Textile Technology (तन्तुकार्यम्)

Most historians of pre-British India are agreed that India of that time was not only an agricultural, but also an industrial society. And a survey of Indian technologies cannot be complete without some discussion of textiles, the great industrial enterprise of pre-British India. Up to 1800 India was the world’s leading producer and exporter of textiles. This production was almost entirely based on techniques that could be operated at the level of the individual or the family. Spinning of yarn was an activity in which perhaps whole of India participated. According to an observer from Manchester, Amo Pearse, who in 1930 visited India to study its cotton industry, there were probably 5 crore spinning wheels (charkhas) intermittently at work even then. And this simple small wheel was so efficient that till the early decades of the nineteenth century a widowed mother could still maintain a whole family in reasonable manner by spinning on the charkha for a few hours a day. Weaving was a relatively more specialised activity. However, the number of those belonging to the weaver castes was smaller in comparison only to those from the cultivating castes. Early nineteenth century data for certain districts of South India indicate that each district had around 20,000 looms. Arrno Pearse in 1930 estimated the number of handlooms operating in India to be in the vicinity of 20 lakhs.

There were vast regions of India which specialised in specific types of fabrics. Each of these areas developed techniques of weaving, bleaching, dyeing and painting etc., which were indigenous to the region, and also had its own characteristic designs, motifs and symbols. For example, in Western India alone, Sironj in Rajasthan and Burhanpur in Khandesh were major centres of cotton painting; cheap printed cottons came from Ahmedabad; woollens including the extra-ordinary Cashmere Shawls were produced in Kashmir; true silks were worked as patolas at Patan in Gajarat and so on.

These dispersed and diverse techniques were so optimised that textile produced in Britain through the technologies of industrial revolution could hardly match the Indian textiles in quality or price. Till the early nineteenth century, mill produced fabric had to be protected from Indian competition by the imposition of duties of 70 to 80 percent on the cottons and silks imported from India, or by positive prohibition. The historian H. H. Wilson noted that without such prohibitory duties and decrees, ‘the mills of Paisley and Manchester would have been stopped in their outset and could scarcely, have been again set in motion even by the power of steam’.