Developing traditions: Crafts and cultural change in modern India, 1851--1922

This dissertation explores the historical creation of craft "traditions" in late 19th and early 20th century Western India. In this period, crafts became central to both critiques of British rule in South Asia and colonial proposals for how to modernize the subcontinent. What, exactly, had happened to crafts under colonial rule and what could be done to save them for national development: these were questions which became intricately involved in attempts to define Indian heritage, whether in imperial or nationalist terms. Examining exhibitions, schools, craft factories and stores which tried to reshape traditional crafts, I argue that crafts provided the context for often furious debates over the nature of Indian society, the direction of the Indian economy, and the need for a national culture in the face of rapidly changing tastes. Specifically, I examine four areas in which change was most evident in crafts: design, techniques of production, organization of production, and consumption. Through efforts in these areas, concerned outsiders---both British and Indian---drew together disparate practices and products into a single category of crafts, marked less by qualities inherent in objects themselves than by a distinctive relationship between artisanal labor and specific goods. The category "crafts" did not exist in actual fact: it was discursively and materially produced through attempts to define and shape objects and practices. Once produced, however, it had real power. Discursively, crafts had an important role in shaping nationalist arguments about Indian deindustrialization under colonial rule. More materially, the category of crafts influenced economic planning, driving and dividing development agendas to this day. By tracing the cultural creation of an economic category---crafts---this dissertation aims to draw new connections between economic and cultural history. Such connections not only help to explain the colonial-era attention to traditional crafts alongside more pressing concerns with modern industrialization. They also provide help to contextualize Mohandas Gandhi's influential khadi campaigns of the 1920s---campaigns which, for all their striking innovations, were built on cultural and economic understandings of the "crafts question" built up over the previous seventy years.