A Frayed History - The Journey of Cotton in India

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CHAPTER ONE

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Webs of Woven Wind

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A Walk through the History of Cotton and Cloth in India

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otton farmers and hand weavers in India find themselves in a tragic predicament in the early twenty-first century.

Both work on small scales, the farmer growing cotton on small farms and the weaver producing cloth by hand. Both are dependent on spinning mills, the only customers for cotton farmers, and the only suppliers of yarn to hand weavers. The scale of yarn spinning, however, does not match the scale of Indian cottongrowing and hand-weaving sectors, with the spinning mills working to an industrial scale. Thus, not only is there a mismatch of scale, but the uniformity of the spinning technology undermines the diversity that was the strength of the indigenous cotton textile industry. It forces the farmer to grow only one kind of cotton and it supplies only one kind of yarn to handlooms in all regions.

Cotton growing, once closely linked to its use as a textile fibre, has become separated from handloom cotton cloth production, through the intervention of this yarn-spinning technology, introduced into India in the nineteenth century. Yarn continues to be spun in a contemporary version of the same technology even

though its increasing burden of debt clearly demonstrates its unviability. The mainstream textile industry of India, largely made up of yarn spinning mills, is one of the biggest defaulters of bank loan repayments (The Economic Times 2016b). As the nineteenth century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne says, ‘The past lies upon the present like a giant’s dead body’.

Every Indian schoolchild knows that India was famed for its cotton textiles in the past, that cotton cloth in India dates from the Harappan civilization, and that India made the finest cloth in the world, the Dacca muslins. Most of us also know that at present cotton farmers are committing suicide and that handloom weaving is in trouble. But few are aware of the series of twists and turns that this industry has gone through over the centuries.

It’s a fascinating story, and throws some light on the reasons for both its world dominance for millennia and for its present state of depression.

To characterize India’s ancient indigenous cotton textile industry as part of a ‘subsistence economy’ presents problems, since the village economy of which it was a part had been monetized very early on. The industry also does not quite fit into the category of ‘small-scale’, for though the production was household-based, it still manufactured vast quantities of cloth. The structure of the indigenous cotton textile industry was a jigsaw of hundreds of thousands of small cotton farms, millions of households spinning yarn and weaving cloth, and exchanging their wares through small, periodic, local markets that also fed into larger world systems. Not only did this assemblage clothe the common people of India, it also ‘clothed the world’ (Riello & Roy 2009: 6).

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Cotton in Ancient Times To start at the beginning of history: This wonder fibre was known early on the opposite sides of the world. India is one of the two centres of the origin of cotton, the other being Peru (Srinivasan 1999: 183). Evidence of the long history of Indian cottons also comes from sculptures, inscriptions, and mural paintings, and later from letters and records. In ancient times cotton was grown as a tree, and the plants actually yielded more than they do today.

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In the New World cotton has been grown and used from a dateless past—certainly in clothing Peruvian mummies which had slept the sleep of death for centuries even before Pizarro came to disturb the dream of the Incas; and among the treasures which Cortez wrested from the Mexican Montezuma and sent to Charles V were ‘exquisite cotton fabrics dyed in various colours’. (Burkett & Poe 1906: 14–15)

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In India cotton came into general use for the clothing of both rich and poor at an early stage in history. Cotton fabric has been woven in India since as far back as the Indus Valley Civilization. Fragments of woven cotton have been found in the ruins of Mohenjodaro, the ancient city in modern Pakistan dating back to about 5,000 years ago, and recent archaeological finds in Mehrgarh, Pakistan, put back the date of early cotton cultivation and use in the Indian subcontinent even further, to 5000 bce. The fabrics dated around 3000 bce, recovered from the Mohenjodaro excavations, were expertly spun and woven, and identified to be from cotton plants closely related to Gossypium arboreum species. Perhaps at that time during the Bronze Age, in Harappan Civilization even ordinary people used it: iconographic evidence shows that the Harappans wove a range of grades of cotton cloth. Harappan terracotta figurines wear draped garments and the famous statue of the Mohenjodaro Priest King looks as if he’s wearing printed cotton.

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This was, of course, not in a short harvesting period, but over the active bearing life of the tree, which lasted for several years.

Pliny the Elder, following Theophrastus, (Yates 1843: 452) says, ‘The tree from which the Indians make garments resembles the mulberry in its leaves…’. Here Pliny uses the word ‘Tineas’, but the context shows that he referred to cotton.

The ancient Egyptians used linen, a cloth made from the fibre of the flax plant. Native Americans made elaborate clothes from animal skin. Europeans made clothes from sheep’s wool, linen, and animal skins and fur. In China, the rich wore garments of cotton and silk, while the poor wore hemp and wool. Peru is another home of cotton, and its fabrics are equally well known over centuries.

Praises of Indian cotton have been sung in the Vedanga scriptures written in 1000 bce. Kautilya’s Arthasastra, also from about 1000 bce, mentions cotton being woven at several places in India.

Early references to cotton can be found in the Asvalayana Sutra of the Rig Veda and in Manu Smriti where there is a reference to the sacred thread. The earliest mention of cotton or ‘karpasa’ according to George Watt, a former professor of botany and reporter of economic products to the Government of India, ‘appears to be in the Asvalayana Srauta Sutra (say 800 bce), where the material is contrasted with silk and hemp as that of which was made the sacred thread of the Brahmans’ (Watt 1989: 9).

In an earlier book, George Watt (1890) said,

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The Sanskrit word translated cotton is perhaps first mentioned in the Institutes of Manu, where, in Book II No. 44, it is stated that, ‘the sacrificial thread of a Brahman must be made of cotton, so as to be put on over his head in three strings’. The word used in that passage and translated cotton is …‘karpasi’ from which has been derived, according to most writers, the modern Hindustani kapás and even the Hebrew karpás (the ‘green hangings’ of the Book of Esther).

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Cotton from early times has been worshipped and held sacred for its many uses, not just by Brahmans, but by aboriginal Indian tribes like the Khonds, who also grew it in new settlements (Watt 1890: 42–3).

To the Western world, it was the Greeks who first narrated accounts of Indian cotton. Several early Greek and Roman historians and travellers wrote about about the cotton plant as well as the cotton dresses that Indians wore. Theoprastus (350 bce) gives us the first definite picture of Indian cotton cultivation. He says, ‘The trees from which the Indians make cloths have a leaf like that of a mulberry but the whole plant resembles the dog rose.

They set them in the plains arranged in rows, so as to look like vines at a distance….’ He then adds that cotton cultivation may be seen both in India and Arabia (Watt 1989: 11). Curtius, writing in the first century of the Common Era, says that Indians ‘cover their bodies from head to foot with carbasus’ while Dionysius Perigietes, in the second century, says ‘some weave muslins’.

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He continues, noting that

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[t]he raw fibre, as also the Indian cotton manufactures, were, we learn conveyed by the Arabs from Patiala, Ariake [the North Konkan region near Mumbai] and Barygaza [modern Bharuch, in Gujarat] up the Red sea to Aduli [a port on the Red Sea off Eritrea, whose modern name is Zula]. Masulia [modern Masulipatnam, in Andhra Pradesh] was even then famous for its painted calicos, and the fine cotton cloths (muslins) called by the Greeks gangitiki came very possibly from Dacca.

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The Indika of Arrian, a work compiled (150 ad) from Nearchus, Megasthenes, Strabo and Eratosthenes, as also other early Greek travellers, was professedly intended to supersede the inaccurate account of India given by Ktesias of Knidos. After narrating the particulars above mentioned, Arrian adds that the cotton of India is whiter and brighter than that of any other country. Thus by the beginning of the Common Era we have a fairly vivid glimpse of India as a cotton growing and cotton manufacturing country.

(Watt 1989: 12)

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In the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea we have the first mention of commerce in Indian cotton. This Greek manuscript of the first century ce specifically mentions the export of Indian cotton cloth from east, west, and peninsular India, particularly from the port of Barygaza, called ‘Bharukaccha’ in Indian languages. We are told that from this port Indian cotton cloth travelled in the last century bce overland to the markets of Central Asia, as well as over the sea both eastwards and to the West: ‘… in the first millennium bce cotton products from the Deccan, the interior of peninsular India, were being exported in significant quantities through the port of Barygaza’ (Smith 2009: 94).

From these accounts it is clear that since ancient times the cotton fibre has held a central place in trade and that India played

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Speaking of the dress of the king, he says, ‘The carbasa which he wore were spotted with purple and gold’ (Yates 1843: 338).

Herodotus (1996), in about 450 ce, described cotton as ‘a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep’, adding ‘of this the Indians make their clothes’.

Sir George Watt (1989: 12) writes that

a major role in the manufacture of cloth and its commerce, producing enough cotton fabric to clothe her own population and export it all over the world from very early times: By the seventh century bce Indian cotton fabrics reached Assyria (parts of modern Syria, Turkey, and Iran), where they are mentioned in inscriptions. India dominated world trade in this commodity from at least the beginning of the Common Era; exporting westwards to Greece, Rome, Ptolemaic Egypt to Persia, and eastwards to the rest of Asia. It was perhaps just before the turn of the millennium that Indian cotton textiles first reached the Roman Empire.

When they were exchanged for Roman gold, the import duties levied supplied an important part of Rome’s revenues. Trade with the Roman Empire grew by leaps and bounds when the sea route replaced the dangerous overland route and made the transport of cloth easier. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder, complains in CE 1 ‘in no year does India absorb less than fifty million sesterces of our empire’s wealth’ (Pliny quoted in Tchernia 2011: 238).

Romans marvelled at the sheer Indian cottons, calling them nebula (mist) and venti (wind). Dyeing and printing on cotton cloth, India’s other skill, made it particularly desirable. A resistdyed cotton textile, possibly of Indian origin, has been found in a tomb at Niya, China, dating from 25 ce to 220 ce. As we travel down the centuries we come to a piece of resist-dyed cloth found in a rubbish dump in Berenike, one of Egypt’s ancient sea ports. This scrap dates from the fifth century ce, and is almost certainly of Indian origin, so far the oldest physical remnant of Indian trade cloth. Still in Egypt, we find the patch from Quseir al-Quadim and those known as Fustat textiles continuing the saga of overseas deliveries of Indian cotton cloth to the Middle East from the eleventh to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concrete evidence of a continuum of over a thousand years. All these pieces are of thicker cloth, block printed with dyes that are still bright five hundred years later. John Guy’s book Woven Cargoes (1998) has descriptions of these fabrics collected in Egypt by the British Egyptologist Percy E. Newberry and now housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. The textiles from the collection that are identified as of Indian origin are coarse in texture and roughly block printed. Scholars have written

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extensively about the Newberry Collection, as it is known.

The design, the dyes, and the early date of the trade have been commented on, but scholarship declares that these textiles ‘cannot claim fame as good examples of outstanding craftsmanship’ (Barnes 1990). What has escaped the scholarly eye is the fact that India was able to export vast quantities of coarse cloth, obviously intended for the use of commoners rather than for the elite. The Indian cloth in the large Newberry collection—1,225 pieces—is concrete evidence of a unique feature of Indian textile production and trade: no other region was able to make ordinary, everyday cotton cloth, not just fine fabrics, into a market commodity.

These small scraps, preserved in the hot dry sands of Fustat, challenge the common understanding that textile exports from India were mostly of the finer varieties.

Since no such large quantity has been preserved in India, certainly none of ordinary people’s wear, the Egyptian finds from Berenike, Quseir, and Fustat are of particular importance. From these we can assume that the ordinary people of India used similar thick serviceable cottons. About their manufacture, however, we can only refer to local language accounts, inscriptions in stone, and the writings of travellers. Beginning with the Greeks the foreigners tended more to marvel at the fineness of the expensive textiles than comment on the everyday fabrics. Sulaiman, an Arab merchant who visited Calicut (Kozhikode) in 851 ce waxes eloquent on Indian clothes ‘made in so extraordinary a manner that nowhere else are the like to be seen. These garments are … wove to that degree of fineness that they may be drawn through a ring of middling size’ (Taylor 1840: 163). Perhaps he arrived at the port of Muziris in south-western India, now mysteriously lost? This ancient city, probably destroyed by mighty floods in the fourteenth century, was since earliest history one of the great collection points of cloth woven in the hinterland.

Vijaya Ramaswamy, describing the textiles of South India, quotes a twelfth century manuscript, the Manasollasa, which speaks of saris patterned with different colours (Ramaswamy 2006: 17). François Bernier, in the seventeenth century, says of the textiles of Bengal, ‘I have been sometimes amazed at the vast quantity of cotton cloths, of every sorts, fine and coarse, white

and coloured, which the Hollanders alone export…’ (Anonymous 1891: 439; emphasis as per original). ‘Bernier mentions that the Masulipatnam chintz used to line the walls of the Imperial Durbar Hall, and as screens, were so beautiful that painted flowers looked like natural, as if the spectators were gazing at a parterre in a garden. The chintzes from these parts, by their delectable designs and ravishing beauty, enchanted fashionable customers in every country’ (Gandhi 1930: 13).

It was from India that the making of cotton cloth spread to other nearby countries and eventually to Europe. ‘From India the culture of the plant and the manufacture of cotton spread into the south of Persia and into Egypt. By the Mahomedan both were carried wherever their arms extended their conquest’ (Royle 1851: 4). The Moors introduced it into Spain and then to France and Greece. ‘It was in Mohammedan Spain that the cotton manufacture first began in Europe’ (Peake 1985: 16).

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Nineteen Centuries of Export

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Meanwhile, possibly around 1000 ce, trade from India towards the east grew, with enterprising Gujarati and Arab merchants sailing down the west coast with cargoes of fabric from Gujarat, picking up more from southern ports including Muziris, hugging the coast around the cape to Arikamedu and then setting off across the expanse of the Indian Ocean to Indonesia. Perhaps from here Chinese ships took Indian cotton cloth to China, but a large part of the export seems to have been made for Indonesia and the islands of the Malayan archipelago. Here Indian cloths, both silk and cotton, were suffused with symbolic and even spiritual significance, as markers of prestige and status, highly prized, handed down through generations as heirloom objects.

It was this thriving business, alongside the export of spices and gems, which continued from the first to the early nineteenth century, that made India rich in gold and silver, perhaps even the richest country in the world until it was overtaken by China around 1500 ce. While there is no account of the payments for cotton fabrics made over the centuries by Arab, Armenian, and Indian traders, the records of the European companies show that in just

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five years, between 1681 and 1685 the English East India Company alone brought into India 240 tonnes of silver and 7 tonnes of gold to pay for its cotton cloth purchases, as John Keay notes in his book The Honourable Company (Keay quoted in Lally 2009: 59).

China and India were the two largest ‘manufactories’ of the world, which exported not just natural products but manufactured goods. China’s fabricated goods were its unbeatable ceramics and silk, while Indian cotton cloth was the largest manufactured item in world trade from the time of the Roman Empire up to the nineteenth century. The French navigator Pyrard de Laval, writing from Goa in the early seventeenth century, says ‘…the principle riches consist chiefly of silk and cotton stuffs, wherewith everyone from Cape of Good Hope to China, man and woman, is clothed from head to foot’, while of Bengal he writes ‘Cotton is so plentiful, that, after providing for the uses and clothing of the natives, and besides exporting the raw material, they make such a quantity of cotton cloths, and so excellently woven, that these articles are exported…’ (Pyrard 1888: 328).

It was not just the quantities, the variety of cotton goods that came from India also astonished the world. Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary, writes from Malacca in 1515 ‘The trade of Cambay is extensive and comprises cloths of many kinds…’

(Cortesao 1944). Hobson-Jobson, the Anglo-Indian dictionary, has a detailed entry under ‘Piece goods’ of English versions of Indian names of almost a hundred varieties of cloth: albelli, alrochs, cossai, bafta, bejuta, corah, dorea, dosootie, chhint, gingham, jamdani, moree, mulmul, mushroo, nainsook, nillaee, palempore, punjam, susi … the list goes on and contains some fascinating details. For example under ‘Sastracundees’ the note reads: ‘These cloths seem to take their name from a place called Sastra-kunda, “Pool of the Law”….

In the township of Kiyara Sundar is a large reservoir which gives a peculiar whiteness to the cloths washed in it’ (Yule & Burnell 1979: 705).

The European trading companies—Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English—began to muscle in on the trading networks of the Indian Ocean from the end of the fifteenth century. They found, as the Arabs had before them, that it paid to bring textiles from India to South East Asia to exchange for pepper, cloves,

cinnamon, and nutmeg (which Malay kingdoms themselves traded for cotton cloth from India) to be carried to Europe. Later, the East India Company profited from the opium grown in India and illegally imported into China, encouraging the drug habit among the Chinese people (more on this in Chapter 2).These companies, however, could not barter with India, as there was nothing that Europe produced that India wanted, so the traders were forced to pay in gold and silver. The companies also carried cloth from southern India to the west coast of Africa, particularly the checked variety, for the Kalabari people of the Niger delta; the fabric, known there as injiri, was highly valued and used in their birth and death rituals.

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Floating Like a Cloud

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It was the excellence of Indian cotton fabrics, famed as ‘webs of woven wind’ which from the sixteenth century impelled European countries to seek new trade routes to India. Cotton began to be known as ‘white gold’. It was again the race for supremacy in the manufacture of cotton fabrics which led to the scramble for raw cotton in the 19th century. (Sethi 1960)

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India has been recognized as the ancient home of G. arboreum (Sikka & Joshi 1960: 137). India grows all four types of cotton: G. arboreum, G. hirsutum, G. herbaceum, and G. barbadense (see note on cotton varieties in Appendix II).

The legendary Dacca Muslin was dubbed aab-e-rawan (running water), shabnam (evening dew), beft hawa (woven air), because it would float like a cloud if thrown in the air (Sundaram et al. 1999: 6).

These were the sheerest fabrics the world had ever seen, woven for the court and for the higher echelons of society, made from local short-stapled cotton, grown on the banks of the Meghna and Buriganga rivers in Dhaka, woven from yarns of upwards of 600 counts, with 1,000 to 1,800 yarns in a warp. Sir George Watt’s remarkable work on cotton makes this perceptive comment on the famed muslin: ‘…perhaps the Dacca hand spinners might still be able to teach the machine spinners something worthy of their attention. Whatever explanation can be given of the fact, a fact it remains, that the hand spinners of Dacca use a short staple annual

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when a man puts it on, his skin appears as plainly through it as if he was quite naked; but the merchants are not permitted to transport it, for the Governor is obliged to send it to all the Great Mogul’s seraglio who uses it to make the sultanesses and noblemans’ wives shifts and garments for the hot weather and the king and the lords take great pleasure in beholding them in these shifts. (Tavernier in Burkett & Poe 1906: 16)

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Then there is the famous story of Aurangzeb rebuking his daughter for being immodestly clad—though she was wearing seven layers of muslin (Gandhi 1930: 14–15).

The manufacture of this fabric continued, though in a degraded form, until the end of the 1700s, and both the plant and its transformation by the spinners and weavers of Dhaka into fine muslin were closely studied by Europeans. George Watt quotes the report of Mr Bebb, Commercial Resident of Dhaka, dated 1788, calling the staple ‘the finest cotton in the world, producing cloth of astonishing beauty and fineness’ (Watt 1989: 103). Watt also quotes Dr James Taylor who, in a book published in 1851, says of the thread ‘a skein which a native weaver measured in my presence in 1846, and which was afterwards carefully weighed, proved to be in the proportion of upwards of 250 miles to the pound of cotton’ (Watt 1989: 105). It is interesting to note that while the cottons of this region, known variously as bairati, phootee, or nurmah according to Watt, produced extremely fine fabrics, they were unsuited to machine spinning. Dr Taylor, in the same book, agrees with this, but on the other hand also says that the local muslin spinners were unable to use American cotton, and claim that the local fibre is superior to spin fine yarn. Watt adds other accounts, one from Francis Buchannan-Hamilton, writing in 1828: ‘I have no doubt that the fine cotton produced near Dacca is one cause of the superiority of the manufacture, nor do I think that any American cotton is so fine, but then there can be no doubt that the American kinds have a longer filament

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cotton (not long staple tree cotton) in the production of their exceedingly fine muslin yarns’ (Watt 1989: 106–107).

The magical gossamer-like qualities of Dacca muslin have been well recorded over centuries and Tavernier writing in 1660 says

and on that account are more fitted for European machinery.’

Mr Tucker (1829) concurs: ‘The fibre of the Bairati is extremely fine, silky and strong, but the staple is very short’ and adds that he ‘sent the seed of this plant to his native island, Bermuda’ (Watt 1989).

Here is a paradox. While these meticulous observers of Indian cottons were unanimous in their praise for both the plant and the cloth made from it, they also agreed that it was unsuited to the ‘European machinery’. Not one among them seemed to have considered it necessary to recommend a change in that machinery so that it could use this cotton fibre to make comparable fabrics.

Though Indian cotton seeds had been carried to the West and though Indians had always used local varieties for their famed textiles, the development of spinning machinery in England and the US continued on its own path, preferring the long staples of the American hirsutum cottons, and shutting out the shorter, softer-stapled arboreums and herbaceums.

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Growing Cotton

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Since the cotton plant was so intimately connected with the lives and occupations of so many people, the farmers who grew the original Indian varieties had paid a great deal of attention to their particular qualities and characteristics, generation after generation, for centuries. One way in which the plant was improved was through seed selection. Every year seed was collected from the best and hardiest plants, the ones that were the most vigorous and yielded the best lint, and this seed was carefully stored.

The seeds, which are used for sowing are carefully picked, and after having been dried in the sun are preserved in an earthen pot in which oil or ghee has been kept, and the vessel with its mouth stopped up, so as to exclude the external air, is hung up to the roof of the hut, and over the spot where the fire is usually kindled.

(Watt 1989)

Year after year of seed selection improved the variety with regard to the characteristics that cotton spinners and weavers valued. Different varieties were grown in different parts of the

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The high lands are selected for this crop, and are ploughed from eight to twelve times up to September and October, when the seeds are sown. This is done in parallel rows, distant about a cubit from each other, and before the seeds are dropped into the ground they are moistened with water. The cotton plant is liable to injury from hailstorms, heavy rain, and caterpillars. Formerly the ground for cotton was allowed to lie fallow every fourth year, and it appeared to be owing to the neglect of this … in the present day that the produce is now inferior in quality to that of former times.’

(Taylor 1840)

Manuring the land with cow and sheep dung was an important way of improving the yield and quality of cotton, and of preventing the impoverishment of the land due to cotton cultivation.

Mr Garrow, Collector of Coimbatore in 1812, reports on the cultivation of nadam purthee in that district: ‘The ground intended for it is

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country, each acclimatized to the local soil, water, and climate.

This meant that there were perhaps hundreds of different varieties of the genus G. arboreum and also G. herbaceum grown in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. Though most cottons were creamy white in colour, some were naturally coloured: dark brown in Bengal, yellow-green in the Garo hills, and light pink in peninsular India.

The cotton plant mutates very easily, changing its character according to the nature of the local conditions such as the minerals in the soil and water, and the local climate. The same desi variety, kondapathi, of the genus Gossypium arboreum that today grows in Srikakulam and is hand-spun into the very fine yarn that makes the famous Ponduru khadi, was tried in Gujarat some years ago and though it grew and produced lint, the quality was not as fine.

In the old days each region in India had its particular variety that had been grown in the same area and was well suited to the local conditions, and that differed in characteristics from those of other localities. Very few of these remain. Even today, for example, the desi cotton grown in Gollaprolu region of Andhra has a characteristic light pink colour, and is known as yerra pathi, red cotton.

The preparation of the ground where the cotton was to be sown was also carefully done.

prepared by penning the cattle and sheep alternately from one spot to another in the fields until the end of April when the ground is supposed to be sufficiently manured’ and he adds: ‘The large folds of sheep for which Coimbatore is celebrated are principally reared for this purpose (Ratnam 1966: 139).’ Cotton was grown mixed with other crops, and the nadam variety yielded once a year for four or five years before being removed. Even then, ‘It so impoverished the soil that the land was not thought fit for use 6 or 7 years after removal of the nadam cotton crop until it is well manured and dug’ (Mr Peter, Collector of Madura, 1812 in Ratnam 1966: 143). Intercropping with a legume ensured that the fertility of the soil was maintained, a practice still common in the country.

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Eclipse of Indian Textiles

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Until the mid-1800s, India was the largest producer of cotton in the world, and also had the biggest cotton textile industry. As Sven Beckert says, ‘For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900 ce cotton was the world’s most important manufacturing industry’ (Beckert 2015: xiii). However, most of the crop was used locally or traded within India. This changed as India was transformed into a supplier of raw material and an importer of yarn and cloth.

The change was part of the transformation of the world economy from ‘a single global world economy with a worldwide division of labor and multilateral trade from 1500 onward’ (Frank 1998: 52), in which India’s position as the primary producer of cotton cloth was unchallenged, to a competitive economic system in which India became an exporter of raw material and a market for manufactured goods; both had to go hand in hand. As Karl Marx said, ‘You cannot continue to inundate a country with your manufactures unless you enable it to give you some produce in return’ (Karl Marx quoted in Beauchamp 1935: 31). In this case the produce was cotton, the primary raw material of its industry, and the manufactures with which India was inundated were cotton textiles made in the newly established factories of Britain.

It was the English East India Company, which, along with other European companies, had been carrying Indian cotton textiles to Europe since the seventeenth century, that was the agent of this

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To the Editor, The Samachar,

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I am a spinner. After having suffered a great deal, I am writing this letter. … I have heard that, if it is published, it will reach those who may lighten my distress and fulfill my desire….When my age was five and a half gandas (22) I became a widow with three daughters.

My husband left nothing at the time of his death wherewith to maintain my old father and mother-in-law and three daughters …

I sold my jewellery for his shraddha ceremony. At last as we were on the verge of starvation God showed me a way by which we could save ourselves. I began to spin on takli and charkha. In the morning I used to do the usual work of cleaning the house and then sit at the charkha till noon, and after cooking and feeding the old parents and daughters I would have my fill and sit spinning fine yarn on the takli. Thus I used to spin about a tola. The weavers used to visit our houses and buy the charkha yarn at three

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change in the nineteenth century. Now it was able to establish a two-way trade, carrying cotton from India and bringing back the cloth woven from it. The textile factories of Lancashire needed all the cotton the ships could bring. In the regions ruled first by the Company and later by the British State, a monopoly over the purchase of cotton was established by making draconian laws to force growers to sell only in designated ‘market yards’ from where the cotton was sent to the coast to be exported. In the Berar region of central India, for example, the Cotton Frauds Act of 1863 decreed that persons selling cotton outside these market yards could be imprisoned (Satya 1997: 156). This put an end to the vast local spinning and weaving industry by denying it access to its basic raw material.

In India it was easy to change the balance of trade, as the British had access to Indian markets through their overlordship. In the early nineteenth century British ships began to bring machinemade cotton yarn to India, which they sold at cheaper rates than the local handmade yarn. This effectively took away the livelihood of millions of women who earned their living by spinning yarn. This letter, from the 1820s, printed in the Bengali paper Samachar Darpan, and reprinted in an English translation by Gandhi in Young India in 1931, is a graphic description of how peoples’ lives were affected:

tolas per rupee. Whatever amount I wanted as advance from the weavers, I could get for the asking. This saved us from cares about food and cloth. In a few years’ time I got together seven ganda rupees (Rs 28). With this I married one daughter. And in the same way all three daughters. There was no departure from caste customs. Nobody looked down upon these daughters because I gave all concerned …. what was due to them. When my fatherin-law died I spent eleven ganda rupees (Rs 44) on his shraddha.

This money was lent me by the weavers which I repaid in a year and a half. And all this through the grace of the charkha. Now for 3 years we two women, mother-in-law and I, are in want of food. The weavers do not call at the house for buying yarn. Not only this, if the yarn is sent to the market, it is not sold even at one-fourth the old prices. I do not know how it happened. I asked many about it. They say that bilati (foreign) yarn is being largely imported. The weavers buy that yarn and weave. I had a sense of pride that bilati yarn could not be equal to my yarn, but when I got bilati yarn I saw that it was better than my yarn. I heard that its price is Rs 3 or Rs 4 per seer. I beat my brow and said, ‘Oh God, there are sisters more distressed even than I. I had thought that all men of Bilat were rich, but now I see that there are women there who are poorer than I.’ I fully realized the poverty which induced those poor women to spin. They have sent the product of so much toil out here because they could not sell it there. It would have been something if they were sold here at good prices.

But it has brought our ruin only. Men cannot use the cloth out of this yarn even for two months; it rots away. I therefore entreat the spinners over there that, if they will consider this representation, they will be able to judge whether it is fair to send yarn here or not.’ (Gandhi 1941)

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The unfortunate spinner did not realize that it was machinespun yarn being sold at a subsidized price that was undercutting her handiwork. How could cotton yarn that had made two journeys over the sea, once to England in the form of raw cotton, and back in the form of machine-spun yarn, be cheaper than yarn that was spun in or near the place where the cotton was grown? Of course it was not cheaper, but was sold at a price much less than its cost.

Formerly prosperous Bengal was badly affected. Import of ‘mule twist’, in combination with a protective duty of 75 per cent

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In 1821 the first great importation of English twist took place… and since 1828 this yarn has been used here almost to the entire exclusion of the country thread…The manufacture of thread, the occupation in former times of almost every family in the district is now, owing to the comparative cheapness of English thread, almost entirely abandoned, and thus the arts of spinning and weaving, which for ages have afforded employment to a numerous and industrious population, have in the course of 60 years, passed into other hands that supply the wants not only of foreign nations, but of the rivaled country itself. The town presents symptoms of decay… A great number of houses are unoccupied or in a state of ruin…. the interior of the town is filled with stagnant canals and sinks… These sources of malaria are extending widely every year … and affect the great body of the people with disease, incurable maladies and infirmities of the most humiliating character are everywhere presented to our view in a crowd of wretched helpless objects, who procure a precarious subsistence by begging in the streets.’ (Taylor 1840)

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The traditional Indian cloth-making industry gave employment to vast numbers of people at each stage: the cultivation of cotton, harvesting, ginning to remove the seeds, carding to separate and parallelize the fibres, and then spinning the fibre into yarn.

In pre-colonial times cotton had been carried in bullock carts from the inland regions where it grew, to the coast, where it was spun and woven. However, much of the processing took place near the cotton fields. In either case there was no need to press the cotton into bales, so the cotton fibres remained throughout the stages of processing in their natural individual state. The important operation, yarn spinning, used to be done by women of all communities in their own homes on hand charkhas, which

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levied on imports into England, meant the death knell of the fine Dacca muslins, and the ruin of the formerly prosperous city of Dhaka: ‘The weaving of muslins, together with the cultivation of cotton, spinning and bleaching, appears to have been the chief occupation of the Hindoos of this district from the earliest period of its history’ writes James Taylor in 1840. He estimates the commerce of Dhaka in 1787 at a million pounds sterling, declining to nothing by 1817. As he writes in a famous passage,

were probably introduced into India in the 1300s. Before that yarn was spun on weighted spindles—such as are used even today by shepherd communities for spinning wool. Spinning was not restricted only to women—men spun cotton whenever their hands were free. Certain yarns, used in special textiles, such as the head cloths used to keep off the heat of the sun by the Mala community of South India, or by fishermen, were treated by soaking in oil and animal dung with plant extracts that made it softer, stronger, silkier, and heat resistant. Cotton was woven not just by the professional weaving communities (who made the finer varieties of cloth, but did not spin the yarn themselves), but also others, such as the Dher1, who made ordinary everyday cloth and carried out the whole conversion from fibre to fabric under one roof. An account of a local market where such yarn and cloth was exchanged is described by Harry Rivett-Carnac (1869):

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An important article of trade in Chimmoor which finds its way to the weekly fair, and which, strange to say, has not been much affected by the great rise in the price of the raw material, is the manufacture of coarse cloth, which is entirely in the hands of the Dhers, who spin the thread and work the looms. The cloth is coarse and strong, and is in great favour among the Kunbees of Berar, hard-working practical men, whom the comparatively flimsy, but smart looking English-made cloth does not suit…

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Rivett-Carnac goes on to detail the number of stalls at the Jamoorghotta weekly market, of which 572 of the 1,424 deal in cloth, yarn, and cotton. Of these 572, by far the largest segment is that of the 350 Dhers selling ‘coarse cloth of their own manufacture’. The market itself, he says, ‘….it must be remembered is but one of the many places to which the peasantry flock for the cloth made by the Dhers…’ He reckons the ‘annual consumption of cotton in these Provinces to be not less than 60,000 bales’.

Cotton was the central commodity of the first days of an industrial production system that changed the world. Sir George Watt says it would not be far from correct to describe cotton as the central feature of the world’s modern commerce, though he is

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Certainly no more remarkable example of a sudden development exists in the history of economic products than in the case with cotton. The enormous importance of the textile today in the agricultural, commercial, industrial and social life of the world, renders it difficult to believe that, but little more than two hundred years ago, cotton was practically unknown to the civilized nations of the west. But it is perhaps even still more singular that a fibre which for many centuries apparently had been a staple article of clothing in India and the east generally, should scarcely find a place in the early classic literature of these countries. (Watt 1989: 9)

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In India the nineteenth century brought radical changes. The way of cotton spinning that was suited to a dispersed industry made up of a multiplicity of small units had to be entirely transformed to fit the demands of mass production. The ‘modernized’ way of spinning cotton entails a series of actions by heavy machinery that generates heat and damages the fibre. The effects of this process are described later in the book. The large-scale export of raw cotton, grown specifically for this purpose (further eroding the producers’ direct control of the conversion), as well as the import of machine-made yarn broke the close connections that had existed for millennia between the cultivation of cotton and its spinning and weaving in India.

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On the other side of the world from India, cotton had been grown since antiquity in the southern parts of the American continent and in the West Indies before it was brought into America.

Later explorers found cotton in other regions for example, in 1492 Columbus noted that it grew abundantly in the West Indies and on the neighboring coasts of America and that the natives had considerable skill in making it up into cloth. In Mexico, Peru and Brazil, cotton was well known and in Mexico it was the chief article of clothing. In parts of Africa, cotton grows wild and is used by the natives to make cloths. (Peake 1985: 17)

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surprised to find there is little mention of its use and value in early Indian writing.

In the seventeenth century French planters in the West Indies began to grow the native cotton to export it to Europe. European settlers brought these seeds to America in the late eighteenth century. The land, wrested from native Americans and cleared of its virgin forests, was fertile. Slave labour was cheap, and cotton began to be produced commercially for the first time, grown and picked by enslaved men, women, and children. ‘In 1859, as many as sixty thousand Delta slaves produced a staggering 66 million pounds of cotton’ (Beckert 2015: 113). It was said that an expert field hand could pick 200 pounds per day. It was the separation of the seed from the lint that took a long time and created a bottleneck: the most able ginner could produce only 10 pounds of ginned lint per day with roller gins. While the hand-operated roller gins used in India were suited to the scattered nature of the Indian industry, they did not suit the industrial scale of ginning that was done on the huge cotton plantations. The problem was solved by the mechanical saw gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, which had teeth that pulled the lint from the seed and was able to gin 50 pounds per day. Even though it damaged the fibre, Whitney’s gin was the golden key to prosperity for American planters, who immediately increased their land holdings to plant more cotton and bought more slaves to work in the plantations. Cotton production in America shot up from 1.5 million pounds in 1790 to 167.5 million pounds in 1820 (Beckert 2015: 104). The design had staying power: modernized versions of Whitney’s gin are the standard way of separating seed from cotton all over the world today.

Mass production also needed mass transport. To pack these large quantities for efficient transport the method of trampling the lint into bags gave way to screw presses, forcing the lint into smaller spaces in the form of cubic bales. Over time, in pursuit of further efficiency, plungers driven by hydraulic power and using more and more force replaced the screw presses, and the bales became denser and denser. Today modern baling machines are able to bring high pressures on the mass of tiny cotton fibres, compressing them to about the same density as wood.

The establishment of the cotton textile industry in the West had a profound impact on its Indian counterpart. In the Indian

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model, cotton cultivation and the production of cloth were largely in the hands of small, independent players—farmers, spinners, and weavers. The Western model was hierarchic, with control in the hands of the owners of plantations and mills, with profiteering rather than subsistence as its basis. This was early capitalism. As Sven Beckert’s important study notes: ‘Slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence, were not aberrations in the history of capitalism, but were at its very core’ (Beckert 2015: 441). It was this early capitalist industry that dislodged India from its long-held primacy in cotton textiles.

The pioneers of technology development in England began by inventing new machinery for the spinning and weaving of cotton, displacing hand spinners and weavers. Technology was directed firmly towards increasing profitability at the cost of labour. The introduction of this technology into India was devastating, as shown in the letter reproduced earlier. While in India there was quiet despair, in England there was active resistance. Workers, notably the Luddites, banded together to break the new machines.

It was not all machinery the Luddites opposed, but ‘all machinery hurtful to commonality’ as their manifesto declared. Though Lord Byron spoke in Parliament in their favour, the State threw its might behind the industrialists and sent in the army to quell the workers’ movement. ‘There were more troops in the troubled areas of the Midlands and north of England than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsular War,’ writes Brian Bailey (quoted in Byrne 2013).

Until the invention of yarn spinning machinery Europeans could not make a cotton yarn strong enough for the warp, and used wool or linen instead, making cloth known as ‘fustian’. It was only in 1783, using the new spinning machinery, that yarn strong enough for warp was spun and the first fabric entirely of cotton, was made in England. The first machines were driven by animal power, but in 1782 the steam engine was invented and soon began to be used with the spinning and weaving machinery.

These were the machines that gobbled up vast quantities of slavegrown, slave-picked raw cotton from the American plantations.

Who were to be the customers for this new industry? Britain

considered her colonies to be the suppliers of raw materials to her own industries and to be in turn a market for the finished products of the mother country. ‘The Empire… is commerce. It was created by commerce, it is founded on commerce, and it could not exist a day without commerce’ and ‘I would never lose the hold which we now have over our great Indian dependency—by far the greatest and most valuable of all the customers we have or ever shall have in this country’ declaimed Joseph Chamberlain to cheers and applause in the British Parliament in 1894.2 Cotton began to be exported from India to England in the raw state, spun into yarn on machines there, and imported into India first as yarn, and then, as machinery for weaving was invented, in the form of cloth. Meanwhile, the manufacture of Indian textiles was restricted through multiple taxation, about which Francis Carnac Brown, a British cotton planter in India deposing before the Madras Board of Revenue in 1862 says,

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The story of cotton in India is not half told, how it was systematically depressed from the earliest date that American cotton came into competition with it about the year 1786, how for 40 or 50 years after, one half of the crop was taken in kind as revenue, the other half by the sovereign merchant at a price much below the market price of the day which was habitually kept down for the purpose, how the cotton farmer’s plough and bullocks were taxed, the Churkha taxed, the bow taxed and the loom taxed; how inland custom houses were posted in and around every village on passing which cotton on its way to the Coast was stopped and like every other produce taxed afresh; how it paid export duty both in a raw state and in every shape of yarn, of thread, cloth or handkerchief, in which it was possible to manufacture it; how the dyer was taxed and the dyed cloth taxed, plain in the loom, taxed a second time in the dye vats, how Indian piece goods were loaded in England with a prohibitory duty and English piece goods were imported into India at an ad valorem duty of 2½ per cent. It is my firm conviction that the same treatment would long since have converted any of the finest countries in Europe into wilderness. But the Sun has continued to give forth to India its vast vivifying rays, the Heavens to pour down upon the vast surface its tropical rains. These perennial gifts of the Universal Father it has not been possible to tax.

(Testimony dated 9 April 1862, quoted in Ratnam 1966: 272)

TABLE 1.1

Value of British Cotton Exports to India (in £ million)

Year

British cotton goods imported into India [yds]

1814 1821 1828 1835

818,208 19,138,726 42,822,077 51,777,277

Indian cotton goods imported into Britain [yds]

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Source: Beauchamp (1935).

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Besides turning India from an exporter to an importer of cloth, the intervention of the English East India Company into cotton cultivation changed forever the relation between the small farmer and the cotton crop. The Company’s hold on large parts of India allowed it to introduce large-scale, centralized ginning into the cotton-growing areas it controlled. The effect of this was that it was now no longer possible to keep separate all the hundreds of different local varieties, with their specific characteristics, that had been developed through centuries of seed selection and acclimatization to their specific areas. The new ginning machines mixed up all the seed from different varieties, undoing the careful selection of centuries. The large, centralized ginning factories returned mixed seed to the cultivator, whereas with the small hand gins the purity of the strains had been maintained. Since cotton was bought by weight, regardless of its characteristics, varieties that produced more lint began to be cultivated, even though the quality of the cotton was inferior. Hand-ginning could not produce large volumes in a short time, but when cotton had been hand-ginned, the small household recha separated the lint from seed, taking care not to damage it, so that it was available for next year’s sowing. While the machines ginned large quantities in a short time, much of the seed was damaged in the process, and for the first time a shortage of seed for sowing was seen in the areas where gins were introduced.

Moreover, these large gins were big, expensive machines, owned

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It was as a result of these policies that India in the early nineteenth century became a net importer of cotton cloth, as this table (see Table 1.1) from Joan Beauchamp’s British Imperialism in India (1935) shows:

and operated by moneylenders who bought unginned cotton from the farmers, sold ginned cotton to the agents of British firms of traders, and also ‘loaned’ the seed back to the producer against next year’s crop. With this practice the numbers of moneylenders in cotton growing areas increased, and the indebtedness of the cotton farmer to the moneylender, formerly limited to regions where taxes on cotton cultivation were high, now became widespread.

Steam presses to press the loose cotton lint into bales, originally invented in America, were introduced into the Indian cotton growing countryside originally to pack cotton to be carried to England.3 Baling compresses the cotton into a block the consistency of wood; it then has to go through a reverse process to fluff the fibres back into their original, separate state, accomplished by the unbaling and blow-room stages. These processes are, of course, extremely energy intensive and need huge infrastructure.

Besides, by the time the fibre has been through them, it has lost part of its springiness, absorbency, and lustre.

What were the changes that came about in cotton cultivation in India as a result of providing cotton for export rather than for the local textile industry? It completely transformed cotton cultivation in India. As Francis Buchanan Hamilton noted in 1828, though Indian varieties were well known to produce the finest cloth, they were unsuited to the new textile machinery being invented in England. It was the American varieties of cotton, rather than the local ones, suited the Lancashire mills. This altered the perception of the desirable characteristics of cotton and set up new criteria of quality: now the characteristics of cotton were examined with a view to the needs of the machine rather than for the kind of cloth that could be made from it.

The qualities of cotton that were valued before the Industrial Revolution were those that produced the particular kind of cloth that was wanted. The cottons of India were diverse enough to make into different kinds of cloth. For instance, farmers working in the fields needed sturdy, long-lasting cloth that would withstand wear and tear, while the elite wanted soft, fine fabrics.

Indian cottons were also known to absorb and hold dye materials particularly well, producing the unequalled brilliantly patterned

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fabrics the world valued. In the changed view, it was the need of the textile machinery that dictated the qualities that the cotton fibre had to have. The length of staple, which is the most important factor today in deciding quality, was not important; in fact, it was a hindrance when cotton was carded with a bow, because if it was long, the staple had a tendency to wrap itself round the string of the bow during the carding process. Strength of staple, critical to withstand the rigours of machine processing, was similarly not necessary in the traditional hand processes, as it does not translate into strength or durability of cloth. Some factors such as diameter of the fibre, its hygroscopic capacity, the uniformity, and maturity, are influenced by local growing conditions, and Sir George Watt (1989) stresses the fact that varieties differ in their qualities from place to place.

Before the British entered the field of cotton export from India, not much of it was exported out of the country. Some went to China and to the Middle East, but most was used locally and for internal trade, from district to district or from one part of the country to another. We can assume that fragmentary references in British records actually point to this larger, unnoticed picture stretching back to earlier times. For example a Mr Hodgson, reporting on the trade of Coimbatore district in 1807, reports that it exported cotton yarn, cloth, and tobacco to Malabar, cloth to Seringapatnam, and ghee and the finer sorts of cloth to Madras.

Survivals of techniques and social traditions add dimensions to history that escape written records. The history of cotton and cotton cloth making in India has been distorted by too much dependence on the latter. Small production, local trade, and local use of cotton and cloth in the vast inland regions that grew cotton and produced cloth for the local market—Bundelkhand, the United Provinces, Berar, Khandesh—and even in the exporting regions—Bengal, Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, Tamil Nadu, Kerala—in fact in the whole subcontinent, has been neglected by textile historians for lack of written records. So also the overland trade both eastwards and to the west by animal caravan. The abundance of written material available for maritime trade has magnified the role of the sea trade in the Indian textile industry

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and diverted scholarly attention from other aspects. We leave it to new generations of scholars to correct this perspective.

In the next chapter we undertake an overview of the factors that underlie the monumental shift that has taken place in the Indian cotton situation over the last 300 years. A historical perspective brings together the politics that governed the direction of change, and the technologies and agricultural practices that were the consequence of that politics.

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Notes

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1. The Dhers are not weavers by caste.

2. Joseph Chamberlain, speech in Parliament on 22 January 1894. Available at https://web.viu.ca/davies/H479B.Imperialism.Nationalism/ Chamberlain.commercial.imperialism.1883.htm (accessed on 8 March 2016).

3. Baling is still in use, even though spinning mills and cotton fields are located near each other.