August 7th is celebrated as the Handloom Day. Of course, each day is dedicated to someone or the other. Yet, the handlooms are associated with many of the significant moments good or bad across the world. The weaver community is strong in many parts of the country and the rise of textile automation threatened their business. In India, even today, handloom products occupy significant share in the market. However, one cannot claim it to be pure handloom since power looms are used to produce clothes and related material. There are many communities still dependent on these for their livelihood.
During the independence movement, handlooms symbolized the Indian resistance to British textile domination. Indian cotton was imported into Britain at cheap prices, converted to textile products like clothes in Manchester and other Lancashire mills and then exported back to India to be sold at higher prices. This impacted the domestic industry which was withering away. To Mahatma Gandhi, using handloom to spin Khadi symbolized the Indian resistance. It was the moment to attack the British where it hit them the most. For Gandhi, Khadi would seek to destroy Lancashire mills. The workers in these mills would perhaps rise in revolt against the British government back home and thus hasten independence. It was a smart piece of economic warfare given the times they lived in.
Yet, post-independence, India rather shifting to textile machinery and automation continued on this Gandhian handloom model dominated by the weaver castes. The clothing produced was cheap, output low and thus quality too very low. One could not produce mass clothing at scale. The village level set ups ensured technological reach was almost absent and in many ways functioned as a primitive society. There was some movement towards power-looms yet these faced resistance. For long, handlooms ensured that few families continued to hold monopoly over the clothing business. The power-looms threatened to disrupt this monopoly. The textile mills of Bombay or Ahmedabad represented some distant threat while the power-looms set up in these villages represented an immediate and direct threat. The proponents of power-looms were threatened. There were fears of loss of employment carried on by generations with little alternatives in sight.
Some fifty odd years after these events, India still debates textile as labour intensive occupation which generates employment relatively low skilled labourers. There is tendency in the last five-six years to position handloom as something local and to be boasted off. Yet, this would gain currency beyond symbolism if accompanied by high quality and catering to niche scarce market. The handloom based products must be of high quality, command scarcity thus reflecting something of prestige. What was essentially an inferior good is now sought to be projected as something of a superior good. If India were to achieve it in the near future, where Khadi represents a fashion statement to the masses rather than symbolism it would be an interesting case study of something that got converted from negative income elasticity to positive price elasticity.
Yet, textile for all its employment generating potential was once symbolized as employment threatening industry. In fact, it was not just in India but across the world textile has symbolised the resistance to modernity. In fact textiles defined the modern industrial revolution. It was the innovation and the pace of that innovation that resulted in rapid developments in textile industry in the 18th century Britain and by extension Europe thus occupying the central node of Industrial Revolution. The US economic growth of the early to mid-19th century was led primarily by cotton textiles. The ‘stealing’ of machinery technology for textile industry from Britain to US and its spill overs in terms of expansion of textile industry in the US is a classical case study in itself of industrial espionage. The Civil War in US originated in the cotton fields wherein manpower requirements meant the need for slaves. The key difference was this manpower differentials in the industrialised and technologically advanced North as against the primitive agrarian South.
In Britain, anti-textile movements represented the resistance against capitalist growth propelled by the Industrial Revolution. The capitalism spurred the growth in textile machinery displacing the centuries old handloom business. The handloom business necessitated skills that needed to developed at very young age and was not easily substitutable. The textile machinery invented and commercialised in the Industrial Revolution, on the other hand could do with semi-skilled and low skilled labour thus creating new work force. This hindered the employment and thus income for the traditional weaving communities. Their bargaining power was severely weakened. Unsurprisingly, they chose to rise in revolt. While there were revolts against the machines being used from the late 17th century itself, it took a new turn in the early part of the 19th century. It was aggravated by the economic decline and sharp rise in prices caused by Napoleanic Wars.
The resistance especially in the Nottingham area was led by Luddite groups who destroyed textile machinery as form of protest. It was ostensibly led by one Ned Ludd though many claim he was fictitious character something resembling of Robin Hood. These groups, radical and secretive used to attack mills and break apart the machinery thus sabotaging industrial production. Their way of life and work had been disrupted and they used machinery as a symbol of their destruction and thus retributions. The mill owners came down with a heavy hand even killing Luddites. The parliament made machine-breaking illegal and within a few years, the movement was crushed.
Yet, the movement symbolized the aggressive tactics employed by the entrenched as they fear the entry of new competitors who might destroy their way of work and life. Creative destruction something talked a century later by Schumpeter did not exist without costs. While in theory, Schumpeterian destruction gave way to more productive employment of resources, the transition is hard and cost heavy for those losers of globalization. Today, Luddite has come to be associated with anything anti-technology, with anything anti-capitalist, anything anti-machinery but its initial origins was in the textile industry. Despite their fears, Luddites would not have to be worried in hindsight about loss of jobs because textile continues to be one of the major industries in terms of labour employment. However, what did result was the entry of new large scale labour away from the traditional occupations in textile industry thus impacting wages in differing ways. These families from owner based were being driven to employee based. Yet with new technologies emerging disintermediating scale, this course correction is long due. Thus as India celebrates its weaving community, it would be appropriate to recollect this socio-economic-political symbolism of the textile industry.
Thoughts on Theory and Practice 