Skill, Dependency, and Differentiation: Artisans and Agents in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry

Abstract

Female embroiderers in the chikan garment industry of Lucknow are homeworkers whose employment opportunities and wages are adversely affected by the restrictions of purdah and widely held opinions of the lowliness of women's work. They are recruited by agents who extract a portion of the piece wage as their profit. Most agents are men. Some, though, are women with moderate to high skills in embroidery. The dependence of embroidery workers upon female agents calls into question whether gender can be a basis for solidarity and action. (India, Lucknow, artisans, class, women embroiderers) This essay addresses some issues in the current attempts at theorizing women's work in third-world contexts. Specifically, it criticizes those approaches that propose to replace the analytic category class (defined in terms of relationship to the means of production) with a community bound by the collective efforts and relatedness, of women (e.g., Sacks 1989). That perspective, I argue, does not recognize how seemingly harmonious communities of women may be riven by conflicting interests in a way that a more traditional, Marxist analysis of relations of production reveals. The example of female embroiderers of the city of Lucknow, India,(1) adds substance to the arguments of Naiman (1996:26) that it is important to retain class and a material analysis at the core of feminist struggles. Chikan is a style of hand-embroidered clothing whose production is time and again described in the literature as an instance of the oppression of undifferentiated female workers by male agents and traders (e.g., Mathur 1975; Saraf 1982; Paine 1989). While there is indeed a distinct pattern of almost exclusive recruitment of women as embroiderers, one which draws ultimately upon pronounced cultural distinctions between men's and women's responsibilities and natures, the perceived shared circumstances of female production stand in stark contrast to unequal relations among embroiderers themselves. It is misleading to imagine that women's oppression by men in itself either does or ought to unite them with common social interests. Chikan production in Lucknow is a large-scale, low-technology industry in which hand-powered labor predominates, piece wages are paid, and there are no factories. Embroidered garments are made in stages, starting with fabric cutting and tailoring, followed by block printing and embroidering, and, finally, laundering. In all stages but one, male specialists predominate. However, the embroidery stage is completely dominated by women. There are no reliable figures on how many embroiderers there are; estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000. Since chikan is currently a mass-market commodity, cheap, coarse work is far more common than fine work. While there is little superficial resemblance between the best chikan work and the commonplace commercial product, they are connected in that the makers of fine work derive their basic living either from making inferior work for the mass market or from subcontracting it to less skilled women. Chikan is not a simple handicraft activity, rooted in precolonial days. Chikan production belongs in what has commonly (and misleadingly) been described as the unorganized or informal sector, where production is largely undocumented and invisible, and where work is done on an irregular basis, without legislative protection, for piece wages. Increasingly, informal industries are viewed neither as deformations of capitalism nor as persistent backward forms. Instead, their prevalence and growth appear to be fully compatible with the global restructuring of capitalism. In its present form, then, chikan production is not a precapitalist holdover, but in organization and productive relations fits wholly within the contemporary capitalist world. Studies of homeworkers elsewhere in the world have revealed that cultural constructions of gender difference have been useful ideological tools in the extraction of surplus value. …