Artisan Cloth-Producers and the Emergence of Powerloom Manufacture in Western India 1920-1950

Information sharing through informal interaction in low-tech clusters

“…This is demonstrated with the evidence from the literature on the history of technological progress in the handloom industry, i.e., innovation and information diffusion in handloom has always revolved around community, and has for the most part been positively stimulated by community social capital. We term this the 'standard line' in the literature and build it by reviewing the historical experience drawn from works primarily by Tirthankar Roy (1987Roy ( , 1993Roy ( , 1996Roy ( , 1999Roy ( , 2002 and Douglas Haynes (1996Haynes ( , 2001Haynes ( , 2012. It is against this standard line that the experiences of the Saliyars of Balaramapuram are examined in this chapter.…”

“…There is a common misconception on handloom in India, which involves a pastoral notion of handloom textile production as an individual activity performed by rural weavers in a rustic (and more or less static) setting. Haynes (2001Haynes ( , 2012 argues that handloom has always, on the contrary, been a dynamic industry, characterised by frequent innovation and weaver mobility; but it has also always been a community based industry, with entire communities regarding this economic activity as their traditional profession. That is, handloom in India has been characterised by the household-based weaving family working not alone but embedded in community-based clusters that considers weaving (and generally handloom textile production from start to finish) as a community's heritage and not simply a family's source of income; the community being the agency through which innovations have filtered into the industry.…”

“…Familiar labour was always the basic unit of production in nearly all processes of handloom textile production (Haynes, 2012). And in terms of adoption of weaving innovation too, the first adopters of innovations (such as electrification and modernisation of weaving, pre-loom, and post-loom processes) have actually been communities drawn from hereditary 'weaving castes' such as the migrant Padmasalis and the Muslim Momins or Julahas (Haynes, 2001(Haynes, , 2012Roy, 2002). What makes this fact more interesting is that even ancillary activities were community-based, distributed across different communities.…”

“…But the initial resilience was overcome and the workshop form of organisation was eventually absorbed; not displacing the family/community system, and instead growing alongside it (Haynes, 2001). According to Haynes, who has documented in detail the entry of workshops in the industry in Western India, the family slowly began incorporating the management of the workshop and marketing of produce into its existing division of labour.…”

“…Haynes (2012) provides numerous examples of this, including the case of the Vakharias in Surat who built a workshop of about thirty looms, involving the members of a large joint family; in another instance, different brothers performed different management, production, and technical functions. So, though the wage labour was supposedly from outside the 'family' in the workshop system, it was actually sourced mostly from within the community through informal networks of kinship, friendship, and neighbourhood (Haynes, 2001). There was little evidence of public joint-stock offerings or partnerships between unrelated persons (Haynes, 2012).…”