Crafts and Craftsmen in Pre-colonial Eastern India

Technology and Culture

Asha Shukla Choubey

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032134857
• eBook ISBN: 9781000477696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book presents a comprehensive socio-cultural history of crafts and crafts persons in pre-colonial Eastern India. It focuses on the technology of crafts as being integral to the traditional lives of the crafts persons and explores their cultural and social world. It offers an in-depth analysis of the complexities of craft technologies in the three sectors of cotton textile, sericulture and silk textile and mining and metallurgy in the regions of Bihar and Jharkhand in Eastern India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from technology, the book discusses a range of socio-economic themes including craft production systems; marketing and financing patterns; impact of contact with the world market; craft persons' identities in terms of caste affiliations and group divisions; negotiations for upward caste mobility; contestations and dissent of lower castes; power and social stratification; functioning of caste panchayats; gender division of craft labour; myths, beliefs and religiosity attributed to craft usages; social and ritual traditions; and contemporary craft traditions.

Rich in archival and diverse sources, including oral traditions, paintings, and findings from extensive field visits and interactions with crafts persons, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of crafts, medieval Indian history, social history, sociology and social anthropology, economic history, cultural history, science and technology studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest government and non-governmental organisations, textile historians, craft and design specialists, contemporary craft industrial sector, and museums.

1
Cotton textiles

DOI: 10.4324/9781003096511-2

The cotton textile craft, on account of the total value of production and the sizableness of the labour force, constituted the core sector of the non-agricultural economy of Bihar. Patna and its adjoining areas and the districts of Purnea, Gaya, Bhagalpur, and Shahabad were reputed centres for the prolific manufacturing of coarse varieties of textiles for mass domestic consumption, luxury cloth for the court, nobility and commercial elite, some superior assortments for inter-provincial trade, and standardised coarse, medium, and fine varieties for the overseas trade undertaken by the European companies. The manufacture of cotton cloth was marked by an extraordinary diffusion with many hundred thousand people engaged in spinning and weaving in almost every village and town. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the weavers in Patna comprised a multitude of artisan-commodity producers, accounting for the greater part of the population. Robert Hughes, member of the first English Commission, who arrived in Patna in July 1620 noted that the population of the village settlements (gonges and ganj)¹ around the town of Lakhawar consisted mainly of weavers who produced a special fabric, ambarti.² The demand for cotton textiles of Patna was so great that Robert Hughes and John Parker established the first English factory on an experimental basis in Patna in 1621 for the purchase of cheap and excellent local calicoes and for working the raw silk (available from Bengal) into suitable skeins.³ Peter Mundy, who visited Patna about ten years later in 1632, confirmed the ubiquity of cotton cloth and wrote that in Bihar the merchants would go from town to town collecting cloth so that in 5 or 6 months they could procure 40 or 50 corge (score of pieces) or perhaps 100.⁴ It emerges that the profusion, spread, and intensity of cotton textile manufacture in Bihar was as prominent as in Bengal.⁵

Bihar was marked by an abundance of locally procurable raw material, cotton. There were two main varieties of cotton in Bihar. The more common was the herbaceous annual plant, about four feet in height, which ripened about April–May (Baisakh) and was utilised for the manufacture of fabrics. The other was the 12-year-old tree, bearing cotton flowers called sembhal and was best suited for stuffing and quilting.⁶ The cotton shrub or tree was essential to peasant crop rotations and integral to the peasant strategies for survival.⁷ The extensive cultivation of cotton in and around Patna meant its bountiful availability to the cotton manufacturers of Patna, which was the epicentre for production of cotton goods.⁸ Peter Mundy found a luxuriant growth of cotton plants in the area between Naubatpur and Patna in 1632.⁹ Ralph Fitch, Francois Bernier, Thomas Bowrey, and Streynsham Master refer to the production of cotton in Bihar, though no quantitative estimate of the acreage and production is possible. The prosperity of the cotton industry justifies the inference that land under cotton crop had been enlarging. Buchanan pointed out that in the early nineteenth century a great part of the cotton used in the cloth manufacture in Patna was that produced in the district of Behar and Patna itself.¹⁰ In Patna, cotton accounted for 24,000 bighas of land of which 19,000 bighas gave only cotton, and the balance of 5,000 bighas gave other crops also.¹¹ The quality of the Patna cotton was also finer than that of western India, although inferior to the cotton of Dinajpur.¹² Cotton was an important crop in Bhagalpur and was cultivated in 12,000 bighas of land on the plains, besides a considerable quantity on the hills also.¹³ Buchanan reports that the total value of cotton supplied from Shahabad to the English East India Company’s factory at Patna amounted to nearly Rs. 20,000 accounting for 28 per cent of the cotton supply, with about 100 merchants engaged in this work.¹⁴ Cultivation of cotton was carried on extensively in Gaya, in the Jahanabad, Nawada, and Daudnagar subdivisions, catering to the considerable demand created by the cloth factories at Jahanabad, Daudnagar, Maghra, and Bigha.¹⁵ Tirhut and specifically Darbhanga were famous for khokti (kokti) or bhadaiya, a special kind of red-coloured cotton which ripened in August–September (bhadon)¹⁶ and gave thread and cloth of extreme fineness. A dress of khokti cloth was reputed to have lasted a lifetime.

The manufacture of cotton fabrics in Bihar, encouraged by an abundance of raw material, human capital, and skill, was reflected in an impressive variety. The different names which occur in contemporary records for coarse and finer cotton cloth are amriti, cassa, resseyes, zafarkhani, jahangiri, lakhawari, aljah, khes, kamasukha, caymconyes or qaimkhanis, baftas, malmulls, gara, mahamudirasi, mahmudimaddham, mehimahmudinaya, khasa, salgachhi, atharegaji, tangjeb, gajji, motia, bukis, photas, khokti, pagri, pata, charkhana, and kanikosbehar. The textiles were produced as piece goods¹⁷ or readymade clothing (which involved little tailoring); calico, a stout cloth or muslins (which were thinner); plain (unbleached); bleached and dyed; or patterned chintz, the patterns being produced not on the loom with coloured yarns but printed with the wooden block or painted with a pen or stile.

Located along the southern bank of river Ganges, Patna was uniquely advantaged in commanding the routes of Ganges and its three great tributaries, the Ghagara, Gandhak, and Son, which join the Ganges near Patna. The commercial importance of Patna as the largest riverine city of Bihar¹⁸ was further accentuated by its connectivity through land routes and waterways to the northwest and east regions and its integration with the larger grid of the overland traffic to central Asia, west Asia, and Africa. As an inland emporium, a strategic hyphen that joined Bengal, Orissa, and upper India, Patna enjoyed a pre-eminent position in cotton textile production and trade. This was supported by the growth of thriving manufacturing centres and markets of cotton cloth in its rich hinterland which contained the important towns of Tirhut, Saran, Gaya, Singhiya, Bhagalpur, Lakhawar, and Dariyapur.¹⁹

The coarse cotton cloth, woven in and around Patna, was called amertees or ambertress (ambati or ambarti) as is recorded in the reports of the English factors.²⁰ The name was probably derived from Hindi amriti, ambroisa, sweet as nectar.²¹ It was a “strong” close-made and well-conditioned cloth, unbleached and having no faults other than “narrowness,” the narrowness being the price of its durability.²² The English factors in 1620–21 considered the ambarti to be stouter than dariyabadi,²³ the khairabadi,²⁴ and the semianos.²⁵ Robert Hughes recorded in 1620 that when brought from the loom, the calicoes were not of one exact length and were usually “13 coveds jahangiri longe.”²⁶ According to Francisco Pelsaert, ambarty, a superior type of white cloth, was 16 yards (gaz) long and of different widths, worth Rs. 4 to Rs. 10 a piece in 1627.²⁷ This is confirmed by the account of Peter Mundy who found the cloth, when taken from the looms, 12 coveds or 14 1/2 yards long and of various breadths.²⁸ The English factors at Patna declared in the early seventeenth century that they could provide 20,000 pieces of ambertees annually from Patna alone.²⁹ In a letter to the President of the Council at Surat, dated July 12, 1620, Robert Hughes noted that, Rs. 50,000 could easily be investe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Cotton textiles
• 2 Sericulture and silk textiles
• 3 Mining, metallurgy, and metal craft
• 4 Craft production systems, marketing, and financing patterns
• 5 Social world of the craftsmen: cultural dimensions of crafts
• 6 Locating continuing craft traditions
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index