Skill in historiography

The place of skill is coming back, at least in European historiography, so as to observe and build understanding of not only the process of learning weaving, design, and business, but also how this knowledge worked, was preserved, and developed in the communities of practice. With a concern for tackling the questions of exclusion, discrimination, and inequality, there is a growing realization that the nature of modern knowledge systems is such that economic inequality always goes together with social inequality—in terms of gender, race, education, intergenerational relations, health, mobility, and so on—in a perverse, self-reinforcing loop. A growing number of European historians like Joel Mokyr, P. K. O’ Brien, Maxine Berg, and S. R. Epstein have begun to shift their focus away from ‘knowledge’ to move back towards ‘skill’ and the social processes through which ways of commodification were redefined.Footnote ⁶ It is essential to understand the processes of the capitalization of the handloom in which various elements—be they weavers, looms, techniques, or work culture—are transformed. These issues have to be examined around the concrete and the abstract, the material and the ideological edifice of the global frontiers of capital. In Europe, the relationship between the material culture of skill and the making of knowledge has been interpreted around the development of science. Of late, the knowledge of craft is also being explained around theoretical underpinnings and the vernacular theories that guided the practices of artisans.Footnote ⁷

Joel Mokyr discusses the creation of a gentlemanly capitalism in case of Britain before arguing that

John R. Harris too describes these skilled workers as ‘unanalysable pieces of expertise or the “knacks” of the trade—that is to say, knowledge is primarily tacit and could not be learnt except through experience and imitation’.Footnote ⁹ So in Britain's well-known success story, the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution, together with the engineers, skilled craftsmen, and inventors, created a modern sector in which technological progress thrived and which eventually turned into a modern economy. In fact, the institutional causes of Britain's high level of competence have been less connected with institutions of formal education and more with the result of skill and apprenticeship.Footnote ¹⁰

However, unlike the Western craft communities where modern knowledge implied fundamental changes and ruptures in the structure of thinking, in the colonial world it has been, and is still, a problematic and controversial issue.Footnote ¹¹ In this discourse, there is a universal understanding that craft knowledge was never codified. It remained tacit or embodied in fragile objects and ceases to exist with the death of artisans and artisanal cultures. The gulf between these two converging narratives was manifest in almost every aspect of social and cultural discourse. One of the questions underlying this ‘great divergence’ debate is the significance of industrial skills. Claims have been made about industrial products in various parts of the world, but systematic comparisons are still underdeveloped.

Rather, in the existing academic discourse there is a distraction as the South Asian skilled artisan proves to be a backward and conservative person who refuses to negotiate with institutions of modernity. Here, while talking about skill, one needs to assess the relationship between factors like religion, caste, and capital. The compulsions of capital restricted skills within the specific context of social capital, which was never allowed to be progressive. In fact, until the 1990s, the community was the fulcrum of handloom production as very few job opportunities were available on the open market. Besides backwardness or reluctance or numerical strength, the use of invisible labour and skilling through entrepreneurship made negotiations with modern practices of production quite difficult and complex. However, in the case of the global South, knowledge has emerged from different disciplines which do not necessarily deal with varied learning processes, cultures, or worldviews. The archives of modernity—both colonial and nationalist—have developed a four-dimensional discourse in relation to issues of skilling in the case of India, namely colonial Orientalist discourse, nationalist narratives, modern European historiography, and post-colonial historiographical interpretation.

The first approach scrutinizes the term ‘skill’ to look at its changing meanings within the colonial and metropolitan context to assess it vis-à-vis modern knowledge discourse. Colonial officials created and sustained (mis)translations between indigenous skills and Anglo-European categories of knowledge. Research by Nadeem Omar Tarar shows that the debates on the art school curriculum within the Indian civil and educational bureaucracy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century made a fundamental shift in the theoretical and methodological basis of art education in colonial art schools, which were founded for the revival of Oriental arts and craftsmanship through Western ideas of visual literacy. An analysis of the founding decades of the Mayo School of Art demonstrates the intersection of aesthetic discourses in art education with Orientalist views of Indian society as a traditional, tribal, caste-based one. The colonial sociology of occupational castes became the conduit to recruit and train artisan castes in the Mayo School of Art. While this colonial policy in Punjab favoured artisan castes in their occupational careers, it restricted the enterprising students of artisan families who wished to pursue their careers independent of their hereditary associations.Footnote ¹²

Whatever was non-industrial became a type of nostalgic utopia for intellectuals in both Britain and India. For example, William Morris, George Birdwood, Ananda Coomarswamy, and E. B. Havell, among others, were constantly working towards and writing about the preservation and protection of Indian artisans from industrialization. The prospective subjects of transformation became objects of romanticism. Indian nationalist aspirations added to the polarized idea of non-industrial versus industrial, so when the issue of the protection and revival of craft items came about, it had to be fitted into the market. An Indian nationalist economic critique of British rule, articulated chiefly by Romesh Chunder Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji at the end of the nineteenth century, focused on the decline of the textile industry due to the import of English cloth and yarn.Footnote ¹³ To underline a classic case of Orientalist–nationalist paradox, we are not aware whether Orientalist E. B. Havell and nationalist Mahatma Gandhi ever interacted or read each other's works, yet one can see a drastic similarity between the thoughts of the two in terms of plans to revive Indian crafts. It was in terms of objectives that their ideas differed in important ways, and were articulated at different times in different contexts. Havell was among those leading European romantic intellectuals who were aiming to promote Indian arts and crafts as a purely cultural and moral endeavour. With his limited Orientalist objective of appreciating handloom in terms of its artistic value, Havell could not perceive the political uses of the crafts or cloth, unlike Gandhi who gave the handloom political overtones within the binary of imperialism and Swadeshi nationalism, appreciating its power as a national idiom of Swadeshi seeking political independence.Footnote ¹⁴ The romanticized version of non-industrialism inspired by John Ruskin influenced Gandhi and his plan for Indian society. The notion of labour became teleological as he believed that ‘a life of labour that is the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraft man is the life worth living’.Footnote ¹⁵ The Gandhian idea of khadi as a part of the notion of a self-sufficient economy also strengthened the thinking around the preservation and protection of the crafts. In spite of his philosophical base, Gandhi's approach could facilitate neither transformation nor transition. Rather, his vision to universalize spinning and weaving for everyone as a means of Swadeshi empowerment made the traditional weavers’ claim to skilled expertise redundant. Skill as a resource lost its utility as both Orientalists and nationalists promoted their vision about the preservation of the artisan and his craft.

A parallel Orientalist discourse of British administrator-scholars like Alfred Chatterton reasoned that the absence of formal education was the basic cause of the craftsmen's lack of progress. Chatterton spearheaded the colonial government's policies to ascertain whether the handloom weavers could improve their status if modern machines could be introduced.Footnote ¹⁶ There are examples that show that by the early twentieth century artisans were given opportunities to experiment with the reorganization of production and new technologies. Now they had the ‘option’ to choose between indigenous technologies and European machinery.Footnote ¹⁷ However, in the debate regarding the status or utility of the crafts’ techniques, the voice of the craftsmen was missing. The whole argument regarding the difference or similarity of traditional crafts versus modern industry was discussed around the paradigm of the economic modernization of India.Footnote ¹⁸ The interface between traditional craft and modern industry in India, unlike Europe, was not about transformation but polarization, where support for change came from the supporters of Western techniques, while the opponents from the same arena were against any such transition. Thus the colonized material culture continued to polarize craft and modern industries as two different worlds and experiences. However, this story is being revisited even in the metropolitan world. In Europe, in what Mokyr has shown as the linear path of ‘great convergence’ where the ideological position and material culture of transformation both supported each other, we know that there was a tense relationship between craft knowledge and scientific knowledge, and the trajectory of the transition from craft production to industrial production.Footnote ¹⁹ Certainly the differences of the colonial context vis-a-vis the metropolitan world were many, though there were also certain overlaps between the European and Indian scenarios in terms of intellectual concerns which saw crafts either as purely decorative or the nation's cultural products to be saved from the trauma of industrialization.Footnote ²⁰

In such a scenario the skill of craftsmen was overshadowed by the discourse of knowledge. The relationship between workers and their skills became insignificant in the face of an assumed sense of their backwardness. Both British officials and Indian intellectuals were almost on the same paternalistic page, convinced of the need to protect Indian crafts. Rather than empowering the artisan with a capacity for action, a discourse of subordination was created and enabled. Even contemporary scholarship's discussions about craft in general and weaving in particular hinges on the usual arguments about factors like societal backwardness, the phenomenon of caste, and the lack of initiative on the part of artisans, situating a polarized Indian handloom industry vis-à-vis Western industrial enterprise.Footnote ²¹ The context of the linkage of the economy to capitalist production and the colonial economy mediated this discourse on skills and their assessment.

In classical Indian Marxist writings, the significance of skills has been attributed to ‘the existence of a very numerous class of artisans and craftsmen able to live at very low wages’. Quoting foreign travellers like Bernier and Palserat, Irfan Habib argued that the very number of skilled craftsmen would militate against labour-saving techniques.Footnote ²² This argument attributes the relatively high degree of skill specialization itself to the low wages prevailing in India.

Maxine Berg argued that it is time to re-examine craft and small-scale manufacturing within histories of industrialization, both Western and Eastern, and to reflect on the long survival and adaptation of artisanal production in our globalized world of production and consumption. She reflects on small-scale industrial structures in the current globalized environment, emphasizing the continued significance of craft and skill over a long history of global transitions to discuss the past and future of craft and skill in the industry of the global economy.Footnote ²³ With such a backdrop and European claims of ‘great divergence’, ‘useful knowledge’ and ‘knowledge economy’ are the new buzzwords to carry out any study of artisans. Some historians on South Asia, notably Tirthankar Roy, David Washbrook, and Prasannan Parthasarathi, have initiated a debate on useful knowledge and skill. Tirthankar Roy argued that India's resource endowments explain both low investment levels and the resulting lack of productivity growth. According to Roy, the scarcity and resulting high cost of capital and skilled labour in India meant that Indian industry was best suited to be ‘a vast world of traditional manufacturing, consisting of tool-based industrial production performed in homes or small workshops’.Footnote ²⁴ Rather than examining the fate of the producers—weavers and spinners—Roy was interested in how industry adapted to institutional changes to survive. In his arguments, the entrepreneur weaver-capitalist, who emerged during this process of change and symbolized change, seems to be the most admired factor. Economic and social historians have yet to learn to recognize skill in the stories, to look beyond the manual labour to the skill. Values of productivity, efficiency, and standardization have to be understood differently. One requires situating weavers as technologists and innovators to the core, much more sustainable than many so-called modern technocrats, who had the ability to produce fabrics that consistently satisfied customers’ need for beauty and novelty. Prasannan Parthasarathi improved upon both Mokyr and Roy to present an overview of the demographic and economic structures in India to stress that the country was a highly commercialized economy, where factors like caste, family, and household structures did not hinder economic growth. For him, revisiting the ‘historical evidence’ largely created by European observers could be vital to apprehend the ‘state of knowledge and skill’.Footnote ²⁵

This debate on skills extends to contemporary popular discourse as well as policymakers’ views in thinking of them as outdated and unsustainable objects of charity, or as traditional heritage best found in museums and brought out for special occasions. Questions about boundaries of difference, inclusion, and exclusion arise. The attempts to establish a primordial right to certain practices and skills are, however, often politically employed in order to respond to and include as well as exclude others. Thus questions of belonging or not belonging to the stereotype of modernity entail practical and political implications, and in the colonial as well as the post-colonial world the very acts of inclusion and exclusion, identification, and struggles over categories of knowledge and skill have become more topical than their interdependence. In this new model, the work performed by weavers became invisible, even though such artisans and other small commodity producers continued to contribute to their households in the same way as factory workers. Perhaps the fact that the character of the Indian workforce is predominantly rural and the number of skilled labourers employed in the formal sector has been relatively small is responsible for such exclusions.

In the last decade, substantial work has been done on the acquisition of skills through both formal and informal training, and new knowledge about apprentices has been acquired. Research on guilds has also brought to light new evidence about the masters. Arun Kumar explained how the meaning of skill and skill training was produced through the interaction of the colonial educational system and industrial actors in modern India. Highlighting the discourse of skill production and transference, his work shows the ruptures in the story of colonial skill development.Footnote ²⁶ Shahana Bhattacharya focused on state organized technical education in the field of leather production so as to locate its history within a wider discourse of social and economic structures, prevailing ideologies, and notions of skill.Footnote ²⁷ She shows that technical institutes remained the preserve of educated elite castes and the mass of ‘outcaste’ labourers continued to perform degraded manual labour.

These articles diverge from an earlier argument made by Tirthankar Roy who, by stressing the capacity of master artisans to innovate and by suggesting that individuals were the agents of innovation, refocused attention on the skilled individual within a complex discourse of modernization in a traditional society.Footnote ²⁸ In a way both Bhattacharya and Kumar, being methodologically conscious of the historical context of the production of skill, do not take it as only an individual enterprise. This has been the domain of skill where popular claims for decentring or decolonizing Eurocentric theorizing and disciplinary claims are taken up. As seen earlier in this article, even in the European case, recent scholarship has revisited the cognitive sites of knowledge production and explored the artisan dimension of the Scientific Revolution, in the process showing how the worlds of science and crafts intersected in much more complex—and intensive—ways than was previously imagined. Although manual labour and theoretical invention might now seem separate ventures, they are closely linked processes. As Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer observed, ‘knowledge was made in contexts of application, disciplines were fluid, work took place across many social sites, and there was pervasive reflection on the grounds of knowledge in the process of making knowledge’.Footnote ²⁹

To draw the analogy, the social organization of artisanal production in colonial India rested on a labour process that utilized the unremunerated and grossly under-remunerated work of family labour. Sugata Bose noted, with reference to the peasant economy, that ‘expanded commodity production for the capitalist world market was achieved efficiently and cheaply without resort to the formal commodification of labor’.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, the refusal to be reduced to a commodity was itself a result of successful resistance by weaving communities determined to retain access to a combination of skill and production-based entitlement. This very urge for survival provokes a belief that the social world of artisans requires being seen beyond the binary of homogeneous indigenous and foreign structures of skill and knowledge before being broadly understood, shaped, and reshaped. While skill functioned as a commodity and a social process, equally it acted as a bridge between people and society articulating and impacting on heterogeneous processes of production. Processes of skilling reached and operated at the different sites of production, simultaneously remaining muted while acting amid the societal transformations of work, politics, and infrastructure. Rather than dialoguing for or against the too-long-neglected ‘artisanal’ epistemology and morality of traditional skill vis-a vis modern knowledge, one seeks to inquire when and where they continue to be articulated in everyday life? For example, the uses, implementations, applications, platforms, spaces, and circuits of skill reflected, addressed, and reshaped questions of personhood, caste, community, nationality, labour, welfare and socioeconomic inclusion or exclusion within formal and informal networks and community landscapes; and with notions of labour value and culture, performance, habitus, access, and affect. Here skill as intangible evidence can be used to explore the overlapping and established notions of identity, especially to consider the (hierarchical) structures of society and examine how community boundaries were drawn and redrawn, how spaces were imagined, and occupational memberships granted or denied. Here, traditional forms of domination, control, and resistance (including, but not limited to modern understandings of power, race, gender, caste, and class), articulated and challenged within the context of skilling, are the basic premises of the inquiry.

Capitalist modernization and the skills of survival

Within the wider historiography on artisanal industry and culture in South Asian labour and economic history referred to above, there is an urgent need to explore a neglected but growing field of skill formation in the context of handloom weaving. Moving beyond the skill question (its absence and presence) within the historiography, there is an equal need to simultaneously explore the discourse of artisans and skills, and skill training institutions in the local history of weaving in North India which interacted with capitalist developments (yarn prices, demand for clothes, the rise of the textile industry, competition from China and Japan), the colonial state, and the intricate web of local power relations of the industry. The argument is that skills did not disappear with mechanization and were, in fact, critical to the survival of, first, handloom weaving and, then, power-loom weaving in twentieth-century India.

Even before identifying these issues one needs to remember that the work culture of South Asian craft communities has been shaped by external influences and internal changes since their interface with modernity. The tremendous impact of colonialism, the massive power of globalization, and the unprecedented revolution in market culture have accelerated the transition from a traditional community where values and norms are deeply rooted in history to a social group that has been exposed to modernization for the last two centuries. Here deskilling and reskilling have been continuous processes where technological imperialism and nationalist knowledge discourse are not necessarily the only categories to define the history of skill.

In fact, in spite of social, political, and economic constraints, all those who wanted to make the best use of the education or professional skill or the life cycle they had maintained or achieved, or even for the sheer sense of survival, had to connect themselves to whatever limited opportunities they were offered, both by the labour market and by the demand for their skilled expertise in the consumer market. Thus, for these colonial subjects the disruption of existing social and economic models was not easier. The terms of negotiation were possible only by making the best use of the knowledge they had acquired both through generational transfer and colonial technical institutions. The precarious survival of the weaver was made possible as much through community networks as by modernizing their skill through multi-source learning, collaborative knowledge, or mechanized techniques. In fact, the survival of skill was secured only by everyday negotiation and struggle to reimagine the restructuring of operational perspectives within the immediate context of a shifting material existence.

Within this premise falls eastern Uttar Pradesh, basking in the glory of its ancient handloom textile industry. Kautilya acknowledged Banaras and Allahabad (Vatsa Desa) as centres for the manufacture of the finest cotton fabrics.Footnote ³¹ The proficiency of Muslim Julaha weavers lay in their adaptation to the craft during the medieval period. The lower-caste urban artisans who converted to Islam during this time cultivated it as a hereditary skill. The persona of medieval Bhakti poet-saint Kabir emerges as the metaphor for this occupation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Mauwaals (the weavers who migrated from Mau to Banaras in the eighteenth century) had become an important community in the textile landscape and their work was acknowledged in a citation at the Lucknow exhibition of 1835. While the Banarasiwaals (weavers originally from Banaras) had concentrated their skill on finer fabrics, the Mauwaals were able to expand to a whole new range of designs, textures, and products in silk and gold: the Kamkhwab, satin, and takhtposh (cover cloth) for which Banaras was well known. The Mauwaals’ contribution lay in creating heavier and more expensive textiles. They understood the importance of innovation due to their previous experiences of survival through experiments at Azamgarh, and created a different, mixed variety of products that ensured growth. They created special yarn motifs. The Banarasiwaal weavers’ saris, dupattas, dhotis, turbans, handkerchiefs, bridal veils, sashes, caps, and yards of plain, striped, and checked fabrics too were eagerly sought after. Their designs, in both geometric and floral patterns, were as varied as their clients. The introduction of satin into Banaras came through Mau in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³² Silk cloth was only one among many cloth products in the early nineteenth century in the eastern United Provinces.Footnote ³³

The process of change is associated with the interface of local weaving communities with merchant capitalism. European colonial commercial intervention in the eastern United Provinces started much later—at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1801, it was being reported still that ‘weavers and artisans, as they are all freemen; they work by the piece, by contract or by the day, as they can agree one with another’.Footnote ³⁴ Considerable diversity and demand in terms of products, the organizational base, as well as in relations between sectors within the production structure governed the prosperity of this sector. Broadly, one group consisted of weavers who manufactured fine silk clothes on complicated looms; the other comprised those who wove coarse clothes.Footnote ³⁵ However, within two years of the cession of the eastern districts, the British East India Company's commercial residents had replaced the previously active contractors and agents of the Company and begun direct purchases. Now a new mediator, the gumashta, became the interface between native production and the procurement network of the Company. Due to changing British stakes, the Company's practices did not last for long as it was compelled to withdraw from its Indian textile business by the second decade of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, master weavers, instead of supervising the process of weaving, began to control the production process as a personal business concern. They moved into the space vacated by the Company gumashtas and became the interface between production and marketing systems. The new credit and marketing chain also emphasized its dominance over the local production process. Gradually, a new term ‘grihasta'Footnote ³⁶ came into circulation to identify such mediators in the handloom industry of the eastern United Provinces.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century, there were periods of crisis, some linked with changing demand for the products, others with famines and disease (which killed both weavers and consumers). Moderately skilled weavers suffered more because of competition from machine-made cloth, but highly skilled weavers making the ‘highest grade fabrics’ also found their market shrinking through the abolition of the Delhi and Lucknow courts. The exquisitely woven brocades and Kamkhwabs of Banaras could easily have found an expandable market through promotion. This was equally true of the satin fabrics of Azamgarh, but ‘there is no regular demand for them and no attempt to create a demand’. Only casual travellers attracted by their beauty occasionally acquired them. Muslin was no longer a famous product but there were ‘a few families’ in Azamgarh who made it even then, ‘if you care to order it’.Footnote ³⁷ Banaras was still a centre of a thriving trade in silk of every description, from the finest piece of Kamkhwab, which decorated rank and nobility, down to the plainest scarf or chaddar worn by men of moderate means.Footnote ³⁸ Yet some types of specialized cloth production were declining in the other region: ‘A small quantity of jamdani (a fine hand woven figured and damasked fabric) is still woven, especially as borders for caps, but with the change in the sartorian (sic) taste of the Indian upper classes, the demand for this fabric is steadily falling.’Footnote ³⁹

A shift towards new types of products helped the weavers negotiate tough times. The traditional sector put up a stiff resistance and the survival of handloom weaving depended on locality-based skills and connections with new markets in regional contexts. Thus diversifying to specific products and demands, along with a stagnant market, was the new local context for the weaving communities of the qasbas of the eastern United Provinces. We may get a glimpse of the life cycle of the handloom industry in which the processes of economic dislocation and survival were played out in the social milieu of the two important qasbas of Maunath Bhanjan and Mubarakpur. After a gradual revival from the early decades of the twentieth century, Mau diversified its cloth production, which required varied types of skills, thus accommodating different weaver groups in large numbers. Cotton production also helped in creating secondary support clusters in nearby localities. In comparison, Mubarakpur weavers were more inclined towards and interested in silk cloth production which required huge investment and very specific training and skills. This limitation curtailed the possibility of accommodating a large number of weavers and workers in the secondary work of production.

During this period, when rising yarn prices were lowering weavers’ wages, it seemed logical to the colonial ideologues that weavers would have to increase productivity to make up for the loss in wages. The state's policy recommended mechanizing the loom. But the weavers’ solution countered this idea. If yarn prices increased, then they would use less yarn, increase the amount of work they put into the warp, learn more intricate skills, and attempt to carve out a share of the market for luxury products. In essence, they used an older technique that was slower, rather than new ones that speeded up production. This was innovation that went backwards on the productivity and efficiency scale, but forwards on the scale of the beauty and quality of specific products. Weavers had to choose—not productivity over beauty, or tradition over modernity, or even market over heritage—to consistently maintain a balance between the two constantly overlapping contexts. In 1902, at around the time weavers in Banaras were preparing to attend an industrial exhibition in Delhi to showcase their brocades and saris and demonstrate their techniques, aniline dyes began replacing vegetable dyes in this region.Footnote ⁴⁰ But even in the 1920s, the weavers remained sceptical about the use of artificial colours and they were so strongly against it that the ‘Julahas used to outcast [sic] if any of them used aniline dyes’.Footnote ⁴¹ Skilled weavers quickly realized the utility of original dyes for the durability and charm of their products. The revival of the silk industry without any local support (particularly raw material), except the skilled labour of the weavers, was due to the special nature of the products and the versatility of the producers. To this end, the technique and loom did not compete; they worked together. This was how weavers reinvented weaving and turned the crisis in yarn prices and the market into a skill that sustained thousands. Historical information about such material conditions of production and use, and exploring artisans’ skills at work, has been minimal. By the early twentieth century, the different branches of the silk industry in Banaras again underwent major changes. Although the demand for certain types of Banaras silk still existed in almost all parts of northern India, there were indications that the market was becoming smaller. Further, by this time silk from Japan and China was emerging as a potential threat.Footnote ⁴² It was suggested that if the Indian silk industry was to hold its own against foreign competition, it had to organize itself along modern lines. Official inquiries were being made to explore possibilities. By the 1920s, the handloom textile industry of the region had become synonymous with the silk sari industry. The fusion of pre-Islamic patterns with Islamic ones, aided by a local climate that was conducive to silk handloom weaving, put the eastern United Provinces at the helm of silk weaving activities. Silk sari production in this region proved to be a skilful shift by weavers responding to changing demands and fashion. Thus traditional artisanal skills, along with specific changes in consumer patterns, became a major survival strategy. Weavers’ adaptation to foreign silk yarn and Indian mill-made yarn was a major symbol of a compromise between the traditional mode of production and modern circumstances.Footnote ⁴³ Silk cloth emerged as an arena of a more specific production mechanism. The ingenuity of the artisans and changing market trends resulted in the production of a variety of fabrics. Again in the late 1930s, fabricated and duplicated foreign products began to hurt the expertise of indigenous weaving in the silk weaving sector. Embroidered and printed saris of Japanese crepe now began competing with genuine silk saris from Banaras, in spite of the fact that the local weavers did their best to introduce new designs. The response to such threats came not from capitalist relations but from modifications in the skills required. Now the ordinary garha and dosuti cloth was being utilized for a new style of printing for the export trade, thereby increasing the demand for it. In Azamgarh district, the Maunath Bhanjan textile store remained the centre of garha and dosuti varieties. One major innovation was the revival of the use of moonia and dugabia cloth, which had been previously abandoned for want of patronage, in saris.Footnote ⁴⁴

The quality and type of fabrics could indicate the occupational status and artisanship of the weavers. Better quality and higher priced fabric required greater artisanship, labour, and financial investment. Opportunities were more readily available for highly skilled weavers. So skill was becoming a class-oriented acquisition; artisans with ordinary skills would have to migrate due to the lack of demand for their products. However, such power relations were not merely skill-based and had to be redefined in terms of the dominance of capital, design, and marketing vis-à-vis weaving. By the early decades of the twentieth century, diversification into the specialized production of higher-value products and the production structure entrenched in silk weaving resulted in fluctuations in the already shifting power structure. The demand for selected and specific products forced weavers to compress labour costs, which further saw the hierarchical segmentation of the industry according to the type of cloth, cost of raw material, and the degree of organization of investment and marketing. The requirement for costly yarn and gold thread made this skill-based work subordinate to the mediators.

The production of silk fabrics, especially those of high quality, required a strong organizational effort because it called for different, and sometimes very specialized, skills. The requirements of capital investment, raw material, and labour forms conditioned this sector to certain new terms. The province was not known for raw silk production, so the required quantities were mostly imported from foreign countries through the seaport at Bombay, with this shift being taken over by modern textile firms.Footnote ⁴⁵ The subsequent loss of traditional skills, changing patterns of cloth consumption and use of raw material, and the rise of grihastas, along with a corresponding new hierarchy among producers need to be understood in this context. The difficulty of managing in its entirety the complex technological cycle, which would have required a large capital outlay, and the abrupt fluctuations that are typical of an activity largely dependent on foreign markets for the supply of raw material and the sale of its articles, discouraged locating the different production stages in a single place. The system adopted in the qasbas of the eastern United Provinces was a network of scattered workplaces run by their owners with varying degrees of autonomy and linked by the initiative of the handloom entrepreneur (grihasta) with the cloth manufacturer (Julaha). However, the degree of dissemination and decentralization of operations was not the same across the handloom sector. The grihasta was the only owner of the raw material and semi-finished products, and from his workshop directed the transformation process at all stages. The offshoot of the colonial aurang,Footnote ⁴⁶ the karkhana, gradually replaced the households as the directional centre of the entire manufacturing system, but it did not house all the material transformations, and the initial stages of the working cycle—the spinning, dyeing and winding, throwing, warping—took place in different skilled artisans’ houses. In short, the grihasta outsourced most of the productive activity.

In a way, people who connected the informal world of weavers with the formal projects of capital and modernity—particularly master-weavers and middlemen—became powerful as they controlled information and trade.Footnote ⁴⁷ This monopoly was based on an informal apprenticeship system and the control of human capital, and was tied to a closed network of weavers and their families. It was able to function in full force without the backing of any formal institutions as long as favourable local circumstances and the means and motivation to maintain it existed. By the second decade of the twentieth century community forms of patronage or modern trade unions had emerged as the primary strategic institutions resorted to by weaving households. Small weavers, when interfacing with a mediated market or forced into mechanized production, became more vulnerable to the practices of capital. This kind of instability leads to fatigue and, after repeated failure, to despair.

Changing life cycles

The abovementioned interface of traditional patterns, evolving skills, and new circumstances made the weaving sector so vulnerable that the survival of artisan labour structures and their skill depended on either a guild or a social community. What sustained handloom weaving were informal relations—in weaver households, between families, of caste, with the master-weavers, with patrons. All such institutions have traditionally been offered as explanations for the survival of artisan labour structures and their skill. However, such networks of handloom weaving were not sufficient to prevent the decline without capitalist interest and investment in handloom institutions. Whenever weavers interacted with the formal institutions of modernity—for credit, branding, trading, marketing, legal protection from power-loom imitations, research—the modern knowledge discourse rendered weavers helpless. A literary imagining of the weavers’ lifecycle in Jhini Bini Chadariya,Footnote ⁴⁸ a Hindi novel based on the weavers of Banaras and written in the 1980s by Abdul Bismillah, takes us to a frozen-in-time, retrospective history of the weak and weary world of weavers. They do not fall victim to their circumstances but rather fight to change them and to break away from this traditional cycle of misery and exploitation, only to discover that the HajisFootnote ⁴⁹ and the grihastas of the community guard all points of exit—political, economic, and religious. In a contextual perspective, Bismillah's study of the weavers detects different sub-cultures, each with a distinct world, within the composite weavers’ culture. Metaphorically, the life cycle of the weavers symbolizes the changing social-religious-economic world, the world of awareness, and the experiences of having different shades within domestic and work life. If one situates the life experiences of weavers in this region and beyond merely within the paradigm of industrialization and modernization, there is a risk of economic reductionism, as production goes beyond technique and labour and is linked to social processes and organizations. Crafts are not paradoxical to modern forms of production. Thus dichotomies of economic versus social are not valid, as this description shows. Now the weaving households faced competition from the emerging karkhana system, closely knitted around the same community networks, and gender and caste relations in the handloom work culture were being redefined.

Technologies of production and vulnerability of skill

The above scenario goes against the dominant narrative that globalization and modernization created the conditions for a creative reorganization of the institutional structures and adaptation of technology within handloom production.Footnote ⁸⁸ Here, rather than generalizing the process, the trajectories effectively working in South and western India require redefining and reworking, when moving northwards. In the United Provinces, the rise of Muslim-Grihastas as a class of artisan-entrepreneurs was not an easy or smooth process because of centuries-old networks of Bania merchants at the existing sites of handloom weaving. Certainly, the adoption of new tools and methods needed the agency of such sponsors. The lack of change was not always due to weavers not being amenable to change, as is usually argued. Rather, it was due to the unwillingness of merchant capitalists to take risks and provide incentive to weavers to effect the change. Here one has to remember that even minor changes in the initial phase require major investments for which the availability of cheap human labour was always a dampener.

Douglas Haynes has rightly indicated that the handloom weavers of western India relocated, when possible, to be near cloth and yarn markets, and to meet new types of consumer demand emerging in nearby new metropolitan cities like Bombay or Ahmedabad. This new generation could invest in new tools and processes, and thus defined the professional character of a number of industrial towns in western India. This reconstruction of the lives and handloom industry occurred where the refashioning of the caste and community idiom was possible. Thus in the new destinations of western India, the emergence of ‘weaver-capitalists’ was a far easier and smoother process. However, unlike the ‘weaver capitalists’Footnote ⁸⁹ of western India, who had the advantage of being at the new sites of production with new social spaces, this facility was not available in the human geography of the eastern United Provinces where handloom communities and towns had existed for so many centuries. The Julaha weavers relied on pre-existing social structures and sources of labour and skill, constantly intersecting with the colonial state, nationalist politics, and communal mobilization.

Production technology in the region remained more or less the same in the early twentieth century. The weaver sat on the edge of a pit dug in the dry mud floor of his house, the slay was practically on his lap, and the treadles to drive the machine were at his feet.Footnote ⁹⁰ This simple pit loom was largely suitable for weaving plain or coarse cloth, which was sold to the poor and brought low returns. Over the centuries, the simple pit loom had undergone a few changes to alter the make-up of the industry—the gathva (handloom-held frame), introduced in the sixteenth century, and the jacquard loom, introduced in the 1920s, could well be the two most important technical innovations, and they altered the role and number of weavers working on a single loom. The gathva increased the productivity of the individual loom, but three men were needed to operate it. Joseph Jacquard's system for programming designs on fabrics, however, reduced the number of men working the loom to two: a weaver and his assistant (usually a 10- to 14-year-old boy paid by the day). The two simplifications introduced were the use of the jacquard machine in place of the intricate cotton-thread designs strung over the loom, and the adoption of the Hattersley domestic loom, both in about 1928.Footnote ⁹¹ Now the pit loom could be fitted with a throw or fly shuttle. When the jacquard machine was introduced, most textile production consisted of plain, unpatterned fabrics. Therefore, the new machine did not result in considerable unemployment. While traders believed these changes indicated a decline in traditional skill, weavers considered them only as labour-saving devices since this technical improvement left their existing skill untouched. But the introduction of the power loom in the mid-1930s was a technical revolution in the local textile industry. Coping with this was a major challenge for the handloom weavers. Unlike the jacquard machine, which was useful in the production of designed fabrics, the powerloom could produce almost any kind of fabric more quickly. The powerloom was effective, both in the manufacturing of competitive items that required careful handwork and for the production of plain fabrics.

Even then silk production was a sector in which modern technology failed to triumph over the skill and technology of production. The handloom industry was going through a critical transition in the vocation of ‘design’ in colonial India from the realm of handicrafts and the artisanal arts to a new social space of middle-class training and practice. This was quite apparent in the way that designing skills came to occupy a new median space between fine arts and crafts within the structures of skill pedagogy, and the way in which the figure of the professional designer (nakshband) monopolized the sector. This was mainly because silk designing was a significant factor in the highly competitive field of silk marketing. Even after the arrival of the powerloom, the old designs continued to be important in silk production, mainly because there was no alternative for the traditional technologies of handmade designs. The cloth designing sector was traditionally dominated by a skilled group of nakshabands (pattern makers). A brief discussion on the technology of pattern making would explain the reason for the dominance of local skill and technologies in the era of mechanization. The designs were first drawn on talc or paper and then the designer would make its model in cotton thread on small frames. This art was inherited and monopolized by a few families in Banaras. This monopoly over the skill of designing was a hurdle for the introduction of new and different designs as designers asked for large sums to create them as well as transfer them from paper to the yarn frame.Footnote ⁹² The design patterns, originally etched on mica and now drawn on graph paper, were transferred using threads onto a loom, enabling a pattern to be used repeatedly. To create these designs, the artist first drew out the entire concept on graph paper. Then small punch cards were created through which colour threads were passed at different stages as the cards hung on the sides of the loom. Depending on the design, these cards paddled in a systematic way so that the right pattern and colours could be picked up during the main weaving. Hundreds of such perforated cards were required to produce a single design. Depending on the complexity of the design, a normal sari required 15 days’ to six months’ work. By the 1920s, with the dominance of silk cloth in the industry, designers were doing brisk business with a growth in demand for new styles of fabric and new designs in prints. In Mau, one assistant designer was working exclusively on the sari borders required by the weavers. ‘Shadow cloth’ was produced in the modern designs and most of the centres were taking up this line. The 1939 report of the Industries and Commerce Department noted with satisfaction that 107 new designs had been introduced that year.Footnote ⁹³ There were three fully functioning finishing factories at Tanda and one at Mau. However, silk weaving was affected by the problem of fabricated and duplicated foreign products. Embroidered and printed saris of Japanese crepe competed with genuine silk saris from Banaras, although local weavers did their best to introduce new designs.Footnote ⁹⁴ A sari had to be unique in quality, colour combination, design, and pattern. As a result, there was no uniformity in rates, which became a cause for rampant exploitation.