WEAVERS, IRON SMELTERS AND FACTORY OWNERS

 

CLASS- VIII    OUR PASTS -III

07.    WEAVERS, IRON SMELTERS AND FACTORY OWNERS

·       The crafts and industries of India were crucial for the industrial revolution in the modern world. Mechanised production of cotton textiles made Britain the foremost industrial nation in the nineteenth century. And when its iron and steel industry started growing from the 1850s, Britain came to be known as the “workshop of the world”.

·       In the late eighteenth century the Company was buying goods in India and exporting them to England and Europe, making profit through this sale.

·       With the growth of industrial production, British industrialists began to see India as a vast market for their industrial products, and over time manufactured goods from Britain began flooding India.

·       How did this affect Indian crafts and industries? This is the question we will explore in this chapter.

INDIAN TEXTILES AND THE WORLD MARKET

·       Around 1750, before the British conquered Bengal, India was by far the world’s largest producer of cotton textiles. Indian textiles had long been renowned both for their fine quality and exquisite craftsmanship.

·       They were extensively traded in Southeast Asia (Java, Sumatra and Penang) and West and Central Asia.

·       From the sixteenth century European trading companies began buying Indian textiles for sale in Europe. Memories of this flourishing trade and the craftsmanship of Indian weavers is preserved in many words still current in English and other languages.

Words tell us histories

·       European traders first encountered fine cotton cloth from India carried by Arab merchants in Mosul in present-day Iraq. So they began referring to all finely woven textiles as “muslin” – a word that acquired wide currency.

·       When the Portuguese first came to India in search of spices they landed in Calicut on the Kerala coast in south-west India. The cotton textiles which they took back to Europe, along with the spices, came to be called “calico” (derived from Calicut), and subsequently calico became the general name for all cotton textiles.

·       There are many other words which point to the popularity of Indian textiles in Western markets.

Names of the different varieties of cloth

·       Amongst the pieces ordered in bulk were printed cotton cloths called chintz, cossaes (or khassa) and bandanna.

·       The English term chintz comes from the Hindi word chhint, a cloth with small and colourful flowery designs.

·       From the 1680s there started a craze for printed Indian cotton textiles in England and Europe mainly for their exquisite floral designs, fine texture and relative cheapness. Rich people of England including the Queen herself wore clothes of Indian fabric.

·       Similarly, the word bandanna now refers to any brightly coloured and printed scarf for the neck or head. Originally, the term derived from the word“bandhna” (Hindi for tying), and referred to a variety of brightly coloured cloth produced through a method of tying and dying.

·       The widespread use of such words shows how popular Indian textiles had become in different parts of the world.

Indian textiles in European markets

·       By the early eighteenth century, worried by the popularity of Indian textiles, wool and silk makers in England began protesting against the import of Indian cotton textiles.

·       In 1720, the British government enacted a legislation banning the use of printed cotton textiles – chintz – in England. Interestingly, this Act was known as the Calico Act.

·       At this time textile industries had just begun to develop in England. Unable to compete with Indian textiles, English producers wanted a secure market within the country by preventing the entry of Indian textiles.

·       The first to grow under government protection was the calico printing industry. Indian designs were now imitated and printed in England on white muslin or plain unbleached Indian cloth.

·       Competition with Indian textiles also led to a search for technological innovation in England. In 1764, the spinning jenny was invented by John Kaye which increased the productivity of the traditional spindles. The invention of the steam engine by Richard Arkwright in 1786revolutionised cotton textile weaving.

·       European trading companies – the Dutch, the French and the English – made enormous profits out of this flourishing trade. These companies purchased cotton and silk textiles in India by importing silver.

·       When the English East India Company gained political power in Bengal, it no longer had to import precious metal to buy Indian goods. Instead, they collected revenues from peasants and zamindars in India, and used this revenue to buy Indian textiles.

Who were the weavers?

·       Weavers often belonged to communities that specialised in weaving. Their skills were passed on from one generation to the next.

·       Weavers Communities- The tanti weavers of Bengal, the julahas or momin weavers of north India, sale and kaikollar and devangs of south India.

Stages of production-

·       The first stage of production was spinning – a work done mostly by women. The charkha and the takli were household spinning instruments.

·       The thread was spun on the charkha and rolled on the takli.

·       When the spinning was over the thread was woven into cloth by the weaver. In most communities weaving was a task done by men.

·       For coloured textiles, the thread was dyed by the dyer, known as rangrez. For printed cloth the weavers needed the help of specialist block printers known as chhipigars.

·       Handloom weaving and the occupations associated with it provided livelihood for millions of Indians.

Causes of the decline of Indian textiles

The development of cotton industries in Britain affected textile producers in India in several ways.

·       Indian textiles now had to compete with British textiles in the European and American markets.

·       Exporting textiles to England also became increasingly difficult since very high duties were imposed on Indian textiles imported into Britain.

·       By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Englishmade cotton textiles successfully ousted Indian goods from their traditional markets in Africa, America and Europe.

·       Thousands of weavers in India were now thrown out of employment. Bengal weavers were the worst hit.

·       English and European companies stopped buying Indian goods and their agents no longer gave outadvances to weavers to secure supplies.

·       Distressed weavers wrote petitions to the government to help them.

·       But worse was still to come. By the 1830s British cotton cloth flooded Indian markets.

·       In fact, by the 1880s two-thirds of all the cotton clothes worn by Indians were made of cloth produced in Britain.

RISING OF HANDLOOM WEAVING

·       It did not completely die in India. This was because some types of cloths could not be supplied by machines. The machines could not produce saris with intricate borders or cloths with traditional woven patterns.

·       These had a wide demand not only amongst the rich but also amongst the middle classes.

·       Nor did the textile manufacturers in Britain produce the very coarse cloths used by the poor people in India.

·       Sometowns emerged as important new centres of weaving in the late nineteenth century like Sholapur in western India and Madurai in South India.

·       Later, during the national movement, Mahatma Gandhi urged people to boycott imported textiles and use hand-spun and handwoven cloth.

·       Khadi gradually became a symbol of nationalism. The charkha came to represent India, and it was put at the centre of the tricolour flag of the Indian National Congress adopted in 1931.

What happened to the weavers and spinners who lost their livelihood?

·       Thousands of rural women who made a living by spinning cotton thread were rendered jobless.

·       Many weavers became agricultural labourers. Some migrated to cities in search of work, and yet others went out of the country to work in plantations in Africa and South America.

·       Some of these handloom weavers also found work in the new cotton mills that were established in Bombay (now Mumbai), Ahmedabad, Sholapur, Nagpur and Kanpur.

COTTON MILLS COME UP

·       The first cotton mill in India was set up as a spinning mill in Bombay in 1854.

·       From the early nineteenth century, Bombay had grown as an important port for the export of raw cotton from India to England and China.

·       It was close to the vast black soil tract of western India where cotton was grown. When the cotton textile mills came up they could get supplies of raw material with ease.

·       By 1900, over 84 mills started operating in Bombay. Many of these were established by Parsi and Gujarati businessmen who had made their money through trade with China.

·       Mills came up in other cities too. The first mill in Ahmedabad was started in 1861 and in 1862a mill was established in Kanpur, in the United Provinces.

·       Growth of cotton mills led to a demand for labour.

·       Thousands of poor peasants, artisans and agricultural labourers moved to the cities to work in the mills.

Problems of the textile factory industry in India

·       It found it difficult to compete with the cheap textiles imported from Britain. In most countries, governments supported industrialisation by imposing heavy duties on imports. This eliminated competition and protected infant industries. The colonial government in India usually refused such protection to local industries.

Raise of cotton factory in India

·       The first major spurt in the development of cotton factory production in India, therefore, was during the First World War when textile imports from Britain declined and Indian factories were called upon to produce cloth for military supplies.

The sword of Tipu Sultan and Wootz steel

·       Tipu Sultan who ruled Mysore till 1799, fought four wars with the British and died fighting with his sword in his hand. Tipu’s legendary swords are now part of valuable collections in museums in England. The sword had an incredibly hard and sharp edge that could easily rip through the opponent’s armour.

·       This quality of the sword came from a special type of high carbon steel called Wootz which was produced all over south India.

Making of Wootz-

·       Wootz steel when made into swords produced a very sharp edge with a flowing water pattern. This pattern came from very small carbon crystals embedded in the iron.

·       Francis Buchanan who toured through Mysore in 1800, a year after Tipu Sultan’s death, has left us an account of the technique by which Wootz steel was produced in many hundreds of smelting furnaces in Mysore.

·       In these furnaces, iron was mixed with charcoal and put inside small clay pots.

·       Through an intricate control of temperatures, the smelters produced steel ingots that were used for sword making not just in India but in West and Central Asia too.

·       Wootz is an anglicized version of the Kannada word ukku, Telugu hukku and Tamil and Malayalam urukku – meaning steel.

·       Indian Wootz steel fascinated European scientists. Michael Faraday, the legendary scientist and discoverer of electricity and electromagnetism, spent four years studying the properties of Indian Wootz (1818-22).

·       However, the Wootz steel making process, which was so widely known in south India, was completely lost by the mid-nineteenth century.

·       The swords and armour making industry died with the conquest of India by the British and imports of iron and steel from England displaced the iron and steel produced by craftspeople in India.

ABANDONED FURNACES IN VILLAGES

·       Production of Wootz steel required a highly specialised technique of refining iron. But iron smelting in India was extremely common till the end of the nineteenth century.

·       In Bihar and Central India, in particular, every district had smelters that used local deposits of ore to produce iron which was widely used for the manufacture of implements and tools of daily use.

·       The furnaces were most often built of clay and sun-dried bricks. The smelting was done by men while women worked the bellows, pumping air that kept the charcoal burning.

Decline of the craft of iron smelting

·       By the late nineteenth century, however, the craft of iron smelting was in decline. In most villages, furnaces fell into disuse and the amount of iron produced came down.

·       When the colonial government prevented people from entering the reserved forests, the iron smelters didn’t find wood for charcoal and iron ore.

·       Disobeyingthe forest laws, they often entered the forests secretly and collected wood, but they could not sustain their occupation on this basis for long. Many gave up their craft and looked for other means of livelihood.

·       In some areas the government did grant access to the forest. But the iron smelters had to pay a very high tax to the forest department for every furnace they used. This reduced their income.

·       Moreover, by the late nineteenth century iron and steel was being imported from Britain. Ironsmiths in India began using the imported iron to manufacture utensils and implements. This inevitably lowered the demand for iron produced by local smelters.

Iron and steel factories come up in India-Story of TISCO

·       In 1904Charles Weld, an American geologist and Dorabji Tata, the eldest son of Jamsetji Tata, were travelling in Chhattisgarh in search of iron ore deposits. They had spent many months on a costly venture looking for sources of good iron ore to set up a modern iron and steel plant in India.

·       Jamsetji Tata had decided to spend a large part of his fortune to build a big iron and steel industry in India using fine quality iron ore.

·       Weld and Dorabji came upon a small village and found a group of men and women carrying basketloads of iron ore. These people were the Agarias. When asked where they had found the iron ore, the Agarias pointed to a hill in the distance.

·       Weld and Dorabji reached the hill after an exhausting trek through dense forests. They explored that the Rajhara Hills had one of the finest ores in the world.

·       But there was a problem. The region was dry and water – necessary for running the factory – was not to be found nearby. The Tatas had to continue their search for a more suitable place to set up their factory. However, the Agarias helped in the discovery of a source of iron ore that would later supply the Bhilai Steel Plant.

·       A few years later a large area of forest was cleared on the banks of the river Subarnarekha to set up the factory and an industrial township – Jamshedpur. Here there was water near iron ore deposits.

Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO)

·       It came up began producing steel in 1912.

·       TISCO was set up at an opportune time. All through the late nineteenth century, India was importing steel that was manufactured in Britain.

·       Expansion of the railways in Indiahad provided a huge market for rails that Britain produced. For a long while, British experts in the Indian Railways were unwilling to believe that good quality steel could be produced in India.

·       In 1914 the First World War broke out. Steel produced in Britain now had to meet the demands of war in Europe. So imports of British steel into India declined dramatically and the Indian Railways turned to TISCO for supply of rails.

·       As the war dragged on for several years, TISCO had to produce shells and carriage wheels for the war. By 1919 the colonial government was buying 90 per cent of the steel manufactured by TISCO.

 

 

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