Crafts and Cultural Change in Modern India, 1851--1922

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DEVELOPING TRADITIONS:

CRAFTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN MODERN INDIA, 1851-1922

Abigail McGowan

A DISSERTATION

in

History

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2003

OJfsO.Supervisor of Dissertation

/ / AGraduate Group Chairperson


UMI Number: 3087431

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been lucky, while writing this dissertation, to draw on the warmth, support,

and intellectual vigor of a wide range of people. Without them, this project would never

have been possible. Countless formal and informal conversations with mentors and

colleagues have helped me develop my ideas, sharpening some arguments and forcing me

to give up others. Just as importantly, the unflinching support provided by friends and

family have helped me survive the process intact, often even in good humor. I thank all

for their encouragement and interest.

The research for this dissertation was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral

Dissertation Research Abroad grant. I also thank the American Institute of Indian Studies

for their offer of dissertation research funds, which, in the end, I did not need. During my

writing I was supported by an A.W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship through the History

Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Chimincles Writing Fellowship, also

at Penn. During my research in India, London, and the U.S., I have drawn on the

resources of many libraries and archives. I am grateful to the staff and authorities at the

following institutions for generously providing me access to their collections and

assisting me in my research: Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay; Mumbai University

Library, Fort campus; Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune; B. J. Oriental

Institute, Ahmedabad; Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Ahmedabad; Gujarat University, Ahmedabad;

Calico Museum, Ahmedabad; National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad; Sandesh,

Ahmedabad; Baroda Public Records Office, Baroda; National Archives of India, New

Delhi; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; India Office Library and

ii


Records, London; Houghton Library, Harvard University; and the University of

Pennsylvania.

Along the way I have benefited from conversations with scholars working on

similar areas and/or issues, including Susan Bean, Timothy Burke, Ashoke Chatteijee,

Judy Frater, Jyotindra Jain, Don Johnson, Manjiri Kamat, Mani Kamerkar, Michelle

Maskiel, Shirin and Makrand Mehta, and Mridula Ramanna. Tirthankar Roy, who served

as my advisor in India during my dissertation research, was particularly valuable in

grounding my cultural questions in economic history, and pointing out the useful areas of

intersection between those two areas. Douglas Haynes has been a most engaged and

supportive reader, generously sharing his own work and ideas just when they have meant

the most. At Penn, David Ludden has served as an inspired example of critical

engagement with South Asian history. Lynn Lees has provided unflagging support and

encouragement, with detailed comments on drafts and a steady supply of good fiction.

Finally, both while at Penn and then now that she has moved off to other things, Sumathi

Ramaswamy has made crucial interventions in ideas, proposals, conference papers and

drafts, all of which have refined and sharpened my thinking tremendously. Thanks to all.

Just as important as the scholars I have worked with are the friends I have made

and learned from along the way. In India I was sustained by the generous hospitality of

Arvind Bhandari, Meena Chandavarkar, Ramesh and Shailaja Chandra, Anjali Ghate,

Doug and Lucia Gurung, Mridula Ramanna, Mani Kamerkar, Sunil Mehra and Sudha

Mehta. Thanks to the Dhruv family in Ahmedabad for their ready and constant welcome,

with particular thanks to Janaki Druv for being both a wonderful friend and a font of

iii


knowledge on all manner of things related to Indian textiles, crafts, Gujarati history and

culture. As always, I am grateful to Raju, Swati, Ranjana, Jaideep and Kalyani

Kumbhare in Pune for providing me a home away from home for more than a decade.

Finally, thanks to Liann and Andrew Eden for opening their home to me in London.

In India and in Philadelphia, a core group of friends have kept me going

throughout various crises and accomplishments, periods of intense work and others of

total inactivity. Shefali Chandra, Ian Petrie, Yanna Yannakakis, Aiden Downey, Lorrin

Thomas and Daniel Hartzog have challenged, supported, entertained and diverted me

throughout my entire graduate career: I literally cannot imagine what Penn or I would

have been like without them. Sue Dickman and Eiluned Edwards have always appeared

just when I needed a holiday, a good cup of tea, or just a long talk, wherever I seem to be

in the world. Thanks to Paulina Alberto, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Dan Shah, Alison

Mackenzie and Saadia Toor for their friendship and encouragement, and to Kian and

Anya Shah and Marianna Downey for reminding me to not take work too seriously.

Finally, my family has been wonderful throughout my graduate career, forever

trusting that I could and would exceed their already high expectations. I thank them all

for their support and love, now and always. My mother, Mary McGowan, willingly

listened to the seemingly endless trials of graduate school, stepping in to provide moral

support and sound advice whenever needed. My sister Molly McGowan and my aunt

Frances Strayer have kept me true to myself, while also encouraging me to be whatever I

wanted to be. Finally, thanks to Aaron Bloomfield for appearing on the scene.

iv


ABSTRACT

Developing Traditions: Crafts and Cultural Change in Western India, 1851-1922

Abigail McGowan

Dissertation Supervisor: David Ludden

This dissertation explores the historical creation of craft traditions in late 19th

and early 20th century Western India. In this period, crafts became central to both

critiques of British rule in South Asia and colonial proposals for how to modernize the

subcontinent. What, exactly, had happened to crafts under colonial rule and what could

be done to save them for national development: these were questions which became

intricately involved in attempts to define Indian heritage, whether in imperial or

nationalist terms. Examining exhibitions, schools, craft factories and stores which tried

to reshape traditional crafts, I argue that crafts provided the context for often furious

debates over the nature of Indian society, the direction of the Indian economy, and the

need for a national culture in the face of rapidly changing tastes. Specifically, I examine

four areas in which change was most evident in crafts: design, techniques of production,

organization of production, and consumption. Through efforts in these areas, concerned

outsidersboth British and Indiandrew together disparate practices and products into a

single category of crafts, marked less by qualities inherent in objects themselves than by

a distinctive relationship between artisanal labor and specific goods. The category

crafts did not exist in actual fact: it was discursively and materially produced through

attempts to define and shape objects and practices. Once produced, however, it had real

v


power. Discursively, crafts had an important role in shaping nationalist arguments about

Indian deindustrialization under colonial rule. More materially, the category of crafts

influenced economic planning, driving and dividing development agendas to this day. By

tracing the cultural creation of an economic categorycraftsthis dissertation aims to

draw new connections between economic and cultural history. Such connections not only

help to explain the colonial-era attention to traditional crafts alongside more pressing

concerns with modem industrialization. They also provide help to contextualize

Mohandas Gandhis influential khadi campaigns of the 1920scampaigns which, for all

their striking innovations, were built on cultural and economic understandings of the

crafts question built up over the previous seventy years.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements........................................................................................... ii

Abstract........................................................................................................... v

List of Illustrations......................................................................................... viii

G lossary..................................................................................................... xi

Introduction.................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One. Design: Crafts as Culture..................................................... 37

Chapter Two. Techniques and Methods: Crafts as Labor......................... I l l

Chapter Three. The Organization of Production: Crafts as Economy 187

Chapter Four. Consumption: Crafts as Culture Revisited......................... 256

Conclusion: Gandhi and the Category of Crafts......................................... 342

Bibliography............................................................................................... 374

Illustrations................................................................................................. 395


ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate Page

1. Wooden copy of the pierced stone screen in the Siddi Sayyid mosque,Ahmedabad...................................................................................................... 395

2. India Court at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London.................................... 395

3. Illustrations of Indian design in Owen Jones The Grammar o f Ornament. 396

4. Illustrations of Indian design in Matthew Digby Wyatts The IndustrialArts o f the Nineteenth Century...................................................................... 396

5. Indian Court at the 1889 Paris Exhibition...................................................... 397

6. Carved wooden house front............................................................................. 397

7. Private upper-class Indian bungalow, Ahmedabad, c. 1890....................... 398

8. Ahmedabad Stock Exchange, c. 1910.......................................................... 398

9. Small inlaid Surat boxes, sent to the Delhi Durbar Exhibition, 1903 ......... 399

10. Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company teak desk, c. 1885 ............................ 399

11. JJ School o f Art, Bombay, main building.................................................... 400

12. Kala Bhavan, Baroda, main building.......................................................... 400

13. Traditional Sindi potter throwing pots, JJ School of Arts, c. 1890.............. 401

14. JJ School student, decorating vase in the Sindi style, c. 1890.................... 401

15. Sindi style pottery made by students in the JJ School................................ 402

16. Wrought-iron gates, made at the JJ School of Arts, Bombay...................... 402

17. Detail from the Bombay university library building..................................... 402

18. Crawford Market friezes, made by students at the JJ School...................... 403

19. Two Ajanta-style vases made by students at the JJ School, c. 1886.............. 403


20. Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company teak bench........................................ 404

21. Block printer at w o rk .................................................................................... 404

22. Costumes illustrated in John Forbes Watsons The Textile Manufacturesand the Costumes o f the People o f India ..................................................... 405

23. Sindi pottery illustrated in George Birdwoods The Industrial Arts o f India 405

24. Workers grinding powders, making solutions, and weighing ingredientsfor dyes, 1907 .............................................................................................. 406

25. Workers beating dyed material with heavy mallets, 1907............................ 406

26. Indian section, South Kensington Museum, London.................................. 407

27. Full case of artisanal figurines at the V & A, Bombay................................ 407

28. Detail, embroiderers at work, V & A, Bombay.......................................... 407

29. Detail, potters at work, V & A, Bombay.................................................... 407

30. Hand rolling, j a r i ......................................................................................... 408

31. Machine rolling, ja r i ..................................................................................... 408

32. Cartoon from the Hindi Punch, February 1905 ........................................... 409

33. Cartoon from the Hindi Punch, October 1904 ............................................. 409

34. Industrial Mission School, Ahmednagar....................................................... 410

35. Students working in the foundry, Parack School of Art, Surat..................... 410

36. Carpet weaving at the Mission School, Ahmednagar................................... 411

37. Design samples from the AWCC: three single wood panels.................... 411

38. Design samples from the AWCC: wood paneling strips.......................... 412

39. Design samples from the AWCC: wood columns.................................... 412

40. AWCC wall bracket, c. 1885 .................................................................... 413

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41. AWCC picture frame, c. 1885....................................................................... 413

42. AWCC cabinet, c. 1884.................................................................................. 413

43. de Forest home, exterior view........................................................................ 414

44. de Forest home, interior view........................................................................ 414

45. de Forest home, interior view........................................................................ 414

46. Crawford Market........................................................................................... 415

47. The Bombay Room, Delhi Durbar Exhibition, 1903 .................................... 415

48. Kutchi silver vase, given as an example of bad design................................ 416

49. Kutchi silver vase, given as an example of good design.............................. 416

50. Interior, Victoria and Albert M useum ........................................................ 417

51. Pottery from the JJ School, on display at the V&A.................................... 417

52. Indian art industries booth, British Industries Exhibition, London, 1922 . . 417

53. Cartoon from the Hindi Punch, November 6,1904.................................... 418

54. Logo of the Bombay Swadeshi Cooperative Stores.................................... 418

55. Advertisement for the Indian General Stores, Madras............................. 419

56. Advertisement for Khatau Makanji Mills, Bombay..................................... 419

57. Advertisement for Youth Soap, Bombay Soap Factory, Bombay 419

58. Khadi school at the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad................................... 420

59. Cartoon from the Hindi Punch, October 1921 ............................................. 420

x


GLOSSARY

Ari bharat. A style of embroidery based entirely on the chain-stitch, worked with a small awl: the style was very popular in the court of Kutch, and was usually done on fine silks

Bandhani. Tie-and-dyed fabric, usually in cotton or silk, generally with designs made out of a series of small dots arranged in patterns. Designs are made by wrapping small dots in fine thread, thereby providing a resist to the dye when dipped in a dye bath; the cloth starts white, so any dots tied on that initial cloth would remain white. Further colors could be preserved by retying after the initial dyeing, thereby preserving the first color (after white) from subsequent dye baths. Traditionally the dominant colors would be some combination of white, red, yellow, green and black, with white, red and black predominating.

Chambhars. A caste name, usually indicating leather workers.

Charkha. Traditional spinning wheel favored by Gandhi.

Charpoy. Rough cot of string on a wooden frame.

Jari. 1. Embroidery done with cotton thread that has been wrapped in wire: traditionally the wire was gold or silver, but cheaper metals are now more commonly used. 2. The production of the metal-wrapped thread.

Karkhana. Small workshop or factory.

Karkhandar. A workshop or small factory owner.

Khadi. Handspun, handwoven cloth.

Kinkhab. A silk fabric woven with patterns made of either gold or silver thread.

Mahajan. Traders or merchants association, on which artisans guilds hadrepresentation; charged with resolving business disputes between guilds, setting terms of business practice.

Mashru. A distinctive silk-cotton fabric, woven so that the silk is on the surface, while the cotton rests on the skin.

Mistri. Master artisan, or skilled workman more generally.

Patara. Large, decorated wooden dowry boxes particular to Kathiawad.

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Patola. A very expensive, double ikat silk in which color is applied by resist dyeing the yam: traditionally made in Patan and Surat.

Phulkari. Literally flower-work: embroidery done by women in the Punjab, usually done on veil cloths. Work is done from the back of the fabric generally in a flat, satin stitch, often filling the whole ground of the design.

Sowkar. Merchant-moneylender who not only controlled the sale and distribution of goods, but also organized production, often supervising artisans directly.

Swadeshi. Literally, of ones own country; generally refers to the movement to increase the production and use of Indian goods and the overall development of Indian industry, which began in the 1870s and 1880s in Western India and took off as a national movement as part of the agitation against the proposed partition of Bengal in the early 1900s.

xii


INTRODUCTION

This dissertation traces how and why crafts came to be such a pressing cultural

and political concern in India at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. In

this period, crafts became central to both critiques of British rule in South Asia and

nationalist and colonial proposals for how to modernize the subcontinent. What, exactly,

had happened to crafts under colonial rule and what could be done to save them for

national cultural and economic development were questions which became intricately

involved in attempts to define Indian identity and heritage, whether in imperial or

nationalist terms. Building on specific attempts to reshape traditional crafts in western

India, I explore the connections between economics and culture. Specifically, I argue

that crafts provided a central means by which both British and Indian elites tried to come

to terms with economic and cultural change under colonial rule.

That they did so is somewhat surprising. Why did crafts, which the British used

to demonstrate the backwardness of the subcontinent, come to be at the heart of the

nationalist movementa movement which strove to put Indians on equal terms with their

colonial rulers? Why, in a period of intense competition to replicate the industrial

achievements of the West in the colonial world, did Indian nationalists so thoroughly

embrace craftsthe very opposite of modem industry? In suggesting some answers to

those questions, I demonstrate how crafts became a way to articulate different visions for

the future of Indian economy, society and culture.

For centuries, crafts have been central to the representation and identity of India.

In the early centuries of the Common Era, the fine goods of the subcontinent were

l


famous as far away as Rome and Egypt, with significant exports flowing to those areas.

In the seventeenth century, Indian cottons so dominated world markets that many

European nations either banned or imposed significant tariffs on Indian goods in order to

protect their own textile industries. By the late 19th century, however, those same crafts

had lost much of their international markets, while Indian markets were being flooded

with a whole range of new things from outside. The perceived decline of crafts in the

face of such imports became a major subject of elite concern from the 1870s on. Part of

the reason for that concern was economic: then and now, crafts represent a huge sector of

overall employment in the subcontinent. As of 1900, for instance, crafts made up more

than 95 percent of Indian industrial employment, and were the largest single area of

employment after agriculture.1 Declining exports and rising imports seemed to threaten

that huge work force. Economically, then, with so much production located in artisanal

industries, any attempt to develop productive capabilities or reduce Indias reliance on

imports had to take crafts seriously.

But the importance of crafts was never just economic. Politically, Indian

nationalists made the perceived decline of crafts central to their fight against the British.

Indeed, one of the key critiques Indian nationalists made from the 1870s on was that

colonial rule had destroyed the traditional craft industries for which the subcontinent had

always been famous. The swadeshi2 movement in the early 1900s used this critique to

1 Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy o f Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6.2 Literally o f ones own country; generally refers to the movement to increase the production and use of Indian goods and the overall development o f Indian industry, which began in the 1870s and 1880s in western India and took off as a national movement as part of the agitation against the proposed partition of Bengal in the early 1900s.

2


politicize production and consumption of a range of everyday goods. Even more

successfully, in the early 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi took that argument as the basis for a

massive, popular effort to revive traditional hand-spun, hand-woven khadi cloth.

Mobilizing millions to create and wear khadi, he used handcrafitsmanship to express both

resistance to British rule and faith in the possibility of a new India.

That political argument was effective in part because the wealth of knowledge and

abilities embodied in crafts had come to be defined as a key component of Indian culture.

By the end of the 19th century if not earlier, crafts had become Indian heritage and Indian

tradition, to be preserved in the face of the twin evils of modernization and

Westernization. That equation of crafts with culture becomes clear in official

representations of India abroad: from the mid-19th century to today international

exhibitions prominently feature crafts as part of the traditional cultural heritage of India.3

But for all of the self-evident economic, political and cultural importance of

crafts, the category of crafts is not a natural one. What binds crafts together as one set

of goods? On a material, physical level, nothing: brass vessels, Kashmiri shawls and

carved wooden balconies, for instance, use different materials, require different skills and

working techniques, and serve very different purposes. Or, to look at it from the opposite

side, in functional terms, nothing separates a hand-woven, intricately patterned silk

patola4 sari from a machine-printed polyester one: both share the same designs and

colors, and are worn in the same style. What, then, connects some things and separates

3 For a discussion o f the centrality o f crafts to the first major international exhibition, the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London, see chapter one. For a more recent example, see: Aditi: The Living Arts o f India. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Insitution Press, 1984.

3


off others? Within the category of crafts, in these examples at least, the answer is hand-

labor, the absence of heavy machinery, and adherence to some sort of traditional designs.

By the 1920s, these connections on the basis of labor, techniques and design had

begun to seem natural. Most peopleBritish and Indian, official and nationalistagreed

that a category of crafts did exist, even if they disagreed on what the precise boundaries

of that category were. How did that happen? I argue that the category of crafts only

emerges in the period 1851 to 1922. In that time, concerned outsidersboth British and

Indiantried to shape the direction of changes then underway in traditional artisanal

industries. Taken together, their efforts drew together disparate practices and products

into a single category of crafts, marked less by qualities inherent in the goods themselves

than by a distinctive relationship between artisanal labor and specific products. As

suggested above, the category crafts did not exist in actual fact: instead, it was

discursively and materially produced through a series of attempts to shape objects and

practices. And it was produced in strikingly similar ways by both British officials and

Indian nationalists, despite their different visions of Indias future.

Crafts provided the context for often furious debates over the nature of Indian

society, the direction of the Indian economy, and the need for a national culture in the

face of rapidly changing tastes and practices. Working through those debates, I trace the

creation of the category of crafts through four main areas: design, techniques and

methods, organization of production, and consumption. Through a series of interventions

in these areas, Indian nationalists and British officials alike tried to come to terms

4 A very expensive, double ikat silk in which color is applied by resist dyeing the warp and weft yam:

4


withand themselves helped to definetraditional aesthetics, caste society, industrial

organization and modem consumption. Crafts thus became central to emerging ideas of

Indian national culture and identity.

In this dissertation I look at how such conversations about the nations future

were forged in and around local institutions and groups particular to western India. It is

in this sense that this is both a national and a regional story. Viewed one way, this is a

national story particular to a specific region. As an area of both relatively advanced

modem industrial growth and particularly vibrant traditions of artisanal production,

debates over how crafts fit into the countrys social and economic future had particular

salience in western India. Those regional conditions in turn helped to shape the way that

local elites articulated the problem crafts posed at a national level. Indeed, the particular

industrial context of the region shaped the type of nationalism which emerged in western

Indiaone which was centrally concerned with economic issues. And yet, for all that

this is a national story with regional roots, this is also a regional story with national

ambitions. For, when educators opened industrial schools, entrepreneurs opened craft

factories, and researchers experimented with new artisanal technologies in the cities and

towns of western India, they did so with the idea that their efforts would improve crafts

elsewhere in British and princely India. Such efforts participated in a wider debate about

crafts, trying to use local achievements to shape national goals. In the end, the question

of crafts emerges in the interplay between the region and the nation; it is in the sense of

traditionally made in Patan and Surat in western India.

5


that interplay that I use institutions and conversations in western India to speak to

changes in South Asia more widely.

In particular, the emergence of crafts as a singular cultural and economic category

in western India helps to illustrate two larger processes of social and cultural change

underway in this period. First, I trace a shift in access to and control over knowledgein

this case the expansion of knowledge about crafts to non-artisanal groups and the

subsequent reformulation of that knowledge in universalistic terms of design, economics,

and nationalism, among other things. Second, I use crafts as a way to see the extension

of modem disciplinary projects onto the non-elite bodies of artisanal producers and

consumersbodies whose unruly caste, cultural and community specificities were to be

regularized and reoriented towards the productive, progressive needs of the Indian state.

Both cases point to both the power and the limitations of the colonial state in South Asia.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by wide-ranging colonial

attempts to gather and codify native knowledge, whether of caste, religious practices, or

social customs. Crafts were one such object of investigation. During the period of my

study non-artisanal groups dramatically expanded their knowledge of what and how

things were made, and for whom. Colonial officials, industrial reformers, nationalist

activists, educators, missionaries and urban consumers in India and abroad learned more

and more about crafts, through exhibitions, economic museums, industrial surveys, and

publications of all kinds. In most cases this was less an expansion of knowledge in an

absolute sense than a shift in power over that knowledge. Formerly the details of craft

production techniques and the organization of crafts industries had been controlled by

6


specialistsi.e. either by artisans themselves or by merchants involved in the distribution

of crafts. With increasing possibilities for delving deeper into local societies and

communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those details were opened up to new

audiences.

That shift in knowledge enabled new attempts to control craft production in the

name of things like good design, science and rationality, the national economy, better

markets, etc. In design, for instance, art school principals and other crafts enthusiasts

carefully collected different examples of carpets from private collections, museums, and

individual producers to create compendia of authentically Indian designs.5 In

publications of those collections, they rendered individual examples into representative

types on the one hand, and reduced those which deviated from type to the status of

inferior derivatives on the other. The aim was that such judgements would provide

artisans and consumers alike the grounds from which to properly evaluate good or bad

design.

It was in this and other ways that colonial projects to codify native knowledge

did more than just passively record information. As David Ludden and others have

noted, colonial knowledge projects were productive: the orientalist knowledge resulting

from such projects helped to reformulate institutions at the heart of daily life, from caste

5 See, for example, Thomas Holbein Hendley, Asian Carpets: XVI and XVII Century Designs from the Jaipur Palaces from Material Supplied with Permission o f the Maharaja o f Jaipur and Other Sources (London: W. Griggs, 1905); H. J. R. Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice o f Carpet-Making in theBombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1907 [reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series o f Bombay Presidency (New Delhi: Navrang, 1976)]; and an untitled collection o f 18 plates o f famous Bijapur carpet designs distributed to art schools and museums by Cecil Bums, then principal o f the JJ School o f Arts, Bombay in the early 1900s. (See Government o f Bombay, Educational

7


to community, village to region.6 Acknowledging the power which lay behind and

operated through colonial knowledge efforts is not, however, the same as assuming that

that power was ever complete. Indeed, in the case of crafts it is important to note the

TQCwvmg failure of attempts to master artisanal knowledge. No matter how hard

investigators tried to pin down the particularities of craft practices, the totality of those

practices always slipped out grasp. Time after time, authors trying to write authoritative

accounts of particular crafts had to admit that their information was provisional and

partial, particular to some places and not to others. Even incomplete, however, colonial

knowledge was powerful. As this dissertation will show, in the case of crafts it shaped

patronage, technological innovations, and development initiatives.

The second wider cultural and social process which I trace in this dissertation, is

the extension of modem disciplinary projects onto non-elite bodies. For all the scholarly

attention to how colonialism affected an emerging middle class in South Asia, it is

important to note the ways in which the modem state reached out to other sections of the

population as well. Agriculturalists obviously bore the brunt of such interventions in this

period. But artisans received their share of modernizing initiatives as well. Given that

artisans represented the overwhelming majority of industrial producers at this time, the

state could hardly afford to ignore them. Colonial officials and nationalist reformers

Department Resolution No. 360, dated February 19,1907: Maharashtra State Archives (hereafter MSA), Educational Department (hereafter ED) 1907: v. 70, c. #227.)6 David Ludden, Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge, in Carol Breckenridgeand Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 250-278. See also: Bernard Cohn, The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia, in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224-254; and Nicholas Dirks, Castes o f Mind: Colonialism and the Making o f Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

8


were not content with describing the ways in which crafts producers made their goods:

they wanted to reorient those artisans to new working methods and forms of organization.

Thus industrial schools sought to re-educate artisanal bodies to more regular, rational,

and disciplined labor. Similarly, it was not enough to merely know how artisans

structured their production: outsiders tried to reformulate the social structures binding

production to free artisans from relationships of debt and dependence and bring them

more in line with standard forms of modem industrial organization.

In these ways, ordinary laboring bodies were the focus of new attempts to control

society. They were hardly alone in this. As scholars have shown in recent years, the

state tried to regulate and rationalize bodies in various ways. Alongside medical

interventions to control bodies in society at large, reformers focused on workers in

particular, whether agricultural, mill, mine or artisanal.7 All were to be subjected to study

and regulation, in the name of making these bodies modem and economically

progressive. For none of these types of workers were understood in abstraction from

their social and cultural location. Farmers, artisans and mill hands were all considered to

be improperly entangled in caste, community, and religious loyalties. Since their labor

was hidden in these social bodies, it was those social beings which had to be transformed.

In crafts, it was thus not enough to merely introduce new looms to weavers, or new

7 For medical control, see David Arnold, Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 391-426. For efforts to control laboring bodies, see Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770. The New Cambridge History o f India 111.2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics:Class, Resistance, and the State in India, c. 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Janaki Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (Walnut Creek,CA: Sage Publications, 1998).

9


rolling mills to jari workers: those workers had to be extracted from dominant caste and

community relationships and made productive in new ways for the technology to catch

hold. Emphasizing new ways of being in the world fulfilled a range of needs. For the

state, defining Indian society in resoundingly traditionalist terms of caste and community

went along with efforts to ensure that those divisions operated in concert with state needs.

On the Indian side, middle class and elite leaders defined the backwardness of laborers at

least in part to cement their own leadership role over such unruly followers.

Of the various attempts to control laboring bodies, those directed at reshaping

artisans in particular have received perhaps the least attention from scholars. This is

partially a question of the diffuse nature of craft production in colonial India. Unlike mill

workers or mine laborers, artisanal producers were not concentrated in single work

places, under single employers. Instead, they were divided up into many small

workshops and homes, into many small centers across the region, and into many different

industries: weaving vs. metal vs. wood vs. embroidery. Such divisions meant a diversity

of experiences which prevented large-scale strikes on the part of artisans on the one hand,

and discouraged state regulation of working conditions on the other. Just because

artisans were not subject to factory labor laws, however, does not mean that they were

free from state attention. Rather, that attention had to operate in other, less coordinated

ways, through education, technological initiatives, cooperative organizing, etc. It is

these, less obvious ways in which the state tried to control laboring bodies which are

discussed in this dissertation.

10


It is in my attention to power over knowledge, disciplinary projects, and other

areas that this is not just a story of crafts. Indeed, this dissertation speaks more broadly to

two main areas. First, I aim to reinsert the visual as a driving force in colonialism. As

Edward Said and many others have argued, colonialism as a cultural system of power

was built on a series of opposites: East vs. West, native vs. European, traditional vs.

modem, etc. Those oppositions were builtnot just textually or discursivelybut also

visually. I argue that those categories built up through visual means themselves had

material and social power. Specifically, the category of craftsinitially conceptualized

in visual termsitself shaped the possibilities for development efforts. That it did so for

both British officials and Indian nationalists suggests the many ways in which native

elites were invested in the orientalist constructions of Indian society, even as they fought

for political control over the subcontinent.8

Second, I try to draw new connections between economic and cultural history.

Much recent work has been done in African studies in particular on the ways that cultural

values inform the meaning of wages, money, and work, thereby demonstrating how core

economic categories are shaped by cultural context.9 The ways in which culture

influences the production and circulation of crafts is perhaps even more obvious than

8 For the role of orientalism in Indian nationalism, see Ludden, Orientalist Empiricism.9 See, for instance, Keletso Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins o f anAfrican Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993); John and Jean Comaroff, Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context, American Ethnologist, 17 (2), May 1990: 195-216; Jane Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History o f West African Communities (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995); and Sharon Hutchinson, The Cattle of Money and the Cattle o f Girls Among the Nuer, 1930-83, American Ethnologist, 19 (2), May 1992: 294-316.

11


with more abstract things like money. Demand for Indian crafts was never determined

solely by the presence or absence of cheaper industrial goods. Faced with new things

from the West, consumers did not inevitably reject Indian, artisanal things. Rather,

demand for new objects had to be created, through articulations of new desires. Cloth

provides a good example here. In the second half of the 19th century, medium quality

British cotton textiles won over Indian customers only in part because they were cheaper

than similar-count Indian handlooms; imported fabrics also captured wide markets

because of their bright colors and new designs. Price differentials do not tell us why

brighter colors should suddenly become desirable: for that we have to look to changing

ideas of beauty and fashionin other words, to more cultural explanations.

In this dissertation I explore such cultural explanations. But I try to do so in a

way that moves beyond analyzing why individuals make individual decisions. I argue

that culture operates in economics on more macro-economic levels as well, appearing not

just in the aggregates of a whole host of individual consumer decisions, but in how

macro-economic problems themselves are defined. For, fundamentally, this dissertation

traces the cultural creation of an economic category: one that continues to drive and

divide development planning in India today.

One way to see the connection between culture and economics is by using crafts

to historicize the emergence of 19th century debates over the deindustrialization of

Indiadebates whose factual veracity has been the subject of much research, but whose


origin and historical development has been largely ignored.10 Much recent research has

been done in economic history to argue that crafts did not decline under colonial rule as

nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th century had argued. Douglas Haynes and

Tirthankar Roy have been particularly influential here.11 What has not been done is to

address the related cultural question: why did nationalists develop their argument for

decline, if the facts did not support them?

I argue that the major Indian industrial debates of the late 19th and early 20th

century were forged around the idea that crafts were a distinct sector of Indian economy

and culture. Crafts did not just provide the evidence for deindustrialization, but helped

shape the form of the debate itself. Early concern with Indian crafts in the 1850s and

1860s focused almost exclusively on art crafts, identifying them as central to a singular,

pan-Indian traditional culture. Crafts were the quintessential Indian industries, then in

decline due to commercializing tendencies. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851,

for example, Kashmiri shawls, carved ivory boxes from Vizagapatam, blackwood

furniture from Bombay and brass vessels from Benares were all displayed together as

Indian goods, representative of the sum total of Indian manufactures.12 When the

10 For some of the major statements of this debate, see Marika Vicziany, The Deindustrialization of India in the Nineteenth Century, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 16 (2), 1979: 105-146; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, The Deindustrialization of India: A Reply, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 16 (2), 1979:147-161; and Colin Simmons. De-industrialization, Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1947, Modern Asian Studies, 19 (3), 1985: 593-622.11 See, for instance, Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy o f Colonial India', Roy, Artisans and Industrialization', and Haynes, The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and Technological Change in Western India, 1880-1947, in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173-205.12 For recent work on the Great Exhibition o f London in 1851 see Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition o f 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great

13


deindustrialization thesis was being formulated beginning in the 1870s, various writers

took up this idea of a single, unified category o f Indian crafts in decline. Significantly,

however, they altered the explanation for that decline to put the blame on British colonial

rule rather than Indian decadence. Even more importantly for the interventions in crafts

which followed, they also rejected the idea that crafts represented the ultimate endpoint

of Indian industrial development. Emphatically dividing crafts off from modem industry,

they argued that this visual category of crafts represented its own economic sector. That

vision shaped development initiatives, which aimed to preserve the distinctions between

crafts and modem industry, even when that went in the face of logical changes within

artisanal industries. In other words, the cultural creation of crafts as a category shaped

economic planning.

The scope of the study: definitional practices

One of the first problems in attempting to write a history of crafts is that of

definition. Where do crafts end, and other types of products begin? What distinguishes

artisans from other types of workers? As suggested above, the divisions between some

thingsreal silk, woven patola, vs. polyester, machine-printed patola, for instanceare

not necessarily visual ones. Or, from the other side, the commonalities linking together

objects across mediabrassware, shawls and wood carvingare not necessarily

material. Rather, the boundaries around a category of craft lie more in working practices

War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Lara Kriegel, Britain by Design: Industrial Culture, Imperial Display and the Making of South Kensington, 1835-1872, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 2000. For Indian exhibits in international exhibitions more generally, see also

14


and technologies. Thus, in common parlance, the terms craft and artisan seem to

imply a particular means and organization of production: crafts are objects made

predominantly (if not solely) by hand by skilled, independent workers.13

Although, as suggested above, the category of crafts emerges in naturalized form

by the 1920s, the boundaries of that category varied significantly during the period under

study. Three examples of different definitions in action should indicate the problems

with assuming otherwise. The first is drawn from the history of the Sir Jamsetjee

Jeejeebhoy School of Art (or the JJ School as it was and is still known), in

Bombaywhat came to be the pre-eminent art and craft school in western India. From

its founding in 1858 down to the 1930s, the school taught both ornamental crafts and

what are now considered fine arts. Within the crafts program, a wide range of subjects

were proposed over the years, ranging from gem cutting to tapestry weaving, glass

glazing, embroidery and house decoration. And yet, those crafts which actually made it

into the curriculum were only those things familiar to the region.14 When the crafts

program at the school expanded in 1890, for instance, six new ateliers taught enameling,

Carol A. Breckenridge, The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs, Comparative Studies o f Society and History, 31 (2), 1989:195-216.13 Ashoke Chatterjee, Challenges o f the Nineties: Product Development, Marketing and Service, A Report (Madras: Crafts Council of India, 1990).14 For various proposals, see: George Wilkens Terry, Assistant Superintendent of the JJ School, to Government of Bombay, April 21, 1864. MSA, General Department (hereafter GD) 1862-64: v. 15, c. #420:275-279; The Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art and Industry. MSA ED 1875: v. 16, c. #12: 305; K. M. Chatfield, Director of Public Instruction, to C. Gonne, Chief Secretary to Government, Educational Department, May 8,1880. MSA ED 1881: v. 27, c. #7:140; K. M. Chatfield, Director of Public Instruction, to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, October 16, 1888. MSA ED 1889: v. 45, c. #8: 142; John Griffiths, Superintendent o f the JJ School, to Director of Public Instruction, October 22, 1889. MSA ED 1889: v. 45, c. #8:237; Government of Bombay, Report of the Director of Public Instruction in the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1899-1900, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1900: lv; and E. Giles, Director of Public Instruction, Report on the Industrial Conference held in Bombay on 7th and 8th March 1904. MSA ED 1905: v. 70, c. #7: 36.

15


wood carving, silver and gold work, carpet weaving, brass work and copper work; except

carpets, all were crafts with deep historical roots in western India.15 The preference here

was both aesthetic and material: in the eyes of those in charge of the JJ school,

artisanship involved the creation of craft objects of traditional production and style.

Industrial reformers, both in and out of official government service, often

disagreed with this almost-exclusive emphasis on artistic objects. In light of industrial

concerns with increasing production overall, crafts were seen more as a means of

productionby hand with minimal toolsthan as a particular set of objects. In 1903, for

instance, the Government of India appointed the Clibbom commission to investigate how

education could better serve both traditional and modem industries. In their report,

Lieutenant-Colonel J. Clibbon and the other members of the commission rejected the

narrow vision of crafts as decorative arts in place at the JJ School and other art schools.

Instead, they called for a wider definition, in order to better use crafts to build the

economic capacity and resources of the country. Thus, as part of their recommendations,

they urged industrial schools to work with the crafts which provided employment to the

largest numbers of people: oil pressing, leather work, fishing, and pottery.16 Here crafts

seem to be defined almost exclusively as unmechanized, hand labor done in small scale

15 Although there was an historic tradition of tufted carpet weaving in and around the old Deccani sultanate capital of Bijapur, by the mid-W4 century only flat-woven carpets or dhurries were being produced in western India. Indeed, when the carpet weaving workshop opened at JJ school in 1890, the Principal of the JJ School, John Griffiths, reported that he had had to hire an instructor, one Immamudin Umaruddin, from the Punjab to teach the students. See John Griffiths to Director of Public Instruction, October 22, 1890. MSA ED 1890: v. 57, c. #766: 72.16 Clibbom et al., Report on Industrial Education: Part I (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903), 30.

16


settings outside of the realm of formal industrial development: whether specific objects

were produced or not was immaterial.

A third and more recent example of the problem of trying to define the boundaries

of crafts and artisanal labor can be seen in the special reports on handicrafts published as

part of the 1961 Census of India. In Gujarat, the Director of Census Operations, R. K.

Trivedi selected 31 local handicrafts in 103 different craft centers for special study. In

retrospect, some of Trivedis choices seem obvious, some not. Included on his list were

some of the most famous of the states local art manufactures: agates from Cambay,

pataras11 from Bhavnagar, mashrun from Patan, jari19 work from Surat, lacquer ware

from Sankheda, and blocks for cloth printing from Pethapur. Added to these more

predictable artwares, however, are some things that now would fall more in the category

of small industries rather than crafts: padlocks, scales, crochet work, soap, glass and

snuff.20 The implicit definition of crafts in the 1961 Census represents a compromise

between that of the JJ School and that of the Clibbom commission. Here crafts are

artistic or more purely utilitarian objects, produced primarily by hand among hereditary

artisan families, which fill particular needs of a developing economy with limited capital

17 Large, decorated wooden dowry boxes.18 A warp-faced textile, made with a silk warp and a cotton weft, often woven in striped patterns, and popular in Muslim communities. According to John Gillow and Nicholas Barnard the fabric emerged out o f desire to combine Islamic piety with fine living: According to Islamic tradition, orthodox Muslim men were forbidden to wear silk next to the skin. But if mashru fabric was worn, although the surface of the fabric was silk, cotton lay next to the skin, and as such the fabric was allowed by religious law. (John Gillow and Nicholas Barnard, Traditional Indian Textiles (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 96.19 Embroidery done with cotton thread that has been wrapped in wire: traditionally the wire was gold or silver, but cheaper metals are now more commonly used.20 Government of India, Census o f India 1961: Vol. V, Part VII-A(21): Selected Crafts o f GujaratBandhani or Tie and Dye Sari o f Jamnagar (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1969), xi.

17


and surplus labor.21 The wide category was necessary in part to capture the range of

things with appropriate capital to labor ratios.

From these examples, then, we have three different definitions of crafts and

artisanal industry in action: artistic goods vs. hand labor vs. traditional processes in a

particular ratio of capital to labor. The problem is, of course, how to reconcile these

differences, either for a more general definition, or for the purposes of this study? Are

crafts particular objects, a means and organization of production or a sector of the

economy? Could they be all three? My objective here is less to try to create some

definitive definition that will encompass or supersede all earlier ones than to point out the

different types of engagements represented by the variations. Each describes how

various things were produced or processes accomplished in colonial western India, but

each draws boundaries to focus on some things or processes and not others. One of the

goals of this dissertation is to trace how and why those boundaries changed over time and

in various institutional settings. For those boundaries reveal different definitions of

Indian society and economy. The artistic focus of the JJ School, for instance, was based

on the idea that the possibilities for Indian development were limited. The Clibbom

commission, on the other hand, took a more optimistic view of future development, but

argued that all of Indian hand industries had to be reoriented in order to make such

21 In his foreword to the individual craft surveys, Mitra wrote that the importance o f handicrafts for the Indian economy lay in the fact that the tools employed are often timeworn and rudimentary, the pools of skill narrow, highly specialized and hereditary, being limited to certain communities or castes and not infrequently to a few families, and the capital labour ratio associated with these products is favourable to a large population base experiencing large absolute increments which build up large reservoirs of underemployed and therefore cheap labour. (Asok Mitra, Preface, in Government o f India, Census o f India 1961: Vol. V, Part VII-A(l): Selected Crafts o f GujaratAgate Industry o f Cambay (New Delhi: Manager o f Publications, 1967), ix.)

18


growth possible. Finally, the Census of India combines a sense of industrial limitations

with hope for the future, embracing crafts as a path for growth given the reality of a cash-

starved developing society.

Having established the complexity of the definitional problem in the historical

record, there is still the question of how the terms crafts and artisanship will be used

within the space of this dissertation. I have tried in what follows to keep my own sense

of these terms as broad as possible, so as to include the widest range of the activities and

products commonly labeled under those headings in the period under study. The focus

throughout this dissertation is on crafts in general, using interventions in particular

productsfurniture, handlooms, carpets, etc.to speak for larger efforts underway for

the category as a whole. Attempts to intervene in each particular craft participated in a

sphere of activity, by which strategies and goals for altering production, distribution and

consumption were shared across many different media. Artisans and crafts promoters

alike regularly borrowed across media. In design, for instance, wood workers integrated

designs taken from stone monuments, while blockprinters copied patterns produced

originally in bandhani, and carpets took on motifs from handloom weaving. [Plate 1]

Similarly, new ways of organizing craft production were copied from one craft to

another. The late 19th century carpet factory started by the American Marathi Mission in

Ahmednagar, for instance, was seen as a model for furniture production, while organizers

19


in the 1910s tried to replicate the success of weaving cooperatives in attempts to organize

leather workers.22

Those involved in forging the category at the time saw crafts as a common field

of shared processes and changes, a singular economic sector, type of production, and

unitary aesthetic field. Honoring that common vision, I try to draw on the examples of

multiple crafts to build my arguments, using wood, pottery, printed and woven cloth,

dyeing, carpets, and brassware. The discussion of crafts throughout this dissertation is

thus an amalgamated one, drawing together a range of diverse products and processes

under the common label of crafts. It is also, however, an oppositional one, with crafts

forever counterposed to their perceived opposite: modem industry. That opposition is,

indeed, central to the emergence of the idea of crafts. For it is only in the context of

industrialization that the definition of crafts as a certain kind of hand labor and limited

technologyas a particular kind of labor processbecomes possible. Before the rise of

modem machine production and mills, hand production was all there was: it is only when

another type of production becomes possible that certain things get defined by their

origin in hand labor. Crafts thus emerge as the negative of modem industry, both in

terms of the values attached to individual goods and to the possibilities for growth. For,

at the end of the 19th century, the development potential of the crafts sector increasingly

came to be judged in terms of its opposition to and distance from modem industry.

22 For praise of the Mission factory as a model of industrial organization in crafts, see Government of Bombay, Report o f the Director fo r Public Instruction in the Bombay Presidency fo r the Year 1900-1901 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1901), 35; for efforts to start cooperatives among leather workers, see see Government Resolution from the Revenue Department, No. 572,20 January 1911, appended to the end of Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working o f Co-operative Societies in the Bombay

20


In subsequent chapters of this dissertation I explore the creation of the category of

crafts, focusing in each on a different aspect of crafts and tracing the transitions in the

definitions offered, particularly in relation to industrialization and economic growth.

That does not mean that I have included everything which could possibly fall under the

label of crafts in this period. For indeed, debates over the nature and future of crafts in

the late 19th and early 20th centuries did not embrace the full spectrum of artisanal

industries. In keeping with the core understanding of the category of crafts which

emerges during this period, I too have had to omit some possibilities.

The definition of crafts at work in much of the literature on the subject during the

period of my study is perhaps closest to that offered in 1936 by N. M. Joshi, an economist

who conducted research at the Gokhale Institute in Pune under the direction of D. R.

Gadgil. In his study, Urban Handicrafts o f the Bombay Deccan, Joshi addressed the

problem of how to define handicrafts directly. In doing so, he first rejected various

earlier definitions as being either too narrowexcluding any workers who were not

economically independent of middlemen or tradersor too wideincluding all hand-

based work, skilled or unskilled, devoted to the production of objects or notso as to

render the category analytically useless. Joshi insisted that what mattered to the

definition was not the economic situation of producers, but the structure of production.

In his own definition, handicraft was then something .. .in which there is a

transformation of material substances by workers who possess manual skill and work

Presidency (Including Sind) fo r the Twelve Months Ending March 31st, 1910 (Bombay: Government

21


with hand tools or machines or with small power-driven machines, which are used for

one or more but not for all processes.

Joshis definition is useful today for how it clarifies the ideas operating at the core

of debates over crafts. On the one hand crafts are to be distinguished from other hand

processes which do not transform material substance (such as fishing or painting), while,

on the other hand, they are distinct from hand processes which do not involve skilled

labor (such as stone-breaking or street-sweeping). And yet even this narrower definition

still includes a wide range of goods and processesfar more than actually appear in

colonial-era literature on handicrafts or as subjects of attempts to reorganize craft

production or consumption. Indeed, despite formal acknowledgement in writings on

crafts from this period of the diversity and variety of the field, in practice most attention

focused on relatively few crafts.

Government officials, industrial reformers, crafts enthusiasts and missionaries

alike seemed to have had several closely interconnected, if unstated, criteria in selecting

crafts for development, reorganization or promotion. First, they focused their efforts on

crafts which were produced by specialized workers, workers whose primary occupation

and therefore income was production of objects, mostly by hand. Thus the JJ School of

Art, as we have seen, taught men and boys (and later some women, although only in a

few of the crafts ateliers) to be professional artisans, devoted to the practice and

perfection of their art. The numerous industrial schools started by local government

Central Press, 1910).23 N. M. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts o f the Bombay Deccan (Poona: Gokhale Institute o f Politics and Economics, Publication No. 5,1936), 7.

22


boards and missionaries similarly trained full-time carpenters or smiths, thereby diverting

students from competing for either clerical or agricultural employment. This focus

obviously excluded crafts which did not offer full-time employment, including, most

notably, preparatory work done by women, such as preparing warps for weaving or

reeling silk. It also, however, excluded crafts which were intended for personal use, such

as embroidery done by women on clothing or objects for the home.24

Second, and obviously closely linked to the first, crafts advocates focused on

specialized skills. Training programs, whether government or privately funded, rarely

bothered with crafts which required less than a years training for competent practice.

Instead, such programs taught skills which were generally unavailable or difficult to

come byskills that would generally be handed down from artisan to artisan in a more

traditional learning environment, or acquired over years of application to the craft at

hand. Hence the focus on carpentry, for example, which required detailed knowledge of

geometry, precise use of tools, and careful, exact execution of plansall things

presumably impossible without formal instruction and specialized study. Such training

not only supplemented skills thought to be lacking in traditional industries, but also

provided an alternative non-caste-based path to such knowledge which could be

controlled by the state.

A further unstated criteria for interest was that the crafts be primarily used for

secular purposes. Although many crafts had multiple applications, both religious and

24 That dual exclusion of the work of women was not coincidental. Indeed, I would argue that this was a period in which gendered definitions of work changed dramatically, with crafts moving firmly into a masculine realm, and womens working becoming increasingly hidden.

23


secular, training classes or development programs invariably focused on items not related

to worship. In the brassware industry of Poona, for instance, it was the production of

brass vessels and utensils that interested outside observers concerned with the future of

the industrynot the manufacture of images of gods or goddesses for worship, even

though that was perhaps equally important from an economic point of view.25

Interestingly, this focus on the secular over the spiritual was one of use, not design.

Thus, students at the Reay workshops at the JJ School often integrated Hindu gods and

goddesses into designs for doors, ceremonial plates, formal furniture and decorative

paneling; they rarely, if ever, made objects suitable for use in religious worship itself.

Finally, all of the crafts noted in industrial surveys or selected for technological

improvement were easily commodifiable. Starting from the first British interest in

improving and developing crafts for European consumption in the 1850s, the focus was

always on crafts for markets, on crafts in markets. This focus on commodities, combined

with the emphasis on specialized production mentioned above, effectively deflected

attention from those crafts which intersected more rarely, if ever, with marketssuch as

womens personal embroidery or traditional domestic wall painting. Indeed, it was only

as such crafts began to enter markets more regularly that they caught outside attention.

The phulkari26 embroidery done by the women of the Punjab, for instance, became the

25 See John Griffiths, The Brass and Copper Wares o f the Bombay Presidency, Journal o f Indian Art and Industry (hereafter JIAF), 7,1897: 13-22. For changes in the brassware industry as a whole, see chapter five in Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy o f Colonial India, particularly pages 134-136.26 Literally flower-work: usually done on veil cloths, worked from the back of the fabric generally in a flat, satin stitch, often filling the whole ground of the design.

24


subject of serious outside interest only in the late 1880s.27 This interest was based on and

helped to further two parallel changes: first, the movement of traditionally-worked veil

cloths onto the open market, and second, the application ofphulkari stitches to new

products like table cloths, napkins and handkerchiefs, as rural women increasingly

produced piece-work embroidery.28

The interest in crafts only in their commodity form points to a larger concern

lying behind all public engagements with crafts: all were committed to crafts first and

foremost as an economic issue. Granted, visions for the exact role of crafts in the Indian

economy could take radically different forms. At the JJ School and in 19th century

international exhibitions featuring Indian handicrafts, for instance, British art educators

and officials emphasized aesthetic purity and vigor of design as the key to preserving a

strong future economic position for crafts. Beautiful, particularly Indian crafts, they

argued, would find markets in Europe and around the world, thereby providing

employment and reducing Indian dependence on agriculture. Indian and British

industrial reformers alike, however, disagreed. From the turn of the century onwards

they argued in industrial conferences and public journals that the future economic

importance of crafts was dependent on artisanal access to raw materials, credit, improved

tools and technologies, and marketing facilitiesnot on aesthetic purity.

That difference between aesthetics as opposed to supply and demand should not

obscure the underlying similarity of focus. Although they differed in their choice of

27 See, for instance, the article on the topic by British novelist Flora Annie Steel in the influential Journal o f Indian Arts and Industries: Phulkari Work in the Punjab, JIAI, 2 (24), 1888.

25


markets on which to focusluxury and foreign vs. utilitarian and domesticart school

educators, exhibition organizers and industrial reformers all shared a common concern

with better orienting crafts to markets of one kind or the other. Thus, whatever the

cultural appeals for preserving crafts as indigenous traditionand virtually all

participants in debates over crafts, from artisans to educators to museum curators, made

such appealsoptions offered rested ultimately on economic opportunities.

That centrality of economics has been largely ignored in scholarship on crafts in

this period. With the exception of a few, focused studies of particular craft industries,29

much of the work in the last twenty years which has tried to situate changes in crafts

within political, economic and cultural developments of colonial rule has focused on

more purely aesthetic issues. In the work of G. H. R. Tillotson and Raymond Head, for

instance, design in crafts is the central theme: both Tillotson and Head focus on who

controlled designs and how design practices changed in the context of art school

education.30 In Partha Mitter and Tapati Guha-Thakurtas work on art and nationalism,

on the other hand, crafts are seen in light of the emergence of the fine arts in South Asia.

Art school efforts in crafts thus become part of a British refusal to recognize and validate

28 See article by Michelle Maskiell, Embroidering the Past: Phulkari Textiles and Gendered Work as Tradition and Heritage in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab, Journal o f Asian Studies, 38 (2), May 1999: 361-388.29 See, for instance, Willem van Schendel, Reviving a Rural Industry: Silk Producers and Officials in India and Bangladesh, 1880s to 1980s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995).30 G. H. R. Tillotson, The Tradition o f Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change Since 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); or Raymond Head, Bagshot Park and Indian Crafts, in Sarah Macready and F. H. Thompson, eds., Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture (London: Society of Antiquarians: Occasional Paper (New Series) VII, 1985), 139-149.

26


Indian fine arts, and thus represent an impediment to the development of modem Indian

painting and sculpture.31

None of these authors take the economic problems posed by crafts seriously.

Only addressing crafts in terms of design or the development of the fine arts in India

misses the central concern of debates at the time. Indeed, doing so treats crafts only

through one very particular subset of the engagements operating at the timethe

aesthetic approach most common to art schools, international exhibitions, and select art

publications. It ignores a whole range of other attempts to understand and intervene in

crafts, attempts where economics were the primary, not secondary, concern. Economic-

minded activists sometimes addressed the same issues as their aesthetic fellows, but they

did so for different reasons. Thus, industrial schools, industrial surveys, craft factories,

cooperatives and swadeshi stores may have been interested in things like design, but only

in order to improve sales of crafts, not as an end in itself. To focus only on aesthetic

efforts to improve crafts is to assume the terms of a very narrow section of overall

interest in crafts, naturalizing the idea that crafts were primarily a problem for the fine

arts. Just as importantly, it ignores both the economic imperatives driving much of the

interest in crafts and the fact that the question of crafts arose as much in opposition to

industry as to fine arts.

31 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making o f a New 'Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal 1850-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

27


As suggested above, debates about crafts in the late 19th and early 20th century

focused on only some things and not others. Taken together, Joshis definition and the

further criteria of specialization of production, skill, secular use and commodity status

help to clarify that selectivity. And yet, even within these boundaries the number of

things eligible for attention as crafts remains large, encompassing everything from the

most basic village pottery and domestic basket weaving to the most sophisticated brocade

weaving or elaborate silver fabrication. What holds these things together, besides a

common definition as crafts? Is there any utility in such a definition which lumps

together rural, unorganized and urban, specialized industry, objects for personal use and

objects for market sale, production by amateurs and that by professionals, and the most

basic utilitarian objects like wooden cart wheels with the most luxurious decorative

pieces like fine gold jewelry?

Many scholars have argued that the answer is, quite simply, no. Tithankar Roy

and Douglas Haynes have done much to point out the very different experiences of

different crafts, of crafts in different parts of the subcontinent, as well as of different

practitioners within a single craft. They, and others, argue that rather than assume single,

unitary categorieswhether of crafts, traditional industry, or even handloom

weavingscholars must pay attention to specific, local experiences to see how particular

artisans fared in the context of changing economic circumstances. For, not all crafts

fared the same in the social, economic and cultural changes of the 19th and early 20th

centuries.

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Roys work in particular is invaluable for disaggregating crafts as a category in

order to point out how some traditional industries (as he prefers to call them) had more

success than others in adapting and reorganizing in the face of those changes.32 Even

with the more familiar example of handloomsalways at the heart of arguments about

the destruction of crafts in the face of industrialization and colonizationRoy argues that

there was no one trajectory. Instead, closer attention to documentary evidence reveals

that weavers in western India, for instance, fared far better than those in Bengal over the

course of the 19th century. On a more local level, handloom production not only survived

but expanded in towns like Sholapur in the early 20th century, while it all but stopped in

other centers like Pune and Thane. Even within a successful weaving town like Sholapur,

though, it is difficult to talk about a single artisanal experience. As Haynes notes, the

differences within the industry could be profound: some artisans were able to move into

positions of wealth and dominance as small factory owners, while others lost their

relative independence and sank to the status of wage labor or left weaving altogether.33

More generally, various scholars have questioned the validity writing history

through categories which assume unitary experiences for large groupsparticularly those

of subaltern vs. elite, but here also those of artisan vs. some other imagined category of

workers or middlemen or traders. As Rosalind OHanlon and others have pointed out in

the context of critiques of the Subaltern Studies approach to the history of South Asia,

such categories do as much to elide differential access to and forms of power and

32 For details on differentiation and development within crafts generally, see Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy o f Colonial India', for information on differentiation within the handloom industry in particular, see ch. 3.3 Haynes, The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy.

29


domination as they draw attention to the fundamental fact of power in social life.34 To

take the example at hand, artisans may have been subaltern vis-a-vis the colonial state, or

vis-a-vis the emerging professional Indian elite, but that does not mean that they were

either internally undifferentiated or subaltern in all contexts. Within the category of

artisan, males exercised power over females, older men over younger ones, rich

karkhandars3S over wage laborers, skilled workers over unskilled, etc.

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have suggested that one way forward is to pay

attention to the formation of categories themselves. They argue that scholarship which

engages with discrete categorieswhether cultural, national or otherwiseonly render

differences between such categories natural and inevitable when in fact they are historical

and contingent. Instead of lapsing into such essentialisms, they argue for turning

...from a project of juxtaposing preexisting differences to one of exploring the

construction of differences in historical process.36

This is, in part, what this dissertation aims to do. Part of the argument to be made

here is that a whole series of interventions by different agentsgovernment officials,

local and provincial government bodies, missionaries, and Indian artisans, reformers,

nationalists and industrialistsserved to reify the category of crafts so as to obscure the

contradictions, exclusions

Documents

Crafts and Cultural Change in Modern India, 1851--1922