Suchergebnisse

This article briefly traces some general trends defining the existence of handloom weaving industry in United Provinces in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Handloom industry, in spite of the dislocation through large imports of British cloth, still remained the largest employing sector in this region, after agriculture. Use of machine-made yarn play a part in the survival of the handloom weaver, and there being now escalating competition between Indian and British mill yarn for supplying the local handloom industry. Handspun yarn ultimately became a miniscule part of the yarn market. The article analyses the ways in which the region's handloom weavers were affected by these changes, by focusing on the shifts towards production of special kinds of cloth and search for investments, raw material and market. Such changes also meant that the previous inter-community forms of dependence tended to be transformed into intra-community forms of exploitation.

AbstractIn existing historiography, the modernity discourse presents modern knowledge as being more economically efficient and technologically advanced compared to traditional skills. This theoretical lens has introduced a hierarchy of production and restructured the meaning of work and division of labour within the profession of weaving. Historically, the contexts of both the modern textile industry and traditional handloom weaving were interrelated in terms of technology and skills, but they have become increasingly segregated over the last two centuries. This article suggests an apparent distinction between "modernization" as a historical process and "modernity" as a condition. Analysis of the policies and prejudices of the colonial state explains the dynamics between producers, products, and techniques in the handloom textile sector of the United Provinces during the early twentieth century, as well as the impact of government policies, nationalist ideas, and global processes on the sector. Studying these interactions allows us to explore localized nuances pertaining to knowledge and skill that have often been ignored in historiography due to preconceived cultural, political, and institutional compartmentalization of craft communities.

AbstractThe role of skills has been eclipsed in the transition from an agrarian-craft economy rooted in hand-labour in small households to a modern political economy where productive work takes place outside the household, in offices and factories. Yet the ideological erasure of skilled work should not be confused with its actual disappearance. Precisely because such work was typically construed as private and unimportant, the embedded hierarchies and skills that shaped the handloom weaving industry in the North Indian province of United Provinces under colonial rule could escape systematic conversion to capitalist structures. Skill as human capital constituted the capitalist labour processes in the modern handloom industry, not as an abstract act, but as a historical experience. Handloom workers were reproduced, generationally, socially, and hierarchically, through the passing on of skilled labour within the unorganized informal sector of handloom weaving. Thus the stuff of community skills should move beyond its projection as either 'endangered' or 'regressive' to explore its access to capitalist structures and the exploitative networks that contain, transmit, and enable the production of skills.

Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015, 393 pp.; Ajay Skaria, Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance, Ranikhet: Permanent Black & Ashoka University, 2016, 390 pp.

Locating the theorisation and practices of caste hierarchies within South Asian Islam with reference to high-caste Muslims (Ashrafs) versus Julaha weavers (Ajlafs), this article argues that class exploitation and class hegemony over the marginalised sections of Muslim society in North India were practised through caste stratifications, social hierarchies and land relations. The horizontal equality of 'textual Islam' was transformed into vertical social hierarchies in South Asia. While explaining the conditions of the disadvantageous socio-economic status that ensured their subordination, this article narrates instances of resistance and quests for equality undertaken by the Julaha weavers. The dialectics of these negotiations produced factors such as the stigma of status mandated by their caste, on the one hand, and the weavers' integration within the capitalist colonial economy and politics, on the other. The article explores this history of hierarchies and the complex resistances offered to it, closely mediated by social and economic structures, prevailing ideologies and notions of colonial legality and mobility. The processes of the weavers challenging their social marginalisation, predicated on their economic status and their quest for new identities may look familiar to other communities which similarly used religion, caste and colonial law to resist and subvert hierarchies. Hence, the politicisation of the colonial public sphere affected the relations among the Indian Muslims in a new milieu. These arguments are significant in terms of rewriting the existing historiography that reinforces the binaries of nationalist–communalist or Hindu–Muslim politics.