Ways to Modernisation and Adaptation

Abstract

This article is a study based on the United Provinces (UP) State Archive records on the early history of modern weaving schools in UP. Handloom weaving has been a major occupation in this region, diversified in skills, and involved some of the most skill-intensive types of textiles woven on the loom. Did the schools—as expected—formalise that knowledge to modernise it, bring it from the private domain to the public and encourage experiments upon it by making training less tradition-bound? These are important questions in the history of traditional industry, for the schools do represent some sort of paradigm shift in the way knowledge of technology forms. The case of experimental weaving schools in the United Provinces proved to be a site of contestation reflecting the overlapping and contradictory notions for the binary superstructures of modern state and community. As far as the dominant colonial power structure was concerned, a need to accommodate traditional ‘community’ and its product was certainly recognised in an attempt to legitimise many actions of the state. But this accommodation of the ‘community’ was possible only in a conditioned form in the new power structure. If ‘community’ was not ready to get accommodated in that particular conditioned form, then it had to suffer marginalisation. In fact, the colonial regime was certainly offering a technical alternative in the form of new content in the syllabi, modes of transmission, and enhancement of knowledge and motivational structures. But the parallel existence of traditional, sophisticated and complex knowledge, conveyed through kinship, dynasticism and close-knit cultural groups was not going to relent so easily. How, as per the new ground realities, both the systems interacted, co-existed, challenged and overlapped with each other and in the process transformed each other as well are some questions to be posed here.