘knowledge node’ of the crafts including

bandhani (silk and cotton tie dye), ajrakh (resist cotton printing),

embroidery, batik prints, cotton and woollen weaving, lacquerware,

enamelling, woodcarving and cutlery, and silver and gold jewellery work.

Local production served the particular demands of the Jat, Ahir, Harijan

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and Rabari tribes, and the nomadic cattle herders of Banni in Northern

Kachchh 16 and provided fine fabrics for the court in Bhuj, and

merchants trading from Mandvi to Diu and Surat, and from there to

markets in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South East Asia. Many

of its craftsmen came from Sindh, groups invited by the king of

Kachchh, Rao Baharmalji 1 (1586-1631), including dyers, printers,

potters and embroiderers. Skills and design connected further to the

Persian Empire.17

What happened to these vibrant craft and textile regions with their

long histories of global trade as they passed through the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries? Their histories have been those of colonialism and

de-industrialization in India more broadly. But recent studies of the late

colonial and nationalist periods have found not just a survival of craft

economies, but a resurgence of small producer capitalism in the

interstices of colonial constraints and economic underdevelopment.

Tirthankar Roy’s study, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial

India (1999) focused on broad areas of India over the period 1870-1930.

Increased commercialization after the opening of the Suez Canal

fostered more production for non-local markets. In the period since

1947, he demonstrates, small-scale industrial production increased its

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share of waged employment. In the last fifty years there was staggering

growth in the towns and informal industrial labour in the crafts he

studied: handloom weaving, gold thread, brassware, leather, glassware

and carpets.18 Indeed he argued that artisan industry ‘has not just

survived, but shaped the character of industrialization both in colonial

and post-colonial India.’19

Douglas Haynes, in his recent book, Small Town Capitalism in

Western India, focused on an overlapping, but extended period of 1870

and 1960, and researched in depth the textile economies of Western

India and Gujarat. His analysis of the cycles of the craft economy over

this long period charts not the great decline of the textile economy, but a

resurgence of small producer capitalism. He argues a case for the rise

of ‘weaver capitalism’ in small manufacturing centres; the old handloom

towns renewed their cloth manufacture with small producers using

electric power. A small-scale power loom industry in karkhanas or

workshops with multiple looms radically changed a textile economy

which by the 1930s was dominated by the disjuncture of large-scale mills

and declining handloom manufacture. From the 1940s the karkhanas

diversified their output, adopted electric or oil power and power looms,

and explored their capacities for flexible specialization. They sought

plant and equipment in Japan and Belgium, built new dyeworks and

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developed innovative product lines. At the end of the twentieth century

Western India’s small weaving towns became large urban

agglomerations with millions of looms, the cloth manufacture located in

tight enclaves. The resurgent cycles of small producer capitalism over

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had deep historical roots in a

wide Indian Ocean and global trade, and in versions of the mixed

workshop and family economy embedded in networks of middlemen and

sub-contractors in eighteenth-century Surat and other textile towns of

Gujarat.20

8. Methodologies

Haynes’ investigation of the industrial cycles and recent economic

development of the textile manufacture of Western India relies on many

local gazetteers, reports and industrial surveys. It also relies on over

200 interviews with artisans, workers, merchants, industrialists and

industry experts. Interviews and oral histories also provide a way to

connect the globalized world the crafts and small industries now inhabit

with that eighteenth-century world of Indian Ocean and global trade in

luxury goods. Interviews and oral histories take us into the methods of

archaeologists, some of whom see themselves practicing ‘ethno-

archaeology’; others simply seeking another way of accessing local

material cultures and technologies. Archaeologists have used analogical

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reasoning observing and interrogating living communities in the regions

where they seek to reconstruct material cultures of pre-historic

production centres. Archaeo-botanist, Martin Jones, Professor of

archaeology in Cambridge is currently researching the globalization of

grain crops: wheat, millet, and barley between Southwest Asia and

China, and others between South Asia and Africa by the 2nd millennium

BC. He combines archaeological digs in Kazakhstan with interviews with

local hill farmers on their memories of technologies before and after

collectivization.

I follow similar methodologies to understand production processes

for global markets in eighteenth-century Kachchh and Gujarat by

interrogating those processes today. The methodologies of oral history

also have another purpose: with digital technologies they can be

archived in a virtual museum on a website accessible to the peoples of

Kachchh and to world museums, the Ashmolean, the V&A, and the

Chhatrapati Shivaji[Prince of Wales] Museum in Mumbai among others.

The crafts and small producer sectors of Kachchh are a part of a

new story of global history and craft production. As in other parts of

India, producers there faced a decline in traditional domestic markets

with the competition of factory goods, synthetic fabrics, screen printed

prints and mass produced bandhani.21 The state and NGOs have played

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a part, especially since the 1980s, in building infrastructure, information

exchange, and business aid as well as a programme of national

craftsman awards and support for travel to international exhibitions.

My research in the area has given me some sense of the great

difficulty in accessing these goods for world trade during the early

modern period. Bhuj is 865 kilometres from Mumbai, now a 14 hour

train journey; there is an airport, and it is a two hour flight from Mumbai.

There was no road system until the Indo-Pakistan wars between 1965

and 1971; prior to this much of the transport was by ox and camel cart,

and some buses on very limited roads.22 The railroad was extended to

part of the region at the beginning of the 20th Century, 36.5 miles of track

from the coast (Tuna) to Bhuj; by 1951 this had extended to 72 miles.23

Even now the 60 km from Bhuj to Mandvi is a slow journey along twisty

roads not infrequently interrupted by herds of cattle or goats. Yet in the

eighteenth century fine European mirrors, glass and china ware were

brought via Mandvi over this land area to the royal court of Rao Lakhpatji

at Aina Mahal in Bhuj, and the fine manufactures of Kachchh were

traded out from there and other ports on its coast.

The seventry artisans and their families interviewed during the past

six months show deeply-embedded craft communities, some going back

many generations, but several with fluid work histories, with some

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generations or parts of families leaving the craft, and subsequently

returning. Many tell migration stories from other parts of Gujarat, from

Rajasthan and from Sindh. They show a number coming from farming

backgrounds, or continuing to combine their work as artisans with

farming or coolie work. They show us high levels of specialization and

division of labour, and adaptation to new materials and technologies.

High success rates in international markets for some contrast with

extreme struggles for survival among others. Even within the most

successful businesses craftsmanship sits with low wages and alienated

labour. The resilience of this craft node relies on its local as well as its

global markets; producing the quality luxury goods adapted to the

designs of world trade provides a possible competitive edge. Continuing

to produce for the local sumptuary codes of the tribal people and local

communities also means an anchor in local markets, but these are

under threat from the impact on rural communities of recent land sales

and industrial development, and of cheaper imitative fabrics brought

from elsewhere.

Among the most successful of these artisans are the ajrakh

printing artisans from the villages of Ajrakhpur and Damadka near Bhuj,

and a group of woollen and cotton weavers from the village of Sarli.

Both are well-integrated with international markets and exhibitions,

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national award schemes, NGOs and design institutes. The Khatri family

of printers sell to Maiwa in Canada, to Fab India, a social enterprise

company in which L Capital, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy now has an

8% stake, and to many other international buyers through exhibitions.

The weavers get bulk orders from exhibitions and sell to Malaysia,

Brazil, Milan, Paris, London, Colombo and Singapore. Some trade

through a large wholesaler, Kantibai, or agents from Mumbai and Delhi.

Both also continue to supply traditional local tribal markets, the Rabari,

Ahir and Patel communities. The Khatris of Damadkha date their

residence back to migration from Sindh in the sixteenth century. Some of

the older weavers of Sarli and Bhojodi date their families’ work in the

craft back four generations; others have entered more recently out of

farming communities, and some migrated in generations past from

Rajasthan.24Bandhani, or tie dye, practiced for many generations across

Kachchh, provides the sumptuary codes of many communities,

especially for marriages, and also now for wide national and international

markets. Centres in Mandvi, Mundra and Bhuj supply the Kadarbhai

firm; the finest work goes to international exhibitions, NGOs and buyers

such as Maiwa. Some families have returned to the craft after some

generations in other occupations, and women practice it as part of the

daily routines of their lives.25

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The Batik craftspeople of Mundra date their artisan practice back

five generations; they have taken part in the design courses run by one

of the NGOs, supply the wholesaler Kantibhai and Fab India, but they

have not accessed foreign markets. Access to international and wider

national markets is key to craftspeople in the region, especially in cases

where there have been recent dislocations in local markets. Those

struggling include very highly skilled specialist crafts such as Mochi

embroiderers and the Rogan workers; the high levels of skills involved

and length of time each piece of work takes requires access to specialist

high value international markets.26 Those experiencing much greater

difficulty are those who have little access to these markets, such as the

cutlers of Reha who have also worked for generations in their trade,

selling their knives through agents taking them to local markets

throughout Gujarat. Their fine swords appear in international exhibitions

and sell for ceremonial use in Kachchh and the Punjab.27

International markets, NGOs and government schemes have

created opportunities in this craft sector for many small businesses.

They are like the later twentieth-century weaver capitalists described by

Douglas Haynes. But all of these crafts contain a division of labour

either within families, or by deploying groups of labourers specialised to

one task. Unless connected through business or family to sources of

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capital they are wage and piece workers confined to one task. The

women working in bandhani tie and dye and batik workers never learn

the exclusive skills of dyeing. The ajrakh printers pound their blocks,

never missing an alignment day in and day out for years to come from

the age of 10 or 12. A washer, Haddu Babubhai has spent 25 or 30

years in the washing vats, making all the hidden colour sparkle to the

surface.28. All the processes of cutlery making are divided into seven or

more separate processes, workshop by workshop; Abdul Rashid has

made wooden handles for knives for 35 years. Women are closely

engaged in many family crafts, in mochi work, bell making, and weaving,

and more recently in rogan and batik work.

Haynes found new opportunities opened by technological change

as well as the well-known histories of the decline of the handloom sector.

Technology has brought diverse experiences to the craftspeople of

Kachchh in the later twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The

weavers have adopted the hand fly shuttle over the past forty years, and

have greatly increased their productivity. Shamji and Ramji Visram Siju,

weavers of Bhojodi improved their markets by shifting during the 1960s

to a softer weave, but were deeply affected from 1995 by competition

from power loom cloth from the Punjab which flooded their markets.

Cutlers have kept their ancient forging technologies, but have adapted

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all their processes to small electrical motors. Printers and batik workers

debate the impact of chemical and natural dyes. Chemical dyes

introduced into ajrakh printing in the 1960s met local demands for

brighter colours, but high quality international market demanded a return

to natural dyes, and investment in training and skills in the use of natural

dyes. The focus of international customers on natural dyes has closed

off markets for batik workers who cannot yet adapt their techniques to

these dyes.

Interviews and oral histories among the craftspeople of Kachchh

today convey to us a world of high quality goods produced within strong

craft communities and providing both goods for local sumptuary and

everyday use in the region and products for globalized markets. The

region provides a unique setting for investigating the impact of

globalization and new technologies on embedded craft skills. The deep

history of this craft economy also makes it a place for the use of

analogies between the present and the past. The things carried out of

the region as fine art objects by merchants and the East India Company

into Europe’s domestic interiors and later museums were most likely

made in small village workshops or in outwork or proto-industrial

settings. We can suggest that craft work, then as now, was a divided

process involving merchants and master craftsmen/designers and a

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range of specialized labourers, uneducated and with no access to the

capital that might raise them in time to master craftsmen themselves.

The descriptions we do have left by eighteenth-century travellers convey

as much. But the context and elaborations of those divisions are

different. The opportunities and challenges of new national and global

markets now are helping some; others seek these. But the historical

parallel we see is a remote part of the world with highly localized skills

and knowledge which have survived and been passed on in this and

closely adjacent areas from ancient times, and an area which was also

intensely connected through its ports to global trade networks that took

its textiles at least to wide world markets. Through these trade networks

localized knowledge embedded in fine craft products had an enduring

impact on the material cultures of widely diverse parts of the globe.

1 Eiluned Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, (London and Ahmedabad), pp. 118-22.2 Interview with Neelam Khanna, Mandvi, Kachchh, 16 Feb. 20123 See the discussion of local and global in A.T.Gerritsen, ‘Local Production of Ceramics and the Writing of Global History’, Unpublished paper, 2012; A.T. Gerritsen, ‘Scales of a Local: the Place of Locality in a Globalizing World’ in Douglas Northroped, A Companion to World History (Oxford, 2012); Also see Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities, London: Sage Publications, 1995, pp. 25-44; Arjun Appadurai, ‘How Histories make Geographies: Circulation and Context in Global Perspective’, Transcultural Studies 1, 2010, pp. 4-13.4 Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty. Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility (London, 2007), p. 39.5 Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution:Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy (Cambridge, 2008); Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods,’ Past and Present, 182 (2004), pp. 85-142.6 Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New Haven, 2010)7 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, 1966); Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy; Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London, 2008).8 Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy.9 Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York, Palgrave, 2009); Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty. Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility (London, Routledge, 2007), pp 136-144.10 See Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘The History of Indian Economic History’, 11 See Morris D. Morris, ‘Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History,2, IESHR, 5 (1968), pp. 1-15; Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘A Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History?’ IESHR, 5 (1968), pp. 77-100; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ‘De-industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications,’ The Journal of Development Studies, 12 (1976), pp. 135-164; Colin Simmons, ‘”De-industrialzation,” Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1947,’ Modern Asian Studies 19 (1985), pp. 593-622.12 Order Lists of the English East India Company: E/3096/18, IOR, BL. Derived from Europe’s Asian Century EIC trade database, unpublished.13 Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘Exploring the Gulf of Kachh’, pp. 462, 466,468-9,478-9.14 Azhar Tyabji, Bhuj. Art, Architecture, History (Mumbai, 2006), pp. 9-16.

15 L.F. Rushbrook Williams, The Black Hills. Kutch in History and Legend (London, 1958), pp. 136-147; Tyabji, Bhuj, pp. 34-35.16 Christopher London, The Arts of Kutch (Mumbai, 2000).17 Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, pp. 28-30; Eiluned Edwards, ‘Contemporary Production and Transmission of Resist-dyed and Block-printed Textiles in Kachchh District, Gujarat’, Textile, 3, pp. 166-189, p. 170.18 Roy, Traditional Industry, pp. 3-6, 232-5.19 Ibid., p. 7.20 Ibid., pp. 24-36.21 Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, pp. 126-7.22 Edwards, ‘Contemporary Production and Transmission’, pp. 170-1.23 Wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutch_Gujar_kshatriyas_contributions_to_the_Indian_railways; Wikipedia.ord/wiki/Cutch_State_Railway. Consulted 23 September, 2012.24 Interviews with Ismail Khatri, Ajrakhpur, 15 Feb., 2012; Kantilal Vankar, Sarli, 26 May, 2012; Shamjibhai Visram Siju(Vankar), Bhodjodi, 27 May, 2012 25 Interview with Hanifa Yusuf Sumra and Jamila Ramju Sumra, and Hawabai Sumra, Mandvi, 16 Feb. 2012; Interviews with Abdullah and Mohmedhusain Khatri, 3 July, 2011.26 Interview with Kasam and Juma Adham Sangar, Mandvi, 26 May, 2012; Interview with Sumar Daud Khatri and Abdul Gafur Khatri, Nirona, 26 May, 2012.27 Interviews with Abdul Rashid, Mustaq and Suleman, 17 Feb., 2012.28 Interviews with Imtiaz Araby Khatri and Haddu Babubhai, Ajrakhpur, 27 Feb. 2012; Interviews with Shakeel Mohammed Qasim Khatri, Mundra,