Roy, Tirthankar 
ORCID: 0000-0002-4183-2781
(2024)
Rewriting the history of Indian crafts and why that matters.
In: Reubens, Rebecca and Kachru, Tanishka, (eds.)
The Routledge Handbook of Craft and Sustainability in India.
Routledge India, Abingdon, UK, 65 - 74.
ISBN 9780367757489
Abstract
Until the 1980s, the narrative on the history of Indian crafts was a pessimistic one. It said that the mechanized goods imported from an industrializing Britain from around the 1820s killed India’s handicrafts (Habib, 1975; Bagchi, 1976). The impact of that disaster on the economic and social life in this region must have been very significant when we consider that in the centuries before the British industrial revolution began, India’s industries like handmade textiles were so well-developed as to attract traders from all over the world. Indeed, some of the fabrics they supplied to the European markets redefined fashion in Europe. The indigenous states valued artisans because their special skills were needed to sustain the consumption of the wealthy classes. Technology changed the balance decisively. A power loom that could move six times faster than the handloom, or a spinning machine that could produce a hank of yarn using one-eighth of the labour that a hand-operated spinning wheel would need, left the Indian spinner and weaver with little chance to compete on price. Mechanized and mass production systems caused the price of manufactured textiles to fall; the average cotton cloth price around 1900 was one-fifth of what it was in 1820 (Roy, 2020). Similar, but less dramatic stories of modernization would come from other consumer goods, like metal products. Each such example entailed a parallel one of obsolescence and decline in Asia and Africa’s traditional industries. Not all historians believed that the story of a catastrophic decline was persuasive. In 1963, the American economic historian Morris D. Morris (1963) wrote that the decline story stood at odds with handicrafts’ extensive presence in modern India. Morris’ answer to what he thought was a puzzle was that the cheapening of manufactured consumer goods overall had induced buyers to buy more handmade goods. But this was not adequate. If the costlier handmade goods were identical in quality as the cheaper machine-made goods, why would anybody buy any handmade goods? No matter, Morris raised a storm in India by questioning the orthodox interpretation that Britain killed India’s artisans. The puzzle produced three types of responses from scholars of that time. First, it encouraged more research on the historical national income statistics. The definitive work in this area showed that no decline in the small-scale industry’s income was in evidence in the early 20th century, even though the proximate cause of a fall-technological obsolescence-remained in force. Morris might have been right to question the decline narrative. Second, the debate encouraged work with industrial employment statistics, all of which showed that the crafts did indeed employ fewer people in the 20th century compared with the early 19th, but the number of those who carried on in this industry, over ten million, was still enormous. These two findings, when combined, conveyed a message. Obsolescence did occur. But along with obsolescence, another process occurred: surviving crafts changed business organization and adopted new techniques that made them more productive than before. To see why this process happened and what it meant, we would need to go beyond the numbers, and study the people and the places that engaged in these activities. Since about 2000, this explanation has developed mainly along two tracks, one of these concentrates more on the spatial context, and the other concentrates more on design and skill. The two tracks are not alternatives. Both contend that the trajectory of change in the skilled crafts was a capitalist development, in the world as well as in India. The crafts recreated capitalism in distinct ways from factory-based industrialization or commercial agriculture. This claim represents the third and the most substantial response to the puzzle that Morris pointed out. It represents an alternative paradigm to decline-and-fall and one which has a great deal of contemporary relevance, something the decline-and-fall cannot have because it dismisses the prospect ofy worthwhile creative dynamic among these activities. These preliminary remarks lead to three questions. Where did the decline story come from? Why does the notion of artisan-capitalism matter? And how does history have contemporary relevance?
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author |
| Divisions: | Economic History |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD2329 Industrialization ?? HD2329_I4 ?? |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Dec 2024 18:09 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 18:09 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126341 |
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