Indian Textile Quotes

Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores.

The first and the most exciting thing for me as someone who has studied growth across countries from a macro perspective was that there is something truly unique about the Indian development model. I call this the ‘precocious development model’, since a precocious child does things far ahead of its time—in both the good and bad sense. Political scientists have often observed that India is a complete outlier in having sustained democracy at very low levels of income, low levels of literacy, with deep social fissures, and with a highly agrarian economy. Almost no country in the world has managed that under these conditions. I think the only continuous democracies have all been small countries (Costa Rica, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius and Botswana) with higher levels of literacy and fewer social divisions. The second part of the precocious model is that it entails not just precocious politics but also precocious economics. There are many ways of explaining this precocious economics model, but I focus on two. Most countries grow by either specializing in or exploiting their minerals—as in the old model—and in some cases, exploiting their geography. But most of the post-war growth experiences have come about by becoming manufacturing powerhouses, especially starting with low-skill labour and going up the value-added spectrum. Korea, Taiwan and China are classic examples, specializing in textiles and clothing initially and now becoming major exporters of electronics, cars, IT products, etc.

To put it in somewhat contradictory terms, true tea existed only before the advent of the tea ceremony. After the coming of tea, when deformation came to be consciously sought, common everyday beauty disappeared and unnatural manipulation began. This meant the demise of the beauty of tea. Every country, according to its historical and geographical conditions, has its own peculiar character. India is characterized by intellect, China by ready action and Japan by aesthetic perception - the three splendors of the East. Indians are adept at thinking, Chinese at acting and Japanese at appreciating art. In Europe, France is close to Japan, Judaism to China and Germany to India. In Germany, however, the intellect tends to be philosophical rather than religious. While there may be many intrinsic contradictions, I still think that there is probably no country like Japan whose people live in surroundings composed of specially chosen objects. Behind it all is undoubtedly some sort of educated taste or standard of beauty. In Korea, the number of monochrome pieces in white or black glaze is stupendous. there are no intricate designs featuring a multitude of colors. the same is true for Korean textiles, which are undyed. Everyone wears white clothing.

Robert Clive, one of the architects of British India, got married in St Mary’s Church. But that was much later. The very first marriage recorded in the register, on 4 November 1680, is that of Elihu Yale with Catherine Hynmer. Yale was the governor of the Fort from 1687 to 1692. It was during his tenure that the corporation for Madras and the post of the mayor were created, and the supreme court, which evolved over time into the present-day Madras high court, was set up. But despite an eventful stint, Yale was sacked because he used his position for private profit—he was engaged in an illegal diamond trade in Madras through an agent called Catherine Nicks. Yet he stayed on in Madras for seven more years, having packed off his wife to England. He lived in the same house with Mrs Nicks, fathering four children with her, and a Portuguese mistress called Hieronima de Paivia, who also bore him a son. He finally returned to London in 1699, an immensely wealthy man. As he busied himself spending the money he had made in India, a cash-starved school in the American colony of Connecticut requested him for a donation. The Yale family had lived in Connecticut for a long time before returning to England in 1652 when Elihu Yale was three years old. So when the college sought financial assistance, he shipped across nine bales of exquisite Indian textiles, 417 books and a portrait of King George I. The school kept the books and raised £562 from his other donations and, in gratitude, decided to rename itself after him. Thus was born Yale University, with the help of ill-gotten wealth amassed in Madras.

But the innovation that would most transform the subcontinent—and its economic relationship to the rest of the world—did not involve separating the seeds from their fibers; every society that domesticated cotton for textile use ultimately developed some kind of mechanical gin. What made Indian cotton unique was not the threads themselves, but rather their color. Making cotton fiber receptive to vibrant dyes like madder, henna, or turmeric was less a matter of inventing mechanical contraptions as it was dreaming up chemistry experiments. The waxy cellulose of the cotton fiber naturally repels vegetable dyes. (Only the deep blue of indigo—which itself takes its name from the Indus Valley where it was first employed as a dye—affixes itself to cotton without additional catalysts.) The process of transforming cotton into a fabric that can be dyed with shades other than indigo is known as “animalizing” the fiber, presumably because so much of it involves excretions from ordinary farm animals. First, dyers would bleach the fiber with sour milk; then they attacked it with a range of protein-heavy substances: goat urine, camel dung, blood. Metallic salts were then combined with the dyes to create a mordant that permeated the core of the fiber. The result was a fabric that could both display brilliant patterns of color and retain that color after multiple washings.

The opium was then sold to the Chinese in exchange for goods that were sold back in Europe. It solved the EIC’s silver problem but destroyed the Indian economy. Cheap textiles made on an industrial scale by British mills devastated the old artisan-made textile industry.

Up to now, gold bullion had represented 75 per cent of the EIC’s imports to Bengal, and was the source for much of the ‘prodigious ancient riches of the province’. But now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases. India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas to London

East India Company created an army that conquered Bengal and ruled the subcontinent for over a century in order to protect its interests in the Indian textile trade. Exxon shaped American foreign policy and environmental regulation for decades. Today, Facebook’s algorithms determine what we see and know, shaping the very discourse that citizens engage in. This suggests that, at the very least, businesses should be cautious before seeking to craft society’s values—their actions are magnified beyond what any individual could ever hope to achieve. I would go further. Businesses should stay out of the politics game entirely. They do not have access to some essential wisdom about what the common good is. They should instead

was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth

As a donor and member to organizations such as The McCallum Theater and The Children's Discovery Museum of the Desert, Kaarina Sidi participates in their children’s programs with her family. As a member she is also attends events with her kids at The Living Desert and Indian Wells Tennis Gardens.