Craftspeople of Gujarat and Kachchh in the 18Th and 21St Centuries

1

Maxine Berg

Producing for Global Markets:

Craftspeople of Gujarat and Kachchh in the 18th and 21st Centuries

[Please do not quote without permission]

AHRC International Network. Global Commodities. The Material Culture of Early Modern Connections: The V&A 11-12 October,

1.Introduction

The subject of my paper is the people who produced and now produce fine luxury goods for local and global markets. I compare the periods of global history of eighteenth-century India and globalization in twenty-first century India. I focus on artisans, skill and markets in one area of India – the region of Kachchh in Northern Gujarat, even now considered a remote part of the new global India.

In Mandvi, the celebrated ancient port of Kachchh, best known for its boatbuilding of dhows made from teak and acacia wood, boats that sailed the Arabian Sea to Zanzibar and beyond, we find a long history of bandhani making. Bandhani, or tie dye, is widely practiced in Bhuj, Mandvi and many other towns and outlying villages across Kachchh. It is a classic outworking occupation. Organized by men, especially in the Khatri community through family networks, these prepare the cloth in workshops where they stencil the designs onto fine cotton or silk. The tying is done mainly by women but also by male outworkers; the fabric is then dyed by men who have passed their knowledge on through generations.[1]

Sisters Hanifa and JamilaSumra and all other members of their family combine tying with agricultural and domestic labour. It takes them 5 days to complete a piece of work and they might earn 1500-1800 R. per month. Theirwork andthe work of all the women who practice it, is also like a habit; they never sit empty-handed. In a small darkened house across from the putting out shop where

they bring their goods, NeelamKhanna counts the tied bandh. She is well-educated with a second year of a BComm, but unmarried and the carer for her mother after the death of her father. She is widely trusted by contractors and workers, and with steady work; she earns 3,000 Rs. a month. The counting is intricate, but logical – she takes 15 minutes to count 1,000 kadi (or chains of 4 ties each). Shabana, tying by the side of Neelam, had been practicing the trade for ten years, and explained that the cloth was tied first in white, then in its dyed form.[2]

My paper reflects my own New Directions in the study of a part of the world I had never researched before. Rather than trying to write about the whole world, I choose to write about a place that some of us may consider remote, and how it connected to the wider world. I also choose to write about the production processes whose histories we abandoned in the early 1990s in our quest for consumer revolutions.

2.The Local and the Global

Kachchh, in a remote area between Northern Gujarat and Sindh, now modern Pakistan, became known in the wider world in the wake of the 2001 earthquake. NGOs converged on the region, and the Indian government developed the area leading north from Ahmedabad into Southern Kachchh as the Kandla Special Economic Zone. Today trucks, cars and camels jostle on a four-lane highway leading past many factory developments. In 1809 Alexander Walker, the British Chief Resident at Baroda, travelled through the region and described it as a country whose ‘independence over a series of centuries altho’situated between powerful and ambitious empires, is a sufficient proof that it has yielded nothing to gratify ambition, or to compensate the expense of conquest.’ Yet this was the region that produced many of the over 1200 pieces of printed cotton textiles in the Ashmolean’s Newberry Collection, most of these dated between the 10th and 15th Centuries, and traded to Egypt, up the Red Sea ports through the Middle East, out across the Arabian Sea to East Africa, and down the Malabar coast and on to present-day Indonesia. Its textiles were soon to fill the cargoes of Portuguese, Dutch then British ships trading from Diu, Mandvi and Surat, and pass on to European consumers. Today it remains a knowledge node of the crafts, its people responding to the challenges and opportunities opened in the wake of the earthquake and globalization. Understanding the history of this production centre demands that we talk to its people now; this brings to us a sense of the cycles of production in the long course of industrial development and the adaptation of skills and products to local and global markets.

My colleague at Warwick, Anne Gerritsen has developed a local study in global context of the great porcelain centre of China, Jingdezhen. Her study of the local production contexts of its products traded all over the world from the 14th C. onwards demonstrates the unevenness and complexities of global history. I follow her example in seeking the history of the global in the local history of Kachchh. Local contexts bring us access to the places of production, now too commonly neglected by global historians focussed on shipping and caravan routes, and they [3] demonstrate the deep historical roots of the materials, skills and product designs that made these global products possible.

Finally I am pursuing new directions in methodologies. Like archaeologists I found myself with extensive evidence of the material culture of the region – for example those c. 1200 pieces of textile in the Newberry Collection. These pieces are in Oxford; others are in the V&A, and in the South Asia collections in museums around the world, as well as in the textile collections of India’s museums such as the ChhatrapatiShivajiMuseum in Mumbai. They are not in the museums of Kachchh destroyed in the earthquake; only rarely can they be found as fragments in archaeological excavations, unlike the indestructible porcelain shards found in excavations not just in Jingdezhen, but around the world. The production processes for these products were, and are, embedded in the skills of the region’s artisans. There were few archival or printed records of the experience of these artisans, their organization of production, their acquisition of skills, or their access to markets. To learn of these I have followed the practice of some archaeologists in speaking to inhabitants in the region today. Part of my evidence, therefore relies on a series of interviews and oral histories of current crafts people.

3. Skills, Useful Knowledge and Export Ware

My own work has long focussed on what was entailed in making goods for distant markets; how was an exotic ornament transformed into an export-ware good? How was it manufactured; how were skills accessed and adapted to the designs sought in world markets? Few now study manufacture, but this is central to the themes of material culture and consumption which inspire us today. Part of that consumptionin early modern Europe was of goods from Asia, and shortly after of the goods manufactured in Europe to imitate these.[4]

Social scientists, from Michael Polanyi in 1966 to Richard Sennett in 2008 have devoted extensive theoretical and empirical research to the ‘knowledge economy’, investigating local skills, craft and talent, and the vital components of ‘tacit knowledge’. [5]Recent historical research on ‘useful knowledge’ has in the main been confined to Europe. We need to turn to the ‘local knowledge’ in Asia. There is a recent turning to some discussion of ‘useful knowledge’ and skill among some of India’s historians, notably Tirthankar Roy, David Washbrook and PrasannanParthasarathi.[6] Parthasarathichallenged Mokyr, but faced the limitations of India’s historical evidence in arguing that the ships, guns, cannons and other commodities that were made in India suggest a sophisticated and dynamic culture of technical knowledge.’[7] David Washbrook, however, provides an alternative scenario of a textile economy of pre-colonial and early colonial South India which produced unique forms of quality through extreme specialisation by caste and subcaste. Global markets tapped into the facility of Indian textile producers to make quality goods in great variety, but innovation remained embedded in skills, and ultimately the result was not a path to ‘industrious revolution, but ‘luxury in a poor country.’[8] Useful knowledge in the context of India demands that we turn to discussion of artisans and industry in India’s history.

Recent books by Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (2009) and Douglas Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (2012) address the political potency of craft in modern India. The artisan became a political symbol of India’s fate under colonialism. For British colonizers the crafts demonstrated India’s economic backwardness, but they also collected their unique and beautiful products in museum collections that orientalised not just the goods, but the artisans themselves. In these discourses artisans were traditional, ossified, homogenized, subjects to be archived and preserved in museums and art schools.[9]

For nationalists craft producers represented the remains of the self-sufficient society that they thought India had once been before the disruption of colonialism, industrialization and the competition of European textiles. Gandhi’s khadi campaign epitomised the turning of these discourses into a craft critique of Empire. The discourses also informed the writing of Indian economic history for the generations after Independence.[10]Comparing the course of artisan production in Gujarat and Kachchh over its early modern global history and its recent framework of globalization allows us to engage in larger debates on industrialization and on India’s industrial history over the pre-colonial, colonial, nationalist and recent global periods.

5. Gujarat, Kachchh and Long-distance Trade

Gujarat’s reputation from ancient times for its trade and fine manufactures, especially its printed textiles, took on new dimensions under the Mughal empire. The region was annexed by the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1573,and its ports became linked into a global trading network; its textiles renowned. European trade extended rapidly with the Portuguese ports in Diu from the sixteenth century, and with the Dutch in Surat and in Mandvi in the seventeenth century, followed by the British from the mid eighteenth century. Surat in Southern Gujarat, by the late seventeenth century provided Europe with indigo, printed cloth, quilts and fine Mochi embroideries. It was a vibrant centre of trade and manufacture; trading to the East India Company alone over 20 different fabric typesin 1708.[11]Recent research emphasises the continued strength of trade at the end of the eighteenth century. This was also a period of expansion of European trade with the northern part of Gujarat, the region now known as Kachchh. Merchandise coming out of the Gulf of Kachchh was much sought after by Indian Ocean merchants, especially cotton and textiles. The English East India Company was already well aware of this in 1710, directing its officials in Surat to give special attention to the trade:

‘you likewise say that you have assurances of the Large quantitys from Cutch and Patan of the same Sorts with what you buy in and about Suratt but at easier rates and that you will make advances therein since their People and Vessells trade yearly to your Port.’[12]

Mandvi in the mid eighteenth century was a cosmopolitan place, attractingmany Indian Ocean merchants especially interested in cotton and textiles. The main destinations for these were the coast of Africa, Zanzibar, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Malabar Coast and on from there to South East Asia. With the coming of the Dutch these goods entered into the VOC’s extended intra-Asian trade network with markets in Bengal, Malacca and Batavia and China, and also in the Dutch Republic.[13]

The crafts developed under the patronage of the royal courts, for long distance trade, and for local ceremonial use. The Kutch dynasty ruled from Bhuj from 1549 until the merger with the Indian Union in 1948, but was marginalised from the later eighteenth century as a princely state under British rule.The city now has a population of 133,500; the earthquake of 2001 killed 13,000 in the city and in the surrounding rural communities; there has been much rebuilding in the years since.[14] The remains of the AinaMahal palace,which according to folk history wasbuilt and decorated in the early 1750s under MaharaoLakho by the engineer and architect, Ram Singh Malam, show a significant integration of Dutch and other European arts and crafts. Design and architecture there and in Mandvi reflect the period of expansive commerce in the mid eighteenth century, the Dutch presence and openness to European arts and crafts.[15]

Bhuj was also long a ‘knowledge node’ of the crafts including bandhani (silk and cotton tie dye), ajrakh (resist cotton printing), embroidery, batik prints, cotton and woollen weaving, lacquerware, enamelling, woodcarving and cutlery, and silver and gold jewellery work. Local production served the particular demands of the Jat, Ahir, Harijan and Rabari tribes, and the nomadic cattle herders of Banni in Northern Kachchh.[16] It provided fine fabrics for the court in Bhuj, and merchants trading from Mandvi to Diu and Surat, and from there to markets in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South East Asia. Many of its craftsmen came from Sindh, groups invited by the king of Kachchh, RaoBaharmalji 1 (1586-1631), including dyers, printers, potters and embroiderers. Skills and design connected further to the Persian Empire.[17]

6. Manufacturing in Gujarat in the 19th and 20th Centuries

What happened to these vibrant craft and textile regions with their long histories of global trade as they passed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Their histories have been those of colonialism and de-industrialization in India more broadly. But recent studies of the late colonial and nationalist periods have found not just a survival of craft economies, but a resurgence of small producer capitalism in the interstices of colonial constraints and economic underdevelopment. Tirthankar Roy’s study, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (1999) focused on broad areas of India over the period 1870-1930, finding that in the period since 1947, there was staggering growth in the towns and informal industrial labour in the crafts he studied: handloom weaving, gold thread, brassware, leather, glassware and carpets.[18] Indeed he argued that artisan industry ‘has not just survived, but shaped the character of industrialization both in colonial and post-colonial India.’[19]

Douglas Haynes, in his recent book, Small Town Capitalism in Western India, focused on an overlapping, but extended period of 1870 and 1960, and researched in depth the textile economies of Western India and Gujarat. His analysis of the cycles of the craft economy over this long period charts not the great decline of the textile economy, but a resurgence of ‘weaver capitalism’ in small manufacturing centres; the old handloom towns renewed their cloth manufacture with small producers using electric power. A small-scale power loom industry in karkhanas or workshops with multiple looms radically changed a textile economy which by the 1930s was dominated by the disjuncture of large-scale mills and declining handloom manufacture. From the 1940s the karkhanas diversified their output, adopted electric or oil power and power looms, and explored their capacities for flexible specialization. They sought plant and equipment in Japan and Belgium, built new dyeworks and developed innovative product lines. At the end of the twentieth century Western India’s small weaving towns became large urban agglomerations with millions of looms, the cloth manufacture located in tight enclaves. Haynes and Roy have charted not just the long continuity of small-scale manufacturing over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but a reshaping of informal sectors in response to local, national and more recent global markets, technologies and the state.

Haynes thus deconstructs the binaries that inform the historiographies of India’s de-industrialization: handloom and powerloom, craft and industry, artisan and factory work, and informal and formal sectors of the economy.[20] Western India’s textile history is, furthermore, not one of simple transition from artisan-based production for local markets in the pre-colonial period to one of commercialization and factory production in the nineteenth century, and on to globalization in the late twentieth century. Haynes recognizes that the cycles of small producer capitalism he charts over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had deep historical roots in a wide Indian Ocean and global trade, and in versions of the mixed workshop and family economy embedded in networks of middlemen and sub-contractors in eighteenth-century Surat and other textile towns of Gujarat.[21]

7. Methodologies

Haynes’ investigation of the industrial cycles and recent economic development of the textile manufacture of Western India relies on many local gazetteers, reports and industrial surveys. It also relies on over 200 interviews with artisans, workers, merchants, industrialists and industry experts. Interviews and oral histories also provide a way to connect the globalized world the crafts and small industries now inhabit with that eighteenth-century world of Indian Ocean and global trade in luxury goods. Interviews and oral histories take us into the methods of archaeologists, some of whom see themselves practicing ‘ethno-archaeology’; others simply seeking another way of accessing local material cultures and technologies. Archaeologists have used analogical reasoning observing and interrogating living communities in the regions where they seek to reconstruct material cultures of pre-historic production centres. There has been considerable debate over ethno-archaeology; for example, the association of the past with unchaing traditions. But with a critical historical approach such interviews can suggest possible interpretations of the past. Archaeo-botanist, Martin Jones, Professor of archaeology in Cambridge is currently researching the globalization of grain crops: wheat, millet, and barley between Southwest Asia and China, and others between South Asia and Africa by the 2nd millennium BC. He combines archaeological digs in Kazakhstan with interviews with local hill farmers on their memories of technologies before and after collectivization.