Craft and Small Scale Production in the Global Economy: Gujarat and Kachchh in the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

India's production of fine luxury and craft goods for world markets was discovered and exploited by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Textile producers in Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal applied fine craft skills to European designs, colour codes, and textile lengths and widths. Through the intervention of the East India Companies and private traders as well as their intermediaries, brokers and local merchants, weavers, and printers produced the goods to satisfy Western markets just as they had done for Eastern and African markets in the centuries before.Today Indian craftspeople are engaging in a new phase of production for global markets. They are using traditional techniques of the kind that attracted Western buyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: hand weaving, hand block printing, and natural dyes. Accessing the niche national and international markets needed to provide a future for these crafts is a major challenge. This article focuses on the artisans, skills and markets in one area of India—the region of Kachchh in northern Gujarat, even now considered a remote part of the new global India. It sets this within a wider context of Gujarat and the earlier and more recent history of its textile industries. Douglas Haynes's recent book, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (2012) provides a framework for the study of small-scale industry, and the article will address his subject and methods. The new sources used are a collection of oral histories of craftspeople in a range of industries. These oral histories address skills and training across generations, and how these crafts have adapted and continue to adapt to the demands of national and world markets.