Material Culture for Global Markets: the Craftspeople of Eighteenth and Twenty-First Century

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M

Maxine Berg

Material Culture for Global Markets: the Craftspeople of Eighteenth and Twenty-first Century India

1.Introduction

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

The research I am telling you about today arises from a large team-based history project entitled ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830. It also reports on a recent oral history project which I have conducted with others among the craftspeople of Kachchh in Northern Gujarat.

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

Sisters Hanifa and Jamila Sumra and all other members of their family combine tying with agricultural and domestic labour. It takes them 5 days to complete a piece of work and they might earn 1500-1800 R. per month. (roughly £20-24). Their work 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, Neelam Khanna counts the tied bandh. She is well-educated with a second year of a BComm, but unmarried and the carer for her mother after the death of her father. She is widely trusted by contractors and workers, and with steady work; she earns 3,000 Rs. a month. The counting is intricate, but logical – she takes 15 minutes to count 1,000 kadi (or chains of 4 ties each). Shabana, tying by the side of Neelam, had been practicing the trade for ten years, and explained that the cloth was tied first in white, then in its dyed form.[2]

My lecturereflects some of my own New Directions in history writing in turning to study of a part of the world I had never researched before. My background is that of an economic historian of Europe. It reflects a shift in the types of research we might practice as global historians, moving beyond those titles which first inspired our turning to global history: ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations’ and ‘The Great Divergence’. After over ten years there are now many variations on a the theme filling our shelves, on why the West Ruled or got Rich and Asia did not or does now, other books on power and wealth, plenty and peoples, empires and world history, and all the globals and Indian Ocean worldsin many varieties. We are still dominated by the developmental models that lead us to ask why was China not first; Pomeranz’s recent advance on this has been to ask why China wasn’t second. We might indeed well ask what region or nation was second – allowing ample opportunity for a quip from Joel Mokyr at the last AHR conference – it was Belgium. Rather than trying to write about the whole world, I choose to write about a place that some of us may consider remote, and how it connected to the wider world. I also choose to write about the production processes whose histories we abandoned in the early 1990s in our quest for consumer revolutions.

2.The Local and the Global

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

My colleague at Warwick, Anne Gerritsen has developed a local study in global context of the great porcelain centre of China, Jingdezhen. Her study of the local production contexts of its products traded all over the world from the 14th C. onwards demonstrates the unevenness and complexities of global history. I follow her example in seeking the history of the global in the local history of Kachchh. We see through her study that local histories are not just for local inhabitants. They challenge the linearity and universalism of our global histories. They also bring us access to the places of production, now too commonly neglected by global historians focussed on shipping and caravan routes.[3] Local contexts also demonstrate the deep historical roots of the materials, skills and product designs that made these global products possible.

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

3. Luxury Goods and the Global Economy

Why do luxury goods from Asia matter to global history? Luxury goods have always been of obvious significance to historians of the prehistoric, ancient and medieval worlds. Andrew and Susan Sherratt followed those mundane bronze age beakers that travelled in the slipstream of the gold, silver and precious jewels that traversed Eurasia in 2000 B.C.. But Immanuel Wallerstein dismissed these luxury goods as mere preciosities on the route to modernization from the early modern world, and few economic historians of the 18thC to modern world give them any regard at all. My subject looks back to a global shift from a world provided with fine manufactured goods from Asia to a world of European industrial revolutions. And it considers a contemporary global shift of the late 20thC. and early 21st Century which sees a new Asian ascendancy now providing the world with many of its manufactured consumer goods. I have argued elsewhere that the first phase of long-distance maritime trade from Asia to Europe in tea, silk, cotton and porcelain transformed European consumer and material cultures, in turn stimulating the product imitation and innovation that led onto Europe’s own industrialization. The exotic luxury goods associated with long-distance sea voyages and East India Companies continued, for many Europeans, to depict the meaning of Empire through the nineteenth century. Arindam Dutta in his The Bureaucracy of Beauty has written ‘Economists may bristle, but empire is about taste: gold, silver, spices, silk, tea, textiles, the view, furniture, opium, coffee, bananas, paisley, arabesques....’ [4] In the 21st Century, globalization has been about China as the world manufacturing power, about India’s industrial and IT ascendancy, but also about a global luxury trade that includes fine craft goods from India.

4. Skills, Useful Knowledge and Export Ware

My own work has long focussed on what was entailed in making goods for distant markets; how was an exotic ornament transformed into an export-ware good? How was it manufactured; how were skills accessed and adapted to the designs sought in world markets? Few now study manufacture, but this is central to the themes of material culture and consumption which inspire us today. Part of that consumptionin early modern Europe was of goods from Asia, and shortly after of the goods manufactured in Europe to imitate these.[5]

How those imitative goods were made in Europe is one story which I have pursued along with other European historians. This is a history of technology and skills, recently highlighted as ‘useful knowledge’ and declared by Joel Mokyr to be at the heart of the ‘great divergence’.[6] It is also a history based in ‘local knowledge’; the special ‘nodes of craft skill’ which the late Larry Epstein followed through early modern Europe.

Neither Mokyr nor Epstein, however addressed Europe’s engagement with local knowledge nodes in Asia, specifically for my talk today with those in Gujarat and Kachchh India.

5. Theoretical Background

Social scientists, from Michael Polanyi in 1966 to Richard Sennett in 2008 have devoted extensive theoretical and empirical research to the ‘knowledge economy’, investigating local skills, craft and talent, and the vital components of ‘tacit knowledge’. [7]Many years ago in The Tacit Dimension (1966) Polanyi drew a distinction between ‘tacit’ and ‘codified’ knowledge, arguing the special place of skills and ways of doing in transmitting technologies. Mokyr in his 2002 book, The Gifts of Athena, and most recently in The Enlightened Economy: an Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (2010) defined this tacit and codified knowledge as ‘useful knowledge’ which played a fundamental role in the industrialization of the West.[8]

Recent historical research on ‘useful knowledge’ has in the main been confined to Europe. We need to turn to the ‘local knowledge’ in Asia. We have huge collections of Indian textiles in our world museums; we have extensive and especially quantitative research on the trade in these textiles to Europe, the Atlantic world and Japan, and some research on that trade to Africa. But we still know little of the skill centres producing these textiles. There is a recent turning to some discussion of ‘useful knowledge’ and skill among some of India’s historians, notably Tirthankar Roy, David Washbrook and Prasannan Parthasarathi, who have pointed to India’s deep history of tacit skills and her dynamic culture of technical knowledge.

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

For nationalists, craft producers represented the remains of the self-sufficient society that they thought India had once been before the disruption of colonialism, industrialization and the competition of European textiles. Gandhi’s khadi campaign epitomised the turning of these discourses into a craft critique of Empire. The discourses also informed the writing of Indian economic history for the generations after Independence.[10] Economic historians of India debated the de-industrialization thesis and the fate of India’s artisans from the later 1960s into the 1980s.[11] Comparing the course of artisan production in Gujarat and Kachchh over its early modern global history and its recent framework of globalization allows us to engage in larger debates on industrialization and on India’s industrial history over the pre-colonial, colonial, nationalist and recent global periods.

6. Gujarat, Kachchh and Long-distance Trade

Gujarat’s reputation from ancient times for its trade and fine manufactures, especially its printed textiles, took on new dimensions under the Mughal empire. The region was annexed by the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1573,and its ports became linked into a global trading network; its textiles renowned. European trade extended rapidly with the Portuguese ports in Diu from the sixteenth century, and with the Dutch in Surat and in Mandvi in the seventeenth century, followed by the British from the mid eighteenth century. Surat in Southern Gujarat, by the late seventeenth century provided Europe with indigo, printed cloth, quilts and fine Mochi embroideries. It was a vibrant centre of trade and manufacture; trading to the East India Company alone over 30 different fabric typesin 1708.[12]This was also a period of expansion of European trade with the northern part of Gujarat, the region now known as Kachchh.

The old Kachchh port of Mandvi in the mid eighteenth century was a cosmopolitan place, 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]

James Tod perambulated about the town in 1823, encountering’groups of persons from all countries: the swarthy Ethiop, the Hinki of the Caucasus, the dignified Arabian, the bland Hindu banyan, or consequential Gosén, in his orange-coloured robes, half priest, half merchant.’

‘Hides of rhinocerous, semi-transparent, resembling immense cakes of glue, were hanging up in the streets, prepared for being fashioned into shields; elephants’ teeth for female bracelets and other ornaments, dates, dry and fresh, raisons, almonds, pistachios all spoke the names of lands with which Mandvi still maintained commercial intercourse. Cotton, however, is perhaps the staple article of trade…’

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

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