Wendt on Singh, _The Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Eastern India: A History of Survival_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (April 2007)

Vipul Singh, _The Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Eastern India: A 
History of Survival_. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2005. ix 
+ 118 pp. Rs.250 (hardback), ISBN: 81-8069-235-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Ian C. Wendt, Department of History, 
Washington State University.


_The Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Eastern India_ is the product of 
Vipul Singh's master's thesis (MPhil) at Delhi University in 1996. 
Singh is a Lecturer of Medieval History at Motilal Nehru College 
(University of Delhi). His doctoral and later research has focused on 
topics related to the ecological history of eighteenth-century 
northern India. _Artisans_ reflects the mass and quality of a 
competent master's thesis. It is a modest, incremental contribution 
to the historiography of artisans in early colonial India. The 
reviewer regrets that he cannot wholeheartedly recommend it to a 
broad readership, but it will be of interest to social and economic 
historians of South Asia interested in seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, particularly textile production and trade. Sadly, the book 
does not seem to be available from vendors outside of India, so 
readers ought to contact the publisher at publishing at conceptpub.com.

Singh's brief book focuses on Patna between 1765 and 1811. It is 
based on published primary sources, predominantly Francis Buchanan's 
detailed survey of the region in 1811. Given the limited volume of 
historical scholarship on artisans in seventeenth and eighteenth 
century India, and the real paucity of such work on the Gangetic 
plain, this book contains a variety of interesting data and 
descriptions that contribute to our knowledge of the social and 
economic history of the region at the rise of English colonial rule. 
The analysis in the book is a standard narrative of British colonial 
aggression, monopolistic trade policies, and handicraft industry 
decline. The author shows an awareness of other historiographic 
debates over the complex historical experiences of Indian regions 
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But they do not shape 
his analysis.

The first chapter reads very much like a gazetteer, with a short 
description of the geography of Patna and a long narration of the 
political and administrative fortunes of Bihar, particularly Patna, 
under the Great Mughal emperors followed by the East India Company. 
It concludes with a summation of European competition in Patna during 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leading toward English 
dominance after 1765.

The second chapter focuses on artisan communities, especially textile 
producers, in Patna and their production methods. In connection with 
this chapter, Appendix II contains a very interesting tabulation of 
the artisans of Patna from Buchanan's 1811 survey. The chapter and 
these data show Patna to have been a very large urban area with 
surrounding suburbs and villages filled with artisans of all kinds. 
Textile producers predominated. Singh gives interesting descriptions 
of the various artisans. The reviewer was struck, however, by a 
common oversight the author shares with many historians. Singh 
describes spinners in an intriguing paragraph on pp. 34-35, but 
discounts them in this manner: "Since spinning was comparatively a 
lighter and less technical job it was quite often done by women." 
Singh displays the common notion that South Asia's artisans were 
predominantly professional men. To be fair, he does indeed note women 
contributing to a handful of artisan activities, and describes the 
importance of the entire household in production. But he overlooks a 
startling fact -- according to his own data, female spinners 
(numbering 330,396) constituted no less than 71 percent of all 
artisans in Patna in 1811. They outnumbered all other textile 
producers 4 to 1. Notwithstanding this oversight, the chapter 
contains useful descriptions of diverse artisan producers in Patna.

The third chapter briefly describes the caste organization of Patna's 
artisans, noting jajmani commercial relations in rural areas. It 
concludes with a discussion of advances (dadni) made to weavers to 
produce cloth for commercial markets, with an argument about the 
oppressions placed on weavers by the monopolistic East India Company.

The fourth chapter is a disjointed outline of European trade in Bihar 
and Bengal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- 
Portuguese, Dutch, English and French. It is based on secondary 
scholarship, primarily J.N. Sarkar, Om Prakash and H.K. Naqvi. It 
describes all major trade goods, focusing on cotton and silk 
textiles, saltpetre, opium and sugar.

The fifth chapter quickly summarizes the negative effects of English 
colonialism and monopolistic trade policies on Patna's artisans. 
Unfortunately the chapter is too brief to conduct a systematic 
analysis of the topic, relying instead on brief anecdotal evidence. 
The chapter does however contain an interesting historiographic 
summation of the debate over deindustrialization in 
nineteenth-century India. He describes Morris's arguments as well as 
the critiques of scholars like Thorner, Matsui, Habib, and Bagchi.

Singh concludes that colonialism was the cause of significant 
economic decline and immeasurable subjective harm to Bihar's artisans 
as early as 1765 and continuing through the nineteenth century. Over 
the last couple of generations historians have produced a growing 
array of interesting scholarship on South Asia's artisans, textile 
producers and international trade from the sixteenth through the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vipul Singh's thesis is a modest 
contribution to that body, informing our knowledge of Patna.


Ian Wendt is currently revising his dissertation, "The Social Fabric: 
Textile Industry and Community in Early Modern South India," Ph.D. 
dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2005, for publication as a 
monograph.

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