Indian Economic & Social History Review examines weavers' migrations

Indian Economic & Social History
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Conceiving mobility: Weavers' migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India

Douglas E. Haynes and Tirthankar Roy
Indian Economic Social History Review 1999 36: 35
DOI: 10.1177/001946469903600102
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Conceiving mobility: Weavers’ migrations in
pre-colonial and colonial India
Douglas E. Haynes
Dartmouth College
New Hampshire
Tirthankar Roy
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research
Mumbai
During the past decade, historical work on artisans has moved away from old
preoccupations. While scholarship once focused on the question of whether or not
handloom weavers and others had been displaced from their occupation in the
economic environment of the nineteenth century, recent work has stressed the
ways in which artisans adapted dynamically to changes under colonialism, and
sometimes made significant contributions to the character of the larger economy.’I
Acknowledgements: Earlier versions of this article were presented in seminars organised at the
University of Hyderabad and the University of Mumbai. We wish to thank participants in these
two seminars for their many suggestions. David Rudner provided extensive comments on an
earlier draft, and these have influenced the current form of this article in significant ways. We
would also like to thank an anonymous referee for a careful reading.
1
For some examples of works which have broken outside the deindustrialisation model to produce
a more variegated picture of change among artisans during the colonial period, see C.J. Baker, An
Indian Rural Economy 1880-1955: The Tamilnad Countryside. Delhi, 1984, chapter 5; Tirthankar
Roy, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century, Delhi, 1993; Konrad
Specker, ’Madras Handlooms in the Nineteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History
Review (hereafter IESHR
), Vol. 26(2), April-June 1989; Douglas Haynes, ’The Dynamics of
Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry’, IESHR. Vol. 23(2), April-June 1986; idem, ’Weavers’
Capital and the Origins of the Powerlooms: Technological Transformation and Structural Change
among Handloom Producers in Western India: 1920-1950’, Paper Presented at the Meeting of the
Association of Asian Studies, Chicago, 1997.

36
This article discusses one particular manner in which handloom weavers, dyers
and printers shaped their environment: by migrating from one area of South Asia
to another. We explore here instances when artisans changed their sites but not
their profession, when they moved to places with better markets, cheaper resources
and greater security. To put the point somewhat differently, we deal with migrations
that did not destroy the South Asian handloom industry, but strengthened it in a
number of ways. Such movements are an important feature of the social history of
the subcontinent that is yet to be recognised.
The essay places such movements in a longer timeframe, stretching deep into
the pre-colonial period. It argues that some sections among the weavers were always
mobile, always willing to pick up from regions in decline and move to those showing
signs of expansion. Mobility has always been a strategy for ensuring subsistence,
surviving famine, improving economic livelihoods and, in some cases, resisting
efforts to control weavers’ labour. Such movements reshaped the places that
received the weavers, stimulating the growth of towns, long-distance trade and
industrial enterprise. In the course of such circulation, weavers have also demon-
strated an ability to recreate and refashion a sense of community in their new
locales.
The study of weavers’ migrations also has implications for the study of mobility
in South Asia more generally. To date, there has been a disjunction between work
that has explored labour migration before the nineteenth century and scholarship
that has dealt with the colonial era. Most of the literature on the subject has focused
on the later period, and has concentrated on movement into ’modem’ capitalist
enterprise such as factories, mines and plantations.’ Though a few historians may
acknowledge in passing the existence of migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, they have tended to see more recent movements as a result of factors
unique to the colonial period, especially the rise of modern industry and other
forms of large-scale capitalist enterprise. There is very little discussion of mobility
in the ‘informal sector’ of South Asian industry during the colonial period. By
contrast, contemporary scholarship on pre-colonial India, in moving away from
the picture of self-sufficient village communities has suggested a picture of high
2
For example Lalita Chakravarty, ’Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in a Dual Economy’,
IESHR, Vol. 15(3), July-September 1978: Ranajit Das Gupta, ’Factory Labour in Eastern India:
Sources of Supply, 1855-1947, Some Preliminary Findings’, IESHR, Vol. 13(3), July-September
1976; C.P. Simmons, ’Recruiting and Organizing an Industrial Labour Force in Colonial India: The
Case of the Coal Mining Industry, c. 1880-1939’, IESHR, Vol. 13(4), October-December 1976;
Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, ’Tribal Migration in India and Beyond’, in Gyan Prakash, ed., The
World of the Rural Labourer in Colonral India. Delhi, 1992; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery:
The Export of Indian Labourers Overseas. 1830-1920, New York. 1974; Arjan de Haan, ’Migration
in Eastern India: A Segmented Labour Market’, IESHR, Vol. 32(1), January-March 1995; Rajnarayan
Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working
Classes in Bombay. 1900-1940. Cambridge. 1994. chapter four: Anand Yang, ’Peasants on the
Move: A Study of Internal Migration in India’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 10(1),
1979; Jan Breman, Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist
Production in Western India. Delhi, 1985.

37
volatility and geographic circulation well before the nineteenth century. As David
Ludden has suggested, ’mobility was at least as characteristic ofpre-modern India
as sedentarism’.~ Little of this literature, however, attempts to extend the analysis
mto the nineteenth century, and some scholars even argue that there was a significant
reduction in mobility after the advent of colonialism, as artisans and pastoralists
were forced into sedentary agriculture.’ This view implies that migration associated
with the later nineteenth century is a whol ly new process, sharing little in common
with earlier patterns of circulation. As a whole, then, the existing literature suggests
a sharp break between migrations before the early nineteenth century and those
taking place afterwards.

The evidence examined here enables us to reconsider continuity and discontinuity
in mobility at least for one segment of the population. We show that handloom
weavers have engaged in collective migrations as a strategy for survival and
betterment at different points in South Asian history. At these times, artisan cloth-
makers generally moved from regions that were becoming peripheralised by
processes of economic and political change, to areas that were emerging as new
cores of civilisation and economy. These movements had many similarities in
form, whether they occurred before or during British rule. The paucity of statistical
information in pre-colonial times makes it difficult to determine definitively whether
migration increased or decreased under colonialism. It is possible, however, to
see important qualitative differences in the factors stimulating movement by the
later nineteenth century. While earlier migrations of weavers were integrally
connected to processes of state formation in South Asia, they became disconnected
with these processes after the advent of British rule. By the later nineteenth century,
the movement of skilled artisans was associated primarily with new patterns of
regional dynamism and decay brought about by the uneven character of industriali-
sation and commercial expansion and by changes in the organisation of artisanal
enterprise.
These arguments also add some qualifications to the deindustrialisation’ thesis.
In the classic statement of the thesis, weavers displaced by mill production in the
nineteenth century were absorbed into agriculture, usually as wage labourers. We
do not dispute here that large numbers of artisan cloth producers shifted towards
agrarian employment or experienced harsh economic circumstances if they
remained in artisanal employment. But we wish to add an element of regional (and
perhaps chronological) disparity in this picture. Stagnant or declining conditions
were not universal during the entire colonial period. In some regions, prospects
for handloom production were not only better than in others, but possibly even
improved over time. Outright exit from industry was not always the only option
for artisans whose local markets had contracted severely. Migration in search of
3
David Ludden, ’Caste Society and Units of Production in Early Modern South India’, in Burton
Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia. Delhi.
1996, p. 108.
4
David Washbrook, ’Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720-
1860’. Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 22(1), February 1988, p. 81.

38
better conditions of work was another, and weavers utilised it extensively. In the
presence of such strategy, declining numbers in some regions were sometimes a
sign of success elsewhere.
At this point, it is necessary to make a distinction. The kinds of adaptation that
this article deals with were confined mostly to specialised artisans who belonged
to ’weaving communities’. We do not find the same signs of mobility among low-
caste agricultural labourers who wove part-time on the side. This article, therefore,
concerns itself mainly with those who regarded weaving as a hereditary profession,’
and who possessed specialised skills and knowledge that were in demand in many
locales and were thus transferable. Employers both in the mills as well as in hand-
loom units often preferred hiring people of such background.
The article is divided into two major sections which rely on very different kinds
of evidence. The first draws largely upon secondary sources and colonial gazetteers
to document weavers’ migrations at various points before A.D. 1800. Because
information about particular movements is often quite shallow, we rely on a breadth
of cases to make our generalisations. The second section, by contrast, relies more
heavily on original research done by the authors on the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and looks at two particular cases in special detail. Juxtaposing
these two kinds of evidence permits some significant initial conclusions about
patterns of migration over long time periods.
Pre-colonial Migration
Migration of weavers was a well-established phenomena long before colonialism.
In many parts of India, the more skilled and professional weavers seemed not to
be strongly integrated into village jajmani systems (when such systems existed)
and their dependence on land for employment was often quite limited. Their
differentiation from others in the countryside sometimes manifested itself in
relatively high levels of social tension in their localities, ranging from left/right-
hand strains in South India, to conflicts across religious boundaries in the north.’
The relative weakness of weavers’ ties to their local environment and their
dependence on wider networks of commerce and political power meant that they
were often ready to pick up and move to new places as political and economic
circumstances changed.
Most well-recorded instances of weavers’ migration prior to the eighteenth
century represent a movement away from decaying or unstable polities towards
5
We, of course, do not mean to suggest that all members of any community grouping followed a
given profession. In referring to hereditary profession, we mean to identify the occupation around
which a given ’caste’ or ’community’ shaped its identity.
6
Mattison Mines, Warrior Merchants: Textiles. Trade and Territory in South India. Cambridge,
1984; Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi, 1980; Brenda Beck,
Peasant Society in Konku: A Study of Right and Left Subcastes in South India. Vancouver. 1972,
and Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi, 1990.
chapter 3.

39
the territory of stable and powerful regimes. Typically, the records mention or
imply a conscious decision by political patrons to settle weavers in their capital
cities. Tax remission was frequently an incentive offered to weavers in new
settlements.’ For artisans, association with power could mean the possibility of
claiming social and ritual privileges above what agrarian society was willing to
offer them. The strong connection between capital cities or temples on the one
hand, and textiles on the other, suggests that weavers were central to the very
processes of state formation. High-quality cloths were critical to the status and
commitment of a nobility and were thus essential to the establishment or attraction
of a ruling elite. While aristocratic styles, of course, changed. over the centuries,
the importance of luxury clothing to the development of South Asian polities did
not.
The linkage between textiles and power did not always come in the form of
direct patronage and could be shaped by more indirect kinds of aristocratic support,
usually mediated by market formation. When the seat of power was a city of some
importance, it could itself represent a large market as well as an intersecting point
between long-distance trade routes. But so far as business depended upon security
of assets, goods and commerce, the markets themselves tended to be closely
conditioned by processes of state formation.
Another factor responsible for inducing considerable movement was external
trade. Weavers were frequently attracted to areas with substantial potential for
textile export, and they appear to have moved away from areas where overseas
trading prospects were in decline. Vijaya Ramaswamy finds proximity to ports to
have been a key factor determining the location of weaving centres in South India.8
This appears to be true of Bengal and western India as well during much of the
later medieval period.
Unfortunately, we often do not have sufficient data to identify ’push’ factors.
No doubt, the actual decision to move must have often been motivated by more
than the mere invitation to do so. It might have involved, for instance, a condition
of distress or depression at home and better market opportunities abroad, as well
as the prospect of patronage. In a Marxist analysis, A.I. Chicherov suggests that
migration might be seen as an expression of class struggle, in which weavers resisted

those making demands upon them through flight.’ Memories of great famines
among some communities suggest the role of food shortages in stimulating
emigration. But the evidence does not permit the building of any universal generali- ’
sation.
Nor do the sources usually allow us to draw any firm conclusions about the
’
organisation of production at either the place of origin or the fmal destination of

weavers. In a few cases, perhaps, weavers might have been shifting to participate
7
For epigraphical evidence from South India see Vijaya Ramaswaimy, Textiles and Weavers in
Medieval South India, Delhi, 1985, p. 34.
Ibid.,
8pp. 6-13.
9
A.I. Chicherov, India: Economic Development in the 16th-18th Centuries. Outline History of
Crafts and Trade, Moscow, 1971, p. 35.

40
in larger karkhanas (workshops), which were sometimes set up by royal courts to

patronise particular forms of textile production. But since the artisan family ’firm’
was the dominant form of production unit during the pre-colonial period, we would
suggest that most migrations reflected the movement of families, who changed
their organisational structure little in the places to which they migrated.
The association between textiles, migration and power is clearly illustrated in
the earliest and best known pre-colonial evidence on this subject: the inscriptions
at Mandasor. These inscriptions, set down in the fifth century, testify to the
movement of a set of silk-weavers, along with their kin and children, from the area
of Lata (located in present-day Khandesh) to Dasapura (in present-day Malwa) in
the Gupta Empire. According to the inscriptions:
Drawn by the virtues of the kings of this country,

caring nothing for the real and manifold hardships of the journey,
filled with respect, first with their minds and then bodily,
they came to Dasapura, bringing their children and kinsfolk.10
In were ’honoured by the kings like their own sons’, and they
Dasapura, they
seemed have thrived particularly under the protection of King Bandhuvarman.
to
According to the inscription, many remained professional weavers, but others
diversified to become archers, warriors, astrologers and even religious teachers.
In their new home, the silk-weavers formed a craft guild, which used its ’hoarded
wealth’ to build an ’incomparably noble’ sun temple in c. 437-38, and they restored
this temple about 30 years later (no remains of this construction have been found).&dquo;&dquo;
Even admitting some self-glorification, the inscriptions clearly are an important
source on the nature of the processes involved in community formation among
artisans during this period.&dquo;
The evidence says very little about the weavers’ reasons for leaving Lata. A.L.
Basham speculates that declining demand for exports to the Roman Empire accounts
for the demise of the industry in Lata, which had manufactured considerable cloth
for foreign trade.’3 If so, migration to a powerful and prosperous regime inland
was an adaptation to profound economic transformations taking place during this
period.
Existing evidence for the medieval period in north India also suggests consider-
able movement of artisans. Best known are the cases induced by Akbar’s policy of
settling foreign artisans for the weaving of silk and woollen carpets.&dquo; But there
10
A.L. Basham, ’The Mandasor Inscription of the Silk Weavers’, in Bardwell Smith, Essays on
Gupta Culture, Columbia, 1983, p. 95.
Ibid., pp. 93-106; M.K. Pal, Crafts and Craftsmen in Traditional India, New Delhi, 1978.
11
12
Basham, ’The Mandasor Inscription’; H.N. Randle, The Saurashtras of South India. Madura.
1949.
13
Basham, ’The Mandasor Inscription’, p. 95.
14
Tapan Raychaudhuri, ’Non-Agricultural Production: Mughal India’, in Irfan Habib and Tapan
Raychaudhuri. eds. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I,c. 1200-1700, Cambridge,

41
was clearly much internal mobility as well. Families of printers from Gujarat were
taken on land grants to Agra around 1530; at an uncertain date, but one when Agra
had ceased to be a political centre. many of these families then migrated to Jaipur,
Kanauj and Benares.’’ Settlement of immigrant artisans also occurred in cities
founded and developed by the Gujarat sultanate. Khatri weavers living in Gujarat
largely trace their ancestry to Champaner in the current Panch Mahals district or
Hinglaj in Sind. Community genealogists today preserve the memory of how Khatri
families fanned out through much of central and southern Gujarat in the late
sixteenth century.16
The case of the Khatris elucidates the importance of community myths as a
historical source on group movements. Typically, such myths attribute origin to a
specific locale and suggest that migration was precipitated by some catastrophic
socio-political event, such as conquest by outside rulers and the threat of conversion.
Indeed, many artisans in different parts of northern and western India trace their
origins to Champaner, the capital of Panch Mahals in Gujarat in the fifteenth
century.&dquo; It seems possible that such claims provided a kind of cover memory that
disguised more diverse places of origins and more gradual processes of movement.
As we shall see, this is clearly the case with nineteenth century myths, such as
those of the Momins, which account for only a small fraction of the movement by
the community. Origin myths give migration a collective character that is essential
to the creation of sustenance of community identity in the new setting, and at the
same time establish an aura of status risked and retrieved. Claim to a specific
place of origin could also bring with it a certain prestige associated with that
locale.
As a result, such myths can only be used with caution. Here we can only indicate
hesitantly the patterns they would seem to indicate. The oral histories recorded in
the tribes and castes volumes of various provinces refer to a large number of
weavers’ movements in western and northern India, which seemingly occurred
sometime in the late medieval period.&dquo; They suggest a tendency to move away
from thinly populated, arid regions of Sind, Rajasthan and perhaps tribal Gujarat,
1982, p. 271;Abu’l Fazl Allami, The A’in-i Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann, New Delhi, 3rd edn,
1977, p. 57.
15
’The BarodaCourt. Journal of Indian Art and Industry. Vol. 1(16), 1884-86. p. 129.
16Douglas Haynes was able to see a number of these volumes in Baroda. See also Surendra
Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, 16th and 17th Centuries: A Study of the Impact of European
Expansion on a Precapitalist Economy, New Delhi, 1975, p. 186.
17
’The Baroda Court’, p.130; ’The Industries of the Punjab’, Journal of Indian Art and Industry,
Vol. 2(20), 1887-88, p. 30.
18
R.E. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of the Bombay Presidency. Bombay, 1920. Vol. I. p. 147,
Vol. III, p. 116; Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IX, Part I: Gujarat Population: Hindus,
Bombay, 1901, p.177; Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company
and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal. Delhi, 1988. p. 49; W Crooke, Tribes and
Castes of the North-western Provinces and Oudh, Vol. I, Calcutta, 1896, p. 134, Vol. II, p. 222. Vol.
III, p. 316; R.V. Russell,Tribes and Castes ofthe Central Provinces of India, Vol. II, London, 1916,
p. 429.

42
areas where South Asian craftsonce seem to have flourished. toward the agrarian
heartland of the Mughal Empire in northern India and toward coastal Gujarat and
Bengal (that is, the nodal points in the external trade of the empire). In general,
artisans seem to have shifted from areas that were becoming more peripheral to
the post-sixteenth century states towards new cores that were in the process of
formation.
In some cases, migration was a short-term strategy designed to cope with more
particular circumstances. For instance, seventeenth century records mention

extensive migration during times of famine. In the region around Surat, a large
number of weavers simply vacated the area during the famine of 1630, making it
impossible for the English East India Company to gain its supplies of cloth.’9
Migration or threatened migration was also a means of pressing authorities to
offer improved political circumstances. In 1636, when the Mughal governor of
Baroda tried to compel weavers to sell him textiles at ’slavish prices’, and impri-
soned and tortured brokers who did not provide this cloth, the weavers as a com-
munity left the town and moved to Ahmedabad. Before they could complete their
journey, the Baroda official sent delegates to persuade them to return, promising
that the oppressive practices would be halted.2° A similar incident occurred in
Bharuch during the 1620s.2’
In medieval south India, each of the four main weaving communities of south
lndia-the Devangas, the Salis, the Kaikkolars and the Sourashtras-has a history
of circulation in the medieval period and earlier. Both Vijaya Ramaswamy and
Prasannan Parthasarathi have argued for mobility as one of the chief characteristics
of the weaving population in the South.22 Both agree that weavers cannot be seen
as an enduring part of any kind of stable, self-sufficient village society. Parthasarathi
sees the movements as a reflection of the economic strength of the weavers; their
ability to pick up and leave gave them considerable bargaining power in negotiations
with merchants. Ramaswamy, while arguing for the strong economic and social
position of weavers in the pre-eighteenth century period, indicates that migrations
occurred mainly during times ’of acute distress or as a mark of protest against
enhanced taxation’. 23
Much of the evidence on mobility in southern India is connected in some way
to the Vijayanagara empire. The importance of Vijayanagara in the patronage of
crafts has already been the subject of considerable scholarship. European travellers
19
William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India, 1630-33, Vol. IV, Oxford, 1910, pp. 97,
122, 146, 178.
20Foster, ed., The English Factories in India, 1634-36, Vol. V, Oxford, 1911, p. 290.
21Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, p. 201.
22
Prasannan Parthasarathi, ’Weavers, Merchants and States: The South Indian Textile Industry,
1680-1800’, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Economics, Harvard University, 1992; Ramaswamy,
Textiles and Weavers. See also S. Arasaratnam, ’Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom
Industry in South-eastern India,1750-1800’, in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchants, Markets
and the State in Early Modern India, Delhi, 1990, p. 207.
23
Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers, pp. 120-21.

43
commented the wide range of textiles in the Vijayanagara capital, especially

on
silks.24 information exists on the movement and settlement of artisan
Significant
populations connected with the rise and fall ofthe empire. Ramaswamy attributes
the migration of Devangas from Andhra or Karnataka further south into Tamil
country to the expansion of Vijayanagara.11 The entry of the Devagiri Sourashtras
(explained later) into south India is also connected with the growth of the
Vijayanagara state. By contrast, branches of the Salis, variously known as Salis,
Saliyars, and Saligas in different parts of the Andhra-Karnataka regions (and
possibly related to the Salagama of Sri Lanka), were prominent under Cola
patronage for centuries, but appear to have suffered a partial eclipse during the
Vijayanagara empire with the rise of the Kaikkolars. A number of Salis, however,
did resettle in the deep south during this period. 16
Except the Kaikkolars, none of the four major weaving communities in the
Tamil region was predominantly Tamil-speaking. The Kaikkolars furnish fewer
examples of dramatic mass migration, but nonetheless display the dependence of
specialised weavers with sites of power and physical mobility in other ways. They
are known to have combined weaving with soldiering in the early phases of the
Vijayanagara empire. Later, with the consolidation of the empire, they specialised
increasingly in weaving. They moved (in a limited way) from south towards the
north, apparently in connection with production and trade. Mines suggests some
were artisan-merchants who performed the role of linking isolated nuclear peasant
localities through trade.2’
Both Devangas and Sourashtras were pre-colonial immigrants into they deep
south. The southern Devangas migrated southward into the northern part of Tamil
Nadu, the chief seats being Coimbatore and Salem. According to Enthoven, the
Devangas of western India were migrants from Vijayanagara territories, where
their community leaders still resided.28 The Devangas of Salem trace their origins
to Hampi, the capital of the empire.29
Southern weavers in new locations claimed social and ritual privileges
(occasionally Brahmanhood), established temples, fostered origin myths that
sometimes incorporated identities of alienness and histories of migration. In short,
the combination of skilled weavers, direct patronage and migration usually implied
’
attempts at some form ofsanskritisation.30 Such attempts may imply a reasonable

chance of upward mobility. It is not surprising that they seem to cluster in the
24
Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar), London, 1900.
25
Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers, p. 13.
26
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 34.
27
28
Enthoven, Tribes and Castes. Vol. I, p. 302.
29
Madras District Gazetteer, Salem, Vol. I, Part 1, Madras, 1913, p. 181.
30
There are instances of Sanskritisation by silk-weaving communities in southern India which
did not necessarily involve the memory of migration. For the Tamil Saliyans (distinct from the
Telugu-speaking Salis), of Kornad and Ayyampet, see Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari, Castes
and Tribes of Southern India, Madras, 1909, Vol. VI. p. 277; for the Kannada-speaking Devangas
of Tamil Nadu, see ibid., Vol. II, p. 160.

44
Vijayanagara period, when urbanisation, long-distance trade and state patronage

combined for a length of time.
The Sourashtras illustrate a number of these processes-migration. patronage
and sanskritisation-in rather dramatic ways. The Sourashtras constitute a small
urban community in Tamil Nadu, concentrated in Madurai, where they form a
substantial portion of the city’s population. A century ago, they were handioom
weavers and merchants. Today, they are engaged exclusively in small-scale
manufacture and trade, with a continuing textile bias. They strongly maintain the
group’s historical tradition, which emphasises their sense of alienness. The story
of their migration is a central component of Sourashtra identity today.
The strongest evidence of migration and multiple settlements is the Sourashtra
dialect, which carries unmistakable traces of Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu
and Tamil. Several social and religious practices also indicate origins outside Tamil
Nadu. Sourashtra stories specify places of settlement where members of the
community may have lived in the past. The most famous of these is a migration
fable, known as Bhoguluvas (or Baulas in corrupted form), ritually recited as part
of the bethrothal proceedings in Sourashtra marriages. This fable suggests ’Sorath’,
Devagiri, and Vijayanagara as three group settlements prior to their arrival in
Tamil country (see Map 1). There is some controversy about where Sorath is
located. I.R. Dave places it in Gimar in southern Gujarat-Saurashtra. However,
H.N. Randle, a former Librarian of the India Office Library, disputed the roots of
the language in Gujarat-Saurashtra and traced it to Marathi.11
The Baulas unfortunately does not hint at any reason for migration, nor any
dates. But the myth has been absorbed in twentieth century historians’ efforts to
recreate a reason and date for migration. The most common theme seems to have
been the progress of Muslim power from north India, southwards. In this framework,
the eleventh century destruction of the Somnath temple by Mahmud of Ghaznavi
induced the first southward movement, the fourteenth century capture of Yadava
Devagiri by a Khalji Sultan brought about the second, and the sixteenth century
fall of Vijayanagara under the combined might of southern sultanates led to the
third and final exodus, to Madurai.32 Convincing historical evidence on the specific
circumstances behind the earlier movements is quite limited. But the myths are
consistent with the later pattern, that is, Sourashtra movements were associated
with the decline and rise of powerful states. So much at least can be suggested
without having to accept the notion of religious nemesis and rebirth implied in the
Muslim invasion theory.
The move from Vijayanagara to Madurai is the only migration on which it is
possible to comment with some authority. It does not seem to have been a sudden
31
Tirthankar Roy, ’Capitalism and Community: A Study of the Madurai Sourashtras’, IESHR,
Vol. 34(4), October-December, 1997.
32
See I.R. Dave, Saurashtrians in South India: Their Language, Literature and Culture. Rajkot,
1976, pp. 19-25. The connection posited in community migration myths between the Mandasor
inscription and the South Indian Sourashtras, while fascinating, seems to have little convincing
empirical foundation.

46
exodus, or a single movement. The Nayaka rulers of Madurai were feudatories of

Vijayanagara and had sustained contact with them.33 A now obscure early seven-
teenth century document, in which Tirumala ( 1623-59), the greatest of the Nayaka
kings, invited the Vijayanagara Sourashtras to settle in Madurai is dated many
decades after the fall of the empire. This suggests that either the ’invitation’
sanctioned a prior resettlement, or the fall of the regime induced a gradual migration.
Nevertheless, the end of Vijayanagara rule appears to have been a decisive event,
since by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sourashtras had all but
disappeared from what had been the core territories of the empire.
After Vijayanagara, the expansion of Maratha power southwards after the middle
of the seventeenth century encouraged textile trade between Pune and Burhanpur
on the one hand, and Mysore on the other.34 The silk and cotton weavers associated
with this trade were the Patvegars of the Bangalore area. Their dialect appears to
be Marathi-related, possibly with some Gujarati influence, and may be related to
the language of the Sourashtras.35 Like the Patvegars, there were also silk-weaving
Khatris settled in small groups in Tamil Nadu towns. A section of the silk-and-dye
traders in Kanchipuram were Khatris, a name that is connected to silk-weaving in
western India. They reportedly speak ’a dialect of Marathi’ and were called
’Patnulkaran’, a local term associated with the Sourashtras.36 But the former’s
exact origins remain obscure.
The importance of the south Indian state in determining settlement and
resettlement of artisans is indirectly demonstrated in instances of what might be
called ’patronage failures’, as a factor that pushed weavers out of their homes.
Two types of patronage failure can be discerned, the first associated with
disintegration of a regime, the second caused when the regime became predatory
in nature. The fall of Vijayanagara furnishes several illustrations of the first type
of patronage failure. It proved to be a negative inducement for the Sourashtras
and for a variety of other prominent groups of southern weavers. Devangas who
settled in western India trace their origin to towns formerly under Vijayanagara
rule, and the reason to migrate to the decline of the empire.&dquo; The Devangas of
Salem migrated from Hampi, where the head of the community resided for a long
time afterwards. Their southern mo.vement was clearly not a single flow, for it
33
K. Rangachari, ’The History of the Naik Kingdom of Madura’, Indian Antiquary, Vol. 18,
1914, p. 138.
34
Francis Buchanan observed this, but found the trade in depression during the aftermath of the
Anglo-Mysore wars. See A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and
Malabar, Vol. 1, London, 1807, p. 198.

35
Thurston and Rangachari, Castes and Tribes, Vol. VI, pp. 187-88; Enthoven, Tribes and Castes
of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. II, p. 224; Madras District Gazetteer, Madura, Madras, 1906, p.
110; H.V Nanjundayya and L.K.A. Ananthakrishna Iyer, The Mysore Tribes and Castes, Vol. IV,
Mysore 1928-37, p. 476.
36
Thurston and Rangachari, Castes and Tribes, Vol. III, pp. 282-87. The Khatris disavow any
connection to the Sourashtras.
37
R.E. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of Bombay Presidency, Vol. I, p. 301.

47
eventually led to the bifurcation ofthe southern Devangas in Telugu- and Kannada-
speaking groups.38
In other instances, migration was a form of resistance to local elites. An inscrip-
tion of A.o. 1388 tells us that the Kaikkolars departed in a body without paying
their due to the temple, deserted the area and left it in a ruin. Another from south
Arcot dating back to A.D. 1485 speaks of the resettlement of Kaillas, who had left
the village because of inability to pay taxes.&dquo; Obviously, these cases resonate
with some of the evidence on north India cited earlier.
The role of both state patronage and patronage failure continued to be important
factors stimulating movement during the eighteenth century. This may have been
a time when weavers’ mobility accelerated. Contemporary historians, of course,
no longer accept the view of the eighteenth century as a time of political chaos and
.
economic decline. The picture now available is a highly variegated one. While the
importance of the imperial centre in north India undoubtedly diminished, a number
of regional kingdoms, both large and small, show clear signs of political dynamism
and economic growth. Indeed, some scholars have argued that these ’successor’
states represented a new form of polity that was more closely linked than its
predecessors to the interests of commercial and financial capital and more directly
involved in the promotion of productive and market activity. There was, no doubt,
a significant economic transformation as mercantile capitalism consolidated itself,
textile manufacture expanded and the needs for skilled labour increased.4° In this
context, specialist weavers moved frequently from states exhibiting less political
stability and greater predatory behaviours to those where they could continue to
practice their trade and where rulers showed the greatest interest in the patronage
of crafts.
Often these movements were specifically prompted by the action of local political
regimes. According to C.A. Bayly, the rulers of Farrukhabad, ’made a policy of
attracting weavers from disturbed regions of the east Punjab and Delhi territories’,
while the Rajas of Benares brought in weavers from Gujarat and other distant
territories in order to encourage the manufacture of high-quality silk cloth and
brocades.4’ Weavers of the small town of Shahzadpur ’moved across the Ganges
to seek patronage and protection among the taluqdars of south Awadh’ .42 There is
38
F.J. Richards, Madras District Gazetteers, Salem, Vol. 1, Part I, p. 181.
India:
39Chicherov, Economic Development, p. 92, citing Annual Progress Report of the Assistant
Archaeological Superintendent for Epigraphy Southern Circles. 1909-1910, No. 354. p. 112; Annual
Report of South India Epigraphy, 1928-29, No. 292, p. 31; Annual Report of South India Epigraphy
1928-29, 1930-31, No. 218, p. 20.
40
David Washbrook, ’Progress and Problems’; C.A. Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India,
Vol. 2, Part I, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1988, chapters 1
and 2.
41
Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion,
Cambridge, 1983, pp. 145-46.
42
Ibid., p. 292; for other settlements in Awadh, see Gyanendra Pandey, ’Economic Dislocation in
Nineteenth-Century Eastern Uttar Pradesh: Some Implications of the Decline of Artisanal Industry
in Colonial India’, in Peter Robb, ed., Rural South Asia: Linkages, Change and Development,
London, 1983, p. 93.

48/
evidence to suggest that similar developments took place in Bihar and Orissa.43 In
south India, Hyder Ali reportedly brought some Patnulkarans (Sourashtras) to his
kingdom in order to encourage silk-weaving. Under Mysore rule, the weavers
were exempted from the payment of taxes, and their activity flourished until the
fall of Seringapatnam. 44
Another significant kind of migration flow taking place during the eighteenth
century was that into coastal provinces within the reach of East India Company
protection. Like its predecessors, the Company depended upon the encouragement
of artisan settlement for its own development as a state power. But unlike Indian
rulers, the Company sought to stimulate weaver migration less to clothe a local
nobility and more to gain profits from the sale of textiles in Southeast Asia and the
Persian Gulf. In part because Company officers were so intent on trumpeting any
evidence of their superiority to Indian rulers, records of movement from unstable
or predatory regimes toward Company-controlled or influenced territories are quite
numerous and probably exaggerated. In south India, such movement clearly began
in the seventeenth century.°5 Hameeda Hossain records that weavers in one town
after another in Bengal left areas experiencing Maratha occupation during the
1740s, often to seek refuge in the protected factories of the English. ,16 Large numbers
of weavers, ’entering the Hon’ble Company’s employ’, settled in Gorakhpur town
in 1803, soon after its absorption into the emerging Empire.47 In western India,
during the 1780s, thousands of weavers appear to have left centres under Maratha
influence like Ahmedabad, for Surat, where the British enjoyed authority as
governors of the castle. 48 Bombay, too, became gradually populated by weavers
producing cloth for export. In south India, the Company had offered inducements
to settle in areas surrounding Madras as early as the seventeenth century. Weavers
were provided rice at cheap prices and lower taxes. Ramaswamy suggests that
there may have been a net migration out of temple towns to European settlements
by the turn of the century.~~ Here again, therefore, we see migration of weavers as
central to the processes by which new, dynamic polities constructed themselves.
But by the end of the century, many weavers were beginning to employ migration
as a way to escape or to reduce the Company’s demands. As the English consoli-
dated their hold on many coastal regions during the late eighteenth century, they
often attempted to bypass existing merchant intermediaries and reduce the prices
43N.G. Mukherji, Monograph on the Silk Fabrics of Bengal, Calcutta, 1903, pp. 123, 126, 133.
Russell, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, Vol. IV, p. 474. Susan Bean, ’The Fabric
44
of Social Life in Pre-British Mysore’, The Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society, Vol. 78(1-2),
1986, p. 83.
45
S. Arasaratnam, ’Weavers, Merchant and Company’, p. 207; Joseph Brennig, ’Textile Producers
and Production in Late Seventeenth Century Coromandel’, in Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
ed.,Merchants,
Markets and the State in Early Modern India, Delhi, 1990, p. 80.
46
Hameeda Hossain, Company Weavers of Bengal, p. 3.
47
Pandey, ’Economic Dislocation’, p. 93.
48
Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency: Gujarat. Surat and Broach, Vol. II, p. 134.
49
Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers, p. 121.

49
that weavers received for their cloth. From the perspective of the cloth producers,
the Company was itself engaged in ’predatory’ behaviour that called for resistance.
Parthasarathi has shown how migration to places outside territory controlled by
the Company, sometimes on quite a large scale, was an important mechanism by
which artisans tried to compel the English to accept weavers’ concerns (though
not always successfully).5° This also seems to have been happening in Bengal
during the 1790s.5’ In short, the association of migration with resistance to predatory
regimes appears to have consolidated itself.
Colonial Migration
Evidence that handloom weavers continued their geographic mobility during the
colonial period as handloom weavers is quite pronounced. There almost certainly
existed a time during the early nineteenth century when the growth of textile imports
from Britain produced declining opportunities for artisans all over the subcontinent,
a significant reduction in the inter-regional movement of craftspeople, and the
absorption of large numbers of out-of-work artisans into agriculture. There are,

however, some records indicating mobility of craftspeople and craft activity even
during this period. 12 On the other hand, by the mid-nineteenth century, many
thousands of weavers were able to resist ’peasantisation’ during the later colonial
period by moving to other areas where industrial employment was available, often
as handloom weavers. In interviews, elderly weavers in several parts of western
and southern India insisted that few or none of their community fellows ever took
part in agriculture; the same individuals gave extensive testimony on the movement
of themselves or family members to other textile centres, whether in the formal or
informal sector. While such oral accounts are undoubtedly imperfect,53 they do
point at least to a powerful norm in many weavers’ communities that sanctioned
migration to other parts of India as a preferable alternative to absorption into the
agricultural sector.
Much of late nineteenth century migration reflected the short distance circulation
of individuals and families in search of better work conditions. In Hungud taluka
in Bijapur district of the Bombay Presidency, for example, weavers were reported
50
Prasannan Parthasarathi, ’Weavers, Merchants and States’, p. 202. See also S. Arasaratnam,
’Weavers, Merchants and Company’, p. 207.
51
Hossain, Company Weavers of Bengal, pp. 163-67. In this case, however, many weavers seemed
to have abandoned weaving altogether.
52
Letter from John Dunlop, Action Collector, Dharwar District, to Acting Secretary to Government,
Bombay, 2 February, Maharashtra State Archives (hereafter MSA), Revenue Department, 1836,
Vol. 62/749, comp. 274; Petition of some inhabitants of Nagar Village, Nagar Jillah, 21 Sept. 1835
in MSA, RD 1836, comp. 33, vol. 52/739, beginning page 281. Ashanna Lachhammayya Irabatti,
Notes from My Life: With Travelogue and a Biography of Markandeya, Sholapur, 1971, note 2.
53
Syed Siraj-ul-Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H.E.H. the Nizam’sDominions, Madras, 1989
(reprint of 1920 original), p. 543, mentions that some Padmasalis had moved into agriculture as
landowning peasants, tenants and farm labourers at the time of his writing. Contemporary Padmasalis
tend to downplay participation by community fellows in the agrarian sector.

50
(in 1920) to be involved regularly in passing ’backwards and forwards between

the various centres of the industry, usually obtaining better terms in the shape of
loans for marriages or kindred purpose from a succession ofsowcars [i.e., shahukars
or merchant intermediaries]’.54 The insecurity of employment in handloom weaving
prompted a constant search for work among a segment of the artisan population.
According to one survey of Ahmednagar and Pune during the 1930s, a number of
weavers had never been permanent residents of these towns, and instead had been
’moving from one weaving centre to another. The causes of their migration are
due to the insufficiency and inconstancy of their incomes. ’55 Histories of individual
families constructed by one of the authors among Padmasalis and Momins in
different locations suggest that some weavers made as many as half a dozen
significant moves during their lives, in addition to frequent trips between their
place of origin and place of work.56
For those involved in this geographic circulation, the advent of employment in
modern factories and other new industries added possible options in their constant
search for work outside agriculture. Handloom weavers, as persons who already
possessed great experience in the production of cloth, often found their skills to
be in demand in the mills. Entry into the mills was commonplace during times of
recession in weaving, such as the crisis that affected handloom producers during
World War J.57 There is also significant evidence of mobility into form of industrial
labour other than textiles, particularly in small-scale enterprises. 58 As several
interviews reveal, movement into the ’formal’ sector was often not permanent in
nature, and many millworkers from the weaving communities could return to
handloom production after some time. This confirms Chandavarkar’s findings of
considerable insecurity in industrial employment and the permeability of the
supposed boundaries between ’formal’ and ’informal’ sector employment.19
An especially critical factor stimulating short-term movements of weavers during
the nineteenth century was famine. Handloom weavers belonged in a wider set of
people who frequently did not possess sufficient grain-wealth to survive a season
of severe scarcity without credit. During times of famine, moreover, the demand
for their output in rural society often collapsed, as peasants and others delayed
Selections from the Records of the Bombay Presidency, n.s., Vol. DLXVI, Papers Relating to
54
the Second Revision Settlement of the Hungud Taluka of the Bijapur Collectorate, Bombay. 1920,
pp. 3-4.
55
K. S. Venkatraman, ’The Economic Condition of Handloom Weavers’, Journal of the University
of Bombay, n.s. Vol. 10, Part 4, 1942, pp. 75-104.
56
Interviews done by Douglas Haynes in Sholapur, Bhiwandi, Telengana and Allahabad District
in eastern Uttar Pradesh.
57
For migration to mills during World War I, see Land Revenue Report for the Bombay Presidency,
1915-16 in MSA, RD 1916, comp. 511, Part 1, pp. 14, 19 and Administrative Reportfor Ahmednagar
District, 1915-16 in MSA, RD 1916, comp., 511, Part V, p. 25.
58
See, for instance, H.C. Sharma, Artisans of the Punjab: A Study of Social Change in Historical
Perspective, 1849-1947, Delhi, 1996, pp. 94-101; V. Ramakrishna Reddy, Economic History of
Hyderabad State (Warangal Suba: 1911-1950), Delhi, 1990, p. 516.
59
Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism, chapter 3.

51
cloth purchases until food prices returned to pre-scarcity levels.60 When severe
food shortages struck, they were often among the first to enter famine relief camps
or to migrate to other regions of India altogether. Evidence of famine migration by
weavers is particularly noticeable during three major famines that affected the
Deccan area: in 1876-77, 1896-97 and 1899-1900. The 1896-97 famine, perhaps
the most severe for weavers, coincided with a ’singhast’ year (an inauspicious
year for marriages) and a plague epidemic that strongly affected artisanal towns,
and seems to have provoked an especially high level of mobility.
The degree of susceptibility to famine among weavers, however, was not uniform.
Patterns of broad differentiation were noticed by colonial officials in famine
reports .6 At one end of the spectrum were the rural semi-skilled weavers of low
caste who combined agricultural labour and other menial tasks with weaving. They
came to the relief camps the earliest, suffered the highest mortality and
malnutrition,62 and when they migrated, they often left weaving altogether for
general labour. In 1876, William Digby observed that many rural weavers in the
deep south were forced by the famine to resettle themselves or mortgage, even
sell, their IOOMS.61 On the other hand, more specialised artisans who considered
weaving their main hereditary occupation, entered work camps more reluctantly,
and frequently sought some means of remaining in the profession, such as by
migration or by entry into specialised camps for weavers. 64 Some returned to
homelands from which they themselves had migrated earlier, and waited until a
revival of demand made a resumption of weaving possible. Others went to towns
at some distance where weaving work was available. Thus, Kamathi Koshtis
migrated in the 1876 famine from Narayanpeth in Hyderabad State to Pune, and
many Momins moved from Malegaon to Bombay in 1896. 65 Some weavers
60
Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Simla, 1898, p. 297. On the effect of scarcity of food
and work on urban weavers in the Bombay Presidency during the late nineteenth century, see Douglas
E. Haynes, ’Urban Weavers and Rural Famines in Western India’, Paper Presented for the Conference
on New Trends in the History of Modem Maharashtra, Bombay, 1994. According to the 1880 Famine
Commission, weavers were ’the most numerous class among artisans who habitually require relief’,
cited in the 1898 Report, p. 298.
61
For instance, Madras, Report of Famine in the Madras Presidency, 1896-97. cited in Thurston
and Rangachari, Castes and Tribes, Vol. VI, p. 275; Report of the Indian Famine Commission,
Calcutta, 1901, p. 78.
62
Digby, writing on Bombay, reported, ’those who received relief mainly belonged to the humbler
castes of the Hindu community, and to the class of field labourers, of rude artisans, and of village
menials’, in Famine Campaign in Southern India, London, 1878, Vol. I, p. 369 (emphasis added).
Other contemporary records mention part-time weavers as the main constituent of the class of ’rude
artisans’.
63
Digby, Famine Campaign, Vol. II, pp. 352-53.
64
A fuller discussion of their migratory patterns is found in Haynes, ’Urban Weavers and Rural
Famines’.
65
N.M. Joshi, Urban Handicrafts of the Bombay Deccan, Poona, 1936; S.M. Edwardes, A
Monograph upon the Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, Bombay, 1900, p. 54; Indian Famine
Commission 1901, Appendix: Vol. I: Evidence of Witnesses, Bombay Presidency, Calcutta, 1901, p.
1,195.

52
producing the highest qualities of cloth appear to have been able to maintain their
livelihoods at the times of the worst famine, though they were affected by high
food prices. Interestingly, the case cited by Digby shows that at the height of
famine there were people buying looms at full price in some weaving centres.
V4~hile famines as severe as those of the late nineteenth century became a distant
memory in western and southern India by the inter-war period, persistent food
insecurity persisted in many parts of the subcontinent and continued to serve as an
important motivation behind the movement towards textile towns.
But in addition to the steady circulation of weavers looking for some ways to
sustain themselves without falling back into agriculture or unskilled labour, there
was a more systematic long-distance movement from areas experiencing regional
decline to those where there was significant vitality. Weavers continued their long-
established pattern of shifting from peripheral areas to cores, as cores and peri-
pheries became redefined.
The factors affecting areas of industrial vitality, however, changed significantly
as the British placed state formation on a new foundation and as industrial capitalism
caused a realignment in regional economies. First of all, the external markets of
the Indian handlooms contracted significantly; there are few records, during the
colonial period, of weavers moving to coastal centres to produce for overseas
customers. In addition, regional allocations of handloom labour became detached
from the political processes that had been their most important impetus before the
colonial era. By the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial regime no longer saw as
a significant part of its role the encouragement of weavers’ settlements in its own
capitals such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. With the refashioning of the culture
of statehood came a sharp shift in ruling class cloth consumption. Members of the
Indian Civil Service wore European-style clothes that distanced them from the
Indian population and from pre-colonial traditions of nobility. The Indian officials
who served under this elite also refashioned their clothing patterns. No longer was
patronage of luxury production critical to the attraction of loyal officials. Of course,
the Indian princes who survived as agents of indirect rule continued to provide
some demand for the products of the looms, especially because they were expected
by their British overlords to look the part of traditional rulers. But the incomes of
these figures and their subordinate nobles were drastically reduced, and could not
sustain the same volume of cloth production. There is little nineteenth century
evidence of princes attempting to attract weavers directly through offers of
patronage.66
Patterns of regional expansion were associated less with processes of state
formation than with the uneven distribution of new forms of industrial and
commercial activity. Most importantly, there was a profound shift in the regional
66
Discussion of some of these patterns in clothing can be found in Bernard Cohn, ’Cloth, Clothes
and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The
British in India. Cambridge. 1996; C.A. Bayly, ’The Origins of Swadeshi (home industry): Cloth
and Indian Society, 1700-1930’, in A. Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, 1986.

53
distribution of South Asia’s cloth manufacture. Areas that underwent agricultural

stagnation or ’involution’, where peasants had to press the land much more
intensively to eke out a living, often did not generate the demand needed to sustain
existing weaving populations, especially when this development was accompanied
by the withering income of a pre-colonial nobility. Workers spread widely from
such labour catchment areas,&dquo; throughout India.
Most of the attention in scholarly literature has focused on the agricultural
workers who emigrated from these regions to seek employment overseas or within
India in plantations, coal mines and modern factories. But areas of this sort also
often released many skilled weavers to work in handloom enterprises elsewhere in
India.
At the same time, urban, industrial and commercial growth in some areas created
significant pockets of dynamism where cloth of all sorts was in increased demand.
Cities such as Bombay, Pune and Madras developed important concentrations of
the consumers of handloom products, particularly among middle class and upper
class women. There was also expansion in purchases of handloom cloth in certain
areas of growing agricultural prosperity. Evidence from western India repeatedly
mentions the importance of markets for cloth in the cotton-growing tracts of
Khandesh, where not only land-owning peasants but also ’tribals’ working as
agricultural labour spurred new kinds of demands for Maharashtrian saris. By
contrast, highly commercialised agricultural regions in Gujarat appear not to have
provided the same stimulus for handloom cottons, perhaps because of the demand
among women there for prints done on mill-made cloth. But Gujarat and Bombay
apparently did provide a very substantial demand for silks. 61
’
Changing sources of raw materials also provided impetus for movement.

Presumably, there had often been a geographic connection between cotton
cultivation and handloom weaving before the late nineteenth century. With the
development of railroads, this connection was broken. Machine-produced yarn
significantly reduced the cost of manufacturing handloom cloth. Once such yarn
became readily available, most Indian weavers switched away from country yam
in a matter of decades. Many weavers clustered in or around towns where spinning
mills were established, such as Sholapur, Hubli, Surat and Coimbatore. Others
were located in places that could be easily reached from the biggest mill cities,
such as Ahmedabad and Bombay, and ports such as Madras and Bombay through
which yarn was imported. In general, handloom weavers tended not to settle directly
in the very biggest industrial cities., since the cost of living there was often quite
high. But it was still not expensive to send yam from cities to neighbouring towns
(such as Bhiwandi and Malegaon near Bombay), or to railroad towns (such as
67
To a certain extent, this analysis follows Chakravarty, ’Emergence of an Industrial Labour
Force in a Dual Economy’.
68
Haynes, ’Market Formation in Khandesh.1880-1920’, Paper Presented at the 12th International
Economic History Congress, Madrid, 1998; Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, chapter 4, especially,
p. 113; H. Maxwell-Lefroy and E.C. Ansorge, Report on an Enquiry into the Silk Industry in India,
Calcutta, 1916-18.

54
Sholapur in Maharashtra). By the turn of the twentieth century, the transition to

the useof imported dyes provided another reason for locating close to colonial
ports. In other words, handloom activity tended to expand in those areas also
experiencing the growth of ’modern’ forms of economic activity, and weavers ’
tended to move to weaving towns in those regions.69

Finally, there were important developments in the organisation of cloth
production that prompted weavers to move. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the
major form of production organisation among handloom weavers was the dependent
family firm, that is, a kind of unit where work was done by family labour on looms
located in the weavers’ homes but where finance came from non-producing
merchant capitalists, generally known as shahukars.1 By the late nineteenth century,
larger karkhanas employing extra-familial labour, owned for the most part by
families from the weaving community, emerged in the centres of expanding
production, mostly in western India.&dquo; In some cases, the owners of such workshops
were able to break their reliance upon mercantile capitalists. The karkhanas, centred
largely in the towns of more dynamic regions, often served to attract weavers
originating in areas of declining business. Individually, karkhanas were inherently
unstable forms of organisation, ones that could contract or dissolve when market
conditions were poor?2 But in the aggregate their emergence in western India
provided a new impetus to mobility, since weaving families no longer had to bring
their own looms or to make investments in new weaving establishments as they
moved. There was very little similar change in organisational pattern in areas of
declining demand, where shahukars generally retained a tight hold over family
producers.
In other words, the changing character of capitalism during the nineteenth
century, and especially regional unevenness in its form, caused the emergence of
new ’cores’ in India, regions that could be as attractive to artisans as to those who
sought employment in the modem sector. Such regional reconfigurations prompted

large-scale migrations of skilled weavers.
Three patterns of movement deserve special investigation. These are: (a) the
migration of Padmasali weavers from Telengana to western Maharashtra; (b) that
69
This process was accompanied by the ’urbanisation’ of weaving, see Roy, Artisans and
Industrialization, chapter 5.
70
See Haynes, ’The Logic of the Artisan Firm in a Capitalist Economy: Handloom Weavers and
Technological Change in Western India, 1880-1947’, in Stein and Subrahmanyam, eds, Institutions
and Economic Change in India, pp. 182-95.
71
Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, pp. 80-88, 96-101; Haynes, ’The Logic of the Artisan
Firm’, pp. 195-203.
72
Haynes, ’The Logic of the Artisan Firm’. We do not intend here to imply an inexorable pattern
of development towards the kind of productive relations that Marx has described as typical of
industrial capitalism. Family-based units persisted alongside larger workshops, few karkhanas
developed into full-fledged industrial factories, and these few were always a minority. Mercantile
capitalists have shown (in recent times) a tendency to regain positions of dominance in textile
production, even when bigger weaving units have existed. The question is not whether capitalist
relations have shown a tendency to strengthen themselves, but what kinds of such relations reproduce
themselves in what kind of contexts?

55
of Momin from northern India to northern Maharashtra; and (c) the shorter
weavers
distance movement of weavers in the more dynamic centres of south India.
Padmasalis
The Padmasalis were a ’community’ within a larger set of actors known as the
Sales that was spread across wide areas of southern India. Before the colonial
period, Padmasalis concentrated primarily in Telugu-speaking regions, particularly
in the dry regions of Telengana.&dquo; Professionally, Padmasali weavers tended to
concentrate in the weaving of cotton cloth. They apparently sold their products to
consumers from the regional nobility to ordinary peasants. A few Padmasalis had
moved toward western India even before British rule. Some, for instance, had
settled in Pune and Ahmednagar by the late eighteenth century.&dquo;
During the nineteenth century, and particularly after the 1840s, the large-scale
movement of Padmasalis from Hyderabad State towards the Deccan districts of
the Bombay Presidency began in earnest. These migrants originated widely in the
Telengana districts, but seem to have come primarily from Karimnagar, Medak
and Nalgonda (see Map 2). In the nineteenth century, they moved westward to
handloom towns of growing significance, especially Sholapur, Pune, Yeola and
Ahmednagar. Bombay and its mills also became significant magnets attracting
Padmasali weavers. By the 1920s-30s, Padmasalis had begun to move in small
numbers to the weaving towns in the north of Maharashtra. A census report of
1951 noted that migration from Hyderabad to the Bombay Presidency had assumed
vast proportions, that most of those migrating were non-agriculturalists, and that
both handloom establishments and cotton-pressing factories were absorbing a major
portion of the migrants. More than 80,000 migrants from Hyderabad State had
moved to Sholapur district alone.&dquo; Observers in Telengana also noted the huge
outflow of skilled weavers from rural areas.&dquo; Today, Padmasalis are found wherever
weaving is done in western India, either by hand or by power. The migration of
weavers to the Deccan centres has continued into the post-independence period,
rendering some of these places into ’Telugu towns’ that have elected Padmasali
mayors and members of parliament.
The depressed economic conditions many weavers faced in Hyderabad State
undoubtedly prompted this movement to a great extent. General accounts of the
weavers picture their circumstances as ones of great poverty and dependence upon
73
Syed Siraj-ul-Hasan, The Castes and Tribes of H.E. Nizam’sDominions. pp. 536-44; P.
Swarnalatha, ’The World of the Weaver in Northern Coromandel, 1750-1850’, Ph.D. dissertation,
Department of History, University of Hyderabad, 1991, p. 79. Nanjundayya and Ananthakrishna
Iyer, The Mysore Tribes and Castes, Vol. IV, Mysore, p. 560; Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers,
chapter 6.
74Irabatti, Notes from My Life, discusses the history of settlement in Maharashtrian towns.
Census of India, Vol. IX, Hyderabad, 1951, Part IA (Report), pp. 90-95. Many of the migrants,
75
of course, were not Padmasalis. For numerous qualitative discussions of migration, see Irabatti,
Notes from My Life.
Census of India. 1931. H.E.H. Nizam’s Dominions (Hyderabad State) Part I. Report. 1933, p. 66.
76

57
shahukars. Raghbir Sahai wrote in his survey of artisan cloth producers in

Hyderabad: ’The economic condition of our handloom weavers is far from satis-
factory and despair is writ large on his face, wherever I found him. ’77 Sahai attributed
the poverty to ’the local sowcars and yam dealers who rapaciously rob them of
their legitimate wages and profits, leaving a poor margin for their bare sub-
sistence’.’8 Observed another report: ’their [the weavers’] repaying capacity is
very much narrowed by the small wages which they earn. Their individual assets
are very often not more valuable that a small grass-thatched hut and one or two
old hand-looms ... with a rapidly shrinking market for their goods, their capacity
for borrowing and the scope for developing their businesses are limited.&dquo;9 In
addition, work was very inconsistent and unemployment during the monsoon and
winter was commonplace.8° Indeed, it appears to have been those times when
shahukars were unable to provide work, and ties were thus at their weakest, that
weavers were most tempted to move. In other instances, interviews indicate, the
factor precipitating migration was the coming of age of a young male child who
could not be sustained on the existing orders for cloth received by the family.
Not all weavers in the region faced such bleak circumstances. Some of those
who engaged in silk-weaving and other higher quality fabrics, for instance, often
found ample markets for their goods. The town of Narayanpet, which specialised
in solid border saris, many destined for markets in Maharashtra, was able to sustain
an industry of up to 15,000 looms and a weaving population of up to 50,000
weavers even during the depressions of the 1930s.8’ In general, it was those who
continued the weaving of coarse cotton cloth who were placed in the most
vulnerable positions. But this constituted the majority of Telengana’s weavers.
The poor market conditions faced by many weavers can be traced in part to the
more general depression of living standards in the Hyderabad region. Existing
scholarship does not allow us to draw clear conclusions about the effects of indirect
rule on demand for handloom cloth from the aristocracy. While some demand for
handloom products was no doubt sustained by the Hyderabad court, conflicts
between the Nizam and the local nobility may have limited the incomes and
77
A Report on the Survey of the Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries in
Raghbir Sahai,
H.E.H. Nizam’s Dominions, Hyderabad, 1933, p. 11.
78
Indebtedness in H.E.H. Nizam’sDominions.
Ibid., p. 12; See also S.M. Bharucha, Agricultural
Hyderabad, 1937,p. 44.
79
Hyderabad State, Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies of H.E.H. Nizam’s
Government forthe Year 1338-39 Fasli, Hyderabad, p. 9.
80 B.K. Narayan, ’Economic Development of Hyderabad State’, Ph.D. dissertation, Mysore
University, 1958. This was also corroborated in a large number of interviews with weavers and
others involved in the business.
81
Hyderabad State, Report on the Working of the Department of Industries and Commerce for
the Year 1343 Fasli, Hyderabad, p. 13. Sahai gives an estimate of 9,000 weavers during the same
time-period in A Report on the Survey of the Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries. p. 128.
Markets for these goods are discussed in Sahai and in D.V. Rao ’Cottage Industries and their Role in
Hyderabad’s Economy’, in Hyderabad Bulletin of Economic Affairs, Vol. I (9), December 1948, pp.
1,098-1,102.

58
spending power of the latter.g2 At the same time, current scholarship points quite
clearly to the existence of agrarian stagnation and decline. Peasants in Telengana
lived on small farms with poor soils, were often deeply in debt, and often subject
to heavy demands for rent from landlords as well as for extraction of vetti (corvee)
by these landlords, village officials and other agents of the state. Famine regularly
visited the area before World War I. The introduction of commercial crops such as
groundnuts, tobacco and castor-seeds led to the emergence of a small, more pros-
perous stratum within the peasantry, but its size and purchasing power hardly
matched its counterparts in the wealthier agricultural regions of western India.83
Telengana weavers, moreover, were often unable to capture existing markets
for handloom products within their own region. The Nizam’s dominions imported
substantial quantities of handloom cloth from other areas of India, including centres
where the primary source of labour were Padmasali workers. Observed Raghbir
Sahai in his report: ’But in Hyderabad State it [the handloom industry] has declined,
not so much from the effects of mill competition as from inability to stand up
against the results of the adoption of improved methods by handloom weavers in
British India. It will be seen that handloom-made piece goods to the value of Rs.
26,89,000 were imported into the state during the last year.’84 Sahai mentioned
Nagpur, Malegaon, Amengudh, Ahmednagar, Poona, Salem, Ilkal and Sholapur
as some of the chief sources of handloom imports, with Sholapur saris finding the
widest markets.
Local weavers faced several disadvantages. During much of the colonial period,
tariffs were charged on yam imported from Bombay and elsewhere into the state,
and this placed local weavers at a serious disadvantage.85 In addition, weaver-
capitalists in the British territories, many of whom ran karkhanas employing non-
familial labour, were making constant adaptations in their manufacturing and
marketing methods to the changing economic climate of the later nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Karkhanadars often introduced new techniques of
production and new products. The use of the fly-shuttle loom, which increased the
speed of production by 50 per cent and more, was widespread in many of the
larger centres of western India by the 1920s. The lack of direct access to the
market among Telengana weaver-households dependent on shahukars seriously
inhibited the adoption of new techniques.g6 Hyderabad manufactures were stymied
82
For such developments, see Carolyn Elliott, ’Decline of a Patrimonial Regime: The Telengana
Rebellion in India, 1946-51’, Journal ofAsian Studies. Vol. 34(1), 1974, pp. 28-30; Sheela Raj,
Medievalism to Modernism: Socio-Economic and Cultural History of Hyderabad, 1869-1911,
Bombay, 1987, p. 99.
83
D.N. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India 1920-1950. Delhi, 1983, pp. 180-212; Reddy,
Economic History of Hyderabad State, pp. 169-200.
84
Sahai, Report on the Survey of the Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries. p. i. See also
Hyderabad State, Report on the Working of the Department of Industries and Commerce for the
Year 1339 Fasli, p. 1.
85
Raj, Medievalism to Modernism, p. 176.
86
Sahai, Report on the Survey of Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries, pp. 12, 76; for a
discussion of the different rates of innovation in these two kinds of artisan production unit, see
Haynes, ’The Logic of the Artisan Firm’.

59
by the low cost of non-Hyderabadi manufactures produced by weavers using

improved techniques.8? The imports, using new designs, patterns and dyeing
methods, and representing a superior level of standardisation in quality and size,
were also better geared to the tastes of consumers than their local counterparts.
Finally, the karkhanadars of western India and the merchants who sold their goods
were more aggressive in the marketing process. Agents of centres in the Deccan
and south India regularly visited Hyderabad and other major markets; some even
set up shops in these towns in contrast to the local sellers of cloth.88
As they migrated to western India, Padmasali weavers were, in fact, moving to
the kinds of handloom firms that were outcompeting the artisans of Hyderabad.
Most commonly, they found themselves working in larger workshops employing
some kind of wage labour. In effect, they were participating in a slow and very
uneven shift in the organisation of production from dependent family households
associated with their homelands to the karkhanas in their places of destination,
that is, from a system based upon merchant capital to one founded on ’weavers’
capital’.
Those who emigrated obtained work through existing channels of relations, kin
and friends in the place of their arrival. Most commonly, workers reported that
they first went to live with some person they had previously known, most commonly
some relative. Weavers typically chose their place of destination on the basis of
their well-established connections; those without these connections rarely risked
migration. Often migrants relied on such contacts in order to find them work in the
handloom workshops in the place of their destination. There appears to have been
little direct recruitment of labour by western Indian karkhanadars or their agents
back in Telengana. Jobs in the mills of Sholapur and Bombay were often obtained
in the same way. Usually, karkhanadars needed to provide new workers an advance,
sometimes in the currency of Hyderabad State itself, before they could secure the
weavers’ labour.89 Workshop-owners among the Padmasalis also typically gave
their employees a place to eat and sleep in the karkhana itself.
Rarely did the new migrants cut off ties with Telengana. Frequently, they travelled
home to visit families on festive occasions and on marriages. When business was
slow in the western Indian karkhanas, they often returned to their villages, where
they could wait out the slack season at lower costs to themselves than in the western
Indian towns and cities. Women and children frequently stayed behind in the
villages. In some cases, the workers brought family members to Maharashtra after
some years, frequently to work in the handloom industry itself. But in other
instances, family members remained in the native place for decades while the
menfolk carved out a new living. The maintenance of these ties allowed return to
home regions during old age and when work was not available. In the last two
decades, as the powerlooms have driven the majority of handloom weavers out of
87
Sahai, Report on the Survey of Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries, pp. 12, 76, 78.
88
Sahai, Report on the Survey of Handloom Weaving and Dyeing Industries, p. 77.
89
R.G. Kakade,
A Socio-Economic Survey of Weaving Communities in Sholapur, Poona, 1947,
pp. 158-65.

60
business in some towns, some elderly Padmasalis have come back to Telengana to
weave ’traditional’ Andhra designs, for which there has been a revived demand.
Gradually, however, the Padmasalis who stayed in the Deccan built up a new
social fabric in western Indian towns. Neighbourhoods composed largely of
immigrants and their children sprang up, and handloom activity became con-
centrated there.9° During the nineteenth century, they established organisational
structures known as fands, a vertically organised group focused on great men,
which regulated social affairs such as marriages among community members and
raised money for temples.9’ The leading figures in these organisations most
commonly were big karkhanadars in the western Indian towns, not traditional
leaders from the Telengana homeland. In the twentieth century, the fands lost their
significance as new institutions-charitable trusts, educational foundations, and
social reform organisations-assumed a prominent place in Padmasali society of
western India. But the neighbourhood leaders continued to be drawn from the
ranks of the biggest Padmasali weavers and merchants. In short, new forms of
community were created by the Padmasalis in their new places of residence.
MominslJulahas
The second prominent set of artisans involved in long-distance migration were the
Momins (also known as Ansaris or, more negatively, the Julahas). The term Momin
refers to a rather diverse set of people who were spread widely over northern
India but who shared their Islamic faith and a traditional association with handloom
weaving.92 In practice, Momins were dispersed over a fairly wide range of profes-
sions by the mid-nineteenth century. Involvement in agriculture was not uncommon,
though here again there was a significant degree of reluctance to work as agricultural
labourers.91 Many Muslim weavers took great pride in their artisanal skills, and
saw abandonment of the profession as a last resort. In some instances, Momin
weavers preferred moving to other areas to become handloom weavers or mill-
workers as a superior alternative to the performance of unskilled agricultural or
industrial labour.
By the late nineteenth century, a large number of Muslim weavers, especially
from eastern United Provinces, had begun to move to western India (see Map 3).
Many of them concentrated in small towns in northern Maharashtra along the Agra-
Bombay highway, including Dhule, Malegaon, Bhiwandi and Bombay itself. There
were also significant settlements in Yeola and Sangamner. Initially, they came on
foot or by bullock cart, but later, train became the most common mode of migration.
90
For instance, the neighbourhood of Sakharpeth in Sholapur. For discussion of the problems of
neighbourhood formation among the Salis in Sholapur see a brief discussion in Collector’s memo
No. 508 of 1908, 5 July 1908, Huzur Collector’s Archives, Sholapur, 1908, No. 34, File A/864.
91
Irabatti, Notesfrom My Life.
92
The diversity of Momins or Julahas is discussed in Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of
Communalism, esp. pp. 94-96.
93
Interviews conducted with Momin weavers in Allahabad district.

62
Those who settled in Bombay often became skilled workers in the textile mills,
but those who came to inhabit the smaller towns frequently tried to maintain the
profession of handloom-weaving. Generally, they produced very different kinds
of cloth, suited to the taste of Maharashtrian consumers, from those they had made
in their home regions.&dquo;
The Momin myth attributes the cause of movement to catastrophic events in the
1850s, namely the riots in Hanumangarhi (contemporary Faizabad-Ayodhya) in
1856, and the Revolt of 1857. According to these accounts, Muslim weavers
decided to leave under conditions of severe duress, even persecution.9’ But some
Momins had begun to move towards western India several decades before the
1850s. And the number of migrants appears to have been greater towards the end
of the nineteenth century than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Revolt. In
effect, this migration myth, like the myths of earlier migrant groups elsewhere in
India, provides an encapsulating memory around which group identity is sustained.
The broader economic conditions facing handloom weavers in north India from
the mid-nineteenth century onwards clearly provided much of the motivation to
move. Gyanendra Pandey has argued that a significant decline in demand occurred
across much of the eastern United Provinces; in some towns the number of looms
in use fell by the 1890s to a fraction of the number that had been at work 50 years
earlier.96 Certainly significant here was the decline of consumption by both the old
nobility of the Mughal empire and the aristocracy of the regional ’successor states’,
which had a profound impact on many producers. This region, after all, had once
supplied a large portion of the needs of the nobility all over northern India.91 Mill-
made goods from England and then from western Indian mills no doubt absorbed
much of the demand for products of finer and middlish quality.9$ In addition, the
low standard of living in the region meant that demand from local agriculturalists,
who still used handloom products to fill a substantial portion of their clothing
needs,99 was hardly sufficient to sustain the pre-existing population of weavers;
those centres that continued to support substantial weaving populations, such as
Varanasi and Azamgarh, often possessed markets that stretched far beyond the
region.’°° Handloom weavers of north India were also at a relative disadvantage
94
Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari ki Tehzibi Tarikh, Bombay, 1994, discusses
migration of Momins in some detail. See especially chapters 27, 33.
95
This was brought up in numerous interviews conducted by one of the authors, but is also
discussed in Momin Mohiyuddin, Momin Ansari Biradari ki Tehzibi Tarikh, passim.
96
Pandey, ’Economic Dislocation’, pp. 96-104.
97
C.A. Silberrad,
A Monograph on Cotton Fabrics Produced in the Northwestern Provinces and
Oudh, Allahabad, 1898, p. 46. On the drastic decline for the
jamdani of Tanda, see Government of
India, Report of the Indian Tariff Board (Cotton Textile Industry Enquiry), Vol. III, Bombay, 1927,
p. 124.
98
Pandey, ’Economic Dislocation’, p. 105; Silberrad,
A Monograph, pp. 45-48.
99
Handloom products constituted about one-third of cotton cloth (by weight) consumed in the
United Provinces. A.C. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries of the United Provinces. Allahabad,
1908, p. 12.
100
Abdullah Ibn Yususf Ali, A Monograph on Silk Fabrics of the United Provinces of Agra and
Oudh, Allahabad, 1900, pp. 102-4. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, pp. 17-18.

63
because of the nature of the raw material manufactured in the area. Since cotton
grown in the United Provinces was of poor quality, the Kanpur mills generally
provided only the coarser forms of yarn, with virtually none of counts higher than
20.’°’ When prices of raw materials rose, or when agricultural seasons were poor,
weavers who had been living on the brink of subsistence were squeezed out of
their profession, at least in their homeland. 102
As in Hyderabad State, there was considerable unevenness in the fate of the
weavers in eastern United Provinces. A number of centres in the region continued
to make cloth on a very large scale. In Azamgarh district, for instance, 13,000
looms were still working at the end of the nineteenth century, though the industry
was reported (even then) to be in a state of serious decline. After a significant
contraction in the first decade of the twentieth century, the number of looms
rebounded to about the same level by the 1920s.’°3 The evidence seems to suggest
comparatively little outmigration of weavers in this district.,&dquo; By contrast,
Allahabad no longer possessed handloom centres of much significance, and most
of those still involved in weaving produced coarse cloth for local agriculturalists. 15
Persons from the weaving communities responded both by diversifying into other
professions, and by migration. 106
Weavers in the region were well-known for their mobility. As one official stated,
’In artisan or trading communities, the individual is far more migratory, and it is
not unusual for a heavily indebted artisan or small trader to decamp, leaving no
trace behind him’.’°’ No doubt, some artisans circulated from place to place within
northern India. But many thousands migrated toward the Bombay Presidency, where
they expected employment prospects to be better.
Those who did so found themselves under very new circumstances in their places
of arrival. Often they became involved in the production of various kinds of cloth
for western Indian consumers, such as high quality cotton saris for middle class
residents of Bombay, and low and middle quality Maharashtrian saris for the
peasants and agricultural labourers in the agrarian regions. They also usually came
101
Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, p. 20.
102From Director of Industries to Director of Public Instruction, United Provinces, 27 September
1911 in Uttar Pradesh State Archives (hereafter UPSA), Department of Industries, File 410 of 1911;
Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, p. 21.
103
Azamgarh: A Gazetteer District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh,
Allahabad, 1911 (reporting on 1876),pp. 61-62. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, pp. 17-18;
Mohammed Mushtaq, Report of the Industrial Survey of the United Provinces, Azamgarh District,
Allahabad, 1923, p. 16.
104
Final Report on the Seventh Settlement of the Azamgarh District of the United Provinces,
Allahabad, 1908, p. 8.
105
Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, p. 16; Jagdish S. Valal, Report on the Industrial Survey of
the United Provinces: Allahabad, Allahabad, pp. 55-57.
106
In contrast to Azamgarh, there was a sharp difference between numbers of persons belonging
to weaving communities and those actually involved in
weaving. Note by Rai Bahadur R. Prasad,
24/10/21, Appendix to ’Report of the Weaving School Committee, United Provinces, 1921’, in
UPSA, Industries Department, File 407 of 1920.
107
Note Regarding Possibilities of Cooperative Societies’, in ’Notes Required for the Industrial
Commission’, in UPSA, Industries Department, File 430 of 1916.

64
to work for different kind of productive organisations. In the United Provinces,

most had been household weavers who worked under contract for some shahukars.
With the exception of Varanasi silk-weaving, there was little system of ’factories’
using wage labour in the north.’°8 In the Bombay Presidency, new migrants generally
worked in karkhanas, often ones run by wealthier Momins. Some of these master-
weavers had established reputations for high-quality products in western India,
and in order to satisfy the demand for their goods, needed to hire extra-familial
workers. In some cases, the size of these workshops could be quite large, with up
-
to 50 looms.
Also like the Padmasalis, Momin weavers generally found jobs through relatives
and friends who preceded them. The advance system prevalent in Padmasali regions
was less common among Momins, though advances probably were given to workers
with special skills or with proven records of loyal service.
As Momins moved to western India, they created novel kinds of society. As
already mentioned, the weavers actually came from diverse backgrounds in northern
India. But in towns like Bhiwandi, new social institutions were formed. Prominent
among these was the bissee, a kind of communal eating house where single, male
migrants gathered to take their meals. Panchayats, organised sometimes around
place of origin and sometimes around big men in the community, shaped and
enforced group norms. Prominent karkhanadars provided monies for the building
of mosques and the establishment of educational institutions. The Momins of
western India generally regarded themselves as upwardly mobile, and their leaders
sought to ensure group religious and social practices that would reflect their
perceived new statuses.
Again, as with the Padmasalis, most Momin families did not cut off their ties
with their native places. Return for marriages, religious festivals, births and deaths
remains a feature of many weavers’ lives. In many cases, family members continued
to sit on ancestrallands; remittances of monies from western India sometimes
made new land purchases possible. Many weavers and textile workers returned to
their villages upon their retirement, and the most prosperous individuals even
gave money to build mosques and schools in their native places. Over the past 100
years, there has been a continuous circulation back and forth between eastern
Uttar Pradesh and north Maharashtra. Some persons interviewed had moved
between the two regions several times during their work careers. 109
South India
Interestingly, in contrast with western India and with its own pre-colonial past,
south India experienced a sustained expansion in handloom (and later powerloom)
production after the late nineteenth century without substantial long-distance
migration. There seem to be -three major reasons for the distinctive pattern of
growth in the Tamil Nadu region.
108
A Proceedings, December 1914. No. 21 in UPSA, Industries Department, File 281 of 1914.
109
This paragraph is based largely upon interviews done in Bhiwandi, Malegaon and Allahabad
districts.

65
First, Tamil Nadu witnessed a large-scale influx of non-hereditary weavers into

small-scale textile units (whether handloom or powerloom).&dquo;° Observers attributed
this development to the inherent strength of the handloom industry, and a constant
tendency of peasants and labourers to start weaving whenever agricultural
conditions deteriorated.&dquo;’ Such entry escalated in districts which witnessed very
rapid growth of handlooms, such as Salem. Second, weaving in the south relied on
short-distance migration. The Fact Finding Committee of 1942 discussed the pull
that large weaving towns on their immediate neighbourhood as a place
exercised
for contractual and wage employment. The examples again included Salem, where
the phenomena had apparently been going on for some times A recent study on
Kumarapalayam confirms the importance of commuters as a major source of
supply.&dquo;3 Third, the industrial organisation in these regions followed different
paradigms. In contrast to western India, the family firm was the dominant form of
productive organisation in south India and larger establishments employing wage
labour were rarer. In Salem, there was a significant presence of hired labour, but
the scale of such development was far smaller than in Sholapur. The pattern of
expansion thus resembled the ’proto-industrialisation model’, where town
merchants recruited rural families into ever-widening putting-out arrangements.
A major difference between this case and the classic European model, however,
was that the new entrants were not all part-time peasants, but included many who
became full-time weavers. This form of expansion promoted a more diffused pattern
of weaver settlement, spread out over clusters of small towns as opposed to vast
agglomerations. The reasons for this pattern of organisation deserves further study.
To generalise, the west and the south represent two profiles of growth, one
driven by larger workshops, wage labour and long distance migration of hereditary
weavers, the other characterised by family firms, putting-out and the short-distance
migration of local non-weavers.
’
Conclusion
’
While this essay has been divided into pre-colonial and colonial sections, this
division is partly artificial, marked chiefly by the different kinds of evidence utilised.
The paper actually documents at least four periods in the history of migration
worth noting. First, there was the pre-eighteenth century (itself a broad, internally
differentiated ’period’) during which a large number of weavers’ movements took
place, usually in the context of shifting regional patterns of state. formation and
110
India, Report of the Fact-Finding Committee (Handloom and Mills), Delhi, 1942, p. 65; India,
Survey of Handloom Industry in Madras State, 1955-56, Bombay, 1959, chapter V.
India, Survey of Handloom, p. 52. This process is referred to in a recent study, K. Nagaraj, S.
111
Janakarajan, D. Jayaraj and B. Harriss-White, ’Adjustment and Development: Agrarian Change,
Markets and Social Welfare in South India, 1973-1993’, Madras Institute of Development Studies,
Madras, 1996, p. 69.
112
India, Fact-Finding Committee, p. 67.
113
Geert de Neeve, ’Continuity and Change: A Preliminary Outline of the Role of Communities
and Individuals in Urban Dynamics’, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Madras, 1996.

66
decline and changing export opportunities. Second, during the eighteenth century,
the development of new kinds of regional kingdoms, the strengthening of mercantile
capitalism, the growing significance of external commerce, and the rise of the
East India Company may have stimulated an acceleration of mobility by weavers.
This movement, however, continued to be associated with state patronage and
encouragement. In the early nineteenth century, weavers’ movements became
disjoined from the processes of state formation. No longer was patronage of the
ruling elite critical, capital cities did not provide any particular attraction for hand-
loom weavers, the export markets generally became unimportant and foreign texfile
imports brought about a reduction in total artisanal employment. There appear to
have been few areas of significant growth in Indian weaving to absorb those
displaced.
Finally, during the later nineteenth century, regional changes associated with
mature industrial capitalism brought about new regional patterns of dynamism
and decay in South Asia, and in turn promoted a revival of long-term migration.
Weavers moved from ‘labour catchment areas’ where commercialisation and demo-
graphic pressures had produced agricultural involution and an impoverished
peasantry with limited buying power. They often settled in regions experiencing
economic expansion and the growth of both urban and agrarian classes who
possessed an enhanced ability to purchase cloth. The textile mills also exercised a
pull for handloom weavers who valued reliable supplies of high quality mill yarn.
Further, a variety of conditions created, mainly in western India, new kinds of
weaver-capitalists who preferred to meet their need for labour from their places
of origin.
The long-distance migration of weavers thus cannot be easily categorised as
either a ‘traditional’ or ’modem’ phenomena for several reasons. First, collective
movements of weavers have long been a feature of South Asian society; such
movements persist to the present day. Second, the mobility of industrial labour in
more recent times did not always involve a transfer of population from ’traditional’
occupations to factories, plantations and mines or the reduction of skilled artisans

into unskilled labourers. This essay has discussed several streams of migration
involving weavers who sought employment in the ’traditional’ activity of handloom-
weaving outside their home regions. When they did so, they often moved into
handloom units organised on a much larger scale than those that they had left. The
’informal’ sector, in effect, was marked by a dynamism that paralleled that of the
’formal’ sector.
Third, weavers, in all the periods we have studied, showed some common
propensities in their patterns of community formation. At different points in history,
migrant artisans made efforts to give shape to a new sense of community in their
new locales by attempting to gain monopolistic control over their craft, by building
ritual associations with kings, by setting up community institutions such as guilds
and panchayats, by launching sanskritising attempts and by constructing community
shrines. The very maintenance of a history of having moved from another place,
often under conditions of duress, served to demarcate them from others around
and to sustain their sense of distinctiveness. The tightness of the networks within

67
weaving communities has often deceived others into thinking that such bonds
have been permanent, unchanging features of their organisation rather than new
social forms constantly being constructed in new environments.
Thus, on the one hand, this article disputes any notion of a sharp break between
pre-colonial and colonial periods. The study of migration shows how pre-existing
strategies can serve as a means of adaptation to patterns of change associated with
modem industrial capital. Movement has served as a means of accommodation to
regionally differentiated forms of growth and decline at very different points in
South Asian history. At the same time, the article does not suggest any kind of
seamless continuity between pre-colonial migrations and more recent movements.
Instead, it reinterprets the nature of the shift. What really was different between
the different phases were the circumstances that prompted weavers’ movement,
and in turn, the nature, participants and destinations of change.
Specialised weavers belonged in a larger sector of the South Asian population
who possessed portable skills and who chose to adapt to significant economic
restructuring through relocation when alternative possibilities were available. While
this article has focused on only one kind of social actor whose roots in local com-
munities may have been especially shallow, it raises larger questions about how
historians conceive mobility. How applicable is a master narrative that sees labour
circulation during the colonial period as induced by entirely novel kinds of disrup-
tive forces that weakened its once-tight community bonds? Is the alternative that a
mobile pre-colonial society gave way to peasantisation, sedentarisation and
immobility preferable? Perhaps we must in part opt for a third alternative, one that
views mobility as a persistent pattern of adaptation through much of South Asian
society at times when regionally differentiated patterns of economic change opened
new opportunities for skilled persons in some areas as options elsewhere contracted
or closed.
At the same time, this article raises some new puzzles about the nature of
industrial change in the late colonial and post-colonial era. For example, the contrast
between western India and the deep south suggests that we must look at why
different ways of meeting the need for capital and labour are chosen in different
contexts. How does the contrast between an expansion fed by migrants and one
fed by locals matter to differences in industrial organisation? How are migration
processes in contemporary India, when the ’informal’ sector has overtaken the
’formal’ in many industries, similar to or different from those dealt with in this
article? Do artisans who migrate as artisans and those who migrate into the formal
sector differ in social characteristics? The material presented here is not adequate
to deal with these issues. But we hope that the article will serve as a useful point of
reference for further work on large-scale population movements, especially as
interest grows in mobility induced by the expansion of small-scale, decentralised
production.&dquo;4
114
For recent work on spatial mobility within the informal sector see Jan Breman, Footloose
Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy, Cambridge, 1996.

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Indian Economic & Social History

Conceiving mobility: Weavers' migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India

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>> Version of Record - Mar 1, 1999

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taking place afterwards.

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migration might be seen as an expression of class struggle, in which weavers resisted

organisation of production at either the place of origin or the fmal destination of

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in larger karkhanas (workshops), which were sometimes set up by royal courts to

Drawn by the virtues of the kings of this country,

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particular circumstances. For instance, seventeenth century records mention

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commented the wide range of textiles in the Vijayanagara capital, especially

attempts at some form ofsanskritisation.30 Such attempts may imply a reasonable

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Vijayanagara period, when urbanisation, long-distance trade and state patronage

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exodus, or a single movement. The Nayaka rulers of Madurai were feudatories of

Malabar, Vol. 1, London, 1807, p. 198.

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absorption of large numbers of out-of-work artisans into agriculture. There are,

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(in 1920) to be involved regularly in passing ’backwards and forwards between

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distribution of South Asia’s cloth manufacture. Areas that underwent agricultural

Changing sources of raw materials also provided impetus for movement.

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Sholapur in Maharashtra). By the turn of the twentieth century, the transition to

tended to move to weaving towns in those regions.69

sought employment in the modem sector. Such regional reconfigurations prompted

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shahukars. Raghbir Sahai wrote in his survey of artisan cloth producers in

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by the low cost of non-Hyderabadi manufactures produced by weavers using

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to work for different kind of productive organisations. In the United Provinces,

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First, Tamil Nadu witnessed a large-scale influx of non-hereditary weavers into

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occupations to factories, plantations and mines or the reduction of skilled artisans

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