Cotton to Cloth: An Indian Epic by Uzramma

University of Nebraska - Lincoln
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Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings Textile Society of America
1-1-2006
Cotton to Cloth: An Indian Epic
Uzramma
uzramma@gmail.com
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Uzramma, "Cotton to Cloth: An Indian Epic" (2006). Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. Paper 330.
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Cotton to Cloth: An Indian Epic
Uzramma
uzramma@gmail.com


     The cotton handloom industry of India is one of the great manufacturing institutions of the
world: its looms have run continuously for five thousand years. Remnants of cotton thread
 have been found in the ruins of the Harappan civilization [5000-3500 BC], and the
 weavers of India have supplied the markets of the world with cotton cloth since at least
 the first century of the Christian era. The golden age of Indian cotton in recorded history
 stretches from that time untill the beginning of the nineteenth century and there are
 testaments to the quantity, quality and variety of Indian cotton fabrics scattered through
 written records. Indian textiles were traded for Roman gold at the time of the Roman
 Empire; Pliny, the Roman historian of the 1st century AD,calculates the value of imports
 of Indian fabrics to Rome at a hundred million sesterces [equal at the time to 15 million
 Indian rupees] every year, and complains that India is draining Rome of her gold.
 Suleiman, an Arab trader who visits Calicut in 851 A.D writes in his diary “…garments
are 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.”1Tome Pires, a Portugese traveler of the 16th century writes in 1515
 from Malacca describing the ships that come there from Gujarat and the Coromandel
coast, worth eighty to ninety thousand cruzados, carrying cloth of thirty different sorts.2
Pyrard de Laval in the early 17th century says Indian fabrics clothed “everyone from the
 Cape of Good Hope to China, man and woman…from head to foot.”3 Certainly the
 largest manufactured trade item in the world in pre-industrial times,Indian cotton cloth,
 paid for in gold and silver, was the source of India’s fabled wealth. The thriving export
 trade in cotton textiles was built on the base of domestic industry. Cotton was grown
 and cloth woven for export as well as for local use in weaving  regions throughout the
 country, each making its own distinctive product. Fine textiles  were woven for the
 nobility, ordinary home-spun for common people. The rich had  many fine garments,
 the finer the more costly. The emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1717)  is said to have
 chided his daughter for being improperly dressed, to which she replied  that she had
 on seven jamas or suits.4 The common people on the other hand dressed
 in coarse undyed cloth, as the descriptions of early European travellers and the
 sketches of European artists show.
 Indian cloth was ‘in demand from China to the  Mediterranean’6 and trade in Indian
 cotton fabrics had been carried on for centuries  by Armenian, Arab and Indian
 traders until, from the early seventeenth century, the  large European trading
companies began to dominate the region’s textile, spice and  slave trade, ensuring
 control of supply through forcible conquest of producing regions. Portuguese,
Dutch, French and English trading companies seized territories  in Thailand,
 Malaysia, Indonesia, China and India.
1 Sir George Watt, The Wild & Cultivated Cotton Plants of the World, 1907
 (New Delhi: Sagar Book House, 1989).
2 Mattiebelle Gittinger, Master Dyers to the World (Washington:
 Textile Museum, 1982).
3 Ibid.
4 Yule & Burnell, Hobson-Jobson (London: John Murray, 1903).
5 See for example the early 19th century engravings of Rudolph Ackermann,
Balthazar Solvyns and others.
6 John Guy, Woven Cargoes (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998).


In 1600 the British East India Company was granted a Royal Charter for exclusive
 rights to Britain’s trade with India. Textile exports from India, for which the demand
 in Europe seemed to be insatiable, made up the bulk of its trade. In 1682 the port
 of Surat on the West coast alone exported 1,436,000 pieces and the total for the
 whole of India came to more than 3 million pieces – each piece being about 18
 yards in length.7 The cloth was of different descriptions, most of it cotton of a
variety of weaves and weights, dyed, printed and plain, for both garments and
drapery. Ship’s musters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries speak of thirty
 to forty different sorts of cotton fabrics, each with a name: bafta, mulmul, mashru,
 jamdani, moree, percale, nainsukh, chintz, etc, all paid for in bullion: in 4 years alone
 between 1681 and 1685 the East India Company imported 240 tonnes of silver
 and 7 tonnes of gold8 into India. During the 17th century so much Indian cotton
 was imported into England that the English woollen handweaving industry suffered
 and declined. English weavers protested, and eventually at the end of the 18th
century England loaded a duty of 75% onto Indian cotton imports.
     The East India Company, beginning as a trader carrying finished cotton textiles
 from India,soon transformed itself into a colonial power. It proceeded through a
 series of wars and treaties with local rulers to establish itself as the ruler of large
 parts of the country and extractor of revenue through taxation. At the time when it
 began operations cotton in India was almost entirely grown for the domestic
 weaving industry, which ‘is, and has been for ages past, enormous.’9 This massive
 textile manufacturing industry worked through a smooth and wellestablished
chain of exchange and processing between the peasant cultivator, the local market,
itinerant carders, domestic spinners and home-based weaver families. Under
Company rule the chain was disrupted. The peasant cultivator, who had under
 Mughal rule paid a maximum of 25% of his annual income in taxes, now became
 the source of land revenue for the Company and
-----------------------------
 7 Nick Robins, The Corporation
 that Changed the World, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006).
8 John Keay, The Honourable Company, (London: Harper Collins, 1993).
9 Report from the Select Committee on the Growth of Cotton in India, (London:1848).
--------------------------------
.
had to pay a much larger proportion, varying from 40 to 50%. Besides, cloth making was
 taxed again at different stages:
The story of cotton in India is not half told,” writes Francis Carnac Brown, a British cotton
 planter in the Malabar region of India, “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 2 ½ 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.
 Oppressive taxation by the Company accompanied export of raw cotton and import
 of finished products, at first yarn and later, cloth. This combination had the effect of
 reversing the traditional trade flow; India which for centuries had been a net exporter of
cotton textiles, gradually became an importer. First came the import of yarn. One immediate
 effect this had was of taking away the occupation of millions of women spinners in this country.
 Until colonial times, the yarn for handloom weaving in India had traditionally been spun by
 hand. Millions of women spun at home, the richer ones as a leisure pastime, the poorer ones
 to earn a living. With the invention of spinning machinery in Britain and the import of machine
-spun cotton yarn this occupation vanished. This letter, from the 1820s, was printed in a
 Bengali paper Samachar
-----------------
10 Proceedings of the Madras Board of Revenue no 407 dated April 9, 1862, quoted
 in Ratnam, Agricultural Development in Madras State prior to 1900, (Madras:
New Century Book House, 1966).
-----------------

Darpan, translated into English and re-printed a hundred years later in Gandhi’s Young India
llustrates the effect of the imports:
To the Editor, The Samachar,
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 fulfil 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 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 (Rs28). 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 father-in-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 realize
 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 it 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. 11
     Britain saw India as a supplier of raw materials and a market for its
 manufactures. Machinewoven cotton fabrics were brought into the country,
while cotton was shipped out to supply its own industry. But there was a problem:
Though Indian cotton, Gossypium arboreum, had produced the finest fabrics the
world has yet seen, the famous Dhaka muslins, it was unsuited to the newly invented
 textile machinery, which was designed for the cotton of America. ‘I have no
doubt that the fine cotton produced near Dacca is one cause of the superiority of the
manufacture’, writes Dr.Hamilton in 1828, ‘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.12 That is to say, American
 cotton varieties, Gossypium hirsutum, produced a longer, stronger staple, more fitted
 to the rigours of machine processing. Since America had declared itself independent it
 could no longer be relied on as a supplier of cotton, and so the East India Company
 set about ‘improving’ Indian cotton, which meant making it more suited to the machine.
 ‘The American plant grown in India produce[s] a staple longer, and therefore better
 calculated for the European manufacturer.’13 Before the Company’s intervention,
 local cotton varieties had been closely adapted to Indian textile technology, producing
 cotton fabrics of a staggering diversity that were durable, strong,
-------------------------------
11 M K Gandhi,
Young India 21-5-1931, reprinted in Economics of Khadi, (Ahmedabad:
Navjivan Press, 1941).
12 Sir George Watt, ‘The Wild & Cultivated Cotton Plants of the World’,
 1907, reprinted: (New Delhi: Sagar Book
House, 1989).
13 Report from the Select Committee on the Growth of Cotton in India,
(London: 1848).
----------------------

soft, light in weight, absorbent, washable, and that were capable of holding colour
 permanently. Native Indian varieties were grown without irrigation on rain-fed soils,
 intercropped with the local food crops. They fruited over a long period, and so
 could be picked by family labour. In other words, they were suited to an economy
 of dispersed rather than mass production. The new British machines on the other
 hand were the heralds of the era of mass-production, and they needed uniform raw
 materials in large quantities, and the need to grow cotton to supply those machines
 rather than for the local textile industry completely transformed cotton cultivation in
India. This was the critical point when the hundreds of varieties of Indian cotton
which had been bred over centuries to supply the hundreds of weaving regions,
 now had to produce instead a uniform supply. Diversity which had until then been
 valued, now became a handicap.
     The East India Company began to research into ways to increase the quantity
 of cotton for export, and its suitability for the spinning machinery, replacing the
 centuries old Indian varieties with American. Obviously this research benefited the
 Company and the English textile manufacturers, neither of whom cared about
 preserving Indian textile traditions, or the welfare of Indian farmers or weavers.
 In fact they saw the Indian weaver as a competitor for the supply of
cotton and the Indian farmer as inefficient, because he was unwilling to fit into
 the new tradedominated industrial pattern. They knew that Indian cotton produced
 much less per acre than the American, and they felt the fault lay in the ignorance
 of the Indian farmer of better varieties and better agricultural practices. They
 decided to bring American cotton planters to India to teach Indians how to grow
 cotton, about which John Sullivan of the Madras Revenue Board had this to
say: ‘when the cotton fabrics of India had been carried to the highest perfection
 centuries and centuries before the cotton plant was known in America, it seems
odd that we should be thinking now of importing people from America to teach
 the people of India how to cultivate, clean and collect their cotton.14
     But the Company went ahead. In 1840 it employed ten American cotton
 planters to demonstrate American style cotton growing in India. Three of these
 planters were sent to Coimbatore and given land and all the help they
------------------
 14 Report from the Select Committee on the Growth of
Cotton in India, (London: 1848).
----------------------

  needed. They were supervised by Dr Wight, who at the same time gave the
 American seed to the Indian ryots and bought back the cotton produced.
The experiment went on for 13 years. In 1861 Wight reported:

In three years the American planters had completely exhausted the fertility of the
 soil by cropping it with cotton year after year.
In the fourth and fifth year the crop was not worth gathering.
At the end of the fifth year, the planters retired from the field altogether, confessing
 candidly that they could not compete with the Coimbatore farmers.

     American planters were beaten out in three years. ‘The Coimbatore ryots at the
 end of the thirteenth year of trials produced from American seed of their own raising
 a cotton crop as good and as abundant as was produced by the planters in the first
 year, and this cotton was produced at half the cost of the Americans.’15
The damaging effect of substituting American for native varieties was recognized by the
well-informed. George Watt, the botanical advisor to the Government was categoric:
It might almost be said that progression is deliberately stultified, the labours of centuries
 ruthlessly thrown away, and a large and important industry practically cornered or
 restricted in its possible development by interested parties.. since the existing traffic
 is aimed at the destruction of all the good features of the indigenous fibre.16
In 1947 India regained its independence, but by this time mass production was
 synonymous with modernity and India’s own spinning and weaving mills took over
 the role of Lancashire in the textile industry. It was taken for granted that research
 into cotton varieties would continue to develop cotton for the mills, making sure that
 the cotton plant kept pace with the development of the machines. American cotton
 varieties and their hybrids gradually replaced the native ones, so that at present the
 native varieties grow only in a few pockets.
Cotton in India is grown largely by small farmers, and the new practices have changed
 the nature of farm practices from sustainable family based agriculture to intensive
 commercial farming with severe and tragic consequences. Seeds come from large
 multinationals rather the farmer’s own stock, and are expensive. While the local
 varieties were rain-fed, the new varieties need irrigation, which increases humidity.
 Humidity in turn encourages pests and fungus. A cocktail of chemicals – fertilizer,
 pesticide17 and fungicide is used which adds to the cost of cultivation, but does
 not guarantee a good harvest. The farmer runs up huge debts hoping for a
good crop, but India’s weather is variable, ground water is fast depleting and if the
 crop fails the risks are entirely the farmer’s. The distress of the cotton farmer leads
 to numbers of suicides; in 2004 in the state of Andhra Pradesh alone almost 600
 farmers, the majority of them cotton growers, ended their lives.18 Lately the
 introduction of genetically modified seeds has led to even more severe problems
 in cotton growing areas of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.
     Not only cotton farmers but handloom weavers too are in trouble, and a large
 part of their problem is related to cotton yarn. Hand weaving in India today is a
 livelihood for a large section of the population, particularly in villages. Over 6
million square yards of textiles – 16% of
---------------------------------
15 C Shambu Prasad, Suicide Deaths and Quality of Indian Cotton, Economic
 & Political Weekly, January 30, 1999.
16 Sir George Watt, ‘The Wild & Cultivated Cotton Plants of the World’,
 1907, reprinted: (New Delhi: Sagar Book House, 1989).
17 Cotton which is grown on about 5% of the cultivated land accounts for
 55% of all the pesticide used in India.
18 Andhra Pradesh Rythu Sangam, 2005.

India’s textile output - were produced on hand looms last year [04-05]. There
 are six and a half million weaving families, besides whom there are an equal
 number occupied in ancillary trades connected with the industry – dyers,
warpers, sizers, bobbin-winders, and tool makers. Yet this enormously
significant and productive sector does not get yarn specifically suited to it, but is
treated as a poor relation of the mill textile industry, and has to use mill-spun yarn,
which puts handwoven textiles at a disadvantage in terms of quality. Handwoven
 fabrics can compete in the market only on their quality, not their price. The
 Indian weaver’s skills need to be underpinned by suitable yarn to carry through
 into fabric the important characteristics of cotton.

The technology in use in contemporary spinning mills is a centralized, capital
 and energy intensive technology ill-suited to the operating conditions in India
 where cotton is grown by millions of farmers on small farms and yarn in turn
 is woven mostly (over 90%) by dispersed handlooms and powerlooms.
 Because spinning machinery has high capacities, only large quantities are
economical to spin, so farmers are required to grow uniform varieties of cotton.
The overheads of transporting cotton to the mills and yarn to the weavers add
 to the costs. On the weavers’ side, small quantities of different types of yarn
 are needed, which are difficult for large mills to supply.
     When cotton began to be exported not only the growing but also the handling
 changed. For local use cotton was carried in loose sacks, but these obviously
were not suited to transport overseas. Steam presses were introduced to
 compress the loose cotton into bales, squeezing the soft fibres into a dense
 mass of the consistency of wood, pressing trash – bits of leaf, seed-coat
and dirt - more firmly into it. Now baling is taken to be an essential part of
cotton processing even if both cotton growers and spinning mills are located
 within miles of each other.
     Today spinning mills in India use only baled cotton. The bales are torn open
 by spiked metal wheels and the loosened cotton blown apart by force in the
 blow-room to separate the fibres before the cotton is cleaned and carded
. By the time it has gone through these processes the cotton is limp and lifeless
 and has lost the springiness that would otherwise give cotton fabric a
wonderful drape and feel. The yarn made on these machines is strong enough
 for machine  weaving, but with its tighter twist is over-spun for handlooms,
and has also lost some of its durability, absorbency and colour holding capacity,
 all the desirable natural qualities of cotton which can be retained through gentle
 processing and hand-weaving.
     Dastkar Andhra, Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit independent Trust, whose
 objective is to reaffirm the vitality of household production of cotton textiles as
 an economic activity in the contemporary context. The Trust provides
consultancy services to artisan industries to contemporize their organizational
 structures and market linkages, making use of new technologies where it suits
 them, while retaining and reinforcing the strengths of traditional skills. Dastkar,
 in collaboration with handloom weaving co-operatives, develops systems for
effective linkages between dispersed production and the market and researches
 technologies both traditional and modern, that would buttress the strengths
 of the cotton handweaving industry.
.
Dastkar Andhra and Vortex Engineering, Chennai, are collaborating in a research
 project to design and manufacture a set of machines that uses fresh cotton
 straight from the fields, eliminating some steps between ginning and spinning -
 baling, transport of bales, blow-room - and simplifying carding. These machines
 are capable of spinning small lots of cotton of highly variable quality, suited to
meeting the differing yarn needs of unstandardized looms. They free
the cotton farmer from the tyranny of demands by ever faster spinning machinery,
 needing cotton of longer & stronger staple, unsuited to being grown in Indian
 conditions. They can supply handloom weavers with yarn made from local cottons.
 With these machines it will be possible to link cotton growing to hand-weaving
 in the many hundreds of villages in India where both co-exist. This is our vision,
of a way of regaining the diversity and variety that were the hallmarks of India’s
 ancient textile tradition. At present we have one pilot unit working, processing
 about 25 kg of ginned cotton in each 8-hour shift into sliver, which is then
 distributed to domestic spinners operating small motorized ring-frames. Once
 the yarn is spun it is woven on hand looms into a soft, durable, absorbent,
medium weight cloth called ‘malkha’ with excellent draping and dye-holding
 properties.

     Some say that as energy from steam, oil and electricity ushered in the era of
 mass production in the 19th century, it will be clean, renewable energy that will
 take dispersed production industries to the top of the heap in the 21st. As the
 stock of fossil fuels comes to an end notions of efficiency will change and
 low-energy manufacturing processes will gain in value. At the same time markets
 are becoming saturated with the look-alike products of factory production,
and there are more and more customers for the individualized products that
 dispersed production can offer. In this situation household manufacture of
 cotton textiles in India, particularly if it can use yarn made from cotton fresh
 from the field, looks as if it will have the last laugh over mass
production after all.