The tumultuous reversal of fortune suffered by Indian cotton cultivators and handloom weavers must surely rank as one of the cruellest sagas of modern economic history. The subcontinent has been the cradle of the cotton fabric since the dawn of the Indus Valley civilisation, with the Mohenjo-daro ruins bearing evidence of fragments of woven cotton. The classical Western world, too, was aware and awed by India’s centrality in the manufacture of cotton.
The advent of the British decimated India’s supremacy in cotton production. The Industrial Revolution in England in the second half of the 18th century, with its attendant machines like Arkwright’s ‘Spinning Jenny’ marked the death knell of India’s biodiversity in short-stapled cotton. Journalist and author Meena Menon and Uzramma, director of the Malkha Trust, document the turbulent odyssey of cotton in India and the meltdown of this thriving, homespun industry.
The book complements Harvard academic Sven Beckert’s recent global history of the crop, the acclaimed Empire of Cotton . While Menon travelled extensively through Maharashtra to talk to farmers, Uzramma documented the journey of weavers in remote Chinnur in Andhra Pradesh among others.
The book’s early chapters show how the East India Company’s denigration of short and medium staples of Indian cotton led to an enforced malleability to suit the English machines in Lancaster’s cotton district. This transformed a hitherto subsistence fibre into a commodity, as Indian cultivators were forced to produce more to slake English commercial thirst. As the 19th century drew to a close, India became one of the largest markets for English cottons with the East India Company flooding the market with its cheap, machine-made emulations of Indian fabrics.
The Indian agrarian economy with its intricate link to cotton production was further ravaged when the East India Company disastrously attempted to introduce long-staple American cotton varieties like Bourbons and fine Sea Island. The irony, as the authors point out, is that the hybrid American Bt cotton now dominates the Indian cotton scene.
This ‘magnificent obsession’ for high technology, besides diminishing indigenous varieties, gave rise to that arch nemesis of cotton farmers — the small green American bollworm, which as the authors say inspires an “awe disproportionate to its size, driving farmers across the country to the edge of madness.” Poor returns and repeated crop losses have led to increasing numbers of farmers wishing to move away from agriculture. Yet, the bleak story is offset by heartening triumphs of traditional handloom weavers like the hill cotton farmers in Ponduru in Andhra Pradesh, who are fighting to keep alive a tradition thought harking back to 5,000 years.
A Frayed History: The Journey of Cotton in India ; Meena Menon, Uzramma, Oxford University Press, ₹750.
