Here is the full text of Uzramma's talk sponsored by the Lila Foundation at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, on October 21:
Cotton cloth as continuity-
the power of the handloom
Do you remember the fairy tale of the
emperor’s new clothes?: Long long ago there was once a country that made the
best cloth in the world, in vast quantities, enough of it to clothe everyone in
the country, with enough left over to
send to many other countries. The other countries paid for that cloth in gold
and silver, making the weaving country one of the richest in the world. The kings
of that country wore fancy versions of that cloth, the poor people of that
country wore plain versions of the same. All the people, the milkmaids and
shepherds, the merchants and governors, the farmers and townsmen, all wore
versions of the cloth specially made for them.
One day some clever swindlers came to that
country and sought an audience with the emperor. Your majesty, they said, the
clothes you wear are not good enough for you. How can you wear the same as what
the fishermen and farmers of your country wear? Not only that, there are so
many different kinds of cloth made in your country that it is confusing. The cloth made in your country lasts for too
long, it is too soft and too comfortable. Don’t you know that the world is
changing and now things made by machine are the fashion. Cloth made by machine
wears out much sooner, it is not as soft, mass produced cloth is the same
everywhere, so everyone looks alike, it may be boring, but this is modernity.
The fantastic thing about this new way of
making cloth, they said, is that it is highly profitable for the owners of the
machines. It’s silly to make cloth on simple wooden looms in your villages,
from a bewildering variety of cottons; our expensive and complicated machines
that mass produce cloth in factories and need one and only one kind of cotton are a much better bet. This advantage
can be seen only by intelligent people like us, to all others it is invisible,
they said.
The emperor fell for this story and shelled
out sackfuls of gold and shipfuls of silver for the machines and for the cloth
made from them. The conmen dressed the
emperor in their machine made cloth, all
the time telling him how wonderful the new clothes were and how he now looked
like a real emperor. And for the next
two hundred years the people of that country waited for someone to say: That
cloth is rubbish. The cloth we made was much much better.
They are still waiting.
That fairy tale is the story of cotton
cloth in India. As in the fairy tale, India made enough cotton cloth to clothe
rich and poor in the whole subcontinent, with so much left over for export that
it was said to ‘clothe the world’. The world paid for this cloth in gold and
silver, which poured into India, not just into the pockets of the Adanis and Ambanis
but into the hands of the millions of
farmers who grew the cotton, the women who spun the yarn, and the weavers who
wove the cloth. India grew rich from its export, so rich that Europeans flocked
to India to make money for themselves, to ‘shake the pagoda tree’ as it was
said.
Today I’m going to remind you of the many
advantages of weaving on the handloom. I want to suggest to you that we should
look at the handloom not as an outmoded relic of the past but as a low-carbon
production technology for the
energy-stressed future. In my talk I’ll tell you about the grim reality
of cotton yarn spinning in India today, and what a dreadful fate awaits it. I
will also point out a possible brighter future – a possible, affordable and
rational future in which we safeguard the Indian cotton textile industry and
our rural livelihoods.
For much of my life I've been fascinated by
the story of cotton and cotton cloth making in India. I've spent the last 24
years working in this field. I’m part of
a small group of people who have been puzzling over the strange trajectory of the
indigenous cotton textile industry of India, during more than 20 years of
research combined with active involvement with handlooms. And I find that the
reality is as unbelievable as a fairy tale.
I’ll tell the story of the different bits of this industry by jumping from
country to country and century to century, backwards and forwards, because
that’s the way the story makes sense. In between we’ll hear some voices from
history. I’ll end with a possible roadmap for the future and I hope you’ll have lots of comments to add.
Simply put, India today is actively decimating
a sensible, energy-efficient low-carbon way of weaving cotton cloth on the
handloom, in favour of capital and energy intensive mechanized weaving which
only survives on subsidized electricity
and exploited workers. That’s the
powerloom weaving. And the yarn spinning industry too is in terrible shape. But
it is always the woes of the handloom and handloom weavers we hear about, while
the much larger woes of mechanized weaving
and spinning in India seem to be hidden, or ignored. To understand the strength
of the handloom, we need also to look into the dismal situation of the
mainstream cotton textile industry today.
The past, present and future of cotton
cloth making in India is fascinating. The distant past is extraordinary: the
Indian subcontinent clothed the world in cotton cloth for thousands of years.
The present is a mess, a real horror story.
The future depends on the choices we make. I believe the Indian cotton
textile industry has the potential to be a huge factor in India’s social and
economic well-being, if we take the right direction and recognize the power of
the handloom.
Making cotton cloth was the largest and
most important industry of the subcontinent for at least 2000 years, from the
time of Jesus Christ upto about the middle of the 19th century. Actually, we all know that. But do you also
know that
Today,
over 50 million’ people
in India grow cotton, gin cotton, bale and unable cotton, spin cotton yarn,
weave cotton cloth, sell cotton cloth, make clothes from cotton, export cotton,
yarn or clothes, or make oil and oilcake from cotton seed, and we’re not even
talking of the toolmakers, or including Pakistan and Bangladesh! But as if by magic, as if
it’s a fairy tale, this massive industry has become invisible!
Questions need to be asked, and the
first one is: How did the vibrant past
turn into the grim present? The answer seems
obvious: mechanization in the 19th
century made craft production unviable. But it wasn't as simple as that. There’s a crucial point here –The
mechanization was not just a matter of turning a hand process into a mechanical
one. It was a shift of fundamentals, of principles. It changed a flexible
technology into a rigid one. It changed a dispersed industry made up of
millions of small, scattered production centres into a centralized one, concentrated
in ‘industrial areas’ where the profits went into only a few pockets. [The Tatas, the Ruias, the
Sarabhais, the Ambanis all made their first millions in textile mills]. Mechanization
need not have been like that. It could have been quite different. You could
have had mechanization that was both flexible and decentralized, as hand
processing had been.
And
by the way the change didn’t happen automatically and smoothly, as many of you
are aware. It was made to happen all through the nineteenth century through unfair
trade practices by the English East India Company. A fascinating part of the
textile story:
Imagine yourself living in India in the
year 1820. You will remember from your
history lessons what was going on in India at that time. The last Mughal emperor
was weak. The Maratthas were defeated. Names familiar to us played prominent
roles on the Indian stage: Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, Baji Rao Peshwa of the
Maratthas, Wajid Ali Shah of Avadh. All of whom wielded enormous power. But the
most powerful ruler of them all was - the British East India Company. What was the Company? It was merely a large corporate entity, like
Walmart is today. But, backed by the government of Britain, it starts to rule over
large parts of India. The Company maintains an army, levies taxes and makes
laws. Nick Robins in his book The Corporation that Changed the World points out:“At its height, the Company ruled
over one-fifth of the world’s people, generated a revenue greater than the
whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.” .
Can you imagine a corporation like Walmart having its own army, levying taxes
and making laws! a corporate entity whose
sole purpose is to make a profit for its shareholders!
The trade of the Company, the ‘Honourable Company’,
as it was known, had an effect not just on the economies but also on the
societies of both England and India, an effect that is ‘hard to over-emphasize’
as a scholar of the subject puts it. Beginning in the early 1600s the Company imports
cotton cloth from India into England, where it becomes extremely popular because
its so washable: people prefer it to the locally woven cloth made from wool, linen
and mixed fibres; so much so that it destroys the English textile industry and
ruins the lives of English handloom weavers – while it makes English traders
and merchants rich (remember Napoleon 200 years later called them ‘a nation of
shopkeepers’!).
Cotton is the hinge on which artisanal cloth making turns to mass-production. The
first machines of the Industrial Revolution are machines for spinning cotton
yarn, machines that can be run by water or steam. This new industrial cotton textile production
needs to be fed cotton at an industrial rate, so cotton begins to be grown in
the newly colonized American continent, to
be imported into England from America, cotton that is grown and picked and
ginned by African slaves and the children of those slaves. “Indeed, so closely tied
were cotton and slavery that the price of a slave directly correlated to the
price of cotton” says a 2011 article in the New York Times, headed ‘When cotton
was king’.
“Slave produced cotton” is imported into England
to be mechanically turned into cotton yarn, the first product of
mass-production. And where is all that yarn to be sold? In India, of course, the
biggest cotton cloth weaver in the world. The Company carries the machine made yarn to
India, selling it cheap, undercutting locally made handspun yarn, and destroying
the hand-spinning industry of India.
..here is the first of two voices from
history –a short extract from ‘Representation from a suffering spinner’ a
letter printed in the Bengali newspaper Samachar
Darpan, in 1828:
“I am a spinner. [the letter says]. After having suffered a
great deal, I am writing this letter …The weavers used to visit our houses and
buy the charkha yarn at three tolas per rupee…
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
market, it is not sold even at one-fourth the old prices. …They say that bilati yarn is being largely imported... 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'…They have sent the
product of so much toil out here because they could not sell it there. 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 … to judge whether it is fair to send
yarn here or not.”
The devastation of handspinning was one part of the destruction of the
Indian cotton textile industry by the East India Company. There was more. There
were the taxes. Listen to Francis Carnac Brown on the subject of taxes in 1862.
Francis is a British cotton planter in India, on the Malabar coast.
“The story of cotton in India is not half
told, (he says), how it was systematically depressed from the ..date that
American cotton came into competition with it about ..1786, how ..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 …how the cotton farmer's plough and bullocks were
taxed, the Churkha taxed, the bow taxed and the loom taxed; …how it paid export
duty both in a raw state and in every shape of yarn, of thread, cloth or
handkerchief, ..how the dyer was taxed and the dyed cloth taxed, …how Indian
piece goods were loaded in England with a prohibitory duty and English piece
goods were imported into India at a duty of 2 1/2 percent. (He goes on to say): It is my firm conviction
that the same treatment would long since have converted any of the finest
countries in Europe into wilderness. ...”
That was the 19th century.
Now we’ll take a jump backwards in time,
the period that lasted from the time of Jesus Christ upto the early 19th
c. This was the period, lasting almost 2000 years, in which India clothed the
world. And it has its relevance to today.
There is an impression that the greatest
achievement of ancient Indian cotton cloth weaving was – as you must have heard- Dhaka muslins. Cotton cloth
woven so fine that that it had names like Woven
wind, Evening dew, Flowing water; So fine that when the Mughal emperor
Shahjahan chides his daughter the Princess Jahanara for being immodestly
dressed, she retorts that she has on seven layers of the stuff. Yes of course
this was a fantastic achievement… But in my opinion the greater achievement was
something else which I want you to pay close attention to, because I believe
that it is this that holds the key to the future:
‘Fustat textiles’ are pieces of Indian
cloth found in Egypt, carbon dated 9th
to 14th century. They are
thick, ordinary, coarse cloth. Ruth Barnes, the Textile scholar says these textiles “cannot claim fame as good examples of
outstanding craftsmanship”… but the significance for me is exactly that, that
it is coarse cloth, obviously for the
common man. India was unique in producing ordinary cotton
cloth for ordinary people on a vast scale
as a market-oriented activity from which millions of people derived their living. Making and selling cotton yarn and cloth were
economic activities which gave people an income. While cloth for the elites
was made in the ‘karkhana’ system, where yarn was given to weavers by a
‘master-weaver’ who marketed the finished product, cotton yarn and cloth was
sold through local markets to ordinary people, and both these kinds of cloth
were exported. According to my understanding making ordinary coarse cloth for aam admi was India’s
real strength: Ordinary cloth made in
vast quantities by ordinary weavers for ordinary people at affordable prices.
No
other region could do this. In China as
in our Northeast today cotton cloth was made as a household occupation. It was
only in the Indian subcontinent that it was a massive, market-oriented economic
activity. So viable, so embedded in
society that it has sustained for 5000 years. This is not just as a matter of
historic interest, but also is a vital clue to the future.
About
scale: Enough cotton cloth was made in India to clothe India’s own rich and
poor and for export both eastwards and to the west. In the
first century after Christ the Roman historian Pliny complains that India is
draining Rome of her gold - partly for spices, but mostly for cotton cloth. In 1610 Pyrard de Laval says about Indian cotton cloth “wherewith
everyone from Cape of Good Hope to China, man and woman, is clothed
from head to foot”.
It was the largest variety of cloth the world had
ever seen. "Every year ships arrive from Gujarat
on India's West coast… from Cambay a ship put into port worth seventy to eighty
thousand cruzados, carrying cloths of thirty different sorts" says Tome
Pires in 1515. [A cruzado was a Portugese gold coin]. And you find the
names of some varieties of these cloths in the Anglo-Indian dictionary known as ‘Hobson
Jobson’: Albelli, alrochs, cossai, baftas, bejutas, corahs,
doreas, dosooties, chhint, ginghams, jamdanis, morees, mulmuls, mushroos,
nainsooks, nillaees, palempores, punjams, susi.. and so on..
But
export was the smaller part. A huge part of the indigenous cotton textile
industry also went into local loops: cotton grown, spun, woven and sold
locally, through local markets. There is an account of a local weekly market at
Jamoorghatta, in a report dated 1867, by Harry Rivett-Carnac, Cotton
Commissioner for the Central Provinces, in which out of about 1400 stalls, 572
relate to cotton, yarn and cloth and 350 of the cloth sellers are non-weaver
castes: ‘Dhers, selling coarse cloth of their own manufacture’
It’s
amazing how little research has been done on this part of Indian textile
making. All the textile scholarship seems to be about export. No research on clothing
for the entire Indian population (250 million people in 1830)? That’s part of
the cloak of invisibility this industry wears! It’s not just for historic
interest that we need to look into this, but more important, to understand what
were our particular strengths and advantages that will be of use in the future,
that we can use today to make a viable, ecological and democratic cotton
textile industry, not one that just puts more money into rich industrialists’
pockets.
Now lets
go back to the 19th century let’s
see how the intervention of the EIC affected the growing of cotton in India:
Cotton
has been grown in India for 5000 years by smallholder farmers – as it still is.
Different varieties were grown in different parts of the country. They were
rain-fed and grown mixed with food crops of various lentils. Growing it with
other crops, did 2 things, it kept off pests and it replenished the soil. These
2 things made it possible to grow cotton in the same spot over millennia. But different varieties did not suit
mass-production, and Indian cottons did not suit the new yarn spinning machinery
that began to be invented in England in the early 1800s.
This
new way of spinning yarn was not in small scattered locations using wooden
equipment. it was concentrated in a few places and using huge machinery made of rigid steel. And what effect
did this change in spinning have on Indian cotton farms and farmer families? An
earth-shaking effect. Now cotton had to be aggregated, collected together, so
it had to be all of one kind, and that kind had to be one that could stand up to the harsh action of these
new steel machines. Indian varieties were too soft and their fibres were too
short. And so American cotton varieties were introduced into Indian cotton
farms by the East India Company, the Hirsutum varieties that had the long strong fibres the newly invented English
technology needed.
A
Colonel Prain writing in 1828 tells us:
“I have no doubt that the fine cotton produced near Dacca is one cause of the
superiority of the manufacture”, he says “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 and on that account are more fitted for European machinery”.
The machines were heavy metal, bruising
and battering the delicate cotton fibres. Longer, stronger filaments took the
strain better, though they didn’t produce better cloth. That was it. Now that kind of cotton, became known as the best
cotton, not the cotton that made the best cloth. Instead of inventing a technology to suit the cotton, Walmart’s
ancestor, the EIC, changed the cotton plant to suit the technology. And nobody
cared that Desis and Americans grow in very different ways, one of which is
suited to Indian conditions, and one of which emphatically is not.
And
since then, till today, the definition of best quality cotton is what can stand up to harsh machine processing. .. and as machines are made to run faster and faster, nature is expected to keep up.
But
nature has its limits: and we’re feeling those limits now in the 21st
century. Cotton farmers today have only one customer -
the spinning mill, and all spinning mills today only have one kind of
machinery, the kind that demands ever longer and stronger staples. Growing American cottons does
not suit Indian soils or Indian climates, why because, as we say down South, the
American hirsutum cottons are shallow rooted, they cannot stand extremes of
climate.. You can never depend on the Indian climate - one year it rains too
much, the next year the rains fail. Desis have long taproots, which helps them
survive both too much and too little rain. Hirsutums need irrigation. Irrigation
creates humidity in which bacterial, viral, fungal diseases and pests thrive to
which cotton is particularly prone. The Bt gene is only
useful against a few varieties of caterpillar, its not a cure for virus or fungus, nor does
it prevent insect attack by thrips, aphids, mites,
mealy bugs.
Large-scale spinning broke up the
close relation of weaving cotton with growing cotton. After all, weavers and farmers were neighbours –
as they still are. Today between them
stands the modern spinning mill, to whom the cotton farmers must sell their cotton and from whom the
handloom weavers must buy their yarn.
A mill that forces farmers to grow the
kind of cotton that’s immensely risky for them …a level of risk that small
farmers cannot bear..the farmer suicides that have been happening particularly in
Maharashtra & Andhra Pradesh for the last 20 years, part of the largest
wave of suicides in history as Sainath reminds us. Many, possibly most, of
these suicides are of cotton farmers. But I don’t read anywhere that the
connection of cotton farmer suicides with cotton spinning technology has been
made.
Let’s take a
quick look at how yarn making happens in the mill: Cotton lint from the plant is first separated
from the seeds. In the 1800s, a new stage was introduced: after seed removal loose fluffy lint began to
be pressed tightly into bales. So tightly that it becomes as hard as a block of
wood, and needs an elaborate process and
huge machinery to get it back into separate fibres. Basically to its original
form. Its only after that the fibres are made into a loose blanket, then twisted and
thinned more in 3 stages into
yarn.
Of course
baling made sense when it was done to carry the cotton overseas to England. But
the unbelievable thing is that baling, bale breaking, bale opening and
reconstituting it into individual fibres are still integral parts of yarn
making! Even when cotton grows nearby! And these additional, energy-guzzling
stages that need huge infrastructure, are one of the main reasons for the
unviability of modern textile technology.
And of course
the reason why this industrial revolution yarn technology is unsuited to Indian
conditions is: it is uniform. It needs one kind of cotton and
one kind of cotton only. With this way of making yarn India loses what could its
greatest advantage, of being able to grow different kinds of cotton in different
regions. We need flexible yarn making technology that can adapt to different varieties of cotton.
Yarn-making
specifically suited to Indian diversity of cotton varieties is the missing link
in our otherwise potential, green, low-energy cotton-to-cloth production chain.
If we had that we could regenerate our diversity of cotton varieties. We still
have the handloom. Link the flexible technology of the handloom with diversity of
cottons through adaptable spinning and what will you get? A unique, hard-to-beat cotton textile
industry. It’s only the middle stage that’s missing. I suggest we rid ourselves of a
past “that lies upon the present like a
giant’s dead body” [to quote Nathaniel
Hawthorne] the burden of a rigid,
inflexible, energy-intensive yarn spinning technology.
And
how are the existing modern spinning mills of India doing?
Very badly. Today the mechanized
textile industry of India -mostly spinning- is on financial life-support from banks.
It has gargantuan bad debts which it is unable to repay. If you think Kingfisher
Airlines’s debts are enormous at 7000 crores, what d’you think of the mechanized
Indian textile industry's debt, at almost 2 lakh crores! Strange that we don’t hear these dire facts
about the mainstream industry, while its constantly dinned into us that
handlooms are in such bad shape. Its not
the handloom industry that has these huge debts! The fact is that the textile technology
that today is considered modern, both yarn spinning and mechanical weaving, is
“viable” only through debt-financing and on the back of an exploited
workforce. A kind of exploitation in
which we can’t compete with China. And because its on life-support its attracting
Vulture Investors.What are Vulture Investors? Vulture investors look for dead & dying industries: “There are
a lot of dead carcasses on the road, and the vultures are out sniffing,” says a
New York Times report after the 2008 Wall Street crash.
They’re here already. A recent headline in the
Economic Times [July 30 this year] says the US’ W L Ross plans to invest in the
Indian textile sector. Has anybody heard of Wilbur L Ross? He is known in the
US as the dean of vulture investors. And now this canny investor has already taken the first steps
towards swallowing up the Indian Textile industry. Its my guess that he is poised to flood the great Indian market with
low-cost yarn spun in China and Vietnam. He could be the 21st
century avatar of the East India Company, destroying Indian spinning again 200
years later! So it becomes urgent to develop small-scale spinning, because the only kind of industry that can stand
up to Wilbur L Ross and his ilk is
a dispersed one, with small investments in scattered infrastructure.
This is a
plea to the country’s scientists and technologists to put in the research and
development needed to work out small-scale cotton yarn making for the future,
specifically suited to Indian cottons and to the handloom: smaller, flexible
machinery that can be run by alternative energy and that can process different
cotton varieties. We could then take the
cotton textile industry out of ghettos
and industrial centres where it is today and put the whole field-to-fabric
production chain in thousands of locations next to cotton fields. Cutting out the
exploitation of powerloom workers. Saving energy by cutting out transport,
cutting out baling. With smaller investments in small-scale infrastructure. An industry
that can be owned by producer collectives. A truly modern, democratic textile
industry on a vast scale, suited to an energy-stressed future. That would bring
smiles and not tears to cotton farmers and weavers - whose combined numbers
make up a substantial part of the Indian population.
And finally:
handloons & climate change. A recent report of the Global Commission on the economy & Climate change, which has
members from the World Bank, Unilever, and
the Bank of England, says that investments in low-carbon technologies will stimulate
rather than hamper economic growth. That makes India several steps ahead on this score – we don’t even need to invest vast sums - we already have a low-carbon
weaving technology in all parts of the country, complete with its huge bank
of equipment and skills. This means that we can have our cake and eat it too and share it around: by promoting hand weaving we can claim
international credit for setting up a low-carbon textile industry, we can make
good cotton cloth for ourselves and for export and spread the profits of textile making among a large part of
our population.
Weavers
and farmers must be re-connected through small-scale spinning – not by harking
back to the past, but in a modern, viable, feasible way, building producer-owned,
flexible technologies around the handloom rather than replacing it.The handlooms are there, the weavers are there,
the cotton farmers are there waiting to be offered an honourable life in return
for providing us energy-efficient cotton textile production!
As a
post-script I’d like to add that the Malkha initiative in which I have been
involved for some years has taken the first small steps in this direction, so
far with some success.
