LAUSR

Karuna Dietrich Wielenga’s book examines the changes brought about by the dynamic global currents from 1800 to 1960, and their impact on the handloom industry in South India. Using a variety of historical sources, Wielenga carefully demonstrates the local transformations in manufacturing techniques and production systems. The literature on textile manufacturing in India is divided into two broad positions: one holding colonialism responsible for the decline of hand spinning and weaving in the economy, and the other revisionist view that competition from northern England’s goods increased efficiency in India’s domestic cloth-making processes. Disagreeing with the literature’s revisionist position, Wielenga expands our understanding of the shifts within handloom manufacturing by stressing the importance of disentangling social groups and concepts to reveal multiple layers of complex socioeconomic relationships that fed economic realities. By extending the narrative to a decade and a half after independence, the author avoids the artificial boundary of 1947 and examines the long-term trends in India’s handloom weaving. While Weaving Histories is not about the technology of cloth making, it touches upon significant technological issues that intersect with society, culture, and state-led policy-making. Wielenga successfully demonstrates that economic outcomes in handloom weaving were a product of local social conditions as well as the actions and inactions of the colonial state. An entire chapter to the role of caste in shaping handloom weaving is significant, well-analyzed, and well-placed, as is the next chapter on local movements to secure policies in line with weavers’ interests. Previous chapters on the geography as well as the social groups and looms dominating the industry provide important insights into the workings of a complex system of manufacturing serving domestic and distant markets. The English East India Company’s role in re-shaping production relationships informs the account of changes to the production systems. B O O K R E V I E W S