Abstract
In India, the relative importance of the handloom sector, one of the largest employers following agriculture, has been declining for the last few decades. The All India Handloom Census data for the year 2009–10, however, showed a rather modest decline in the number of weavers in West Bengal, in contrast to a 33% decline at the national level between 1995–96 and 2009–10. Data from the same Handloom Censuses also point to considerable occupational diversification among weaver households in West Bengal. Based on analysis of the same data, we find that recent history of handloom in West Bengal is not only of exit, but also of entry of labourers into the sector along with acquisition of skills by new entrants. Inter- and intra-sectoral labour mobilities call into question the dominant view of ‘skills’ in this sector, ‘skills’ being the singular lens through which the handloom sector has traditionally been viewed. We argue for a more labour-focused rather than a ‘tradition’-centred approach to the handloom sector.
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Notes
- 1.
The number of handloom and all handicrafts workers in 2014 were 4.33 million and 6.89 million, respectively, in 2009–10 (Government of India 2014b). In the Indian context, hand loom means any loom, other than power loom and includes any hybrid loom on which at least one process for weaving requires manual intervention or human energy for production. See https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/cons-products/garments-/-textiles/no-change-in-definition-of-handloom-textile-ministry/articleshow/28600164.cms.
- 2.
- 3.
Even though the number of looms and workers in the handloom sector declined between 1995–96 and 2009–10, cloth production increased from 3120 to 6930 million square metres over the same period. The number of man days worked, the proportion of full-time weavers and the proportion of weavers who derive more than 60% of income from weaving increased and the proportion of idle looms decreased over the same period (Government of India 2014b). The total cloth production on handlooms increased to 7638 million m2 in 2015–16 accounting for 15.3% of India’s total cloth production. Around 95% of world’s hand-woven fabric comes from India.
- 4.
This aspect of colonial history of India, known as the ‘deindustrialization thesis’, concentrated on the distress of artisans resulting mainly from trade-related policy discriminations and internal measures of repressions by the colonial government in India.
- 5.
The revisionist history argued that (i) it is the eastern part of the country, especially undivided Bengal and Odisha, that heavily bore the brunt of this downfall, (ii) the shift of operations to karkhana system and to the employment of full time handloom workers led to perceptible rise in productivity and income in other parts of the country and (iii) hand-spinning, rather than hand-weaving was affected most.
- 6.
Some have argued, however, that the technological changes are not absent in the handloom sector but, ‘remain scarce in relation to the scale of the industry’ (Liebel and Roy 2003), and also that this dynamism in the handloom includes transition from handloom to powerloom (Roy 1998a; Liebel and Roy 2003).
- 7.
Policy measures attempted to raise production efficiency, through interventions related to production and distribution networks and some organizational reforms (e.g. cooperativization).
- 8.
We did not use the National Sample Survey reports on the unorganized manufacturing sector for this purpose since the sample of handloom units producing fabric would be very small at the state level.
- 9.
The percentage shares of these five states—WB, TN, AP, UP and OD—in total number of handloom weaver households in the country are 10.75, 7.2, 5.85, 3.72 and 1.47, respectively. Seven north-eastern states, despite accounting for more than 55% of these households are excluded from this analysis because a very significant proportion of looms in these states are operated non-commercially as a ‘part of the culture across all social groups’ and primarily to meet domestic fabric requirements. Weaving and other handloom activities in the selected states, on the other side, are guided primarily by commercial considerations. Alternatively, we can use the proportion of all adult handloom workers and full-time weavers as criteria of selection. The selection of states remains the same under the alternative criterion.
- 10.
For India as a whole, 87.5% of handloom weaver households were rural in 2010. The figure drops to 70.1% if we exclude the seven north-eastern states.
- 11.
- 12.
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Bhattacharya, R., Sen, S. (2019). Handloom in West Bengal: Decline or Dynamism?. In: Bandyopadhyay, S., Dutta, M. (eds) Opportunities and Challenges in Development. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9981-7_17
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