“The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India." The English Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, 1834
“The Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.” John Sullivan, the founder of the British settlement of Ootacamund, now known as Ooty, observed in 1840
Textile history underscores the breadth of South Asian history. As I’ve discussed in the first essay in this series, much of Indian wealth came from textiles. The trade goes back to ancient times. Within the subcontinent, textiles were associated with wealth and status, as is obvious from sculptures and paintings. In those previous two essays, I didn’t touch on perhaps the most important element of textiles—cloth-born identity.
South Asia is a vast region connected over generations by politics and colonialism, but culturally, there are numerous cultural distinctions. This linguistic diversity points to even greater ethnic diversity. Additionally, caste is a structural system underlying social stratification. Caste regularly determined jobs and marriages. With so much diversity, visual markers became essential to denote who was in and who was out of any group. Textiles served as a mark of position but also belonging.
Many of the textiles, though they helped denote identity, were different than the textiles produced for trade. But these exported textiles also shaped identity, serving as a source of incredible cultural pride. Many of the small family businesses had hereditary knowledge honed over centuries. These were born vocations. The results of these craftsmen were otherworldly. Meena Menon and Uzramma write in A Frayed History: The Journey of Cotton in India that Indian muslins were known as aab-e-rawan (running water), shabnam (evening dew), and beft hawa (woven air).
In this essay, let’s explore how the British attempted to destroy the South Asian people by destroying both the textile industry and impairing the local textile crafts, and how South Asians making textile crafts today is an assertion of identity and anti-colonialism.
**This is part of my continuing series on Indian Textiles: **
While many people assume jewels and spices were the reason the British wanted South Asia, textiles and textile workers were the real jewel for the colonial crown. South Asia had 1/5 of the world’s population in 1600. As I said previously, this vast population had been producing trade goods for millennia. It’s no surprise that, at the precipice of British occupation, India single-handedly produced some 23 percent of world GDP at the time, towering over England’s measly 1.8 percent, as estimated by historian Angus Maddison. By the time the British left, the Indian economy was reduced to about 4% of the world’s GDP. The narrower number is starker still. In 1800, India made close to 20 percent of the world’s manufactured goods. By 1860 it was 8.6 percent. By 1913 it was 1.4 percent.
