Crafting the Nation in Colonial India

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Crafting the Nation in Colonial India

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Crafting the Nation in Colonial India Abigail McGowan

crafting the nation in colonial india Copyright © Abigail McGowan, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61267-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGowan, Abigail. Crafting the nation in colonial India / Abigail McGowan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-61267-9 1. Decorative arts—India. 2. Industries, Primitive—India. 3. Cultural awareness—India. 4. India—History—British occupation, 1765–1947. I. Title. NK1047.M38 2009 306.4'70954—dc22

2008055761

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of my father.


Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1

Demanding Knowledge, Documenting the Body

23

2

The Culture of Difference: From Colonial Knowledge to the Problem with Crafts

67

3 4

Developing Traditions: Preservationist Design and the Independent Artisan

103

Modernizing Artisanship: Rationalization, Efficiency, and the Cult of the Craftsman

149

Conclusion The Long Life of Difference: Gandhi and the Politics of Crafts after 1920

187

Notes

205

Bibliography

245

Index

261


List of Figures

1.1 1.2

1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

The Indian Court at the Great Exhibition, 1851, color lithograph by Joseph Nash

24

Examples of Indian ornament taken from the displays at the Great Exhibition and published in Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament as lessons in good design

32

Illustrations of jewelry in Birdwood’s The Industrial Arts of India

47

Jaipur gateway to the Rajputana Courts, Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, London

59

Clay models of artisans, with details of embroiderers and potters, Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay

61

Metal worker from the Jaipur School of Art, Journal of Indian Art and Industry, 1894

62

Vases prepared by students at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Arts in the late 1880s

113

Illustration of the ceiling from “Jodh Bai’s Palace,” Fatehpur Sikri in the Technical Art Series, 1894

120

Pinjra designs in wood from the Punjab, drawn by Ram Singh under the direction of Lockwood Kipling

121

Sketches for Anglo-Indian furniture, drawn by Ram Singh, under the direction of Lockwood Kipling

122

The Bombay Room at the Delhi Durbar Exhibition of 1903

129

Bench prepared by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company, late 1800s

135

x

3.7 4.1

LIST OF FIGURES

Lockwood de Forest home, East 10th Street, New York City, early twentieth century

137

A weaver working D. C. Churchill’s improved handloom

172

Acknowledgments

I have been lucky, while writing this book, 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 has helped me survive the process intact, often even in good humor. I thank all for their encouragement and interest. The research for this book was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant and both the Dean’s Fund and the Department of History at the University of Vermont. During my research in India, London, and the United States 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 for assisting me in my research while I was among them: Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; 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; the offices of the Sandesh, Ahmedabad; Baroda Public Records Office, Baroda; National Archives of India, New Delhi; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; India Office Library and Records, London; Houghton Library, Harvard University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Virginia; and the University of Vermont. Along the way I have benefited from conversations with scholars working on similar areas and issues, including Catherine Asher, Susan Bean, Timothy Burke, Ashoke Chatterjee, Vidya Dehejia, Deepali Dewan, Eiluned Edwards, Judy Frater, Sandy Frietag, Pika Ghosh, Jyotindra Jain, Don Johnson, Manjiri Kamat, Mani Kamerkar, Prashant Kidambi, Michelle Maskiell, Shirin and Makrand Mehta, Mridula Ramanna, Satadru Sen, and Haruka Yanagisawa. I owe particular thanks to the two anonymous

xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

reviewers of the manuscript who offered invaluable suggestions on revisions and refinements; thanks also to my editor at Palgrave, Christopher Chappell, and to his assistant Samantha Hasey for carefully shepherding this project through to publication. Sudha Mehta provided invaluable help with translations. Many thanks to my colleagues in the Department of History at UVM—particularly Jim Overfield, Kathy Carolin, and Kathy Truax—for providing a welcoming working environment. At the University of Pennsylvania, David Ludden provided an inspiring example of critical engagement with South Asian history while Lynn Lees provided unflagging support and a steady supply of good fiction. Both at Penn and elsewhere, Sumathi Ramaswamy has been crucial to the development of this project, offering timely interventions that have refined my thinking tremendously. I have also benefited from working with Douglas Haynes and Tirthankar Roy who have provided unfailing encouragement as I explored areas they know much better than I; thanks in particular to Doug for reading drafts, sharing ideas, and collaborating on new research in this process. Finally perhaps one of my earliest academic debts is to Eleanor Zelliot whose love of Indian history and fierce dedication to teaching has inspired many to find careers in academia; I’m honored to count myself among her students. 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 hospitality and generosity of Arvind Bhandari, Meena Chandavarkar, Anjali Ghate, Doug and Lucia Gurung, Mani Kamerkar, Sunil Mehra, Sudha Mehta, and Mridula Ramanna. Thanks to the Dhruv family in Ahmedabad for their ready and constant welcome; I owe a lasting debt to the late Janaki Druv for being both a wonderful friend and a font of knowledge on all manner of things related to Indian textiles and crafts. I am always grateful to Raju, Swati, Ranjana, Jaideep, and Kalyani Kumbhare for providing me a home away from home for more than fifteen years. Thanks to Liann, Andrew, Becky, Ellie, and Julia Eden for welcoming me into their family in London. More broadly, thanks to Paulina Alberto, Sarah Betzer, Shefali Chandra, Sheila Crane, Paul Deslandes, Sue Dickman, Aiden Downey, Eiluned Edwards, Daniel Hartzog, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Joe Kable, Adriana Katzew, Jen Nix, Ian Petrie, Shelly Rayback, Peggy Senter, Alison Mackenzie Shah, Dan Shah, Lorrin Thomas, Saadia Toor, and Yanna Yannakakis, all of whom have challenged, supported, entertained, and diverted me at various stages as I figured out how to be a historian. Finally, my family has been wonderful, ever trusting that I can and would do better than their already high expectations. I thank them all for

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

their interest and their love, now and always. My mother, Mary McGowan, willingly listened to the seemingly endless trials of academic life, stepping in to provide moral support and sound advice whenever needed. My sister Molly McGowan and my aunt Frances Strayer kept me grounded in who I was, while also encouraging me to be whatever I wanted to be. And finally my love and thanks to Jon Kohn for nurturing me through this process with patience and good humor, even as it kept dragging me away from him and back to my computer; I cannot imagine having done this without him.


Introduction

W

riting in May 1919 in the pages of his weekly paper Young India, Mohandas K. Gandhi complained that not enough attention was paid to Indian crafts: “The industrial arts and handicrafts, considered as inessential luxuries, are practically ignored even by recognised authorities on economics.” Because such authorities “never attempted to interpret national wealth in terms of life,” they “found it impossible to realise the connection between art and industry and to appreciate the value of quality or a high standard of workmanship.” Misled in turn by the “discredited misconceptions of the so-called economists,” consumers then embraced “unlimited machine industry” in the name of market superiority. Education might have revealed the follies of such trends, if only it was properly directed. Instead, the “distinctly anti-national” school system furthered the embrace of modern industrialization. That was perhaps inevitable, given that, according to Gandhi, schools were “directed and controlled as it is by those who have no first-hand knowledge of indigenous arts and crafts or of hereditary skill.” The result was that “public taste has been progressively deteriorating and the public demand is not for genuine articles but for cheap and gaudy knick-nacks imported from foreign countries.” Degraded taste led, in turn, to a decline in the quality of crafts themselves. Here, “the result is both obvious and inevitable. We are deliberately pushing our unique industrial arts and the hereditary craftsmanship to extinction.”1 Despite these dire warnings, Gandhi held out hope for Indian crafts by offering various ways to reverse the decline. The first and most profound was simply to give India’s “rare industrial arts and handicrafts” their “due recognition and encouragement.” Once that happened, industrial activists would no longer advocate only mechanized production. They would begin to recognize that the crowded mills, polluted cities, alienating machines,

2

CRAFTING THE NATION IN COLONIAL INDIA

and degraded working populations of Western industrialization offered dangers to be avoided, not successes to mimic. India would then be able to “benefit by the mistakes of the West” to forge its own path of development based on hand craftsmanship. It was not enough, of course, to merely hope for this change of direction. To encourage progress down that path, Gandhi suggested concrete steps to promote crafts: permanent and traveling exhibitions to demonstrate high standards of work, sales agencies to bring fine products into permanent public notice, state-sponsored collections of crafts to document product diversity, and collaborative programs to bring designers in closer touch with artisans.2 In this 1919 article Gandhi relied on an assumption that would have been familiar to his readers: crafts mattered. Indeed, their worth—as understood by a new kind of economics defined not by national efficiency and productivity but individual happiness and morality—was so self-evident that Gandhi only had to call for due attention to it, without actually explaining its sources explicitly. He did, however, hint at some possibilities. For one, crafts were part of national culture; although made by diverse artisans, individual objects when taken together were “our unique industrial arts” (emphasis added). For another, crafts were central to national economics; a mode of production rooted in India’s past, they provided an indigenous alternative to Western industrialization. Third and finally, crafts were reflective of national society; ignored by those raised to love all things foreign, ridiculed by outsiders who knew nothing about them, rejected by those in pursuit of cheap amusements, and prostrated in the face of capitalist exploiters, crafts suffered the fate of many valued, ancient elements of Indian society and culture. The assumed importance of crafts helps explain the responsibility Gandhi assigned to the public for their decline. It was not artisans alone who had brought about the progressive decay of crafts under colonial rule; nor was it just the British who had destroyed India’s past industrial glory. Instead, all of India was to blame. Since everyday Indians chose imports over local goods, embraced “anti-national” education, let their taste deteriorate, and worshipped modern machinery, they were responsible for the consequences. Writing inclusively, Gandhi urged readers to understand their role, arguing that, if no action was taken, “we shall then be guilty of strangling them with our own hands” (emphasis added).3 This emphasis on the national, public importance of crafts directly informed Gandhi’s famous campaign to encourage hand-spun, handwoven khadi cloth, his commitment to the use of swadeshi, or Indianmade, goods, and his promotion of Indian culture and traditions.4 All of these mixed economics with culture, tradition with development, and

INTRODUCTION

3

national progress with personal austerity. By spinning and weaving their own khadi, patriotic Indians learned to appreciate manual labor while helping atone for the deterioration of the Indian handloom industry. By replacing foreign goods with swadeshi ones, Indians built up local industry while striking a blow against the underlying profitability of the colonial enterprise. By embracing indigenous styles of clothing, Indians expressed pride in their national culture while rejecting British claims to the superiority of the West. By giving up machinery to return to hand production, Indians forged a new path to economic development while remaining rooted in tradition and committed to fundamental social transformation. For all their power in his khadi campaigns, however, it is important to remember that Gandhi did not invent these assumptions of the cultural, economic, and political importance of crafts. Those ideas had emerged earlier, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; indeed, Gandhi’s success with khadi rested in part on his ability to mobilize preexisting understandings of crafts. Crafts were central both to critiques of British rule and to constructive programs to rebuild India’s strength long before Gandhi. In protest movements, politicians promoted the use of Indian crafts and the boycott of foreign goods to underline dissatisfaction with colonial policies. In newspapers, journals, books, and official reports, writers documented traditional designs and techniques and offered solutions to the problems facing artisans. In international and domestic exhibitions and museums, organizers displayed crafts as the summation of Indian indigenous industry, past and present. In schools, laboratories, and roving demonstrations, teachers sought to develop and disseminate new technologies to make crafts more efficient. In workshops and stores, missionaries, private entrepreneurs, and industrial activists introduced new styles of goods designed to secure wider markets for artisanal products. All of these initiatives represented a totally new public debate about traditional industries that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Suddenly crafts were not just the private concern of individual artisans and merchants anxious about their own economic survival, or of individual consumers trying to satisfy personal material desires. Instead, crafts stood in for India as a whole: economy, society, culture, and politics. 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 movement—a movement that 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, did Indian nationalists so thoroughly embrace crafts—the very opposite of modern industry?

4


This book argues that the politicization of crafts was the result of struggles by Indian elites and British officials to establish authority over the lower classes as well as the state itself. Crafts were not a natural or inevitable focus of politics; instead, they had to be rendered that way over time. Emerging ideas about crafts—as national culture, economics, and politics—made that rendering possible and allowed outsiders to define core categories of economic thought in ways compatible with their own power. This process had parallels elsewhere; the late nineteenth century witnessed movements around the world promoting crafts as expressions of national culture and resistance to modern industrialization, inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement ideals of John Ruskin, William Morris, and others.5 But the new public interest in crafts in India was not merely the derivative expression of metropolitan arts and crafts ideals. Instead, as I will argue, it represented a creative project within colonial society to use global ideas to negotiate Indian realities. Crafting a New Narrative of Development In pursuing the cultural politics structuring crafts development, one of the objectives of this book is to insert culture into studies of the economy. Economists and economic historians have paid close attention to the status of crafts under colonial rule, moving from early attempts to define the nature, extent, or even fact of “deindustrialization” under the British6 to more recent efforts to explore how structures of production, distribution, and consumption changed in the colonial era as artisans initiated extensive reorganizations to suit market developments.7 Such scholarship is crucial to understanding the contours of the colonial economy and, particularly, the role of crafts within the larger whole of Indian production. My objective, however, is quite different: to examine how knowledge was created about crafts during British rule and how this knowledge helped shape development efforts at the time. In an excellent recent book, Manu Goswami offers one model for doing this. She notes the central role that economic issues played in the development of nationalist politics and asks for close attention to how ideas about the economy are developed in particular places and times through particular material means.8 Extending Goswami’s example, this book explores new ideas about crafts both in the writings of the era and through a close analysis of specific interventions into craft production. In doing so, I build off a long-standing interest emerging from the work of Michel Foucault in both the construction of knowledge and the intersection between knowledge and power. In South Asian studies, scholars

INTRODUCTION

5

inspired by Foucault have explored how the basic terms of local society—caste, gender, language, religion, art, nation—took new forms under colonial rule.9 Crafts were no different. For one, the sources and types of knowledge shifted dramatically. Unlike in Europe, where artisans themselves created modern, dense information networks in print to share ideas, technologies, and strategies,10 in India artisanal communities tried to keep technologies and designs private within kin or caste networks. Responding to the absence of artisanal initiative, the colonial state assumed a primary role in gathering and codifying public knowledge about crafts. Reflecting that colonial origin, knowledge about crafts came embedded in strict orientalist hierarchies that separated the intellectual, individual fine art and scientific, modern industry of the West from the instinctual, communal, archaic crafts of India.11 More broadly, the power of that knowledge expanded dramatically in the late nineteenth century. In that period crafts came to stand not just as a set of products or a type of production but as a larger snapshot of Indian society itself, representing its visual culture, social organization, intellectual traditions, and engagement with the larger world. Or, as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya put it in a pithy 1964 formulation, “to understand Indian life is to understand Indian handicrafts, or vice versa to understand Indian handicrafts is to understand Indian life.”12 The reading of India through its crafts meant that any problem in the field took on national dimensions. And problems there were, of all kinds. For some the crisis was cultural; whether or not potters used traditional wheels was a matter not of individual choice or personal convenience but of national heritage. Thus, many crafts activists of the period—men such as Dr. George Birdwood, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and E. B. Havell—interpreted any Westernization in design, slip in quality, or loss of market share for crafts as a sign of India’s political, aesthetic, spiritual, and moral decline in the face of modernization. As Saloni Mathur puts it, “the actual physical body of the craftsman—ruined, disfigured, and enslaved by colonialism— became a powerful metaphor in the work of these writers for the state of the national body itself.”13 For others, the crisis was economic; whether or not carpenters made tight joints was a concern not merely for one consumer hoping to get value for money, but for India’s competitiveness in global markets. Thus, industrial reformers such as Mahadev Govind Ranade, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Alfred Chatterton saw the destruction of traditional industries under colonial rule as threatening India’s national viability. Since, as of 1900, crafts made up more than 95 percent of Indian industrial employment, with “modern” industry responsible for only a very small segment of overall production and employment, those

6


concerns were real.14 Indeed, Arindam Dutta argues that attention to artisans emerges as a key trope in the reconfiguration of labor and capital and the global economy, as the British tried to make India more productive on imperial terms.15 This twin importance in cultural and economic terms made crafts central to debates about India’s future; they were simply too important to ignore. But it also shaped the approach taken to crafts in those debates. Since crafts represented national culture, their development could never be measured purely in terms of efficiency and productivity; conversely, since crafts involved a large section of the national economy, their preservation could never rest on aesthetic appreciation alone. Attention to crafts, therefore, brought together markets and tradition, heritage and progress. Those who tried to preserve traditional design and craftsmanship tackled the problems of colonial capitalism; hoping to find a better coincidence between production and consumption, traditionalist reformers encouraged more “authentic” design as a means of restoring national taste and thus markets for artisanal products.16 Those who advocated modernization did so in full knowledge of the many problems attached to industrialization in the West, including dangerous working conditions, exploited labor, crowded slums, and polluted cities; activists promoted new technologies and forms of artisanal organization to prevent such evils in India and find a development path better suited to Indian needs. Whatever the solutions offered, almost everyone involved with crafts argued that local conditions made an exact replication of Western-style development impossible. The question was what elements should be appropriated for a more national economic and cultural modernity.17 Both sides, therefore, can be seen as part of the emerging field of Indian economics, which, as Goswami argues, in attempting to fashion a “political economy attentive to ‘indigenous’ institutions represented a sharp riposte to authors of Eurocentric frameworks who homogenized and repressed forms of historical difference.”18 In terms of crafts at least, Britons and Indians offered similar ideas for that new political economy. This fact points to an important caveat about the politics of crafts in the nineteenth century: they did not necessarily follow the racial lines of colonial society. Nationalist historiography has long argued that British colonial rule distorted the Indian economy by increasing India’s dependence on agriculture, turning a manufacturing nation into a source of raw materials for the imperial economy, and hobbling the development of large factory industry.19 I am interested here not in the opposition between destructive policies set in place by the British and heroic resistance offered by Indian nationalists, but in the

INTRODUCTION

7

shared ideas that made the opposition possible: how Indians and Britons alike began to use common understandings about crafts to debate the economy. More Britons than Indians, to be sure, embraced an orientalist vision of timeless village craftsmanship as India’s natural form of production. And indeed, this vision often carried explicitly imperialist connotations, intertwined as it was with arguments that India could best be protected from the evils of modernizing times by a benevolent, paternalistic British government. But Gandhi offers an obvious example of an Indian who romanticized the virtues of traditional artisanal production, albeit for very different political ends. On the flip side, Indians were prominent advocates of industrial modernization who criticized the British government’s failure to introduce and support change. And yet here too, modernization was not racially exclusive, as seen by the dedication with which men like Alfred Chatterton or D. C. Churchill worked to develop traditional industries in full support of the existing structure of colonial rule. Indeed, rather than focus on diverging policies, I want to emphasize a converging agenda. Indians and Britons alike put crafts development at the heart of the state’s duty to promote the welfare of its people; both sides agreed that crafts offered a way either to preserve popular happiness via traditional structures or to build up industrial diversity and ease national poverty. They also agreed that artisans were subjects, not agents, of that development. British officials and Indian elites alike used claims of artisanal backwardness to assert control over crafts communities; ignoring artisanal innovation, they preferred to see all progress as coming from outside and thus argued that they—Western educated, scientific-minded, and thoroughly imbued with ideas of progress—were the ones to direct it. British claims to authority in crafts rested on the larger justification for colonial rule; since artisans/Indians were unable to embrace modernity on their own, the British would step in and lead the way. Power over artisans thus was but one expression of power over the subcontinent as a whole. Arguments by Indian elites for their right to leadership were also about power, but in different ways. On the one hand, such claims were part of the still ongoing process of political consolidation by which certain groups fashioned themselves as intermediaries between the colonial state and native society, defining their own political importance to the British by establishing their ability to speak for lower classes, castes, and communities.20 On the other hand, Indian elites also used authority over crafts to contest the power of the state. As recent work by Gyan Prakash and Sanjay Seth has demonstrated, Indian elites used their thorough incorporation of the discourse of progress—whether through science or Western

8


knowledge, more broadly—as the grounds from which to claim one of the key functions of the colonial governmentalist state: the ability to care for its people.21 As such, offering leadership in industrial matters was a potent means of establishing legitimacy in the eyes of the state at a time when Indians otherwise were shut out of political power. Emphasizing the shared use of crafts to claim power is not meant to imply that there were no differences between British officials and Indian elites on questions of crafts. Those differences were real, even if the language and categories deployed were often the same. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, Indian nationalists drew heavily on the conceptual frameworks of colonial rule, even as they resisted its exercise.22 Specific to crafts, Saloni Mathur points out that under Gandhi’s leadership Indian nationalism “rejected foreign domination, but it did so by asserting some of the most naive essentialisms of the colonial paradigms that preceded it: the ancient purity of the Indian village, the timeless dignity of the indigenous craftsman, and the ‘infinite superiority of the Indian artisan,’ in [Ananda] Coomaraswamy’s terms, ‘both physically and spiritually’ to the English factory worker in the West.”23 Ideas about and interventions into Indian crafts thus emerged out of the particular politics of colonial society. As such, this book offers a useful counterpart to two recent, excellent studies by Dutta and Mathur that explore the imperial side of this story: how ideas formed in England about India—and specifically about Indian crafts, artisans, and design—shaped British perceptions and interests in the subcontinent.24 Both focus, in different ways, on what Mathur calls “the cult of the craftsman”: British fixation on the bodies and practices of Indian artisans at the high noon of empire. Whereas Mathur explores how Indian artisans appeared in exhibitions and department store displays in Britain, Dutta follows the wide reach of British design bureaucracy into India tracing the global extension of British aesthetic ideas in ways supportive of colonial power and international capitalism. These remain, however, imperial stories, in which Indians appear largely as recipients of ideologies forged in the metropole. To complement that British narrative, this book explores the Indian side of things, arguing that ideas about crafts in India served distinct ends within colonial society. Part of that novelty is visible in the wide range of actors involved in crafts. Alongside government art schools or British design reformers, native states, nationalist organizations, private entrepreneurs, and independent industrial reformers all took an active part in craft development, articulating their own interests and agendas. That broad interest reveals another reason why efforts in crafts took their own direction in India; crafts had a deep political salience. Historically rooted in the importance of artisanal production and markets to state

INTRODUCTION

9

power,25 that salience also rested on the contemporary possibilities crafts offered to Indian elites in negotiating their own authority vis-à-vis the lower classes and the state. If one goal of this book is to insert culture into economics, another is to insert economics into culture. Aside from the economic history mentioned earlier, scholarship on crafts in the colonial period has focused either on colonial art policies or on changing styles within particular industries. From the policy side, many historians emphasize the role of the state in promoting traditional styles, depicting efforts in government art schools, publications, and displays as a traditionalist coating that masked the transformative goals of the modernizing Indian state.26 Crafts here often appear as a side issue to other, more central topics. Thus, in Partha Mitter and Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s insightful work on art and nationalism, art school efforts in crafts appear as part of a British refusal to recognize and validate Indian fine arts; in this view, crafts classes diverted attention and resources from painting and sculpture, impeding development in those two key artistic fields.27 Scholars who focus on stylistic changes, meanwhile, often do so in isolation from concerns about politics, with the notable exception of work on clothing.28 More broadly, the recent outpouring of work on histories of visual culture has focused largely on the two-dimensional arts of photography, popular posters, and film—items that, since they played little role in economic development in the colonial era, are rarely discussed in terms of economic policies for that period.29 None of this work takes the economic problems of culture—whether crafts or otherwise—seriously. Addressing crafts in terms of only changing styles or colonial institutions amounts to accepting the terms of the largely British art officials who promoted traditional designs in India. But these officials were only one small subset of a much larger group of people across colonial society engaged in redefining artisanal production, including economic nationalists, missionary organizers, technical experts, industrial educators, and store owners, most of whom saw crafts as a key economic issue for India’s future. More pointedly, ignoring the economic challenges crafts posed means ignoring the way crafts fit into elite attempts to define their own leadership in colonial society—a key reason why crafts figured so prominently in national debates. Attention to elite leadership in shaping the debate about crafts helps to make sense of later iterations on the theme of difference, whether in the hands of Gandhi or in the policies of new craft organizations after Independence, in 1947. In C. A. Bayly’s classic article about the origins of swadeshi politics, Gandhi’s use of clothing as a key tool in nationalist

10


politics rested heavily on precolonial understandings, specifically the power of cloth to capture and retain moral essences.30 More recently, Lisa Trivedi has explored the roots of Gandhi’s campaigns to promote khadi in the metropolitan ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and Leo Tolstoy, on the one hand, and the specific activism of the swadeshi movement in Bengal, on the other. 31 Both emphasize how cloth provided Gandhi with a tool to oppose Western domination—a tool forged out of precolonial ideas and anticolonial activism. Crafts had, however, a more complicated history before Gandhi, one that divided Indians along lines of class and education as much as it united them against the British. That complicated history, in turn, had a much longer influence than is usually assumed. In particular, the content and scale of the massive development efforts in crafts after 1947 make little sense if Gandhian khadi campaigns were their only point of origin. Indeed, as I argue in the conclusion, Gandhi was more of an interruption than an inspiration for post-1947 craft policies—policies very much rooted in the ideas and power politics explored in this book. The Scope of the Study: Definitional Practices In this book, I trace conversations about crafts and the nation’s future as they were forged in and around local institutions and groups particular to western India. Combining national focus and local action, this is both a national and a regional story. Viewed one way, this is a national story that is specific to western India. Gujarat in particular—defined as it was then with its intellectual capital in Bombay—boasted both relatively advanced modern industrial growth and unusually vibrant traditions of artisanal production. The result was an unusually vibrant engagement with crafts as compared to other parts of India. As such, as Svati Joshi points out, Gujarati-speaking elites paid close attention to questions of technology, industrialization, and the changes in traditional production from the 1850s on, drawing heavily on Indian leadership in industry to define their political activism.32 Viewed another way, however, this is a regional story with national ambitions. For, when educators opened industrial schools, entrepreneurs inaugurated 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. Trying to use local achievements to shape national goals, such efforts participated in the wider debate about crafts. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, since the nation was, as Goswami has argued, the privileged site of economic imagination and—through the collection of statistical data on the national level—political economic

INTRODUCTION

11

processes.33 In the end, the question of crafts emerges in the interplay between the region and the nation; debates about the present and future of crafts operated at the national level, even as specific interventions had a more local scope, depending on the presence of particular artisanal communities or specific industrial activists. If that suggests where this history is located, the question of what the topic of crafts includes still requires explanation. For all of the evident economic, political, and cultural importance attached to 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 use different materials, require different skills and working techniques, and serve very different purposes of carrying liquid, adorning bodies, and supporting houses. Or, to look at it from the opposite side, in functional terms, nothing separates a handwoven, intricately patterned silk patola34 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 off others? Where do crafts end and other types of products begin? What distinguishes artisans from other types of workers? In the examples just cited, the answer is hand labor, the absence of heavy machinery, and adherence to some sort of traditional designs. This category of crafts had achieved naturalized form by the time Gandhi wrote his 1919 Young India article on the neglect of Indian art. And yet, the boundaries of that category varied significantly during the period under study. Three examples of different definitions in action suggest 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 Bombay—what came to be the preeminent art and craft school in western India. From its founding in 1857 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.35 And yet, the crafts that actually made it into the curriculum were only things familiar to the region. When the crafts program at the school expanded in 1890, for instance, six new ateliers taught enameling, wood carving, silver- and goldwork, carpet weaving, brasswork, and copperwork; except carpets, all were crafts with deep historical roots in western India. 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.

12


More industrial-minded reformers often disagreed with this almostexclusive emphasis on artistic objects. In light of industrial concerns with increasing production overall, crafts were seen more as a means of production—by hand with minimal tools—than as a particular set of objects. In 1903, for instance, the Government of India appointed the Clibborn Commission to investigate how education could better serve both traditional and modern industries. In their report, Lieutenant-Colonel J. Clibborn and the other commission members rejected the narrow vision of crafts as decorative arts in place at the JJ School. Instead, they called for a wider definition, one that reflected the role crafts played in the national economy. Thus, as part of their recommendations, they urged industrial schools to work with the crafts that provided employment to the largest numbers of people: oil pressing, leatherwork, fishing, and pottery.36 Here crafts seem to be defined almost exclusively as unmechanized, hand labor done in small-scale settings outside 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 thirty-one local handicrafts in 103 different craft centers for special study. In retrospect, some of Trivedi’s choices seem obvious, some not. Included on his list were some of the most famous of the state’s local art manufactures: agates from Cambay, pataras37 from Bhavnagar, mashru38 from Patan, zari39 work from Surat, lacquerware from Sankheda, and blocks for cloth printing from Pethapur. Added to these more predictable artware, however, were some things that now would fall more in the category of small industries rather than in that of crafts: padlocks, scales, crochet work, soap, glass, and snuff.40 The implicit definition of crafts in the 1961 census was of artistic or more purely utilitarian objects, produced primarily by hand among hereditary artisan families. This compromise between the definitions offered by the JJ School and the Clibborn Commission emerged out of the particular needs of a developing country saddled with limited capital and surplus labor. As the registrar general of the Indian Census Asok Mitra put it in his foreword to the individual craft surveys, the importance of 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

INTRODUCTION

13

large population base experiencing large absolute increments which build up large reservoirs of underemployed and therefore cheap labour.41

These examples offer 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 for the purposes of this study. Are crafts particular objects, a means of production, or a sector of the economy? Could they be all three? My objective here is less to create some comprehensive definition than to point out that the variations rely on different definitions of Indian society and economy, each of which comes with its own politics. The artistic focus of the JJ School, for instance, was based on a limited sense of India’s development potential; art industries in this view were all that India could contribute to globally competitive markets. The Clibborn Commission, by contrast, took a more optimistic view of future development, seeing potential in a range of skilled and unskilled, processing and manufacturing industries; the commission members argued, however, that all of Indian hand industries had to be reoriented to make such growth possible. Finally, the Census of India combined a sense of industrial limitations with hope for the future by embracing crafts as a path for growth given the reality of a cash-starved developing society. Those three definitions represent, in other words, different arguments about India’s place in the world. One of the goals of this book is to trace the politics of how and why those definitions changed over time and in various institutional settings. 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 book. In what follows, I explore the discourse on crafts in general, using interventions in specific areas—furniture, handlooms, carpets, and so on—as examples of how this discourse affected material practices. In doing so, I reflect the tenor of the debates of the period, in which industrial activists both in and outside government treated all crafts as a single sector, bound together by common characteristics and concerns. Government surveys, for instance, carefully tabulated comparable information for each industry on average wages, total employment, and changing product ranges in order to create standardized reports. With diverse processes occurring across wide geographic areas in disparate industries all distilled into common categories of analysis, it became increasingly possible to see all crafts as experiencing similar sets of issues. Indeed, critics tended to use experiences within one craft as evidence of larger trends. The fact

14


that Ahmedabadi woodworkers were shifting from carving to building construction, for instance, was no longer merely a local change within a particular artisanal community. Rather, it provided evidence of a wider movement of castes and communities in or out of artisanal employment for the Bombay Presidency and India as a whole. And indeed, many studies revealed that similar things were happening in different crafts. One report after another noted competition from new types of goods, whether mill cloth in cotton weaving or chinaware in pottery; author after author traced the geographic reorganization of production, as ivory carving became increasingly concentrated in Poona, while more and more of Gujarati block printing was done in Ahmedabad, both at the expense of more diffuse production earlier. A sectoral approach that identified shared problems across crafts led to hopes for common solutions. Government officials, for instance, praised a late-nineteenth-century carpet factory started by the American Marathi Mission in Ahmednagar as a model that could be adapted for production in other media.42 Meanwhile, as discussed in Chapter 3, organizers in the 1910s tried to replicate the success of weaving cooperatives among leatherworkers on the basis of the idea that cooperative principles could be implemented among any artisanal group.43 Or, to give yet another example, the industrial schools discussed in Chapter 4 offered instruction in carpentry and metalwork in part to train a new generation of workers in those crafts but also to establish general skills thought to be needed across crafts: principles of accuracy, precision, and efficiency as well as more material abilities in interpreting drawings, measuring, caring for tools, and documenting work for customers. Honoring the vision of those involved in industrial reform who saw crafts as a common field of shared processes and changes—a singular economic sector, type of production, and unitary aesthetic field—I draw on the examples of multiple crafts to build my arguments, using wood, pottery, printed and woven cloth, dyeing, carpets, brassware, and more. The discussion of crafts throughout the book is thus amalgamated, drawing together a range of diverse products and processes under the common label of crafts. It is also, however, oppositional, with crafts forever counterpoised to their perceived opposite: modern industry. This opposition is, indeed, central to the emergence of the idea of crafts. It is only in the context of industrialization that the definition of crafts as a certain kind of hand labor and limited technology—as a particular kind of labor process—becomes possible. Before the rise of modern machine production and mills, hand production was all there was; it is only when another type of production develops that certain things get defined by their origin

INTRODUCTION

15

in hand labor. Crafts thus emerge at the end of the nineteenth century as the negative of modern industry, in terms of the values attached both to individual goods and to the possibilities for growth. This does not mean I have included everything that could possibly fall under the label of crafts in this period. Debates over the nature and future of crafts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries never embraced the full spectrum of artisanal industries; in keeping with those debates, I too omit some possibilities. The definition of crafts at work in much of the literature on the subject during the period of this study is perhaps closest to that offered in 1936 by N. M. Joshi, an economist who conducted research at the Gokhale Institute in Poona under the direction of D. R. Gadgil. In his study Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, Joshi addressed the problem of how to define handicrafts directly. First he rejected earlier definitions as being either too narrow (excluding any workers who were not economically independent of middlemen or traders) or too wide (including all hand-based work, skilled or unskilled, devoted to the production of objects or not) so 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 with hand tools or machines or with small power-driven machines, which are used for one or more but not for all processes.”44 Joshi’s definition is useful for clarifying the ideas operating at the core of debates over crafts. On the one hand, crafts are to be distinguished from hand processes that do not transform material substance (such as fishing), while, on the other, they are distinct from hand processes that do not involve skilled labor (such as stone breaking or street sweeping). And yet even this narrower definition included a far wider range of goods and activities than actually appeared in colonial-era literature on handicrafts or as subjects of development. Indeed, despite regular acknowledgment in this period of the diversity of the field, in practice most attention focused on relatively few crafts. Government officials, industrial reformers, art lovers, and missionaries alike seemed to have had several closely interconnected, if unstated, criteria in selecting crafts for development, reorganization, or promotion. First, they focused on specialized workers whose primary occupation was production of objects, mostly by hand. Thus the JJ School of Art taught men and boys to be professional artisans, devoted to the practice and perfection of their art. The numerous industrial schools started by local government boards and missionaries similarly trained boys to become

16


full-time carpenters or smiths, thereby diverting students from competing for either clerical or agricultural employment. This focus obviously excluded crafts that did not offer full-time employment, most notably those done by women. Indeed, the focus on professional work wrote women out almost by definition, whether they specialized in preparatory stages like preparing warps for weaving or reeling silk or did all stages of a craft as in embroidery. In either case, the fact that women’s work involved relatively little technology and could be put down and picked up around domestic duties rendered it largely invisible to public planning. Second, crafts advocates focused on specialized skills. Training programs rarely bothered with crafts that required less than a year’s training for competent practice. Instead, they taught skills that were either unavailable or difficult to come by—skills 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 plans—all things presumably impossible without formal instruction and specialized study. Such training not only supplemented skills then seen as lacking in traditional industries but also provided an alternative non-caste-based path to knowledge that could be controlled by the state. A further unstated criterion of interest was that the crafts be primarily used for secular rather than ritual purposes. In the brassware industry of Poona, for instance, it was the production of brass vessels and utensils that interested outside observers concerned with the industry’s future—not the manufacture of images of gods or goddesses for worship, even though that was perhaps equally important from an economic point of view.45 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. This focus on crafts for and in markets, combined with the emphasis on specialized production mentioned earlier, effectively deflected attention from crafts that intersected more rarely, if ever, with markets: for example, women’s 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 phulkari46 embroidery done by the women of the Punjab, for instance, became the subject of serious outside interest only

INTRODUCTION

17

in the late 1880s.47 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 of phulkari stitches to new products like tablecloths, napkins, and handkerchiefs, as rural women increasingly produced piecework embroidery.48 Taken together, Joshi’s definition and the further criteria of specialization of production, skill, secular use, and commodity status help to clarify the ways in which late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century activists narrowed down the diversity of crafts. We are left, however, with what is still a wide field encompassing everything from the most basic village pottery production and crude basket weaving to the most sophisticated weaving of luxury cloth or fabrication of elaborate silver vessels. What holds these things together, besides a common definition as crafts? Is there any utility in such a definition that 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, and of different practitioners within a single craft. They and others argue that rather than assume single, unitary categories, scholars must pay attention to specific, local experiences to see how particular artisans fared in the context of changing economic circumstances. Roy’s work in particular is invaluable for disaggregating crafts 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.49 Even with the more familiar example of handlooms—always at the heart of arguments about the destruction of crafts in the face of industrialization and colonization—Roy argues that there was no one trajectory. Instead, closer attention to documentary evidence reveals that weavers in western India fared far better than those in Bengal over the course of the nineteenth century. On a more local level, handloom production not only survived but expanded in towns like Sholapur in the early twentieth century, while it all but stopped in other centers like Poona and Thane. Moreover, within a successful weaving town like Sholapur, as Haynes notes, the differences within the industry could be profound, making it difficult to talk about a single artisanal experience; some artisans moved into positions of wealth and dominance as small factory owners, while

18


others lost their relative independence and sank to the status of wage labor or left weaving altogether.50 More generally, various scholars have questioned the validity of writing history through categories that assume unitary experiences for large groups—whether subaltern as opposed to elite, or artisans as opposed to industrial workers, middlemen, or traders. As Rosalind O’Hanlon and others have pointed out in critiques of the subaltern studies approach to the history of India, such categories do as much to elide differential access to power as they draw attention to the fundamental fact of power in social life.51 To take the example at hand, artisans may have been subaltern visà-vis the colonial state or vis-à-vis the emerging professional Indian elite, but this 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 karkhandars52 over wage laborers, skilled workers over unskilled ones, and so forth. 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 that engages with discrete categories—whether cultural, national, or otherwise—only 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.”53 Responding to that charge, this book examines the construction of crafts difference in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part of my argument is that a whole series of interventions by different agents—government officials, local and provincial government bodies, missionaries, artisans, reformers, nationalists, and industrialists— reified the category of crafts in opposition to modern industry. This was an essentially creative process. Emphasizing difference and not similarity was an interpretative choice, made in spite of much evidence to the contrary. Indeed, Roy and Haynes have shown that radical restructuring in this period rendered crafts more like modern industry—that is, more centralized, specialized, and commercialized.54 This choice had real material consequences, as reformers directed development efforts at some artisans and some types of production and not others. It also had ideological ones, as the repetition of the “fact” of difference rendered it common sense. Finally, it also had political consequences, as outsiders claimed authority over the field of crafts and, more specifically, Indian elites used crafts to contest the power of the state. This is not to say that the idea of crafts difference had absolute power. Indeed, it is important to remember

INTRODUCTION

19

the limitations of the idea of crafts difference; while it structured public interventions into crafts, it had relatively little effect on artisanal choices or strategies, as traditional industries struggled to meet the challenges of new technologies and markets. Chapter Outlines Before anyone could intervene to change production or use crafts to advance a political agenda, more had to be known about traditional industries: what was being made, by whom, how, where, and for whom. In Chapter 1, I explore how late-nineteenth-century British officials launched a series of attempts to translate the scattered practices of individual artisans into standard, universalized accounts of crafts as a whole. Taking material form in exhibitions and museums—including most famously at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London but also at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Bombay and local exhibitions in Broach, Nagpur, Bombay, and Baroda—these accounts outlined both the contours of local production and the status of local goods in comparison to global manufactures. Taking textual form, these accounts explored the methods and processes involved in crafts, carefully documenting for public consumption just how artisans did their work. Whether material or textual, much of the emphasis in these documentation efforts came to focus on the artisanal body. Via the physical presence of artisans at exhibitions or the endless discussion in print of kinship networks, marriage practices, and religious traditions, observers defined crafts as fundamentally rooted in unscientific, tradition-bound artisans whose productive abilities were overdetermined by cultural environment. This definition reflected the Arts and Crafts Movement’s emphasis on the culture and process of crafts, but with a colonial twist: here the artisanal body was orientalized, expressing the fundamental difference of India from the West. In Chapter 2, I explore how that culture-bound artisanal body shaped, in turn, attempts to understand the problems facing Indian crafts. Latenineteenth-century industrial activists explained both the distinctive achievements of the past and the striking problems of the present in terms of cultures of work: how artisans understood and approached their crafts. Reformers argued that artisans across different media shared common, conservative attitudes toward new technologies, education, independence, and occupational mobility; they also argued that it was these attitudes that prevented crafts from developing toward Western-style factory production—indeed, that defined crafts in opposition to modern industry. And yet, this was precisely the period in which artisans moved

20


into new working relationships, adopted novel technologies, and subdivided work processes in ways that narrowed the gap to factory production. The assumption of difference reigned despite these changes, setting India’s traditional crafts in opposition to colonial modernity. It did so in part because of the absence of artisans from the conversation. Artisans launched their own changes in this period by reorganizing production and introducing new technologies. But they rarely played an active role in public debates about crafts; objects rather than subjects of the conversation, they—like women in debates about sati55—provided the grounds on which arguments about development took place. If artisans found themselves shut out of leadership in their own field, Indian elites did not. Indeed, craft development represented for Western-educated Indian industrial activists a play for power—power over artisans now defined as unable to direct their own future, power over a national future increasingly seen to hinge on economic success, and power over the colonial state that bore primary responsibility for economic development. One of the reasons for the longevity of ideas of artisanal difference is thus their political utility in struggles by Indian elites to claim equality with the British. Colonial knowledge emerged in tandem with practical interventions; the same men who wrote about crafts proposed changes to existing production, while attempts to introduce new technologies provided the basis for assumptions about artisanal conservatism. In Chapter 3, I turn to one example of the interpenetration of discourse and practice: projects designed to preserve traditional crafts. Such projects highlighted the things that most set artisans apart from modern factory workers: traditional design and individual autonomy. Thus, the JJ School, the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, museums, and exhibitions tried to reinvigorate ossified styles by rebuilding individual design abilities. For their part, the Indo-American Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company (AWCC), established in 1883, and early-twentieth-century cooperatives tried to restore artistic and economic independence to artisans then in the grips of exploitative markets. All of these initiatives advanced innovations of various kinds: in control over design, new styles for distant markets, and financial cooperation among artisans. And yet all disguised change in the name of preserving the traditional difference of crafts. Not everyone was content to return crafts to precolonial models. As I discuss in Chapter 4, even modernization efforts like industrial schools and handloom improvements, however, put strict limits on change to preserve the ideal of artisanal difference. Emerging in western India in the 1850s, industrial schools offered up-to-date, systematic classroom instruction in

INTRODUCTION

21

place of conservative, idiosyncratic traditional apprenticeships; by offering training on hand tools and not machines, targeting artisanal castes, and keeping strict limits on the literary education provided, however, they perpetuated the separation from modern industry. Similarly, inventors like D. C. Churchill at the American Marathi Mission developed new loom technologies to help handweavers compete with mills; by preserving hand power and individual independence when engines and factories would have been more efficient, however, Churchill and others also solidified the idea of artisanal difference. In other words, activists structured even modernizing efforts around the idea that crafts were not—and should not become—like modern industry. In conclusion, I examine the long life of the idea of crafts difference, first in Gandhi’s khadi campaigns and then in new efforts to promote traditional crafts after Indian Independence in 1947. As suggested earlier, Gandhi’s striking engagement with artisanal industries in the 1920s was itself made possible by nearly seventy years of work documenting, understanding, preserving, and modernizing crafts. In his deployment of khadi, Gandhi was an innovator to be sure, mobilizing incredible political power to spread the message of crafts to much wider levels of society than ever before. But in those innovations, Gandhi built on much earlier work that had created value for the categories of the artisanal and the hand-made and that had made crafts a way of negotiating authority within colonial society. Those continuities operated after 1947 as well, in an era that is usually thought of as marking a decisive break with British policies. Independent India did witness a dramatic expansion in public attention to crafts, with new programs to help artisans access raw materials, adopt new tools, introduce modern designs, and reach wider markets, as well as new attempts to build consumer interest. And yet, as I argue, these efforts continued the trends laid down before 1920 in terms of isolating artisans from modern industry while confirming artisanal dependence on outside leadership—now in the hands of the Indian state.


1

Demanding Knowledge, Documenting the Body

I

n the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the famous Crystal Palace in London (see fig. 1.1), the East India Company brought together a lavish assemblage of goods intended to represent British holdings in the subcontinent. Composed of “such specimens of the products and manufactures of that country as may tend to illustrate its resources,”1 the prominently placed Indian Court combined very disparate things into a single display. One section detailed the raw materials, vegetable, and natural resources of the subcontinent, with cases filled with samples of iron, copper, tin, lead, and other minerals, on the one hand, and crops suitable for export, on the other. Another section was devoted to the tools and machines used in agriculture and manufacture and contained models of plows and harrows, an oil mill, a pottery wheel, looms for weaving cloth and carpets, and models of various artisans at work. Some cases near the transept displayed richly decorated clothes and ornaments: a coat with pearl epaulettes, an emerald and diamondstudded gold girdle, ruby-encrusted armlets that had once belonged to the Mughal emperors, and various necklaces of gold and precious stones. Other cases were draped with plain and patterned fabrics in cotton, silk, and wool, with woven, printed, tie-dyed, and embroidered designs. Counters lining one of the bays offered up the weapons of the subcontinent— everything from inlaid silver matchlocks to swords with enameled hilts, leather shields, chain mail, bows and arrows, and battle axes. Another bay displayed assorted carved, lacquered, and inlaid wooden goods designed to Western tastes, including inkstands, cigar boxes, pen holders, and card cases. And finally, a massive tent lined with rich shawls and carpets enclosed a room furnished in the style of an Indian palace, featuring a massive ivory throne presented to Queen Victoria by the Rajah of Travancore that was surrounded by intricately carved wooden furniture from Bombay.2

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Figure 1.1 The Indian Court at the Great Exhibition, 1851, color lithograph by Joseph Nash Source: Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Courtesy of the Columbia University Libraries.

By 1851, Britain’s political suzerainty in the subcontinent was clear. And yet visitors to the Crystal Palace knew relatively little about the full range of Indian raw or manufactured goods. As Carol Breckenridge has argued, previous access to Indian things came only from cursory descriptions in written sources or limited exposure to small collections.3 For those who saw the exhibition, the Indian section thus presented a unique opportunity. As the French political economist M. Blanqui put it, The great value of this portion of the English Exhibition is, that it is impossible to find it elsewhere, either on a large or a small scale. The greater portions of the Indian articles, not being in conformity with European taste, very few are generally imported into Europe. . . . This is an entire industrial world, new to us even from its antiquity . . . and which, from its perfectly original character, resembles no other.4

One of the many novelties of the Great Exhibition was its attempt to present the “entire industrial world” of India comprehensively and logically. Indeed, the 1851 exhibition represents a major milestone in one of the key colonial projects of the late nineteenth century: the centralization and systematization of knowledge by the state. Earlier eras offered little

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precedent for such an effort in crafts. That is not to say that there was no foreign knowledge about India’s products. As part of growing trade to the subcontinent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European trading companies and travelers accumulated what information they could about specific goods, most notably India’s prized textiles. Part of this knowledge was personal, practical, and local: where to find the best weavers in an area, what those weavers could produce at a given price, and how best to get cloth dyed and printed to company specifications. But part of the knowledge was also general: how, as a whole, Indian weavers produced unusually fine cottons and complexly patterned silks, printers and painters created intricate designs, and dyers rendered those designs in vibrant, permanent colors.5 Practical and general knowledge obviously overlapped a great deal. When in 1678 Georges Roques prepared a 333page manuscript on cotton printing in western India titled “La manière de nègocier dans les Indes Orientales” for the Compagnie des Indes, he offered his documentation of the stages of printing, the care to be taken to ensure proper quality at different steps, and the contractual terms under which work could be done all as a means of encouraging French cotton exports from the area.6 As the British consolidated their control over India in the early nineteenth century, they began to assemble earlier case studies of particular industries into more systematic knowledge across the economy as a whole. Usually appearing as part of surveys of new territories, such information represented a broad effort to understand the inner workings of local communities. Perhaps the most detailed effort was Francis Buchanan’s monumental survey of the Bengal Presidency conducted between 1807 and 1814. Buchanan investigated the state of manufactures as one of his seven topics of inquiry, alongside topography, natural resources, the state of agriculture, divisions within communities, religious habits, and commerce.7 That effort to situate individual crafts within local and regional economies was relatively unusual for a period in which Europeans tended to focus only on export-oriented industries. And yet, his study was both geographically confined and relatively idiosyncratic, unable to comment on production processes elsewhere or even to offer the same level of analysis to all crafts within that area. A regional expression of the totalizing drive for information visible in 1851, Buchanan’s survey did not come close to the Great Exhibition’s attempt to survey all of India’s products, let alone collect them into a single display of India’s material wealth. Nor, for that matter, had earlier Indic states attempted anything similar. Indic states had long histories of interest and patronage in crafts. Rulers competed to attract the best artisans to their courts to

26


encourage the best possible production for royal consumption.8 At the same time, such rulers accumulated exotic goods from far and wide as expressions of kingly ambition; as C. A. Bayly has argued, possessing iconic foreign goods—Chinese porcelains, Persian silks, Malaccan pearls, Kashmiri shawls—allowed kings whose practical authority was limited to lay claim to more global influence.9 In neither case, though, did Indic rulers attempt to encourage, catalog, or accumulate all things from a region. Instead, they focused materially on fine objects suitable for courtly grandeur, and intellectually on things most important for regional competition or trade. Before 1851, then, neither Europeans nor Indians had comprehensive knowledge of the full range of Indian goods, let alone how, by whom, and for whom they were produced. This was typical of early colonial knowledge economies. As Bayly notes, within the subcontinent, information on all topics—from political threats to agricultural markets—had been inevitably fragmentary before 1800, in part because control over knowledge was socially decentralized; no one actor claimed or even aspired to universal knowledge.10 With British power still fragmented and—in some cases—unstable, and with direct access to the countryside only growing slowly, more was neither possible nor necessary for state needs. Nor did nonstate actors have the ability or desire to synthesize information on all crafts. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, things had changed. They did so for two reasons, one based in new forms of state power and the other rooted in international aesthetic trends. Politically, as British power consolidated in the early 1800s, officials increasingly justified colonial rule in the name of progress, arguing that they were replacing past systems of resource control—now denigrated as exploitative—with rational policies designed by enlightened rulers. As David Ludden has argued, claims to the rationality of those policies rested on the use of standard, centralized knowledge. This knowledge was partly appropriated, as Europeans took information previously confined to a range of Indian specialists and converted it into systematic, scientific forms subject to abstract truth testing. It also was created, as the British colonial administration gathered new data that had never been produced by Indian rulers—what Ludden calls “new kinds of facts for a new kind of regime.” The resulting empirical reorganization of India helped make possible the political reorganization of the subcontinent, with new, more detailed data allowing evermore precisely tailored policies.11 The revolt of 1857 only increased the need for better knowledge. Unable to understand how their subjects could have risen against them in such numbers, the British blamed the event in part on inadequate understandings of


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local conditions. With more and more detailed information about different groups in society and how they fared under colonial rule, officials hoped to be able to better predict political loyalties. The push to define the legitimacy of the state through progress, combined with a real fear of unknown political threats lurking in local society, resulted in a massive documentation process after 1857 driven by what Bernard Cohn has called different “investigative modalities”—archeology, the census, mapping, photography, and more.12 Many of these modalities specifically explored the productive elements of society. Within the allimportant agricultural sector this meant minute attention to soil types, soil productivity, crop patterns, and agricultural methods. More broadly, it also resulted in new attention to labor supply and productivity, raw materials, local industries, and skill levels across society and how those added to or detracted from overall growth. In 1872 the Reporter on the Products of India for the India Office, John Forbes Watson, defined this need in the following terms: Much has already been accomplished in respect of opening the country by means of information. The trigonometrical, topographical, revenue and geological surveys have been undertaken on a scale of perhaps unprecedented magnitude. It remains to complete the industrial survey which shall take stock of all the various productions of the country, agricultural, forestal, pastoral and mineral, of manufactures, of the localities of production, of the varieties, qualities and values of the produce, its supply and mode of distribution and consumption.13

As Watson’s statement suggests, pleas for greater information about India’s products reflected a growing sense of economic integration, so that regional products in Gujarat or Bengal mattered not just for local markets but also for Indian and imperial economies. As Manu Goswami has argued, such economic knowledge helped create the geographic space of British India, thereby naturalizing the nation as the space of economic planning.14 That knowledge also, however, created the internal contours of the economy. For, as state planners slotted regional manufactures into a subcontinental grid of national economic capability, they simultaneously divided that economy into distinct sectors of activity: manufacturing, agriculture, and mining; Gujarat, the United Provinces, and Bengal. State officials hoped to measure each against the others to create a thorough picture of the entire economy. Systematic understanding was slow in coming, though, in part because the colonial state never did conduct a comprehensive industrial survey. Indeed, industrial knowledge accumulated fitfully through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way

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of occasional overviews of particular provinces, government gazetteers, and craft surveys. The statist desire to map the country’s productive resources was not, however, the only motivation for growing documentation of artisanal production. Another inspiration was the international appreciation for Indian design sparked by the Great Exhibition. Suddenly exposed to a wide range of Indian manufactured goods, influential midcentury British art figures such as Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave, Owen Jones, and Matthew Digby Wyatt declared Indian ornamentation and use of color unsurpassed. Enshrining Indian goods at the heart of the British design reform movement, these men ensured evermore elaborate displays of Indian crafts at subsequent European exhibitions and museums. This exposure helped create sustained public interest in Indian crafts that lasted into the early twentieth century. Among those swept up in this appreciation for Indian styles were members of the international Arts and Crafts Movement like William Morris and C. R. Ashbee, who saw contemporary Indian artisans as embodying the artistic, ennobled labor to which they were striving. Whether concerned with the design products of Indian artisanal industries or the craftsmanship that produced them, international fans wanted to know more about India’s art crafts. This global interest sparked new efforts to document designs, identify regional traditions, and describe skills. In all these efforts—economic and aesthetic, productive and artistic— outsiders tried to render knowledge about artisanal production public, exposing private practices to general understanding. While those involved saw themselves as bringing to light what had previously been hidden, it is important to note the essential creativity of this public documentation. It defined categories of analysis; by isolating crafts as a single type of production and artisans as a particular subset of workers, documentation helped to give conceptual unity to those labels. It established significance; by describing crafts as contemporary manifestations of ancient, inherited practices, studies defined artisanal objects and skills as embodiments of Indian traditional culture, poised in opposition to modern technology and thought. Finally, documentation efforts identified a rationale for intervention; by exploring both the dangers of cultural Westernization and the promises of economic development, surveys situated crafts within the purview of a governmentalist state committed to the welfare of its people. Perhaps the most obviously creative aspect of this process was the increasing emphasis on the difference between Indian crafts and modern, Western industry. Initially, this difference operated through craft objects.


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At international exhibitions, the glories of Indian patterning, ornamentation, and coloring stood in opposition to the failures of Western industrial design. Within India, exhibitions and museums displayed handmade local goods next to machine-made imports in order to demonstrate India’s material weakness and encourage demand for new technologies. Over time, though, the articulation of difference increasingly shifted from products to producers. Part of a larger colonial project to map and discipline the bodies of colonial subjects—through health, hygiene, fitness, labor habits, and more15—documentation efforts defined crafts via the culturally bound, ethnographically defined artisanal body, rooted in local practices, traditions, and communities. In the 1880s, for instance, government gazetteers began presenting products as defined by the distinctive features of caste and community: marriage customs, gods or goddesses worshipped, and general attitudes toward thrift. Efforts in subsequent decades to document crafts perpetuated this intimate connection between economics, society, and culture. Indeed, industrial surveys down into the 1960s continued to feature detailed information on the religious, familial, and personal habits of artisans as part of the explanations offered of production systems. In doing so, such studies operated on the idea that production was intimately connected to culturally constituted artisanal bodies—making those bodies central to crafts in ways that marked off distance from mechanized, factory production.

Documenting Material Production: 1850s to 1870s The first steps toward building knowledge about Indian crafts involved gathering basic information about regional specialties: what things were made in particular areas and how those differed from comparable products from other regions. Crafts already circulated widely across western India and indeed across the subcontinent as a whole, with Banarasi brocades finding ready markets in Surat, and Ahmedabadi paper popular in the Central Provinces. And yet those markets tended to operate in isolation from each other; traders specializing in textiles had little knowledge about brassware, while those involved in gold knew little about ironwork. After 1851, the demand was for synthetic understandings of all crafts; only that would allow public assessments of each region’s overall productive capacities. Such knowledge built up over time, albeit unevenly. Exhibition organizers, for instance, grew increasingly confident of their ability to name the particular manufactures of Junagad compared with Surat or to identify the distinguishing characteristics of Indian as opposed

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to Egyptian art. But they were less sure about why Surati brocades were better than those from Junagad, or what prevented growth in some crafts and encouraged it in others. Overall, expertise developed relatively rapidly about objects, while knowledge of production lagged behind. Indeed, not until the 1880s did either production or producers become serious objects of investigation.

The Great Exhibition of 1851: Defining “Indian design” The Great Exhibition of 1851 constituted not only one of the first but also one of the most influential attempts to gather Indian crafts into a common frame of reference.16 As noted earlier, the 1851 Indian Court featured a diverse collection of manufactured goods, raw materials, models of agricultural and artisanal tools, and other miscellaneous objects. One stated goal for the collection was to stimulate trade with India. As reporter on economic products for India at the India Office in London, John Forbes Royle, put it during the planning stages for the exhibition, “A more extensive knowledge among European manufacturers of the Raw Products of the Indian soil could hardly fail to increase its commerce; while an exhibition of its manufacturing skill may still extort admiration.”17 More broadly, the Indian Court helped domesticate India in the metropole by rendering recently conquered territories known to the public and demonstrating the material contribution the colony could make to the British Empire.18 As his quote suggests, in planning the Indian section, Royle had assumed that the raw materials would attract the most trading interest.19 Once the Crystal Palace opened to the public, however, attention focused on the manufactured goods. Echoing Royle’s own admiration for the “wonderful delicacy of hand,” “purity of taste,” and fine patterns exhibited in Indian crafts,20 many critics were enraptured with Indian design. One of the leading industrial design reformers, Owen Jones, called the opportunity of studying the Indian exhibits “a boon to the whole of Europe” and noted that all of the artists he knew shared his opinion that “the Indian and Tunisian articles were the most perfect in design of any that appeared in the Exhibition.”21 Indeed, Jones used the Indian section at the Great Exhibition as the starting point for his discussion of design in his book The Grammar of Ornament—one of the most important publications of the British design reform movement and a book that was to be a mainstay in all British design schools down to the early twentieth century.22 For his part, M. Blanqui wrote that the Indian Court had “produced a great


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sensation amongst all connected with art and manufacture”—an effect he attributed to the excellence of Indian woven goods, which he called “capable of themselves revolutionising the fashions” of the age.23 Not everyone praised Indian design.24 But those who did focused on two specific points: color and ornament. Writing for the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, Royle argued that “Indian patterns . . . please multitudes of admirers, due no doubt, in a great measure, to the command which the natives of India have of colours, and the admirable taste with which they harmonise complicated patterns.”25 Color and pattern were closely related. It was not just that Indian textiles and lacquerwork featured vibrant hues; their colors were combined skillfully, with proper balance between foreground and background and pleasing arrangements of ornamental detail. To the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt, the “especial value” of the Indian goods at the Great Exhibition in 1851 thus “consisted in the admirable illustrations they furnish of the possibility of obtaining repose and quiet beauty by the right employment of the most brilliant colouring when broken up into minute and properly contrasted forms, and arranged for flat surfaces.”26 The enthusiasm critics showed for Indian color and ornament stood in striking contrast to their relative lack of interest in Indian forms. The shape of lacquered boxes or the sweeping lines of an enameled vase did not interest Jones or Wyatt. Rather, as printed attempts to summarize design lessons from the Great Exhibition reveal, the crucial contribution of Indian designs—and thus, in part, what made those designs “essentially” Indian—was the decoration on the boxes and vases. Thus, in Wyatt’s two-volume set The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century27 and Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament, Indian examples rarely appeared in full form. Instead, ornamentation on small sections of objects stood as lessons on patterning and color harmony, with no information on the context in which the examples might have appeared (see fig. 1.2). Indeed, for many critics form seemed not to matter at all to the “Indian” nature of an object. Blackwood furniture from Bombay, for instance, excited much admiration at the 1851 Exhibition for its distinctively Indian designs, even though the forms of that furniture—including dining tables and divans—were clearly European. Observers saw the fine colors and patterns on view in the Indian Court as not only particularly beautiful but also particularly Indian, providing an essential unity to the diverse goods from across the subcontinent. Indeed, virtually every commentator treated all the Indian manufactures as part of a singular aesthetic field, bound by common artistic principles. This was a particular solution to a more general problem

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Figure 1.2 Examples of Indian ornament taken from the displays at the Great Exhibition and published in Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament as lessons in good design Source: Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, plates XLIX, LII, LIV. Courtesy of the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries: Gift of Geo. C. Mason.

visitors faced in 1851: how to accommodate “the monstrous volume and variety of objects on display” within Victorian desires for order. Larry Lutchmansingh argues that, for the exhibition as a whole, the constitution of all objects as commodities “disabled the differences between otherwise radically unrelated objects in the interest of an abstract and universal law of exchange.”28 A more particular strategy for making sense of heterogeneous objects was to emphasize the unity of national displays. Thus, in a lecture to the Society of Arts, Royle called attention to “the beauty and variety of patterns” of the whole range of Indian goods. He argued that that beauty was visible as well in the carved or engraved, as in the painted, printed, woven, or embroidered works. . . . This we see, whether we examine a production of Dacca, or one from Delhi, Benares, or Ahmedabad, Rajpootana, or Hyderabad, from Madras or from Mooltan, Cashmere or Khyrpoor, and whether in a common chintz or in a fabric of silk, or one enriched with silver or gold, or with imitations of gems.29

Whatever the media represented, or from whatever part of the subcontinent they came, to Royle all were equally Indian in design. For Blanqui, that unity set “Indian art” apart from all other arts. Praising it over the arts of China, Greece, and Rome, he wrote that “Indian art, in truth, is deserving of this preference—it resembles no other. It . . . is a special art, more


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simple than is generally believed, even in its digressions, and which never appears to have varied nor borrowed anything elsewhere.”30 Appreciation for Indian design operated largely independently from any real interest in either the people or processes involved in its creation. The omission of people was hardly particular to the Indian Court; as Jeffrey Auerbach and others have noted, the exhibition as a whole obscured labor.31 But the elision of processes was more particularly colonial; after all, one of the central features of the exhibition was the thundering equipment of the Industrial Courts, where steam engines, huge multispindle spinning machines, massive mechanized looms, and even a machine to make envelopes demonstrated Europe’s—and more particularly Britain’s—industrial achievements. The Indian Court did present some models of artisans at work along with a few artisanal tools, including pottery wheels, cloth and carpet looms, and tools for carpentry and blacksmithing.32 Overall, however, observers gave Indian artisans little credit for their own productions. Virtually none of the commentators treated the items on display as expressions of individual genius; instead, praise was meted out on a national level. The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, for instance, attributed the superiority of Indian cottons to a “matchless delicacy of taste.” Who shared this superior taste? An undifferentiated mass only described as “native spinners and weavers.”33 Indistinguishable in the present, Indian artisans were no different from those of the past. Thus, according to The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, “The Hindoos of the present day seem to have had handed down to them an unbroken legacy of the agricultural and manufacturing arts of the ancient Egyptians.”34 Mere recipients of earlier abilities—which were not even particular to India but part of collective human knowledge—Indians had not managed to add anything to their hereditary practices. As Royle put it, India’s present inhabitants continue to venerate sciences which they know only by name, and practise arts of which they know not the principles; and this with a skill not only remarkable for the early period at which it attained perfection, but also for the manner in which it has remained stationary for so many ages. This can be explained only by the fact, that the son was unable to add to the manual dexterity of his father, and could not improve an art which he knew only as a routine process.35

Even in their acknowledged areas of superiority—ornamentation and color—Indian artisans were not active creative agents but passive vehicles for primitive, universal instincts. A common theme in European accounts of the Great Exhibition was that Indian artisans only produced such fine

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designs because they were unsullied by reason, science, or technology. Indeed, according to the German architect Gottfried Semper, who was in London for the Great Exhibition, Europeans were now too civilized to match Indian design skills: We possess a wealth of knowledge, a never-surpassed technical virtuosity, a profuse artistic tradition, recognized artistic images, and a proper view of nature, all of which we must certainly not abandon for half-barbaric ways. What we should learn from people of non-European cultures is the art of catching those simple melodies in form and color—that instinct granted to human works in their most primitive formations, which we, with our more extensive means, always find more difficult to grasp and retain.36

John Ruskin agreed, declaring in 1856 that “the Chinese and Indians, and other semi-civilized nations, can colour better than we do. . . . It is their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true instincts have play, and do their work.”37 Compared with their products, Indian artisans thus held little interest to European audiences. On the one hand, they offered no unique skills, but stood merely as human museums of ancient, universal arts. On the other, the very thing that allowed Indian artisans to excel—their instinctual, primitive practice—was seen as fundamentally incompatible with European scientific rationalism. Nor were visitors to the Great Exhibition much interested in the tools those artisans used. In his Society of Arts lecture, Royle described only products without any reference to producers or their technologies. Apologizing at the outset of his lecture for “being himself practically unacquainted with the working of these arts,” he claimed that that weakness was actually a strength, arguing that it allowed him to discuss Indian goods more generally, as he put it, “disencumbered of manufacturing details.”38 Those who did deign to notice the pottery wheels, looms, and other implements that appeared in the Indian Court mostly expressed wonder that such rude tools could produce such fine results. Ignoring several centuries of attempts to appropriate Indian skills and designs—particularly in textile weaving, printing, and dyeing—to raise the quality of European industries,39 observers now claimed that Indian technologies offered no contribution to global knowledge. Compared with European inventions, they were “of so peculiar a nature, and of so limited an application, that they can scarcely be considered as bringing into play any principle of general competition or comparison.”40 Instead they provided useful proof of the essential stasis of Indian culture, particularly when counterpoised against


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the countless machines of the European Courts that revealed the relentless progress achieved in the West. 41 Archaic relics of a bygone age, Indian tools did not facilitate high-quality or fine designs. Instead, those tools only held Indian artisans back from greater progress, revealing their ultimate weakness in a world of global competition. As the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue put it, “it is remarkable that the faculty of invention and the desire of improvement should for so many ages have remained stationary, for there is no doubt that many of the tools and machines might be improved, friction diminished, and yet their simplicity retained.”42 Whether in terms of explaining tools, identifying the particular skills of artisans, or merely presenting objects themselves, overall the Great Exhibition generated enormous new knowledge about Indian crafts. At the most basic level, the exhibition exposed Europeans to a wide range of goods from across the subcontinent; Europeans now knew there was enormous variety among India’s manufactures. At the same time, commentaries on the exhibition drew some common lessons out of those manufactures, identifying a unitary style of Indian design marked by particular skill with color and ornament, while defining artisans and their methods as primitive. Of course there was never just one set of ideas about the exhibition or its Indian Court. But some core understandings did emerge from 1851 that helped shape later approaches to Indian crafts—both in Britain and in India itself.

The exhibitionary complex in India For all its ephemeral nature as a temporary exhibition, the Great Exhibition had a profound influence on the production of knowledge about Indian crafts. The most obvious impact was on subsequent international exhibitions. Throughout the nineteenth century, these followed the 1851 model of highlighting Indian crafts while steadily expanding Indian Courts to offer evermore comprehensive views of manufactures from all parts of the subcontinent.43 But the influence of 1851 was also felt within India. Inspired by their European counterparts, organizers put on an impressive series of exhibitions across the country in the course of the nineteenth century; in western India these included events in Bombay (1854 and 1873), Broach (1868), Baroda (1882), Jaipur (1883), Bhuj (1884), Poona (1880, 1888), and Surat (1891).44 At the same time, others tried to ensure more permanent displays of local raw materials and manufactures by creating provincial economic museums.

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As Gyan Prakash has argued, the desire to first classify the material world and then put it on display was central to Western modernity, defining not only modern superiority over the premodern past but also present-day Western superiority over colonial peoples. In the nineteenth century, colonial officials shared a “conviction that India needed a new form of knowledge” to bring it into the modern world. Museums and exhibitions emerged to provide that knowledge, ordering the chaos of local materials and rendering the subcontinent more productive.45 Prakash notes that such institutions faced a fundamental challenge in making their displays legible to native audiences. Whether emphasizing classification in museums or function in exhibitions, officials struggled “to make objects rise above their concreteness and their native particularity to reveal something more abstract and universal.”46 The universal Prakash explores is science; another option was the economy. Indeed, just as different pumps and plows revealed the inevitable superiority of Western technology, so too Indian cottons, wooden boxes, and brass vessels revealed the relative weakness of the local economy within a wider imperial framework. Museums and exhibitions, in other words, displayed local goods, but to change as well as expand knowledge. All three venues—international exhibitions, Indian exhibitions, and Indian museums—inherited much from the Crystal Palace. First, they shared common classificatory strategies, dividing displays into sections on the raw materials, tools/machinery, manufactures, and fine arts and identifying materials by their scientific categories. Second, they all shared a similar desire to stimulate progress in the subcontinent—something considered woefully absent even by the most ardent proponents of colonial rule. Third, they shared common personnel to gather, process, and interpret materials, whether for presentation within India or overseas. Fourth and finally, down to the 1870s they all shared a common focus on products rather than producers, doing little to document how things were made in favor of collecting information on what was available. Together, exhibitions and museums helped to deepen and widen knowledge about Indian crafts, but increasingly they did so in response to conditions within India. The East India Company assembled its collections for the 1851 exhibition through a series of regional committees composed of local officials, informed European nonofficials, and a few native gentlemen. The regional committee in turn relied on local committees in smaller centers to actually survey products, submit lists of possible items for inclusion, and eventually gather exhibition materials through loans, donations,


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or outright purchases. Whether at the regional or the local level, those involved did not necessarily have personal knowledge of local crafts. It was a real challenge for many, therefore, when committees received their instructions from the East India Company. Prepared by Royle in London, the instructions listed only broad categories of goods for collection—silk, cotton and wool fabrics, brass utensils, lacquered toys, paper—and gave no indication of where such goods could be found or whether one region’s goods would even stand up in comparison with those from somewhere else within India.47 Part of each committee’s assignment, therefore, was to create that knowledge: where and what things were made locally and who the best manufacturers were. All subsequent exhibitions—international as well as domestic—relied on the same collecting structure, reforming committees every time a new collection was required for another event. Exhibitions were frequent; the nineteenth century featured more than twenty major international events and at least as many more within India.48 As a result, committees operated almost constantly, often with the same people involved for years in a row. Museums were comparatively more rare, with only twelve in the subcontinent as a whole as of 1857. In western India Bombay’s Government Central Museum—referred to here by its eventual name, the Victoria and Albert (V&A), which it acquired as of 1872—was the only one of its kind for more than thirty years; not until the 1880s did other cities open museums, including the Watson Museum in Rajkot (1888), the Lord Reay Industrial Museum in Poona (1890), and museums in Baroda (1894) and Bhavnagar (1895).49 Isolated and chronically underfunded, the V&A drew heavily on the systems established to gather materials for international and Indian exhibitions. Within the Bombay Presidency, for example, one of the first curators of the V&A, Dr. George Birdwood, was also in charge of preparing displays for exhibitions in Paris in 1855 and 1867, London in 1862, Jubbulpore in 1866, and Agra in 1867.50 When Birdwood left for England in 1868, he continued to oversee Indian contributions to international exhibitions into the 1900s from his position at the India Office. Meanwhile, his replacement at the V&A, JJ School of Arts superintendent George Terry, likewise served both as museum curator and as head of various exhibition coordinating committees. Both Birdwood and Terry made the most of their dual roles, regularly using the system of local committees to solicit duplicate samples for permanent display at the V&A. Thanks to both the regularity of the work and the constancy of staff involved, the 1850s to the 1870s witnessed a steady accumulation of knowledge about Indian crafts. The Paris Exhibition of 1855, for instance, included virtually no manufactured goods from Kathiawad; after looking

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through the list of specimens desired by the Bombay committee, the Kathiawad committee had decided that “there is nothing of sufficient Interest (Raw products being excluded) in the manufactured articles of the Province to warrant their transmission.”51 By the time of the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, by contrast, it would have been inconceivable to leave out the fine bandhani, embroidery, and other products of the region. Indeed, exhibition organizers recognized Kathiawad’s wood traditions as not only sufficiently interesting but also original enough to be represented by two separate screens carved in the distinctive styles of Junagad and Bhavnagar.52 Similarly, for the 1851 exhibition Royle only issued a general request for Indian jewelry—anything within that broad rubric was apparently acceptable. For the 1872 London exhibition, the secretary of the organizing committee, Henry Y. D. Scott, knew exactly which types of ornaments he hoped to include, going so far as having photographs prepared to exactly illustrate the appropriate styles.53 Greater knowledge emerged from focused attention on local environments. Exhibitions, for instance, usually aimed to closely document the particular resources of a region, even while also trying to demonstrate the region’s position within the larger imperial economy. To give but one example, one of the first large exhibitions in western India was held at Broach in late December of 1868 and early January of 1869. Open for nine days, the exhibition drew large numbers of European and native visitors from across classes, including virtually all of the native chiefs from Gujarat as well as native troops, police officers, local schoolgirls, and more than 1,000 native women and children who came during mornings set aside for ladies only.54 Those visitors got to see the usual raw materials, machinery, manufactures, and fine arts exhibits, along with separate displays of livestock and agricultural produce. Within the latter, organizers displayed locally grown grains, pulses, vegetables, and cotton, along with samples of dyes, oilseed, and tobacco. For its part, the manufactures section—which Broach collector T. C. Hope called “perhaps one of the most complete and satisfactory in the whole Exhibition”55—offered a still wider range of goods from western India, including cottons, silks, embroideries, carpets, hardware, native-made furniture, paper, harnesses, and conveyances. Finally, “by far the most popular and constantly thronged part of the Exhibition”56 was the fine arts section, which featured jewelry worth several lakh rupees—including the personal jewels of the Gaekwar of Baroda—along with silver and gold-hilted Kutchi weapons, Cambay stonework, and a large collection of carved and inlaid blackwood and sandalwood work from Ahmedabad and Surat. For purposes of comparison,


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each section featured regional goods alongside ones from farther afield. Thus, local agricultural implements in the machinery section stood next to new bullock-powered pumps, an improved sugar mill, a European threshing and winnowing machine, and tube wells—a limited display of what organizers assumed could “be safely recommended” to local agriculturalists.57 In the manufactures and fine arts sections, European cottons, wools, glass, china, and watches appeared along with Cuttack filigree ornaments and Vizagapatam workboxes to demonstrate the relative worth of local artisanal skills. The Broach exhibition presented much more detailed information about the particular resources of Gujarat than would have been possible or appropriate at a larger international exhibition, where Gujarati goods competed for space with other parts of India, as well as the rest of the world. That level of detail was also visible at the V&A. In response to complaints about “how little is known comparatively of the natural productions of this country,” the museum took on a similar goal of documenting the productive capabilities of western India.58 Thus early curators Dr. George Buist (1856), the Reverend Dr. Alexander Fraser (1856–1857), Dr. George Birdwood (1858–1868), George Terry (1868–1871, 1876– 1879), Dr. Wellington Gray (1871–1876), and Dr. D. Macdonald (1880– 1898) tried to identify natural resources available in the region, their industrially useful properties, and their relative cost. The goal of the collection was economic development; as an early request for contributions put it, with information on local resources the museum would “ultimately be the means of increasing the produce and sale of these articles alone which can add to the wealth of this part of India.”59 Without it, growth was impossible: As with the study of any subject of science not a step can be taken in advance with certainty until an acquaintance has been obtained with every thing that has been made public on that subject, so no new step can be taken with confidence in the successful development of the resources of a country, until it be known what that country up to the time, is capable of producing.60

Whatever their goals to offer comprehensive displays, neither the Broach exhibition nor the V&A actually encompassed the full range of local products. Instead, organizers of each shaped exhibits to reflect their own ideas about the regional economy. At the V&A, this meant emphasizing raw materials at the expense of manufactures. By the time the museum permanently opened its doors in 1857, it already boasted a collection of more than a thousand samples of regional minerals, resins and

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oils used in pharmaceutical products, food products, and vegetable and animal substances used in manufactures. The entire collection of regional crafts, by contrast, consisted of only scattered samples of textiles, local ceramics, Bombay inlaid woodwork, artificial flowers, fans, Cambay agate beads, and lacquerwork.61 That emphasis on raw materials remained throughout the nineteenth century; down to the 1890s, curators simultaneously congratulated themselves for relatively complete collections in that category even while they complained about the piecemeal nature of displays of local manufactured goods.62 In part the focus on raw materials reflected the scientific rather than industrial training of museum curators; many were medical doctors and amateur botanists who took great personal interest in classifying the plants and natural resources of the region. It also, however, reflected nineteenth-century British assumptions about India’s role in the imperial economy. Hobbled by out-of-date technologies and primitive industrial organization, India could not hope to compete with the manufactured goods of Britain’s modern mills. Presented as description of an existing reality, this was at the same time colonial policy; the colonial state offered few concrete interventions to promote industrial growth until the 1920s and failed throughout the nineteenth century to offer adequate protection for young industries struggling to compete.63 Instead, colonial railway construction, shipping charges, technical expertise, research monies, and import and export duties all worked to promote India’s production of raw materials for industrial use elsewhere in the empire. The museum did its part to towards that end by regularly documenting and investigating industrially useful minerals and vegetable products. Thus, in 1872–1873 and 1875–1876, the V&A curator Dr. Wellington Gray prepared samples of first all the gums and gum resins produced in the presidency and then all the different woods; he then sent both collections to Britain for the use of manufacturers there.64 The limited collections of crafts at the V&A fit within this larger orientation toward imperial rather than local needs. Curators talked about trying to widen markets for regional crafts; at the same time, however, they also worked to document demand for British manufacturers hoping to replace local goods. As early as 1858 George Birdwood had suggested making a representative collection of European and Indian goods available in regional markets. The hope was that, with such a collection, “hereby at a glance, the British Merchants of Bombay would learn what were the goods for which the inhabitants . . . had a natural appetite.”65 The V&A never had the funds to undertake that project itself, but seems to have benefited from other attempts to do so. In 1861, Birdwood


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reported that a Captain L. Pelly had donated a collection of Asian and European goods available in the markets of Afghanistan and Persia— a collection that served to document local demand in those areas.66 On a more ambitious scale, the museum probably received a copy of John Forbes Watson’s monumental The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India. Compiled in London in the early 1860s, the project consisted of 700 actual specimens of different fabrics in use across India assembled into a series of eighteen-volume sets to illustrate consumer demand. Watson was explicit that his goal was to help British manufacturers capture Indian markets. Thus, in the introduction he explained, “The 700 specimens . . . show what the people of India affect and deem suitable in the way of textile fabrics, and if the supply of these is to come from Britain, they must be imitated there. What is wanted, and what is to be copied to meet that want, is thus accessible for study.”67 Unable to keep the original fabrics together in London, Watson devised the textile volumes as a portable trade museum capable of reaching wide audiences. In the end, twenty sets of volumes were distributed, thirteen within England and seven in India, with the set sent to Bombay likely going to the V&A.68 At the V&A, then, curators presented crafts less to celebrate local skills than to identify opportunities for future development—possibly by Indian artisans, but more likely by British merchants and industrialists. This attempt to situate Indian crafts within a competitive imperial economy, in which they suffered from distinct disadvantages in terms of style, price, quality, and availability, carried over to exhibitions as well, even when the latter offered much larger displays of manufactured goods. In 1868, Broach was at the heart of a productive region boasting vibrant artisanal and agricultural communities—many of which were flourishing in midcentury. And yet exhibition organizers operated on the principle that Indian artisans were always, inevitably backward. In his speech opening the Broach exhibition, governor of Bombay Sir William Fitzgerald argued that there was no point in exhibiting “specimens of the most perfect ingenuity as applied to industry or art” because Indians were too uneducated to appreciate the very finest technical achievements. Instead, he only hoped that displaying Indian and European things side by side would “teach our native fellow-subjects the advantage, not only of industry, but of applying all the sciences, and all the newest machinery to the improvement of the productions of the country.”69 On the one hand, this meant introducing European machinery considered appropriate for local conditions, including joiners, saws, and printing presses, along with agricultural technologies like cotton gins, clod crushers, sowing, threshing

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and winnowing machines, sugar mills, and hand flour mills.70 On the other hand, it also meant emphasizing modern goods. Thus the exhibition committee gave awards for things like cotton piece goods made by steam looms, hill tents, flannels, saddlecloths, embroidered tablecloths, brocade handkerchiefs, European-style furniture, iron chairs, boots, and fancy baskets.71 That this represented less than a complete picture of local abilities can be seen by the example of brassware. At the exhibition, brass objects could only be displayed as a subcategory of hardware and cutlery. Jurors E. Jones and W. J. Addis awarded the Rs. 25 prize in that category to Messrs. W. Nicol & Co. for “a fair collection of Brass work, such as door and window fittings, also steam-pressure gauges, taps, boiler fittings, &c., &c.”72 The fact that a European firm won the prize is hardly surprising. Western India had a dynamic brass industry centered at Poona and Nasik, but its artisans did not turn out much hardware or cutlery and certainly did not specialize in boiler fittings. Instead, local production focused on ritual objects as well as utilitarian cooking and storage vessels—all things excluded from the exhibition category by its very definition as hardware rather than simply metalwork. This sense of relative failure is but one of the many ways that Indian exhibitions and museums differed from events overseas. In Indian Courts at international exhibitions, organizers used crafts to reveal the distinctive riches of the subcontinent, displaying silks, cottons, metalwork, furniture, and jewelry as evidence of India’s famous design achievements in rich colors and intricate patterning. Giving up on complete thoroughness, collecting committees simply left out weaker goods to create a stronger display. To the head of the Bombay committee for the 1872 London exhibition, George Terry, this selectivity was the whole point. He argued that a responsible committee would give a tone of unity, a fixed principle, to the whole exhibition, which it seems to us, it does not yet partake of, & would select such objects only as represented truly the arts, art manufactures, & produce of the Country, rejecting all spurious articles either imitations of European styles or European reproductions claiming to be Indian.73

In India, by contrast, exhibitions and museums assembled local goods to show not competitive advantage but comparative weakness. Indian venues thus presented a much fuller sense of local products, representing a wider range of skills. And yet they did so in a spirit of crisis rather than celebration. As C. Bernard wrote in a report on an 1865 Nagpur exhibition, “If on


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this occasion the representatives of these districts and communities were awakened to a sense of backwardness, the Exhibition will at least have had this good effect.”74 And they did so both to promote local goods and to open them up to outside competition.

Linking Products to Producers: 1880s to 1900s For all their differences, exhibitions and museums in India and Europe down to the 1870s shared much in their attitudes toward artisans. All considered existing methods of production too archaic to be worth investigating. Instead of documenting current technologies, exhibitions and museums displayed new machinery and better tools to revolutionize production. Nor were the people who produced crafts themselves subjects of study. Almost no information is available in the records from the V&A or the Broach exhibition, for instance, about who made the individual objects on display. Such information was not deemed necessary. Thus, in an 1855 minute, Bombay Governor Lord Elphinstone advised that all articles displayed at the V&A “should be marked with the name of the place where they are produced, its distance from Bombay, the prime cost & the probable cost of carriage, the purposes to which they are commonly applied, & any other particulars which may be likely to be of interest.”75 He issued no instructions that information on producers be collected or displayed. Indeed, the whole premise of pre-1880 displays was that objects could speak for themselves, standing as evidence not of individual skills but of regional capabilities. In the 1880s this separation of producers from manufactures began to break down both within India and overseas. Suddenly not just what was made, but how and by whom it was made became crucial to understanding Indian crafts. A rash of new publications appeared describing in minute detail the artisanal communities and technologies involved in different crafts; those descriptions created intimate connections between culture and production, individual taste and objective results. Exhibitions began to include live artisans at work demonstrating their skills; museums used clay models of artisans to achieve the same goal. Creativity and a freedom from machinelike drudgery became new terms of approval for crafts production. In attempts to document crafts from this period onward, ethnography now operated side by side with economics. Why this shift? From the perspective of the state, a more ethnographic approach represented a better way to understand the population. After the revolt of 1857, British officials demanded better knowledge of local

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communities to prevent future uprisings. At the same time, Queen Victoria’s declaration in 1858 of noninterference in local customs and traditions demanded better understanding of what exactly was to be protected. And yet those demands for better social data came to little until the late 1870s. Only after several failed attempts to compile systematic information did the state begin to issue comprehensive district gazetteers. Conducted under the leadership of W. W. Hunter, the director general of gazetteers, these investigated every detail of local society: communities, religions, events, institutions, occupations, and physical surroundings. These were not mere summaries of resources or manufactures. Instead they attempted to map out the social and material structure of daily life, emphasizing caste in particular as key to understanding networks, skills, and loyalties. This, as Nicholas Dirks has phrased it, was the emerging ethnographic state, one that based its rule on thorough knowledge of local communities and justified that rule on the basis of the irreconcilable differences between individual castes.76 Within crafts, this new knowledge imperative meant growing attention to the nature of different communities and more emphasis on how community identity shaped production. It also meant a particular investment in the artisanal body that reflected both ethnography’s mapping of culture onto the biological bodies of natives and colonialism’s use of the same bodies as key sites for the articulation of imperial power.77 A second influence on this shift in how crafts were understood was the international Arts and Crafts Movement. Emerging in Britain around John Ruskin, William Morris, and others, the movement argued that modern industrial production was socially and artistically evil, reducing free-thinking independent artisans to mere drudges controlled by machines, and replacing the beautiful individuality of hand-made things with the dead uniformity of factory goods. In place of a mechanized society built around factory production, Morris and others advocated a return to small-scale communities of handcraftsmen and farmers where labor would be individually fulfilling and morally uplifting. For many in the movement, a key model for such a society was medieval Europe; another, however, was contemporary India. This made the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement in India twofold. On the one hand, it encouraged further investigation into Indian crafts. As an inspiration for hand production in the West and an acknowledged source for beautiful crafts, India’s artisanal traditions offered many possible lessons—if only more was known about them. On the other hand, the international movement also encouraged specific attention to production. Now crafts were not just a form of industry, but a way of life; handcraftsmanship was not just a means to an end, but itself a key source of value. As curator of the Jaipur


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Museum of Art Thomas Holbein Hendley put it in a catalog to the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, As every article is hand-painted and the designs are so rarely repeated, the prices are necessarily somewhat higher than those charged by European potters, but the purchaser has the pleasure of knowing, when he becomes the possessor of a Jeypore vase, as is the case with so many other articles of Indian manufacture, that he owns something that has required an individual effort of mind to produce, something in short which is not a mere mechanical repetition of the design of another person.78

With value dependent on individual handwork, it became increasingly important to understand how and by whom that work was done. Third and finally, hardheaded economic realism also demanded more information about producers. Increasingly, those interested in economic development began to insist on the importance of traditional industries, to both the country’s present and its future. By the late 1870s, there were growing fears that European imports were swamping Indian industries as the volume of foreign goods was growing steadily year by year, both in new kinds of things—umbrellas, clocks, matches—and in India’s traditional specialties—most importantly textiles. As critics tried to make sense of this trend, they voiced concerns about the slow growth of modern industries and the slower transformation of traditional industries. With so few modern factories, most production was still artisanal; whatever their problems, therefore, crafts were India’s industries. It was no use, then, to just wait for their eventual replacement by factory production. The needs of the present demanded thorough attention to the factors limiting development in crafts: the composition and education of labor, access to raw materials, tools and technologies, and knowledge of markets. Merely collecting objects for comparative display, as at midcentury Indian exhibitions and museums, had revealed the fact of local limitations; it had not revealed the source of those limitations. For that, new information was necessary, not just about products but also—crucially—about production. The result of all of these influences was a fairly radical shift in the scale and type of knowledge about Indian crafts. Down to the late 1870s, no Indian exhibition or museum offered a comprehensive collection of Indian crafts. Even though such collections were being assembled regularly for international exhibitions, lack of ambition and funds kept displays within India regional and fragmentary. Nor was such a comprehensive view available in texts; aside from Watson’s The Costumes and Textiles of the People of India, no study compiled existing knowledge about crafts within a single region, let alone across regions or the subcontinent as a

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whole. Finally, up to the late 1870s, few people paid much attention to production; instead exhibitions and museums offered objects in isolation from their makers. Again, in the 1880s all this changed. Museums, publications, and exhibitions aimed at comprehensive depictions of all Indian crafts, in all media; publications exploded, rendering material information into textual form; and, finally, production took center stage. All these developments were closely integrated, with museum collections documented in journals that reported on efforts to study artisanal methods. Together they tried to take scattered, partial details and render them into a standardized, all-encompassing vision of Indian crafts. But they did so in ways that simultaneously undercut the possibility of abstract knowledge, preferring to locate skills not in science but in artisanal bodies.

First steps: George Birdwood and The Industrial Arts of India One of the first attempts at a comprehensive textual survey was George Birdwood’s influential The Industrial Arts of India. Prepared as the handbook to the Indian Court at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 and then reprinted in an expanded form for a more popular audience in 1880, The Industrial Arts of India covered all crafts, in all media, from all parts of the subcontinent. Birdwood was well suited to the task of compiling such a handbook, given his efforts to document and collect Indian crafts since the 1850s. Born in India in 1832, Birdwood took up a position with the Medical Service in Bombay in 1855, eventually becoming not only curator of the V&A Museum but also professor at the Grant Medical College, honorary secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay, and registrar of the University of Bombay. An active botanist and ardent admirer of Indian crafts, he himself undertook investigative trips around the region and corresponded widely with others gathering similar information. After he left India in 1868 because of ill health, his authority over the field only grew; serving at the India Office in London until his retirement in 1899, he gave regular lectures on India at the Royal Society of Arts and generally acted as a clearinghouse for information about the resources and industries of the subcontinent.79 The Industrial Arts of India opens with a long discussion of Hinduism, which Birdwood thought essential for understanding Indian crafts. Ignoring the central role Muslims played in India’s culture, he argued that, since “the arts of India are the illustration of the religious life of the Hindus,” understanding those arts required “not only the sensibility which can appreciate them at first sight, but a familiar acquaintance with the character and subjects of the religious poetry, national legends


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and mythological scriptures that have always been their inspiration, and of which they are the perfected image.”80 The second part of the book explores, chapter by chapter, different crafts: gold and silver plate, enamels, arms, art furniture and household decoration, musical instruments, and so on. In each chapter, Birdwood discussed what different regions produced in that media, identifying particular local specialties notable for their unique designs, workmanship, or market dominance. Thus, in a long chapter on metalwork, he not only noted the famous brass vessels of Benares, Madurai, and Tanjore but also described things that were much less known, including metal pans from Nuddea in Bengal and steel from Tendukhera in the Central Provinces.81 Black-and-white illustrations reinforced the text descriptions and helped establish differences between, say, the jewelry of Cuttack and Poona, Trichinopoly and the Punjab (see fig. 1.3). Overall, the book established all-India rankings of different crafts; the best tile came from Bulri and Saidpur in Sindh, the best papier mâché could be found in Kashmir, while the best muslin was produced in Dacca. But it also mapped crafts onto regional landscapes; if visiting Sirsangi in the Bombay Presidency, readers would know to look for the locally prized bullock bells.

Figure 1.3 Illustrations of jewelry in Birdwood’s The Industrial Arts of India: “Necklace, Punjab” (left) and “Native Gemmed Jewelry of Trichinopoly, Madras” (right). Source: Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, plates 45 and 53. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

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If one of the key innovations of The Industrial Arts of India was its composite, all-inclusive view, another was its emphasis on how cultural environment shaped production. Drawing heavily on the international Arts and Crafts Movement, Birdwood argued that beautiful Indian crafts did not emerge in a vacuum; they were produced by religiously minded caste artisans working specifically by hand in traditional villages. This ensured not only individual contentment but also artistic success. Thus, after a long description of the slow tempo, everyday beauty, and easy prosperity of village life, Birdwood argued, We cannot overlook this serenity and dignity of his life if we would rightly understand the Indian handicraftsman’s work. . . . He has his assured place, inherited from father to son for a hundred generations, in the national church and state organization; while nature provides him with everything to his hand, but the little food and less clothing he needs, and the simple tools of his trade. . . . This at once relieves him from an incalculable dead weight of cares, and enables him to give to his work, which is also a religious function, that contentment of mind and leisure, and pride and pleasure in it for its own sake, which are essential to all artistic excellence.82

This idealization of artisanal life was a key theme in The Industrial Arts of India and one of Birdwood’s lasting legacies on ideas about Indian crafts. As the first comprehensive study of all of India’s crafts, the book established a framework for comparing and contextualizing goods from across the subcontinent. It also set out a series of principles for understanding crafts: they were determined by the particular cultural circumstances of India, their beauty and value lay in hand production, and they were central to the very definition of Indian culture. Those principles had a long life well into the twentieth century, thanks in part to Birdwood’s personal stature as a top British official shaping craft policies, but also to the book’s wide distribution. Immediately after its publication, the secretary of state for India sent dozens of copies to each province at government expense where they were distributed to every school of art, scientific and literary society, government college and university, as well as leading newspapers and public institutions in each district named as a seat of art manufacture.83 The ethnographic state in action: Production in government surveys Working from London, Birdwood compiled the information for The Industrial Arts of India on the basis of published reports. He was well aware of the limitations of this strategy. Indeed, in the introduction he described


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the book as an “index to [the] deficiencies” of existing information available through the India Museum and elsewhere.84 An eminently practical colonial official for all his arts and crafts romanticism, Birdwood helped resolve that knowledge deficit by calling in 1880 on the Government of India for direct investigations into traditional methods, to be conducted systematically and thoroughly by officials across the subcontinent.85 That demand was met, first by the 1880s series of government gazetteers and then by a series of government craft monographs conducted in the 1890s and 1900s. Both sets of surveys reoriented knowledge about crafts from products to producers. And yet they also echoed Birdwood’s ideas about the essential connection between crafts and culture. The 1880s series gazetteers were based both on the new statistical information from the first all-India census in 1871 and on specific attempts to investigate traditional manufactures. Expressive of the growing desire to generate comprehensive, comparable descriptions of all parts of the empire, these studies radically expanded the scope of data easily accessible about local conditions. In every gazetteer, standard chapters explored the geography, production, people (divided into Hindu and Muslim, grouped into occupational groups—husbandmen, craftsmen, fishers, unsettled tribes, etc.—and then described by castes), agriculture, capital, trade and crafts, history, land use, justice, finance, instruction, health, subdivisions, and places of the district. As an important part of local economies, crafts received their due share of official scrutiny, with attention directed specifically to manufacturing processes, tools and technologies, artisanal communities, objects in regular production, and markets. To give a sense of scale, the craft section of the 1885 Poona district gazetteer ran almost forty pages with separate discussions of twelve different crafts, including tape weaving, wood turning, the making of copper and brass vessels, cotton cloth, silk cloth, gold and silver thread, glass bangles, ivory combs, clay figures, iron pots, felt, and paper.86 By comparison, the General Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1871–1872 devoted only four pages to the crafts of the entire presidency, giving only a brief summary of distinctive manufactures.87 Compared with earlier attempts to document crafts, the 1880s series gazetteers presented far more information on all levels. One area of particular expansion was production. In The Costumes and Textiles of the People of India, Watson had offered no description at all of how silk was made, but merely listed different silk products according to their use. Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise; since Watson compiled his information in London from fabric samples already in the collection of

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the India Museum, he had no opportunity to see production firsthand.88 Nor did the V&A or Indian exhibitions document existing manufacture, preferring instead to introduce improved machinery. The 1885 Poona gazetteer, by contrast, included over five pages on all the different stages of silk making, from sorting and reeling to twisting, bleaching, dyeing and sizing yarn, warping, and weaving fabric.89 Alongside details about processes, gazetteers also offered extensive descriptions of producers: their economic standing, social reputation, attitudes towards education, gods worshipped, types of rituals, and marriage customs. The 1883 Nasik district gazetteer, for instance, noted not only the specific tools used in brass- and copperwork but also the condition and habits of the Kasars and Tambats—the two principal castes involved. That cultural information actually appears twice: once in the chapter on individual castes and then again in the chapter on manufactures. In the latter, descriptions of specific processes were interspersed with such details as the fact that the Kasars worshipped Khandoba, Bhairaba, and “the Devi,” took no animal food or liquor, and allowed widow remarriage, while the Tambats worshipped Pavagad, Mahakali, and Khandoba, held marriages only once every four or five years, lived in “rich, strongly built houses and are a clean, orderly, hardworking and prosperous class.”90 By interweaving cultural characteristics with production and market information, the district gazetteers firmly linked individual objects to the artisans who made them. Whether or not the Kasars worshipped the Devi was not at all extraneous to their work in copper; according to the gazetteers, it helped shape how, why, and when artisans did their work. In some cases, this influence was direct, as in stories of a Hindu caste in Bhuj who, after taking refuge in the temple of Maha Kali some 200 years ago, took up copperwork at the instruction of the goddess.91 In other cases, however, the influence was more indirect, appearing not in injunctions to stay in a craft or leave it, but through attitudes toward work: honesty, thrift, diligence, and so forth. The 1880s series of gazetteers proved foundational for later attempts to investigate crafts. As the first detailed studies of local production carried out all over India, the gazetteers both established the model for understanding production through people and processes but also supplied the core information on which all later investigators built. Indeed, surveys down to the present have quoted extensively from the 1880s gazetteers, often using them as a benchmark by which to measure later changes.92 The gazetteers did, however, have their limitations. First, space constraints


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kept entries short; no matter their local significance, crafts remained only one topic among many, neither more nor less important than agriculture, irrigation, education, health, or social unrest. Second, entries were broadly descriptive rather than precisely analytical, making them all but useless on either technical or development grounds. In the Sholapur gazetteer, for instance, it would have been impossible to either replicate or improve on existing dyeing practices given descriptions like the following: “The silk is first softened by being placed with lime and carbonate of soda in boiling water; afterwards to dye it magenta, it is steeped six days in the water in which cochineal has been dissolved.”93 Such details might help explain current production, but without closer analysis of ingredients, precise recipes, or a detailed assessment of tools, they made it difficult to suggest innovations. Third, part of a wider official attempt to understand the contours of local society, the gazetteers did not isolate present problems or note promising trends that might make crafts more competitive. As such, they were not much help in economic planning. Fourth, descriptions varied enormously according to apparently arbitrary criteria. The Sholapur gazetteer, for example, offered fifteen pages describing the various rites of passage practiced by the 448 members of the Karanjkar caste, who worked at a range of crafts, but only a single page on the 5,092 members of the Sonar (goldsmith) caste, who were not only more numerous but also more prosperous.94 Finally, these remained local studies, noting innovations, social mobility, or decline at the district level. To compare those trends regionally, one had to wade through entries scattered across numerous bulky volumes, compiled by officials with different degrees of familiarity with industrial matters. Calls to improve on the district gazetteers came in the late 1880s from within the government itself. The Home Department was so “impressed with the existing want of information at hand as to the extent, character, and circumstances of important local industries in every province of India,” that it issued a resolution in 1888 suggesting that “in each province an Industrial survey should be completed.” Such a survey was to be the foundation of proper economic planning. For, the resolution argued, it would discover those industries that were centralized, growing in both production and trade, and capable of scientific improvement—that is, industries suitable for development.95 The result was a series of annual craft monographs starting in 1893 and ending in 1909. At the request of the Government of India, each province prepared a monograph on the same craft in a given year, thereby helping to coordinate knowledge across the subcontinent. In the Bombay Presidency, superintendent of the JJ School John Griffiths conducted the initial survey in 1893 of the

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copper- and brassware industry. Altogether, Griffiths spent six months on the project, visiting different manufacturing centers, compiling information from other sources, and writing up his report, which the government then published.96 The subsequent twelve monographs for the Bombay Presidency examined silk fabrics, cotton fabrics, woolen fabrics, dyes and dyeing, carpet making, stone carving and inlaying, wood carving, ivory carving, pottery and glassware, iron- and steelwork, wire and tinsel, paper making, and tanning and working in leather. These monographs had a specifically developmental orientation: to identify factors preventing or encouraging growth in different crafts and to suggest how impediments might be overcome.97 This focus determined the information collected. Authors analyzed not just the communities responsible for production and the types of products, but a whole range of factors that impacted each, including average wages, working conditions, nature and sources of raw materials, markets for finished articles, recent technological innovations, the overall expansion or decline of employment within the craft, and the comparative strengths and weaknesses of different production centers. Monograph authors, in other words, assessed not just the current state of an industry but also its potential, closing almost every study with a section on future prospects. As part of their attention to future development, monographs offered much greater detail on artisanal methods. They did cover products, often pairing written descriptions with black-and-white illustrations of key goods. But authors were more interested in how things were made. For instance, in their respective studies, J. R. Martin analyzed the preparation of barks used in tanning; E. Maconochie described how potters created moulds, shaped clay, joined parts, and dried and then polished finished earthenware pitchers; and R. T. F. Kirk detailed how to spread pulp evenly over a screen to make paper and then how to polish dry sheets.98 In each case, authors attempted to coordinate scattered knowledge and compile a single authoritative description out of myriad individual practices. They also tried to translate those individual practices into universal laws of chemistry and mechanics in order to assess why certain processes worked as they did. And yet, just as the monographs helped abstract crafts into scientific principles, the same publications also reaffirmed the intimate connection between crafts and individual artisanal bodies. Some did this by combining descriptions of industrial organization with those of caste characteristics, religious practices, and kinship relations99; all did this by emphasizing the way artisans used touch, taste, smell, and intuition to guide their practices. C. G. H. Fawcett’s Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing


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in the Bombay Presidency, for instance, opened with a brief overview of the social characteristics and status of Bhavsars, Chippas, Rangaris, and Khatris, the main groups responsible for cotton dyeing. Only then did he turn to the technical aspects of the craft, devoting the rest of the report to various dyestuffs and processes—the chemical properties and efficacy of different dyes and the methods used to produce different colors.100 Throughout, Fawcett returned again and again to two themes: first, the primitive nature of the tools used, and second, the embodied nature of the work. On the subject of technologies, Fawcett warned his reader that “the appliances used by a native dyer in this country are of the simplest and roughest kind,” with correspondingly inexact methods; the work of an Indian dyer “is all hand labour; and his processes are tedious, complicated and imperfect, being still carried on more or less as they were by his ancestors before him.”101 On the subject of working methods, Fawcett stressed that Indian dyeing could not be reduced to abstract rules. Dyers worked with dyestuffs of constantly varying purity and strength, relied on natural water sources whose changing mineral composition could radically alter dyeing results, combined materials by eye rather than exact measurement, and negotiated by feel variable weather conditions—most importantly, humidity—to determine the exact time needed for dyeing, drying, or other stages. With so many variables in constant flux, it was impossible to reduce methods to exact formulas or confidently predict results. Instead, success in dyeing was always uncertain, as it did not rely on scientific principles but on the instinctive knowledge of an artisan juggling disparate factors by the criteria of touch, taste, and smell.102 Dyeing was, in other words, primitive and archaic in technologies and profoundly unscientific in application and results. Gazetteers and government monographs contributed much toward the systematization of information Birdwood had been hoping for. Despite his investment in production as key to understanding beauty and value, Birdwood himself had only really been able to compile substantive information about craft products in The Industrial Arts of India. At that point there simply was not enough known about production in different areas to create a synthetic picture of craft technologies or materials across all of India. The gazetteers and then the monographs made such a picture possible, investigating and comparing the state of industries in different areas to assemble a comprehensive idea of the factors encouraging or preventing growth on a national scale. And yet they did so not in abstract economic terms of supply, demand, market share, and capital needs, but in terms of embodied, ethnographic labor. Birdwood’s generalized argument that Indian village life was responsible for India’s fine craft production here

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took on concrete form, with particular religious habits or kinship patterns linked to specific attitudes toward skill, education, and productivity. Now it was not the village but the artisanal body that explained production. To make such arguments, gazetteers and monographs deployed ethnographic claims to scientific objectivity. Isolating and identifying cultural groups as discrete entities, government officials reduced individuals to artisanal types, representative of the collective as a whole. The ethnographic state in action: Documenting design The push to better understand craft production did not stop at how things were made, but also explored what things were made. Part of this interest was economic; officials wanted to understand the range of goods being produced within artisanal sectors of the economy. More of it, however, was aesthetic; officials directed much of their attention toward a very specific subset of all artisanal goods—those produced in traditional styles. Like surveys of crafts communities and their methods, documentation of traditional design also exploded in the 1880s and 1890s. This took the form of a wide range of publications, new exhibitions, and museum displays, all illustrating regional styles and demonstrating the excellence of historic decorative abilities. This new attention to traditional styles built on the long-standing appreciation for Indian design expressed from the 1851 Great Exhibition onward. It also, however, emerged from a more immediate fear at the end of the century that Indian design was dying out in the face of Western influences. This sense of decline prompted the government to gather together art school and museum officials in Calcutta in 1883 to debate what could be done for “the encouragement of good design and workmanship” and “the prevention of degradation” in industrial arts.103 The result was the Government of India’s “Draft Scheme for the Promotion of Industrial Art,” a series of proposals to promote crafts in general and traditional design in particular, including regional art experts to advise artisans, expanded museum displays to highlight local manufactures, and new publications to document the best in traditional arts.104 One result of the new 1883 initiative in the Bombay Presidency was an attempt to expand the craft collections at the V&A and the JJ School of Arts. At the latter, teachers had been using historic and contemporary regional arts in classrooms since the mid-1870s; in addition to items bought in local bazaars, teachers led annual trips to draw and make models of key architectural monuments in the region.105 In 1881 the JJ superintendent John Griffiths assembled all those materials into a formal


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school museum and secured an annual grant of Rs. 500 from the government to further build up the collection, which was later raised to Rs. 1,100 a year.106 Although the museum remained too limited to truly represent all the manufactures of western India—gathered as it was out of items purchased by individual instructors from artisans or regional exhibitions—it did present an abbreviated picture of India’s artistic past and present, serving as a source of ideas for students working in both the fine and industrial arts.107 That collection was in turn supplemented by efforts at the V&A in the 1880s to finally expand its crafts collection. An initial boost came at the 1883 Calcutta Exhibition, where Griffiths purchased Rs. 8,000 worth of artware largely for the V&A.108 By 1886 the museum had enlarged its holdings of local fabrics, carpets, jewelry, hornwork, sandalwood carving, soapstone, lacquerware, pottery, and porcelain; it also now boasted a series of models of artisans at work, including complete depictions of a silk weaving workshop, copper- and goldsmith shops, and an iron forge.109 Bombay-based museum collections paled, however, compared with those assembled elsewhere in India. One of the most successful attempts to thoroughly represent regional artware was at the Jaipur Museum of Art. Organized by Thomas Holbein Hendley largely around items displayed at an 1883 exhibition in Jaipur, the museum explicitly set out to present “selected examples of the best art work of India,” including “specimens of local manufactures, in order that strangers might see what could be obtained in the neighbourhood.”110 That curatorial strategy guided not only the content of the displays but the very building in which they were housed. Colonel Swinton Jacob, then the supervising engineer of Jaipur state, conceived of the museum building as a record of local skills and styles. Thus, while he drew up the overall plan for the museum, Jacob left ornamental details up to local masons, who drew their ideas from traditional buildings in the area.111 Indeed, the museum had no collection of carved work aside from what was on its walls, where, according to Hendley, “almost every pillar and almost every inch of wall space is a copy of, or an adaptation from some well-known and admired native building.”112 An even more influential result of the 1883 scheme was the Journal of Indian Arts—later renamed the Journal of Indian Art and Industry (JIAI). Launched in early 1884 under the editorship of Lockwood Kipling (principal of the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore and father of the more famous Rudyard), the journal quickly became a key forum for documenting design.113 According to the government resolution, it had two objects: to present the history of different crafts, “especially with reference to designs

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and forms,” and to help the economic advancement of the crafts.114 To the former end, many articles documented a particular regional art, briefly outlining centers of manufacture, types of products, methods of production, and artisans involved. Early articles in this vein included “Punjab Wood Carving (1884), “Thana Silks” (1885), “Jeypore Enamels” (1885), “Bidri Ware” (1885), “Indian Ivory Carving” (1885), “Mooltan Pottery” (1886), and “Burmese Silver Work” (1886). In each, authors supplemented economic details with information on typical or particularly excellent designs, which were then lavishly illustrated in color plates. JIAI editors linked together separate articles on individual crafts in different ways. One method was to devote a single issue to several different regional studies of the same or related crafts. The January 1903 issue, for instance, contained articles on silk fabrics in the Bombay Presidency, Central Provinces, and the Punjab, respectively; this was followed in the April 1903 issue with articles on silk in Burma, wool fabrics in Bombay, and cotton fabrics in Bombay, Assam, and the Northwest Provinces and Oudh. Another way to create linkages was to locate particular crafts within an all-India “art census” presented through a series of surveys briefly listing manufactures by region. Conflating, as Deepali Dewan notes, stylistic regions with political boundaries, the census aimed at “stereotyping in this journal the peculiar features and forms of each local art while it yet remains distinct, and in preserving a detailed account of the practices and methods adopted at each place where a manufacture is conducted.”115 In the first survey, “List of the Arts and Industries of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh,” this stereotyping took the form of a tabular summary of regional manufactures that indicated types of products, where made, prices, and distinctive features of the craft. Thus under the general class of “Inlaid work,” items listed included pen-trays, inkstands, salvers, and boxes from Mainpuri and Pilibhit. These were “of shisham wood, into which patterns are beaten in, in brass wire and polished. The designs are either of foliage or geometrical. Prices up to Rs. 100. The same work can be introduced with good effect for paneling doors, picture framing, &c.”116 Another way the JIAI tried to create a comprehensive vision of crafts was by addressing issues common across media. On the one hand, authors identified a universal language of Indian design, often drawing on historic monuments as visual proof for essential lessons in color or ornament. Articles on “Rustic Ornamentation” (1884), “Indian Architectural Details” (1890), “Dravidian Architectural Details” (1894), “Moghul Colour Decoration of Agra” (1902), or “The Elephant in Industry and Art” (1904) tried to abstract common ideals from specific examples


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of Indian decoration, transforming three-dimensional examples into two-dimensional patterns suitable for application to any surface.117 Any artisan interested in authentically “Indian” design could—presumably—use these lessons. On the other hand, authors established unity across crafts through shared problems. Focusing on the difficulties created by Westernization and commercialization, articles on the “Difficulties of Art Manufacture” (1884), “The Parable of Indian Art” (1889), “Industrial Art in India” (1891), and “Defects in Indian Art-Ware” (1913) argued that artisans of all kinds faced similar challenges and must adopt similar solutions to survive in changing times. The JIAI was not the only outlet for published ideas about design. Thomas Holbein Hendley, for instance, was a regular writer for the JIAI who contributed articles, from 1884 down to his death in 1916, on enameling (1884), metalwork (1892), bookbinding (1894), silk (1910), arms and armor (1913), jewelry (1909), the Indian contributions he himself had assembled for the Festival of Empire of 1911, and many other topics.118 He also, however, published a series of books documenting regional arts. When, for instance, Hendley wanted to summarize the achievements of the 1883 art exhibition he had organized in Jaipur, he did so via a magnificent four-volume set of plates, which the Jaipur state then distributed to select libraries throughout India as a gift from the Maharaja. The hope was that the volumes would “secure, for the benefit of the public and of the Indian workman, copies of the beautiful art treasures which still exist in the country, but are being rapidly dispersed throughout the world, with the certainty that such masterpieces will never be produced again.”119 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Hendley supplemented these four volumes with other publications also intended to show off the best in traditional designs from Rajputana. These included books illustrating carpet designs from the royal collection in Jaipur, the art treasures of Ulwar, damascene work in India, and Jaipuri enamels. The two main types of documentation efforts in the 1880s—gazetteers and monographs on the one hand, and design publications and exhibits on the other—differed in significant ways. In broad terms, the former focused on the connection between people and processes, while the latter connected visual appearance to products. Whereas gazetteers and monographs tried to explain technologies in the exact language of science, efforts to understand design often got rid of technical details altogether. Striking examples of this difference appear in excerpted versions of government monographs that appeared in the JIAI. B. A. Brendon and S. M. Edwardes, for instance, both published abbreviated versions

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of their studies of wool and silk in the Bombay Presidency, respectively, in the JIAI in early 1903. The JIAI versions were much shorter; while the original studies ran fifteen and seventy-four pages each, the excerpts were only two and six pages long.120 Leaving out details about artisanal communities or regional variations, the shortened journal articles presented a single, standardized description of production, common to the presidency as a whole.121 By doing so, the JIAI articles helped readers understand the distinctive skills involved in creating wool and silk products, but did nothing to assess the overall prospects for the industries in the region or to reflect dynamism in production strategies from one town to another. In other words, the JIAI articles presented little useful economic knowledge. For that, the comparative, town-by-town analysis of the monographs and their attention to constraints on growth were more helpful. And yet, even though they differed, all of these new knowledge projects were similarly concerned with production. Whether focused on design or economic development, objects no longer appeared independent of the labor that produced them. This was most obvious in the gazetteers and monographs, which provided descriptions of artisanal communities as part of the essential knowledge of particular crafts. But it was equally true of design-oriented publications and exhibits, which not only focused on objects and visual appearance but also paid close attention to production. In 1890, western India’s premier design center, the JJ School of Art, opened the Reay Art Workshops to offer more specialized instruction in crafts. According to the then superintendent Griffiths, the Reay Workshops taught only crafts that were “truly Indian in their treatment”—wood carving, pottery, silverand copperwork, embroidery, and enameling.122 For Griffiths, what kept those crafts “truly Indian” was the fact that each workshop was run by a native craftsperon according to the “traditional mode of working peculiar to each craft”; under proper European supervision, traditional working methods were the necessary precondition for traditional designs. To give another example of the same theme, in a catalog to the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, Hendley lavished praise on an intricately carved wooden gateway leading into the Rajputana Courts (see fig. 1.4). Like the Jaipur Museum building, the general form of the gateway had been designed by Swinton Jacob, but the details had been executed by Indian woodcarvers. Hendley praised the work for “the endless variety of ornament, showing the fertility of invention, and the true artistic sense of the carvers.”123Although the gateway stood as a rich visual record of ornamental detail, its true importance lay elsewhere: in how that carving came into being. The woodworkers, Hendley wrote, “were what one could imagine the workmen who built the great


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Figure 1.4 Jaipur gateway to the Rajputana Courts, Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, London Source: Cundall, ed., Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, p. 19. Courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

Cathedrals of Europe were—each man taking a part, not as a mere machine, but as a creator bound down only to work on a certain frame-work.”124 Finally, for all their differences, all these late-nineteenth-century efforts to document crafts agreed that production was a specifically male activity. Earlier studies noted the participation of women in a range of crafts processes, largely at preparatory stages. By the end of the nineteenth century women’s roles had been systematically devalued. As Clare WilkinsonWeber notes, government monographs described women as either “helpers” to men or part-time workers occupying their leisure hours with craftwork. This was the result of a dual bias. On the one hand, investigators did not collect information, since they did not see women’s participation as work; influenced by global discourses of domesticity, studies portrayed women primarily as caregivers and homemakers, not economic agents. On the other hand, household producers did not offer information about the role women played, both because that role was seen as subordinate to male leadership and because social status increasingly rested on women’s nonparticipation in formal work.125 Thanks to these biases, crafts were, in the end, men’s work, embedded in specifically male bodies.

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Conclusion: Crafts and the Artisanal Body One striking demonstration of the focus on production is the need to display artisans at work. Overseas, most major exhibitions from the 1880s onward included live Indian craftsmen. At the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, for instance, organizers erected a small courtyard of shops in which some forty-five artisans from different parts of the subcontinent “daily plied their trades under the eyes of the public.”126 These men and boys attracted a great deal of attention at the exhibition; dense crowds gathered daily to watch the artisans stitching delicate embroideries, making inlaid wooden boxes, and weaving rich carpets, and the popular press printed illustrations of the artisans at work. Indeed, the executive commissioner of the 1886 exhibition, Sir Francis Philip Cunliffe-Owen, declared that the “body of native artizans” put on display was “undoubtedly the most attractive feature of the whole Exhibition.”127 Within India, as mentioned earlier, the V&A acquired models of artisanal workshops in the mid-1880s, later adding an entire case of miniature figurines of artisans at work—all of which remain on view to this day (see fig. 1.5). Similarly, one of the most popular sections at an 1890 exhibition at the JJ School featured artisans carving wooden boxes, forming silver teapots, throwing and decorating pottery, stitching embroidery, and making spangles.128 Even exhibitions that emphasized modern industry over crafts followed the practice of putting artisans on display. At the 1904 Indian National Congress’s Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition in Bombay, the JJ School set up small workshops in which students demonstrated pottery, stone carving, weaving, carpentry, jewelry, copper beating, silversmithing, and house decoration.129 Other exhibitions held in connection to earlytwentieth century Indian industrial conferences regularly featured handloom weavers, usually demonstrating new appliances or looms designed to increase handloom weaving speed.130 Publications similarly depicted artisans; in the case of the JIAI, as Deepali Dewan notes, almost every article on crafts included some image of bodies at work.131 A short 1894 article on metalwork from the Jaipur School of Art, for instance, featured only two images; one was of brass vases produced at the school, the other was of an old man seated on a mat surrounded by tools, with his hands folded in his lap, staring off into the distance (see fig. 1.6). From the photograph, it is not clear how he would have used those tools or how he would have produced the finished box and cups lying before him. Not enacting work, he appeared only as stereotype of an artisan. Other images did illustrate different stages of production. Thus S. M. Edwardes’ 1903 article on silk production in the


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Figure 1.5 Clay models of artisans, with details of embroiderers and potters, Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay Source: Photographs by the author.

Bombay Presidency—excerpted from his longer monograph—offered five images of artisans winding silk onto reels, spinning, doubling thread onto drums, warping, and then weaving. Rough drawings rather than photographs, these provided only a general sense of the scale and shape of tools, with little detail about the stages of the warping process or how the complicated two-story silk looms worked. Such displays represent a very public expression of the growing attention to producers. By the end of the century, exhibitions that otherwise reduced cultures to their objects and obscured labor now also tried to offer visual evidence of production. But they did so not out of respect for Indian technologies, but out of a sense that production in India could not be abstracted from the male artisanal body. Gazetteers and monographs tried to render production into the language of science; by identifying

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Figure 1.6 Metal worker from the Jaipur School of Art, JIAI, 1894 Source: “Metal Work, School of Art, Jeypore,” JIAI 6 no. 48 [1894]. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.

crafts as embodied labor they also marked the fundamental impossibility of such a project. As we will see in Chapter 2, this close attention paid to caste bodies helped establish the fundamental distance that separated Indian crafts from modern industry. Indian artisans might make intricate things, but only through patience and diligence, not innovation and mechanics. The same artisans might cooperate closely in highly specialized labor requiring detailed experience, but only out of caste loyalties and kinship networks, not out of logical, efficient capitalist principles. In the end, documentation efforts rendered Indian skills ethnographic, not industrial, rooted as they were in cultural proclivities that simultaneously explained current production but also prevented future development.


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In documentation efforts, crafts appeared as examples of indigenous knowledge. But surveys, monographs, and exhibitions were careful to label that knowledge archaic, offering it up as yet another example of Indians’ inability to become the proper “knowing subject who is set apart from, even set up against, the objects to be known.” As Sanjay Seth has recently argued, Western education in India drew on the wider Enlightenment heritage to advance the distinction “between genuine knowledge, the ability to understand the meaning of something through one’s own reasoning processes, and . . . having made knowledge one’s own, and being ‘stuffed’ with others’ ideas and therefore in possession of only secondhand knowledge.” This was, moreover, “a distinction in which good knowledge and failed knowledge map onto the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy, between an active subject and a passive one.”132 Crafts skills failed to make the grade of “genuine” knowledge on all levels. Passed on from one generation to another, taught by elders who expected unquestioning obedience from their students, and mastered through rote repetition of gradually more difficult tasks, artisanship offered no space for individual ownership of knowledge, let alone incentive to explore the underlying principles that informed daily work. Embodied, traditional crafts skills appeared, in other words, as the antithesis of the modern. That opposition to modern knowledge helped to add more coherence to the category of crafts itself. At the same time that government surveys, museums, and journals isolated individual castes and communities by their cultural habits, working methods, and economic status, they also united crafts by identifying commonalities across media and region. Standardized reports carefully tabulated comparable information for each craft on average wages, total employment, and changing product ranges. With diverse processes occurring across wide geographic areas in disparate industries all distilled into common categories of analysis, it became increasingly possible to see crafts as a single sector, experiencing shared trends, whether of geographic centralization, competition from mill goods, artisanal immiseration, or innovation in designs. Those comparisons emerged naturally from survey design; the goal of standardizing gazetteer or monograph questions, topics, organization, and level of detail was to produce information that could be easily translated from one part of the country to another, one community to another, and one industry to another. They also emerged naturally from statistics as a form of knowledge, which, as Arjun Appadurai has argued, both flattens out idiosyncrasies within categories and hardens boundaries between categories.133 By categorizing artisans within a common class of workers—as opposed to other classes such as writers, traders,

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husbandmen, musicians, servants, shepherds, and laborers—gazetteers forged an aggregate identity for crafts marked by shared characteristics and common problems. Similarly, by identifying wooden chairs, embroidered bedcovers, silver tea trays, cotton saris, brass waterpots, woolen shawls, leather shoes, and ivory combs under the common rubric of crafts, late-nineteenth-century reformers emphasized conceptual unity rather than material differences. Being able to see individual dyers as representatives of a common class of artisans or to place individual objects into a wider category of crafts relied on both a certain level of abstraction and a certain level of distance from the subject of study. This process was hardly unique to crafts. As noted earlier, the basic conceptual frameworks of Indian society—caste, religious community, language, region—were all undergoing a process of cultural objectification in the late nineteenth century as Western-educated Indians began to step back from their customs, rituals, and traditions and to view them as essential elements of a complete entity, a “thing” now consciously seen as Indian culture.134 As outside observers replaced occasional, idiosyncratic surveys of local crafts with common, uniform accounts about industries across the whole subcontinent, they transformed the nature and function of knowledge. For one, the complexity of local knowledge shifted; as Fawcett compiled a standard description of dyeing, for instance, he necessarily jettisoned many local variations and innovations to create commonality.135 For another, the point of local knowledge shifted; silk weaving in Poona now represented not just local productivity or labor utilization but national industrial skills and potential, to be judged for its contribution to the overall economy alongside weaving in Surat, Benares, and Mysore. In other words, as with other forms of indigenous knowledge like Sanskrit or ayurveda, documentation rendered crafts passive objects of analysis rather than active, living practices.136 Even more important, though, was the fact that control over knowledge also shifted as authors of surveys, gazetteers, and monographs put into public hands information that formerly would have been kept as the personal heritage of individual families or caste groups. This was a striking change at the time. Compared with the dense and wide-ranging circulation of printed materials about production in Europe from as early as the late seventeenth century,137 Indian artisans in the late nineteenth century generally kept technical knowledge to themselves. One key reason for this was fear of competition; as an 1876 article in the reform-minded Gujarati journal Buddhiprakash put it, “There are many who think that if they teach their craft to others, they may lose their own business and earnings.”138 That is not to say that no records existed. Late-nineteenth-century Gujarati blockmakers, printers, and merchants involved in the production of block-printed saudagiri


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cottons for Southeast Asian markets, for instance, all kept paper copies of typical designs to facilitate orders with Thai merchants.139 But such paper copies seem to have been private rather than public documents, kept within particular families rather than distributed for the general use of printers as a whole, let alone all textile workers, or all Gujaratis. Thus, the most senior saudagiri blockmaker still active in 2000, Maneklal Gajjar, retained design samples compiled by his father and grandfather from the late nineteenth century onward as evidence of the particular skills of his family, not of the general state of printing in earlier eras.140 As Tirthankar Roy has pointed out, keeping information private represented a logical response for individuals struggling to retain a competitive edge in an era with no protection for intellectual property rights.141 The shift, then, to making knowledge publicly available through exhibitions, museums, and publications represents a radical innovation not only in access but also in power. By documenting crafts in print or material display, art officials claimed their right to disrupt existing systems of knowledge transmission and revealed their ability to do so in the face of artisanal desires for privacy. They also declared themselves experts in the field of crafts, demonstrating their superiority over artisans in both breadth and depth of knowledge. In terms of breadth, art officials compiled composite histories of traditional arts, assembled coherent narratives of growth, achievement, and decay, and distilled underlying concepts from the myriad objects available—all of which added up to a comprehensive vision of the field seemingly unavailable to artisans working in caste-bound isolation. In terms of depth, officials used the language of abstract knowledge and scientific analysis to identify underlying principles and universal truths of artisanal work—again a view inaccessible to artisans seen as capable of only instinctual, habitual practice. Here the definition discussed earlier of different types of knowledge as active or passive, genuine or failed, translated into different types of leadership; those with active knowledge of the field claimed the right to active leadership. Documentation efforts, in other words, displaced artisans as masters of craftwork in favor of self-appointed outside “experts”; as Deepali Dewan puts it, textual descriptions of craft processes made the artisan’s “actual presence superfluous.”142 That displacement is visible in the very format of late-nineteenthcentury documentation efforts. Printed surveys of crafts appeared in expensive English-language publications, which would have been inaccessible to often-impoverished, generally illiterate artisans. Nor were such publications designed to serve artisanal needs. Most only documented what artisans themselves already knew, summarizing existing working practices rather than detailing new technical innovations, and describing traditional product lines instead of exploring new commodity demands.

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If artisans were not the presumed audience for documentation efforts, neither were they acknowledged as the authors. At exhibitions artisans appeared not as experts to answer questions on tools or methods to fellow craftspersons, but, as Saloni Mathur points out, as largely silent bodies on display.143 To European viewers those bodies seemed so exotic as to be hardly human; describing the reaction of the crowds that flocked to see the Indian artisans at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the Bengali museum official T. N. Mukharji noted, “They were as much astonished to see the Indians produce works of art with the aid of rude apparatus they themselves had discarded long ago, as a Hindu would be to see a chimpanzee officiating as a priest in a funeral ceremony and reading out Sanskrit texts from a palm leaf book spread before him.”144 In print, the informants who provided details of dye recipes, tanning techniques, or carving skills were never named; instead they are described only as “workmen,” “dyers,” “leatherworkers,” or “carvers.” Thus John Griffiths starts out his description of “the operation of working brass and copper into the various shapes” in an 1896 article in the JIAI with the following lines: The sheet of copper or brass is placed by the workman on the floor, and on it he traces with a pair of compasses a circle of sufficient size to form the vessel he is about to make, and cuts it out with a pair of scissors. If the article to be made is a small one, such as a lota . . ., it is hammered into shape from one piece of metal, beginning from the bottom and working up to the mouth; but if it is a large one, such as the handa . . ., then it is made of two pieces with a joint at about the centre.145

Griffiths writes his informants out of authority in his article on several levels; not only is the copperworker left unnamed, much of his work is rendered in the passive tense—the sheet “is placed,” the small vessel “is hammered,” the large vessel “is made.” If the physical ability to put artisans on display represents one obvious demonstration of the new power dynamics in crafts at the end of the nineteenth century, this emerging intellectual authority over crafts is another. Outsiders now controlled the public presentation of information about crafts even as artisans continued to circulate ideas and technologies through more private channels. As crafts emerged more fully into the public eye, they also became subject to new public demands for change. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 2, in the late-nineteenth-century British officials and Indian elites alike asserted their power in yet another way: by defining what was wrong with crafts and determining what should be done to fix them.

2

The Culture of Difference: From Colonial Knowledge to the Problem with Crafts

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urvey compilers set out to study crafts for complex reasons. One of the most basic was perhaps curiosity; Indian-carved agates, woven shawls, dyed cottons, and inlaid sandalwood had long-standing markets in Europe, and yet comparatively little was known of how, where, and by whom they were made. Thus, museum displays and government monographs set out to fill gaps in existing knowledge and resolve minor mysteries of origin and technique. They also, however, did far more. For, alongside particular attention to the chisels or resins used in wood carving, or the methods of preparing wool for shawl weaving, documentation efforts also contributed to a much larger project of outlining the underlying structures of the Indian traditional economy. Indeed, it is hard to imagine why the colonial state would regularly invest public resources into systematically mapping—geographically, culturally, economically, socially, and technically—craft production if there was not that underlying goal. When surveys and exhibitions rendered artisanal knowledge public, they did so not just because they could—thanks to the newfound investigatory powers of the colonial state. They also did so because organizers thought they should—on the basis of the idea that crafts were a vital part of the larger economy, with consequences—good or bad—for the nation as a whole. Crafts, in other words, were not just subject to public scrutiny but also subject to public duty. This public commitment to crafts in India emerged as part of a much larger concern with industrial strength as a key component in modern nation-building. From at least the 1870s on, industrial activists worked

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to convince the public that industrial production and productivity were not merely economic concerns, tied only to narrow pursuits of profit and individual market share. Rather, they argued, industry was an essentially political matter, crucial to ideological claims to national reputation as well as to material expressions of international power. On a domestic level, writers identified prosperous and progressive areas of the subcontinent on the basis of their production; writing in January 1877, the Buddhiprakash warned that “any area that cannot or does not produce good things is to be considered as good as mere forest.”1 On an international level, activists argued that power and status rested on industrial aptitude. Thus, noting the surprising power by which England, “placed in one corner of Europe, much less in size than our Gujarat province even, . . . has turned so strong and wealthy as rulers of one-third of the world,” the Buddhiprakash offered a simple explanation: “the reason is industry.”2 Arguments that industrial strength brought international fame and prosperity while its absence invited famine and poverty began appearing in journals like the Buddhiprakash in the early 1870s.3 By the end of the century even women’s magazines had taken up the refrain. Thus in 1893 the Gujarati journal Stri Bodh advised its readers that “a country’s prosperity and wealth is also dependent on the industry of its people. Where the people are idle, it is easy to find poverty and backwardness. Industry, on the other hand, lights up desolate lands with beautiful gardens and lovely buildings.”4 Indeed, the link between industrial achievement and national success had become so accepted by 1903 that the Buddhiprakash could confidently state that “now everyone at least recognizes that only such a country enjoys wealth and happiness where its trade and commerce are flourishing.”5 This new public engagement in industrial issues worked not just to call attention to the state of production but also to demand individual action to improve conditions. For women, this meant a call to “leave off idleness and take up industry and work instead” within the home, to the benefit of house and family.6 For men, more explicitly public action was demanded: pursuing technical training in chemistry or engineering, investing in new factories, opening stores to sell Indian goods, or entering industrial jobs instead of taking the easy route into government service.7 As the 1903 Buddhiprakash article put it, “If we want to improve the situation of our poor country, and desire that trade and commerce flourish once more, and that our goods reach all corners of the world, we must begin to take steps for it.” What steps should those be? Among others, “providing encouragement, somehow or the other, to our artisans to increase the production of native goods.”8

THE CULTURE OF DIFFERENCE

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As a key sector producing “native goods,” crafts offered a compelling area for development as public interest in economic matters increased. In the late nineteenth century, crafts were not merely of statistical interest, passively measured and described; instead, they became a site of active negotiation about what the future of the Indian economy should be and how modernization should be pursued. And yet, as the Buddhiprakash quote above suggests, those negotiations generally excluded artisans themselves; the “we” of the quote extended to only the educated elite readers of the journal, those seen as capable of offering encouragement to the possessively described, abstract entity “our artisans.” In development debates, various outsiders competed to establish their authority over crafts. Indeed, the more information assembled in surveys, exhibitions, museums, and journal articles about crafts processes, the more sure the knowledge gatherers were that artisans had little to offer in terms of leadership. Seen as incapable of grasping either the scientific principles underlying their techniques or the macroeconomic principles shaping their working conditions, artisans were too hopelessly mired in the minutiae of everyday practice to offer global visions for future development. Instead it was up to outsiders to step in and impose order and rationality. Only they would be able to properly understand craft processes and organization; even more importantly, only they would be able to turn local, particular habits to national, universal development ends. If this modernization project excluded artisans from leadership roles, it did not exclude all Indians. Indian economists, journalists, industrial activists, philanthropists, and social reformers all joined hands around issues of artisanal production, offering some of the most prominent voices for change. Interestingly, they did so not on the basis of superior knowledge of the field of crafts. As Arindam Dutta has pointed out, Indian elites based their ideas and interventions almost entirely on state knowledge as produced through surveys and annual statistical abstracts; they rarely, if ever, went out to gather information directly from artisans themselves.9 That shared knowledge base ensured not only common understanding with the state of the technical and organizational needs of artisans, but also a common acceptance of the ethnographic, culture-bound nature of the artisanal body. Both—the documented facts of production and the “ethnographicization” of artisans—actually served elite as well as official interests equally. For, just as the British used the culture-bound, conservative bodies of artisans to set India off from the West, so too Indian elites used those bodies to set themselves off from traditional ways by claiming superior vision, commitment to progress, and rationality as demonstrations of a superior modernity. And, just as fundamentally, Indian elites

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and British officials alike defined that superior modernity via the developmental discourse of the colonial state, with its ideals of progress, commitment to science as the basic syntax of reform, and investment in state power as the means of achieving economic and social goals.10 This shared commitment to economic development and planning in crafts was, as David Ludden has argued, centrally about power, “specifically state power in a development regime.”11 Public interest in and claims of responsibility for crafts emerged in the 1870s alongside and as part of growing Indian demands for greater political power in government. Critiques of the Indian economy at the time, as laid out by men like Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and Romesh Chunder Dutt, focused on the role of the colonial state in the decline of traditional industries, the growing dependence on agriculture, and the failure of modern industrialization. Those critiques did not question the state’s role in the economy; indeed all assumed that the state itself could and should become part of the solution by finally shaking off the claims of laissezfaire economics and taking on an activist, interventionist role in fiscal and industrial matters. And yet few Indian thinkers at the time were willing to cede all authority to the state. Instead, industrial activism offered a means of establishing Indian leadership abilities—abilities denied by the British in political institutions. To give but one example, in a long series of articles in 1876 and 1877 exploring the condition of Indian industries, the Buddhiprakash suggested a number of ways the government could help: offer more technical education, introduce new technologies, improve public facilities for trade and travel, and create employment for the poor. Such assistance was vital, the journal argued, since Indians “still do not have enough strength to improve on our own.” But the unnamed author immediately made it clear that that weakness was already almost a thing of the past: “When the child is young the parents would feed and support it, but when it grows up, the child has to be on his own. Similarly, now we must learn do our own improvement independently.” In light of that newfound power, the article cautioned readers to no longer be “dependent on the government for each and everything.”12 In other words, involvement in industrial development helped to declare Indians’ political coming of age. A shared development agenda across the racial boundaries of colonial power did not mean unanimity on the paths to progress. Indeed, reformers inside and outside of government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered opposing views about what should be done with crafts. In keeping with the forward-looking tone of the swadeshi movement, many pinned hopes for India’s future on new factories devoted to cotton spinning and weaving, chrome tanning, chemicals and


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pharmaceuticals, tobacco, pottery, buttons, soap, matches, ink, paper, and candles.13 Within this modernizing imperative, traditional manufactures seemed to offer little. Thus Glyn Barlow, the then principal of Victoria College at Palghat and former editor of the Madras Times, declared in a 1904 book, Industrial India, that “India’s old-fashioned ways of working are, as it were, bow and arrows, with which she will vainly compete with the foreigner with his machinery-guns. India, for her salvation, must get rid of her bows and arrows and must learn to use machinery-guns too.”14 In industrial terms, learning to use machine guns meant embracing modern technologies: “the hope of India’s industrial future means that India must identify herself more and more with the ways of the West. . . . For her industrial progress she must bring in the steam-engine and the machine.”15 Others were not so ready to give up on crafts. In a July 1904 review of Barlow’s book in the industrial reform journal the Indian Review, the economist and statesman Romesh Chunder Dutt argued that improving handlooms did far more good for the nation than any increase in mills could accomplish. One of the most respected economic critics of colonialism, Dutt structured his defense of crafts in social terms, contrasting the happiness of an Indian weaver with the suffering of a British mill worker: The individual man is at his best, in dignity, independence, and intelligence, when he ploughs his own field or works his own loom than when he is a labourer under a big landlord or an operative in a huge factory. . . . The Indian village weaver, working his loom with the help of his wife and children, and selling the prepared cloth in the village market, is a more responsible and dignified being than the Lancashire operative, working in crowded and noisome factories, and leading a life in which all the natural instincts of human nature are crushed out in one eternal round of factory work. The ploughed field in India seems to belong to the cultivator; the ploughman in England seems to belong to his field and his landlord. The weaver’s wife in India is a domestic woman and housewife first, and an operative afterwards; the factory girl of England is an operative first, she may be anything or nothing of a woman.16

For Dutt, the shift from crafts to factory production thus involved considerable sacrifice, entailing as it did a decline from dignified independence to exploitative suffering. Barlow and Dutt represent two sides of a fairly common debate in industrial circles about crafts development. Despite their obvious differences, however, the two men shared some key basic assumptions. First, both wrote about crafts as qualitatively different from modern

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industry. For Barlow, crafts were “bow and arrows” while modern industry was “machinery-guns”; the two represented totally separate technologies, stages of civilization, and forms of power in the world. For Dutt, the “Indian village weaver” and the “Lancashire operative” might both weave cloth, but they had nothing at all in common in terms of how, where, and for whom they worked. Similarly, both men also doubled the opposition between crafts and modern industry by the dichotomy between India and the West. For Barlow, India’s “industrial future” lay “with the ways of the West”; crafts represented India, while futuristic, machine-based modern production was essentially Euro-American. For Dutt, the Indian weaver stood in contrast not to a Bombay mill worker, but to “the Lancashire operative” and “the factory girl of England”; the culture-bound ethnographic bodies of “the Indian village weaver” and “the weaver’s wife” marked the essential nature of difference. These shared assumptions—about the contrast between Indian crafts and modern, Western industry—were common sense in India by 1904. Although visible in general terms in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the full-fledged dichotomy emerged in India more slowly. Midnineteenth-century articles in the Buddhiprakash, for instance, detailed the many ways in which artisans were unlike modern men of the time. Thus, an 1856 article noted that while artisans were too conservative to accept the latest technologies from Europe, the “learned people” of the day had woken up to the need for change and were reading widely about what was going on overseas, exploring science, collaborating on new ventures, and adopting new technologies.17 Elites, therefore, had stepped in to lead the way: “Today the quick improvement of the country is in the hands of the intelligent people.” But artisans could be part of progress as well: “If the people of our country imitate each other for this [i.e. improvement] they will act and on account of this acting in their minds they will change.”18 The dichotomy between modern men of learning and conservative artisans was, therefore, not permanent. Modern industry was the goal, but it could grow out of existing production and did not demand entirely new structures of industrial organization. Thus, when a later article in the same journal exhorted readers to “bring out the machinery and equipment that produce such [i.e. modern] goods,” it assumed artisans would be involved, arguing that new technologies would “be used by our workers, make profits for our country and our people.”19 In midcentury, industrial reformers still held out hope that artisans could make the transition from old to new methods by adopting modern technologies and embracing novel forms of industrial organization to better compete with factory goods. And, as we will see, there was a great


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deal of evidence on the ground for just those kinds of changes throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, however, public leaders increasingly ignored the possibility of an easy transition from crafts to modern industry, highlighting instead the essential difference of crafts from Westernstyle factory production. For those who longed for the latter, the contrast operated largely in negative terms: whereas modern factories were centralized, efficient, massive concerns, artisanal production was individual, isolated, and small scale; whereas modern workers were rational, disciplined, and progressive in their working methods and technologies, artisans were inexplicably tied to archaic traditional ways, unmethodical, and hostile to change. For those steeped in the rhetoric of the international Arts and Crafts Movement, on the other hand, crafts fared more positively: whereas modern workers were oppressed, confined, and exploited, artisans were independent, autonomous, and dignified; whereas industrial products were lifeless in their dull uniformity, crafts embodied human creativity through their hand-made variations and imperfections. These contrasting ideas of artisanal difference—either as something to be celebrated aesthetically and socially or as something to be bemoaned materially and economically—emerged in response to the widespread changes of the late nineteenth century. Ideas that only existed in outline form in India in midcentury, when stylistic innovation was limited and modern industry virtually unknown, took on new meaning over time. More and more Indians introduced Western goods into their homes and lives, adopting—even if only selectively—new clothes, furniture, utensils, adornments, and comforts; styles and habits changed accordingly, in terms of consumer loyalty to Indian products or desire for novelty in design. Simultaneously, Indian exposure to Western science and technology—industrial and otherwise—expanded dramatically. Although limited in number, engineering colleges, university science courses, and technical schools brought breakthroughs in practical and theoretical sciences to Indian students. At the same time, spinning and weaving mills in cotton, silk, and jute in places like Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Calcutta provided a select laboring class practical experience working with modern machinery. These upheavals of a society in transition cemented rather than erased the difference between crafts and modern industry. As in other parts of the world, the possibility of another form of production initiated sustained debates about crafts. In William Morris’s Britain, the daily reality of modern industrial cities, with their smoke-filled skies, dangerous mills, and overcrowded slums, fostered the appeal of crafts as a moral and artistic alternative. In India during the same period, by contrast, modern

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factories were rare, confined geographically in western parts of the country to a few cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad and materially largely to textiles. The sense of difference that emerged with crafts defined as all that industry was not—not Western, not modern—then, was not local or immediate, but international and theoretical. And thus, it was, by nature, globally comparative, counterpoising Indian artisans not to Indian mill workers—who did exist and were a visible part of the urban landscape in Bombay and Ahmedabad by late century—but to Western ones. Key to this opposition was the culture-bound artisanal body. Documentation efforts noted that crafts differed from modern industry in structural terms, including scale, integration, diversification, and mechanization of production. And yet authors attributed only part of the responsibility for these differences to market relations; more important, they claimed, were the attitudes and habits of artisans and the culture of work they represented. In idealized descriptions of the glories of craft production, such as the one Dutt offered in his review of Barlow’s book, how artisans felt about their work and their essential characteristics—their dignity, independence, responsibility, and intelligence—illustrated their distance from modern mill labor. Such an approach fit in snugly with the descriptions offered in more prosaic government gazetteers and monographs, where craft processes and products appeared embedded within dense ethnographic detail about artisanal marriage habits, diet, religious beliefs, housing types, styles of clothing, rites of passage, and attitudes toward work. All made economic choices the product of cultural proclivities: conservatism, religiosity, hostility to education, a desire for stability. All therefore, implicitly or explicitly, held artisans responsible for problems in adapting to a radically changing marketplace. And those problems were legion. Crafts idealists complained of too much change, seeing growing commercialization, falling quality, and Westernizing designs as evidence that Indian handcraftsmanship, with all of its aesthetic and social benefits, faced imminent extinction. Crafts modernizers, for their part, did not find enough change, worrying that artisans were too conservative and stubborn to make necessary adjustments with the times—a failing that led to growing poverty for individuals and the nation as a whole. All agreed that the changes that had come had not improved anything; artisans had either succumbed to commercial impulses at the expense of traditional styles or defensively retreated into age-old habits instead of enthusiastically embracing new opportunities. Either way, artisans had proven unable to adapt successfully to the modern world. Too conservative, backward, stubborn, or uneducated, artisans appeared in reform literature to be in desperate need of help. The obvious


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solution, then, was to bring in outsiders better versed in the structures and requirements of colonial society: educated elites. As discussed in Chapter 1, the artisanal body came into prominence only in the late nineteenth century with the shift in attention from products to producers. So too the opposition between Indian/traditional crafts and Western/modern industry defined through culture-bound, caste-determined artisans emerged only then. This chapter explores the nature and development of this opposition: how crafts came at a certain time to stand as the Other of modern industry through debates about the nature and pace of change in India. Fears about sweeping Westernization clarified a vision of what was apparently being lost: a traditional way of life built around beautiful objects and independent handcraftsmanship. Complaints about the snail’s pace of technological progress, on the other hand, solidified an image of what the future might hold, if only artisans could adapt to a new era of global competition. Whether rejecting or advocating change, romanticizing an idealized past or dispassionately describing a problematic present, activists agreed that crafts were not like modern industry. And over time, as each attempt to describe artisanal practices built off of what came before, enshrining earlier opinions as established truths, they became only more confident in that assessment. The effect was both cumulative and productive, forging a set of basic “facts” about crafts that became, to adopt David Ludden’s words from another context, “so saturated by excess plausibility” that they shaped all future assumptions and interpretations.20 Through government surveys and other writings the similarities between crafts and modern industry progressively disappeared in the face of the “excess plausibility” of difference. And, as crafts emerged as a distinct sector, simultaneously separate from all other parts of the economy but also internally unified across media and regions, that sector became increasingly subject to leadership claims by outsiders anxious to impose their own visions on the field. If the fact of artisanal difference meant that the solutions offered could not too closely mirror those of modern industry, it also meant that artisans could not be trusted to direct future developments. Thus attempts to intervene in crafts—as we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4—operated on the basic idea of difference. Crafting Knowledge: The Common Sense of Difference How, exactly, did Indian crafts differ from modern industry? What was the substance of this opposition? Late-nineteenth-century arguments of difference revolved around two main points: crafts represented

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distinctive products and craftsmanship represented a distinctive mode of production. As products, handcrafted goods were beautiful, traditional, national, and profoundly human, shaped by unique creators steeped in the lore of their caste ancestors and the spirit of their people, their variable imperfections allowing consumers access to individual creativity through material form. This rich heritage and variety was in contrast to machine goods, whose designs drew broadly on the latest, newest, ever-changing global styles and whose sleek uniformity replaced human idiosyncrasy with machine precision. As a mode of production, the contrast was even starker. Based in hereditary employment shaped by family, caste, and community, craftsmanship was simultaneously individualistic and creative, with traditionally trained artisans working age-old implements by hand in home workshops according to their own desires and the needs of their customers—men and women often personally connected to the artisan through community or more formal patron-client ties. Again, craftsmanship stood in total opposition to modern factory production, in which people from all manner of earlier employment operated the latest thunderous machinery in large mills to produce goods destined for distant, unknown markets, all for wages granted by a capitalist-owner who determined products, schedules, and distribution. Individualistic, human, distinctively Indian objects opposed standardized, impersonal, denationalized ones; decentralized, autonomous, small-scale, technologically archaic community-based production stood in contrast to centralized, anonymous, modern, efficient, global industry. Value did not automatically adhere to one side of those dichotomies in either products or production. Depending on how a particular writer weighed the relative merits of things like aesthetics against efficiency, independence against productivity, one part of the equation became more appealing than the other. Those who insisted that life should be beautiful and personally fulfilling rather than merely efficient and rational argued that crafts were superior to modern factories. Those who argued that production should provide the greatest material (if not aesthetic) good to the greatest number, on the other hand, dismissed crafts technologies as archaic and inefficient compared with more up-to-date methods. Hoping either to perpetuate or to destroy what marked crafts off from modern industry, both sides accepted difference, but attached contrasting meanings to that fact. Divided by their attitudes toward industrialization rather than by race, those who advanced these different interpretations spanned the political spectrum, demonstrating the breadth of ideas of difference.


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Defining difference positively: The production of beauty, the beauty of production In its most basic form, the opposition between Indian crafts and Western industry was already visible in European responses to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. As suggested in Chapter 1, European commentaries on the event favorably contrasted Indian submissions to British ones on design grounds, praising the gorgeous ornamentation and harmonious hues of Indian crafts while deriding the excessively naturalistic patterns and garish colors of British industrial manufactures. The official guide to the exhibition noted the “exquisite skill” of the Indian submissions in general and “the elegance of its manufactured fabrics” in particular.21 The Times went further, hoping that “by their suggestiveness” the “remarkable and characteristic collections” from India could correct “the vulgarities in art-manufactures, not only of England but of Christendom.” For, “from the carpets, the shawls, the muslins, and the brocades of Asia, and from much of its metallic and earthenware products, can be clearly traced those invaluable rules of art, a proper definition and recognition of which form the great desiderata of our more civilized industrial systems.”22 British interest in Indian crafts at the Great Exhibition was largely utilitarian; critics hoped to extract new design ideas with which to reform British manufactures, where they argued aesthetics had been all but forgotten in the drive for cost competitiveness.23 As the century progressed, however, Indian crafts increasingly attracted attention on their own right, independent of their impact on European design. In that transition, writers expanded on the nature of difference between crafts and Western industry to include not just visual appearance but also the wider cultural context of production. Late-nineteenth-century writers paired the striking exoticism of Indian crafts with the distinctive social organization of production; just as Indian pottery did not look like pottery from Britain, so too the social context looked nothing like that of the industrial West. For some, compared with the drudgery, exploitation, and alienation of Western factory production, Indian crafts offered an ideal world of material beauty and social contentment in which close-knit village communities or benevolent urban patrons fostered artisanal creativity and productivity. These themes echoed those of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. Leaders of the movement such as William Morris, Walter Crane, and C. R. Ashbee argued that beauty in design depended on beauty in work. Highly stratified factories in which individuals with no control over designs tended large machines could

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only produce ugliness and contrivance; small workshops in which master artisans collaborated closely with designers to produce objects using hand techniques, on the other hand, could only result in grace and harmony. These ideas had a profound influence on aesthetic developments throughout Europe and North America in the 1880s and 1890s, thanks to the translation of Morris’s writings into various major European languages, the wide circulation of the movement’s key publication, the journal The Studio, and trips abroad to give talks or execute commissions on the part of key designers affiliated with the movement. By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, most of the regions of Central Europe, and the United States had their own active arts and crafts movements, inspired by the British example, but rooted in their own vernacular styles and nationalist concerns.24 India was part of this international trend, thanks to what were often quite direct ties to British arts and crafts leaders. Birdwood’s complaints about the quality of some of the Indian goods on display at the 1878 Paris exhibition so stirred artists, designers, and intellectuals back in Britain that they wrote a public letter of thanks for his “independent and courageous criticism”; its signatories included Morris, Crane, and Henry Doulton, among others.25 President of the Silk Association of Great Britain and Ireland, Thomas Wardle, another key figure of the era instrumental in promoting Indian silks to international audiences, had direct working ties with Morris, printing silks that Morris designed. Finally, Lockwood Kipling modeled the crafts instruction at the Mayo School in Lahore—where he served as principal from the school’s formation in 1875 until his retirement in 1893—on Morris’s efforts to revive crafts guilds in England.26 Much as in other parts of the world, the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement can be seen in late-nineteenth-century India most clearly in idealized depictions of craftsmanship. In The Industrial Arts of India, Birdwood celebrated the traditional village artisan who had an “assured place” in community and national life, whose limited needs relieved him of “an incalculable dead weight of cares,” and who worked with “contentment of mind and leisure, and pride and pleasure in it for its own sake.”27 This vision of dignified, unhurried, artistic production echoed in other writings of the time. In an 1888 article in the JIAI Flora Annie Steel described the phulkari embroidery of the Punjab as “a work of leisure—the work of women, who, after doing yeoman’s service with father or husband in the fields, sit down in the cool of the evening to watch their threshing floors, and . . . darn away with patient, clumsy fingers at the roll of ruddy cloth upon their lap.”28 Another JIAI article the


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following year similarly emphasized the context of production: specifically, systems of patronage in Indian crafts. Reviewing the Indian section at the Paris exhibition of 1889, the unnamed author singled out for particular approval the Indian displays of the London firm Proctor and Co., arguing that the success of their furniture was “owing to their system of manufacture being as near as possible that by which the great works of art were originally produced in the palaces of Indian princes.” Not only did Proctor and Co. employ “the best possible workmen” in their workshops in Bombay, but those workmen were “allowed to follow their own ideas in working out the designs.”29 Objects produced under such conditions could not help but be more beautiful than machine-made alternatives. Thus Steel declared, “Phulkari work is a true art, insomuch that it must be the outcome of love and leisure, not of haste and greed.”30 In his report on Indian silks presented at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 and reprinted in the JIAI, Wardle explained the glories of India’s fabrics as follows: The Indians, like the Chinese and Japanese, have never cared so much for what in Europe is termed excellence of quality, which means for the most part mechanical regularity in texture and pattern, and although they have had to weave with threads often much varying in regularity and thickness, yet they have down to to-day managed somehow or other, if they have had a pattern to weave, to put, so to speak, soul into it, and to raise it above the commonplace fabrics so often produced in modern Europe.31

After praising a twenty-foot-long silk turban cloth dyed in Ulwar, Wardle went on to dismiss an English-made imitation he saw in the same market: “It was machine-printed, and of course bore no comparison to the taste in arrangement of lines of the native work. The lines on the machine-printed English specimen are exceedingly crude and hard, and the colours wanting in the richness of tone of the originals.” The superiority of Indian silks lay, in other words, in the fact of their traditional, hand production, which brought rich tones, tasteful decoration, and “soul.”32 If objects produced by hand in India were superior to their machinemade competitors from Europe, so too the creative, inspired life of Indian artisans was far preferable to the degraded existence of the Western mill worker. For Birdwood, compared with the “serenity and dignity” of daily routines that allowed the village artisan to work with “pride and pleasure,” the English worker faced a “desperate struggle for existence which oppresses the life and crushes the very soul out of the English working man.”33 Part of that difference Birdwood ascribed to capitalism, arguing that its haste and competition and constant pressure to produce more

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things at cheaper prices were essentially foreign to traditional India. But he also explained it in terms of tools by defining machinery as anathema to the artisanal way of life. For Birdwood “what . . . is chiefly to be dreaded is the general introduction of machinery into India,” since it would throw Indian crafts into “the same confusion of principles” that afflicted British manufactures and destroyed artisanal happiness.34 This essential opposition between the aesthetic and social glories of Indian craftsmanship and the horrors of Western industry appeared in its most elaborate form in a short book by the Anglo-Ceylonese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) titled simply The Indian Craftsman. Although best known for his studies of the fine arts such as Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), Rajput Painting (1916), and History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927)35—the last completed while he was curator of Indian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—Coomaraswamy was also a devoted admirer of crafts. Published in 1909, The Indian Craftsman quotes approvingly—and often at great length—from The Industrial Arts of India, acknowledging Birdwood as an authority and inspiration.36 But Coomaraswamy was far more involved in the British Arts and Crafts Movement than Birdwood and other writers about Indian crafts of the time. During a long period of residence in England between 1907 and 1916, Coomaraswamy was near neighbor, close associate, and intellectual friend of Ashbee (who had taken over the mantle of arts and crafts leadership by the turn of the century), bought Morris’s printing press in 1907, and wrote and lectured on crafts and craftsmanship.37 Perhaps reflecting those wider ties, Coomaraswamy went beyond his contemporaries in celebrating the culture of crafts in The Indian Craftsman to the point of virtually ignoring products and technologies. Birdwood inserted short paeans to handcraftsmanship within his long survey of goods produced in different places; Steel, Wardle, and others offered quick asides contrasting crafts to Western industry. Coomaraswamy, by contrast, declared the purpose of The Indian Craftsman as “being rather to portray the craftsman than to describe his work.”38 Exploring the position of artisans in society, the patronage on which they depended, how they were organized, and how they understood their work, Coomaraswamy returned again and again to the alternative offered by a crafts society to the perils of modern industrialization. In Coomaraswamy’s portrayal, the Indian craftsman emerged as entirely free of the competition for employment or markets that marked the modern West. In rural areas, artisans were valued members of the village community, “there in virtue of a perpetual contract whereby their services are given to the husbandman, from whom they receive in return


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certain privileges and payments in kind” (1). In more urban areas, artisans relied on the benevolent patronage of wealthy elites. Thus, at the local chieftain’s house “were to be seen craftsmen working for him patiently and contentedly, receiving only their meals, while their families cultivated lands for which service was due to the chief ” (31). Nor did artisans compete against one another in the open market, but relied instead on craft guilds to regulate conduct within each craft: who could enter, the hours of labor, wages, price levels, quality, and to whom one could sell. Drawing indiscriminately on evidence from both India and Sri Lanka to build his argument, Coomaraswamy thus noted that seventeenth-century Ceylonese smiths had “this Privilege, that each has a parcel of Towns belonging to them, whom none but they are to work for” (37). Taken together, “the principles upon which they [the guilds] acted were, indeed, altogether socialistic, and realised as an accomplished fact many of the ideals for which the European worker is still fighting” (7). If one marker of difference between the Indian craftsman and workers in the West was his relationship to structures of work—employers, markets, other workers—another was his relationship to actual production. For Coomaraswamy, caste-based divisions of labor in India made work not just vocation but devotion, with each artisan’s inherited craft ordained as the means “through which alone he can spiritually progress” (43–44). This provided deep psychic and emotional roots to craft production: “the craftsman is not an individual expressing individual whims, but a part of the universe, giving expression to ideals of eternal beauty and unchanging laws, even as do the trees and flowers whose natural and less ordered beauty is no less God-given” (48). As a result of this ideal support for and engagement with his work, the Indian craftsman lived with “the assurance of his position, and the assurance of his purpose and value.” This assurance led him to produce objects of real beauty, since “it is only in the absence of anxiety as to the immediate future, that that quality of leisure so characteristic of true works of art and craft can appear in them” (59). India offered both an ideal and a unique setting for artistic production; listing the material conditions and spiritual approach “which we find expressed in the work of true craftsmen of whatever age or place,” Coomaraswamy argued that they are found “perhaps more in India than anywhere else” (60). He himself did not devote much space to the condition of workers or work in those places “anywhere else” that had long since departed from the ideals of craft society. But the implicit contrast would have been clear to readers at the time schooled on the writings of Ruskin or Morris. In a foreword to a 1989 edition of The Indian Craftsman Alvin C. Moore Jr. laid out Coomaraswamy’s implied opposition between the

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perfect world of Indian craftsmanship and the degraded state of modern industrialization directly: In the one case, the craft was truly something of the man: an activity which, when properly conceived and executed, nourished the whole man—corpus, anima, et spiritus—in a truly sacramental way; the other has become merely an activity which has a market and which employs only a part of the man, that part which lives by bread alone, and which can be practiced by anyone. . . . In the one case time was available for good work, time for entry into the rhythms inherent in the tasks themselves, and time for rising on these rhythms to levels above those with which the task was commenced. . . . In the modern trade, the rhythms are determined by machines and the average worker comes from his tasks with no benefits other than his wages.39

Taken together, Coomaraswamy’s descriptions of the individual creativity, personal engagement, harmonious organization, and human pace of Indian crafts presented an alluring alternative to Western industrial capitalism with the latter’s disparities of power between rich and poor, constant competitive pressures, and widening gulfs between producers and consumers. Defining difference negatively: Handcraftsmanship as backwardness Coomaraswamy’s The Indian Craftsman represents one of the fullest expressions of the idealized vision of crafts difference in India, standing in a class of its own as an entire book devoted to the idea of craftsmanship rather than to practices or products. And yet not everyone who thought that Indian crafts differed fundamentally from Western industry found this a cause for celebration. For all those who idealized handcraftsmanship in India, there were always just as many who found it problematic in the extreme, arguing that crafts were inefficient, archaic holdovers from an earlier age that should be replaced as soon as possible with more modern forms of production. These critics were not blind to the artistic achievements of Indian artisans. In his account of the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, T. N. Mukharji described Indian crafts as “all poetry, a fairy dream delineated in all its picturesque sweetness,” compared with stiff, methodical British products. Whatever its beauty, however, such poetry was ill suited to modern times: Prosy wakefulness thrives in this world of ours, my countrymen! not the trance of poetry; so when prose in the shape of steam and mechanism is the master of millions, poetry in the shape of hatchised chisel hardly gets


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five rupees a month, a handful of millets or rice to stay the pangs of hunger, and a two-penny date-leaf mat to lie down upon on a cold night. Our art is doomed to die and it ought to die, if it cannot earn more than ten shillings a month.40

To Mukharji, the dangers of modern Western industry in terms of crowded cities and deadened labor did not negate its tremendous achievements. Indeed, these results—cheap, sturdy goods of standard quality accessible to the masses—were worth some sacrifice. And no place more so than in India, which desperately needed to join the modern age both to to supply national needs and to build national pride. Like the celebration of the difference between beautiful Indian crafts and ugly British industrial goods, the criticism of crafts difference found early expression at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Many European visitors to the Crystal Palace, even while admitting like Mukharji the beauty of Indian crafts, dismissed those crafts as essentially inferior to Western industry on technological and social grounds. As noted in Chapter 1, the exhibition devoted enormous space to British machinery as part of its emphasis on revolutionary advances in weaving, spinning, printing, and other industries. The few basic looms, wooden plows, and simple blacksmithing instruments on display from India offered a striking contrast, pitting archaic hand tools against the most sophisticated machinery of the age. Noting the models of artisans at work, Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace set up that contrast directly: Not far from Nasmyth’s steam-hammer, the Khamar or Bengal blacksmith, was represented with his simple bellows, forge, and anvil; and within a very short distance from the latest refinements in agricultural implements and machinery, were illustrations of ploughing and harrowing with apparatus which no European could use.41

To cement the difference between Indian crafts and Western industry, commentaries at the time portrayed Indians as technological primitives stuck in the ancient past while the rest of the world had moved on to the industrial present. Thus Tallis’s History went on to argue that, “The products of India and China represent with sufficient accuracy the state of industry as it was two thousand years ago, when France and England were covered with forests. The Great Exhibition, therefore, does not only present the different industries of nations, but that of centuries.”42 Bizarre remnants of past ages, Indian tools had nothing to offer a modern age intent on technical and material progress. Indeed, some argued that India’s aesthetic achievements had come at the expense of such progress.

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In a well-publicized speech evaluating the exhibition, the Cambridge don William Whewell expounded on the moral and material differences between the luxurious crafts of the East and the sober manufactured goods of the modernizing West. According to Whewell, in the West the machine with its million fingers works for millions of purchasers, while in remote countries, where magnificence and savagery stand side by side, tens of thousands work for one. There Art labours for the rich alone; here she works for the poor no less. There the multitude produce only to give splendour and grace to the despot or the warrior whose slaves they are, and whom they enrich; here the man who is powerful in the weapons of peace, capital, and machinery, uses them to give comfort and enjoyment to the public, whose servant he is, and thus becomes rich while he enriches others with his goods. If this be truly the relation between the arts of life in this country and in those others, may we not with reason and with gratitude say that we have, indeed, reached a point beyond theirs in the social progress of nations?43

For Whewell, slavery, despotism, and savagery irretrievably tainted the beauty of Indian crafts. Ugly machine goods might be regrettable aesthetically, but they represented social progress since they emerged from a system of production that served poor and rich alike. At the Crystal Palace, the differences between crafts and industry expressed the fundamental opposition between the technological, progressive West and the archaic, timeless East. Here the dichotomy between crafts and industry was culture, history, and morality all rolled together. Just as India could not help but be despotic, luxurious, and backward, the West could only be democratic, practical, and forward looking. As India struggled to modernize over the course of the nineteenth century, this opposition grew stronger even as explanations for it changed in tenor. No longer based on the visual opposition between simple Indian craft tools and massive, steam-powered English machinery, the dichotomy now operated through the continued survival of millions of traditional artisans working in direct competition with imported manufactured goods. By the end of the century India was awash in new goods and ideas, with Western products flooding urban and rural markets and Western science and technology seeping into elite education. In this context, industrial reformers argued that it was no longer natural that Indian crafts were so different from Western industry. Artisans could have transformed their production; that they had not now done so required conscious explanation. Thus in a 1905 speech to the first Indian Industrial Conference in Banaras, Prem Behari echoed the 1851 catalog when he asked his audience to “take the


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case of a village potter, a carpenter, a blacksmith or a weaver, and compare him with his brother in Europe. The artisan in India is the same as he was a thousand years ago.”44 But, unlike in the 1851 commentary, Behari now tried to explain that agelessness, arguing that it was due to “the traditional training and religious prejudices of the illiterate class” brought about by a lack of primary education.45 Assuming that change was more natural than stasis, critics like Behari offered various ideas for why Indian artisans had resisted change. These included both social failures (the absence of industrial leadership and occupational division into castes) and individual failures (artisanal secrecy, inefficiency, untrustworthiness, limited education, lack of inquisitiveness, and indifference to material advancement). Able to draw on the host of documentation efforts described in Chapter 1, these writers used their new knowledge to confirm the essential difference of crafts and the fundamental inferiority of hand production to modern industry. At the same time, their new knowledge also allowed critics to root the inadequacy of crafts in the individual bodies of Indian artisans. In late-nineteenth-century colonial discourse, caste offered the key to understanding the inner workings of Indian society, explaining everything from material markers, such as occupation, financial status, food habits, and dress styles, to more abstract characteristics, such as religious fervor, industriousness, honesty, and thriftiness. It is hardly surprising, then, that industrial activists emphasized the role caste played in structuring artisanal production. While some admitted that this role could be positive, generally critics argued that caste had a negative impact on production; emphasizing the pressures to follow caste norms in employment, technology, and product diversity, reformers pointed to the ways in which caste kept artisans from responding freely to new market conditions. Speaking to the third Indian Industrial Conference in Surat in 1907, for instance, the experienced British industrial official Alfred Chatterton noted his inability to convince weavers in the Madras Presidency to adopt more efficient fly-shuttle looms and warping machines; he argued that extreme caste conservatism, by which workers held firmly onto the tools and methods of their forefathers, made weavers refuse to embrace innovations even when they would have brought in more income and ensured steadier work.46 Many reformers had stock tales to tell about such conservatism. In his 1905 speech Behari related an experience with a weaver in Agra who refused to work on a new kind of loom; the man had offered the explanation that “if he did, he would be excommunicated from the caste.”47 In an 1890 speech Wardle offered a similar story of trying to get a Peshawar indigo dyer to dye a piece of cotton red. Wardle suggested a good price for

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the work and even offered to demonstrate how to produce the new color. The dyer made a very respectful salaam, but said very firmly, “Tell the Sahib that I and my forefathers have dyed blue for thousands of years, and that I will dye it only blue.” No money inducement nor the promised information on the processes of dyeing other colours were of any avail, and so I brought my two yards of white calico to England undyed.48

In his month-long trip visiting silk producers across India in 1885–86, Wardle spent little time in Peshawar, so it is impossible to know whether a closer connection to the dyer would have produced different results.49 But his conclusions were widely shared among the government officials who had facilitated Wardle’s trip, all of whom had much greater experience in India. Indeed, the 1879 Ahmedabad gazetteer anticipated Wardle’s arguments of conservatism, extending them from the case of an individual dyer to the totality of the artisanal community. Summing up “the systematized tyranny” of caste-based guilds, the gazetteer concluded, On the whole these unions have been hurtful to the general interests. The clever and the stupid, the hard worker and the idler have been kept at the same level by an indolent and bigoted communism which does not scruple to enforce its decrees by the most formidable religious sanctions; all efforts at improvement have been suppressed and the accumulation of individual wealth impeded.50

For reformers, caste prevented innovation or profit within crafts, binding individuals to backward technologies and grinding poverty. But caste had more global economic effects as well. Specifically, industrial activists argued that since caste trapped labor into hereditary occupations, it prevented individuals from shifting into new occupations perhaps better suited to their skills and interests. This argument operated on two levels: castes could pressure their members to stay within a craft, but also individuals might avoid switching to new occupations associated with lower castes. The domination of crafts by the lower castes meant that craft work was itself lower status, considered degrading to the dignity of upper castes, no matter if wages were higher than in more prestigious office work.51 As numerous reformers complained, caste therefore prevented the natural reallocation of labor according to the push of necessity or the pull of profitability. Just as damningly, caste kept elites from offering intellectual leadership in industrial matters. Thus, as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha complained, “The thinking classes and the working and trading classes


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have always lived separate. The highest thought lived, as it were, divorced from the highest practical skill.”52 To the president of the Indian Industrial Conference of 1908, R. N. Mudholkar, the fact that “the intellectual and spiritual elite of the nation had no thought to throw and no time to waste” on material development explained the destruction of India’s industries just as much as “the heavy disabilities and restrictions imposed upon them by the economic and fiscal policy of England and other countries.” For it was the divorce of thinking elites from material production that had brought about technical stasis: “Left to be cared for only by the working men and artisans, the study of the sciences on which manufactures, art and trade depend was neglected.”53 Divided as they were by caste from fellow artisans as well as intellectuals, craftsmen could not pool knowledge, tap into scientific developments, share market information, or collaborate in new products. Nor, many reformers argued, did craftsmen want to do those things. Indeed, alongside the social failures tied to castes as a whole came the many more individual failures activists attached to artisanal bodies. Some of these were rooted in the environment: artisans lacked education and thus did not understand the principles of their own work. Others were based in perceived personality flaws: artisans were secretive, inefficient, untrustworthy, and indifferent to profit. Of these, perhaps the most basic perceived flaw of individual artisans was a lack of education. Few within artisanal communities went to modern schools and few among them became literate through alternative channels. The result, as the president of the 1910 Indian Industrial Conference at Allahabad, R. N. Mukherjee argued, was that no matter how intelligent artisans might be, “being universally illiterate and thus shut out from a knowledge of any improved methods in their respective trades, they make no advancement or progress throughout their lives and are content to continue working on lines that for generations have become obsolete.”54 Alfred Chatterton agreed, but went still further to point out that lack of education did not just close artisans off from new ideas, it also kept them from properly understanding existing practices. In his extensive experience working with handloom weavers, leatherworkers, and metalworkers, Chatterton found “the ordinary artizan . . . unacquainted with principles, and is therefore quite unable to explain why one way of doing a thing is better than another.”55 Competent only in their own traditions without any understanding of the science that underlay basic processes, artisans in this view were left flat-footed when it came to adapting their existing skills to new products or situations. Without a solid appreciation of chemistry, dyers could not confidently substitute one dye for another

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or know how new synthetic fabrics would take on color; without a proper grasp of how wood responded to different climatic conditions, woodworkers could not prepare joints that would retain their strength when shipped overseas. In design terms, artisans faced the same problems. As the JJ School of Art superintendent Cecil Burns argued in 1918, whereas the Indian craftsman’s “intuitive taste can often be relied upon to keep him fairly straight when dealing with traditional designs,” alien forms and patterns created chaos: “Directly they depart from their traditional designs the Indian craftsmen do not know what is right or wrong.”56 Why, according to reformers, were artisans so uneducated? Many put the blame squarely on artisans themselves; whatever the limitations of government schools, the inaccessibility of technical publications published only in English, or the iniquities of British economic policies, individual craftsmen bore ultimate responsibility for their failure to embrace new ideas. Part of the problem, according to industrial reformers, was that artisans refused to apply themselves consistently or diligently. Voicing a common complaint about poor working practices, the Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha argued in 1893 that Indian artisans display in their daily avocations, a lack of system, method and precision—the usual characteristics of practical training—and are impatient of the restraints imposed by considerations of time and punctuality. . . . There is undoubted capacity for work—both mental and physical—but the results so far are not commensurate with the capacity for effort. Their exertions are spasmodic, often put forth under compulsion, through necessity or in fits of enthusiasm, but we look in vain among the general public for patient toil, sustained interest and persevering application to the minutiae of business.57

Many ascribed that lack of initiative to intellectual failures; compared with Europeans, Indians were uninterested in improvement. Impressed on his visit to Europe by “the all-absorbing enthusiasm of the European for progressive advance,” Mukharji found the average European “always on the look out for new things. He is constantly striving to make new contrivances and to discover new ways and means to enable him to move on to a higher plane in the sphere of his own pursuits.” The Indian, by contrast, was so sunk in “national torpor” that he “has always done his best to shut his eyes against the influence of modern enlightenment.”58 Others blamed poor working methods on limited material desires; unlike the ever-striving capitalists of Europe, Indians were satisfied with what little they already had. Thus in 1912 Chatterton ascribed “the poverty of India . . . to the fact that the people themselves are content with an extremely low standard of living and are averse to more exertion than is


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required to provide themselves with what is generally little more than the bare necessities of life.”59 Still others argued that poor work revealed a fundamental moral failure; in contrast to the upright craftsmen of Europe, Indians turned in shoddy work as a means of skimping their customers. John Wallace, editor of the Indian Textile Journal, mistrusted the Indian artisan implicitly, arguing that “he will give the smallest possible return for his pay” and that the only ingenuity he displayed was in coming up with excuses when charged with fraud.60 Speaking at the first Indian Industrial Conference in 1905, the Allahabad judge Lala Baji Nath agreed, arguing that Indian craftsmen were very “unbusinesslike,” thanks to such practices as “unpunctuality, want of uniformity of quality, short lengths, short weights, [and] absence of fixed charges.”61 In all these examples, fault for the lack of progress in Indian crafts lay squarely on artisans’ shoulders. If artisans had been more independent of their castes, they could have embraced new technologies and applied their skills to new occupations. If artisans had been more open to outsider leadership, they could have benefited from the new knowledge elites were bringing in from the West. If artisans had been less lazy and more trustworthy, they could have raised standards of work rather than cutting corners at every opportunity. And, finally, if artisans had been properly oriented toward material consumption, they would have expanded and improved production to earn more money for their families. Passive in the face of modern changes, content with the past, secure in the work they had done for generations, timeless and unchanging, Indian artisans appeared as the polar opposite of the striving, competitive, rational, efficient industrial men of Western capitalist enterprise. As an 1896 Buddhiprakash article put it, the difference between Indians and the English “is they are enterprising, industrious, fearless, and determined to finish work once undertaken. We are neither enterprising, nor industrious. We are satisfied with what we get.”62 As the pronoun “we” suggests, this difference was disastrous not just for individual artisans but for India as a whole. Thus in a 1902 speech the Gaekwar of Baroda offered opposing pictures of traditional, archaic Indian and modern, mechanized Western production as evidence of “the enormous gulf, which we have to bridge over, before India can be said to be on the same plane as the European Nations.”63 Obscuring Knowledge: Alternative Readings of Artisanal Practices But was India on such a different plane than European nations? Were Indian crafts the opposite of Western industry? Assumptions about the

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sudden destruction of cultures of handcraftsmanship or the persistent survival of conservative structures of caste and guild often developed in the face of alternative evidence. As such, they represent a narrow reading of the condition of crafts—one that, as we will see at the end of this chapter, served diverse political ends in colonial society. Rather than accept such assumptions at face value, then, it is important to examine evidence available at the time that pointed to other interpretations. In the past, few villages probably held true to Birdwood and Coomaraswamy’s romanticized image of community patronage supporting artisans as treasured members of isolated localities. For one, villages were never as self-sufficient as imagined in the model of the “village republic,” made popular by Henry Maine and others.64 Long before the nineteenth century, India’s villages were closely interconnected into regional and panregional economies and networks of production, exchange, power, and authority.65 Within those villages, artisans rarely had the independence to produce according to their own creative impulses. Just as in agriculture, where Christopher Baker has warned against viewing production “through the theoretical retina of the individual, independent peasant, toiling away in the fields and wrestling hopelessly with the external forces of trade and moneylending,” artisans were deeply embedded in social and economic relationships of debt, dependence, and duty that constrained and determined artisanal practice.66 On the rural level, where the producer-consumer relationship was the most direct—and therefore where the ideal of artisanal independence might seem to make most sense—exchange was based on relations of patronage and hierarchy, in which low-status artisans had limited power. Within more urbanized networks, artisans generally produced for merchants or moneylenders under varying degrees of dependence; some were in debt for cash, others worked with promises to sell all finished goods at fixed prices to a certain dealer, and still others worked on materials dealers gave them. Even wealthy artisans who did not financially depend on merchants were constrained in their production choices by the dictates of local and wider markets, which were often ruthlessly specific about styles, colors, designs, and forms.67 If things had never been as good as Birdwood and Coomaraswamy made them out to be in the past, neither were they as bad in the present as critics of the late nineteenth century claimed. Whatever the commonsense assumptions about caste-based artisanal conservatism, government surveys suggested otherwise. Numerous gazetteers, for instance, noted movement across crafts, as artisans took up new occupations in response to the changing fortunes of different industries. In turn-of-the-century Gujarat, woodworking was flourishing to the extent that tailors, blacksmiths, and


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potters were all becoming carpenters.68 In dyeing, new, easy-to-use chemical dyes opened the craft up to outsiders who lacked the skills to manipulate natural dyes. At the same time, the cheapness of chemical dyes made it impossible for skilled natural dye artisans to compete, forcing many out of the trade. Thus, as of 1908 Khatri caste dyers were moving into other crafts, including silk and cotton weaving, gold and silver thread making, carpentry, wood turning and bricklaying.69 Finally, the 1885 Poona gazetteer noted that members of the Jingar caste, who had traditionally been saddle makers, exhibited a “readiness to take to any new craft which offers an opening.” As a result, Jingars “followed a variety of callings, casting metal, carving stones, painting, making figures of clay and cloth, carving wood, and repairing boxes, padlocks and watches.”70 More generally, caste rarely matched perfectly with occupation by this period, if indeed it ever had done so; gazetteer entries for artisanal castes almost always noted multiple areas of employment. Just as artisans were moving across caste lines to find employment, so too they were reorganizing production into more modern forms. Granted, few made the complete transition from household production to massive factories employing hundreds of workers under a single roof. But many moved along that continuum, shifting from small-scale production controlled from start to finish within a single household to larger-scale systems capable of mass production based on task specialization. In wood, for instance, individual craftsmen came together by the hundreds into large furniture workshops in Bombay to make standard catalog designs.71 In embroidery and bandhini, dealers developed increasingly elaborate piece-work systems to coordinate the work of thousands of home-based workers.72 In major weaving centers, master weavers amassed multiple looms worked by wage labor in their own workshops.73 In block printing, Surat- and Bombay-based export houses centralized control over the production of saudagari cottons exported to Southeast Asia by sending their own agents directly to different villages to commission printing blocks and have the fabric printed and dyed.74 In zari smaller workshops gave way to larger ones better able to afford the expensive new implements available in the market, including imported brass plates to draw down the wire, rollers to flatten the wire, and winding frames to wind the wire onto a silk thread; these new tools significantly increased production speed, decreased the skill needed by individual artisans, and improved product uniformity—a crucial issue in the face of growing competition from France.75 Finally, in the booming brassware industry of Nasik and Poona, production was divided into discrete stages: “The men work in bands of five or six dividing the labour. Some make the rough outline of

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the shape, others shape the neck, a third set form the lower piece, a fourth solder the shaped pieces, and a fifth polish the whole.” According to the 1885 government gazetteer, it was this strategy of “adopting the union of combination among the workers and separation among the articles made which is the secret of cheap production” that allowed Poona metalworkers “to undersell their rivals.”76 Nor did artisans uniformly reject new technologies. In weaving, Tirthankar Roy and Douglas Haynes note that there were logical reasons to reject new looms depending on weavers’ scale of production, access to markets, and the nature of the technologies available.77 Semi-independent weavers with little control over markets could rarely afford to adopt new looms, which promised increased output; since merchants would respond to the resulting flood of new cloth on the market with lower prices, the weavers themselves would see no net gain from the new technology. Thus, instead of embracing new looms, such weavers limited their changes to the introduction of mill yarns and aniline dyes, which allowed them to lower costs without raising production. Owners of weaving workshops who hired day labor and produced on a larger scale, by contrast, had better access to markets and so were more interested in increasing output. They expanded relatively quickly into new looms, provided they were able to maintain their traditional flexibility in type and amount of production, division of labor, and ease of adaptation to new products.78 In other words, where change was profitable, weavers embraced it; where it proved otherwise, they stuck with older styles of production. More broadly, Roy notes that accepting new technologies was never a simple matter of a particular implement’s discrete characteristics, but involved who controlled it, how it changed existing divisions of labor, and what it did to other resources within the household—things that usually escaped the attention of contemporary outside observers. Communities, not individuals, determined the fate of innovations, with success or failure based on the resolution of two key questions: “whether change was good for the larger group and who had the right to deviate from the norm.”79 To illustrate this, Roy cites the different fates of two new weaving implements in the early twentieth century: an improved dobby capable of producing a highly profitable style of checked cloth and a brand new loom on which one weaver could weave three different cloths. The first was brought in from outside the community and could be made accessible to everyone; it entered general use. The second was the proprietary invention of an individual weaver who tried to sell his loom to fellow artisans; they were so threatened by his attempt to seize leadership that they burnt down his home with the loom inside it.80


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Finally, outsiders did not often appreciate the true cost of adopting new technologies and so dismissed as conservatism what was really a pragmatic assessment of potential utility. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, British officials tried to get Deccani cotton growers to adopt a new, steampowered gin. Despite the evident superiority of the new gin in terms of speed and efficiency, the introduction of American experts, and official encouragement, farmers refused to give up hand ginning, much to the frustration of British agricultural agents. Although officials blamed native conservatism, the real explanation lay in the concrete advantages of ginning by hand done by women and children at home: higher profits, lower transportation costs, retention of cotton seeds for cattle feed, maintenance of independence, and the ability to mobilize unpaid labor within the household.81 As Sabyasachi Bhattacharya argues, this was not “a rejection of change itself, but rejection of a change for the worse.”82 Generalizing more broadly, he notes that failed innovations were often those that increased dependence—whether on yarn merchants, sheet-metal dealers, hide suppliers, or dye agents—thereby striking at what Nita Kumar has noted to be a central value among latetwentieth-century artisanal communities as well.83 Difference as Power The commonsense assumptions of late-nineteenth-century writers about crafts thus stood on shaky foundations. For every potter throwing clay in perfect communion with his self-contained village community, there were many more thoroughly integrated into broad market structures. For every wood-carver toiling in isolation, there were many more working in various forms of association—from piecework putting out systems to debt bondage to merchants, to wage labor in workshops—to make increasingly standardized goods for mass, often distant markets. For every dyer who refused to switch from indigo to red, or weaver who would not adopt a new loom for fear of being excommunicated by his caste, there were others who led change from within crafts by adopting new technologies or shifting to new occupations altogether. Concrete evidence was available that artisans not only could accept change but sometimes actively embraced it. Indeed, all the arguments cited earlier about caste mobility across occupations, organizational upheavals, and technological changes were based on late-nineteenth-century government sources. Assumptions of cooperative production in the precolonial past or of artisanal conservatism in the present emerged despite that evidence.84 By the early twentieth century, writers across the political spectrum argued that production in crafts was unlike that in factories; so too, artisans

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were unlike modern men of industry. Public discussions of economic development increasingly treated artisanal and mill industries as distinct topics representing separate sectors of the economy. In the early twentieth century, for instance, activists held an annual series of industrial conferences, organized to coincide with the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress. As might be expected, much of the attention at such conferences focused on emblematically modern industries like steel and textiles or—those favorite subjects of late-nineteenth-century industrial plans—soap, matches, glass, and umbrellas.85 Participants at industrial conferences also, however, discussed other major sectors of the economy, including mines and minerals, agriculture and plantations, trade and commerce, and of course crafts. Thus, at the Indian Industrial Conference held at Surat in December 1907, three separate speakers presented papers on handloom weaving in India, including one that detailed handloom improvements made by the American Marathi Mission in Ahmednagar and another describing attempts to reorganize handlooms into small workshop production in the Madras Presidency.86 Even though handlooms shared much with mills—they produced the same general product (cloth), shared the same input (mill-spun thread), and faced the same competition (British imports)—they were rarely discussed in the same papers, appearing instead as a separate topic of discussion entirely. Occasional attempts to compare the status of handlooms and modern industry only cemented this difference. Thus, when Dutt spoke as president of the first Indian Industrial Conference held in Banaras in December 1905, he repeated his admiration for home-based hand production, arguing that “weavers who work with their family at home lead a better and more satisfying life than the tens of thousands of laborers who work in one big mill.” And yet, he defined progress solely in terms of modern mills: “keeping in step with times is also necessary, and so some changes in our ways also must be adopted, and we too must learn how to set up companies, operate the machineries of factories and mills here.”87 Crafts might be appealing, but for social, cultural, and moral reasons; economics demanded modern mills. Increasingly, explanations of difference rested on culture; artisanal attitudes, habits and instincts, their forms of belonging, and group practices all separated crafts from industry and indeed from modern progress. More specifically, when articulating that difference, writers often focused on the individual artisanal body, not the larger networks of production and exchange in which individuals were embedded. Coomaraswamy’s book is thus titled The Indian Craftsman, not “Crafts in India”; similarly, Dutt and Birdwood set up their oppositions not between crafts and


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modern industry but between an individual weaver or potter and an individual mill worker. For Coomaraswamy, Birdwood, and others who idealized crafts, artisans were autonomous and creative workers who earned their living through the generous support of entire village communities or wealthy patrons. For those anxious to replace crafts with modern industry, artisans were so isolated and conservative that they were unable to combine for more efficient production or to take advantages of economies of scale. In documentation efforts, official investigators firmly linked complex production processes to the culture-bound bodies of artisans; here the same impulse operated, deploying the individual artisanal body not to explain the present but to reveal the future—defined as either a perpetuation of tradition or a failure of development. In the hands of an imperial official like George Birdwood, the appeal of an argument that Indian traditional industries were fundamentally different than those of the West is relatively clear. Fitting snugly into classic orientalist ideas about the alterity of the timeless, conservative East, such an argument merely provided further evidence for why traditional, backward India was and should be under the progressive rule of the self-professedly modern, scientific-minded British. The Industrial Arts of India, for instance, declared “the life and arts of India essentially the same as we find them in the Ramayana and Mahabharata,” thanks to the essentially unchanging character of India’s villages: India has undergone more religious and political revolutions than any other country in the world; but the village communities remain in full municipal vigor all over the Peninsula. Scythian, Greek, Saracen, Afghan, Mongol, and Maratha have come down from its mountains, and Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Dane, up out of its seas, and set up their successive dominations in the land; but the religious trades union villages have remained as little affected by their coming and going as a rock by the rising and falling of the tide; and there, at his daily work, has sat the hereditary village potter amid all these shocks and changes, steadfast and unchangeable for 3,000 years, Macedonian, Mongol, and Maratha, and Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Dane of no more account to him than the broken potsherds lying around his wheel.88

Action, vitality, politics, and progress all lay outside the village in the hands of Greeks, Afghans, the Portuguese, and the English; throughout it all, the village potter sat at his wheel, immovable as a rock, patiently doing what his ancestors had done 3,000 years before. What change there was came from outsiders; on their own, Indians were masters of continuity, not progress. For men like Birdwood the failings of artisans—caste,

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conservatism, irrationality, archaic tools—were not specific to crafts, but spoke to the larger failings of Indian society. At the same time, the achievements of artisans—beauty, social harmony, freedom from the pressures of capitalism—were also the achievements of India, ones that marked the country’s relative isolation from the global world of economic competition. Such a country could do little to hold its own in the wider world. For that British rule was a necessity. If arguments of India’s craft difference served imperialist needs so easily, why, then, would so many nationalist-minded Indians adopt the same ideas? In answering this question it is important not to assume either a passive acceptance of British categories for understanding the world or a failure to understand the imperial political implications of such views. Instead, it is worth considering how, in articulating crafts difference, Indians advanced their own ideas about the nature of both the economy and possibility of native leadership—ideas that just as often justified opposition to as support for colonial rule. Coomaswamy, for instance, closely paralleled Birdwood in emphasizing the timeless, traditional nature of Indian craftsmanship. In The Indian Craftsman he drew from fifteenth-century Sinhalese poems, tenth-century Chola inscriptions, the Ramayana, the Dharma-sutras, Buddhist Jatakas, the Ain-i-Akbari, the thirteenth-century Sinhalese royal chronicle the Mahavamsa, and charters for Buddhist monasteries dating from the second century B.C.E. to the eighteenth century C.E., all to create a static picture of ancient crafts traditions with no regional variety and no divergence between prescriptive texts and actual practices.89 And yet, whereas Birdwood argued that such timelessness demanded colonial rule, Coomaraswamy used it to challenge imperialism. For Coomaraswamy, equating handcraftsmanship to ancient Indian tradition turned a potentially narrow aesthetic concern into a core element of Indian culture to be preserved in the face of British domination. As a regular guest of the Tagore family in Calcutta in the early twentieth century, Coomaraswamy joined in lively discussions of nationalist aims and tactics, taking particular interest in the need to free India culturally, spiritually, and aesthetically from the shackles of Western materialism. This commitment to cultural nationalism appeared clearly in a 1911 essay, where he declared, India politically and economically free, but subdued by Europe in her inmost soul is scarcely an ideal to be dreamt of, or to live, or die for. . . . It is the weakness of our national movement that we do not love India; we love suburban England, we love the comfortable bourgeois prosperity that is to be some day established when we have learned enough science and forgotten enough art to successfully compete with Europe in a commercial war.90


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By turning their backs on progress and civilization as defined in the West, he argued in 1924, patriotic Indians would then be free “to follow the historical development of our own beliefs, our architecture, sculpture, music and literature, and of all the institutions, social and religious, with which they are inseparably intertwined.”91 This was a message for Europe as much as for India. Declaring in 1918 that “it is life, not merely Indian life that claims our loyalty,” Coomaraswamy sought to make the harmonious, traditional life of India a model for the world at large as it struggled to come to terms with the horror of the Great War.92 For Coomaraswamy, in other words, the difference embodied in India’s hereditary artisans did not justify India’s subservience to the British; instead it established India’s right to lead the global march to a better future. As in other forms of colonial knowledge, orientalist difference could operate just as easily within nationalist as imperialist logic.93 More broadly, though, the idea of artisanal difference did not just help to establish the essential cultural identity of India in opposition to the West, but also helped to define the authority of a new generation of elites within Indian society. In a period when old forms of power rooted in caste, community, and landholding were in flux, elites turned to new criteria to justify their prominence: things like education, progress, science, technology, and government titles. In some parts of the country, this shift of focus involved a degree of upheaval, as older elites unable to master new idioms of power lost prominence to younger generations more adept in the public world of colonial society.94 In western India, however, existing structures of power generally proved flexible enough to adapt to the new era. In language terms, as Veena Naregal has demonstrated, traditional literary elites reestablished their dominance through the new means of a strict hierarchy between English and vernaculars.95 In industrial terms, Svati Joshi notes a similar process by which public debates about development proved entirely compatible with the existing economic, social, and cultural power of a merchant-industrialist-social class.96 Within crafts, this domination rested on the essential cultural difference of artisanal bodies, defined as the antithesis of not just modern western labor, but modern Indian elites as well. All of the stereotypical characteristics of artisans outlined earlier, whether virtues (traditionalism, village identity, communitarian anticapitalism) or faults (conservatism, lack of education, refusal to change jobs, disregard for economic gain) were precisely those rejected by India’s modernizing, Western-educated, upwardly mobile, ambitious urban elites. Whereas artisans remained defined by and rooted in the past, industrial activists set their sights and claims firmly on the future. This essential opposition comes out clearly in reform writings

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of the time. Thus, in an 1876 article on the need for industrial development in India, the Buddhiprakash offered the following exhortation: Dear artisans of India, do not give way to inertia and negligence in such a critical time for our motherland. Produce even better things than the ones given by foreign manufacturers. You might say it is a very difficult task. Then listen to me. In earlier periods, our country was very much ahead of all other countries in its artistic skills and products. You have allowed those skills to be used by the foreigners who are now dominating you! Why should you allow them what is your own inheritance, what belongs to you through your ancestors? Why have you given away your treasure and turned into idlers? Why would you not be skilled as those people have become? The means they possess are not sent to them alone by way of the skies by God, surely! But these people have to be praised for their determination and enthusiasm. You too can become aware and skilled like them. However, you are backward even when you copy them, so how would you develop new skills? But if you really try hard enough, we can put our country ahead soon.97

The slippage in pronouns here is telling. While failings are carefully defined in the second person—“you allow them what is your own inheritance,” “you are backward”—a more inclusive vision emerges through first-person plural claims to the nation as a whole—“our country was very much ahead,” “we can put our country ahead.” Artisans might, in other words, bear responsibility for the failings of the past; they might equally help with progress in the future if they try hard enough. But the natural tendencies toward inertia and negligence, the inevitable impediments to progress coming from a backward group, demanded that “we”—the educated, elite readers of the Buddhiprakash—step forward to help pull the country into a more progressive, profitable future. A November 1904 cartoon from the Anglo-Gujarati journal the Hindi Punch made that role even more obvious. Captioned “Divali Music: Loud Enough to Wake the Heaviest Sleeper,” it depicts a group of industrial activists poised with drums and horns—labeled “Perseverance,” “Strenuous Endeavours,” “Special Efforts,” and “Energetic Cooperation”—around the recumbent, sleeping form of Indian Art and Industry, ready to wake her up. The implication is clear; since Industry might not wake up on her own, the educated leaders of the nation, working together, must step in to rouse her. That “we” aimed to define itself by modern criteria: education, class, commitment to progress, facility with the institutions of the colonial state. There was no room in this shared agenda of industrial development for petty divisions of caste or community; nor, for that matter, were political divisions between British and natives to disrupt a common


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agenda of progress. Indeed, industrial activists did all they could to define economics as politically neutral, as the grounds for unanimity in an otherwise increasingly divided political landscape.98 Thus, in his speech opening an industrial conference in Poona in 1890, Mahadev Govind Ranade noted that whereas social and religious issues divided traditionalists from reformers, one sect or caste from another, in regard to the material issue of the poverty of our resources, and our physical weakness, all men are agreed, and all have a common interest in co-operating together for the common good. . . . Hindus and Mahomedans, Parsees and Christians, the Rulers and the Ruled, the Privileged and the Unprivileged Classes, all stand on a common platform, and, as the constitution of the present meeting itself demonstrates, are prepared to work together.

In keeping with this unanimity of opinion, the organizers had chosen to “eschew Politics altogether,” making the event “eminently catholic and acceptable to all.”99 Others made similar claims that economic interests operated above the divisive politics of parties and religion. The editor of the Buddhiprakash for much of the late nineteenth century, Dahyabhai Dalpatram, refused to cover political and religious subjects in order to not disrupt a presumed consensus around how best to reform society and the economy.100 Similarly, even though industrial reformers organized the first Indian Industrial Conference in Banaras in December 1905 to coincide with the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress, they declared the conference to be explicitly nonpolitical in order to encourage participation from all parties. The result was “abundant and genuine sympathy” extended “by every European—official as well as nonofficial—who was approached with a request for co-operation and help, by every Indian gentleman without reference to his official position or his political views, and by every section of the Press, beginning with the London Times.”101 Such claims to operate above ideology, race, caste, and religion offered a potent form of political legitimacy to India’s industrial reforming elites. In advocating for greater productivity, new technologies, better organization, and more skilled labor, elite reformers argued that they spoke not only for artisans but for the entire nation. For, whatever the differences in methodologies, everyone was presumed to agree on the common goal of development itself. This offered, in turn, an opportunity to assert a new claim to power, not for representation within the state, but, as Gyan Prakash notes, over a central function of the state: its governmentalist projects of

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caring for and improving the Indian population.102 Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century development ideology assigned the state primary responsibility for progress—a responsibility based not just on presumed duty but also on the reality of superior resources.103 As the Poona-based newspaper the Mahratta put it in an 1895 article demanding more public spending on technical experiments, private enterprise on its own could not provide the building blocks for industrial growth: “In almost every country such movements are supported by Government, and we see no reason why the Bombay Government should be an exception to it.”104 And yet, even as activists held the British responsible for development, they denied that a foreign government could ever properly understand or provide for India’s needs. Emphasizing the exteriority of British rule, Indian elites put firm limits around the role the government should play in development. In his speech opening the Indian Industrial Exhibition in Ahmedabad in 1902, for instance, the Gaekwar of Baroda defined the British government as holding “a unique power” with which it could offer economic encouragement and stimulate industrial progress; this power could be exerted by enforcing trade production and buying government supplies within the country. Before acting, however, he cautioned that the government must get “to know the public opinion through the better known and intellectual sections of its subjects.” Only then would it put the right policies in place; only then would “all the possible and reasonable benefits of governance” accrue to the population.105 Many other industrial reformers agreed, steering official interventions into broad infrastructural needs—education, credit, tariff protection, technical experiments—while reserving for themselves the job of implementing real change on the ground. Thus in his speech opening the Poona industrial conference in 1890, Ranade first listed all the steps the government might take, if only it were more committed to industrial development: impose import duties, offer low interest loans, guarantee loans, invest in Indian industries directly, and offer contracts for government supplies to Indian producers. But then the focus changed from what “it” (the government) might do to what “we” (educated, progressive, modern Indians) must do. This shift was marked with a reminder: “After all, Government can do but little, save pioneering work.” After some initial help from the government, it was up to Indians to implement fundamental, practical change. That change would demand arduous work. Given the challenges, unity and cooperation were vital: “The evil is too great, and of too long a standing, to be brought under control by private individual efforts. We have to work with a will, to pull long, and pull all, and to pull till we succeed.” To ensure that this common goal was defined properly, Ranade then singled out “those


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who think with us on this matter” and “men of light and leading from different parts” to put their heads together and come up with a plan of action.106 As much as crafts development did focus on the needs and concerns of artisans, then, it was always, already about power. Defining crafts through difference helped the British defend the necessity of their rule in India; at the same time, it allowed Indian elites to claim authority over the lower classes. Indeed, in part because artisans were so thoroughly excluded from the debate, crafts offered Indian elites a means of asserting their growing leadership skills on a national stage. If still excluded from formal political power, industrial activists could establish their authority in the realm of the economy; if continually reminded of their racial inferiority to the British, those same activists could assert their own superiority over tradition-bound, illiterate artisans. The idea of crafts difference thus served diverse political ends: dramatizing the problems with British rule, inspiring a search for crafts-based alternatives to Western-style industrialization, justifying elite leadership over backward artisans, and defining the material scope of Indian national culture. More immediately, perhaps, this difference also served precise practical ends, shaping the form interventions in crafts took. Indeed, as we will see in the subsequent chapters, all attempts to reform crafts to better suit national needs operated on the basis of the essential difference between artisanal and modern, industrial production.


3

Developing Traditions: Preservationist Design and the Independent Artisan

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n early May 1853, India’s first baronet Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy wrote to the government of Bombay with a proposal for a new philanthropic endeavor: “a School for the improvement of Arts and Manufactures.” As a member of Bombay’s organizing committee for the Great Exhibition in London, Jeejeebhoy had been struck by both the strengths and weaknesses of Indian artisans. Because of their delicate physiques, Indians were “naturally suited to industry requiring skilled, delicate handiwork”; the problem was that their industrial ingenuity was too often misdirected. The solution, in his mind, would be an art school that would introduce new technologies—including “any practical improvement in the weaving of cotton, silk, Musroo and Velvet”—and offer instruction in “Painting, Drawing, and Design, Ornamental Pottery, Metal and wood carving and turning, wherein the use of complicated machinery is not indispensable, as also in Gem and Pebble cutting.” Such instruction, Jeejeebhoy argued, would do many things: develop skills, elevate taste, expand demand, introduce new industries, stimulate employment, and—finally—improve “the habits of Industry of the Middle and lower classes of our Native population.” The result, Jeejeebhoy hoped, would be that India could then “take up an advanced position among the manufacturing countries of the world.”1 The generous offer of Rs. 1 lakh to found the school was duly accepted, and classes started at what came to be the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (JJ) School of Art in Bombay in March 1857. But Jeejeebhoy’s vision of a school that, by teaching art, would launch India’s global manufacturing competitiveness did not come to pass. Instead, in keeping with the growing idea of crafts difference discussed in Chapter 2, by the end of the

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nineteenth century the JJ School had firmly separated art from industry, traditional aesthetics from modern manufacturing. Indeed, institutional developments cemented those divisions. When, as noted earlier, the JJ School expanded its commitment to crafts in 1890 with the opening of the Reay Art Workshops, school officials dictated that the new workshops teach not just traditional styles but also traditional working methods, thereby excluding new machinery as well as more efficient factory-like divisions of labor. Such modern concerns found an entirely separate home across town in the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute (VJTI), which opened in Bombay in 1889; from its inception the VJTI offered instruction in the science, technology, and practice of spinning, weaving, and dyeing as used in the modern mill industry. For the colonial government, the split between craft and industry, tradition and modernity, art and manufactures was complete; the JJ School dealt with one, the VJTI with the other. Whatever Jeejeebhoy’s hopes, by the end of the century art school instruction had proved incompatible with industry. Instead of modernizing crafts, JJ School officials set out to preserve them, trying not to erase but to perpetuate the positive markers that separated crafts from modern industry: visual beauty and a specific mode of independent, creative, hand production. Nor were they alone in doing so; in this chapter I explore how exhibition organizers, museum directors, publishers, handicraft emporia managers, craft workshop owners, and cooperatives activists all were equally anxious to rescue Indian crafts from the widespread social and cultural upheavals brought on by colonial rule. The most public of these efforts focused on preserving traditional designs in an era of rampant Westernization, whether by documenting them in print, displaying them in exhibitions and museums, or teaching their principles to practicing artisans. Less well-known examples tried to retain autonomy for working artisans. Whichever approach they took, however, all shared an assumption that how an object was made impacted what was produced. And, more specifically, all the interventions tried to address both products and production. This dual focus can be seen best, perhaps, by thinking of alternatives. If design preservation had meant only a desire for traditional-looking goods, success could have been achieved with no attention to working methods; by centralizing production, distributing approved designs, and standardizing quality control, art officials could have ensured a steady supply of things that looked distinctively Indian. Instead, officials specifically rejected just those changes and did everything they could to keep artisans independent, including teaching design principles and publishing examples of historic designs in the hope that artisans would reinvigorate indigenous styles on their own. Rather than

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impose tight control over production, art officials worked to build autonomy in the face of oppressive market conditions. At least they did so up to a point. At the same time that art officials insisted that artisans bear ultimate responsibility for designs, they also kept this creativity in check by reserving the right to act as arbiters of taste. Likewise, cooperatives and factories that promised creative and social autonomy to artisans simultaneously enforced new kinds of oversight and control. On both sides, the interplay of independence and authority revealed both pride in traditions and a growing sense of their importance to society at large. Whatever the individual creativity at play, by the end of the nineteenth century crafts had become national heritage in that they represented not just the particular products of separate creators but the collective unconscious of the whole country. In an 1885 speech at the opening of an exhibition at the Bhuj School of Art, for instance, Khengar III, the Maharao of Kutch, declared, The artizans of India are still possessed of such skill and superior workmanship as any country in the world might justly be proud of. They excel in anything requiring patience and diligence, their patterns are tasteful and original; they are expert in executing gorgeous and elaborate designs, and this has been the unanimous opinion of those who can really appreciate them. . . . India has in this respect, as in any others, a glorious past to fall back upon, which is a great advantage for any nation to possess.2

For the Maharao traditional arts belonged not to individual artisans but to the nation as a whole; if at the start of the quote it is the “the artizans of India” who possess superior skills, by the end it is “India,” which owns those skills as part of its glorious past. In that slippage, crafts became national culture and history, rolled into one. That slippage made it all the more worrisome that India’s traditional arts seemed to be in danger of disappearing in the face of the twin forces of Westernization and modernization. In a two-part article in the JIAI in 1890 on “The Decline of South Indian Arts,” South Indian scholar Pandit Natesa Sastu found evidence of the erosion of traditional design everywhere he looked. At the famous carpet center of Ayyampet, artisans suffering “in utter poverty” from the loss of markets had turned away from traditional patterns and dyes in favor of “an awkward imitation of European patterns, and an admixture of Hindu with European magenta and other colours” which produced “a most hideous appearance.”3 In goldsmithing, beautiful, purely Hindu patterns of indigenous gold ornaments had been “replaced by an ugly and hybrid English-Sami pattern,” which was “a disgrace to both European and Hindu art.”4 Across all crafts, “the boldness of the execution has now fled

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away, and all the old patterns have perished,” with European styles acting like a “luxuriant growth of weeds,” choking the life out of South Indian arts.5 As Annie Coombes has argued, a rhetoric of decline permeated latenineteenth-century British discussions of colonial material culture, with writer after writer describing native cultures as slowly falling apart in the face of modernizing influences from the West.6 In the Indian context, George Birdwood provided an early example of that rhetoric in his commentaries on the Indian section at the 1878 Paris Exhibition. In The Industrial Arts of India, he declared that Indian arts of all kinds were more and more overcrowded with mongrel forms, the result of the influences on Indian art of European society, European education, and above all of the irresistible energy of the mechanical productiveness of Birmingham and Manchester. Through all these means foreign forms of ornament are being constantly introduced into the country; and so rapidly are they spreading, that there is a real fear that they may at last irretrievably vitiate the native tradition of the decorative art of India.7

Looking around at artisanal production of the day, Birdwood’s successors found further evidence of “a bastard English style”:8 silver British racing cups made with elephant handles, wool carpets combining Axminster and Mughal designs, and saris woven with elements taken from English wallpaper patterns. Neither European nor Indian, the results horrified design purists. In 1914, Samarendra Nath Gupta of Lahore’s Central Museum warned that the incursion of “elements of foreign art . . . would result, as has already been the case in some Indian indigenous industries, in the production of mongrel hybrids.”9 Glyn Barlow for his part argued, in 1903, that “Indian art-work is good; and European art-work is good; but that which is neither the one nor the other is unlovely. The signs of an uprising of a hybrid species are in the land, and it is a pity.”10 Bastardization, mongrelization, a new species—all these commentators spoke in the late-nineteenth-century language of racial miscegenation, posing artisanal experiments in design as direct threats to cultural and indeed pure racial identity.11 Crafts were, of course, only one component of a much larger trend toward hybridity among Indian elites, by which Western education, dress, habits, and tastes threatened to blur the cultural boundaries between the British and their colonial subjects. As Homi Bhabha has argued, such native “mimicry” proved profoundly unsettling to colonial officials, revealing as it did the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of colonialism: the promise of a universal civilizing mission resting on the grounds of constantly maintained difference.12 It is hardly surprising, then, that in the


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late nineteenth century the British insisted ever more stridently on at least the visual markers of difference. Thus, British authorities required princes educated in British public schools or in the new Mayo College in Ajmer to appear in imperial durbars dressed in their “native” garb, while British architects designed railway stations housing paradigmatically modern technologies sheathed in Indo-Saracenic ornament.13 Even as colonial rule compelled change, officials rushed to cloak it in the mantle of tradition. This was decline defined in visual terms: as a shift from traditional authentic styles to modern, hybrid ones. Accompanying it was decline defined in social terms: as an unraveling of the ideal social relationships built around handcraftsmanship. George Birdwood paired his striking evocation of the glories of artistic hand production within harmonious Indian villages cited in Chapter 1 with a warning that such glories were under increasing threat from colonial modernity; by the late nineteenth century, artisans were increasingly moving “into the colossal mills of Bombay, to drudge in gangs, for tempting wages, at manufacturing piece goods, in competition with Manchester, in the production of which they are no more intellectually and morally concerned than the grinder of a barrel organ in the tunes turned out from it.”14 In a speech on Indian silks at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, Thomas Wardle marked the fate of native dyers who “are not able to hold up against machine competition, and their occupation threatens to be soon extinguished, and with it the artistic perception and skill which has for ages given to so many people an interesting and beautiful employment.” With the “substitution of machine for hand work” not only a “richly decorated class of goods” would be lost, but an entire way of life built around art and skilled craftsmanship.15 In The Indian Craftsman Coomaraswamy outlined a similar fall from grace, arguing that British rule had reduced skilled, spiritual, learned craftsmen “to mere paid workmen, earning daily wages.”16 Patrons had disappeared under an alien government uninterested in local crafts traditions, leaving craftsman who live “only to make brass trays and other pretty toys for passing tourists whose lives and manners he does not understand, and for whom, as he well knows by experience, any bungling is good enough, since they know nought of good or bad craftsmanship even in their own land, and still less in his.”17 More broadly, a recent “degradation of standard, which is undermining alike the crafts of the East and the West” was due to the arrival of “modern individualism”; “whether we call it ‘Laissez Faire’ in Manchester, or the introduction of ‘Free Western Institutions’ into India [it] hesitates to interfere with a man’s sacred individual liberty to make things as badly as he likes, and to undermine the trade of his fellows on that basis.”18

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In depicting change as erupting into village crafts through the interference of outside forces, Coomaraswamy spoke to contemporary understandings within swadeshi politics, as Manu Goswami puts it, of capitalism “as an ‘outside’ that impinged on rather than constituted and shaped from within” the Indian nation.19 For those who valued crafts as a superior form of social organization and as a source of beauty, capitalism had disrupted India’s natural, cooperative, communal production system. Thus, in a 1901 speech to the Philosophical Institute in Glasgow Romesh Chunder Dutt noted that previously flourishing weaving villages that had “produced that famous Indian muslin which was once the wonder of Europe” were now “deserted and desolate; the great lakes excavated in the olden times are silted up; the temples and religious edifices are in decay; the streets are covered with jungle; and the old weaver families have migrated elsewhere to seek a scanty subsistence, and their old ancestral villages know them not.”20 Dutt blamed the decline on a range of British policies, including high land assessments, unfavorable tariffs, and the drain of wealth. But he also explained the change in terms of the intrusion of capitalism into Indian manufactures. Pitting Western capitalism against community-minded Indian craft production, he saw the influence of the former in terms of a destruction of artisanal happiness: Work exists for many under the Indian system; man seems to exist for work in the field or the factory in England. Capitalism has done much for man, but has not improved the type of humanity. Rather has it the tendency of reducing man to something like a part and parcel of the soulless machinery it has helped to set up.21

Whether arguing in visual or social terms, Dutt, Sastu, Birdwood, Coomaraswamy, Gupta, and Barlow all defined the dangerous changes of the period as having come from outside. The worst kind of European designs had invaded Indian bazaars, forcing artisans to degrade their skills and bastardize their designs; exploitative, hierarchical Western capitalism had intruded into the harmonious, cooperative life of India’s villages, thrusting artisans into debt or into wage labor in factories. Framing the argument thus not only highlighted India’s difference from the West, it also made Indian artisans out to be passive victims of historical forces beyond their knowledge or control. As we have seen in Chapter 2, such a view legitimated the leadership of educated elites better versed in worldly matters; since artisans had been so unable to counteract design or market changes on their own, they clearly needed assistance from outsiders, whether British or Indian.22 But, just as crucially, claims of decline from a


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past golden age also structured the types of interventions offered. Rather than embrace design innovation or market consolidation, these reformers used the rhetoric of decline to justify a rescue mission to preserve India’s traditional crafts. Preservationism emerged out of a fear that India’s traditional crafts were disappearing, not out of a concern that all artisanal production would shift to factories. Most observers agreed that the modern industrial sector would not be able to supply all of India’s material needs for decades to come. The problem was that, as artisans struggled to adapt in the meantime, crafts would retain their own worst features (isolated workers, backward technologies, no economies of scale), while also adopting new faults from modern industry (exploitation, hierarchy, and alienation from work). In other words, crafts would remain, but the positive aspects of crafts difference would be gone. Such a transition would not just be individual and economic, with the effects confined to particular artisans who descended into poverty. It would also be national and cultural; India as a whole would lose its distinctive designs and way of working—a way suited to its own community-oriented social being—in favor of the foreign styles and competitive capitalism of the West. Anxious to prevent such a future, preservationists sought to hold off the twin evils of Westernization and capitalism. Not all change, however, was resisted and not all innovation rejected. Art officials were not blind to the threat from imports or the opportunities posed by new technologies. As in other fields, they tried to accommodate such changes, pushing artisans to search out new markets or to develop new products suitable to modern needs. But officials also tried to contain the cultural impact of such developments by holding onto key elements of crafts difference. Thus, if market exigencies replaced paternal local patronage with distant, unknown consumers, at least artisans could still retain their individual autonomy; if changing desires demanded a shift from carved house fronts to carved dining tables and sofas, at least those items could still feature recognizably Indian ornamentation. The Object of Preservation: Traditional Styles in Changing Times Design preservation efforts actually took some time to get started in India. Indeed, in the 1850s and 1860s, art officials in India generally encouraged European designs and methods among artisans. Given the acclaim heaped on Indian ornamentation and color skills at the Great Exhibition of 1851, it is somewhat surprising that it was not until the 1870s that serious efforts to promote traditional styles began, starting first in art schools

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and then quickly spreading out to exhibitions, publications, museums, and stores. It is not that art officials in India were unappreciative of local design skills. It was just that there seemed to be little reason to worry about their ultimate survival. With traditional manufactures still popular in local markets, teachers and exhibition organizers focused on improving local design skills rather than preserving them. Indeed, it was not until new tastes and mounting imports threatened to swamp local traditions that officials began to think about preservation. As such, efforts to promote Indian design in the subcontinent emerged from a different context than overseas. At international exhibitions Indian crafts appeared always, already traditional thanks to a rigorous, multilayered selection processes in India that weeded out inappropriately hybrid submissions. In India, it was impossible to ignore hybrid goods; artisans gravitated towards them, bazaars were full of them, consumers purchased them. The desire to promote traditional design emerged in India, therefore, not only because of abstract admiration for Indian design among other international design traditions, but more specifically because of real fears that Indian design was about to disappear altogether. Art officials launched drawing classes for artisans, displayed historic examples of traditional arts, and promoted those arts to the consuming public to stem that tide of change. On the surface this was purely a visual movement, concerned with changing styles and design. But it was nonetheless also invested in production. Specifically, all of the efforts to restore Indian styles insisted on individual artisanal power over designs—power rooted in a proper understanding of historic examples and design principles alike, but carefully kept into proper visual channels by the oversight of largely European art officials.

Instruction: Art schools, museums, exhibitions, and the educated eye Among the earliest—and certainly the most institutionally powerful—sites for the preservation of Indian crafts were government art schools, the first of which were established in the Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in the 1850s. Indeed, in a June 1909 lecture on “The Function of Schools of Art in India” delivered to the Royal Society of Arts, JJ School of Art principal Cecil Burns defined preservation as the central mission of art education in the subcontinent. According to Burns, the Government of India had set up art schools in the mid-nineteenth century not to advance the fine arts, but “to preserve from decay and to improve the crafts of the country.”23 Ignoring the role of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy in creating his own


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institution in Bombay, Burns described school founders as “Europeans of cultivated taste and learning” whose enthusiasm had been simultaneously aroused by “the beauty and distinctive character of the buildings and craft-work of a former period” and frustrated by the comparatively poor quality of modern work. Burns defined part of the problem as a loss of creativity; workers had stopped inventing, “and from much copying their designs became lifeless, while the craftsmen, from never attempting to devise new patterns, lost whatever power of original thinking they may have formerly possessed.”24 But another part of the problem was the incursion of foreign styles; the flood of foreign imports entering India in the nineteenth century had created a situation in which “India from an artistic point of view quickly became and has since remained a suburb of Paris and London, as she is from an industrial point of view the suburb of Manchester and Birmingham.”25 As Burns described them, it was to “arrest this decay” in both individual creativity and national design that the art schools opened, providing a bulwark against the artistic degradations of the marketplace.26 In the early years of the school, officials argued that the best way to preserve Indian art was to give artisans a clearer understanding of the principles underlying their work. The first head of the JJ School, J. A. Crowe, for instance, admitted in 1857 that “it has been the good fortune of Eastern nations to possess a natural gift for harmonies of colours,” which meant that “the Hindoos have been able up to the present time to reproduce the most admirably modulated harmonies.” But he argued that this gift was purely instinctual, operating “without any laws” through conservative adherence to tradition.27 Such instinctual skill in color would not be enough to survive the cultural upheavals of the modern day. For that, artisans needed a solid knowledge of design principles. Thus Crowe argued that it was “a most desirable object” to “teach these laws and illustrate them by the perfect models before them without endangering the existence of that which is already so good.”28 Writing the same year, Bombay’s director of public instruction E. Howard argued similarly that native talents would only benefit from European rules. Indeed, his hope was that the JJ School would become “a school of design . . . native in the best sense, owing to a sense of accuracy, truth, and natural beauty to European inspiration, but moulding its material into purely Indian types.”29 This emphasis on principles reflected orientalist assumptions of Indian difference from the rational, scientific, rule-bound West; what was instinctual, particularistic, hereditary practice in India had been rendered into abstract, universal truths in the West. In art terms, Western design professionals increasingly saw aesthetics as a science, the mastery

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of whose laws ensured both beauty and economic success.30 To bring that science to the benighted colonies, art schools took on the job of opening up traditional practice to principles, rules, and order. Initially at least, this meant an almost exclusive focus on drawing and basic geometry—i.e., on abstract design lessons rather than the practical application of aesthetic principles to actual production.31 Thus, when the JJ School first opened in March 1857, it only offered drawing classes. Nor did students seem to object; the early classes filled quickly to the point that, by February of the following year, 68 students were enrolled, with an additional 40 applicants turned away for want of space.32 That focus on drawing continued into the 1860s as the school stabilized financially and added more students, eventually moving into an elaborate new building on the Esplanade in April 1878 where it remains to this day. Whatever the goals of using Western principles to revitalize traditional Indian design, many scholars have noted that early instruction tended to do precisely the opposite, training Western realist portraitists and public works department draftsmen.33 Art school instruction was essentially European in personnel and methods, with South Kensington–trained instructors following syllabi laid down by the Department of Science and Art in London. In the beginning at least, it was also European in content; until the early 1870s India figured only as the exceptional exotic example in an otherwise exclusively European parade of design examples selected, as an 1859 report on the school noted, “from good specimens of the Antique, Middle Ages, Renaissance, &c.; principally from Dyce’s Government School of Design Drawing Book, and Gruner’s specimens of Ornament.”34 This European orientation carried over into the school’s three new decorative arts studios established in the mid-1860s. Students of decorative sculpture and fresco painting turned out gargoyles, allegorical friezes, busts of famous men, and models of ethnic types for the new neo-Gothic buildings of Bombay, including Victoria Terminus, the High Court, Bombay University and Crawford Market. Meanwhile students of ornamental metal work made iron railings, grills, plant stands, and outdoor tables all modeled on European examples; when exhibited at the 1865 Nagpur exhibition, these elicited praise from event organizer Harry Rivett-Carnac for demonstrating “the successful manner in which Natives can be taught to copy English work.”35 This emphasis on Europe did not last. As appreciation for Indian crafts grew and ideas of difference deepened, so too did commitment to teaching Indian design. As early as 1868, architectural lecturer George Molecey dismissed the use of ancient Greek or Gothic examples in Indian instruction, arguing that they “must to the Indian student be as it were a


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dead language.” In their place, Molecey recommended that the JJ student explore “the indigenous style of his own country.”36 Fellow teacher John Griffiths agreed, arguing that “in reproducing the works of their ancestors [students] would be preserved from the practice of an alien and uncongenial art with which they can never have any true Sympathy.”37 In the fine arts, this meant fewer copies of Western masterpieces, replacing that with attempts to capture Indian subjects, colors, and themes using the techniques of Western realism.38 In crafts, the impact was even more dramatic. To begin with, the school expanded its own collection of crafts in order to give students direct access to examples of indigenous design. It also began sending students out on government-sponsored trips to document the principal architectural monuments of the region; such trips offered the dual advantage of studying art in situ but also of assembling detailed drawings, photographs, and models of buildings and ornamental detail for classroom use. The most famous of these trips—a series of twelve yearly excursions led by Griffiths to Ajanta—generated careful reproductions of the famous cave paintings that then circulated within all the departments of the school, influencing painting styles, pottery decoration, and designs for copper.39 (See fig. 3.1) By incorporating a range of Indian arts, JJ instructors hoped to provide their students with varied

Figure 3.1 Vases prepared by students at the JJ School of Arts in the late 1880s Source: “Bombay Pottery,” JIAI 2 no. 17 (1888), 4. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

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examples of excellent design in diverse media. But they also hoped that those examples would revive a sense of national design, returning students to a more congenial idiom than was possible using foreign examples. That hope rested on the assumption that students had a natural affinity to anything produced in the subcontinent, even, for instance, to sixth-century cave paintings. Thus, describing his work with JJ students copying the Ajanta paintings, Griffiths noted: The most curious and interesting phase of my Indian experience was the intuition of Hindu, Parsee and Goanese students in the mysteries of an art still congenial to the oriental temperament and hand. . . . I am persuaded that no European, no matter how skilful could have so completely caught the spirit of the originals.40

This preference for indigenous styles took institutional form at the JJ School with the opening of the Reay Art Workshops in 1890. As noted in Chapter 1, the workshops specialized in regional art crafts that were, as then JJ superintendent Griffiths put it, “truly Indian in their treatment”: wood carving, pottery, silver and copper work, and carpet weaving.41 For Griffiths, what made these crafts “truly Indian” was not just their visual appearance but their traditional mode of production. The Reay Workshops tried to preserve both. In place of objects inspired by English country churches or classical Grecian friezes, students produced rugs patterned on Mughal designs and carved wooden screens echoing the jali work of Ahmedabadi mosques. In place of classroom instruction in which students copied out practice examples set by an instructor, the workshops employed a master-apprentice model in which all students worked on actual objects for sale, with those who were the most advanced handling the more difficult stages of production. Griffiths hired master craftsmen to head each workshop, promising that no interference of any kind is made that would tend to disturb the traditional mode of working peculiar to each craft, beyond the insistence that the work executed shall be of the best, and that the ornamentation shall be, as far as it is possible for it to be in this age when art is cosmopolitan, Indian.42

In the Reay Workshops, students learned not just design content— what was a properly Ajanta-styled figure or the appropriate shape of a couch—but also design principles—the rules of proportion, line, balance, harmony, and color that made possible good design. In other words, they


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learned not just to copy tradition, but also how to produce it anew in changed times. JJ instructors argued that artisans who could not adapt traditional ornamentation to new types of objects were doomed to failure. Thus, in his 1909 speech to the Royal Society of Arts, Cecil Burns argued that Indian artisans had lost their markets “not in consequence of the action of hostile tariffs, but by reason of their lack of capacity to adapt themselves to altered demands and changed conditions.” For Burns, “the economic salvation of the craftsmen of India” would not come until they were “trained to understand the principles upon which their ancestors built up their designs, and apply those principles.”43 Instruction, in other words, reaffirmed the ideal of independent, artisanal creativity. But it did so with the provision for external oversight by art school officials. Dissemination: Spreading traditional design among working artisans Whatever the ability of Griffiths or Burns to demand only properly traditional work within the walls of the JJ School, artisans continued to integrate foreign and Indian elements into their work in private workshops across the region.44 Such work reflected popular taste; mixed styles were in high demand at the time, across class lines. And yet art officials refused to accept this trend, instead insisting that hybridity could be quashed if only art schools could extend their reach in society; it was not that traditionalism was unpopular, they argued, it was just that the message of traditional design was not being spread consistently to enough people. They were, to some extent, correct—at least in their assessment of the influence of art schools. The JJ School and other later art schools in the region— including ones at Baroda, Surat, Bhuj, Rajkot, Nagpur, and Jaipur—had a very limited impact. Not only did they teach a miniscule percentage of the overall artisanal population, even their own graduates refused to stick to purely Indian design once they started work commercially. According to art officials, that failure to adhere to traditional styles revealed a basic problem with how designs circulated in local society. Artisans rarely had the opportunity to see high quality historic work; private collections of fine crafts rarely went on public display and few artisans could afford to keep the best examples of their own or their ancestors’ work. Nor did artisans have local models for how to adapt old decorative ideas to new consumer desires. As the director of the Lahore Museum Percy Brown put it in 1907, since artisans “have no traditional designs for many of the articles now in demand,” they were forced to adopt European styles wholesale.45

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Anxious to reach beyond the small numbers of students actively enrolled in art schools, design preservationists sought to bring the traditionalist agenda out to practicing artisans in their workshops. To do so, they launched a two-pronged effort: first, to widen knowledge of traditional ornament, and second, to demonstrate how those traditions could be adapted to new purposes. As with art schools, this was an innovative traditionalism that involved expanding European oversight, circulating designs in new ways through print, and asking artisans to employ a broadly conceived historical tradition of ornament in their work. Two of the most important men in the definition and implementation of the preservationist design agenda beyond the boundaries of art schools were John Lockwood Kipling and Thomas Holbein Hendley. Trained at the South Kensington School, Kipling first came to India in 1865 to teach ornamental sculpture at the JJ School. On the basis of his success there, he was awarded in 1875 the dual positions of curator of the Lahore Museum and principal of the newly formed Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, posts that he held until he retired from government service in 1893. That move to Lahore represented an aesthetic as well as physical shift; after working largely in Western realist sculpture in Bombay, Kipling devoted himself to traditional crafts at the Mayo School. Inspired by William Morris’ attempts to revive artisanship in England, Kipling used the Mayo School as a platform from which to celebrate traditional design, tirelessly teaching, writing and organizing events on the subject.46 Hendley, by contrast, came from a medical background, serving the Government of India as residency surgeon in Jaipur State from 1874 until 1897. Based on personal interest and not professional training, Hendley’s investment in traditional arts developed during his time in Rajputana into a public mission. Starting with private collecting and investigative efforts in the 1870s, he then went on to found the Jaipur museum in 1881, assemble an exhibition of Indian arts at Jaipur in 1883, organize the Jaipur Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, preside over a Government of India art conference in 1894 called to discuss the future of traditional arts, and—back in England—chair the Indian Committee for the Festival of India Exhibition of 1911, all the while publishing widely on Indian arts.47 Early converts to the cause of design preservation, Kipling and Hendley established models for how to bring that message out to practicing artisans. One of the earliest expressions of their emerging commitment came in the form of twin exhibitions: the Punjab Art and Industry Exhibition at Lahore in 1881–1882 and the Jaipur Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1883, each organized to demonstrate the continued vitality of indigenous design.


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At the Lahore exhibition, visiting American designer Lockwood de Forest reported that only those items were admitted that were “strictly native, no Europe things or anything in that style”; indeed, de Forest thought that emphasis on indigenous design so remarkable that he later termed the event the “first exhibition of Indian Art held in India.”48 The 1883 Jaipur exhibition similarly displayed excellent local and regional goods in traditional styles as evidence of the achievements of indigenous arts. Although intended to popularize traditional design among the public at large, both exhibitions sought specifically to address the needs of artisans. Thus, at the Jaipur exhibition, Hendley not only presented fine traditional work for local artisans to copy, he also put on exhibit negative examples of things “which show what should have been avoided, and what mischief has already been done by the contact between Oriental and European art” in order to sound a warning note to artisans tempted to stray into foreign styles.49 Such exhibitions could reach large numbers; more than 230,000 people attended the Jaipur exhibition during the two months that it was open. But in the end, they remained temporary affairs. To reach artisans on a more stable basis, Hendley retained many of the exhibits for display in the Jaipur museum, which moved into a permanent home in Albert Hall in 1886. Lessons of design operated on several levels there. First, as discussed in Chapter 1, the building itself documented the best in local ornamental traditions, with the walls covered with architectural details copied by local stone carvers from historic buildings in the region. Within the walls, Hendley displayed only the finest works of traditional arts in hopes of stimulating consumer demand. More generally, Hendley encouraged artisans to visit the museum and use the fine historical examples they saw there as inspiration for new work in traditional styles. And there is at least some indication that the museum was successful on these grounds; in his account of the Jaipur exhibition, Hendley noted that, after the museum had only been open three years “it is quite a common thing for artisans to go to the Museum for a few minutes to study.”50 More broadly, Kipling and Hendley helped to formulate Government of India policies to promote traditional design among artisans. When in 1883 the Government of India was considering how to revive industrial arts, Kipling and Hendley were two of the men asked to a conference in Calcutta to offer advice. One of the key suggestions they agreed upon was the creation of local, regional, and national museums displaying crafts. These museums were to have a broadly inclusive aim suggestive of a documentary interest: to create “a typical collection of the arts and manufactures of the Province.” And yet not all local manufactures were welcome. With a view toward the impact such museums could have

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on contemporary craft production, objects copied from or inspired by European examples—no matter how profitable or popular—were “debased samples” to be excluded. Instead displays were to feature only the “best examples of oriental designs and processes.”51 Commenting on the Calcutta conference’s proposals, Government of India revenue official E. C. Buck made clear that documentation here had a very specific agenda: to “maintain an acquaintance with the patterns and forms formerly prevailing in the country, and specially typical of oriental art and design.”52 That insistence on proper styles only grew stronger with time, reflecting the influence of Kipling, Hendley, and others. It was not enough that objects be beautifully made or well-suited to their purpose; as of 1901, the Government of India asked that museum officials also examine samples on the basis of design authenticity “to decide finally whether they are to be accepted as fair specimens of Indian art.”53 Hendley and Kipling also looked beyond exhibitions and museums to spread the lessons of traditional design in another form: print. One option for publication was the JIAI with its lavish illustrations of superlative crafts. Hendley and Kipling both regularly wrote for—and indeed helped found—the journal, which they and other members of the Calcutta conference hoped would be a useful reference for artisans.54 Early years of the journal featured contributions from the two men on Punjabi brasswork, copperware, cotton printing, wood carving, rustic ornamentation, Indian ivory carving, Mooltan pottery, and Burmese silverwork (all by Kipling), and Indian metal work, bookbinding, rugs, jewelry and enamels, Rajasthani decorative arts in general, and the arts of Ajmer and Bikaner in particular (all by Hendley). The format of the JIAI was not, however, especially conducive to artisanal use. Within articles, the text usually focused on existing processes (which artisans already knew and practiced) while the plates illustrated only a few select examples within a craft—hardly enough to provide a full sense of the historical complexity of a style. Within the journal as a whole, the articles covered diverse subjects, exploring South Indian cotton printing in one issue, Bengali ivory carving in another, Punjabi woodwork in a third, and rarely returning to the same craft within a single year.55 Other publications offered more concentrated lessons in traditional design. One option was the Technical Art Series of Illustrations of Indian Architectural Decorative Work that was assembled by Hendley’s colleague in Jaipur, Colonel Swinton Jacob. An engineer by training who served as the head of the Jeypore Public Works Department from 1866 to 1912, Jacob was an ardent admirer of traditional building and craft skills. Frustrated with the anonymous, standardized buildings being put up by


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the Government of India’s Public Works Department, Jacob assembled meticulous scale drawings of traditional architectural elements for the use of local artisans. One attempt to distribute those drawings was via the Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details; published with the support of the Maharaja of Jaipur between 1890 and 1895, the Portfolio offered assistance to architects and artisans interested in reviving authentic, Indian buildings.56 The Technical Art Series aimed at an even wider audience. Published at nominal cost by the Survey of India starting in 1886, the series was intended, as the title plate makes clear, “For the use of Art Schools and Craftsmen.” By illustrating select details from historic buildings, the series aimed to increase public knowledge of India’s rich tradition of architectural ornamentation, and thus public demand for more Indian styles across crafts. The first four plates of the 1892 collection, for instance, presented individual sections of carved granite pillars at the Virabhadra Temple in the Anantapur District of the Madras Presidency, selected to show varieties of ornamental patterning. Later plates in the same volume drew from monuments across India, including soffits, brackets, and dado panels from Fatehpur Sikri, a temple doorway from Bundelkund, and arches, windows, and wall surface decoration from Bijapur.57 Although drawn specifically from architecture, the illustrations were offered as inspiration for artisans in all media. Thus the text accompanying a plate depicting the stucco centerpiece of the ceiling in a room in “Jodh Bai’s Palace” at Fatehpur Sikri (see fig. 3.2) suggests that “the design is of exceptional beauty and is admirably adapted for many purposes. Among artificers it could advantageously be used by gold and silver-smiths and workers in brass and iron, as well as for [sic] woodcarvers.”58 Another plate illustrating the mihrab in the Jama Masjid in Dholka, Gujarat, noted that “worked in silver, with but few modifications, such a form would present a pretty case for a small time-piece.”59 The Technical Art Series tried to serve all crafts, presenting a common set of decorative elements useful to the entire artisanal community. Other publications focused on a single craft, offering more precise details on how design ideas could be applied in practice. In 1905 Hendley published Asian Carpets, a massive volume of beautiful full-color plates documenting details of historic carpets in the collection of the Maharaja of Jaipur, with the explicit goal of their proving useful to students of this most interesting subject, as well as to Schools of Art and Museums, but more especially to manufacturers, who, with their aid, might be able to produce copies which would truly represent the artistic and magnificent works of the best period.60

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Figure 3.2 Illustration of the ceiling from “Jodh Bai’s Palace,” Fatehpur Sikri in the Technical Art Series, 1894 Source: Courtesy of the New York University Libraries.

A more affordable attempt to reach out within particular crafts was a series of Industrial Art Pattern Books prepared in inexpensive formats by government art schools to illustrate the principal styles in key crafts by province.61 One of the first of these—possibly prepared by Kipling— appeared in the early 1890s, covering wood decoration in the Punjab. The book offered some one hundred examples of older styles of work—what Kipling’s successor as principal of the Mayo School, Percy Brown, described as “a representative selection of purely indigenous examples gathered from some of the most historic sources in the Punjab, . . . fully illustrating all the principal styles of work in this particular material” (see fig. 3.3). Along with those historical examples came suggestions for how to adapt old styles to new products, carefully maintaining traditional


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Figure 3.3 Pinjra designs in wood from the Punjab, drawn by Ram Singh under the direction of Lockwood Kipling Source: Lockwood Kipling, “Punjab Woodcarving,” JIAI, 1 no. 4 (1884). Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

decoration while admitting new forms. These ideas were presented “in the form of ‘working drawings’ and it is anticipated [they] will be of value to any workman requiring a good series of specimens to refer to in connection with any art woodwork he may have in hand”62 (see fig. 3.4). The goal, as Brown put it, is to prevent the rapidly increasing use of the very worst form of foreign . . . illustration to which unfortunately the wood-carver owes many of his present day inspirations. . . . The Industrial Art Pattern Books are an attempt to stem this tide of ugly and unsuitable designs which are now flooding the workshops of India.63

A still more informal means of disseminating traditional designs was in unpublished patterns that circulated among producers. Hendley made available his designs from the collection of the Maharaja of Jaipur through hand drawings as well as through more formal printed works; as of 1905 when Asian Carpets came out, its designs were already in use across north India, in the Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and Ajmer Jails and in private firms in

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Figure 3.4 Sketches for Anglo-Indian furniture, drawn by Ram Singh, under the direction of Lockwood Kipling Source: Lockwood Kipling, “Punjab Woodcarving,” JIAI, 1 no. 4 (1884). Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Amritsar and Srinagar.64 Other sources for such designs were jails and museums. In the 1890s, the Yeraoda Jail in Pune produced exact woven copies and detailed paper patterns based on a collection of famous 250year-old carpets held at the Asar Mahal in Bijapur. The Yeraoda workshop superintendent then supplied the patterns free of charge to other jails or to private manufacturers either in full-size samples or in special composite carpets designed to show off common patterns.65 Similarly, when in 1894 Lockwood de Forest was gathering ideas for furniture to be produced at the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company (see below), he requested and received a series of paper drawings of wood carvings from Jaipur, including designs of the main doors to Albert Hall, home of the Jaipur museum.66 To ensure that artisans learned the proper design lessons from these various sources, art officials in the 1880s and 1890s gave themselves the responsibility of “pointing out and controlling any cases in which bad design or careless workmanship or foreign influence are acting prejudicially on the local industries.”67 To do that, they traveled to key centers of craft production, visited artisans in their workshops, offered design advice, and suggested new product lines. Kipling regularly worked with artisans on


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how to adapt old patterns to new ends; in the words of the Government of the Punjab, the Mayo School acted “as ‘an aesthetic centre,’ and ‘a source of enlightened criticism and advice’” for local artisans.68 In Jaipur, Hendley similarly reached out, in part through expanded access to museum collections; Jaipur Museum policy dictated that “all good specimens of Indian artwork are freely lent to the local workmen for reproduction.”69 But beyond that, Hendley himself suggested new design directions, encouraging local metal workers in the mid-1880s to expand their production from un-embellished waterpots and vessels to large, intricately ornamented repoussé brass trays.70 Within the Bombay Presidency, the JJ principal John Griffiths used the carpet studio in the Reay Workshops to recast old designs into new shapes suitable for use in Western-style living rooms; the school then supplied those designs to different carpet manufactories around the region in the 1890s, thereby fulfilling the government’s desire that, under the leadership of the JJ School, “the industry will be properly supervised.”71 In the early 1900s, then JJ principal Cecil Burns expanded his oversight over traditional styles still further. Not only did he supervise traditional-style production at the Reay Workshops, he also published studies of ivory and fine metal work, advised carpet weavers on designs, held exhibitions of the work of past students in order to make sure “that their work has not degenerated,” and, in 1910, opened a new normal class to centrally train teachers for industrial arts for western India.72 On the surface, these attempts to disseminate traditional designs made artisans passive recipients of either printed patterns or design advice delivered by European officials. When, for example, Griffiths and officials at Bombay Presidency jails circulated carpet patterns, the assumption was that those designs would be copied directly by other producers. But the appearance of passivity is misleading. When Kipling provided examples of pinjra-decorated designs for desks and tables (see fig. 3.4) in his 1884 article in the JIAI, he offered some potential uses of the original decorative patterns on furniture; by also providing numerous examples of the original ornamentation as applied to historic buildings or abstracted into decorative details (see fig. 3.3), however, he also encouraged artisans to develop their own alternative applications. When the Technical Art Series published examples of architectural detail it demanded artisanal interpretation even more directly. While the textual notes accompanying the plates suggested which crafts those details might best be copied into, no examples of how that might be done were provided; indeed, the 1890 government resolution formalizing the Technical Art Series stated that “the main object of the series is not to provide craftsmen with working

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drawings, but to give them ideas which they can work up for themselves in their own way.”73 Similarly, government policy refused to provide set patterns to artisans. Such an idea “of fixing the art of a locality by approved designs or standard patterns” was proposed as part of the Government of India’s 1883 attempt to formulate policies on industrial arts. It was, however, roundly rejected by art school and museum officials “on account of the restriction which would be placed on original development by native workmen and others connected with art-manufactures.”74 Instead of imposing standard designs directly, the art officials unanimously agreed that more could be done indirectly through local museums “by storing up the best examples of oriental designs and processes.”75 Like art schools, then, museums, exhibitions, and publications designed to promote Indian styles demanded that artisans take an active role interpreting and adapting traditional ideas. Not content just with a visual result—the revival of traditional design—these efforts also addressed the methods used to produce those results. In doing so, they worked to reaffirm both elements that separated crafts from modern industry: a distinctive appearance and a specific mode of production based in independent, creative artisanal labor. Promotion: Bringing public value to traditional styles Complementing and extending these efforts to promote design traditionalism among artisans—in schools or workshops through material examples, print, or personal intervention—were other efforts focused on an entirely different audience: consumers. Design reformers realized that converting producers to traditionalism meant little if there was no market for their work. As the viceroy of India Lord Ripon argued in a speech opening the Simla Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition of 1881: It is, of course, absolutely necessary in regard to industrial art, if you wish that art to be good and truly artistic, and based upon sound principles, that you should not only have good inclinations and good training in the workmen or persons who construct the works of art, but that they should be encouraged by good taste on the part of the public.76

The problem? Late-nineteenth-century consumers seemed to lack just that good taste. As a subsequent viceroy, Lord Curzon put it in 1905, Indian elites filled their homes “with flaming Brussels carpets, with Tottenham Court Road furniture, with cheap Italian mosaics, with French oleographs, with Austrian lustres and with German tissues and cheap brocades.”77


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For all the hostility in that quote, Curzon was not far off the mark; by the turn of the century, Western furnishings and fine arts had become a key marker of distinction in upper-class homes. Virtually all the major new palaces in princely states featured furniture and décor imported directly from Europe; two of the many examples of this trend from western India are the Laxmi Vilas Palace in Baroda (started 1878, completed 1890) and the Ranjit Vilas Palace in Wankaner, Kathiawad (started 1907, completed 1914). Nonroyal elites similarly invested in foreign styles, whether at the highest levels of society as evidenced in Rajendro Mallik’s Marble Palace in Calcutta or J. D. Tata’s home in Bombay, or at the more modest scale of English-educated government servants who ordered local copies of Chippendale or Queen Anne style furniture for their homes. Tottenham Court Road furniture and Austrian lustres fulfilled modernizing desires and enabled new pleasures; by comparison traditional floor cushions or brass oil lamps represented holdovers from an earlier era. Design preservationists thus had to convince consumers that traditional design was compatible with modern comforts. Or, as Ripon put it in 1881, they had “to educate the taste of the public, so that taste, being developed by the contemplation of so many beautiful and suitable things, the demand for those things may produce an adequate supply.”78 As with attempts to reach out to artisans, publications provided a key way to bring this new message to consumers. Crafts monographs, exhibition catalogues, and the JIAI all addressed consumer needs, providing information on distinctive styles, prominent artisans, and representative prices. In his 1907 government monograph on carpet weaving in western India, for instance, H. J. R. Twigg not only explained in some detail which carpets were available where, but he also spent an entire chapter advising consumers how to evaluate the quality and therefore price of a carpet according to the fibers and dyes used and the density of knots per square inch.79 The JIAI was even more clearly oriented towards consumer concerns, illustrating “possible European applications and uses” for each craft and providing prices for the items depicted whenever possible. Indeed, the government resolution creating the journal stated that its “chief practical object” was “to establish in all parts of the world in which an interest is taken in the Art Manufactures of India a better knowledge of the various types now existing, with the view both of increasing the demand for them, and of facilitating their supply through the agency of traders in Oriental wares.”80 Of all its functions—documentation, design instruction for artisans, and taste-making for consumers—the JIAI probably served the last best. Describing basic production processes offered no new technical knowledge to artisans, but taught consumers where the skill of a craft lay and why it

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was valuable; illustrating only a few examples of traditional work failed to establish the historical trajectory of design for a particular region or media, but clarified for collectors the key differences between Banarasi and Poona brasswork, or between Bengali and Punjabi embroidery; finally, jumping from one craft or region to another only occasionally glanced on the needs of artisans in a particular media but provided buyers a composite, all-India sense of artisanal traditions. In other words, the very things that made the JIAI useless to artisans were exactly what made it invaluable to consumers. The JIAI operated as a resource guide to the art industries of the subcontinent, alerting potential buyers to local specialties and areas of particular interest. Exhibitions and museums offered similar services, from their outset aiming not just to document local skills or resources but also to promote the sale of local goods. Thus the V&A Museum in Bombay was founded with the hope that, by displaying local products and raw materials, the museum would “ultimately be the means of increasing the produce and sale of these articles alone which can add to the wealth of this part of India.”81 In the early years of the V&A, the articles in question were often European in form and style; hence displays at exhibitions and museums alike in the 1850s through the 1870s featured Indian-made furniture, boots, harnesses, cutlery, or ironwork, all designed to show how local artisans could master European skills. But even then some attention was paid to Indian decorative arts as a distinctive part of local economic capabilities. In 1858 then V&A curator George Birdwood spent Rs. 500 on a variety of inlaid wooden work prepared by Atmaram Waleram, a local artisan who had recently won prizes for his submissions to the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Birdwood then arranged Waleram’s inlaid chess table, carved workboxes, envelope box, inkstand, and bookstand with the purchase prices clearly visible, as a means of establishing for museum visitors what constituted fair prices for the best quality work.82 As the traditionalist design agenda took hold in the 1880s that focus on building markets for Indian work only grew stronger. At the V&A, new collections of Sindhi-style plates and Ajanta-styled vases then under production at the JJ School provided a useful stimulus to school sales, while displays of contemporary Kutchi silver established skill levels and appropriate styles. In Jaipur, Hendley reached out to consumers even more directly through the 1883 exhibition and through the Jaipur museum’s home at Albert Hall, which he envisioned as a three-dimensional catalogue of local arts from which visitors could have reproductions made of favored pieces.83 Subsequent exhibitions built on these lessons to consumers. When the Maharao of Kutch Khengar III married in February 1884, his Diwan Manibhai Jasbhai organized an Arts and Industries Exhibition;


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of the twenty categories of items displayed, one was devoted entirely to local crafts.84 Similarly, one of the events organized to welcome the Prince of Wales to Bombay in 1890 was an exhibition of industrial arts at the JJ School. Assembled by the Bombay Art Society—an organization that, one of its leaders claimed, was “doing good work in cultivating the artistic tastes of the people of this Presidency”—the exhibit included examples from the collections of native princes and specimens of carpets, brass, and marble work sent from Jaipur by Hendley, all gathered “to stimulate the public in an appreciation for objects of industrial art.”85 Publications, exhibitions, and museums all focused on improving taste as an indirect means of stimulating demand: the hope being that consumers would apply the lessons learned to their own negotiations with artisans, demanding indigenous styles. Not all consumers were so enterprising. For those who could not travel across India in search of fine crafts or who were not in one place long enough to place orders with artisans directly, museums began to open permanent emporia devoted to fine crafts in the 1890s. Meant to supply a perceived need for centralized access to Indian art industries, such stores opened in western India in Poona, Surat, Baroda, and Nagpur. On the surface these were consumer driven; consumer complaints about difficulties faced finding Indian crafts prompted local officials to open stores in which such things would be available. And yet they also had a strong didactic mission, aiming to educate consumers into developing a proper taste for traditional crafts. Operated usually on some form of government subsidy, traditional crafts emporia attached to museums used rigorous selection criteria to exclude all but the highest quality goods. This set them apart from commercial dealers who, government officials insisted, “traded in every form of art workmanship, the good with the bad,” focusing on “the most popular and fashionable articles, which it would not be beside the mark to designate as frequently the least artistic and often the most degraded types of work.”86 At museums, the “main object of the sale room” was, according to Percy Brown of the Lahore Museum, just the opposite: to bring “to the notice of the purchasing public the very highest and best examples of local art industry; the matter of trade being a very secondary consideration.” Such an endeavor “would do a great deal towards maintaining the high quality of Indian Art, both as regards design and manufacture.”87 That, indeed, was the hope of the Government of India, which suggested in the 1883 scheme to promote Indian industrial arts that crafts emporia “would enable wealthy purchasers, who are prepared to give adequate prices for good work, to ascertain what are the highest standards of each class of Indian manufacture.”88

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The didactic mission of these crafts emporia becomes even more clear when considered in light of their close affiliations with museums. Not only were most craft emporia operated by museum staff on museum premises, but the goods offered for sale in such stores were often closely tied into existing museum collections. After the Lucknow Museum opened a crafts shop, for instance, artisans regularly produced new items for the museum collection, with previous examples rotating into the attached shop for sale to visitors.89 Other emporia in Lahore, Kanpur, Madras, Bangalore, Rangoon, and Nagpur had similarly close connections with their respective local museums.90 In western India, the Reay Economic Museum in Poona, founded and operated by the Industrial Association of Western India, opened an attached showroom in 1889 in order to offer duplicates of their collections for sale to the public.91 Similarly, in 1898 some private gentlemen launched a crafts depot-cum-museum in Surat, with goods on sale complementing the items on display.92 The Government of Baroda for its part opened an emporium attached to the Baroda Museum in 1912, “for the purpose of increasing among the public the love and taste for good artistic objects.”93 As of 1916, the emporium offered a range of art crafts, including pottery, lacquer work, objects in silver and other metals, textiles, and ivory inlays.94 Emporia and other attempts to reach out to consumers had a largely visual focus: to create a particular taste for traditional styles. They also, however, helped to accentuate the other key element of crafts difference: hand production. Most basically, they did this by insisting on a basic division between handmade goods and machine-made ones, confining the latter to separate sections if not—as in the JIAI—excluding them entirely. More subtly, they helped reinforce the idea that handwork was itself valuable, a site of traditional culture and national heritage. When the V&A added a series of clay models of artisans at work sometime around the turn of the century (see fig. 1.5), the figures served a documentary function, demonstrating the peoples and processes involved in craft production. On another level, though, they also played an educative role, connecting objects on display in other parts of the museum to particular artisanal bodies and traditional skills. Similarly, descriptions of processes in the JIAI, while useless on a technical level to practicing artisans, helped to focus consumer attention on the methods of craft production, making those methods central to the proper appreciation of crafts. That dual emphasis on teaching consumers taste and the value of handwork reached its fullest expression with the 1903 Delhi Durbar Exhibition. Organized by Viceroy Curzon to mark the accession of Edward VII to the throne as emperor of India, the exhibition highlighted the achieve-


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Figure 3.5 The Bombay Room at the Delhi Durbar Exhibition of 1903 Source: George Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, 1903, plate 2. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

ments of Indian artisans working in the purest indigenous designs. In his instructions to the exhibition organizers, Curzon explicitly stipulated that the exhibition was to contain “only the work that represented India’s trade, traditions, instincts, and beliefs of the people” with no foreign styles allowed. Indeed, when it opened in January of 1903, Curzon called it “an Exhibition of all that is rare, characteristic or beautiful in Indian Art.”95 Yet this was Indian art designed around Westernized lifestyles, featuring a series of model rooms designed, as exhibition organizer George Watt put it, “for the purpose of exemplifying the adaptability of the various better known styles of Indian Art, to modern household furnishing and architectural decoration.”96 In the Bombay room, for instance, several profusely carved couches covered in local fabrics shared space with a large tufted carpet, metal and clay decorative urns, a wooden standing screen, a sculpture of an Indian woman, and a bust of Shivaji (see fig. 3.5).97 Building proper consumer taste was one of the central goals of the Delhi Durbar Exhibition. In his speech opening the exhibition, Curzon argued that the event would show that for the beautification of an Indian house or the furniture of an Indian home there is no need to rush to the European shops at Calcutta or Bombay, but that in almost every Indian state and province, in most Indian

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towns, and in many Indian villages there still survives the art and there still exist the artificers who can satisfy the artistic as well as the utilitarian tastes of their countrymen and who are competent to keep alive this precious inheritance that we have received from the past.98

And yet, as the second part of that quote reveals, Curzon did not ask consumers merely to fill their homes with reproductions of ancient styles or machine-made goods covered with Indian ornament; instead, he called on them to reach out to living artisans, to become their patrons, and so keep Indian art alive in the creative present. Indeed, later in the same speech Curzon gave patrons and artisans equal responsibility for India’s art future: Many of these objects are beautiful in themselves, but we hope that the Indian workmen who are here, and also the patrons who employ them, will study them, not merely as objects of antiquarian or even artistic interest, but as supplying them with fresh or rather resuscitated ideas, which may be useful to them in inspiring their own work in the future.99

At the Delhi Durbar Exhibition, as with publications, museums, and emporia, design preservation reached directly out to consumers, asking patrons to take an active role in determining the future of traditional styles. These venues worked in tandem with efforts to educate artisans into the principles and content of traditional design. Indeed, all were equally concerned with a certain visual result, trying through different means to ensure the unique appearance of traditional crafts. At the same time, all were also concerned with the means by which that result was achieved. Like education and dissemination efforts to reach out to artisans, promoting traditional crafts to consumers demanded active, creative producers, albeit now supported by equally active patrons similarly committed to traditional design. Implicitly harkening back to an earlier era of generous royal patronage, exhibitions and emporia tried to educate a new generation of buyers to revive that tradition in the present, rejecting foreign styles as they did so. Preserving Work: Artisanal Relationships in Flux All the efforts discussed so far set out to affect the outcome of craft production: whether styles were indigenous or foreign, purely traditional or hybridly modern. Indeed, inspired by Western influences spreading inexorably through colonial society, these represented the bulk of the preservation efforts of the era. Combining the dissemination of


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approved designs with education in design principles, schools, exhibitions, museums, publications, and emporia did try to affect the process of production. Art officials argued that only a certain kind of creative, thoughtful labor would ensure the survival of traditional design as a living art rather than a relic of the past. Hence the emphasis on teaching principles, on distributing plates of design elements, on educating consumers into active support for indigenous styles: these were the means necessary to the end of design preservation. For some, however, independent creative labor was not the means to an end but the end in itself. Indeed, alongside the better-known efforts to preserve styles were other attempts to preserve particular working conditions. These projects fought different demons than design preservationists, attacking not Westernizing designs but commercialization, exploitation, and impoverishment. And they proposed different solutions, arguing not for design education but for new forms of working relationships intended to preserve individual independence within protective structures designed to shield artisans from the intense competition of consumer markets. Here I focus on two very different examples of this side of the preservationist agenda: a commercial attempt in Ahmedabad to revive traditional patronage within a novel furniture workshop; and a noncommercial effort across western India to rescue artisans from exploitative middlemen through cooperatives. The two addressed different geographic markets (overseas as opposed to local), focused on different types of consumers (an international cosmopolitan elite as opposed to the local middle and lower-classes), involved different artisans (woodworkers as opposed to handloom weavers), and attracted different attention (by art officials as opposed to experts in rural development). Even in their one main area of commonality—a commitment to restoring artisanal independence—they defined that independence differently. The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company (AWCC) encouraged wage laborers to develop their own artistic ideas, giving free reign to individual creativity in decorative elements; independence here was aesthetic not economic, defined in terms of personal expression not how individuals fit within a larger corporate whole. Cooperatives worried little about individual expressiveness and more about the social context for production, helping artisans escape both wage labor and financial dependence on middlemen; given the relative rigidities of markets for handloom cloth—the main product of artisanal cooperatives—artistic freedom may well have been beside the point. Both the AWCC and cooperatives harkened back to the ideal state of craftsmanship Birdwood and Coomaraswamy had described,

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with contented village workers intellectually engaged with their work. But they emphasized different sides of that vision: the artistic need for personal creativity as opposed to the economic need for structured self-sufficiency. Both, however, shared a fundamental investment in preserving artisanal independence—a key element separating crafts from modern industry. Creativity: Lockwood de Forest and the AWCC The first example of a preservationist effort aimed at the process of production actually parallels quite closely the design-focused efforts already discussed. Founded in 1881, the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company was devoted to producing fine furniture and wood paneling drawing on the architectural heritage of western India. The artistic director, American designer Lockwood de Forest, was a close associate of some of the most important men working for Indian design preservation in the late nineteenth century, including Kipling, Hendley, and Jacob. More broadly, de Forest knew virtually everyone else involved in Indian arts at the time: George Birdwood and Purdon Clarke in London, John Griffiths and George Terry in Bombay, various heads of the Madras and Calcutta art schools, and key industrial officials across India such as Alfred Chatterton and E. C. Buck. With these men de Forest shared ideas, investigated regional artwares on common collecting trips, poured over museum collections, built up knowledge of design traditions, exchanged new designs, and exhibited work.100 For all his admiration for these men, however, de Forest differed from them in several key respects. First, as an American acting in a private commercial capacity, he did not boast the institutional authority of British art school officials or industrial officers. Nor, trained as an oil painter in the United States, did he share their grounding in the South Kensington system of art education. More importantly, he differed in his assessment of what was wrong with Indian crafts and what should be done to preserve them. British art officials explained problems and offered solutions in crafts in visual terms: Indian artisans did not properly understand aesthetic principles and so needed art education or access to better designs. de Forest insisted that Indian design already was excellent. Looking back in 1919 on his efforts in India, he wrote that crafts in India “were perfectly organized and the work done was as perfect as the organization and had been for untold centuries as the further one went back the more perfect it seemed.”101 That perfection meant that Indian artisans had more to teach the world than to learn from it. Thus, when in 1912 de Forest published a


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book of designs to be used in American art schools, not only were most of the illustrations taken from Indian examples, but much of the introduction focused on the artistic abilities of Indian artisans, describing them as men who “had so mastered the notes of line that they were not only able to read their meaning but to compose in them.”102 Taking that praise one step farther, in 1918 de Forest suggested bringing over working craftsmen from India to teach in American art schools to “show how work should be done, for it is only in the East that the workman have not lost their art and skill.”103 For de Forest, the problem with contemporary Indian crafts was not design but patronage, not inadequate knowledge but bad markets. Indian artisans were perfectly capable of turning out the finest quality work in purely traditional styles; in de Forest’s view, they were masters in their arts, not just technically but also aesthetically, capable of creative innovation within their respective craft traditions. It was just that Indian artisans could not utilize those skills because of the current configuration of the marketplace with its pressures to produce cheap goods for uncaring clients. The solution, then, was twofold. First, improve patronage: provide proper support from customers who understood and appreciated good design. Writing to Louis Tiffany in 1881, de Forest argued: “there is only one way to keep up Indian art and that is to make a market for the best things and then you will have no difficulty in getting them. . . . A few lacks [sic] of rupees will do more to preserve Indian art than all the art schools and all the talk possible.”104 Second, restore autonomy: create a careful system of production that would protect artisans from commercial pressures, ensuring creative freedom in their art. The AWCC set out to do both. Indeed, it emerged directly out of de Forest’s frustrations with existing production networks that offered neither good patronage nor true artisanal autonomy. During his first trip to India in 1881–1882—made to investigate traditional arts on behalf of Associated Artists, his business partnership with Tiffany, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler—de Forest found quality standards declining across crafts, with artisans pressured to cut corners and degrade their skills in order to produce cheaper goods at greater profit to merchants. Nor was he able to intervene effectively on his own. Instead, de Forest faced frequent difficulties getting good work done, unable to convince artisans to work consistently or carefully for him, an unknown client. The solution, both to his own search for high quality goods and to the larger problem of structures degrading artisanship, came via the prominent Ahmedabadi merchant Muggunbhai Hutheesing. Hutheesing came from a family of prominent bankers, civic leaders, and art patrons; his father Kesrising

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had financed the construction of the famous Seth Hutheesing temple in Ahmedabad, completed in 1848. By 1881, however, much of Muggunbhai Hutheesing’s fortune had disappeared, thanks to the crash in the Indian cotton market at the end of the American Civil War.105 Thus, when de Forest came to Ahmedabad looking for help in getting wood carving done, Hutheesing agreed to help; drawing on his family’s role as patrons of crafts in the past—and perhaps responding to straightened finances in the present—Hutheesing went into partnership with de Forest to produce high quality, traditionally inspired wood work, founding the AWCC. The AWCC aimed to be the perfect sponsors of fine quality work. No pressure was exerted to simplify designs or skimp on materials in order to save money; aiming at only the wealthiest markets, the firm was able to support excellence. At the same time, the AWCC also strove to provide the perfect environment for individual expression, based on de Forest’s belief that art lay not in an object itself, but in the creativity brought to it, in the thinking human who brought it into being. de Forest had come to that belief in India; watching Indian artisans at work “has taught me as no other study what art really meant—that art was the creative principle of the world and the universe itself.”106 It took him a while, however, to put that belief in personal creativity into action at the AWCC. When the firm first started, de Forest exerted fairly direct design control. After walking through Ahmedabad with Hutheesing and the head mistri,107 picking out patterns and motifs from local mosques, tombs, and old wooden house fronts, de Forest drew up a series of designs. Hutheesing then assembled the drawings—for wooden panels, decorative molding, mantels, picture frames, sofas, swings, armchairs, and desks—into pattern books, keeping one copy for himself and giving one to de Forest so that orders could be coordinated even when the latter was not present.108 But that system of rigid pattern making soon gave way to more informal direction. After only a few weeks watching the woodcarvers at work, de Forest quickly realized that “my mistri could originate designs just as easily as making copies.”109 As his confidence in the workmen grew, de Forest began to dictate only the overall form of an object—the dimensions of a mantelpiece, or the width of molding—leaving the ornamentation up to the woodworkers in question. Those instructions carried over into more complex commissions as well, as indicated by the surprised pleasure de Forest showed at the completion in 1882 of the workshop’s first full set of living room furniture. As de Forest’s wife, Meta, reported in a letter to her mother-inlaw, “Lockwood thinks the men have been wonderfully clever, for he only made a rough drawing and did not expect them to be able to do it all so thoroughly.”110 The results of this kind of collaborative creativity could


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Figure 3.6 Bench prepared by the AWCC, late 1800s Source: Courtesy of Umung Hutheesing.

sometimes be startling; in one piece de Forest designed in the 1880s, the famous tree of life motif from Ahmedabad’s Sidi Sayyid Mosque appears on the carved back of a bench whose arms are formed by curling cobras (see fig. 3.6). Inspired by high principles of benevolent patronage and artisanal autonomy, the AWCC was also founded on a very practical collaboration between de Forest and Hutheesing. The former took responsibility for creating designs, finding customers, and generally setting the artistic direction of the firm; the latter managed the practical details of hiring and supervising workmen, maintaining accounts, ensuring the exclusivity of de Forest’s designs, and dispatching finished goods—taking a commission of 7 percent for his troubles. It was from the beginning a commercial undertaking dedicated to producing excellent goods at steady profits for customers around the world. Those combined skills allowed smooth operations from the start. Opening in February of 1881 with some twenty men and boys, the workshop turned out its first full set of carvings and brasswork in less than seven months at quality levels far exceeding de Forest’s expectations. Part of that success seems to have been due to a ready availability of skilled labor; according to de Forest, the status of the Hutheesing

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family was such that artisans thought “it was rather an honor to work for them.”111 Proud of the results, de Forest sent the finest of the wood carvings to Kipling’s exhibition of Indian arts in Lahore at the end of 1881. They made quite an impact; Purdon Clarke, then on tour collecting for the South Kensington Museum, was so impressed that he ordered several things for the museum.112 Other attention and orders soon followed thanks to de Forest’s aggressive efforts to publicize his work. On the commercial front, de Forest arranged with James Proctor Watson (of Watson and Co. in Bombay and London) and the London carpet dealer Vincent Robinson to sell AWCC goods in Indian and British markets.113 On the official front, the workshop’s accomplishments were noted in a speech by the Governor of Bombay at the opening of the Poona art exhibition in 1881, and were prominently displayed in the Bombay artwares courts at the 1883 Calcutta International Exhibition.114 More individually, orders arrived from Jaipur state, the Rajkot durbar, and local British officials.115 Confident of the firm’s position at the forefront of what he imagined would be a run on Indian arts,116 de Forest returned to the United States in the summer of 1882 to build the American market for Indian wood carvings. Initially, at least, the response was disappointing; although an early exhibition of his Indian collections held in the early fall of that year was a success, de Forest failed to arouse much interest among his architect friends in the carving and stone work.117 Over time, however, he was more successful. For the next twenty years, de Forest worked steadily to expand sales of AWCC work, taking over the American side of the business himself after the dissolution of the Associated Artists in November of 1882 and eventually designing his own house in New York City as a demonstration of all that could be done with Indian carvings (see fig. 3.7). These efforts paid off in terms of articles celebrating his work in major design magazines and commissions for interiors—complete with carved paneling, furniture, and all the fittings—for prominent clients across the country, including Andrew Carnegie, Bryn Mawr College, and Marshall Field’s of Chicago.118 Those commissions, combined with demand generated by prizewinning pieces sent to international exhibitions in London, Antwerp, Chicago, and elsewhere, kept the AWCC busy through the 1890s.119 After Muggunbhai Hutheesing died in 1889, his three sons took over the business without disruption; when de Forest returned to India for a second trip in December 1892 he found the workshop operating smoothly with some 100 men at work.120 By the turn of the century, however, business had begun to decline, with stocks piling up unused in New York. Around the same time, de Forest began to shift his attention away from Indian work. Anxious to devote more time to painting, de Forest eventually sold


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Figure 3.7 Lockwood de Forest home, East 10th Street, New York City, early twentieth century Source: de Forest, Indian Domestic Architecture, plate XX. Courtesy of the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

his share of the AWCC to Tiffany Studios in the fall of 1907 in the hopes that they would be able to build markets back up again. He was, however, disappointed, writing later, “Though I had turned over to them a complete organization which I had been able to manage with the greatest ease, they did not understand how to use it to advantage.”121 Tiffany Studios apparently tried to change not only the workshop’s products, but also the business relationship with the Hutheesings, further disrupting production. By 1911 Purushottambhai Hutheesing was regularly asking de Forest to intercede with Tiffany over issues ranging from the commission he collected to wages, fees for shipping, and the thickness of wood needed for intricate pierced work.122 The problem was not just that the nature of the partnership was now in doubt. Input prices had increased significantly by 1911; compared to the early 1880s, prices for good quality teak wood had climbed by 60 percent or more while wages for good carpenters had increased from Rs. –.12.6 a day to between Rs. 1.2 and Rs. 1.8. Nor was it always possible

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to even find labor at those prices; Purushottambhai Hutheesing wrote in 1911 that, despite his best efforts: “I want today more than a dozen carpenters. . . . I don’t mean to say there is scarcity of crude labour but the cultured labour is dearer and scarce as well.”123 On the demand side, new aesthetic trends in the United States pushed exotic Indian work out of fashion. Assessing the decline in carving work some years later, de Forest admitted, “Perhaps even I could not have succeeded in arousing a greater interest in Indian carving [than Tiffany Studios had done] with the adverse influence of the Architects towards the French art of the Louis period, and the late renaissance.”124 In any case, troubled by an unsympathetic American partner, saddled with higher costs, and faced with shrinking markets, the AWCC soon closed down; by the time de Forest made his last collecting visit to India in 1913–1914, the workshops had essentially ceased operations, with only a few men at work. Whatever its ultimate failings, the AWCC was hailed by crafts enthusiasts as a resounding success in its early years. Commercial yet based in traditional aesthetics, centralized under efficient management yet artistically individualistic, producing at the highest quality yet able to employ up to a hundred artisans at a time, the firm provided a totally different model for preserving and revitalizing crafts. Unlike art schools, exhibitions, museums, and publications, de Forest did not try to tell others what to do; instead he just went ahead and did it himself, putting his ideas into direct, successful action. And others recognized that. As early as 1884, John Griffiths gave the AWCC full responsibility for reviving fine wood carving in a city where the craft had almost died out; by the early 1890s, the workshops had become one of the required stops for European travelers to Ahmedabad.125 For his part, de Forest claimed that the AWCC did more to “encourage and preserve real art,” than the “the so called schools of Art,” which, by introducing European methods, were “in most cases doing everything to destroy it.”126 What made the AWCC’s furniture “real art” to de Forest were the methods used to produce it. He did not impose traditional decoration but respected and fostered the creative abilities of his workers—in the process operating according to the idea of crafts difference as defined through both product and process.

Financial autonomy: Cooperatives and the individual artisan Compared to de Forest’s self-conscious attempt to revive crafts by channeling artisanal creativity through careful commercial structures, the final preservation effort in crafts—cooperatives—appears not to be


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preservationist at all. When they began in the early 1900s, cooperatives resolutely looked forward to a utopian future; rejecting exploitative control by merchants and middlemen, artisans would band together to forge harmonious, egalitarian relationships of mutual assistance; suppressing individualistic strivings for personal profit, fellow craftsmen would pool resources to ensure an adequate livelihood for everyone; shedding the shackles of the present, workers would march together into a better future. Nor did cooperatives appear to set much store in individual creativity or autonomy; instead the objective was to ease poverty through economic collaboration. As the 1915 Government of India Committee on Co-operation in India declared, “The chief object of co-operation in India was to deal with the stagnation of the poorer classes;” specifically, the basic principle was that “an isolated and powerless individual can by association with others and by moral development and mutual support obtain in his own degree the material advantages available to wealthy or powerful persons, and thereby develop himself to the fullest extent of his natural abilities.”127 Underneath the revolutionary rhetoric, however, the movement also looked backwards, not to utopian futures in which individuality had disappeared into anonymous collectivity but to idealized pasts in which artisans worked separately, controlling the pace and outcome of their own work. Counterintuitively, one of the primary objectives of the cooperative movement was to restore individual independence, rescuing artisans from new cycles of debt and dependence—a development which, as E. M. Edwardes described for silk, had cast weavers “from the pedestal of independence at the feet of the capitalist trader. . . . The grandson of him that paid others to assist him is but the labourer hired by the merchant to toil from morn till eve.”128 This transition was real. Although pockets of prosperity existed within almost every craft, economic historians have noted a general loss of artisanal independence in this period.129 As of 1909, for instance, P. N. Mehta reported that only 30 percent of handloom weavers in western India had any degree of independence in their craft; approximately 50 percent were indebted to the degree that the work on their looms was pledged until the repayment of that debt, while the remaining 20 percent were so financially compromised that they no longer even owned their own looms but wove as paid labor for others.130 Cooperatives fought against this trend. In place of external domination they promised to restore productive independence, allowing individual artisans to once more control what they made and to whom they sold their goods. Cooperatives did not, it should be noted, promote absolute independence with craftsmen struggling in isolation

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against competitive markets; that would have doomed artisans to failure. According to the director of industries for the United Provinces V. N. Mehta it was that isolation—or what he called “the individualistic method of production”—that was the “main cause of evil” in handloom weaving. Using yarn spun within the household, warping each piece separately at home in short lengths suitable to only a single piece of fabric, finishing poorly, and relying on “inefficient and wasteful” marketing with “the manufacturer losing a whole day on the bazaar day to dispose of one or two pieces of cloth”—these were the things destroying artisanal viability.131 In place of such individualism, Mehta and others proposed structured, communitarian independence, with each artisan producing separately while relying on the support of his (and all cooperatives in this era focused on men) fellow workers. Writing in 1921, Alfred Chatterton declared that the “present amorphous state of the community of handloom weavers” demanded more structure including “some sub-division of labour” in preparatory stages and marketing. For, “to do his best the hand-loom weaver cannot work alone.”132 By pooling information, artisans could create their own direct connections to distant consumers, thereby becoming independent of moneylender-merchants who controlled markets. By pooling money, artisans could invest in more efficient technologies that were priced out of reach of individual producers. Thus, Mehta suggested that handloom weavers set up central processing depots for each cooperative with beaming machinery to produce warps of standard lengths and widths, and facilities to calendar and finish cloth.133 Chatterton and Mehta wanted to protect artisans’ economic autonomy, freeing them from the clutches of moneylenders. Both agreed, though, on the simultaneous need to preserve social autonomy, keeping artisans in charge of production rather than combining them as wage labor into centralized factories. Thus, just as emphatically as he demanded subdivision of labor, Chatterton imposed strict limits on change: “We do not want to turn the hand-loom weaver into a machinist or make him a unit in a complex organization of the modern factory type.”134 Others shared those views. In a 1918 article in the government-published Bombay Co-operative Quarterly, K. R. Kulkarni laid out a series of steps that could be taken to help crafts compete with mill production. Like Chatterton, though, he insisted that the goal was both to retain “the intellectual and imaginative forces in life which go with the existence of skilled craftsmen and small workshops” and to preserve “a large class of craftsmen from sinking to the level of ‘coolies’ and wage-earners.”135 Cooperative advocates emphasized the evils of factory production in which workers, forced to do deadening work in unsafe conditions


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during the day, returned to crowded, unhygienic homes at night. While such evils were obviously not unique to India, many argued that Indians were particularly ill-suited for such conditions. The past president of the International Cooperative Alliance H. G. Wolff spoke to common assumptions when he posed the question in 1919 “to anyone who knows India, whether the Indian appears at all cut out for the wholesale monotonous and wearying mill-work, in more or less close and shut up, unhealthy rooms, at a steady grind, away from his house and little field.”136 Echoing Wolff, P. G. Shah noted physical differences that made factory work problematic in India: “The tropical climate of this country makes strenuous exertion in factories a heavy strain on the ill-fed physique of the labourer, and leaves him open to dangers and diseases in the slums, which are already reported to be worse than those in European countries.” But he also noted sociocultural factors that made artisanal production preferable. Citing “the unwillingness with which a born potter or weaver leaves his ancestral employment and village to join a factory,” Shah declared that “there is no doubt that he would be infinitely more happy in his ancestral environments . . . than in the slums of factory life.” Part of that happiness he ascribed to a particularly Indian “attachment to ancestral home”; more significant, though, “is the love of freedom, and the dislike of the discipline and of the regular hours of factory life.”137 In the end, Shah declared that “the central idea” of cooperative organizing to be “the emancipation of the workman from the blighting monotony of factory life.” To do that, work had to be done on a small scale “so that the workman produces more or less a complete thing and is able to bring his individuality to bear upon his work.”138 On the face of it, this goal seems incompatible with the beaming machines and finishing depots Mehta recommended that rendered production more centralized, standardized, and factory-like. And yet, on closer examination, they were indeed compatible. Cooperatives carefully targeted services at particular stages of production and particular sections of the artisanal population in order to balance the competing demands of combination and independence. Within production, that meant mechanizing or centralizing only preparatory and finishing processes, while leaving the actual creation of specific products in individual hands. Thus in weaving, the transformation of yarn into cloth was the preserve of individual weavers while everything done to the yarn before it got to the loom (spinning thread, beaming and sizing warps) or after it left the loom (calendaring, finishing, marketing) could be done cooperatively. Within the overall population, cooperatives tried to represent only independent producers, excluding wage laborers on the one hand and large

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workshop owners employing other artisans on the other; explaining the policy, the Government of Bombay’s annual report on cooperatives in 1915 argued that big workshop owners were men “to whose interest it is to keep their caste fellows in economic bondage.”139 With the exclusion of such men, cooperatives promised to bring artisans of similar economic standing together in equality and harmony, increasing productivity without succumbing to the evils of factory production. Just as importantly, they promised to do so in a way that made sense to Indian values and culture. Indeed, many argued that cooperatives were a natural fit with India, both in terms of the basic principles of shared work and mutual aid operating in villages, but also in terms of the larger traditions of caste associations and artisanal guilds. Wolff, for one, saw India as an excellent field for cooperative organizing, since “there is undoubtedly a natural bent towards Co-operation in the Indian character. Hindoo and Mahomedan alike show a distinct predisposition for collection action.”140 Bipin Pal agreed, arguing that Indian society was rooted in the principles of “association not isolation; cooperation, not competition; . . . duty and not right.”141 Cooperative activists had the opportunity to put their principles into action in India in 1904 with the passage of the Cooperative Societies Act allowing the official registration of societies. At the beginning, artisans were only a peripheral concern; inspired by mounting concerns about farming debts, the initial focus was on agriculture. Even as the movement gained momentum in the 1910s and 1920s that emphasis remained, with the overwhelming majority of cooperatives across the subcontinent representing farmers. As of 1917, for instance, only 180 out of the 1,225 registered societies active in the Bombay Presidency were nonagricultural; of that 180, only 29 were artisanal cooperatives.142 Despite that emphasis on agriculture, cooperative enthusiasts across India quickly recognized the benefits of extending the movement to artisans. Initial efforts focused on handloom weaving, with weavers’ cooperatives starting as early as 1906 in the Madras Presidency, United Provinces, Central Provinces, and Mysore State.143 As the second largest sector of employment in the country after agriculture—and as an industry marked by worker poverty, uncertain markets, particularly extractive middlemen, and growing competition from all sides—weaving was an obvious choice; as the Registrar for Co-operatives in the Bombay Presidency put it in 1915, “There is no class of men in this Presidency for whom co-operation can do more than for the weavers.”144 Compared to other parts of the country, however, the Bombay Presidency developed artisanal cooperatives relatively slowly. In 1907 the first two weavers’


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cooperatives of the region opened in Ratnagiri district;145 in 1912 the number rose to ten while by 1919 there was a total of thirty-three representing some 2,300 members around the presidency, with another nineteen societies in the Baroda State.146 As the number of cooperatives grew, services expanded as well. Virtually all artisanal groups started as credit agencies, offering members low-cost loans to cover the purchase of raw materials, new appliances, or other productive inputs. This alone did many things: it saved artisans money since they were not forced to pay the extortionate interest rates charged by local moneylenders; it freed artisans to seek out the best prices for their finished goods, since they were not tied through debt to sell their products to local merchants; and it allowed artisans to invest in new technologies. As cooperatives grew more established, a few began to purchase raw materials at wholesale prices for members, lowering input prices dramatically; by 1919, nineteen of the thirty-three registered societies offered this service.147 Some began to purchase preparatory equipment like warping and winding machines in weaving for shared use, giving members access to efficient but expensive equipment that radically decreased production time. Some also arranged to sell work in a cooperative store so that members would not be forced to hawk their wares individually in saturated local markets or to turn them over to local dealers at reduced prices; by 1919 seven of the thirty-three societies offered marketing facilities.148 Most of the early artisanal cooperatives in the Bombay Presidency represented weavers. While these societies faced regular crises brought on by leadership upheavals, sudden changes in input prices, or the onset of drought or famine that destroyed the buying power of their rural consumers, they seem to have been somewhat more successful than cooperatives in other crafts. Government cooperative officials considered leather, for instance, a promising field for cooperative development; thanks in part to official confidence perhaps as many as twenty leatherworkers’ societies were founded between 1908 and 1911.149 Yet by 1913, all but three had folded, frustrating R. W. Ewbank, the registrar of cooperatives for the Bombay Presidency, so much that he was willing to write off the possibility of any future development among leather workers at all. As he saw it: “There is no doubt that Chambhars150 are too ignorant and too factious to manage Co-operative Societies without constant help and supervision from outside. If this cannot be obtained the societies must be gradually wound up.”151 Other crafts did not even experience the modest level of cooperative growth enjoyed—even if only briefly—by leatherworkers. Indeed, as of 1919, weaving was the only craft represented by officially recognized cooperative bodies in the Bombay Presidency.

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Whether in weaving or leather, the immediate goal of cooperative organization was to restore artisans’ independence, freeing them from the clutches of middlemen, while simultaneously protecting them from factory-like alienation of labor. And yet that independence was elusive and expensive. Particularly in their early stages, cooperatives could only replace some of the functions of local sowkars.152 Credit societies limited loans to productive purchases only, which kept members dependent on moneylenders for marriages, funerals, and other expenses; those that provided raw materials or sold finished goods could rarely match the supplies and expertise of established dealers. Membership in cooperatives, then, often threatened vitally important access to money, materials, and markets. This made association with cooperatives not only unappealing but downright dangerous. In Dharwar town, one weaving cooperative initially had trouble attracting members; weavers there were afraid that if the local moneylender heard they had purchased yarn through the society rather than from his shop, he would call in all outstanding debts, resulting in financial ruin.153 Although the Dharwar cooperative did eventually succeed, an attempt to provide yarn at reduced prices in another town in the same district fared more poorly, since members remained dependent on local sowkars for sales; according to W. T. Pomfret, the acting principal of the VJTI, “Merchants of the place knowing that sarees made . . . were the product of the Society’s yarn refused to buy from the weavers till such time as the weavers had no money: and as the latter were unable to sell elsewhere, they had eventually to sell at a loss to the former.”154 Even when artisans did want to form cooperatives, they did not always have the skills necessary for successful operations. In weaving, again, observers regularly noted that organizing the purchase of the diverse colors and qualities of yarn required by members weaving various kinds of cloth proved difficult for many cooperatives, since it required intimate knowledge of the distant, often highly unstable wholesale yarn markets in Bombay.155 Sales were even more daunting; disposing of cloth that varied in quality according to the skills of member weavers, either in local markets controlled by often hostile merchants or in more distant centers, demanded organizational, marketing, and accounting skills well beyond the capabilities of many societies.156 And that was in good years. In periods of economic uncertainty the challenges posed by fluctuating prices, demands by members for cash advances on goods prepared, and shaky consumer demand proved well nigh insurmountable. In 1919, for instance, the very successful Dharwar Union of ten weavers’ cooperatives found itself suddenly saddled with a debt of Rs. 50,000, thanks to an ill-fated combination of unexpectedly high yarn prices on the one hand and the onset of both influenza and famine that destroyed local markets


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on the other. Anxious to support its members during that difficult time, the union cooperatives continued to give cash advances against finished cloth, thereby precipitating the financial crisis that was only solved by an emergency grant from the provincial government.157 The artisanal independence from merchant-moneylenders that cooperatives tried to achieve was, then, almost impossible to achieve in practice. Markets were too complex and economic relationships too intertwined for artisans to become totally self-reliant. If the promise to deliver independence was flawed in execution, it was also flawed in its very premise. Cooperatives offered freedom from moneylenders while simultaneously tying members into new forms of dependence to the society itself; organizers tried to replace the exploitative relationships of colonial capitalism with what they argued were the more natural, Indian ties of community, cooperation, and mutual aid. As Douglas Haynes notes, a society’s financial success relied on members producing for the cooperative even when they could earn more elsewhere, whether temporarily during busy seasons or more permanently when they could expand their business by adding looms and hiring labor. Loyalty to the cooperative precluded some of the most important survival strategies artisans had: adjusting production, switching markets, and seeking out new outlets as a way to weather changing market conditions. By demanding that weavers give up that flexibility, Haynes argues that cooperatives threatened to undermine the defense mechanisms that were critical to basic economic survival.158 The autonomy offered by cooperatives was thus defined in opposition, not just to financial exploitation by outsiders but to individualistic striving by members. Building as they did off idealized models of harmonious communities pitching in for common purposes—models supposedly rooted in India’s particularly noncompetitive, cooperative ethos—cooperatives represented a particular affirmation of the lost world of traditional production. Change in the Name of Tradition Preservation efforts of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century focused on two key issues: traditional design and artisanal autonomy. On both fronts, activists looked to the past for models of proper artisanal practices. Visually, art officials hoped to restore earlier design integrity, purging foreign elements in the decorative arts by educating artisans and consumers into the active support of India’s own design traditions. Socially, AWCC managers and cooperative organizers tried to return control to artisans, fostering artistic and economic autonomy within larger

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organizational structures inspired by traditions of royal patronage and village mutual aid. Although primarily directed at artisans, these were broadly inclusive efforts that gave producers and consumers, rich and poor, rural and urban alike a role to play in the restoration of Indian crafts. Crafts here were a public concern, important not just for individual artisanal prosperity or personal consumer comfort, but for national economy and culture. Reformers argued that the solution to the problems of the present lay within India’s own heritage, if only that heritage was properly understood. Thus, art schools, museums, exhibitions, publications, workshops, and cooperatives looked to India’s distinctive craft heritage for lessons on how to forge a path for development. Or at least they did up to a point. It is important to recognize that these efforts were also essentially innovative. Whatever their claims to preservation, none aimed to return artisans to past products or practices wholesale, but instead tried to advance change. The caveat was that that change could not threaten the core aspects of artisanal difference: ornamentation or artisanal autonomy. The most obvious innovations were visual. Most basically, all preservation efforts encouraged new forms. In 1894–1895 for instance, the Reay Workshops produced a silver address casket, spirit measures, salt cellars, copper plates, a large copper vase, an octagonal wooden table, and an ebony and ivory carved tablet on which an address to the governor of Bombay was engraved; all represented novel forms, but were covered with Indian ornament.159 The Technical Art Series and the JIAI similarly promoted new products: clocks echoing the shape of a carved mihrab, tablecloths embellished with embroidery patterns used on phulkari shawls, writing desks covered with pinjra designs. The AWCC operated in the same vein, applying carvings copied from a temple doorway to a fireplace mantle or translating the form of a mosque window into the back of a bench. Aside from novel forms, all these products reveal innovation in the very definition of Indian ornament. By applying design elements from one media to another (a stone mihrab reinterpreted into silver), one region to another (a Lahore balcony copied in Ahmedabad), and from one time to another (ancient cave-temple paintings reformulated as decoration on modern vases), preservationists design efforts worked to forge a broader definition of national design. More fundamental still, though, were innovations in control over production. All preservation efforts operated on a shared assumption that artisans needed external supervision. As noted earlier, Griffiths promised that mistris in the Reay Workshops would have complete control over their work, “beyond the insistence that the work executed shall be of the best, and that the ornamentation shall be, as far as it is


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possible for it to be in this age when art is cosmopolitan, Indian.”160 That was a crucial caveat, in that at the JJ and other art schools British teachers assumed responsibility for keeping students to Indian styles of ornamentation. British officials did not trust the mistris; since even the most accomplished traditional workman tended to stray into foreign styles, Griffiths argued the necessity of maintaining the “most vigilant watch over them; otherwise they are sure to go wrong and turn out some most atrocious work.”161 At the AWCC, similarly, for all de Forest’s claims to be restoring creative autonomy to artisans, he maintained clear and exclusive control over products, supervising styles even when overseas via a complex system of sketches, cabled orders, and personal letters. AWCC products provide visual demonstration of this control. Within his house in New York City, for instance, de Forest had a dining room mantelpiece copied from the doorway of a Jain temple, a sideboard of teak with perforated copper panels copied from an old royal cabinet, and a large window framed with open work arches and perforated screens copied from a balcony in Lahore.162 All had been prepared according to inspiration de Forest had found across north India, none of which would have been directly accessible to his woodworkers in Ahmedabad. Within such pieces, woodworkers had the freedom to invent new patterns within certain sections, but de Forest dictated how those elements fit together into a form of his own devising. Artisans, in other words, were autonomous within only very narrow limits; otherwise they remained almost entirely dependent on the firm for direction and employment. That dependence becomes particularly clear in a story recorded in a 1961 survey of wood carving in Gujarat: It is said that it [the firm of Messrs Hutheesing Brothers] fell into bad days as there was no demand for carved articles. The proprietor, anxious to maintain his faithful workers, asked them to go on preparing one inch cubes perfect in every respect. Curious to know what the master did with them, one of the workers spied him feeding them into his hooka. When this was known by other artisans, they became careless and their cubes were no longer perfect. The owner, noticing this, regretfully discharged the workers saying that their faithlessness was the cause of their downfall.163

Whether true or not, the story attributes the firm’s success to AWCC management; without a clear sense of the firm’s purpose, artisans became sloppy in their work, bringing on dismissal due to their own faithlessness. This hardly was a picture of artisanal autonomy; instead artisans relied on their managers for basic direction, incapable of maintaining their skills or jobs on their own behalf.

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Even cooperatives, which were set up with the specific purpose of empowering artisans, remained ambivalent about turning over actual power to the artisans themselves. Government organizers promised that societies would be self-governing, and yet subjected them to oversight far more stringent than that exercised over commercial firms. Whereas with joint stock companies the government could only request information be made public, with cooperatives, as H. Clayton a former registrar of cooperative societies in Burma noted in 1920, “The Registrar is placed in a sort of paternal position in regard to every society. He defines the terms on which alone it comes into existence, he has the power to keep himself fully informed of its working, and he has the full discretion to bring its existence to an end, if he thinks such a course desirable.” Clayton defended that enhanced power over cooperatives, arguing it made sense “when the class of persons for whom the Co-operative Societies’ Act is intended is realized”—i.e., artisans, agriculturalists, and other people of limited means, all of whom had limited education. According to Clayton, only when that class had really imbibed the true principles of the movement and built up their own skills could government supervision decrease and cooperatives become more truly autonomous.164 That members might never be judged capable was an obvious threat; indeed, a 1958 study found that government officials often essentially ran cooperatives, dictating terms rather than allowing members to manage their own affairs.165 In other words, external government oversight remained a fundamental, accepted part of cooperative organizing. Within craft preservation efforts, then, leadership rested in the hands of outsiders: European art experts, American designers, government cooperative officials. In all cases preservation did not allow leadership to artisans themselves, but instead presumed artisans to be incapable of extricating themselves from the problems of the moment. If preservation efforts were not all that they claimed to be, however, their very novelty remains remarkable. As suggested in Chapter 2, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century Indian economic reformers imagined a natural progression from artisanal to modern factory production, with the latter promising new efficiency and productivity that would rescue India from poverty and backwardness. It was only by the end of the century that preservationists turned their backs firmly on mechanized industrialization, insisting instead on the key markers separating crafts from modern industry: artisanal autonomy and indigenous design. The novelty of preservation efforts, therefore, relied on the attendant novelty of the idea of artisanal difference—an idea with enormous productive power.

4

Modernizing Artisanship: Rationalization, Efficiency, and the Cult of the Craftsman

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n 1889, writing at the height of the preservationist efforts discussed in Chapter 3—with the Lahore and Jaipur exhibitions less than seven years before, the Journal of Indian Arts and Industries in its second volume, the Technical Art Series only three years old, and the Reay Workshops to open the following year—the Gujarati poet Dhirajrai issued a plea for industrial regeneration in India in the pages of the Buddhiprakash: O Natives, now take pride in your own Nation, get together Encourage the native ways and fill up the nation with your crafts and skills. You have become powerless and your home is burnt down, you are making great efforts to stay afloat; But if you do not discover new strategies, you are surely done for. Using the key of chemistry, discover new machines, Go abroad, visit America, England, China, bring forth all their skills. Says Dhirajrai, embrace swadeshi, remove your superstition and other faults.1

Compared with preservationists, Dhirajarai offered a very different summary of the issues facing India’s crafts. The problem with current production, in his mind, was not frenetic change but powerlessness and passivity; superstition, shame, and helplessness had combined to burn down the house of Indian manufactures. Dhirajrai also offered a radically different solution: not to look inward to India’s traditional past but to turn outward to Western science and modernity. Only by encouraging native ways and introducing foreign industrial technologies would the nation stay afloat; only with new, forward-looking strategies would India be able to remove its faults.

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This call for technical change was echoed a few years later in an 1893 article in the Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Using prose rather than verse the journal laid out the problem in the following terms: “The real standing of a country in the scale of civilization is thus increased by the practical pursuits of its people, the number and magnitude of their callings, their industries, their enterprise, their skill, their ambition and their performances and by the extent to which they employ natural forces as aids to production.” Since competitive progress among nations was revealed in “the superiority enjoyed by one nation over another in the arts and reproductive industries of the world,” it was vital that India learn to adopt new technologies. Looking to the West, “we see how those that keep abreast of the times and work with perseverance in profitable occupations on modern methods are able to live well and enjoy a high scale of comfort.” Within India, however, “we notice that the great majority of our people are barely able to make both ends meet and that some millions of them live on the very verge of existence.” The explanation for this difference was not hard to find: “It may be prejudice, it may be ignorance, or want of opportunities, but, certain it is that they continue to follow discredited methods of industry and occupation too slow for the age.” What did the future then hold? Catastrophe, if things continued much longer: “The times have changed and if our working classes will not adopt modern methods of work and rapid ways of production they must inevitably be crowded out of all profitable occupations.”2 The modernizing imperative laid out by Dhirajrai and the Poona Sarvajaik Sabha represent the second major strain of crafts development efforts in India, operating in ideological opposition to the preservation efforts described in Chapter 3. Concerned about the slow development of modern industry in India, many activists were frustrated by preservationist approaches. To them, mimicking ancient ways of working only perpetuated India’s backwardness, preventing Indians from taking advantage of the proven achievements of efficiency, productivity, and profitability demonstrated by modern industrialization. Insisting on visual difference, meanwhile, limited Indian production to decorative luxuries, which did little to nothing to balance India’s growing trade deficit. In both cases, modernizers insisted on two key points: first, that the primary challenges facing crafts were economic rather than social or aesthetic, and second, that the solutions lay in the modern industrial West rather than ancient artistic India. Thus in 1908 Hemendra Prasad Ghose expressed only qualified gratitude to “enthusiastic European lovers of Indian art” for their efforts “to see in all Indian products the stamp of a solid national style— a style penetrating and unifying all the products of the country.” Those

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Europeans, he argued, had missed the point. “With their eyes fixed not on economic questions but on artistic considerations,” they had concentrated on traditionally designed luxuries for the rich or artistic independence for individual craftsmen. In doing so they had “sadly ignored” the needs of the masses whom Ghose labeled “the great patrons of the industries of a nation.”3 Distracted by art, Europeans ignored economics; anxious to preserve national style, they neglected the modern technologies that could have brought greater profits to producers and lower prices to consumers. The industrial chemist and president of the Poona City Municipality Dorabji Pudomjee shared Ghose’s emphasis on economics over art and technical change over social continuity. In 1902 he argued: In my humble opinion the regeneration of India depends more on the establishment and support of large factories that can turn to use the vast mineral and vegetable resources of the country and that can employ workpeople by the thousand, than on the revival of ancient trades such as hand weaving of carpets, shawls, silks, silver and gold chasing and enamelling, ivory carving, lacquer work, damascene work, artistic pottery and metalware, marble inlaid work, &c., trades which certainly deserve every encouragement that a benign Government can give, but which are calculated to help units and not the nation.4

In place of a backward-looking preservationist approach, men like Ghose and Pudomjee set out to modernize artisanal production. Starting from the view that all of the things that separated crafts from modern industry were problems to be solved rather than assets to be protected, these activists tried to erase difference, making crafts more like modern industry. If artisans were sloppy and devious in their habits, carefully structured schools would discipline them into precise efficiency; if artisans were conservative and archaic in their methods, scientific-minded elites would offer structured technological interventions to modernize production. This investment in change reveals a fundamentally different view of India’s economic and social future than what underlay preservationism. Rejecting the inevitability and desirability of India’s difference, efforts to discipline labor and introduce new technologies declared India part of the modernizing world, firmly ascending the global ladder of civilization that, as Michael Adas has argued, was seen as graded according to technological sophistication.5 Modernizing efforts had two main goals: to improve labor and modernize technology. In terms of labor the 1880s and 1890s were seen to be a period of crisis. One crucial element of this crisis was the shortage of skilled labor, with not enough workers capable of filling new consumer

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needs suitable to a modernizing society. Officials in Sind, for instance, complained that there were not enough accomplished carpenters or smiths there to make furniture, build government structures, or supply the hardware required by the local population.6 Factory owners, for their part, worried over the lack of skilled hands for their cotton-spinning and weaving mills; not only did that slow down production, but it forced owners to pay high wages to the few trained operatives they did have, just to keep the latter from taking their knowledge elsewhere.7 But alongside such complaints about the lack of skilled workers came fears about the underemployment of large sections of the population. In rural areas high taxes, uncertain prices, mounting debts, population growth, and the subdivision of land into unsustainable fragments all combined to push farmers off their land; even those with land to work found themselves idle during the long dry season if they lacked irrigation.8 In urban centers the educated middle class was an even more pressing concern, as more and more graduates of government schools found themselves unemployed, unable to find office positions and unwilling to accept lower-status employment.9 Together these employment problems laid the foundation for political unrest as frustrated youths turned to radical parties for solutions. They also stymied national growth, since, as the Buddhiprakash argued in 1877, “the country which is full of idlers and beggars can never make progress.”10 Along with the need for more and better labor came the associated imperative to improve the work that that labor did. European visitors to international exhibitions had long remarked on the archaic nature of Indian artisanal tools; the surveys and studies of crafts in the late nineteenth century only confirmed this fact, laying out in clear detail the imprecise, inefficient traditional methods used to produce a variety of goods. Reformers saw large sections of the productive population working far below their potential, leaving individuals in poverty and consigning the nation to backwardness in terms of both internal self-sufficiency and international competitiveness. By introducing better technologies, reformers hoped, in the words of T. K. Gajjar, the founding principal of the Kala Bhavan in Baroda, “to rescue our small industries and make them with the help of modern science a source of prosperity to our country.”11 Indeed, to many, as Gyan Prakash has argued, modern technology offered the magic solution to India’s many problems by promising to resolve social inequities, generate productivity, and generally advance India into the modern age.12 These dual modernizing projects—to improve labor on the one hand and technologies on the other—represented a shared project on the part


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of Indian and British elites. Free of the orientalist emphasis on India’s timeless, communalistic traditional past that marked preservation efforts, public attempts at labor and technical reform attracted much greater participation from Indian elites. Nationalist critics and government officials alike agreed that one basic way to make the Indian economy more productive was by stirring conservative and backward artisans into greater discipline and efficiency. The shared nature of this agenda within colonial society is particularly striking given the often sharp differences between Indian and British priorities in other aspects of industrial modernization. Nationalists of the day saw the British as either apathetic or downright hostile to both advanced technical training and modern industrial development in India.13 Scholars have echoed those views, closely tracking heroic Indian struggles to advance the cause of advanced technical and scientific training or to launch modern factories in steel, cotton, and other core industries in the face of subtle or overt British resistance.14 There has been, by contrast, little attention to the substantial overlap between Indian and British ideas about lower-level industrial education or technical improvements for artisans. Not subject to the often bitter racial division of debates over elite technical education, public discussions and plans generally featured significant agreement on the need to modernize and rationalize lower-class artisans. In terms of education, British and Indian elites offered joint support to schools designed to create a disciplined, productive workforce out of unruly, unpredictable lower-class artisans— schools that, like the other parts of the education system, reinforced rather than erased hierarchies within colonial society.15 In terms of technology, British and Indian elites invested shared energy in using science to devise solutions to the problems of artisanal production—with scientific methods and principles carefully defined as the intellectual property of Westernized intellectuals alone. In this chapter, I focus on the central elements of this joint project to modernize crafts: industrial schools, which set out to reform labor, and technical experiments, which set out to transform processes. Both tried to remove key stumbling blocks in the way of more efficient, rational production. Through careful instruction into basic geometry, proper techniques, and simple accounting, uneducated artisanal boys would become models of disciplined labor, capable of producing to meet modern consumer needs; modeled on state-sponsored efforts in Germany and Japan, where modernized workforces had enabled rapid industrial growth, such schools promised to revolutionize production. Through detailed scientific analysis of available materials and tools, archaic looms, kilns, and dye stuffs would finally give way to up-to-date technologies capable of standardized results

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and large-scale production; applying the technical principles underlying European industry to the problems of Indian crafts, experiments promised to bring customary practices in line with modern approaches. Even while trying to render crafts more like modern industry, however, modernizing efforts often worked to preserve the essential difference of crafts. Thus, schools that tried to discipline labor limited students to hand tools and promoted individualized work, thereby separating artisans from factory conditions; at the same time, efforts to develop new technologies shied away from mechanizing or centralizing production. Improving Labor: Industrial Schools and the Modern Culture of Hand Work The first institutional efforts to create new labor skills in western India began in the 1850s via industrial education. One such attempt was the Bombay School of Industry, which was founded at the private initiative of Dr. George Buist in the early 1850s to promote “the spread of mechanical improvements, and extension and improvement of mechanical skill, throughout India.” Later renamed the David Sassoon Industrial and Reformatory Institution, the school also sought “the laudable object of the reformation of the many juvenile delinquents annually arrested by the Police, the encouragement of apprenticeship amongst the working classes, and the introduction of better implements than are common in India.”16 To accomplish these varied ends, apprentices were given limited classroom instruction alongside extensive workshop training in carpentry, metalwork, molding, wood turning, and tailoring in the hope that they would be able to find work and avoid lives of crime.17 As the nineteenth century progressed, the Sassoon School updated its instruction to keep up with the changing job prospects of Bombay city, introducing courses in carriage building and painting in the 1870s and printing and power loom weaving for modern mills in the 1890s.18 It did so through a combination of private and state funds and private and official leadership. On the private financial side, the eminent Parsi philanthropist and civic leader Jugganath Sunkerseth provided land for the school, the Hindu banker Mungaldas Nathoobhoy gave an early donation of Rs. 17,000, and the prominent Jewish merchant family the Sassoons contributed more than Rs. 30,000 to endow the school.19 The government, for its part, paid the salary of an engineer assigned to supervise instruction and then, from 1857 onward, also paid a small sum to the school for every student per month in recognition of the amount saved to the state by not keeping the boys in jail.20 In terms of leadership, when the school


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was reorganized under the Sassoon name in 1857, its managing committee consisted of members of the Sassoon family, local Indian leaders like Sunkerseth, as well as government officials from the police, education and general departments.21 The Sassoon School differed from other industrial schools in the volume of financial support it received from both private and public sources, as well as in the specific association with the police in the treatment of juvenile delinquents. Most other industrial schools operated on far less lavish funds and offered instruction on a voluntary basis. On other levels, however, the school shared much with other institutions of the time. In terms of sponsorship, industrial schools represented diverse actors, ranging from missionary groups to local municipalities, philanthropic individuals, princely states, and industrial reform groups. In terms of instruction, most industrial schools offered a mixture of classroom and workshop training, emphasizing the latter both to provide hands-on, practical instruction and to keep boys in manual rather than clerical trades. Finally, in terms of goals, schools aimed at a variety of industrial objectives. Most sought to improve the level of skills within existing industries, usually focusing on teaching improved methods in carpentry and blacksmithing; others tried to train new labor, introducing boys to crafts then in demand in colonial society. Industrial schools emerged at the same time as—and often operated in close communication with—the art schools discussed in Chapter 3. Some schools like Kala Bhavan in Baroda even straddled the line dividing the two, offering courses in basic carpentry as well as fine arts, button manufacture as well as decorative silverwork. Like art schools, industrial schools tried to use education to rationalize artisanal production, subjecting hereditary practice to detailed oversight by trained outsiders. Both also tried to teach abstract, scientific laws—whether geometry and physics or proportion and perspective—to artisans seen as unable to comprehend the principles underlying their daily work. And finally, all relied on government aid and oversight; even if not always run directly by government, most schools accepted some government assistance, which brought with it annual inspections by officials from the education department. For all those similarities, though, industrial schools also departed significantly from the model of art instruction. For one, they taught very different crafts: utilitarian carpentry, blacksmithing, and weaving rather than decorative carving, embroidery, or silver work. For another, they emphasized techniques, not designs; what mattered at a local industrial school was not the ornamental style on a desk, but the quality of its joints, the efficiency by which the parts were prepared, and the degree of precision achieved in

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execution. Still further, they operated from different attitudes about Indian skills; whereas industrial schools emerged out of frustration with the failures of local artisans—failures to learn new crafts or to do good-quality work in existing crafts—art schools assumed that skills were excellent, or at least had been so in the past and so just needed help to return to former standards. On the basis of these differing attitudes, industrial and art schools took different approaches to tradition. By the 1880s art schools did all they could to revive traditional design, documenting, disseminating, and popularizing indigenous styles to help them survive in the face of Westernization. By contrast, industrial schools did all they could to disrupt existing skills, introducing entirely new industries and reformulating existing ones to create efficient production suited to a modernizing society. Industrial schools were like art schools, however, in perpetuating crafts difference. Even as they tried to render artisanal practices more efficient or introduce improved techniques, industrial schools held onto key elements separating crafts from modern industry. As critics remarked, schools rarely addressed the needs of modern industry. That mismatch was visible in the skills and subjects taught. Hand carpentry, blacksmithing, handloom weaving, and book binding did little to prepare laborers to work the new machinery of large weaving or spinning factories or newspaper presses. But the insistence on crafts difference was also visible in the comprehensive nature of the curriculum that aimed to create independent artisans capable of retail work for individual clients, rather than specialized, segmented labor for large production houses. One of the many industrial schools that opened in the latter part of the nineteenth century was the Dharwar School of Industry. Opened in 1873, the school operated until 1883, when a new railroad workshop in the town took over the task of preparing skilled labor.22 Typical for the Bombay Presidency in terms of size, longevity, and the type of instruction it offered, the Dharwar School is a useful example of a small industrial school that shared the dual objectives, outlined above, of improving labor and building industries. Located in a small district headquarters in the southern part of the presidency, the school perhaps had more limited access to markets and materials than others located in larger cities and towns. But, like its counterparts among other early schools that opened in Ratnagiri in 1863, Surat in 1865, Poona and Pandharpur in 1878, Sirur and Bombay in 1879, and Dhulia in 1880, it struggled with common issues of attracting and retaining students, finding outlets for their work, and maintaining its long-term viability in the face of official scrutiny. Thus, while the particular expression of such problems may be specific to


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Dharwar, the school helps illustrate the promises and limitations of early industrial education more generally.23 Boys at the Dharwar School spent half their time in the classroom learning reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, and half in the workshop developing specific skills in carpentry and blacksmithing as well as more general principles of efficiency, accuracy, precision, and diligence. Once formally enrolled, boys moved through a sequence of progressively more difficult levels of work with the expectation that the complete course would take five years. In the first standard, students were expected to be able to plane and square a piece of wood; by the third standard, they were to have mastered the construction of simple door frames, doors, and desk boxes and the basics of iron work; meanwhile by the fifth and final standard, they were to be able to do any carpentry work assigned to them and to fit up a small working model steam engine.24 As they advanced through the standards, boys were subject to regular examination; success on exams determined the level of stipend a student was entitled to, ranging from Rs. 1 a month in the first standard up through Rs. 6 a month to those who had passed the fourth standard.25 The choice of wood and metal at the Dharwar School reflected very particular local labor needs; when it opened in 1873, the school was meant to train skilled workers for a local saw-gin factory. In continuing the training in those two areas after the quick demise of the factory, however, the school responded to a more general sense of optimism in those crafts. Markets for both were expanding in the late nineteenth century as consumers demanded more furniture, new styles of buildings, gates and railings, and mechanical equipment. Market growth in turn brought increased earnings; virtually all the 1880s series gazetteers across western India echoed the findings for Ahmedabad district in 1879 that “carpenters and blacksmiths are better off than before.”26 Although this encouraged artisans from a variety of crafts to take up carpentry and metalwork, demand for skilled labor in both crafts continued to exceed supply down to the turn of the century.27 In a period of expanding demand, the school promised to train existing carpenters and smiths to new styles; during a period of occupational mobility the school offered to help new artisans make the transition to wood and metal skills. Or at least that was the theory. For all its lofty aspirations, the school faced troubles almost from the start. One key issue was financial. Initially, the school hoped to be economically self-sufficient, with sales of student work underwriting instruction. And, in fact, it did show significant early sales; by late 1879 the school had sold a total of Rs. 14,613 worth of goods, including carts, saw gins, railings, doors, and boxes.28 But while cumulative

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totals appeared rosy, annual sales had been declining steadily from 1875, with work done for the government alone shrinking from Rs. 5,309 for 1876–77 to Rs. 3,958 for 1877–78, and Rs. 1,940 for 1878–79.29 One explanation for that failure was the mismatch between the simplicity of student skills and the complexity of consumer demands. While many students started the course, few stayed through the entire program; the majority of students were, therefore, left clumped in the lower standards with only basic abilities totally inadequate for complicated commissions. As the Southern Division’s superintendent engineer, Col. J. R. Mansell, put it, “There is almost no work which can be entrusted to the school proper—that is to the apprentices. . . . When he [H. W. Lewis, the school superintendent] gets a job he calls in adult labour from the outside market.”30 Forced by low student skills to rely on expensive labor hired from the bazaar, the school never came close to its goal of self-sufficiency, but instead remained dependent on funds from the local municipality and the Education Department. Other problems emerged in recruitment and retention. One of the school’s basic objectives was to improve skills available locally by replacing informal, home-based, on-the-job learning with a fixed curriculum, graded instruction, and yearly examinations. In keeping with that goal, officials hoped that the school would primarily teach boys from artisanal castes, interrupting existing training, which, they argued, had failed to impart high standards. Unfortunately, few artisans seemed interested. As of 1879, Lewis reported that only five out of 36 boys then enrolled were officially of artisan or carpenter castes; the rest he described as East Indians, Rajputs, Lingayats, Chitragars (or painters), Hindus of other castes, and Muslims.31 Nor did this caste composition change much in the next few years; in 1881 there were only seven artisans among the 38 boys enrolled.32 Although school officials attributed this low turnout to conservatism, artisans had real reasons to stay away. Practically, instruction at home produced similar results but at much lower costs, with boys contributing to family income far earlier than if they had to rely on school stipends.33 Morally, Nita Kumar has pointed out that traditional apprenticeships taught young artisans not only how to produce goods but also how to work in accordance with the religious and moral precepts of the community; given that cultural message, colonial education systems represented a threat to a community’s ability to socialize its youth into the ideals and skills of a particular profession.34 The boys who did enroll rarely stayed in school for long. Most—whether artisan or otherwise—attended classes infrequently or dropped out entirely after only one or two years.35 Some left as soon as they acquired enough literacy skills to apply for low-level clerkships. Others moved on when they


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achieved a basic competency in their craft, finding that they could earn more elsewhere.36 K. M. Chatfield, the director of public instruction for the Bombay Presidency, made this early departure a sign of success, arguing that boys leaving for more remunerative employment in the bazaar was “so far satisfactory as it shows that the school instruction enables boys to earn money at a trade.”37 But Chatfield and others remained disappointed that students did not stay in school and constantly experimented with different strategies to improve retention, including fines for early departure but also incentives like higher stipends and profit sharing for those who did persist into higher standards.38 As suggested above, the Dharwar School was fairly typical of its era. Other industrial schools that opened in the 1870s and 1880s in cities like Poona, Bombay, Surat, and Ahmedabad or in smaller towns like Pandharpur, Ratnagiri, Vaso, Patan, and Sirur similarly offered a graded, structured curriculum, focused instruction in wood and metal, and targeted boys from artisan castes. Those other schools also shared many of the problems Dharwar faced, including financial instability, difficulty recruiting artisanal students, and trouble retaining boys into the most senior classes.39 Observers of the time were all too well aware of those failings. Some of the harshest criticisms came from within the government. Asked by the Viceroy Lord Dufferin to prepare a memorandum on the condition and prospects of industrial education in India, the Home Department secretary to the government of India A. P. MacDonnell summed up the state of the field in July 1886 thus: the so-called Industrial Schools, modelled upon no considered plan, . . . never rise above mere workshops for the production of inferior articles at extravagant cost. For all purposes of practical training they are useless; and it is no exaggeration to say that of the 45 Industrial Schools which now exist in India, hardly one serves any true educational purpose.40

Almost twenty years later, things had not improved. Writing in a January 1904 resolution on education policy, H. H. Risley, MacDonnell’s successor as Home Department secretary to the government of India, presented his own list of complaints, including that industrial schools in India have been wanting in definiteness both of methods and objects, . . . that they have been insufficiently coordinated with particular local industries or trades, and that the impression produced by them either upon industrial development or upon industrial education has been relatively small.41

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As proof of those policy problems, Risley noted that schools had failed to train better artisans: A large proportion of the pupils who attend them have no intention of practising the trade they learn, but pass into clerical and other employments, using the industrial schools merely in order to obtain the general education which they could acquire in ordinary schools at less cost to the State, but at greater cost to themselves. Even for those who do intend to follow the trades taught in the industrial schools, it is feared that in some cases the teaching given does not provide a training of a sufficiently high standard to enable them to hold their own with artisans who have learnt their craft in the bazaar.42

Swept up in what became a torrent of criticism about the state of education in India from the 1890s on,43 industrial education came in for sharp attack by nationalist-minded Indians. But whereas MacDonnell and Risley explained its failures in terms of poor planning and lack of coordination, nationalists in particular argued that the problem lay in a much more serious absence of political will. In November 1898, Poona’s Kesari newspaper lambasted the government for its poor record on industrial education by arguing that it had “never gone an inch beyond boasting of its noble intentions to do this and to do that.” If Japan could manage to teach industrial subjects so thoroughly in thirty years, the paper asked, why could the Indian government not manage to do anything “beyond producing a few sapless graduates, when it has had every facility at its command and very good material in the intellect of the Hindus”?44 This reference to Japan is telling. Many looked overseas for examples of how a systematic, well-funded program of industrial education could propel industrial modernization. At the 1908 Indian Industrial Conference in Madras, for instance, the conference president R. N. Mudholkar argued that the recent rapid industrial transformation of America and Germany was “due to the cultivation of the natural sciences and their application to industrial purposes,” made possible by extensive scientific and technical education. If a similar industrialization had failed to take off in India, he reasoned, it was due to the state’s failure to provide adequate education for industry.45 The example of successful efforts overseas provided one reason to hang onto the principle of industrial education in India even if the current practice of it was flawed. Another reason was the high price of inaction. Crafts represented much of the 95 percent of industrial employment that was located outside officially recognized factories46; without some change crafts would continue to lose ground to factory imports, thereby


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dooming India’s economy to further decline. On their own, artisans seemed unable to effect the necessary changes; industrial schools thus represented one way to intervene in the hope of bringing artisanal practices into line with modern needs. That sense of pressing need sparked a major expansion in the number of industrial schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with the earlier era of industrial education, most of these new schools closed down within two or three years of opening, usually because of the combined financial burden of providing both student stipends and working materials for instruction. Still, the numbers of schools and students did grow; whereas in 1885–86 there were only seven industrial schools, with 755 students in the whole of the Bombay Presidency and Sind, by 1890 there were 28 schools, serving 1300 students, and in 1902 the number of schools had risen to 32.47 Further expansion came in the 1900s; as of 1939 the presidency boasted 32 officially recognized industrial schools for boys teaching things like carpentry, metalwork, leatherwork, bookbinding, tailoring, and handloom weaving; another 30 institutions offered courses for girls in lace making, needlework, and other skills.48 Even as the overall scale of industrial education expanded, activists worked to reform its content. One of the most sustained efforts at reform came in 1901 thanks to the particular interest of then Viceroy Lord Curzon. In April of that year E. C. Buck, the secretary to the government of India in the Revenue and Agricultural Department, completed a six-month official survey of the progress made toward industrial and technical education across India.49 Then in September, Curzon himself assembled an educational conference at Simla of all the provincial directors of public instruction to recommend changes in educational policy, with a particular focus on industrial education based on the information provided in Buck’s report.50 This then prompted the appointment of another commission of four experts led by Lieutenant-Colonel J. Clibborn, the principal of Thomason Civil Engineering College at Roorkee, to consult with interested parties across India about how best to implement the recommendations of the Simla conference.51 Not only did all of this activity mark a radical expansion in the level of government attention to the question of industrial education, it also represented a new attempt to coordinate activities across India. By carefully gathering testimony from across the subcontinent on existing practices and ideas for future development, the hope was to craft a common system that could reshape all schools in all parts of India—part of Curzon’s larger drive to introducing efficiency across his administration.52

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This push to rethink industrial education generated few concrete suggestions for how to run individual schools. Competing parties found little common ground on issues such as the length of instruction, age of students at admission, scale of student stipends, or relationship to markets. The government itself was divided on what to do, rejecting in 1904 the suggestions of its own Clibborn commission, which proposed moving students out of formal schools and into apprenticeships in governmentsupervised workshops.53 Perhaps one of the few points of real agreement was about what was to be left out of artisanal education: serious literary instruction. Industrial schools were to improve efficiency in production, teach better use of tools, impose more rigorous quality standards, and impart a sense of time discipline—all of which contributed to national productivity; they were to do nothing that might encourage boys to leave their crafts. As Curzon explained in his speech opening the 1901 Simla conference, if the goal was to turn a boy into a skilled craftsman, “as it obviously must be, then you must give him an education neither too high nor too low to qualify him for an artisan. If it is too high you make him discontented with manual labour; if it is too low he becomes a useless workman.”54 This objective became official policy in 1904 when the government of India delineated two primary goals for industrial education: “(1) of keeping up and developing a boy’s inherited manual skill, and (2) of giving him a general education which will enlarge his prospects as a craftsman while preventing him from falling into the clerical groove.”55 In accord with such directives, schools generally offered no instruction in English and indeed only provided training in rudimentary reading and writing in the vernacular for fear of providing artisans boys with the skills to compete for clerical jobs.56 Other grounds of consensus did emerge regarding key principles of industrial education, most particularly the need for greater consistency in curricula and instructional methods. Within the Bombay Presidency these objectives prompted the Education Department in 1902 to introduce new uniform levels of study and common examinations for all governmentaided industrial schools and to institute a common training class for drawing teachers from across the region.57 In 1908 the department went a step farther and instituted a program at the College of Science, Poona, to train teachers for industrial schools; the five main subjects taught were the familiar woodworking (including carpentry and cabinet making), metalwork (including ornamental wrought iron and cast iron), and drawing, with the addition of instruction in teaching techniques and—perhaps optimistically—in tending and testing oil engines, steam engines, and boilers.58


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More broadly, the attempt to reform industrial education prompted many in the field to explain their work in new ways. In the 1870s and 1880s industrial schools had promised to solve local product shortages: not enough good furniture in Dharwar or poor-quality railings in Surat. Such promises opened schools up to predictable criticism if, despite their services, it was still difficult to get a decent cabinet or gate made. Whether to protect schools from such obvious complaints or to widen the promised impact beyond local consumers to the national economy as a whole, industrial educators in the early twentieth century increasingly changed their arguments for industrial education. Instead of providing particular craft skills, educators now claimed to address general labor failures, namely the inability of Indian artisans in any craft to work carefully and efficiently. Defining the need for industrial education before the 1905 Banaras industrial conference, R. N. Mudholkar pointed to those general benefits: The working-man and the artisan whose brain has been developed, whose eye has been trained, and whose hand has acquired deftness by the proper kind of general education and who has grasped more or less the principles of the craft which he follows, the tools which he handles, and the materials he works upon, is a far more efficient workman than he who has only received the traditional training in the practice of his profession without any general or scientific education.59

This shift in objective did not actually change the methods of industrial education. Schools continued to teach carpentry and smithy work; they just defended that choice differently. Wood- and metalwork were now valuable less for preparing carpenters and smiths than as manual training suitable for any kind of artisanal work. Thus A. W. Thomson, professor of engineering at the Poona College of Science and inspector of technical education for the Bombay Presidency, argued in 1902 that carpentry “was one of the very best subjects to teach a boy who was later on to become an artisan of any sort; a boy with even a small amount of ordinary education learning carpentry could, with the acquisition of this knowledge, manage any trade that he was put to.” Indeed, in his testimony to the Clibborn commission, Thomson suggested that carpentry “ought to be the preliminary education for all trades,” noting that it was taught at schools in India “because they wanted to turn out good carpenters and to improve trades generally.”60 How, exactly, were carpentry and smithy work supposed to improve trades generally? By, as Alfred Chatterton put it, helping “to educate the hand and eye, to form habits of observation, judgment and accuracy, to cultivate the sense of proportion, to make the pupil

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ready, resourceful and self-reliant.”61 According to these arguments, all artisans stood to benefit from training in judgment and accuracy whether or not they continued to work in wood and metal; lessons in planning projects, interpreting drawings, measuring components, executing cuts or joints cleanly, or finishing surfaces all taught basic working principles that then could be applied to any other craft. Attempts to train artisans to higher skill levels and more efficient practices were, at their core, attempts to discipline labor. Indeed, industrial schools fit snugly into wider imperial projects to discipline the native body whether through education, medicine, sport, the army, or jails.62 They also fit within larger global projects to control and render productive the lower classes more generally, including efforts within Britain to train its own artisans to proper corporeal habits within hierarchical workshops.63 Those wider contexts directly informed E. C. Buck’s 1901 report for Curzon, which quoted approvingly from an earlier British study of industrial education in Ireland. First and most importantly, “manual instruction aids in the development of the moral qualities, such as accuracy, industry, perseverance, etc.”; beyond that, it “had been recognized by medical authorities as having a beneficial effect on general mental development,” “stimulates the intelligence of the pupils,” and “develops the constructive faculty.”64 Without manual instruction, artisans presumably would fail to develop morality, intelligence, or even constructive skills; it was up to outsiders to step in and lead the way forward, teaching not just new technologies but the essential culture of work. By disrupting traditional closed apprenticeship systems with ordered, systematic, structured instruction, artisans would come to understand the moral value of hard work and would thus be prepared to serve the needs of modern society.65 As on the school cricket field, where elite boys were to be transformed into more amenable colonial subjects—“strong yet obedient, energetic yet docile, individual yet orderly, playful yet useful”—so too in school workshops artisans learned supposedly unfamiliar ideals of precision, diligence, exactitude, and efficiency to take up their proper place in the imperial order as productive, rationalized labor.66 The parallel with cricket extends another direction as well; both cricket and artisanal education taught social differentiation as much as imperial purpose. Within the working classes, industrial schools tried to separate out artisans from nonartisans. Schools like Dharwar tried to recruit only artisans into wood and metal classes. Whether or not individual boys were from communities traditionally involved in these two media was immaterial; operating on the assumption that manual skills could easily be transferred from one craft to another, industrial educators actively encouraged artisans to


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move between crafts and give up unremunerative traditional occupations to embrace new skills. While schools aided the movement between crafts, any attempt to open training to non-artisans brought on sharp rebuke. Thus, Chatterton complained in 1901 that “there is no justification for any attempt to induce other classes of the community to seek their livelihood among the ranks of the already overcrowded industrial classes.”67 Even more worrisome to industrial reformers than movement into crafts by other manual workers was the fear that artisans might attempt to leave the ranks of manual labor altogether. Indeed, the more crucial element of social differentiation embedded in industrial education was the insistence on the fundamental divide separating artisans from elites not involved in manual work. This insistence came in the face of widespread evidence that artisans were looking to break out of manual work. On the one hand, boys often attended industrial schools for other than industrial reasons—that is, to get a literary education at little cost. Boys may have only been able to get limited vernacular literacy skills at industrial schools, but they did so while receiving stipends rather than while paying the fees demanded at other schools. Industrial schools therefore represented a useful means for poor boys to get the education they needed to get office jobs and thus advance socially within colonial society. On the other hand, other artisans tried to get access to literary education more directly. One group in Bombay even formed something called the called the Deccan Artisans’ Association in September 1890 to improve the status of artisans via both religious purification and secular measures, including ensuring community access to “technical and liberal education.” Started by goldsmiths, the association soon reached out to other artisan castes, resolving in 1893 to include on the managing committee one member each from the blacksmith, carpenter, coppersmith, and mason castes, along with two goldsmiths. The hope was that, by joining together, the various artisan groups could better assert themselves in the face of Brahminical domination.68 As with artisanal and other backward caste associations elsewhere, Western literary education here offered the means of building respect and equality, often outside of crafts.69 That the Deccan Artisans’ Association was interested in non-artisanal advancement is suggested by the fact that its leaders were all in office jobs, including a clerk in a solicitor’s office, two men involved with the post office, and the president Bapuji Krishnarao Trilokya, who was retired on a government pension.70 Putting strict limits on the literary side of artisanal education was a way to squash such aspirations to social mobility. As R. N. Mudholkar put it to the Banaras Industrial Conference in 1905, the colonial education system was a highly stratified one designed not to transform society but “to equip

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the different classes of the people with the mental and moral requisites, the literary culture and the scientific and practical acquirements suited to their different stations.”71 This stratification underlay new elite access to advanced technical, engineering, and scientific instruction at Kala Bhavan, the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute (VJTI) in Bombay, and the Poona Engineering College. Requirements for English fluency, extensive coursework in mathematics and science, and high fees at such institutions all helped to shut out artisans. In their place, the VJTI and the like targeted middle- and upper-class boys who might be diverted from higher literary education and trained to be managers of factories and leaders of India’s industrial development. Indeed, that elite focus was essential to the success of these new institutions. As many noted, boys with any pretense to education sought government service or office jobs, shunning anything associated with industrial work; the latter, even if it might pay more, was simply lower status.72 It was not enough, then, to offer technical education to the middle classes. Those classes had to be taught to respect industrial pursuits, to learn, as the head of the Geological Survey of India Sir Thomas Holland put it in 1905, “that the man with technical dexterity is of more use to the country than the writer of editorials or the skilful cross-examiner; that applied science now belongs to the highest caste of learning, and is a worthy field for the best ability we can obtain.”73 One way to reform tastes was to clearly demarcate different kinds of education appropriate for different classes. If middle-class students objected to being too closely associated with lowly artisans, then one solution lay in creating a separate sphere of education suitable not to hands but to leaders of industry. Technical education, in other words, could become a respectable occupation, but only if it was restricted to respectable men—that is, if artisans were excluded. If industrial education sought to separate artisans both from other members of the working classes and from white-collar workers, it also helped to reaffirm the separation of crafts from modern industry. In all the attempts to reform industrial education, there was little real effort to bring it into line with the needs of modern factories. Despite the rapid expansion of the field in the 1890s and early 1900s, only one of the new institutions that opened in that period tried to link artisanal training to modern mills. Thus, the Ranchhodlal Chhotalal Technical Institute in Ahmedabad, when it opened in 1909, offered classes in drawing, design, different textile fibers, and the working and repair of different power looms in the hope that “by means of such a school the standard of intelligence and efficiency among mill operatives in Ahmedabad will be raised.”74 Apart from that one exception, all the other new industrial schools taught hand, not machine, skills and aimed at small artisanal production, not large factories. This orientation toward crafts


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is visible in the comprehensive content of instruction. Industrial schools taught students all stages of production in a given craft, from the preparation of raw materials through design, simple fabrication, more complex construction, finishing, and installation. Thus, graduates of the Dharwar School were expected to be able to construct a piece of furniture from scratch by sketching the design, determining the amount of materials needed, selecting wood, shaping joints, sanding components, assembling the pieces, and applying a final finish. Such training prepared students to operate independently or in conjunction with a few others; it did not orient students toward highly segmented production with strict specialization to different stages of work. This orientation toward craft is also visible, however, in the tools used; schools trained students in the proper use and care of hand tools, expanding occasionally into some basic machinery (lathes, drills, rollers) suitable for an individual workshop. When advanced machinery appeared on syllabi, as at the Dharwar School and in the teacher training program offered at the College of Science in Poona, it rarely impacted students; reserved for the upper levels of training, steam engines and boilers were out of reach for the vast majority of boys who left school after only a few of the lower grades. More broadly, the skills associated with such equipment were carefully identified as being related to repair not construction, maintenance not production; in the larger structure of the imperial economy in which Britain supplied India with engines, machines, and advanced technology, there was little room for Indian artisans to master the creation of such valuable imports. Industrial education, in other words, worked to improve and render more productive labor within existing structures of social, industrial, and imperial difference. Limiting literary education helped prevent undue social mobility by which artisans would compete for clerical jobs; limiting mechanical training and emphasizing individual self-sufficiency in work kept artisans in crafts rather than mechanized work. Part of the conservative social vision inherent in colonial education as a whole, artisanal education specifically built on the culture of crafts difference to hold workers in their jobs with the goal, as Rachel Tolen put it in another context, of creating a subjected but productive workforce.75 Improving Methods: Handloom Experiments and the Science of Production Compared with industrial education, technical improvement took a much longer time to develop in western India. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, efforts were few and far between: experiments to develop sericulture in the 1830s, attempts to identify clays suitable for modern

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pottery in the 1850s, investigations to adapt traditional Sindi pottery to Western dining or drainage needs in the 1870s.76 Nor was there much to show for those measures; no perceptual expansion or modernization resulted in either silk or pottery production. By the 1890s, however, things had begun to change. Growing publicity around artisanal struggles to survive industrial competition drew attention and resources to the role improved technologies could play in traditional production. At the same time public faith in the transformative possibilities of modern science encouraged activists to look past social impediments to imagine technical solutions to the problems facing crafts. Responding to these trends, provincial governments across India in the early 1900s began to open weaving institutes, dye laboratories, model tanning factories, and sericultural farms.77 Within the Bombay Presidency, government experts addressed the needs of pottery, handloom weaving, tanning, sericulture, dyeing, and calico printing.78 The new Department of Commerce and Industries founded in the Baroda State in 1905 took an even more aggressive line, adopting as a central charge the need “to conduct industrial experiments and to give demonstrations of successful processes.” In keeping with this directive, the department engaged experts to investigate materials, methods, tools, and products in traditional industries such as oil and soap production, tanning, calico printing and handloom weaving, along with newer industries, including glass, cement, and button making.79 As in other parts of the subcontinent, in western India the bulk of practical technical work in crafts focused on handlooms. This attention emerged out of a series of interrelated social, economic, and political imperatives. Socially, as we saw in Chapter 2, many praised the superiority of village-based hand production over the evils of modern urban factory industry, with leaders like Romesh Chunder Dutt setting the “dignity, independence, and intelligence” of the individual hand weaver in contrast to the exploitation and suffering of workers in European mill towns.80 Economically, as the largest sector of employment in India after agriculture, handloom weaving was simply too important to ignore. To give a sense of the scale of the industry, as of 1909 there were some 300,000 weavers in the Bombay Presidency alone, with average annual production for all of India totaling some 2 million yards of cloth.81 Given the sheer numbers involved, the survival of the industry was a matter of grave concern. As the government of Bombay declared in 1909, “Among indigenous industries in Bombay the hand weaving industry stands first in point of view of the extent of the population supported thereby, [and] the need for assistance which recent competition from the power industry has


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created.”82 Politically, the imperative for handloom survival rested on the centrality of cloth to emerging critiques of colonial rule. Well before the famous Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, industrial and political leaders in western India from the 1870s on used boycotts of foreign cloth and promotion of Indian cloth to protest unwelcome British policies.83 Although part of the protest was directed against the slow growth of Indian mill production, much was aimed at the decline of handloom weaving in competition with British imports. For such activists, the fate of Indian handlooms stood as a potent sign of the destructive side of colonialism, indeed the leading example of India’s deindustrialization under British rule. These various desires for handloom survival took on new material weight around 1900 because of the growing realization that perhaps handlooms could hold their own against mill cloth. For years, most observers had assumed that first British and then Indian mills would drive all handlooms out of the market, thanks to efficiencies of scale and technology. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, handlooms were not only surviving in some regions and some sectors of the market, but actually expanding, particularly in the bordered saris and complicated weaves that could not be easily replicated in mills. And that was with very little technical improvement in looms or other weaving equipment. As various inventors began experimenting with improved technologies that could render weaving faster and more efficient, the future of handloom weaving seemed even more promising. Taken together, all those factors contributed to enormous public investment in reviving handlooms. Indeed, Dutt argued in 1908 that “no object has been pursued with a greater determination or more sustained endeavour by the people of India than the re-establishment of this industry, which was India’s own in the past and which shall be India’s own again in the future.”84 That determination was necessary, given the myriad technical problems preventing handloom efficiency. At first, many assumed that loom speed was the major impediment to greater handloom productivity. If only they had faster looms, the argument went, weavers could increase their output anywhere from 70 percent to two or four times the production possible on traditional looms, thereby increasing earnings and rescuing weavers from poverty.85 Everyone soon realized, however, that looms were only one factor in determining overall weaving speed and economic viability. Just as important were the quality and preparation of the yarn used in weaving. A faster weaving action put more stress on the thread; that posed no problems if the yarn was strong, but if it was weak, weavers had to stop regularly for repairs, thereby negating the speed advantage of the new looms. Another barrier to speed was the traditional method of

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preparing warps. While a long warp allowed long spurts of continuous weaving, the common use of short warps meant frequent interruptions for the time-consuming task of changing warps. As weaving grew faster it outpaced warp preparation, thereby creating bottlenecks in production as looms were left idle waiting for new warps.86 Then there was the quality of the warp preparation itself. When prepared by hand, warp threads often became tangled or broken, again necessitating frequent stops for repairs. Finally, yarn sizing presented yet a further barrier to efficiency. Usually done by hand by the women and children of a weaver’s household, this was a slow and therefore costly process; a 1911 estimate put the cost of preparing one pound of yarn by native methods at 300 percent more than if it was done in a mill.87 Early-twentieth-century activists of all stripes tried to tackle all these issues. Indeed, Dutt’s comment that it was “the people of India” who led efforts to revive hand weaving is telling. For, unlike in pottery or dyeing, where the government monopolized technical experiments, weaving improvements were spread out across a wide range of actors, including missionary groups, provincial government institutes, princely states, independent industrial activists, and private entrepreneurs. In western India the government played a particularly minor role; unlike the Madras and Bengal presidencies, Bombay had no central research institute devoted to technical investigations in weaving.88 Some experiments on new looms were conducted by instructors at the VJTI in the 1890s and early 1900s and by officials at the Bombay Department of Industries in the late 1910s; otherwise most of the activity in the region was conducted by missionaries or private entrepreneurs. This diversity of agency was possible in part because of the technical needs of weaving. An inspired tinkerer with no particular training in science or engineering could hit upon a good solution to a problem in weaving, and indeed many did so, developing improvements to looms, sleys, warps, dobbies, and the like. In terms of looms alone, these improvements resulted in an outpouring of new technologies, so that, by the early 1900s, weavers could choose among an indigenous loom working with a fly-shuttle sley, the European fly-shuttle, the Hattersley, Jesop’s Japanese loom manufactured in India, the Sayaji Cottage, the Salvation Army Triumph, the Serampore, and the Ahmednagar loom.89 One of the first in western India to try his hand at solving the combined problems of handloom weaving was D. C. Churchill of the American Marathi Mission.90 Headquartered in western India at Ahmednagar, the American Mission had long been an enthusiastic advocate of industrial education, both as an economic means of training Christian converts into


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remunerative, respectable occupations and as a moral means of inculcating discipline, honesty, humility, and resourcefulness into students seen to be lacking those virtues.91 What launched the move into weaving in particular was the great famine that struck western India in 1899–1900. The American Mission was flooded with famine orphans; as of November 1900 more than 2,300 children were under mission care, with fears that the numbers would increase if famine conditions did not let up soon.92 In response to the crisis, the mission brought in Churchill to coordinate and expand its industrial efforts. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering, Churchill had no direct experience with or interest in weaving when he arrived in India in late 1901. In considering possible industries that could be taught to famine orphans in Ahmednagar, however, he quickly decided that weaving was the only appropriate option: As raw material is a scarce commodity in this District such materials as wood and other products of the soil are the determining factors in deciding what industry to undertake; and since cotton is one of the chief of the products of this region and since everybody, however poor, wears cotton cloth, and since weaving is the chief indigenous industry outside of farming in the Ahmednagar district, it seemed wise to undertake the development of this art as a means of livelihood for those of our Christian community who were in need of a trade.93

The challenge, as Churchill quickly discovered, was to make handloom weaving economically viable when existing local weavers earned so little at their craft. With ready access to raw materials and massive local markets, the stumbling block seemed to be weaving speeds. For Churchill, the answer lay in technology: “[I]f we could find a suitable loom which should be fast and simple enough so that it could be made and kept in order by Indians, we could make the pursuit of hand weaving a profitable industry for many of our Christian community and many of the recently acquired famine orphans.”94 With that goal in mind and with a grant of Rs. 5,000 from the American Mission, Churchill launched a series of experiments in 1902 to develop just such a loom. By the end of that year he had produced something capable of weaving coarse cloth at the rate of two or three times the output of a traditional loom (see fig 4.1). When he tried to get weavers to use the new loom for market production, however, he discovered that the faster speeds could not be maintained due to problems with the warp, “which is good and strong but too tangled to admit of fast work.”95 He then set to work on new machines capable of creating more even warps, while also continuing to tinker with his loom design.

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Figure 4.1 A weaver working D. C. Churchill’s improved handloom Source: Hazen, A Century in India, 1913. Courtesy of the Dallas Theological Seminary.

Churchill’s experiments quickly began to attract public attention. Visiting dignitaries made his weaving workshop part of their district tour while Churchill himself took his new loom around India, winning prizes at different weaving competitions, including a gold medal at the Bombay Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition of 1904 and first place at the AllIndia Weaving Competition in Madras in March 1908. That attention was matched by official support, with an initial grant of Rs. 3,518 from the Government of Bombay in 1904 “in view of possible help to the weaving industry at large,” expanding to a five year grant of Rs. 1,000 a month to support Churchill’s experimental work, starting in 1908.96 Indeed, when the Government of India called upon the Bombay government to fund developments in handlooms, the provincial government did not appoint


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its own expert but relied on Churchill to conduct experiments on its behalf. Thanks to his success with the new loom, Churchill became acknowledged as something of an expert on the handloom industry, advising officials in Bombay on industrial matters, speaking on handlooms at annual industrial conferences, and even being invited by Curzon to submit a proposal for how to develop the handloom industry on an all-India basis.97 When Alfred Chatterton, the industrial expert from Madras, visited Ahmednagar in 1905, he was so impressed with what he saw that he ordered fifty of Churchill’s looms for a new weaving factory he was setting up in Salem, declaring in 1908 that they were the best available in India at the time.98 Churchill’s success, according to Douglas Haynes, lay in a relatively simple, inexpensive series of attachments he came up with early on that converted a traditional loom to a modified version of an English flyshuttle loom, improving weaving speeds by 50–100 percent.99 The advantages of his inventions were such that Haynes gives Churchill credit for introducing the fly-shuttle loom—which turned out to be one of the most important technical innovations in handloom weaving—into western India. Unfortunately, Churchill himself was not content with the modest increases in production speeds he could get from his modified fly-shuttle setup. Rather than concentrate on further adapting his invention to the needs of local weavers, he developed ever more complicated mechanisms that could increase weaving speeds still further. Ignoring the realities of what it would be like to work or repair his loom in Indian workshops using local mechanical skills and short staple Indian cotton, he continued his attempts to come up with the perfect handloom and related machinery. What he came up with was technically sound but economically impractical. Haynes estimates that the total cost of the Churchill loom was about Rs. 200 in the 1910s, which was about eight times as expensive as a simple, modified fly-shuttle loom; with the related supplementary machinery for warping and winding yarn, the total cost came to about Rs. 800, which was more expensive than a used powerloom.100 As Churchill’s inventions grew both more complex and less useful, government enthusiasm waned. Churchill’s grant was suspended in 1912 for a year, and then funds were cut off for good in 1917. Indeed, by the early 1910s, government officials seem to have fixed on the simple fly-shuttle loom as the most appropriate solution to basic local handloom weaving needs. Attention therefore shifted to either preparatory equipment or more complicated looms capable of fine weaves and fancy borders. Thus, in 1911 teachers at the VJTI in Bombay returned to the problem of machines for warping and sizing, something that they continued to work on throughout the 1910s; like Churchill, these men focused on

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developing machinery that could service many weavers, thereby assuming some centralization at least for preparatory processes.101 For their part, both Bombay government weaving demonstrator S. V. Wagh and weaving teachers in Baroda State spent much of the later war years trying to perfect a double fly-shuttle loom capable of producing bordered saris.102 These other experiments did not have much more success than did Churchill. Indeed, for all the wide range of new looms and preparatory equipment that emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century, very few of them made it into regular use. One key problem was price. Churchill’s loom may have been a particularly extreme example, but most others also remained far more expensive than traditional looms. When in 1904 the director of industries for the Baroda State Rao Patel announced a prize for a new, faster loom that cost less than Rs. 20, he found no competitors, aside from one designed by his own department.103 Another issue was that many of the new looms were difficult to work, because they either were too heavy or demanded too much attention from weavers. Then there was the question of repairs; the more complicated the new equipment became, the more difficult it was to find anyone locally who could keep it in working order. Finally, as was suggested by the new tack taken by experiments in the 1910s, most of the new equipment was only suitable for weaving plain cloth in a single color. As of 1908, for instance, Churchill’s much-touted new loom could only produce coarse, plain cloth; Churchill never did successfully adapt the loom to produce the elaborately bordered saris that represented the most profitable part of the handloom market.104 As of the mid-1910s fly-shuttle looms could still only weave quickly when doing one color; if two colors were desired, the weaver had to switch shuttles by hand which slowed things down significantly.105 As P. N. Mehta noted in his government-sponsored study of the handloom industry in 1909, there was, in the end, no single loom which met the needs of the majority of weavers in the Bombay Presidency; in his mind it made more sense to make better use of existing technologies than to endlessly invent new ones with limited utility.106 Government and private reformers had already set out to do just that by 1909, pairing efforts to develop new technologies with attempts to popularize their use. By the turn of the century a range of new technologies were available to handloom weavers, including new sleys, looms, dobbies, warping mills and creels, weft winders, and machines for beaming and sizing, all of which promised to improve output. Innovations in looms in the early 1900s alone promised to increase weaving rates between two and seven times—figures that, even if not entirely accurate, led to


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enormous popular interest in spreading new equipment. Noting that “an English handloom can do the work of four of our looms,” for instance, Durgashankar P. Raval argued in 1911 that “the first priority therefore is to introduce these improved looms to our workers in every home and every village.”107 The problem was that, on their own, weavers did not seem to be embracing these new implements. As suggested in Chapter 2 there were a range of structural reasons why this might have been the case, including fears that merchants would monopolize new earnings. Most reformers, however, assumed that weavers simply did not know about or understand the new technologies. It was here that outsiders had to step in; if weavers could not or would not innovate on their own, they should be encouraged to do so by others. Members of the first Indian Industrial Conference held in Banaras in 1905 thus passed a resolution calling for “the establishment of weaving schools, where boys may learn the use of such looms, with a view to their more extended use among the town and villages of all Provinces in India.”108 To pave the way for such schools, early-twentieth-century instructors first toured new technologies through weaving communities via shortterm traveling demonstrations. Throughout both the Bombay Presidency and nearby princely states like Baroda, expert weavers circulated from one handloom center to another visiting master weavers, demonstrating new equipment, and encouraging local artisans to experiment with it. In some cases demonstrators would make several trips, staying each time for a period of a few days; in others, they would remain anywhere from one to six months in a particular community, moving on either in the face of weaver apathy or once the new technologies were well established. In 1913–1914, for instance, Baroda State demonstrators mostly worked in the town of Pattan and surrounding villages where they were able to introduce 30 improved handlooms; in the Bombay Presidency in the same year, demonstrators traveled much more widely, visiting Hubli, Belgaum, Taminkatti, Appin-Betgeri, Ranibennur, Borsad, Ahmedabad, Parola, Erandol, and Pathardi, with mixed success.109 Since demonstration parties were temporary, they could not help artisans with all stages of the transition to new implements. As one study of Punjabi efforts to improve handloom weaving concluded: “A traveling exhibition can remain in one place only for a few weeks. A weaver who has purchased an improved machine finds that he cannot at once turn out as much as on his old loom; he has not the patience to persevere for a few weeks, and, seeing his daily earnings dwindling, he throws aside the new loom and returns to the old.”110 The solution arrived at in western India was to use demonstration parties to pique weaver interest in new

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technologies; only once it was clear that there was sufficient enthusiasm would the government open a more permanent weaving class that demanded daily attendance from students for a fixed term of instruction. As the director of the Bombay Co-operative Department put it, weaving schools “are intended to consolidate and extend the ground gained by demonstrations in the most promising centres.”111 Like demonstration parties, weaving schools aimed to popularize new technologies among practicing weavers, most prominently the fly-shuttle loom. By providing each set of students with thorough training in the use and maintenance of improved looms, the schools hoped that graduates would both adopt the looms themselves and then encourage others in their communities to do likewise. More broadly, weaving schools served as a conduit for introducing into small weaving centers a broad range of innovations developed at the VJTI and elsewhere. If the first weaving schools established in the early 1900s focused almost exclusively on teaching simple weaving of plain cloth on the fly-shuttle loom, by 1917 the seven schools operating in the Bombay Presidency had branched out in several directions: first, they now taught more complicated fabrics, including twill, towel, and sheet weaves as well as bordered dhotis and cotton and silk saris; second, they now introduced additional implements like iron dobbies and English healds, reeds and shuttles; third and finally, they took on the task of teaching local carpenters to make the improved looms and accessories.112 Those innovations made it out into weaving schools via weaving instructors who were kept up to date through training at the VJTI and through on-site visits by the senior government weaving assistant.113 In 1912, for instance, the VJTI launched a series of experiments in warping and sizing; by early 1914 more than half the weaving schools in the presidency had introduced the resultant new warping and beaming machines into their curricula.114 Although it is not clear if it was ever put into use in precisely this form, a sample syllabus issued in 1925 by the Government of Madras suggests how ambitious weaving classes had become by the 1920s. Much of the proposed course focused on teaching a broad range of weaving techniques and technologies, including how to create everything from plain to oxford, twill, satin, double sateens, honeycomb, and canvas cloth, how to work pit, frame, Salvation Army, and Hattersley looms, and how to manage the mechanics of treadle and dobby weaving. Other sections of the course, however, focused on preparation for weaving, including how to test different kinds of yarn, how to calculate yarns, healds and reeds for different weaves, and how to size, wind, and warp thread. And, finally, some sections addressed design and equipment, including how to create


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patterns for fabrics, how to draw plans for weaving appliances, and how build and repair wooden weaving equipment. In all of these areas, new technologies were prominent: looms, treadles, dobbies, healds, warping machines, construction materials, and drawing instruments.115 Weaving schools were never large, usually training somewhere between six and seventeen students at a time; the less popular ones often closed quickly for lack of students.116 According to government accounts, however, many were able to achieve the most sought after marker of success: obsolescence. In their annual reports, officials celebrated being able to close schools in areas that thoroughly adopted new technologies. Thus, the 1916 report on Bombay’s co-operative societies noted with pride that, after successfully introducing more than 800 fly-shuttle looms with English healds and iron dobbies in the town of Malegaon, the local weaving school was transferred to Bhiwandi, “on the ground that it had taught the former centre all that it has to teach.”117 Others followed a similar trajectory, operating in a town for four to six years until the new implements were well established and then moving onto fresh pastures. Part of the appeal of weaving schools was that, unlike industrial schools which sought—and generally failed—to expand and discipline labor, handloom instruction had the much more practical and tangible goal of spreading more efficient equipment. Indeed, efforts to develop and popularize new technologies in handloom weaving appeared to answer many of the criticisms leveled at general industrial education. Clearly oriented toward existing industry, there was no question of a mismatch between official aims and artisanal needs; exclusively focused on practicing artisans, there was no fear that energies would be wasted on those aiming at clerical employment; offering concrete improvements in existing technologies rather than a vague sense of work discipline, progress was easy to quantify. Together, handloom experiments and weaving instruction offered a compelling package, combining technical improvements addressed to the needs of the industry with direct application to practicing artisans. And yet, neither experiments nor classes secured the desired result of sweeping changes in handloom efficiency and productivity. As noted earlier, handloom experiments had a troubled record since many of the resulting looms were poorly suited to local needs; the most glaring failure was that new looms could not manage the bordered saris and dhotis in which handlooms were most competitive against mill cloth. One reason for that poor record was the great social and experiential gulf that existed between the men conducting the experiments and the people who would put their inventions into practice. Surveying the many people involved in

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developing new handloom technologies in 1908, Chatterton found that few were trained weavers or had particular inventive skills.118 As one of the few who possessed the latter, Churchill might have been expected to be more successful in pushing forward new technologies. But Churchill got so caught up in his own experiments that he lost sight of their utility. Nor did he seem to have any contact with local weavers in or around Ahmednagar who might have been able to point out the flaws in his ideas. Churchill was not alone in this failing. In a 1917 book detailing industrial development in the Punjab, A. P. Badenoch issued a scathing critique of teachers at the Salvation Army Weaving School in Ludhiana: It must be admitted that they have absolutely failed to get into touch with the Punjabi weaver. They have not consistently applied themselves to his problems; though situated in Ludhiana they have not systematically experimented on improved looms, with the finer counts the Ludhiana weaver uses, and hence there is an absolute lack of combination between the two.119

With little attention to the tools and equipments and thus the needs of existing weavers, it is perhaps not surprising that technical experiments yielded such limited results. Weaving demonstrations and schools had similarly checkered careers. Official reports based their claims to success on the spread of new looms and equipment among weavers; from virtually no fly-shuttle looms in the presidency as of 1910 there were 800 in use in Malegaon by 1916, 650 in Dhulia by 1919, etc.120 But, as N. M. Joshi noted in 1936, those achievements lagged far behind those of other parts of India; compared to the hundreds of new looms (along with some improved sizing machines and beam-warping machines) introduced in the Bombay Presidency under government promotional efforts, the Central Provinces managed to convince weavers to adopt some 25,000 new fly-shuttle looms between 1915– 1929.121 Along with overstating the significance of their efforts, officials often ascribed responsibility for change to the wrong sources. In his 1918–1919 annual report for the Government of Bombay’s Department of Industries, director R. D. Bell admitted as much, noting that most of the success of new weaving technologies was due to cooperative organizers than to weaving instructors.122 More broadly, as Douglas Haynes and Tirthankar Roy have both pointed out, innovative artisans did far more than any government officials to promote new technologies; by bearing all of the social and financial risks as well as concretely demonstrating the potential profits of change, such artisans made it possible for others to follow far more effectively than mere classroom instruction could ever


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do.123 Examples of just that effect can be read out of official reports. The Baroda administrative report for 1924–1925, for instance, celebrated the quick closure of a new weaving course established in Dabhel; although weavers there only adopted ten new looms during the first cycle of the course, by the end of the year all weavers had switched over to the new looms. Given limited enrollment and the tendency to attract younger men rather than established community leaders, it is likely that the school itself was only one part of the larger story of the transition to new technologies, with much of the initiative located among weavers themselves. Another impediment to success in both developing better implements and then popularizing them among weavers was a shared insistence on crafts difference. From the technical side, men like D. C. Churchill were obsessed with improving handloom speed and output, designing all kinds of complicated mechanisms and attachments in order to make the individual weaver more efficient with less effort. And yet they did not extend their experiments to replacing human power with mechanical power, even though applying a small engine to a simpler loom would have achieved similar productivity at lower cost. Or, to give another example, handloom courts set up as part of the Indian Industrial Conference’s industrial exhibitions featured weavers from different schools and institutions around the country displaying new looms and other preparatory equipment, with competitions held in 1906 and again in 1908 to rank the latest equipment by speed, output, ease of manipulation, and cost-effectiveness.124 Such competitive displays pitted handlooms only against one another, not against power looms, even though it was often the latter that represented the real threat. As the Indian Industrial Commission put it in their report in 1918, since “the hand-loom weaver directly competes with the powerloom weaver . . . his success or failure depends on the first instance upon the right selection of the appliances which he uses, even more than upon the degree of skill which he acquires in working them.”125 If those developing new handloom improvements held the line between crafts and industry by rejecting mechanization of weaving itself, they also did so by perpetuating the ideal of the autonomous individual weaver. A very few public officials—most prominently Alfred Chatterton in Madras—advocated shifting weavers into small handloom factories where they could better take advantage of economies of scale in purchasing raw materials, sharing expensive preparatory machinery, investing in new loom technologies, and more.126 But Chatterton’s position was unpopular, particularly in western India where activists rejected the industrial reorganization of weaving itself. For all the willingness on

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the part of Churchill and others to centralize and mechanize preparatory processes, including sizing, beaming, warping, and winding, they continued to imagine weaving as an individual occupation, with one person capable of mastering the use and maintenance of complicated new attachments along with designing and implementing new patterns. One of the common criticisms made of the most advanced foreign looms was that they were too complicated for the average weaver to maintain: hence the need for a simpler, modified version for the Indian market. Arguing that the average weaver would need to perform common maintenance assumed decentralized individual production in artisanal homes where it would be difficult to get skilled help to solve basic loom issues. If, on the other hand, weavers worked together in large workshops of many looms, specialized repair help might be available, thereby erasing the need for the simpler looms altogether. Similarly, when handloom instructors popularized new technologies, they assumed that one individual would master the entire range of processes, from design to weaving and finishing; no attempt was made to segment the labor process into discrete stages meant for different workers. To give yet another example, when handloom schools offered detailed instruction in a broad range of new fabric types, they imagined a model in which individual weavers would need almost comprehensive product flexibility, capable of shifting into not only new patterns but whole new types of fabrics in response to changes in consumer demand. That again far exceeded the more specialized needs of weavers operating within large workshops, who generally focused on single fabric types. The choice involved in developing technologies and training weavers for individualized autonomous hand production is perhaps more obvious when compared to trends in the weaving industry more generally. Roy and Haynes have both identified widespread consolidation and specialization in handlooms and other traditional industries of the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. One of the most remarkable shifts was in the growth of handloom factories under the direction of master weavers. Generally operating with a combination of family and wage labor, these factories tended to grow slowly, adding on looms and introducing improved technologies over time in order to minimize the need for scarce capital, and to stay attuned to highly fluctuating market demands. With expansion came increased specialization, with single firms often monopolizing the production of particular products or designs; it also brought mechanization, with a few pioneering workshop owners introducing modified power looms as early as 1900, followed by a major shift toward the new technologies in the 1930s.127


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Public advocates of handloom improvements were certainly aware of such developments, noting the shift toward centralized production and the potential for hierarchical organization within workshops. And yet, in the end, they chose not to embrace those changes, preferring instead a decentralized model of autonomous weavers who worked independently. Indeed, they argued that one of the gravest threats facing weavers was the loss of autonomy as formerly independent weavers became wage labor in handloom factories; the hope was that faster looms and better implements might rescue weavers from such dependence, not hurry them toward it. In the end, reformers—whether out of a desire for social equality or out of nostalgic sense of India’s artisanal past—resisted some of the key social and technical changes that were enabling handlooms to stay competitive against mill cloth. In doing so they operated not on the basis of strictly economic arguments of efficiency and productivity, but instead on more cultural assumptions about the identity and meaning of craft. Conclusion Taken together, industrial schools and handloom improvements represented some of the most prominent public interventions in crafts of their day, expressing the industrial hopes of nationalist activists and government officials alike. Industrial schools for craftsmen were the popular face of education for industrial development in India down through the 1920s. Indeed, once the Government of India transferred both education and industrial development to the control of Indian ministers at the provincial level in 1921, efforts to provide such training to artisans actually increased, with new schools opening up to train weavers in particular, but also to instruct workers in wood, metal, and leather. This was, however, perhaps more a financial decision than a sign that all of the issues in general industrial or specialized weaving schools had been solved. Of the three basic levels of education for industry—industrial schools for artisans, technical schools for foremen, and technical institutes for industrial leaders—schools for artisans were by far the cheapest. To give a comparison from Baroda State, instruction in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, agriculture, teacher training, carpentry, and drawing at the advanced technical institute, the Kala Bhavan, cost more than Rs. 50,000—or around Rs. 262 per student—in 1896–1897.128 The total cost for three Baroda district industrial schools then teaching dyeing, carpentry, and other general industrial work was, in comparison, only about Rs. 10,000, or around Rs. 64 per pupil.129 Weaving schools were even more inexpensive; in 1917 the total cost of the seven weaving schools operating

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in the Bombay Presidency came to only Rs. 6,245.130 Per person, it was obviously far cheaper to run industrial or weaving schools than schools that taught more advanced types of knowledge. For the government, this meant that in the face of public criticism, progress and development could be duly noted in official reports at relatively little cost. For the many private or municipal groups that founded artisanal schools, it was simply the only industrially oriented education they could afford. With the transfer of industrial portfolios to the provinces and the budget retrenchment of 1922, even the possibility of large-scale funds for opening new higher technical institutes disappeared.131 As the paper Prajabandhu reported in 1926, the entire budget for the Bombay Presidency’s Department of Industries was Rs. 2,39,000 in 1922–1923, shrinking to Rs. 1,37,885 in 1923–1924, and then down to Rs. 65,800 in 1924–1925.132 Such limited funds left little opportunity for grand initiatives into engineering or technical schools. Given the political prominence of handlooms in particular and crafts in general, continuing with artisanal training was not only cost-effective but also politically expedient. That translated directly into funding priorities. Thus, N. M. Joshi estimated that in 1933–1934 some 43.6 percent of the Bombay Department of Industries’ total budget went to developing and promoting weaving; as a point of comparison, the second largest allotment was 35 percent spent on administration.133 Public attempts to modernize artisanal industries aimed to correct the negative aspects of crafts difference: inefficiency, disorganization, lack of science, conservatism, hostility to outside ideas, and more. Indeed, many aimed to close the gap between crafts and industry, taking the lessons of modern factory production and applying them to artisanal workshops. Some focused on labor, disciplining labor into rational precision to adapt to new markets, without threatening the rigid boundaries of the colonial social order or undermining the global demands of the imperial labor market. Others aimed at artisanal methods, arguing that more efficient tools and technologies could transform crafts from within, whatever the cultural proclivities or working habits of artisans. Either way, reformers tapped into the central themes of colonial development ideology: first, the promise of modernization itself, by which the shortcomings of Indian society could be fixed by proper contact with Western initiatives and principles; and second, a fundamental faith in science as the crucial means of that transformation, providing neutral assessment of problems and presenting rational means for their solution.134 And yet, for all the talk about erasing the gap between crafts and industry by borrowing the logic of the latter, public modernization


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efforts often themselves operated on the basis of the idea of crafts difference. Reformers could rarely envisage a smooth path of transition from artisanal to industrial production, by which traditional skills could be reworked or reapplied into more modern contexts or products. Thus industrial schools and handloom improvements alike taught hand skills and rejected mechanization, operating on the assumption that production would remain individual and autonomous. The fate of an ambitious agenda for technical experiments across traditional industries in western India provides a useful example of this pattern. In response to new funds Curzon made available for the expansion of technical education and promotion of industrial development, in 1904 JJ School officials proposed hiring four European experts in textiles, wood work, metal work (including gold and silver as well as iron and architectural lead work), and pottery. Those four experts were to be given technical laboratories in which to investigate the materials and methods needed for their industries: bleaches, mordants, and sizing materials for cottons, the proper mixture of clays and glazes for different types of pottery products, or preservatives, glues, and polishes for wood.135 Only one such laboratory ever made it past the planning stage: the Sir George Clarke Technical Laboratories and Studios that opened in association with the JJ School in 1909. Representing a total government investment of over one lakh rupees by the time it closed in 1926, the Clarke Labs offered the most decisive application of science to the problems of pottery production in western India to date; the Labs were fully equipped for and completely focused on technical experiments, including testing clays, adapting new kilns to use in India, and developing mechanized production methods.136 In its first year, director E. R. Fern set to work testing different clays available in the region, preparing glazes that could accommodate the expansion and contraction of earthenware pots, and building different kilns suitable for his work.137 Over time, however, Fern and the Clarke Labs shifted focus from hand to mechanical methods, devoting increasing time to the problems of factory production of pottery dishes, tiles, pipes, and the like. By the mid-teens there is little record of any investigations into the problems of the familiar earthenware made by potters across the region; a 1957 history of the JJ School went so far as to argue that Fern was ignorant of the merits of traditional techniques, approaching “the problems of Crafts with an idea of modernising, rather than of researches [sic] into the economic and decorative qualities achieved by the traditional methods.”138 In keeping with that focus on modernization, Fern consulted with men interested in opening up new pottery works. In 1910, for instance, a Mr. Pojut J. Punpyio requested Fern’s advice on how

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to open a commercial pottery works near Bombay, while in 1918–1919 Fern visited Ahmedabad district in order to advise a local syndicate there on how best to work a local kaolin deposit.139 More specifically, Fern spent much of the 1920s developing plans for a demonstration pottery factory to showcase the latest technologies and processes; while that never got off the ground, he was able to help others start a new roofing tile factory in Khanapur in 1919 and a new commercial pottery factory in Talegaon in the early 1920s.140 That focus on modern factories rather than traditional artisanal workshops represented official policy as much as Fern’s personal preference. Indeed, the Government of Bombay declared in a 1910 resolution that one of the primary goals of the new workshops should be “to demonstrate to the public that, given a complete installation of up-to-date machinery, . . . plates, cups, tiles (especially the latter), which are imported into India in large quantities, can be manufactured in India of suitable quality and at a profit on a commercial basis.”141 Inspired by the goal of import substitution, the Clarke Labs found it too problematic or unprofitable to reform craft production. Reflecting a much larger process by which the colonial state marginalized indigenous knowledge systems,142 Fern saw nothing to learn from India’s potters and no way to build a bridge from traditional methods to modern needs for sturdy, waterproof dishes and building materials; thus he and his students focused on large scale production operating according to new technologies adapted from European industrial models. Modernization in pottery, at least at the beginning of the twentieth century, in other words was built directly on the idea of crafts difference; crafts were old, outmoded, and inefficient, to be replaced by all new methods and technologies brought in from outside. But the idea of crafts difference also functioned in slightly more subtle ways in modernizing efforts. Both industrial schools and technological improvements tended to locate the problems in crafts in the individual artisan, imagined to be inefficient, traditional, and out of touch with modern developments. P. N. Mehta, for example, offered the following summary of the “far from satisfactory” condition of handloom weavers in the Bombay Presidency as of 1909: The state of being constantly in want and dependence, kills all enterprise and activity in them. This coupled with ignorance of any improved system of manufacture and the want of even primary education helps to make them what they appear to some, i.e., indolent, lazy, dissipated and extravagant.143

Here Mehta presents the familiar view of artisans as the opposite of modernized, efficient labor, with the roots of that difference expressed in the


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thoughts and attitudes of artisans themselves; artisans are dependent and therefore not entrepreneurial, artisans are ignorant of new technologies and so lazy. Since the problems lay with artisans, it only made sense that the solutions focused on them too: if only artisans could be disciplined into precision and regularity through rigorous industrial education, labor would improve; if only improved systems could be introduced, individual productivity would increase. Had modernizers been able to abstract the problems of craft from individual bodies, however, they would have had to look beyond personal inefficiency and failure to adopt new technologies to address the many structural, market-based challenges facing traditional industries. Mehta himself argued as much, closing the observation given above with the following disclaimer: “They may be all that they are represented to be, but they are mere creatures of circumstances.” Those circumstances involved control over the industry by nonweavers who did not see the point of new technologies and who kept artisans in debtbondage by controlling raw materials, credit, and markets. To Mehta this meant that “it is essential that the economic aspect of the question [of helping handlooms] should take precedence over the technical,” with cooperative societies being the most likely route to real change.144 Himself an earlier recipient of a government scholarship to study the English textile industry, Mehta offered his assessment of handloom needs in fulfillment of a official assignment to study “the present position of the industry and the practical measures that commend themselves to him for its assistance,” with specific attention to defects in existing technologies, production, and marketing systems, and to the possibilities of introducing cooperatives into weaving.145 In giving Mehta that assignment, the Government of Bombay had explained the importance of such a study in terms of the large numbers of people involved in handlooms and “the need for assistance which recent competition from the power industry has created.” Large numbers of “improved processes and implements now under trial” only underscored “the scope for such assistance,” necessitating prompt attention to the topic.146 Implicit within the Government of Bombay’s calls for “assistance” to weavers was a sense that new technologies did more to solve a shortterm social problem than they did to resolve a long-term economic one. For all the talk of productivity and efficiency, many defined improving handlooms first and foremost as a way to save millions of weavers facing immediate poverty in the ruthless competition against mill goods. As Romesh Chunder Dutt put it in his presidential address to the first Indian Industrial Conference in 1905, technologies and state support would “relieve millions of weavers and other artisans from the state of

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semi-starvation in which they have lived.”147 That relief was ultimately to be temporary; to compete in a globalized marketplace Dutt and others argued the need for modern machinery, factories, and companies, all of which would ultimately replace less efficient, less productive handwork.148 The key was to ease the transition from one state to another, acknowledging the needs of artisans unprepared for modern factories while slowly paving the way for the ultimate obsolescence of their way of life. As another speaker at the 1905 industrial conference, a Mr. H. J. Tozer, put it: “Although this ancient handicraft may ultimately be forced to give way under the pressure of competition, it is of importance socially that the process of decay should be gradual.”149 Assumptions by men like Dutt and Tozer, that modernizing efforts served social welfare rather than economic development needs, points to a real lack of faith in the future of crafts. At the same time, they also reveal a fundamental lack of trust in artisans. Ignoring those actively and creatively engaged in building up artisanal production from within— adopting small machinery, centralizing production, and specializing work—proponents of public crafts initiatives argued that only outsiders like themselves could properly direct and engineer change. Just as troubling, as Arindam Dutta has suggested in a different context, by offering education and new technologies instead of addressing exploitative market structures, reformers implied that responsibility for success or failure in the colonial economy ultimately lay on artisanal shoulders. If they had been more disciplined, or technologically savvy, artisans would have done fine; it was their refusal to do so, not the workings of colonial capitalism, that explained poverty, debt, and declining markets.150 Like preservationists, then, modernizers affirmed both the difference of crafts from modern industry and the social distance separating elites and artisans. Public leaders reserved for themselves superior vision, foresight, and rationality while dismissing artisans as irrational, uneducated men incapable of providing the direction needed for economic development—differences that only confirmed the inevitable logic of outside leadership over such a backward community. But, whereas preservationists at least acknowledged traditional skills in design terms, modernizers saw virtually no grounds on which to celebrate artisanal knowledge. Here, outside authority was complete.

Conclusion

The Long Life of Difference: Gandhi and the Politics of Crafts after 1920

W

hen the Indian National Congress staged an industrial exhibition in association with its annual meeting in Ahmedabad in 1902, the Gaekwar of Baroda Sayajirao III gave the opening speech. An acknowledged leader in industrial matters, the Gaekwar had provided generous support for industrial development in his state, including founding the technical institute Kala Bhavan, launching experiments to improve handlooms, introducing artisanal schools, starting demonstration factories, and providing scholarships to send promising students overseas to investigate new technologies. In his speech at the exhibition, the Gaekwar offered an overview of the current state of the Indian economy and suggestions for future development. First, though, he established the need for development via a direct contrast between India and the West on industrial grounds. In Europe, he argued, technical knowledge, collective effort, individual and national ambition, carefully honed intelligence, and a general striving to make nature provide greater human comfort all came together to produce dramatic technical and material achievements. In India, by contrast, he recalled “the market in my own Baroda city—where the artisans were preparing things in the same methods and same goods as they have been doing for centuries, living in low and shapeless houses and dreamless lives.” These vast differences in industrial knowledge, energy, progress, and ambition defined India’s backwardness, preventing India from reaching the level of Europe in comfort, wealth, or development.1 If the dreamless passivity of Indian artisans prevented economic success in the present, the Gaekwar’s proposed solution was to adopt Western methods of manufacture for the future. In a section outlining areas for

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industrial improvement, the Gaekwar urged Indians to introduce new, technically sophisticated factories to begin domestic production of daily necessities then imported from overseas—things such as glassware, soap, candles, furniture, steel implements, durries, paper, and leather goods. It was not enough, he argued, to just issue emotional appeals for patriotic consumption of second-rate Indian goods; sentiment could never compete with hardheaded differentials in quality and cost. True growth would only come when India was competitive on world markets. Thus, the Gaekwar insisted that Indian goods be carefully compared with imports to “find out their differences and also how to remove the defects of our goods and how to increase their sale.”2 In this vision of the future, the Gaekwar did acknowledge traditional artisanal manufactures. Lamenting that the condition of “old native industries” such as wood carving and metalwork was now “so delicate” when once those crafts had been world famous, he supported market research to help artisans adapt to new demands. But he was clear that such efforts emerged from pride in a beautiful native tradition rather than real hope for development. For the Gaekwar, the real economic work lay elsewhere, in “setting up big industries and producing goods for mass consumption using large scale machinery.” Indeed, he insisted that “our economic future and our prosperity are dependent” on modern industry; “until we get into an economy of large-scale industries, we shall never really prosper, ever.”3 Underlying the Gaekwar’s speech was an assumption of the essential opposition between crafts and modern industry. One was culture: timeless beauties representing the past heritage of the nation. The other was economics: modern efficiency and novel technologies. For the former, one looked to India’s past for expressions of national ideals. For the latter, one looked overseas to Europe, America, and—increasingly—Japan. That idea of difference did not serve, as in the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, to resist the advance of modern factory industry or revolutionize social relations. Instead the Gaekwar used it to encourage industrial growth, allowing a segmented economic development by which artisanal production sustained traditional social groups, while real economic progress happened elsewhere—a segmentation that helped ease social upheavals in the inevitable transition to modern methods. What made that growth possible was outside leadership. Since “the lower classes of Hindustan are deeply immersed in ignorance and hopelessness,” the Gaekwar argued that change, rooted in proper understanding of the country’s economic needs, “is something only you could bring about—you who know something of Western thinking and practices.”4

THE LONG LIFE OF DIFFERENCE

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The Gaekwar’s speech demonstrates the full arrival of many of the themes explored in this book: the new idea of crafts difference, its role in the emerging hierarchies of colonial society, and its impact on development efforts. Building on trends in the late nineteenth century, by 1902 crafts had become firmly established in national politics. But that was hardly the end of the story. Indeed, the idea of crafts difference, once in place, had a long and fruitful life. On the one hand, it provided the framework for Mohandas Gandhi’s incredibly successful campaign to promote the production and use of handspun, hand-woven khadi cloth starting in the 1920s. Part of his larger village reconstruction movement by which urban India would help revitalize rural communities through economic development, education, sanitation, and community organizing, khadi was also much more: spiritual rejuvenation, moral purification, and political engagement, all in ways celebrating Indian alternatives to Western models. After independence, on the other hand, the idea of crafts difference became public policy, enshrined at the heart of new institutions such as the All-India Handicrafts Board, the Crafts Museum in Delhi, the Calico Museum of Textiles, the National Institute of Design, and various state-level crafts boards. Under the leadership of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Jasleen Dhamijia, Ajit Mookerjee, D. N. Saraf, and others, India’s crafts were to root the modernizing nation envisioned by Nehruvian socialism in the rich, warm tones of cultural tradition. These developments brought the idea of crafts difference into public consciousness in ways never achieved earlier. The opposition between Indian crafts and Western machine industry had, as suggested above, achieved the status of common sense by the early twentieth century among those interested in industrial development. Now, under Gandhi’s influence men and women who never read industrial reform journals looked to khadi to express their patriotism in tangible ways; those who ignored policy debates about economic growth celebrated traditional embroidery as an embodiment of Indian heritage and culture; those who had bought imported mass-produced porcelain for its durability sought out local artisanal pottery not just for its material values—of color, design, strength—but for its production—its physical representation of hand craftsmanship. While building on earlier ideas and interventions, the new public prominence of crafts in the 1920s and 1950s came about through some significant innovations. In Gandhi’s case the most significant was the transformation of crafts development from private economic initiative to public test of political loyalty. Gandhi refused to choose between preservationist concerns about aesthetic purity and modernizing arguments

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about economic imperative; instead, he combined both, weaving together emotion and economics, romantic evocations of the dignity of hand labor with biting critiques of the inequalities of colonial economic domination. In doing so, he offered—via khadi—ordinary Indians the chance to constructively contribute to the nation while subverting British power. This same interest in both aesthetics and economics characterized the new institutional interventions in crafts after independence. Then, design concerns moved out of art schools and into development agendas, with designers appointed to key positions in national and regional handicraft boards, hired to advise income generation projects conducted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and in some cases given the opportunity to start their own NGOs to better meld aesthetic quality with concrete wage and profit benefits for artisans. Whether under Gandhi’s leadership or after his death, however, craft initiatives continued to structure their responses around the idea of crafts difference, rejecting mechanization, insisting on individual autonomy within the limits of larger cooperative structures, and attempting to circumvent the market. At the same time, all continued to replace artisanal leadership and authority with that of outsiders. Gandhi’s Khadi Campaigns: Crafts Difference as National Mobilization Gandhi’s ideas and strategies for khadi developed over time, in sometimes contradictory directions. When he first returned to India from South Africa in May 1915, Gandhi was content that all members of his Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad take a vow to use only swadeshi products.5 By 1919, however, Gandhi was promoting a much narrower vision of acceptable consumption. Insisting that all patriotic Indians reject not only foreign cloth but also Indian-made mill cloth, he envisioned a nation dressed entirely in handspun, hand-woven cloth. The Indian National Congress (INC) followed Gandhi’s lead, making hand weaving and spinning central to the swadeshi movement at the Amritsar Congress of 1919 and adopting an ambitious plan to revive hand spinning on a massive scale at a special session in September 1920.6 By 1921 the INC started working directly on the production and sale of khadi, opening a separate department to focus on it in 1922 and forming the All-India Khaddar Board later that year to coordinate work in every province.7 Through Congress efforts, khadi stores and centers opened across the country, men and women alike took up spinning, technical advisers introduced new looms among weavers, and people from all walks of life began to wear the fabric as a marker of national pride and honor.8


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As his thoughts on the subject developed, Gandhi increasingly used the social, economic, moral, and political differences between khadi and modern mill cloth to justify his agenda. The most obvious point of difference, and thus perhaps most central, was the means of production. Gandhi’s opposition to Western-style factories is well known. His 1909 tract Hind Swaraj lists factory work as one of the defining evils of Western civilization; as he described it, mill laborers suffered in conditions that were “worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires. Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy.”9 Creating khadi offered a complete contrast to such horrors: it was done at home rather than in factories, so that working conditions were pleasant, clean, and free from physical danger; it was simple, easy to learn, and meant for personal use, so that labor was not alienated; it was inexpensive and restrained, so that no temptation to indulgence was posed. As an unnamed author wrote in a May 1922 article in Gandhi’s mouthpiece Young India, khadi promised profound benefits to producers; not only would hand spinning and hand weaving “set the Indian masses economically on their feet,” they would allow villagers to revive economic self-sufficiency, throw off political domination, and “forge the ties of unity, brotherhood and tolerance among themselves.”10 More broadly, however, khadi promised change not just to those already engaged in cloth production but to all Indians. At the heart of Gandhi’s vision was the expectation that everyone would adopt the charkha11 and devote part of every day to spinning cotton yarn. For poor people, spinning served both individual and general goals: it supplemented family incomes, thereby rescuing individuals from the twin vices of idleness and gossip, on the one hand, and contributed to national development, on the other. Just as importantly, for poor and rich alike, spinning was to be purifying meditation, national devotion, and penance for the nation’s poverty.12 What made spinning so ideal was that, since it required little training or equipment, anyone could do it. This was in sharp contrast to weaving, which Gandhi himself admitted was too highly skilled for most to learn quickly, let alone practice regularly.13 That spiritual, ennobling labor, not surprisingly, created products with distinctive material and moral qualities. Complaining that Indians had a false sense of the artistic, Gandhi argued that “true art takes note not merely of form but also of what lies behind.”14 In this light, khadi was beautiful because it was created by hand, out of love and devotion for country. It was a living fabric, uneven and individual, reflecting the

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lack of uniformity in life itself; machine-made fabric, on the other hand, was all “glossy smoothness,” “metallic hardness,” and “dull uniformity.”15 As “K. R.” instructed readers in Young India in 1922, “The gloss of the mill-made cloth is the flame over the grave, the symbol of death. The soft Khadi is instinct [sic] with life, hence a thing of beauty. Khadi is uneven. Its surface is of living dimples. There can be nothing uniform in things pertaining to life which is rich in its variety and mild heterogeneity.”16 While individual pieces might express organic variability, in aggregate khadi affirmed political and moral unity. Unlike the intricately patterned clothes ranging from simple to luxurious that divided wearers by class, caste, and community, simple, plain, white khadi promised to unite Indians visually.17 Indeed, as the khadi campaign intensified in 1920– 1921, Gandhi increasingly cautioned against the use of fine cloth. Noting that coarse, white handlooms were the fabric of the poor, Gandhi argued that they should thus be the fabric of all patriotic Indians of every class. As P. C. Ray wrote in 1922, “Instead of keeping up a show of luxury, it is necessary that we should all wear coarse Khadi, thereby acknowledging our kinship with our poor countrymen and at the same time making a positive move towards helping them out of their poverty.”18 Only when the nation was clothed in a common cloth could internal divisions be overcome and true national unity forged. That national unity was to come through national means not just in production but also in distribution. Ideally, Gandhi hoped that individuals would not need to rely on the market at all to get their cloth, but would spin their own thread, bring that to a nearby weaver, and then receive finished cloth suitable for their needs. When that kind of closed production loop was impossible, purchase of locally made goods offered the next best option. For, just as Gandhi argued that India as a nation should become self-sufficient in cloth production, so too did he think that each locality should make do with the cloth of its own looms. As he put it in a speech in Ellore in 1921, “I regard as foreign cloth even that which comes from Bombay and Ahmedabad. Our spinning mills must be in our homes, our weaving mills must be in our villages. And just as it will be sinful for you to have your bread baked at Bombay, so is it sinful for you to have your cloth manufactured in Bombay.”19 Ellore’s consumers must be content with what Ellore’s weavers could produce, working to improve production if the goods were not up to standard. Such localized production and consumption would distribute income evenly throughout the countryside, giving each village the tools for its own economic independence—thereby fulfilling Gandhi’s dream of a nation of independent village republics.20 It would also distribute that income to all parts of the


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population—thus preventing capitalistic exploitation of workers by merchants or profiteers.21 Gandhi’s vision for khadi was, therefore, all-encompassing, integrating technologies, organization, distribution, and eventual consumption of handspun, handwoven cloth. It is fitting, then, that Gandhi suggested changes at every level as well. One of the central interventions was technical. For all his celebration of the ancient practices of hand spinning and weaving, Gandhi was intensely dissatisfied with the limitations of existing spinning wheels and looms. Building on earlier efforts in the 1900s and 1910s to improve looms and preparatory equipment discussed in Chapter 4, khadi activists tried to increase handloom efficiency, productivity, and quality. In a series of articles in Young India, in 1921, for instance, Maganlal Gandhi offered solutions to a number of problems weavers faced in trying to work with handspun yarn—yarn that was often uneven and broke easily. These suggestions included how to evaluate and use new looms and how to properly prepare and size handspun yarn.22 On a more concrete level, the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad opened a khadi school in 1922 to teach the theory and practice of handloom spinning and weaving and to work out improvements on all stages of production. The hundred or so yearly graduates of the school were from all over India, the idea being that, upon returning to their home provinces they would spread new technologies and new techniques among local weaving communities, working as khadi organizers under Congress direction.23 Another key innovation was in distribution. Even at the height of the khadi movement only a very few consumers spun enough yarn to meet their needs, obliging most to buy cloth in one way or another. Some consumers made purchases on their own doorsteps from activists—activists who included, in some parts of India, groups of upper-class women who sold fabric in their neighborhoods in defiance of police restrictions.24 More commonly, many accessed khadi either through swadeshi stores that marketed only Indianmade goods—whether mill- or hand-made—or through special Congress khadi depots opened just to supply the national fabric. Both types of stores operated on a strictly noncompetitive basis and on limited profit margins, with the idea that all would work together to promote wider consumption of the cloth. The Bombay Khadi Bhandar run by Narandas Purshottamdas and Vithadas Jerajani, which Gandhi opened in June 1920, for instance, tried to cover all modern consumer cloth needs by carrying bleached and dyed khadi for use in shirts, trousers, saris, blouses, curtains, and cushions.25 Khadi stores, however, rarely could satisfy all needs. This gap necessitated yet another innovation: in consumer desires. In the early years

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khadi came in only very limited varieties, as poor yarn quality confined producers to plain cloth in coarse weaves. Over time, as weavers around the country developed their skills with handspun yarn and the quality of that yarn improved, product ranges widened to include very fine muslins, printed bedcovers, bordered saris and dhotis, and patterned silks.26 But even as khadi activists tried to meet variegated demand, they also tried to redirect demand into different channels. Thus, a 1931 survey of the handloom industry declared it the duty of the people to see to it that the hand-loom products are patronized, in spite of their rough quality and decreased fineness and gloss. The people will have to put a restraint on their fastidiousness in taste and extend their patronage to cloth made out of coarse or medium yarns made within the country.27

Gandhi recognized that this sacrifice would be significant for those accustomed to luxurious, colorful fabrics. But he insisted that a wholesale revolution in public taste was the duty of all, arguing to an audience of women in 1921 that “I have not known a mother throwing away her baby even though it may appear ugly to an outsider. So should it be with the patriotic women of India about Indian manufactures.”28 To do otherwise, to wear anything but the common cloth of the nation was nothing less than a sin. All of these ideas for and interventions into khadi rested on the idea of the fundamental opposition between cloth produced by hand and cloth produced by modern mills. Reducing his focus down to one iconic product—khadi—Gandhi offered a striking expansion in the concept of crafts difference. Operating not just in terms of visual appearance or labor composition or degree of mechanization or economic organization or political implications, difference here incorporated all of those things at once, with moral purity and spiritual practice bundled in as well. Thus hand weaving done out of devotion to the nation was obviously superior to sweated labor tending machines in a large mill; cloth sold at cost without capitalist exploitation carried higher moral value than that made by weavers who worked for pitiful wages while merchants grew rich on the fruit of their labor. At the same time, Gandhi also expanded the implications of difference for development initiatives. Like his predecessors, he rejected advanced machinery; whereas in modern mills the goal was large-scale mechanized production to replace slow, inefficient hand work, the technical experiments and advice offered by the Sabarmati Ashram enshrined hand production as the ultimate goal to be perfected and


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popularized, not done away with. But Gandhi also went beyond earlier ideas to make difference central not just to production but also to distribution and consumption. Whereas modern industrialists aimed to maximize profits and monopolize market share, khadi organizers rejected both objectives: khadi prices ensured not profits but living wages for producers and affordability for consumers; monopoly, in turn, was anathema in a system that encouraged decentralized, small-scale, individuated production. Finally, whereas modern industrial capitalism celebrated consumer choice even while trying to excite ever-widening desires for the latest, most fashionable goods, khadi promoters told consumers to be patient, take what they were given, pare down their needs, embrace the rough utilitarian goods of the poor rather than the finery of the rich, and reject fashion for timeless, honest necessities. Gandhi’s vision, with its underlying insistence on crafts difference, had wide resonance in colonial India. By 1922, when Gandhi abruptly called off the Non-Cooperation Movement in response to the violence at Chauri Chaura, khadi was firmly in place at the heart of nationalist politics. Indeed, in the lull in active nationalist politics immediately after 1922, production activities only solidified, taking on more stable institutional forms, particularly with the creation of the All-India Spinners’ Association in 1925. Promotion expanded likewise; as Lisa Trivedi has demonstrated, special exhibitions, magic lantern slide shows, print advertisements, lectures, spinning contests, and popular posters all helped enshrine the idea that “khadi clothing transformed a colonized body into an Indian body.”29 This is not to say that all the main elements of Gandhi’s vision were put into practice. The ultimate expression of development efforts often fell far short of his ideals, thanks to diverging consumer preferences, difficulties with production and distribution, lack of funds, and the problem of providing living wages to producers while still keeping cloth prices low enough to compete with mill cloth.30 Very few people probably ever fulfilled Gandhi’s ideals of daily spinning and total conversion to plain, coarse, white khadi. Many who adopted the cloth were unwilling to give up their desire for distinction or difference; indeed, as Emma Tarlo has pointed out, consumers kept disrupting Gandhi’s vision of a nation united in white by favoring printed, dyed, and otherwise patterned khadi, often made up in Western fashions.31 Others refused to adopt khadi universally, but only employed the cloth strategically and situationally, wearing it to express nationalist loyalties in some contexts, but retaining mill or foreign cloth for other settings, whether for reasons of politics or comfort.32 Even if not fully integrated into national practices, the ideal of a nation spinning, weaving, and wearing khadi was well established in national

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consciousness by the late 1920s. This national role for khadi represented the full arrival of the idea of crafts difference onto the public stage. It took Gandhi to render the common sense of difference into a compelling campaign capable of arousing mass participation. It took Gandhi to tie together the disparate strands of traditionalism and modernization, products and production, individualization and cooperation into one unified program. Gandhi embraced the vision of India as socially and economically defined through crafts. But he widened the scope and power of that vision considerably, making it the basis for an all-encompassing critique of colonial rule and modernity itself. Gandhi’s success with khadi was thus made possible by key divergences from earlier attempts to understand and intervene in crafts. Most striking was the politicization of crafts that rendered involvement with khadi a matter not of economic theory but of political loyalty, with all the social pressures brought to bear on such a choice. But Gandhi also diverged from the past in other ways. Whereas preservationist art schools, exhibitions, and publications tried to make national taste a matter of cultured refinement, Gandhi rendered it a crucial test of political loyalty. Whereas modernizing industrial schools and handloom experiments saw crafts as a problematic section of the larger Indian economy to be reformed into closer alignment with modern industry, Gandhi argued that crafts were the ideal form of industry, representing what should be the entirety of production for India and indeed for the world. On a different level, Gandhi refused to choose between preservationism and modernization. Earlier efforts had embraced one or the other; activists either held onto the past through romantic evocations of handwork and individual creativity or aspired to push through a modern future by making crafts a more productive part of the overall economy, even if only as a stopgap measure until large-scale industrialization could take off. Rejecting the dichotomy, Gandhi adopted elements of both, combining a love for handwork with a desire to increase individual efficiency and making passionate emotions perfectly compatible with a program for greater economic productivity. Interestingly, one of the areas where Gandhi did not diverge from his predecessors was on the question of external leadership. Given his emphasis on decentralized, local initiative, this support for outside authority may seem counterintuitive. To his credit, Gandhi did open up the criteria for leadership far wider than it had been before, decoupling authority from Western education and knowledge to allow room for younger, less educated men and women to step forward and assume control. And yet, it is important to note the limits of that decentralization. On a practical level, the need to coordinate production across millions of producers and


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consumers demanded some form of centralized organization. Thus the All-India Khaddar Board was founded in 1922—then reorganized as the All-India Spinners’ Association in 1925—to provide technical instruction, facilitate the collection and distribution of yarn supplies, regulate quality, certify authentic khadi dealers, and promote khadi products.33 More theoretically, even if the social scope of leadership widened, it still did not embrace artisans themselves. Khadi activists were community organizers first, weavers second. Indeed, by advocating the production of only plain, coarse material, Gandhi devalued the role of master weavers capable of producing the finest cloth; by insisting that anyone could learn spinning—and indeed, that it was so simple that everyone should learn it—Gandhi effectively denied the need for artisanal expertise. Himself starting with no knowledge of weaving or spinning, Gandhi argued that anyone could excel, that anyone could become a leader in the field.34 Thus the Akila Khadi Vidyalaya established at Gandhi’s Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad in 1922 took in not practicing weavers but middle-class urban students with no experience in textiles and trained them to be khadi activists; on the completion of the course the students fanned out into rural areas both to introduce new groups to weaving and to organize existing weavers into khadi networks.35 As many scholars have pointed out, Gandhi was an innovator who creatively deployed emotionally loaded symbols like salt and cloth to call up new levels of political participation and passion.36 Without denying the crucial ways he transformed Indian politics, however, it is also important to recognize the many ways in which he built on earlier ideas. C. A. Bayly has argued just that, explaining Gandhi’s success with khadi in terms of precolonial ideas about the transformative moral power of cloth.37 Bayly does not push his point far enough, focusing his search for the roots of Gandhi’s ideas on pre-colonial ideas of the materiality of cloth. Gandhi, however, was never just interested in cloth as a product, in the ability of individual items of clothing to impart particular essences to their wearers. Instead, he also addressed the production, organization, and commercial distribution of cloth—all of which had traditionally been more peripheral to cloth’s moral power. In doing so, Gandhi shifted attention away from the material specificity of cloth and onto its theoretical resonance as a marker of India’s economic and cultural alterity. For Gandhi, it mattered less that an individual dhoti was of fine or coarse weave than that, by virtue of its thread being spun by hand as part of national service, it represented a larger cultural alternative of distinctively Indian national development compared with the modern, industrial West.

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Diverging from Bayly, I emphasize Gandhi’s debt to other sources: the earlier discourses of crafts difference and practices of craft intervention discussed in this book. Those did more than just provide the ground on which Gandhi built his khadi campaigns; they conditioned his strategies. Gandhi’s focus on individual laboring bodies, his insistence on hand labor, and his attempts to extract artisans from the exploitative structures of market capitalism all relied on those who had gone before him, further developing issues that already had established appeal. In this light, Gandhi’s innovations were less the individual achievement of a traditionalist longing for an earlier age than modern attempts to forge a tradition in the face of widespread change. Romanticized Artisanship in the Era of Nehruvian Socialism The story of crafts development in the subcontinent hardly ends with Gandhi. Indeed, the period after independence marks a radical expansion in public interest in crafts. On the one hand, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) expanded the scale of khadi work dramatically, assembling a massive staff and building an extensive network of stores in every major town and city. The KVIC also widened the scope of its focus from khadi to other “village industries”—including village tanning and leather work, beekeeping, oil pressing, pickle making, rug weaving, and mat making—considered to be true to Gandhian ideals in terms of simple technologies, universal applicability, and decentralized production. At the same time, a new range of craft boards, design centers, export promotion bodies, museums, emporia, and exhibitions sprang up to popularize the beauty of Indian decorative crafts—even while encouraging artisans to adapt those crafts to the needs of modern consumers. Together, all of these sought to develop the full range of craft products, from simple utilitarian mats and shoes to the finest embroidered silks and woven carpets, to help Indian artisans prosper in the new nation. In many accounts, 1947 marks a decisive turning point when, building on Gandhi’s commitment to crafts, Indians finally rejected destructive British policies and forged a brand-new era of cultural development. Thus in Som Benegal’s 1960 book for the All India Handicrafts Board (AIHB), The Story of Handicrafts, Indian crafts began “The Fall” from earlier golden times under the British who “set about deliberately destroyed cottage crafts.” “The Revival,” by contrast, came when the “new Indian State” began to tackle “the problem of putting a stop to the final disintegration of handicrafts, of giving them a legitimate place of their own in the


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national economy and of helping them to organise themselves in a manner capable of meeting changing trends and conditions.”38 Much more recently, K. K. Subrahmanian credits the new government in independent India for having “reversed the colonial trend” in crafts; “the indifference of foreign rulers” that had left artisans alone “to deal with the onslaught of market forces” was replaced by new policies “reviving the old and dying craft-tradition and protecting and promoting artisans and handicraft activities through planning and interventionist policies.”39 The financial and institutional interruption posed by 1947 should not, however, efface larger continuities with earlier engagements with crafts. That continuity is obvious with the KVIC, which drew directly from Gandhi’s ideas and efforts even while bureaucratizing his vision. But it is just as true for the major institutions devoted to decorative crafts: the AIHB, the Crafts Museum, and the state-level crafts development agencies. Interestingly, however, these institutions built not on Gandhian ideas but on the very traditions they were supposed to have rejected: pre-Gandhian efforts to document and improve crafts. For one, post-1947 crafts reform focused not on the simple goods Gandhi advocated for use by the poor, but on the sumptuous fineries promoted in the JIAI and elsewhere as luxuries for the upper classes—things such as jewelry, metalcraft, shawls, zari, ivory carving, and carved woodwork. For another, development activists after independence rejected Gandhi’s vision of crafts as the whole of the economy, an ideal form of industry that would ultimately replace modern factories; instead, hearkening back to the ideas of Romesh Chunder Dutt, the Gaekwar of Baroda, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and others, post-1947 reformers positioned crafts as one sector of the economy along with mechanized mills, so that promoting one was entirely compatible with promoting the other. In both cases, post-independence activists offered crafts as a way to ease the transition to modernity by providing a crucial economic fillip as large-scale mills got off the ground and rooting a denationalized population more firmly in its cultural traditions. The opposition between crafts and industry still held; each offered distinctive modes of production and links to the national past. But now this opposition was complementary rather than conflictual, with each side promising to help toward the common goal of building India’s path to the future. Industrialization was inevitable—it was merely up to crafts to make that process easier, economically and culturally. Economically, crafts offered two distinct benefits to the new nation of India: generating employment and expanding exports. Whatever the longterm goal of promoting modern factory work, in the short term jobs had to come in forms compatible with a largely agrarian population. Crafts

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fit this need perfectly; requiring little capital, relying on local technologies, and offering work in the slack season when farmers were otherwise unoccupied, they could offer a whole new source of income in rural areas. As J. M. Lobo Prabhu wrote in 1956, crafts and cottage industries more broadly thus “represent the single largest field of employment for the rural masses, who have, at best, other work for only eight months of the year. When the national dividend is reduced by a third from such unemployment there should be no limits to the assistance which government and the public should give.”40 At the same time they brought internal benefits, crafts offered external ones as well. Badly in need of foreign exchange, India had only a limited number of modern industrial goods that could compete on world markets. Again, building on historic interest for distinctively Indian-looking things, crafts could earn the foreign currency needed to build the country’s long-term strength in other areas.41 Culturally, crafts promised a new source of unity in a crucial period of nation building. Industrialization brought, as Adris Banerji wrote in 1946, “its associated restlessness and lack of tradition and its nomadic existence” in which individual workers become “mere automatons of a soulless master.” One solution to such dangers was to insist, as a nation, on preserving “age old customs and traditions, in spite of progress; refusing to be swept away with the tidal waves of modernism, nevertheless accepting the best that modern civilization has to offer.”42 Crafts, many agreed, did just that. Writers in the 1950s and 1960s returned again and again to how deeply rooted crafts were in Indian culture; they also stressed that those roots were essentially national, representing a collective unconscious that tied together rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and illiterate across the length and breadth of the country. Unlike stories or songs, crafts spoke across linguistic lines; unlike other forms of visual arts like oil painting, they appeared in the homes of all classes. According to crafts activists of the time, this commonality spoke to an earlier age of community orientation rather than individualism, in which specific pieces of embroidery or wood carving spoke to a general need for beauty rather than a particular desire to stand out—an age that, for the crafts pioneer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, resulted in “the toran being hung over the doorway to welcome visitors, the colour painted on the horns of the cattle, the artistic shape in which the scythe is made, . . . a hundred and one simple articles touched gently, delicately, aesthetically.”43 Romanticizing India’s villages as the natural reservoir of such disappearing values, writers offered crafts as a means for urban consumers to return to their traditional roots. In Benegal’s words, India’s myriad artisans offered “thousands of different objects, each made with the time-tested craftsmanship of our workers,


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each contributing a little more of the grace of the old world to enliven your home of today.”44 Alive to these possibilities, numerous public and private institutions sprang up after 1947 to preserve craft skills and develop new markets for craft products. Most prominently the Government of India created the AIHB in 1952 under the Ministry of Commerce to coordinate craft development efforts at the national level, including apprenticeships to train young people under master artisans, design development centers to adapt traditional designs to modern needs, and experiments to improve technologies.45 As crafts were designated a state-level subject under the Indian Constitution, the national efforts of the AIHB were then mirrored and supplemented by handicraft boards set up by the states in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Whether at the national and state level, activists reached out to both artisans and consumers. Thus the AIHB and the Handicrafts and Handlooms Export Corporation of India Ltd. (est. 1962) launched exhibitions in India and overseas, opened state-run emporia, and published books celebrating India’s craft heritage. Complementing their efforts was the national Crafts Museum in New Delhi, on the one hand, and the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, on the other; public and private museums established in 1956–1957 and 1949, respectively, each aimed to document and preserve fine specimens of crafts for the benefit of artisans and customers alike.46 All these initiatives were rooted in the idea of crafts difference, carefully preserving crafts as Indian culture and separating out industry as an influence from the modern West. That can be seen perhaps most clearly in the paths not taken: most specifically in the fact that none of these initiatives tried to help artisans make the transition into mechanized industry, even when that might have represented the most profitable, viable economic path.47 In handlooms, for instance, master weavers in the 1950s began to introduce small power looms that they bought as low-priced cast-offs from mills; this move helped the power loom sector expand dramatically, with the result that as of the mid-1990s it represented 85 percent of India’s fabric exports and employed more than 8 million people. And yet, as Tirthankar Roy points out, that growth happened in spite—not because—of public assistance; indeed, government regulations in the 1950s reserved all cotton saris for handloom production only, cutting off power loom producers from competing in a profitable segment of the textile market.48 Preserving crafts difference has served many of the same political needs after independence as before 1920, particularly in allowing elite intervention into the economic and social work of the lower classes. After 1947, the

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Gandhian-era language—even if rarely put into practice—of individual self-sufficiency and autonomy largely disappeared; now artisans appeared in terms of their contribution—positive or negative—to national progress, to be nurtured and rendered more efficient for the needs of the nation. As one of the central figures in the early years of the AIHB, L. C. Jain, put it in a 1986 article, “The craftsmen are hard at work—sweating for the economy and the policy-maker. It is time for the policy-maker to lift his little finger in their favour. We have a heritage to keep.”49 It was through their contribution to the economy that artisans deserved recognition; their bodies housed a national resource. But, as in the colonial era, it was up to the policy maker to respect and use that resource properly, to extend the protective arms of the benevolent state to save artisans from the depredations of global capitalism. That meant supplying raw materials at concessional rates, offering noncommercial marketing outlets, or even providing pensions to elderly artisans in certain cases. It also meant celebrating artisanal skills through official patronage, whether through direct purchases or via national awards given to recognize mastery in crafts. In most cases, artisans appeared not as economic agents of change, but as welfare beneficiaries of state largesse. Indeed, the more the recognition, the more the largesse; a prestigious national award meant not just a cash prize delivered in a public ceremony by the president of India but also access to further income earned by training new artisans, developing designs, representing India at international exhibitions, and more.50 This is not to discount the marked increase in the scale of official patronage for crafts since 1947. This patronage does represent a much larger public commitment to the crafts sector than under British rule. And yet that commitment has not necessarily transformed the status of India’s artisans; as many scholars have noted, crafts interventions since 1947 have had remarkably little success solving the basic problems of artisanal poverty, poor education, archaic technologies, low social status, and exploitation at the hands of middlemen.51 Part of this failure is due to a continued reliance on colonial-era ideas of crafts—ideas that rendered artisans more and more dependent on outsider leadership thanks to the increased bureaucratic reach of the Indian state. That continuity across the political divide of Indian independence reminds us, again, of the commonalities in British and Indian views of crafts before 1947. For all the close associations between crafts and the nationalist movement, development initiatives rested on a great degree of unanimity across the political divisions of colonial society. Whether British or Indian, conservative or radical, modernizing or traditionalist, many


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reformers by the early twentieth century shared Gandhi’s assumptions with which this book opened: that crafts were important, national, declining, and somehow the responsibility of the public at large. Whatever the solutions posed to the problems of crafts, almost everyone agreed that crafts were a distinct sector of the economy characterized by traditional styles, technologies, labor, and organization. It was precisely this definition by tradition that provided outsiders the excuse to intervene. For all agreed that, while change was inevitable, artisans as a group were too tradition bound to handle it on their own. Hence the need for outside intrusion in the name of enlightened modernization—modernization that would preserve the best elements of artisanal practices, while adapting those practices to new contexts. As discussed throughout this book, such intrusion came in many forms. Art schools, exhibitions, and publications sought to return artisans to traditional design, under the close supervision of educated outsiders. Factory managers and cooperative organizers tried to restore artisanal autonomy, within new forms of group association. Industrial schools, weaving experiments, and handloom training classes tried to first understand artisanal work and then rationalize its technologies in the name of scientific rationality. For all their modernizing impulses, all these interventions carefully maintained a boundary between craft and modern industry. Preserving the “indigenous” in design was a way to resist the fact that many crafts were starting to look like industrial goods; introducing cooperatives fought the specter of industry by insisting that all members be independent artisans, not members of workshops; teaching only basic artisanship in industrial schools kept boys in hand skills and out of modern industry; and finally, improving the handloom industry meant focusing only on hand weavers and ignoring the advantages that lay in motorized looms. Ultimately, such interventions were part of a larger project by which outsider reformers claimed public authority over Indian crafts—a key sector of the economy then in the secretive hands of uneducated, conservative, lower-class artisans. By doing so, British officials and Indian elites hoped to reshape the economy and the social groups that drove it forward, redefining craftwork in the process. Their efforts were determined, however, by their cultural understandings of what the economy was and how it was divided—in other words, by the idea of crafts itself.


Notes

Introduction 1. Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Indian Art, Its Neglect,” Young India 1 no. 8 (May 31, 1919): 3. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. For details on these, see Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 5. Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry, eds., International Arts and Crafts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2005). 6. 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 no. 2 (1979): 105–146; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “‘The Deindustrialization of India’: A Reply,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 16 no. 2 (1979): 147–161; and Colin Simmons. “‘De-industrialization,’ Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850–1947,” Modern Asian Studies 19 no. 3 (1985): 593–622. 7. Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Tirthankar Roy, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Douglas Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and Technological Change in Western India, 1880–1947,” in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, ed. Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173–205; Douglas Haynes, “Artisan Cloth-Producers and the Emergence of Powerloom Manufacture in Western India, 1920–1950,” Past and Present 172 (2001): 170–198; and Willem van Schendel, Reviving a Rural Industry: Silk Producers and Officials in India and Bangladesh, 1880s to 1980s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995). 8. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Other models have been provided, much earlier, in African studies, where scholars have looked at how cultural values inform the meaning of wages, money, and work, thereby demonstrating how core economic categories are shaped by cultural context. See Keletso Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

NOTES

of an African 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 no. 2 (May 1990): 195–216; Jane Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995); and Sharon Hutchinson, “The Cattle of Money and the Cattle of Girls Among the Nuer, 1930–83,” American Ethnologist 19 no. 2 (May 1992): 294–316. For only a few of the most prominent examples, see Catherine Asher and Thomas Metcalf, eds., Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sudipta Kaviraj, “Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India,” in Nationalstaat und Sprachkonflikte in Sud-und Sudostasien, ed. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992): 25–65; Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 104; and John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern London,” Past and Present 168 (2000): 129, 167. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, “Painting with the Needle,” Marg 17 no. 2 (1964): 3. Saloni Mathur, India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California, 2007), 46. Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, 6. Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2006), 275. For similar design reform efforts in England see Adrian Rifkin, “Success Disavowed: The Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain (An Allegory),” Journal of Design History 1 no. 2 (1988): 89, 101. For an overview of the major divisions in the nationalist movement for and against Western models of industrial and economic development, see Ira Klein, “Indian Nationalism and Anti-Industrialization: The Roots of Gandhian Economics,” South Asia 3 (August 1973): 93–104. Goswami, Producing India, 240.

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19. Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880–1905 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966). 20. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002). 21. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 22. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 23. Mathur, India By Design, 48. 24. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty; Mathur, India by Design. 25. Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Carla Sinopoli, The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c. 1350–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 26. Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); G. H. R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and Raymond Head, “Bagshot Park and Indian Crafts,” in Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture, ed. Sarah Macready and F. H. Thompson (London: Society of Antiquarians: Occasional Paper [New Series] VII, 1985), 139–149. 27. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922; Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art. 28. For examples of works that largely ignore politics, see Ritu Kumar, Costumes and Textiles of Royal India (London: Christie’s Books, 1999); Sherry Rehman and Naheed Jafri, Kashmiri Shawl: From Jamavar to Paisley (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin, 2006); B. N. Goswamy, Kalyan Krishna and Tarla P. Dundh, Indian Costumes in the Collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles (Ahmedabad, India: Calico Museum of Textiles, 1993); and Oppi Untracht, Traditional Jewelry of India (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1997). For politics as expressed in and through dress, see Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in Modern India (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 29. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997); Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham : Duke University Press, 2006); and Sumathi Ramaswamy, ed., Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003).

208

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30. C. A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–321. 31. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation. 32. Svati Joshi, “Dalpatram and the Nature of Literary Shifts in NineteenthCentury Ahmedabad,” in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 327–357. 33. Goswami, Producing India, 67, 83. 34. A very expensive, double ikat silk in which color is applied by resist dyeing the warp and weft yarn, traditionally made in Patan and Surat. 35. For various proposals, see George Wilkens Terry to Government of Bombay, April 21, 1864. Maharashtra State Archives (hereafter MSA) General Department (hereafter GD), 1862–64: v. 15, c. 420: 275–279; “The Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art and Industry.” MSA Education Department (hereafter ED) 1875: v. 16, c. 12: 305; K. M. Chatfield to C. Gonne, May 8, 1880. MSA ED 1881: v. 27, c. 7: 140; K. M. Chatfield to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, October 16, 1888. MSA ED 1889: v. 45, c. 8: 142; John Griffiths 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, “Report on the Industrial Conference held in Bombay on 7th and 8th March 1904.” MSA ED 1905: v. 70, c. 7: 36. Hereafter annual reports from that Director of Public Instruction will be referred to as “Report of the DPI for xxxx,” with the Presidency location indicated by author. 36. Lieutenant-Colonel J. Clibborn, C. A. Radice, R. E. Enthoven, and Rev. F. Westcott, Report on Industrial Education: Part I (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903), 30. 37. Large, decorated wooden dowry boxes. 38. A warp-faced textile made with a silk warp and a cotton weft, often woven in striped patterns and popular in Muslim communities. 39. 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. 40. Government of India, Census of India 1961: Vol. V, Part VII-A(21): Selected Crafts of Gujarat—Bandhani or Tie and Dye Sari of Jamnagar (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1969), xi. 41. Asok Mitra, Preface in Government of India, Census of India, 1961: Vol. V, Part VII-A(1): Selected Crafts of Gujarat—Agate Industry of Cambay (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1967), ix. 42. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1900–1901, 35. 43. Government Resolution from the Revenue Department, no. 572, 20 January 1911, appended to the end of Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the

NOTES

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

209

Working of Co-operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency (Including Sind) for the Twelve Months Ending March 31st, 1910 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1910). N. M. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan (Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Publication No. 5, 1936), 7. See John Griffiths, “The Brass and Copper Wares of the Bombay Presidency,” Journal of Indian Art and Industry (hereafter JIAI) 7 no. 55 (July 1896): 13–22. For changes in the brassware industry as a whole, see chap. 5 in Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, particularly pages 134–136. 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. See, for instance, the article on the topic by British novelist Flora Annie Steel in the JIAI: “Phulkari Work in the Punjab,” JIAI 2 no. 24 (1888): 71–72. Michelle Maskiell, “Embroidering the Past: Phulkari Textiles and Gendered Work as ‘Tradition’ and ‘Heritage’ in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab,” Journal of Asian Studies 38 no. 2 (May 1999): 361–388. For details on differentiation and development within crafts generally, see Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India; for information on differentiation within the handloom industry in particular, see chap. 3. Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy.” See, for instance, Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22 no. 1 (1988): 189–224; also the introduction in Nita Kumar, Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000). A workshop or small factory owner. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7 no. 1 (1992): 16. Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India; Roy, Artisans and Industrialization; Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy”; and Haynes, “Artisan Cloth-Producers and the Emergence of Powerloom Manufacture in Western India.” Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988): 88–126.

Chapter 1 1. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2 (London: Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851), 858. 2. For descriptions of the contents of the Indian Court, see The Crystal Palace and its Contents: Being An Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the

210

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

NOTES

Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: W. M. Clark, 1852), 65–69 and 100– 103; and Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 857–937. Carol Breckenridge, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 31 no. 2 (1989): 205. Quoted in Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (London: John Tallis & Co., 1852), 239. See also John Forbes Royle writing in the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 859–860. For early European attempts to document Indian dyeing and printing see the work of Paul R. Schwartz, including Printing on Cotton at Ahmedabad, India, 1678 (Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, Museum Monograph No. 1, 1969); “French Documents on Indian Cotton Painting: The Beaulieu ms., c. 1734,” Journal of Indian Textile History 2 (1956): 5–23; and “The Roxburgh Account of Indian Cotton Painting, 1795,” Journal of Indian Textile History 4 (1959): 47–56. See also George Watt, “Note on a Red and a Yellow Dye Said to Have Been Prepared in Bombay During 1787,” in Selections from the Records of the Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, vol. 1, part 1:1888–89 (Calcutta, 1889): 53–58. Schwartz, Printing on Cotton at Ahmedabad. Buchanan’s survey was only finally edited and published some thirty years later by Montgomery Martin as The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1838). Carla Sinopoli, The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c. 1350–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 5; Tripta Verma, Karkhanas Under the Mughals from Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Economic Development (Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1994). C. A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, ca. 1750–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 50–51. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). David Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 252. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. Quoted in Lala Baji Nath, “Some Factors in the Industrial and Commercial Development of India,” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras on Saturday, the 30th December, 1905 (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1906), 299. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See, for instance, David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

NOTES

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

211

1995); James Mill and Satadru Sen, eds., Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004). For a more extended discussion of the emergence of a new definition of what constituted “traditional” Indian design, see Abigail McGowan, “‘All That is Rare, Characteristic or Beautiful’: Design and the Defense of Tradition in Colonial India, 1851–1903,” Journal of Material Culture 10 no. 3 (2005): 263–287. John Forbes Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1851), Appendix: “Papers Referring to the Proposed Contributions from India for the Industrial Exhibition of 1851,” 590–591. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Lara Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 149; Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 115–117. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 857; Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 100. John Forbes Royle, “Lecture XI: The Arts and Manufactures of India,” in Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: David Bogue, 1852), 397. Owen Jones made his comments as chair of John Forbes Royle’s lecture to the Society of Arts. (Forbes Royle, “Lecture XI: The Arts and Manufactures of India,” 401). Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day & Son, 1856). Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, 240, 238. The Cambridge scientist William Whewell spoke for many when he dismissed the beauty of India’s crafts as a sign of barbarism. Thus he argued that, within India, “the arts are mainly exercised to gratify the tastes of the few; with us, to supply the wants of the many. There, the wealth of a province is absorbed in the dress of a mighty warrior; here, the gigantic weapons of the peaceful potentate are used to provide clothing for the world.” William Whewell, “The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” in Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: David Bogue, 1852), 14. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 936. Matthew Digby Wyatt, “Orientalism in European Industry,” Macmillan’s Magazine 21 (1870): 553. Matthew Digby Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Illustrations of the Choicest Specimens Produced by Every Nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851, 2 vols. (London: Day & Son, 1851, 1853).

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28. Larry D. Lutchmansingh, “Commodity Exhibitionism at the London Great Exhibition of 1851,” Annals of Scholarship 7 no 2 (1990): 207, 208. 29. Royle, “Lecture XI: The Arts and Manufactures of India,” 391. 30. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, 239. 31. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, 133–134. 32. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 857–937. 33. Ibid., 932. 34. The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, 101. 35. Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India, Appendix, 586–587. 36. Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1852]), 142. 37. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. 3, 1856) as quoted in Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 240–241. 38. Royle. “Lecture XI: The Arts and Manufactures of India,” 331. 39. See, for example, Schwartz, Printing on Cotton at Ahmedabad; Schwartz, “French Documents on Indian Cotton Painting”; Schwartz, “The Roxburgh Account of Indian Cotton Painting”; and Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 182 (February 2004): 85–142. 40. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 2, 163. 41. Ibid., 193. 42. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 931. 43. Compared with the 30,000 square feet allotted to India in 1851, the Indian Courts at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London occupied some 103,000 square feet; the space given over to the subcontinent at the Empire Exhibition of 1924 was larger still, totaling five acres. (Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, Resolution, Cir. No. 15/5–8, February 17, 1888. Baroda Public Records Office [hereafter BPRO], Huzur English Office, Misc. Dept. section 65, file 8A. Arindam Dutta, “The Politics of Display: India 1886 and 1986,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 30–31 [1997]: 120). 44. Other major Indian exhibitions in the nineteenth century included Madras (1855), Hyderabad (1856), Coimbatore (1857), Calcutta (1864, 1873, and 1883), Lahore (1864, 1881, and 1893), Nagpur (1865), Jubbulpore (1866), Agra (1867), Akola (1867), Karachi (1869), and Mysore (1888). For a discussion of Indian incorporation into a global exhibitionary project, see Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 45. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21.

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46. Ibid., 30. 47. Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India, Appendix, 593–595. 48. For a listing of major international exhibitions, with a focus particularly on England, Australia, and India, see the bibliography in Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display. 49. S. F. Markham and H. Hargreaves, The Museums of India (London: Museums Association, 1936), 6–7. 50. See John Forbes Watson, The International Exhibition of 1862: Classified and Descriptive Catalogue of the Indian Department (London: Her Majesty’s Commissioners, 1862), iv; Report on the Jubbulpore Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Produce, December 1866 (Nagpur: Central Provinces Printing Press, 1867), 2; General Report of the North-West Provinces Exhibition, Held at Agra, February 1867 (Roorkee: Thomason Civil Engineering College Press, 1868), 20; and Dr Birdwood to Government of Bombay, July 14, 1880. MSA: ED 1880: v. 21, c. 277. 51. Lieut. A. Y. Shortt to Henry Carter, July 8, 1854. MSA: GD 1856: v. 73, c. 92. 52. “The Carved Teak Wood Screen of the Bombay Court,” JIAI 1 no. 11 (May 1886): 82. 53. Henry Y. D. Scott, Memorandum: International Exhibition of 1872: Representation of Peasant Jewellery, August 8, 1871. MSA: GD 1871: v. 21, c. 8. 54. T. C. Hope, Report on the Broach Exhibition of 1868–69 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1869), 8–9. 55. Ibid., 14. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 11–12. Organizer of the machinery exhibits, the Khandesh collector L. R. Ashburner specifically excluded from the exhibition anything he thought unsuitable for Indian conditions, fearing that the “impression on the native mind would have been such as seriously to check the introduction of machinery generally.” (Ibid., 11–12). 58. Elphinstone, Letter to Minute No. 4739 of 1855, August 31, 1855. MSA: GD 1855: v. 61, c. 814. 59. Dr. Henry Carter to Secretary to the Local Committee of Surat and Broach, August 21, 1854. MSA: GD 1856: v. 73, c. 92. 60. Ibid. 61. Reverend Dr. Alexander Garden Fraser to W. Hart, June 19, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 55, c. 34. 62. Dr. Wellington Gray to K. M. Chatfield, April 21, 1876. MSA: GD 1876: v. 67, c. 485. Dr. D. MacDonald to Deputy Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, December 17, 1898. MSA: ED 1898: v. 54, c. 534. 63. David Washbrook, “Agriculture and Industrialization in Colonial India,” in Agriculture and Industrialization, ed. Peter Mathias and John A. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 168. 64. Dr. Wellington Gray to Director of Public Instruction, Bombay, November 22, 1873. MSA: GD 1874: v. 42, c. 316; Dr. Wellington Gray to K. M. Chatfield, April 21, 1876. MSA: GD 1876: v. 67, c. 485.

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65. Dr. George Birdwood to William Hart, July 19, 1858. MSA: GD 1858: v. 64, c. 15. 66. Dr. George Birdwood to Secretary to Government, General Department, May 15, 1861. MSA: GD 1861: v. 7, c. 82. 67. Italics in the original. John Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India (reprinted by the Indological Book House, Varanasi, 1982 [1866]), 3. 68. Deborah Swallow, “The India Museum and the British-Indian Textile Trade in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Textile History 30 no. 1 (1999): 29–45. 69. Governor Fitzgerald quoted in Hope, Report on the Broach Exhibition of 1868– 69, Appendix D: Address of the Broach Exhibition Committee and Reply of His Excellency the Governor, 31–32. 70. Ibid., Appendix G: Selections from Reports of the Jurors, 53–55. 71. Ibid., Appendix F: List of Prizes Awarded at the Broach Exhibition of 1868, 44–48. 72. Ibid., Appendix G, 50. 73. George Wilkins Terry and E. W. Ravenscroft to Chief Secretary to Government, General Department, July 30, 1872. MSA: GD 1872: v. 24, c. 588: 73. 74. C. Bernard, Report on the Arts, Manufactures and Produce at the Nagpur Exhibition (Nagpur, 1866), 22. 75. Elphinstone, Minute No. 4739 of 1855, August 31, 1855. MSA: GD 1855: v. 61, c. 814; 128. 76. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chaps. 7–10. 77. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ed., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Mill and Sen, eds., Confronting the Body. 78. Thomas Holbein Hendley, London Indo-Colonial Exhibition of 1886: Handbook of the Jeypore Courts (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1886), 26. 79. “Sir George C. M. Birdwood, K.C.I.E., C.S.I, M.D., LL.D.: His Life and Work,” JIAI 8 no. 65 (1899): 45–47. 80. George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India (London: Chapman & Hall, 1880), 1–2. 81. Ibid., 154–162. 82. Ibid., 312. 83. Government of Bombay, General Department, Resolution No. 3395 of 1880, November 10, 1880. MSA: ED 1880: v. 27, c. 505. 84. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, vi. 85. P. S. Melvill to Acting Minister of the Baroda State, February 12, 1881. BPRO: Huzur English Office, Rev. Dept. section 238, file 1. 86. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVIII, Part II: Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1885), 173–210. 87. Government of Bombay, General Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1871–72 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1873), 364–368.

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215

88. Swallow, “The India Museum and the British-Indian Textile Trade in the Late Nineteenth Century.” This lack of interest in production was revealed in the basic organizing principles of the project, which separated goods out “according to function, quality, material and decoration.” (Watson, The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India, 4.) Since weaving techniques were not part of his basic classification structure, silk-bordered cottons woven on identical looms appeared scattered throughout the survey according to their use as turbans, saris, or dhotis. 89. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVIII, Part II: Poona, 186–191. 90. Ibid., Vol. XVI: Nasik (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1883), 51–53, 145–146. 91. Ibid., Vol. V: Cutch, Palanpur, and Mahi Kantha (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1880), 123–124. 92. See, for instance, H. J. R. Twigg’s monograph on carpet weaving in the Bombay Presidency, the first chapter of which summarizes information on carpet weaving from all the district gazetteers of the presidency. H. J. R. Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice of Carpet-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 1908 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series on Bombay Presidency [New Delhi: Navrang, 1976]). As the Diwan of Baroda, Kazi Shahabudin, argued in 1881, because crafts changed little from year to year, “a description of them once given will hold good for a long period.” (Kazi Shahabudin to P. S. Melvill, February 24, 1881. BPRO: Huzur English Office, Rev. Dept. section 238, file 1.) 93. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XX: Sholapur (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), 269. 94. Ibid., 103–118, 138. 95. Government of India, Home Department (Education), Resolution No. 1999, June 18, 1888. MSA: ED 1888: v. 64, c. 563: 102. 96. John Griffiths to L. Harvey, January 8, 1894. MSA: ED 1894: v. 33, c. 70: 267; Government of Bombay, Resolution No. 776, March 2, 1894. MSA: ED 1894: v. 33, c. 70: 307. See his report “Brass and Copper Wares of the Bombay Presidency,” JIAI 7 no. 55 (July 1896): 13–22. 97. Government of India, Home Department (Education), Resolution No. 1999, June 18, 1888. MSA: ED 1888: v. 64, c. 563: 102. 98. J. R. Martin, A Monograph on Tanning and Working in Leather in the Bombay Presidency, 1903 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 318–319); E. Maconochie, A Monograph on the Pottery and Glass-Ware of the Bombay Presidency, 1895 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 263); R. R. F. Kirk, A Monograph on Paper-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 1907? (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 306, 309). 99. Five of the monographs (on silk, dyeing, pottery, iron and steel, and leather) had separate sections devoted to the key castes involved in production; the remaining studies only named different castes, without giving ethnographic detail on their customs, habits, or general characteristics.

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100. C. G. H. Fawcett, A Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in the Bombay Presidency, 1908 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 87). 101. Ibid., 90. 102. In his monograph on carpet weaving in the Bombay Presidency, H. J. R. Twigg laid even more emphasis on the embodied, experiential nature of dyeing knowledge. His section on dyeing of wool for carpets, for instance, included no recipes for dyes at all, as he declared they would only be “especially wearying and of no practical use whatsoever. It is only in the dye-shed itself that dyeing can be learned.” (Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice of Carpet-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 180.) 103. Quoted in John Griffiths to K M. Chatfield, June 22, 1883. MSA: ED 1883: v. 21, c. 706: 187. 104. Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, Resolution No. 1, January 3, 1884. MSA: ED 1892: v. 51, c. #583: 1. 105. The Story of the Sir J. J. School of Art (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1958), 47–54. 106. K. M. Chatfield to C. Gonne, May 8, 1880. MSA: ED 1881: v. 27, c. 7; Government of Bombay, General Department. Letter to Resolution, No. 2526 of 1884, July 19, 1884. MSA: ED 1884: v. 25, c. 115. 107. Government of Bombay, General Department. Letter to Resolution, No. 2526 of 1884, July 19, 1884. MSA: ED 1884: v. 25, c. 115, 42. 108. Ibid. 109. Dr. D. Macdonald to Municipal Commissioner for City of Bombay, May 25, 1886. MSA: ED 1886: v. 28, c. 534. 110. Thomas Holbein Hendley, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883, vol. 1 (London: W. Griggs, 1884), v. 111. G. H. R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 66. 112. Quoted in “The Opening of the Albert Hall and Museum at Jeypore,” JIAI 2 no. 19 (1888): 21; Thomas Holbein Hendley, Handbook to the Jeypore Museum (Calcutta: W. Griggs, 1895), 2. For a similar description of the carving work at the Jaipur Museum, see Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co., 1891), 23. 113. For an analysis of its role in documenting and defining traditional design see Deepali Dewan, “Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past: The Journal of Indian Art and Industry and the Production of Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie Codell (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 29–44. 114. Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, Resolution No. 1, January 3, 1884. MSA: ED 1892: v. 51, c. 583: 1. 115. Dewan, “Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past,” 35. “An Annotated Index to the Arts and Industries of India: The North-West Provinces and Oudh,” JIAI 1 no. 7 (July 1885): 1.

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116. “An Annotated Index to the Arts and Industries of India,” 3. 117. Dewan, “Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past,” 36. 118. For an overview of Hendley’s contributions to Indian arts, see “The Late Colonel Thomas Holbein Hendley,” JIAI 17 no. 136 (1917): 82–86. 119. Hendley, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883, vol. 1, v. 120. B. A. Brendon, “Woollen Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency,” JIAI 10 no. 82 (April 1903): 17–18; S. M. Edwardes, “Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency,” JIAI 10 no. 81 (January 1903): 1–6. 121. Compare, for instance, Edwardes’ 1900 A Monograph upon the Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency and his article “Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency,” which appeared in the JIAI in January 1903. 122. Quoted in Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1890–91, 27. 123. Hendley, London Indo-Colonial Exhibition of 1886, 12. 124. Ibid., 13. 125. Clare Wilkinson-Weber, “Women, Work and the Imagination of Craft in South Asia,” Contemporary South Asia 13 no. 3 (September 2004): 296–297. 126. J. R. Royle quoted in E. C. Buck, Resolution, Cir. No. 15/5–8, Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, February 17, 1888. BPRO: Huzur English Office, Misc. Dept. section 65, file 8A. 127. Quoted in Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 186. 128. L. R. W. Forest to John Griffiths, July 3, 1890. MSA: ED 1890: v. 24, c. 624. 129. Director of Public Instruction to Secretary to Government, General Department, October 17, 1904. MSA: ED 1904: v. 27, c. 579: 55. 130. “Appendix VIII: Speeches made at opening ceremony of industrial and agricultural exhibition at Benaras,” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, lxxxvii–lxxxviii. 131. Dewan, “Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past,” 40. 132. Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 4, 30, 31. 133. Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 133. 134. 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), 228–229. 135. Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” 270. 136. Seth, Subject Lessons, 172–176. 137. John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern London,” Past and Present 168 (August 2000): 124–169. 138. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan Aapva Vishe” [Regarding encouragement to be given to native arts and crafts], Buddhiprakash 23 no. 8 (1876): 170. To give but one example, the 1879 government gazetteer noted that Muslim paper makers in Ahmedabad bound community members to secrecy on production

218

139.

140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

NOTES

matters, while in other crafts parents refused to teach their daughters for fear that the latter would divulge family secrets to their husband’s household after marriage. (Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IV: Ahmedabad [Bombay: Government Central Press, 1879], 134.) Michele Archambault, “Blockprinted Fabrics of Gujarat for Export to Siam: An Encounter with Mr. Maneklal T. Gajjar,” Journal of the Siam Society 77 no. 2 (1989): 71–74. For other examples of such family pattern books, see Jim Masselos, “The Artist as Patron: Women’s Embroidery in Gujarat,” in Popular Art in Asia: The People as Patrons, ed. Jim Masselos (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1984): 34–46. Manecklal Gajjar, Interview, November 9, 2000, Pethapur, Gujarat. For more on the transition from private to public design in the late nineteenth century, see Abigail McGowan, “Private Goods in the Public Eye: Design Books for Crafts in Late Nineteenth Century India,” paper presented at the 34th Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin, October 6–9, 2005. Tirthankar Roy, “Music as Artisan Tradition,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 no. 1 (1998): 21–42. Deepali Dewan, “The Body at Work: Colonial Art Education and the Figure of the ‘Native Craftsman,’” in Confronting the Body, 127. Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnographic Exhibits: The Case of 1886,” Cultural Anthropology 15 no. 4 (2001): 507. T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (London: Edward Stanford, 1889), 99. Griffiths, “Brass and Copper Wares of the Bombay Presidency,” 14.

Chapter 2 1. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan” [Encouragement to native crafts and industry], Buddhiprakash, 24 no. 1 (January 1877): 10–14. 2. “Udhyog” [Industry], Buddhiprakash 44 no. 7 (July 1897): 205–212. 3. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejanne Lagti Babad” [Regarding the encouragement and promotion of native crafts and industry], Buddhiprakash 24 no. 7 (July 1877): 152. 4. “Hunnar” [Industry], Stri Bodh 37 no. 9 (September 1893): 193. 5. “Masik Nondh” [Monthly notes], Buddhiprakash 50 no. 3 (March, 1903): 91. 6. “Hunnar,” Stri Bodh (September 1893): 193. 7. See, for example, the suggestions offered in “Udhyog,” Buddhiprakash (July 1897): 205. 8. “Masik Nondh,” Buddhiprakash (March, 1903): 91. 9. Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), 255–256. 10. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6. 11. David Ludden, ‘India’s Development Regime,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 252.

NOTES

219

12. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan-Part 1” [Encouragement to native crafts and industries-Part 1] Buddhiprakash 24 no. 4 (April 1877): 76. 13. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 124–131. 14. Glyn Barlow, Industrial India (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1904), 69. 15. Ibid., 118. 16. Romesh C. Dutt, “Industrial India: A Review,” The Indian Review 5 no. 7 (July 1904): 440. 17. “Hunnar na Chupavi Rakhva Vishe: Bhashan” [Regarding keeping industry secret: A speech], Buddhiprakash, 2 no. 2 (February 1856): 33–34. 18. “Hunnar na Chupavi Rakhva Vishe: Bhashan” [Regarding keeping industry secret: A speech] (continued from previous issue), Buddhiprakash 2 no. 3 (March 1856): 46. 19. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan-Part 2” [Encouragement for native arts and craftsPart 2], Buddhiprakash, 23 no. 10 (October 1876): 238. 20. David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives from South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 251. 21. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, Vol. II (London: Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851), 936, 929. 22. Quoted in John Forbes Royle, “Lecture XI: The Arts and Manufactures of India,” in Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: David Bogue, 1852), 398. 23. See, for example, Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1852]), 130–167. 24. For a sense of these influences, see Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry, eds., International Arts and Crafts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2005). 25. George Birdwood, Two Letters on the Industrial Arts of India (London: W. B. Whittington and Co., 1879), 3–4. 26. Naazia Ata-Ullah, “Stylistic Hybridity and Colonial Art and Design Education: A Wooden Carved Screen by Ram Singh,” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (New York: Routledge, 1998), 70. 27. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 312. 28. Flora Annie Steel, “Phulkari Work in the Punjab,” JIAI 2 no. 24 (1888): 71, 72. 29. “The British Indian Section, Paris Universal Exhibition, 1889,” JIAI 3 no. 28 (1890): 22. 30. Steel, “Phulkari Work in the Punjab,” 71, 72.

220 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

NOTES

Thomas Wardle, “The Indian Silk Culture Court,” JIAI 1 no. 15 (1886): 117. Ibid., 122. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 312. Ibid., 334, 336. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908); Rajput Painting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1916); The Dance of Siva (New York: Sunwise Turn, 1918); The History of Indian and Indonesian Art (New York: E. Weyhe, 1927). On issues unrelated to crafts, Coomaraswamy and Birdwood had much less in common. Their sharpest differences arose around the question of Indian fine arts; Coomaraswamy was one of the earliest, most impassioned defenders of the beauty, sophistication, and worth of Indian painting and sculpture, while Birdwood, as his infamous comparison of an image of the Buddha to a suet pudding demonstrated, found no value in them whatsoever. Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy, vol. 3: His Life and Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), chap. 5. Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Indian Craftsman (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt, Ltd, 1989 [1909]), 58. Alvin C. Moore, Jr., “Foreword,” The Indian Craftsman, xii–xiii. T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (London: Edward Stanford, 1889), 222–223. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (London: John Tallis & Co., 1852), 193. Ibid., 236. See also The Crystal Palace and Its Contents: Being An Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: W. M. Clark, 1852), 101. William Whewell, “The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” in Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: David Bogue, 1852), 15. Prem Behari, “Industrial Development of India,” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras on Saturday, the 30th December, 1905 (Allahabad: the Indian Press, 1906), xxxiii. Ibid. Alfred Chatterton, “The Salem Weaving Factory,” in Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat on the 30th December 1907 (Madras: Indian Industrial Conference, 1908), 196. Behari, “Industrial Development of India,” xxxiii. Thomas Wardle, Tissue or Textile Printing as an Art: A Lecture Delivered at the Manchester Municipal School of Art Museum on Wednesday, March 15, 1890 (Manchester: Marsden & Co., 1890), 13. Brenda M. King, Silk and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pt. 2. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IV: Ahmedabad (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1879), 141, 111.

NOTES

221

51. See, for instance, D. A. Shah, An Historical Summary and Critical Examination of the Indian Point of View in Economics: Being the Manockjee Limjee Gold Medal Essay of the University of Bombay, for the Year 1916 (Bombay: Bombay Vaibhav Press, 1920), 55; and “Hunnar Vishe” [Regarding industry], Buddhiprakash 17 no 2 (February 1870): 32. 52. “The Exigencies of Progress in India,” Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 15 no. 4 (April 1893): 23. 53. R. N. Mudholkar, “Presidential Address,” in The Industrial Conference held at Madras, December 1908 (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1909), 19. 54. Quoted in B. G. Kale, “Small Industries in India,” The Indian Review 12 no. 1 (January 1911): 77. 55. Alfred Chatterton, Agricultural and Industrial Problems in India (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1904), 137. 56. Indian Industrial Commission, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Indian Industrial Commission, 1916–1918, Vol. IV: Bombay (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1919), 245, 323. 57. “The Exigencies of Progress in India,” 16–17. 58. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, 77–78. No less a person than the great chemist P. C. Ray agreed; see S. Irfan Habib, “Science, Technical Education and Industrialisation: Contours of a Bhadralok Debate, 1890–1915,” in Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technology Transfers to India, ed. Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (New Delhi: Sage, 1993), 119. See also Barlow, Industrial India, 57, 61. 59. Alfred Chatterton, Industrial Evolution in India (Madras: “The Hindu” Office, 1912), 54. See also Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–84: Reports of the Bombay Committee and Others (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1884), Appendix E., Mr. Griffiths’ Report, 14. 60. John Wallace, “Technical Education for the Workman,” in Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat, 47–48. 61. Lala Baji Nath, “Some Factors in the Industrial and Commercial Development of India,” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 300. See also Charles Harvey as quoted in “The Art Crafts of India,” The Indian Review 17 no. 2 (February 1916): 140. 62. “Udhyog,” Buddhiprakash (July 1897): 209. 63. “The Gaekwar on the Industrial Development of India,” The Indian Review 3 no. 12 (December 1902): 633. 64. For a discussion of the development and content of the village republic ideal and its implications for South Asia, see Jan Breman, The Shattered Image: Construction and Deconstruction of the Village in Colonial South Asia, (Providence, RI: Foris Publications, 1988); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). 65. See for instance B. R. Grover, “An Integrated Pattern of Commercial Life in the Rural Society of North India during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Money and the Market in India, 1100–1700, ed. Sanjay

222

66. 67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

NOTES

Subramhmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990): 219–255; David Ludden, “Craft Production in an Agrarian Economy,” in Making Things in South Asia: The Role of Artist and Craftsman, Philadelphia: Department of South Asia Regional Studies, ed. Michael Meister (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1988), 103–113. Christopher Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 331–332. That specificity of taste had motivated John Forbes Watson’s compilation of The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India, discussed in Chapter 1. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IX, Part I: Gujarat Population—Hindus (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1901), 191, 202. C. G. H. Fawcett, A Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in the Bombay Presidency, 1908, (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series on Bombay Presidency [New Delhi: Navrang, 1976], 84. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVIII, Part I: Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1885), 343, 340. Government of India, Census of India 1961, Vol. V, Part VII-A(2): Selected Crafts of Gujarat—Wood Carving of Gujarat (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1967), 34–36. G. P. Fernandes, Report on the Art-Crafts of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1932), 28–30, 70. See Tirthankar Roy, “Acceptance of Innovations in Early Twentieth-Century Indian Weaving,” Economic History Review 60 no. 3 (2002): 507–532; and Douglas Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and Technological Change in Western India, 1880–1947,” in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, ed. Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996): 173–205. Interview with Manecklal Gajjar, Pethapur, December 2000. See also Jyotindra Jain, “Saudagiri Prints: Textiles for Far-Off Siam,” The India Magazine (October 1985): 54–63. Douglas Haynes, “The Dynamics of Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry: Jari Manufacture in Surat, 1900–1947,” in Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India, ed. Tirthankar Roy (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996), 304– 305; Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 107–109, 114–115; J. Nissim, A Monograph on Wire and Tinsel in the Bombay Presidency, 1909, (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages), 298–302. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVIII, Part II: Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1885), 176, 184. See Roy, “Acceptance of Innovations in Early Twentieth-Century Indian Weaving”; and Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy.”

NOTES

223

78. Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy,” 175. 79. Tirthankar Roy, “Out of Tradition: Master Artisans and Economic Change in Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 66 no. 4 (November 2007): 966. 80. Ibid., 975–977. 81. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “Cultural and Social Constraints on Technological Innovation and Economic Development,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 3 no. 3 (1966): 250–252. 82. Ibid., 261. 83. Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1988). 84. Similar obscurantism operated in agriculture. As David Ludden has argued: “The Company collected data that could have been used to construct very different images of rural India. . . . But alternative formations were obscured and marginalized . . . by the political process that wielded authority in the production of knowledge about India.” (Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism,” 262.) 85. See, for example, Report of the Work of the Indian Industrial Conference, Including a Record of General Industrial Activity in the Country (Madras: Thompson & Co., 1907), 42. 86. See, respectively, D. C. Churchill, “The Hand-loom in Ahmednagar,” 208–217; and Alfred Chatterton, “The Salem Weaving Factory,” 190–208; see also Chunilal B. Desai, “Hand-loom Weaving in India,” 217–225. All are in Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat. 87. Quoted in “Hindi Hunnar Udyog Parishad” [The Indian industrial conference], Buddhiprakash 53 no. 1 (January 1906): 27. 88. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 1–2, 320. 89. For a discussion of this as a common practice in colonial writings about Indian society, see Bernard Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 143. 90. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1994 [1912]), 3–4. 91. Coomaraswamy, “Young India,” in Dance of Siva, 132. 92. Ibid., 134. 93. Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, “Introduction: Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives from South Asia, 12. 94. Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 95. Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India Under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2001.) 96. Svati Joshi, “Dalpatram and the Nature of Literary Shifts in NineteenthCentury Ahmedabad,” in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 327–357. See also R. L. Raval, “Tradition and Modernity in

224

97. 98.

99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

NOTES

the Context of Social Reform Movements in Gujarat during the Nineteenth Century,” Vidya 19 no. 2 (August 1976): 88–102. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan Aapva Vishe,” Buddhiprakash (August 1876), 173. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 231–232; Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” 268–269. Mahadev Govind Ranade, “Industrial Conference,” in Essays on Indian Economics: A Collection of Essays and Speeches (Bombay: Thacker & Company, Ltd., 1899), 181. Joshi, “Dalpatram and the Nature of Literary Shifts,” 332. Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 5. Prakash, Another Reason, 157, 160. Goswami, Producing India, 274–276. Government of Bombay, Report on Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency for the Week Ending 28 September 1895, 9. “Udhyogoddhar” [Uplift of industry], Buddhiprakash 50 no. 10 (October 1903): 300. Ranade, “Industrial Conference,” 203–204.

Chapter 3 1. Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy to Viscount Falkland, May 9, 1853. MSA: GD 1853: v. 85, c. 527. 2. Cutch State. Report on the Administration of the Cutch State for 1885–86 (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Steam Press, 1886), 80. 3. Pandit Natesa Sastu, “The Decline of South Indian Arts: Continued,” JIAI, 3 no. 29 (1890): 28. 4. Ibid., 31. 5. Ibid., 30, 32. 6. Annie E. Coombs, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 7. George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880), 132. 8. George Birdwood, Two Letters on the Industrial Arts of India (London: W. B. Whittington and Co., 1879), 9. 9. Samarendra Nath Gupta, “The Place of Art in Indian Industries,” in Report of the Ninth Indian Industrial Conference: Held at Karachi on the 25th December 1913 (Amraoti: Indian Industrial Conference, 1914), 242. 10. Glyn Barlow, Industrial India (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1904), 115. 11. As Annie Coombes has noted, this was hardly confined to India; indeed, fears about racial purity informed wide-ranging discussions of degeneration in art in this period. (Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 41, 56.) 12. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.

NOTES

225

13. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Bernard Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 303–353; Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 14. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 334, 336. 15. Thomas Wardle, “The Indian Silk Culture Court,” JIAI 1 no. 15 (1886): 122. 16. Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Indian Craftsman (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt, Ltd, 1989 [1909]), 35–36. 17. Ibid., 52. 18. Ibid., 41. 19. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 272. 20. Romesh Chunder Dutt, “The Economic Condition of India” in Speeches and Papers on Indian Questions 1901 and 1902 (Calcutta: Elm Press, 1902), 81. 21. Romesh Chunder Dutt, “Industrial India: A Review,” The Indian Review 5 no. 7 (July 1904): 440. 22. As Annie Coombes notes for the case of Africa, arguments about cultural decline appealed to audiences across the racial divide of colonial societies, supporting British claims to the need for continued power over backward natives as well as native critiques of imperial rule. (Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 38–39.) 23. Cecil Burns, “The Function of Schools of Art in India,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (June 18, 1909): 629. 24. Ibid., 630. 25. Ibid., 631. 26. Ibid. 27. J. A. Crowe to Venayek Wassordeo, July 14, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 36, c. 95: 219. 28. Emphasis in the original. Ibid. 29. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1857–58, 103. 30. Barbara Whitney Keyser, “Ornament as Idea: Indirect Imitation of Nature in the Design Reform Movement,” Journal of Design History 11 no. 2 (1998): 127–144; Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), 103–106. 31. Drawing classes also formed the core of education for artisans in Britain, although for slightly different reasons. See Adrian Rifkin, “Success Disavowed: The Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain (An Allegory),” Journal of Design History 1 no. 2 (1988): 89–102; Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, 22. 32. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1857–58, 100. 33. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922

226

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

NOTES

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty. George Terry, “Appendix M: Extract Report from the Acting Superintendent of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Arts and Industry” in Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1858–59, 394. Harry Rivett-Carnac, “Report of the Chairman of the Internal Decoration and Arrangement Committee” in Report on the Arts, Manufactures and Produce at the Nagpur Exhibition, 1865 (Nagpur, 1866), 74. George T. Molecey to Venayeek Wassoodeojee, April 9, 1868. MSA: GD 1868: v. 1, c. 155: 96. John Griffiths to Venayak Wassordeo, April 8, 1868. MSA: GD 1868: v. 1, c. 155: 93–94. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art; and Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India. For an overview of the Ajanta project and its influence on the JJ School, see The Story of the Sir J. J. School of Art (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1958), 47–54. Quoted in Ibid., 51. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1890–91, 27. Quoted in Ibid. Burns, “The Function of Schools of Art in India,” 637. For a recent exploration of hybrid designs in silver specifically, see Vidya Dehejia, Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2008). Report of the Conference as Regards Museums in India, Held at Calcutta on Dec. 27th to 31st, 1907 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908), 24. Mahrukh Tarapor, “John Lockwood Kipling and British Art Education in India,” Victorian Studies 24 (Autumn 1980): 53–80; Naazish Ata-Ullah, “Stylistic Hybridity and Colonial Art and Design Education: A Wooden Carved Screen by Ram Singh” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (New York: Routledge, 1998): 68–81; and Raymond Head, “Bagshot Park and Indian Crafts” in Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture, ed. Sarah Macready and F. H. Thompson (London: Society of Antiquarians, 1985): 139–149. “Memoir of the Late Colonel T. H. Hendley, CIE,” JIAI 17 no 136 (1917): 82–86. Lockwood de Forest to Louis Tiffany, April 24, 1881. Lockwood de Forest papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter LDFPAAA). Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 261 and 821–826. Thomas Holbein Hendley, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883, vol 1 (London: W. Griggs, 1884), v. Hendley, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883, vol 1, vi. “Extract from the Proceedings of the Government of India, in the Revenue and Agricultural Department (Museums and Exhibitions), dated January 3, 1884,” JIAI 1 no. 1 (1884): 5, 4; “Extract from the Proceedings of the Government of

NOTES

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

227

India in the Department of Revenue and Agriculture, dated Calcutta, the 14th March, 1883,” JIAI 1 no. 1 (1884): 4. E. C. Buck, “Proceedings of the Arts and Museums Committee held on Friday the 7th December 1883.” MSA: ED 1892: v. 51, c. 583: 38. E. C. Buck, Report on Practical and Technical Education (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1901), 40. Buck, “Proceedings of the Arts and Museums Committee held on Friday the 7th December 1883,” 38. Volume one, number 6 of 1884, for instance, included articles on Bidri ware, “Rustic Ornamentation” and “Japanese and Indian Lacquer”. Vikramaditya Prakash, “Between Copying and Creation: The Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details” in Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, ed. Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (New York: Routledge, 2007): 115–125. Technical Art Series of Illustrations of Indian Architectural Decorative Work (Calcutta: Survey of India Offices, 1892). Technical Art Series of Illustrations of Indian Architectural Decorative Work (Calcutta: Survey of India Offices, 1894), plate 2. Technical Art Series of Illustrations of Indian Architectural Decorative Work (Calcutta: Survey of India Offices, 1886–1892), plate 17. Thomas Holbein Hendley, Asian Carpets: XVI and XVII Century Designs from the Jaipur Palaces from Material Supplied with Permission of the Maharaja of Jaipur and Other Sources (London: W. Griggs, 1905), 7. For the central provinces, see C. E. Low, “The Central Provinces and Berar Exhibition” in The Industrial Conference Held at Madras, December 1908 (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1909), 161; for Bengal and Assam, see Percy Brown, “The Artistic Trades of Bengal and Their Development,” in Report of the Fifth Indian Industrial Conference: Held at Lahore on the 30th December 1909 (Amraoti: Indian Industrial Conference, 1910), 121; for Madras, see W. S. Hadaway, Cotton Painting and Printing in the Madras Presidency (Madras: Government Press, 1917), iii. For an overview of the demand for such books, as well as for museums and exhibitions to display type collections of the best of regional art manufactures, see Proceedings of the Art Conference Held in the Technical Institute at Lahore (Calcutta: Government Central Printing Office, 1894). Percy Brown, “Artistic Trades of the Punjab and Their Development,” in The Industrial Conference Held at Madras, December 1908, 178–79. Ibid., 179. Hendley, Asian Carpets, 8. H J. R. Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice of Carpet-Making in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1907) (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series on Bombay Presidency [New Delhi: Navrang, 1976], 146, 198–99.) A similar system operated in the Punjab, where Amritsar carpet firms looked to the Lahore jail factory for designs. (C. Latimer, “Carpet Making in the Punjab,” JIAI 17 no. 131, [1916]: 24.)

228

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

NOTES

For a discussion of the role jails played in the creation and circulation of traditional designs, see Abigail McGowan, “Convict Carpets: Jails and the Revival of Historic Carpet Design in Colonial India,” paper presented at the 37th Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin, October 2008. Colonel Jacobs to Lockwood de Forest, January 25, 1894. LDP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 632–636. Proceedings of the Art Conference Held in the Technical Institute at Lahore, 11. J. Sime to Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, March 1, 1895. MSA: ED 1896: v. 81, c. 345. Hendley, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883, vol 1, v. Thomas Holbein Hendley, London Indo-Colonial Exhibition of 1886: Handbook of the Jeypore Courts (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1886), 34. Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice of Carpet-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 144, 135; K. M. Chatfield to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, October 16, 1888. MSA: ED 1889: v. 45, c. 8. For supervision of jail industries, see K. M. Chatfield to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, October 16, 1888. MSA: ED 1889: v. 45, c. 8: 141–144. For the exhibition of past students’ work, see E. Giles to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, August 13, 1900. MSA: ED 1900: v. 21, c. 509: 333. For the industrial arts normal school, see John Wallace to Government of Bombay, Educational Department, April 15, 1910. MSA: ED 1919: v. 77, c. 7. Technical Art Series of Illustrations of Indian Architectural Decorative Work (Calcutta: Survey of India Offices, 1886–1892), 1. Buck, “Proceedings of the Arts and Museums Committee held on Friday the 7th December 1883.” Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, “Resolution No. 1: Extract from the Proceedings of the Government of India, in the Revenue and Agricultural Department (Museums and Exhibitions),” January 3, 1884. MSA: ED 1892: v. 51, c. 583: p. 3. Lord Ripon, “Opening the Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition at Simla” in Speeches and Published Resolutions of Lord Ripon, ed. Ram Chandra Palit (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1882), 109. “The Viceroy on the Delhi Arts Exhibition,” The Indian Review 4 no. 1 (January 1903): 51. Lord Ripon, “Opening the Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition at Simla,” 109. Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice of Carpet-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 201–208. Twigg opened the chapter—titled “The CarpetPurchaser’s ‘Vade-mecum’”—with the following explanatory note: “The introduction of such a subject into an Industrial Monograph may seem unwarranted, but as not a few would-be purchasers refrain from buying from ignorance of the points which indicate a good carpet, a few very simple guides calling for little technical knowledge may be of use.” (Ibid., 201). “Extract from the Proceedings . . . the 14th March, 1883,” 1.

NOTES

229

81. Dr. Henry Carter to Secretary to the Local Committee of Surat and Broach, August 21, 1854. MSA: GD 1856: v. 73, c. 92. 82. Dr. George Birdwood to William Hart, August 31, 1858. MSA: GD 1858: v. 65, c. 736. 83. Thomas Holbein Hendley, Handbook to the Jeypore Museum (Calcutta: W. Griggs, 1895), 68. 84. “Kachchh Pradarshan” [The Kutch Exhibition], Buddhiprakash 31 no. 2 (February 1884): 10. 85. L. R. W. Forest to John Griffiths, July 3, 1890. MSA: ED 1890: v. 24, c. 624. 86. Report of the Conference as Regards Museums in India, Held at Calcutta on Dec. 27th to 31st, 1907 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908), 27. 87. Ibid. 88. Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, Resolution, July 20, 1892. MSA: ED 1892: v. 51, c. 583: 1. For a similar statement of goals at the end of the century, see John Griffiths to Secretary to Government, General Department, April 5, 1897. MSA: ED 1898: v. 54, c. 534: 238. 89. Northwest Frontier Provinces and Oudh Provincial Museum, Lucknow, Minutes of the Managing Committee from August 1883 to 31 March 1888 with Introduction (Allahabad: Northwest Frontier Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1889), 281. 90. For information on these emporia, see as follows. For Lahore and Nagpur: A. G. Clow, The State and Industry (1920-27) (Calcutta: Government of India, 1928), 64–65; for Lahore and Bangalore: Report of the Conference as Regards Museums in India, 26–27; for Kanpur: V. N. Mehta, “The Government School of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow,” Journal of Indian Industries and Labour 2 no. 1 (February 1922): 48–54; for Madras and Rangoon: Indian Industrial Commission, Report (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1918), 198; and, for Madras: Dr. J. R. Henderson, “Note on the Victoria Technical Institute, Madras” in The Book of the Madras Exhibition, 1915-16 (Madras: Madras Government Press, 1916), 409–411. 91. Mahadeo Ballal Namjoshi to J. Nugent, December 4, 1888. BPRO: Huzur English Office, Misc. Dept. section 65, file 1. 92. F. S. Lely to Secretary to Government, General Department, April 21, 1897. MSA: ED 1898: v. 54, c. 534: 223. 93. Baroda State, Baroda Administration Report, 1911–12 (Bombay: Caxton Works, 1913), 147. 94. Baroda State, Baroda Administration Report, 1916–17 (Bombay: Times Press, 1918), xxxii, 230. 95. “The Viceroy on the Delhi Arts Exhibition,” 51. 96. George Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, 1903: Being the Official Catalogue of the Delhi Exhibition, 1902–1903 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903), 4. 97. Prepared at the Bombay School of Art, the Bombay room was considered a big success; the room won the gold medal for the best example of Indian

230

98.

99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

114.

NOTES

Art furnishing, and the entire contents were purchased by the Nizam of Hyderabad. (Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, 4–5.) Lord Curzon, “Indian Art Exhibition at Delhi” in Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from His Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-General of India, 1898– 1905, ed. Sir Thomas Raleigh (New York: Macmillan Company, 1906), 208. Emphasis added. “The Viceroy on the Delhi Arts Exhibition,” 51. For details on de Forest’s efforts on behalf of Indian arts, and his contacts with others involved in similar attempts, see his unpublished manuscript, Indian Domestic Architecture (hereafter referred to as IDA). LDFP-AAA, Reel 2732: Writings. Lockwood de Forest to Mr. Pritchett, March 22, 1920. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 923. Lockwood de Forest, Illustrations of Design: Based on Notes of Line as Used by the Craftsmen of India (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1912), iii. Lockwood de Forest to Mr. M. D. C. Crawford, November 30, 1918. LDFPAAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 862. Lockwood de Forest to Louis Tiffany, July 9, 1881. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 276. de Forest, IDA, 1140–1141. Looking back in 1911 on his family’s long involvement with the AWCC, Muggunbhai’s youngest son, Purushottambhai, wrote to de Forest that “it was through your angelic hand that my father began his new life after the adversity was tired of our family and became the victim of your business rod. Those days and your presence in my house on that memorable day I shall never forget.” (Purushottambhai Hutheesing to Lockwood de Forest, June 16, 1911. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 695.) de Forest, IDA, 1158. Workman or artisan. de Forest, IDA, 1146; de Forest to Muggunbhai, March 30, 1881. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 254. See also de Forest to Muggunbhai, June 3, 1881. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 269. de Forest, IDA, 1269. Meta de Forest to Mother, March 22, 1882. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 417. de Forest, IDA, 1143–1144. de Forest to Tiffany, December 28, 1881. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 302. de Forest himself was so pleased with the pieces from the workshop that he later declared in his memoirs that they had been “the most important things in the exhibition.” (de Forest, IDA, 1250.) de Forest to Tiffany, March 17, 1882. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 318; Meta de Forest to Mother, June 30, 1882. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 446. de Forest to Tiffany, November 15, 1881. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 294; Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883– 84: Reports of the Bombay Committee and Others (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1884), Appendix E, Mr. Griffiths’ Report, 8–9.

NOTES

231

115. For the Jaipur orders, see de Forest to Tiffany, July 13, 1882. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence 1858–1931: 340. For the Rajkot and other orders, see Muggunbhai Hutheesing, “Invoice of (100) one hundred Wooden panels kept here in reserve by Muggunbhai Hutheesing by the order of Lockwood de Forest,” no date (ca. 1883). LDFP-AAA, Reel 2733: Financial material: 668, 673. 116. de Forest to Tiffany, July 13, 1882. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731: Correspondence: 341. 117. de Forest, IDA, 1264. 118. Caryl Coleman, “India in America,” The Decorator and Furnisher 6 (March 1885): 202–203; William Henry Shelton, “The Most Indian House in America,” House Beautiful 8 no. 1 (June 1900): 422. See also Raymond Head, “Indian Crafts and Western Design from the Seventeenth Century to the Present,” Royal Society of Arts Journal (January 1988): 125. 119. de Forest, “Exhibition of Pictures and Sketches by Lockwood de Forest, National Academician,” LDFP-AAA, Reel 2732: Writings: 742. 120. de Forest, IDA, 1271. 121. de Forest, IDA, 1308. 122. See, for instance, Purushottambhai Hutheesing to de Forest, April 14, 1911. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731, Correspondence: 691–693; Purushottambhai to Messrs. Tiffany Studios, June 2, 1911. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731, Correspondence: 699–701; and Purushottambhai to de Forest, June 16, 1911. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731, Correspondence: 695–698. 123. Purushottambhai Hutheesing to de Forest, June 16, 1911. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2731, Correspondence: 697. 124. de Forest, IDA, 1318. 125. Meta de Forest to Mother, December 11, 1892. LDFP-AAA, Reel 2730: Correspondence 1858–1931: 254. Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–84, Appendix E, Mr. Griffiths’ Report, 8. 126. de Forest, IDA, 1329. 127. Government of India, Report of the Committee on Co-Operation in India (Simla: Government Central Press, 1915), 1, 2. 128. E. M. Edwardes, Monograph Upon the Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, 1900, (reprinted in Art in Industry Through the Ages [New Delhi: Navrang, 1976], 48.) 129. Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 130. P. N. Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry (Bombay: Government Press, 1909), 1. 131. V. N. Mehta, “Co-Operation and Cottage Industries,” The Bombay Co-Operative Quarterly 5 no. 4 (March 1922): 194. 132. Alfred Chatterton, “Hand-loom Weaving,” Journal of Indian Industries and Labour 1 no. 3 (August 1921): 391. 133. Mehta, “Co-Operation and Cottage Industries,” 195. 134. Chatterton, “Hand-Loom Weaving,” 391.

232

NOTES

135. K. R. Kulkarni, “The Spinning Wheel and the Co-Operative System,” The Bombay Co-Operative Quarterly 5 no. 1 (June 1921): 9–10. 136. H. W. Wolff, “The Small Industries of India,” The Bombay Co-Operative Quarterly 3 no. 3 (December 1919): 133–134. 137. P. G. Shah, “Cottage Industries in India,” The Bombay Co-Operative Quarterly 2 no. 3 (December 1918): 141. 138. Shah, “Cottage Industries in India,” 146. 139. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies in the Bombay Presidency Including Sind for the Twelve Months Ending March 31st, 1915 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1915), 17. Hereafter annual reports from that series will be referred to as “Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies,” with the different years indicated by publication date, and the presidency location indicated by author. 140. H. W. Wolff, “Introduction” in Indian Co-Operative Studies (University of Bombay Economic Series No. 2), ed. R. B. Ewbank (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1920), 5. 141. Quoted in Goswami, Producing India, 251–252. 142. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1917), 3, 20. 143. Proceedings of the Conference of Registrars of Co-Operative Credit Societies Held at Simla on the 25th September 1906, and Following Days (Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1906), 18–19. 144. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1915), 5. 145. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1907), 5. 146. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1912), 11; Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1919), 17; Baroda State, Report of the Committee on the Economic Development of the Baroda State, 1918–19 (Bombay: Times Press, 1920), 163. 147. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1912), 11. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1919), 17. 148. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1919), 17. 149. For government faith in the prospects for cooperatives among leather workers, 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 of Co-Operative Societies, 1910. Six leatherworkers’ cooperatives are mentioned in the 1908 annual report by the Registrar of Cooperatives for the Bombay Presidency (Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies, 1908: 4); by 1911 there was a total of 17 such societies (Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies, 1911, 16.)

NOTES

233

150. A caste name, usually denoting leather workers. 151. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Cooperative Societies (1913), 15. 152. Merchant-moneylenders. 153. Proceedings of the Provincial Co-Operative Conference Held in Poona, August 29–30, 1912 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1912), 46. 154. Proceedings of the Provincial Co-Operative Conference Held in Poona, September 1–2, 1910 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1910), 6. For other dangers posed by sowkars if cooperatives failed to provide full services, see Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Cooperative Societies (1914), 2. 155. See, for instance, G. K. Chitale, “Note on Nagar Weavers’ Union and Weavers’ Societies in Nagar District” in Proceedings of the Provincial Co-Operative Conference Held in Poona, August 29–30, 1912, Appendix XVI, 48–49. 156. See, for instance, N. M. Joshi’s assessments of the problems facing artisanal cooperatives in Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan (Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Publication No. 5, 1936), 161–162; also S. K. Raja, “Handicrafts in India,” International Labour Review 35 (1937): 501. 157. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1919), 17. 158. Douglas Haynes, The Making of Small-Town Capitalism: Artisans, Merchants and the Politics of Cloth Manufacture in Western India, 1870–1960, unpublished book manuscript, chapter 6, pp. 38–39. 159. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1894–95, lxii. 160. Quoted in Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1890–91, 27. 161. Proceedings of the Art Conference Held in the Technical Institute at Lahore, 31. For similar views, see also Hendley’s comments at the same conference ibid., 12–13. 162. de Forest, IDA, 1269. 163. Government of India, Census of India 1961, Vol. V, Part VII-A(2): Selected Crafts of Gujarat—Wood Carving of Gujarat (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1967), 32. 164. H. Clayton, “The Position of the Registrar,” Indian Co-Operative Studies, (University of Bombay Economic Series No. 2), ed. R. B. Ewbank (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1920), 171. 165. Indian Cooperative Union, “Survey of Associations of Handicraft Artisans, Dealers and Exporters,” unpublished survey sponsored by the All India Handicrafts Board, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, December 1958, 160.

Chapter 4 1. “Deshi Kala Uttejanna Bhashanma Boleli Kavita” [A poem recited at the speech for the encouragement of native arts], Buddhiprakash 36 no. 7 (July 1889): 161. 2. “The Exigencies of Progress in India,” Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 15 no. 4 (April 1893): 6, 13–14.

234

NOTES

3. Hemendra Prasad Ghose, “Swadeshi-cum-Boycott,” The Indian Review 9 no. 4 (April 1908): 267, 266. 4. Pudomjee made his argument in the context of written testimony submitted to the 1902 Clibborn commission appointed by government to consider the question of technical education. (Dorabji Pudomjee to H. O. Quin, Secretary to Government, Educational Department, February 5, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7: 186.) 5. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 6. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1889–90, Appendix F, xl. 7. See for instance the complaints of Rai Saheb Lala Girdhari Lal, the managing director of a mill in Delhi, at the first Indian Industrial Conference in 1905. (Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras on Saturday, the 30th December, 1905 [Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1906], 379.) 8. Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat on the 30th December 1907 (Madras: Indian Industrial Conference, 1908), xi. 9. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan Aapva Vishe” [Regarding encouragement to be given to native crafts and industry], Buddhiprakash 23 no. 8 (August 1876): 173. See also the Bombay weekly paper the Rast Goftar for November 1898; Report on Native Newspapers Published in the Bombay Presidency for the Week Ending 19 November 1898 (hereafter RNN with the week indicated in the title) (Bombay), 16; and G. Sabramania Iyer in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 367. 10. “Deshi Karigarine Uttejan” [Encouragement to native crafts and industry], Buddhiprakash 24 no. 11 (November 1877): 250. 11. Quoted in Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat, 15–16. 12. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 171–172. 13. On technical education see, for example, “Education in India: A Tale of Obscurantism and Failure, Sir Sankaran Nair’s Indictment,” Young India 1 no. 7 (May 28, 1919): 7. 14. See, for example, Deepak Kumar, ed., Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, 1700–1947 (New Delhi: Aramika Prakashan, 1991), 126–138; Makrand Mehta, “Science versus Technology: The Early Years of the Kala Bhavan, Baroda, 1890–1896,” Indian Journal of History and Science 27 no. 2 (1992): 145–169; Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, 1857–1905 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 15. See, for instance, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “Introduction: An Approach to Education and Inequality,” in Education and the Disprivileged: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002): 1–32; Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2001). 16. Governor General in Council, Memorandum, August 20, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 43, c. 441.

NOTES

235

17. Dr. George Buist to the Court of Directors, January 1, 1850. MSA: GD 1850: v. 94, c. 102. 18. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1875–76, 50; Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1891–92, 29. 19. William Hunter to William Hart, March 25, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 43, c. 441; Abdala David Sassoon, Elinor David Sassoon, David Sassoon, Reuben David Sassoon to William Hart, March 25, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 43, c. 441. 20. Governor General in Council, Memorandum. August 20, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 43, c. 441. 21. Edward Howard to William Hart, July 25, 1857. MSA: GD 1857: v. 43, c. 441. 22. Arthur Crawford to John Nugent, April 2, 1883. MSA: ED 1883: v. 32, c. 353. 23. For lists of the industrial schools in western India, giving their dates of opening, see E. Giles, “Replies to the Interrogations of the Industrial Commission,” January 16, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7; and Mehta, “Science Versus Technology,” 147–149. For a more extended discussion of industrial education for artisans in this period, see Abigail McGowan, “Educating Artisans as Colonial Modernity: Industrial Education in Late Nineteenth Century Western India,” in Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India, ed. Manu Bhagvan and Anne Feldhaus (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008): 84–100. 24. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1874–75, 149–150. 25. K. M. Chatfield to Chief Secretary to Government, Educational Department, November 11, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8. 26. Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IV: Ahmedabad (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1879), 141. 27. E. Giles, A. W. Thomson, and Cecil Burns to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, January 13, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7. 28. K. M. Chatfield to Chief Secretary to Government, Educational Department, November 11, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 7; H. W. Lewis to Educational Inspector, Southern Division, April 22, 1880. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 151. 29. K. M. Chatfield to Chief Secretary to Government, Educational Department, November 11, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 7, 12. 30. Col J. R. Mannsell to Col. C. J. Merriman, February 24, 1881. MSA: ED 1881: v. 30, c. 335: 600–601. For Mannsell’s other complaints about the Dharwar school, see Col J. R. Mannsell to Col. C. J. Merriman, January 16, 1881. MSA: ED 1881: v. 30, c. 335: 588–596. 31. H. W. Lewis to J. Elphinston, September 20, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 87. 32. Report from J. R. Middleton included in Arthur Crawford to C. Gonne, September 5, 1881. MSA: ED 1882: v. 31, c. 37: 227. 33. See for instance, Lieutenant-Colonel J. Clibborn, C. A. Radice, R. E. Enthoven, and Rev. F. Westcott, Report on Industrial Education: Part II: Proceedings of Conferences (Calcutta, Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903), 6. 34. Nita Kumar, Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), 120–150 and chap. 1.

236

NOTES

35. K. M. Chatfield to C. Gonne, November 24, 1876. MSA: ED 1876: v. 25, c. 50: 137. 36. H. G. Pollisen to J. Elphinston, September 23, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 46. 37. K. M. Chatfield to Chief Secretary to Government, Educational Department, November 11, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 3. 38. See H. G. Pollisen to J. Elphinston, September 23, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 54; H. W. Lewis to J. Elphinston, September 20, 1879. MSA: ED 1880: v. 19, c. 8: 62–63. 39. For problems recruiting artisans to the Ratnagiri School of Industry, see Report included in Arthur Crawford to C. Gonne, September 5, 1881. MSA: ED 1882: v. 31, c. 37: 191, 285. For retention problems across industrial schools, see Clibborn et al., Report on Industrial Education: Part I (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903), 8–9. 40. Quoted in Papers Relating to Technical Education: 1886–1904 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), 29. 41. “Resolution on Industrial Schools in India,” The Indian Review 5 no. 1 (January 1904): 57. 42. Quoted in Syed Nurullah and J. P. Naik, A History of Education in India during the British Period (Bombay: Macmillan & Co., 1951), 696. For a general overview of the problems with industrial education in the Bombay Presidency in particular, see E. Giles, A. W. Thomson and Cecil Burns to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, January 13, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7: 98–100. 43. Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 160. 44. RNN for the Week Ending 26th November 1898 (Bombay), 15. 45. The Industrial Conference held at Madras, December 1908 (Madras: G. A. Nateson, 1909), 48–49. 46. Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6. 47. Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1885–86, cxx–cxxi; Government of Bombay, Report of the DPI for 1889–90, 32; E. Giles, “Replies to the Interrogations of the Industrial Commission,” January 16, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7. 48. A Compendium of Art, Arts and Crafts, Technical, Industrial, Commercial, Agricultural and Veterinary Institutions in the Province of Bombay (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1939), 20, 37. 49. E. C. Buck, Report on Practical and Technical Education (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1901). 50. For the recommendations of the Simla conference, see J. F. Hewett to the Government of Bombay, November 20, 1901. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7. 51. See Clibborn et al, Report on Industrial Education: Part I and Part II. 52. Clive Dewey, “The Government of India’s ‘New Industrial Policy’, 1900–1925: Formation and Failure,” in Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic

NOTES

53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

237

and Social History, ed. K. N. Chaudhuri and Clive Dewey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 219. Clibborn et al, Report on Industrial Education: Part II, 3. For the full text of the Government resolution, see “Resolution on Industrial Schools in India,” 57–62. Lord Curzon, “Speech delivered at the opening of the Educational Conference at Simla on the 2nd September 1901.” MSA: ED 1902: v. 22, c. 427. Quoted in Clibborn, et al., Report on Industrial Education: Part II, 6. “Resolution on Industrial Schools in India,” 61. For the new standards and exams, see E. Giles, A. W. Thomson and Cecil Burns to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, January 13, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 62, c. 7, 99. For the drawing course, see Government of Bombay, Educational Department, Resolution No. 1456 of 1902, August 7, 1902. MSA: ED 1902: v. 22, c. 427. Government of Bombay, Educational Department, Resolution No. 3000, December 12, 1908. MSA: ED 1910: v. 77, c. 7. R. N. Mudholkar, “Education and Industrial Development,” in The Congress and Conference of 1905, Being a Collection of all the Papers Read and Submitted to the First Industrial Conference at Benares (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1906), 34. John Wallace, the editor of the Indian Textile Journal in Bombay, agreed, arguing to the Indian Industrial Conference at Surat in 1907 that the only proper object of industrial education was “to improve the efficiency of the native craftsman so that he may turn out more and better work and get a better return for his labour.” (Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat on the 30th December 1907, 52.) Clibborn et al., Report on Industrial Education: Part II, 107. Alfred Chatterton, Agricultural and Industrial Problems in India (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1904), 136. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); James Mills and Satadru Sen, Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Rachel Tolen, “Colonizing and Transforming the Criminal Tribesman: The Salvation Army in British India” American Ethnologist 18 no. 1 (February 1991): 106–125. For a recent collection on the imperial context, see Tony Ballyntyne and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). For artisanal education in Britain, see Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), 133; and Adrian Rifkin, “Success Disavowed: The Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain (An Allegory)” Journal of Design History 1 no. 2 (1988): 96–97. Quoted in Buck, Report on Practical and Technical Education, 4. Deepali Dewan, “The Body at Work: Colonial Art Education and the Figure of the ‘Native Craftsman,’” in Confronting the Body, ed. James Mills and Satadru

238

66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

NOTES

Sen, 130; Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnographic Exhibits: The Case of 1886” Cultural Anthropology 15 no. 4 (2001): 507. Satadru Sen, “Schools, Athletes and Confrontation: The Student Body in Colonial India,” in Confronting the Body, ed. James Mills and Satadru Sen, 58; Tolen, “Colonizing and Transforming the Criminal Tribesman,” 117, 119–20. Quoted in Buck, Report on Practical and Technical Education, 26. As the association’s secretary put it, the group aimed to ameliorate “the condition of the artisan class in general which, when compared with that of the selfopinionated and self-conceited so-called foremost races of the present day, owing to their having possessed manifold opportunities and diverse means to keep us back by the exercise of legal repressive—rather oppressive—measures at their command, socially, intellectually, politically and in various other ways.” (S. V. Kulkarni to W. Lee-Werner, February 22, 1893. MSA: ED 1893: v. 27, c. 313.) A. Satyanarayana, “Growth of Education among the Dalit-Bahujan Communities in Modern Andhra, 1893–1947,” in Education and the Disprivileged, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 50–83. Commissioner of Police, Bombay, to W. Lee-Werner, March 17, 1893. MSA: ED 1893: v. 27, c. 313. Mudholkar, “Education and Industrial Development,” 38. See, for instance, Lala Baji Nath, “Some Factors in the Industrial and Commercial Development of India” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 290; and R. N. Mudholkar, “Presidential Address” in The Industrial Conference Held at Madras, December 1908 (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1909), 50. Quoted in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 30. E. Giles, “Report on the Industrial Conference Held in Bombay on 7th and 8th March 1904,” May 11, 1904. MSA: ED 1905: v. 70, c. 7. Tolen, “Colonizing and Transforming the Criminal Tribesman,” 107. For sericulture, see Dr. George Birdwood to Secretary to Government, General Department, May 1, 1860. MSA: GD 1860: v. 27, c. 123, 312–331. For efforts to investigate clays, see Dr. J. P. Leith, Dr. Henry Carter, and Dr. Lourdes to Secretary to Government, General Department, Bombay, October 20, 1853. MSA: GD 1853: v. 85, c. 527. For attempts to modernize Sindi pottery, see “Bombay Pottery,” Journal of Indian Art and Industries 2 no. 17 (1888): 2–5. For efforts in silk, for instance, see Brenda King, Silk and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); and Willem van Schendel, Reviving a Rural Industry: Silk Producers and Officials in India and Bangladesh, 1880s to 1980s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995). For tanning and sericulture, see S. K. Raja, “Handicrafts in India,” International Labour Review 35 (1937): 497. For dyeing and printing, see “Summaries of Industrial Intelligence for the Quarter Ending 31st March 1922,” Journal of Indian Industries and Labour 2 no. 2 (May 1922): 267. Govindbhai H. Desai and A. B. Clarke, Gazetteer of the Baroda State, vol. 1 (Bombay: Times Press, 1923), 411–413.

NOTES

239

80. Romesh C. Dutt, “Industrial India: A Review,” The Indian Review 5 no. 7 (July 1904): 440. 81. For employment numbers, see P. N. Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry (Bombay: Government Press, 1909), 2. For overall production, see Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, 62. 82. Quoted in Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry, Appendix, 1. 83. Shirin Mehta, “Social Background of Swadeshi Movement in Gujarat, 1875– 1908,” Vidya, 14 no. 1 (January 1981): 31–46. 84. Quoted in Chunilal B. Desai, “Hand-loom Weaving in India,” in Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat, 217. 85. The different estimates came, respectively, from W. T. Pomfret, “Note on the Progress and the Future Working of the Hand Loom Weaving Industry,” in Proceedings of the Provincial Co-Operative Conference Held in Poona, June 23–24, 1911 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1911), 28; Alfred Chatterton, Indian Trade Journal, April 9, 1908; and Durgashankar P. Raval, “Hindustanma Udhyogni Bhav Sthiti” [The price conditions of Indian industries], Buddhiprakash 58 no. 1 (January 1911): 5. 86. A. G. Clow, The State and Industry (1920–27) (Calcutta: Government of India, 1928), 60. 87. Proceedings of the Provincial Co-Operative Conference Held in Poona, June 23–24, 1911, 28. 88. S. V. Telang, Report on Handloom Weaving Industry in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1932), 19. 89. Alfred Chatterton, Indian Trade Journal, April 9, 1908. 90. Established in Ahmednagar in 1813, the mission eventually had major posts in western India in Satara, Bombay, Sirur, Sholapur, Vadala, and Wai; activity at those sites included hospitals, dispensaries, primary and secondary schools, teachers’ colleges, industrial schools, agricultural extension, and camps for criminal tribes. 91. James Smith to William Hazen, August 18, 1908. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions records Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter ABCFM). Unit 4, vol. 31: Reel 425 (1901–1909, letters M–W from the Marathi mission). See also James Smith to Dr. Barton, January 7, 1901, ABCFM, Unit 4, vol. 31: Reel 425. 92. H. Fairbank to Dr. Gregg, November 29, 1900, ABCFM, vol. 28: Reel 422. 93. D. C. Churchill to Rev. James Barton, August 18, 1908, ABCFM, vol. 28: Reel 422. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., March 18, 1904, ABCFM, vol. 28: Reel 422. 96. Ibid., May 29, 1908, ABCFM, vol. 28: Reel 422. 97. For the advice to the government of Bombay, see James Smith to Dr. Barton, March 25, 1904, ABCFM, vol. 31: Reel 425. For the invitation from Curzon, see D. C. Churchill to Dr. Barton, November 8, 1904, ABCFM, vol. 28: Reel 422. 98. D. C. Churchill to Dr. Barton, November 2, 1908, ABCFM, vol. 28: Reel 422.

240

NOTES

99. Douglas Haynes, “The Churchill Loom” unpublished essay, 4. 100. Ibid., 7. 101. Government of Bombay, Financial Department, Resolution no. 4087, December 15, 1911. MSA: ED 1912: v. 71, c. 206; Government of Bombay, Department of Industries, Annual Report, 1918–19 (1919), 4. 102. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1917), 21; Baroda State, Baroda Administration Report, 1915–16 (1917), 155; Baroda State, Baroda Administration Report, 1916–17 (1918), 141. 103. Rao Bahadur Raojibhai Patel, “Hand-loom Weaving in India,” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 200. 104. Alfred Chatterton, Indian Trade Journal; Haynes, “The Churchill Loom”. 105. Registrar of Co-Operative Societies to Government of Bombay, General Department, September 13, 1915. MSA: ED 1915: file 206, 23. 106. Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry, 10. 107. Raval, “Hindustanma Udhyogni Bhav Sthiti,” Buddhiprakash, 5. 108. Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, “Resolutions,” 2. 109. Baroda State, Baroda Administration Report, 1913–14 (1915), 124–125; Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1914), 19. 110. A. P. Badenoch, Punjab Industries (Lahore: Government Printing, Punjab, 1917), 5. 111. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1916), 17. 112. Ibid., 16; Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of CoOperative Societes (1917), 21. 113. Pomfret, “Note on the Progress and the Future,” 27–29. Government of Bombay, Financial Department, Resolution no. 4087, December 15, 1911. MSA: ED 1912: v. 71, c. 206. 114. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1914), 19. 115. Government of Madras, Department of Industries, Notes on Starting Industrial Schools, with Specimen Syllabuses of Instruction: Bulletin No. 17 (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1925), 17–18. 116. Registrar of Co-Operative Societies to Government of Bombay, General Department, September 13, 1915. MSA: ED 1915: file 206. 117. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1916), 17. 118. Chatterton, Indian Trade Journal. 119. Badenoch, Punjab Industries, 4. 120. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1916), 17; Government of Bombay, Department of Industries, Annual Report, 1918–19 (1919), 4. 121. N. M. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan (Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Publication No. 5, 1936), 150.

NOTES

241

122. Government of Bombay, Department of Industries, Annual Report, 1918–19 (1919), 3. 123. Douglas Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and Technological Change in Western India, 1880– 1947,” in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173–205; Tirthankar Roy, “Acceptance of Innovations in Early Twentieth Century Handloom Weaving,” Economic History Review 55 no. 3 (August 2002): 507–532. 124. For handloom courts at the 1905 and 1906 exhibitions, see Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, lxxxvii; and Baroda State, Baroda Administration Report, 1906–07 (1908), 78. For the handloom competitions, see Report of the Work of the Indian Industrial Conference, Including a Record of General Industrial Activity in the Country (1907), 98–105; and Chatterton, Indian Trade Journal. 125. Indian Industrial Commission, Report (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1918), 111. 126. See, for example, Alfred Chatterton, “The Salem Weaving Factory,” in Report of the Third Industrial Conference Held at Surat, 190–208. 127. Haynes, “The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy,” 180–188; Roy, “Acceptance of Innovations,” 513–514. 128. Baroda State, Report on the Administration of the Baroda State for the Official Year Ending 31st July 1897 (1901), 147–149. 129. Baroda State, Report on the Administration of the Baroda State for the Official Year Ending 31st July 1895 (1898), 138. 130. Government of Bombay, Annual Report on the Working of Co-Operative Societies (1917), 21. 131. Clive Dewey, “The Government of India’s ‘New Industrial Policy,’” 244. 132. “The Department of Industries,” Prajabandhu 29 no. 13 (March 28, 1926): 1. 133. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, 158–159. 134. Prakash, Another Reason. 135. “Report on the Industrial Conference held in Bombay on 7th and 8th March 1904,” May 11, 1904. MSA: ED 1905: v. 70, c. 7. 136. The Story of The Sir JJ School of Art, 1857–1957 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1958), 156; Government of Bombay, Sir George Clarke Technical Laboratories and Studios: Pottery Department—Prospectus. MSA: ED 1915: file 12; C. P. Shah, Report on the Possibility of Pottery Manufacture in the Province of Bombay (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1941), 4. 137. Cecil Burns to Director of Public Instruction, June 9, 1910. MSA: ED 1910: v. 77, c. 12. 138. The Story of the Sir JJ. School of Art, 191. 139. Cecil Burns to Director of Public Instruction, May 5, 1910. MSA: ED 1910: v. 77, c. 12; Government of Bombay Department of Industries, Annual Report, 1918–19 (1919), 5–6.

242

NOTES

140. Shah, Report on the Possibility of Pottery Manufacture in the Province of Bombay, 4. 141. Government of Bombay, Educational Department, Resolution no. 2520, December 13, 1910. MSA: ED 1912: v. 73, c. 12. 142. Bhattacharya, “Introduction: An Approach to Education and Inequality,” 6. 143. Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry, 7. 144. Ibid.; and Government of Bombay Resolution (General Department no. 4710, September 7, 1909), p. 2 (appended to the end of Mehta’s report.) 145. Government of Bombay Resolution (General Department no. 4710, September 7, 1909), p. 1 (appended to the end of Mehta, Report on the Handloom Industry.) 146. Ibid. 147. Romesh C. Dutt, “Presidential Address” in The Congress and Conference of 1905, 4. 148. “Hindi Hunnar Udyog Parishad” [The Indian industrial conference], Buddhiprakash 53 no. 1 (January 1906): 27. 149. Quoted in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras, 38. For similar sentiments fifteen years later, see Baroda State, Report of the Committee on the Economic Development of the Baroda State, 1918–19 (Bombay: Times Press, 1920), 162–163. 150. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, 241.

Conclusion 1. “Udhyogoddhar” [The uplift of industry], Buddhiprakash 50 no. 3 (March 1903): 69. 2. Ibid., Buddhiprakash 50 no. 8 (August 1903): 241. 3. Ibid., Buddhiprakash 50 no. 10 (October 1903): 300. 4. Ibid., Buddhiprakash 50 no. 11 (November 1903): 341. 5. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in Modern India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 87. 6. Jaju Shrikrishnadas, The All India Spinners’ Association and Its Work: A Brief Account (Up to 1951) (Wardha: All-India Spinners’ Association, 1951), 8. 7. Shrikrishnadas, All India Spinners’ Association and Its Work, 9–10. 8. For a thorough overview of khadi activities and agencies, see Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 9. Mohandas Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj,” in The Penguin Gandhi Reader, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee (1909; New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 17. 10. “Swaraj and Khaddar,” Young India 4 no. 18 (May 11, 1922): 228, 227. 11. Traditional spinning wheel favored by Gandhi. 12. See Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Uses of Khaddar,” Young India 2 no. 17 (April 28, 1920): 5; P. C. Ray, “Dr. Ray on Charkha,” Young India 4 no. 5 (February 2, 1922): 71; “Public Life In Godhra: Swadeshi and Suppressed Classes,” Young

NOTES

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

243

India 1 no. 31 (August 20, 1919): 1; B. Chowdary, “Recreation in the Charkha,” Young India 3 no. 29 (July 21, 1921): 227; Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Wanted Experts,” Young India 3 no. 38 (September 22, 1921): 304; Ibid., “The Great Sentinel,” Young India 3 no. 41 (October 13, 1921): 324; Shrikrishnadas, All India Spinners’ Association and Its Work, 6; “Greater Use of Handlooms,” Young India 3 no. 19 (May 11, 1921): 152. Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Spinning Wheel,” Young India 4 no. 14 (April 6, 1922): 185. Mohandas K. Gandhi, “To the Women of India,” Young India 3 no. 32 (August 11, 1921): 253. K. R., “The Beauty of It,” Young India 4 no. 31 (August 3, 1922): 324. Ibid. Susan Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi: The Fabric of Indian Independence,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette. B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 355–376. P. C. Ray, “Khadi for Seva Work,” Young India 4 no. 24 (June 15, 1922): 270. “Mr. Gandhi’s Ellore Speech,” Young India 3 no. 19 (May 11, 1921): 150. “The Potency of the Spinning Wheel,” Young India 3 no. 27 (July 6, 1921): 216. “Swaraj and Khaddar,” 228. Maganlal K. Gandhi, “A Model Weaving School: III,” Young India 3 no. 36 (September 3, 1921): 287. Jamanlal Bajaj, “Khaddar Scheme,” Young India 4 no. 23 (June 8, 1922): 264. Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Selling Khadi,” Young India 3 no. 51 (December 22, 1921): 526. “Progress of Swadeshi,” Young India 2 no. 22 (June 9, 1920): 1. For more on swadeshi stores, see Abigail McGowan, “Developing Traditions: Crafts and Cultural Change in Modern India, 1851–1922,” unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2003, chap. 4. T. A. Chettier, “A Peep into My Wardrobe,” Young India 4 no. 32 (August 10, 1922), 334–335; Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 30–31. M. P. Gandhi, How to Compete with Foreign Cloth: A Study of the Position of Hand-Spinning, Hand-Weaving and Cotton Mills in the Economics of Cloth Production in India (Calcutta: The Book Company, 1931), 46–47. Mohandas K. Gandhi, “To the Women of India,” 253. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 68. See also Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 94–117. Shrikrishnadas, All India Spinners’ Association and Its Work, 12–14. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 94–128. See Ibid., 117–118. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 12–37. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 46–47. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 14. See, for instance, Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi”; Bernard Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism,” in Cloth and the Human Experience, ed. Annette. B. Weiner

244

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

NOTES

and Jane Schneider (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 303–353; Tarlo, Clothing Matters. C. A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–321. Som Benegal, The Story of Handicrafts (Delhi: All India Handicrafts Board, Ministry of Production, 1960), 3. K. K. Subrahmanian, “Introduction: An Overview of the Handicrafts Industry,” in The Handicrafts Industry in Kerala: Blending Heritage with Economics, ed. K. K. Subrahmanian (Delhi: Centre for Development Studies, 2006), 4. J. M. Lobo Prabhu, “New Thoughts on Cottage Industry,” Roopa-Lekha 27 no. 1 (1956): 57. D. N. Saraf, Indian Crafts: Development and Potential (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1982), 253. Adris Banerji, “Folk Museums in India,” Modern Review 80 (1946): 200, 199. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, “Origin and Development of Embroidery in Our Land,” Marg 17 no. 2 (1964): 3. Benegal, Story of Handicrafts, 14. Saraf, Indian Crafts, 22, 257. D. N. Saraf, In the Journey of Craft Development (New Delhi: Sampark, 1991), 59–60; Ajit Mookerjee, “Crafts Museum,” Marg 19 no. 1 (1965): 18; Hermann Goetz, “Calico Museum of Textiles at Ahmedabad,” Marg 3 no. 4 (1949): 57–61. H. Kumar Vyas, “The Designer and the Socio-Technology of Small-Production,” Journal of Design History 4 no. 3 (1991): 194. Tirthankar Roy, “Development or Distortion? Powerlooms in India, 1950–97,” Economic and Political Weekly 33 no. 16 (1998): 898, 900. L. C. Jain, “A Heritage to Keep: The Handicrafts Industry, 1955–1985,” Economic and Political Weekly 21 no. 20 (1986): 883. Saraf, In the Journey of Craft Development, 48, 56; P. N. Sankaran, “Wood Carving Artisans in Thiruvananthapuram City: A Study of Beneficiaries vis-a-vis Non-Beneficiaries of Institutional Intervention,” in The Handicrafts Industry in Kerala, ed. K. K. Subrahmanian, 75. Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy, “Handmade in India: Preliminary Analysis of Crafts Producers and Crafts Production,” Economic and Political Weekly 38 no. 51–52 (2003): 5366–5376; K. A. Stephanson, “Socio-Economic Aspects of Labour in Household Handicrafts in Thrissur District,” in The Handicrafts Industry in Kerala, ed. K. K. Subrahmanian, 191–208.

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Index

Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company (AWCC), 20, 122, 131–138, 135 fig. 3.6, 137 fig. 3.7, 145, 146–147 All-India Handicrafts Board (AIHB), 189, 198–199, 201 American Marathi Mission, 14, 21, 94, 170–171 art schools, government, 8–9, 110–112, 138, 155–156 Arts and Crafts Movement, 4, 19, 28, 44, 48, 73, 77–78, 80, 188 Ashbee, C. R., 28, 77, 80 autonomy/independence of artisans, 20, 79, 90, 93, 104–105, 109, 110, 115, 123–124, 131–132, 133–135, 138, 139–142, 144–145, 146, 147–148, 156, 167, 179–181 artisanship, superiority to mill work, 71, 94–95, 140–141, 168, 191–192 Baroda State, 128, 143, 168, 174, 175, 179, 181–182 Sayajirao III, Gaekwar of, 89, 100, 187–189, 199 Bayly, C. A., 9–10, 26, 197–198 Birdwood, George, 5, 37, 39–40, 46, 48–49, 53, 78, 90, 94–96, 126, 131, 132 Industrial Arts of India, The, 46–49, 53, 78, 79–80, 95, 106, 107 block printing, 12, 14, 64–65, 91 body, 5, 19, 29, 43, 52–53, 74, 94–95, 164, 184–185

brasswork and copperwork, 11, 16, 42, 47, 50, 51–52, 60, 66, 91–92 Buck, E. C., 118, 132, 161, 164 Buist, George, 39 Burns, Cecil, 88, 110–111, 115, 123 Calico Museum, Ahmedabad, 189, 201 capitalism, as foreign to India, 79–80, 108, 142, 145 carpets, 11, 14, 52, 105, 119, 121–122, 123, 125 caste, 49–50, 51, 81, 85–87, 90–91, 158 Chatterton, Alfred, 5, 7, 85–87, 88, 132, 140, 163, 165, 173, 177–178, 179 Chattopadhyaya, Kamaladevi, 5, 189, 200 Chhotalal (Ranchhodlal) Technical Institute, Ahmedabad, 166 Churchill, D. C., 7, 21, 170–174, 178, 179 Clarke, Purdon, 132, 136 Clarke (Sir George) Technical Laboratories and Studios, 183–184 Clibborn Commission of 1903, 12–13, 161–162 conservatism, 19, 72, 74, 85–86, 88, 90–93 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 5, 8, 80, 90, 96–97, 131 Indian Craftsman, The, 80–82, 94, 96, 107–108

262

INDEX

consumers/patronage, 124–130, 133, 189–190, 192–195 cooperatives, 14, 104–105, 131–132, 138–145, 178, 185 crafts backward/timeless nature of production, 34–35, 43, 53, 61–62, 71, 83–85, 95–96, 149–152 cultural roots of production, 46–54, 62, 74, 77, 94 definitions of, 11–18 difference/opposition to modern industry, 14–15, 18, 19–21, 28–29, 63, 71–89, 93–98, 103–104, 109, 111–112, 124, 128, 132, 138, 148, 151, 156, 166–167, 179–186, 187–189, 194–196, 199, 201, 203 economic importance of, 2, 5–6, 45, 67–69, 71, 126, 142, 150, 160–161, 168, 199–200 gendering of production, 16, 59 as national culture, 2, 5, 6, 31, 105, 109, 188, 189, 196, 200–201 problems within, 1, 41–42, 53, 57, 62–63, 73, 74, 105–109, 115, 132, 140, 149–152, 169–170, 184–185, 202 reorganization within, 14, 17–18, 20, 90–93, 139, 178–179, 180, 201 technology, need for modern, 140–141, 149–151, 152–154, 168, 171 unity among crafts as a sector, 13–14, 63–64, 75, 163–165 Crafts Museum, New Delhi, 189, 201 Curzon, Viceroy of India, Lord, 124, 128–130, 161, 162, 173, 183 Deccan Artisans’ Association, 165 decline, rhetoric of, 106–109, 111, 133 deindustrialization, 4, 6, 169

de Forest, Lockwood, 117, 122, 132–138 design celebration, 28, 30–35, 54, 77, 105, 109–110, 132–133 documentation, 54–57, 117 instinctual, 33–34, 111, 132 instruction in, 111–115, 132–133 preservation, 20, 104, 109–110, 118, 145 promotion, 116–130 reform movement in Britain, 28, 30, 77 Westernization/hybridity in, 54, 57, 74, 105–107, 111, 115, 117–118, 147 development, public interest in and responsibility for, 2–4, 67–70, 146, 169, 175, 189–190 Dharwar cooperatives, 144–145 School of Industry, 156–159, 167 Dutt, Romesh Chunder, 5, 71–72, 94, 108, 168, 169, 185–186, 199 Dutta, Arindam, 6, 8, 69, 186 dyeing, 51, 52–53, 64, 85–86, 87–88, 91 embroidery, 16–17, 78, 91 exhibitions Ahmedabad 1902, 100, 187 artisans on display, 19, 43, 60–61, 61 fig. 1.5, 62 fig. 1.6, 66 Bombay 1904, 60, 172 Broach 1868–69, 38–42 Calcutta 1883, 55, 136 collecting systems for, 36–37 Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, 38, 45, 58, 59 fig. 1.4, 60, 66, 79, 82, 116 Delhi Durbar Exhibition of 1903, 128–130, 129 fig. 3.5 Great Exhibition of 1851, 19, 23–24, 28, 30–36, 38, 77, 83, 103, 109

INDEX

international exhibitions, 29, 35–38, 42, 78, 79 Jaipur Art and Industrial Exhibition of 1883, 55, 57, 116–117 objectives of Indian exhibitions, 29, 35–36, 38–39, 41–43, 126–127 Punjab Art and Industry Exhibition of 1881–1882, Lahore, 116–117, 136 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 1–3, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 21, 189–199 government role in crafts craft monographs, 51–54, 57–58, 125 1883 Draft Scheme for the Promotion of Industrial Art, 54–55, 117–118, 123–124, 127 gazetteers, 29, 44, 49–51, 57–58, 63–64 post-independence, 10, 201–202 pre-British support for crafts, 8–9, 25–26 responsibility for economic development, 26–27, 28, 67, 70, 99–100, 160 technical investigations, 168, 170, 172–174, 181–182, 183–184, 201 Goswami, Manu, 4, 6, 10, 27, 108 Griffiths, John, 51–52, 54–55, 58, 66, 113, 114, 123, 132, 138, 146–147 Haynes, Douglas, 17, 92, 145, 173, 178, 180 Hendley, Thomas Holbein, 45, 55, 57, 58, 116–118, 119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 132 Hutheesing, Muggunbhai, 133–136 indebtedness, artisanal, 90, 139, 143 Indian industrial conferences, 60, 94, 179 Allahabad 1910, 87

263

Banaras 1905, 84, 89, 94, 99, 163, 165, 175, 185–186 Madras 1908, 87, 160 Surat 1907, 85, 94 Indian National Congress, 60, 94, 99, 187, 190, 193 Industrial Art Pattern Books, 120–121 industrial education, 14, 15–16, 20–21, 153, 154–167, 181 differences from art education, 155–156 limitations of earlier artisanal education, 87–88 preservation of artisanal difference within, 21, 154, 156, 166–167 problems with, 157–160, 177 reform of, 160–164, 166 restrictions within, 162, 164–166, 167 for upper classes, 166, 181–182 industrialization, need for, 70–71, 82–84, 94, 148, 149–151, 186, 187–188, 199 ivory, 14, 52 Jacob, Colonel Swinton, 55, 58, 118–119, 132 jail industries, 121–122 Jaipur, 136 exhibition, 55, 57, 116–117 museum, 55, 116, 117, 122, 123, 126 publications by the Maharaja, 57, 119, 121 school of art, 60, 115 Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, 11–13, 15, 20, 60, 103, 110–115, 126, 127, 183 JJ School museum, 54–55, 113 Reay Art Workshops, 11, 16, 58, 104, 114–115, 123, 146–147 use of Indian art in instruction, 54–55, 112–114 jewelry, 38, 47, 105

264

INDEX

Jones, Owen, 28, 31, 32 fig. 1.2 Journal of Indian Art and Industry (JIAI), 20, 55–58, 60–61, 118, 125–126, 128, 146 khadi, 2, 10, 21, 189, 190–198 Kala Bhavan, 152, 155, 166, 181, 187 Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), 198–199 Kipling, John Lockwood, 55, 78, 116–118, 120, 122–123, 132, 136 knowledge, of design, 30–34, 54–57 limitations of artisanal knowledge, 61–62, 65–66, 69 of production not just products, 34, 43–54, 58 shift from private to public, 28, 64–66, 67 systematization, centralization, 24–28, 29–30, 46, 52, 58, 63–64 Kutch, 105, 126 labor, improvement of, 151–155, 163–164, 167 shortages in, 137–138, 151–152, 157 underemployment of, 152 leadership elite, as proving legitimacy to colonial state, 8, 9–10, 18, 20, 70, 97–101 impossibility of artisanal, 7, 20, 69, 74–75, 87–89, 98, 146, 148, 184–186 necessity of outsider, 7, 20, 65–66, 69, 72, 75, 86, 105, 108, 146–148, 164, 175, 188–189, 196–197, 201–203 shared by Indians and British, 6–8, 69–70, 76, 96, 108, 152–153, 202–203 leather, 12, 14, 52, 143

Mathur, Saloni, 5, 8, 66 Mayo School of Art, Lahore, 78, 120, 123 middlemen, 131, 139, 144 Morris, William, 4, 10, 28, 44, 73, 77–78, 80, 81, 116 Mukharji, T. N., 66, 82–83, 88 museums, 36–37, 45–46, 117–118, 124 emporia at museums, 127–128 paper, 29, 52 pottery, 12, 14, 52, 167–168, 183–84 Prakash, Gyan, 7, 36, 152 Ranade, Mahadev Govind, 5, 70, 99, 100–101, 199 Reay Economic Museum, Poona, 128 Roy, Tirthankar, 17, 65, 92, 178, 180, 201 Royle, John Forbes, 30–34, 37 Ruskin, John, 4, 10, 34, 44, 81 Sassoon (David) Industrial and Reformatory Institution (Bombay School of Industry), 154–155 silk, 52, 56, 60–61, 64, 78, 79, 168 stone carving/inlaying, 52, 55 swadeshi, 2–3, 9–10, 70, 169, 190 Technical Art Series, 118–119, 120 fig. 3.2, 123–124, 146 Terry, George, 37, 39, 42, 132 Tiffany (Louis) and Tiffany Studios, 133, 137–138 Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay, 19, 37, 39–41, 43, 59, 54–55, 60, 126, 128 Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute (VJTI), 104, 144, 166, 170, 173–174, 176

INDEX

Wardle, Thomas, 78, 79, 85–86, 107 Watson, John Forbes, 27, 41 Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India, The, 41, 45, 49 weaving, handloom, 14, 17–18, 52, 91, 131, 139, 169–170 handloom instruction, 175–177, 178–179, 180, 181–182, 193 improvements to, 20–21, 60, 85, 92, 94, 140, 169–170, 171–179, 172 fig. 4.1, 193

insistence on crafts difference, 179–181 need to preserve/improve, 71, 140–142, 168–170, 175, 184–186 wood, 11, 14, 16, 38, 52, 88, 90, 120–121, 155–157, 163 furniture, 91, 121, 131–138 Wyatt, Matthew Digby, 28, 31 zari, 12, 52, 91

265

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