Weaving Hierarchies: Handloom Weavers in Early Twentieth Century United Provinces

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Weaving Hierarchies: Handloom Weavers in Early Twentieth Century United Provinces combines primarily historical data with extensive field research to give us new insights into the structures of artisan trades and the lives of weaving communities specifically located in the weaving hubs of Azamgarh, Gorakhpur and Faizabad divisions of eastern Uttar Pradesh during the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, it fills an important gap in the existing labour historiography, which has tended to focus more on 'modern' sites of labour such as factories, mines and plantations. The book explores the modernity/tradition dichotomy as it has been applied and amplified in our understanding of development, demonstrating that some of the categorizations fundamental to these understandings are in fact profoundly misplaced. Indeed, the argument regarding processes of 'localization' made here is particularly promising in the sense that it does not posit localization in opposition to but in tandem with global processes. The book explores historically grounded, tension-filled categories like class, caste and community, and perhaps its most significant contribution lies in tracing the history of the Julaha community.

Santosh Kumar Rai is a historian of modern Indian history and serves as Professor at the Department of History, University of Delhi.

IN LIFE, ONE TENDS to 'look back' and reminisce about places, people, and events. Being part of a migrants' network makes it easier to correlate and write a history of my ghar-debat. Le. eastern Uttar Pradesh, particularly about those who also have had to face the tragedy of dislocation and migration, albeit in circumstances altogether different from mine. At the same time, the guilt of separation and sense of association forces one to write about that 'past'! I must confess that my initial obsession with this topic began during my post-graduation days, when I came across a research paper being discussed in class by my teacher (who happened to be the author). about my ghar. This discussion evoked in me the childhood memories of mysterious personalities; it was not in a vacuum, as it is only the prosaic, ordinary things in real life that form our imaginations and nostalgia. In my head, I could picture an old, fragile, and somewhat reserved Jumman Mian going towards the fields, and Hazra Bi clearing grain in my house during harvest. In a village of predominantly higher-caste Hindu Bhumihars, these Muslim Julahas (weavers) were the 'other-a people different from 'us'-the remnants of a 'world lost forever' Decades later, when I returned to my roots to conduct fieldwork for my doctoral research, Jumman Mian had already passed away, and Hazra Bi had become frail, old, and poorer. She had lost her thatched house to natural calamities, and I realized that she was not the only one in such a dismal situation. While traveling on NH29, which connects Varanasi to Gorakhpur via Maunath Bhanjan (along with its arterial roads to different towns and villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh), I discovered that a whole lot of her brethren (the Julahas) had met with a similar fate. It was on the dusty tracks of eastern Uttar Pradesh that I discovered what globalization really meant for the common man, how the peasantry and the artisans of the developing world had been affected by it, and how development has bypassed them.

So, the points of departure to historically situate the writing of this book in the second decade of the twenty-first century are the crisscrossing forces of glocalization, nationalism, and radicalism across the globe, affecting the fate of common humans. In this study, the category of 'weavers' is predominantly Muslim, diversified in the specializations of cotton, silk, and carpet weaving. This diversification could be further sourced to the region of origin, the history of conversion, class background, sectarian beliefs, and migration of the people. The dominant representation of the community as socially unchanging and fiercely traditionalist (vis-à-vis modernity) has been, in a way, as persistent as the colonial stereotype of the bigoted, turbulent, and fanatical Julaha. Yet, what remains is the issue of how local artisanal communities address and respond to the experiences of this magnitude. The local affiliations demonstrate the merits of strategies encompassing a variety of methods grounded in the local context of the communities negotiating the process.