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’.

Introduction and Methodology

In the absence of substantial material remains of Indian textile technology(1) in the pre-Islamic period we have depended more on the vibrancy of craft tradition both in terms of techniques, processes, tools and implements as well as that of hereditary skills transmitted across generations. The task of identifying the constituents of a tradition which existed at a remote period of time in India, is, therefore facilitated by the existence of a wide data base of ethnological evidence which lends itself to selective usage. The criteria for selection can be rationally explained as material artifacts and a living craft tradition are both subject to an inner logic which shapes the nature of innovation accepted and the norms which guide selectivity in obsolescence. This topic will not be taken up here as it involves aspects of a wide ranging methodological enquiry beyond the scope of the present exercise. For the purposes of this article, development in the area of textile technology will be broken down into its components of fibre, natural dye and loom structure.

Fibre

Fibres used in India can be accommodated within the categories of bast, wool, silk and cotton. Animal skin and bark cloth(2) are, therefore, being excluded. Felt, namda(3) being non woven, may be classified as a fabric rather than a textile, and has been eliminated from the purview of this survey.

Bast Fibres

The term bast fibre covers the category of strong ligneous fibres of which the most important are flax, hemp, jute and ramie, separated by the process of retting from certain parts of plant tissue. For the proper utilisation of such fibres the precise point at which further decomposition has to be arrested has to be accurately guaged. Fibres may be either woven into clothing or be diverted to the manufacture of cordage and meeting.

Linen, referred to as Ksauma in early texts, is obtained from the plant Linum usimtissirnum. The plant is called Uma in the Charaka Samhita while Panini uses the term Kshuma and atasi. Uma and Kshuma had the connotation of linen while atasi had that of linseed oil (Singh, M.N. pp.11-12). Linum usitatissimum was not indigenous to India and in antiquity it was cultivated in Egypt, Europe and Northern India. The attempt to popularise that plant for its flax fibre failed in this country, but as a source of linseed oil it was extensively cultivated (Singh, M.N. p.1) (4). Flax

fibres are long, lustrous, strong, and can stand up to high tension. They are smooth, hard faced, inelastic and resistant to abrasion. They are good heat conductors and readily absorb water.

On the loom, warp ends can be set closely together as they are marginally affected by rubbing of adjacent warps when there is a change in shed. Individual fibres of good quality flax can be so delicate as to be close to being invisible, and very fine gossamer thin fabrics can be woven from such fibre. When flax is grown for fibre the seeds are sewn close together so that the stems grow straight and there are a minimum number of branches (Baines, p.3; Carrol, p. 15).