Foreign trade and the artisans in colonial

India: A study of leather

Tirthankar Roy

Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research

Bombay

Most kinds of crafts in mid-nineteenth century India can be classified into

two types: commodities and non-marketed services.’ Whether a craft func-
tioned as a service or as a commodity depended on the product and on the
producer’s caste. Leather and agricultural implements were industries for
which a clientele outside the village, or a market
inside it, seem to have
been rare. On the other hand, in textiles it was caste that usually distin-
guished the sellers of a commodity from the provides of a service. The
coarse weaving practised by the ’menial’ castes of central India was part of
the diversified services these castes were supposed to perform for the
village. They were not ’weavers’ by caste, and the fact that they rarely
specialised as weavers on leaving the village, would suggest that there were
implicit barriers to their specialising. In contrast, weavers by caste freely
sold cloth, whether at the village bazaar or to the merchant engaged in
long-distance trade, and when migrating tended to settle, and were settled
by local rulers, as weavers.’
Both sorts of crafts were transformed in the colonial period, though
historians have been mainly concerned with textiles, an industry already
commercialised. On textiles, recent scholarship has argued that expansion
in trade and infrastructure in the second half of the nineteenth century did
’
By ’service’ here is meant serving a patron or benefactor and not the activities that
constitute the tertiary sector. ’Service’ is opposed to ’commodity’ which refers to any product
of labour that is sold. The distinction is generally useful in classifying craftsmen’s labour, but
can become blurred under fairly
rigid contracts that leave the producer with little independ-
ence.
2
Artisan castes in this sense were typically those identifiable with the manufacture and
trade of specific products. Over sufficiently long periods of time, these identities and the
correspondence between caste and occupation could evolve. The identities assumed here,
therefore, are legitimate only in the context of the late nineteenth century conditions.
Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Dharma Kumar for many valuable comments and sugges-
tions on an earlier draft of the essay.
462

not quite destroy Indian weaving, but induced institutional and technological
changes by integrating markets, making labour mobile and hastening
urbanisation.1 This line of reasoning obviously lends itself to generalisations.
Trade, markets and railways might well have transformed a whole range of
industries in the same way as they did weaving and, more importantly,
could have commercialised the more or less custom-bound services, thus
forcing the rural society to adapt.
Leather was probably the most important of the quasi-services that
became commercialised during the colonial period. The following descrip-
tion in Watt’s Dictionary of Economic Products can be taken to be fairly
typical of the industry as it existed before the 1860s in most parts of India:
Each village has its own workers in leather, who are also, to a large
extent, their own tanners; and it is part of their recognized duties to
keep their patrons in boots, and to cure and make up the hides required
for the leathern buckets made for irrigation.4

Domestic trade was not absent, for there was an urban and an army
demand for leather, but this was relatively small. The situation was vastly
different in the last decade of the century. By then, India was one of the
world’s largest exporters of tanned hides and an importer of boots and
shoes from Europe. The scale of export trade, at Rs 60 million in 1890, was
many times that of domestic rural-urban trade, estimated at Rs 8 million
by a source cited in Watt.’ The change was an outcome of expansion in the
leather industry and improvements in tanning technology in the West. It is
tempting to say that leather was an example of India turning into a raw
material supplier and finished goods importer in the world market. But
that would be a trivial conclusion, besides being a half-truth.
First, the process was not complete, and imports replaced domestic
leather goods to a very limited extent. Second, the real impact of trade was
felt not in the extent of specialisation, but in the way technologies and
production relations in both tanning and leather working changed at the
3
See Konrad Specker, ’Madras Handlooms in the Nineteenth Century’, The Indian Eco-
nomic and Social History Review, (hereafter IESHR), Vol. 26 (2), April-June 1989,
pp. 131-66; Sumit Guha, ’The Handloom Industry of Central India: 1825-1950’, IESHR,
Vol. 26 (3), July-September 1989, pp. 297-318; Peter Hametty, ’Deindustrialization Revisited:
The Handloom Weavers of the Central Provinces of India’, Modern Asian Studies (hereafter
MAS), Vol. 25 (3), 1991, pp. 455-510; Haruka Yanagisawa, ’The Handloom Industry and Its
Market-structure: The Case of the Madras Presidency in the First Half of the Twentieth
Century’, IESHR, Vol. 30 (1), January-March 1993, pp. 1-28; Douglas Haynes, ’The Dyna-
mics of Continuity in Indian Domestic Industry: Jari Manufacturing in Surat, 1900-47’,
IESHR, Vol. 23 (2), April-June 1986, pp. 127-49; T. Roy, Artisans and Industrialization.
Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century, Delhi, 1993.
4 George Watt, A Dictionary of Economic Products of India, London, 1890, p. 613.
5 An estimate based on data in Review of the Inland Trade of India, 1888-89, cited in ibid.
 463

imperative of a much enlarged market. And third, for some of the most
numerous and exploited castes, the process involved a social transition as
the market opened up avenues of mobility which the society had previously
denied them.
The present article will sketch this transition in brad outline. The
processes described here seem to have been taking place over a large
region integrated by trade and transportation, though detailed regional
histories can qualify this impression. The period begins about the 1870s,
when exports increased rapidly, and ends before the Second World War.
The essay is divided in three sections: the first describes the producers and
the technology prior to the expansion in the export trade; the second shows
how exports affected tanning, in particular, by creating a market for the
tanner’s labour, and how technologies responded to the merchants’ need to
control quality; the third outlines changes in leather manufactures in
response to increased competition and shortages of raw material. A con-
cluding section connects up recent advances in textile history with features
of the leather industry to develop hypotheses about crafts as a whole.

Tanning as it was
.

A outline of the state of leather manufacturing in the early nineteenth

rough
century would be as follows. Tanning was almost wholly a rural industry.
The government-owned urban slaughterhouse was a later institution, so
the raw hide came exclusively from ’fallen’, that is, naturally dead cattle or
murdari as opposed to halali in north Indian trade parlance. Such cattle
were, of course, all rural. The ’green’ hide, or the hide in raw state, if not
cured within a few hours of death becomes irretrievable as leather. The
risk is so great that even in the age of the railways, the green hide was
never transported. This necessitated the tanner, who was usually the curer,
to stay in close proximity to the cattle population.&dquo; The tanning substances,
moreover, grew in the wild, were collected by the craftsmen and were rarely
traded. Bark of the ubiquitous babul (Acacia arabica), nuts of myrobalan
(Terminalia chebula), bark of the south’s avaram (Cassia auriculata) were
the best-known tannin, whereas curing was usually done with saline earth.7
The raw material frequently drew tanning into the neighbourhood of
forests, which in turn led to the somewhat more delicate industry in skins
6
This also explains the stubborn persistence of crude curing methods even as tanning came
to the towns.
7
The tannin just mentioned were the ’big three’, whose usage continues to date. Other
considerably popular tannin included several varieties of Acacia, particularly cutch and wattle
barks. A detailed description of processes and materials can be found in M.V. Edwards, R. L.
Badhwar and A.C. Dey, The Vegetable Tanning Materials of India and Burma, Indian Forest
Records (New Series), Chemistry and Minor Forest Products, Vol. 1 (2), Delhi, 1952.
However, by the time this informative report was published, some indigenous processes had
become extinct.
464

of wild animals. Thus, regions like the northern borders of Rajputana and
parts of Kumaon Himalayas became famous for sambar and kakar skins,
further strengthening the contact between tanners and the forest.’ In the
largely forested regions like the Central Provinces:
the tanning Chamars are frequently to be found in a separate little
hamlet, the huts of which form a ring, in the middle of which are set the
pits, wells and large earthen vessels, belonging to the trade. These
settlements are generally in the neighbourhood of malguzari jungles,
whence the supply of tanning material can be drawn.9
The ’respectable distance from the villages of the caste people&dquo;&dquo; was
universal and necessitated by the Hindus’ aversion to the craft because of
its association with flesh, while the Muslims found the Chamars’ habit of
keeping ’that foul beast, the pig’, equally offensive.&dquo; Within the colony,
there was a tendency towards cooperative work and using the pits jointly.
Similar descriptions of the tanners’ colony suggest that while the craft
needed space, it was perpetually constrained by limited access to it.,’
The rural location of tanning was reinforced by caste. The Chamars of
the northern plains from Bengal to Punjab, the Mahars (Dheds) of central
India and Gujarat, the Dhors of Bombay Deccan, the Madigas of the
Telugu countryside, and the Chakkiliyans of the Tamil country, were
castes that performed a variety of services in the village. Coarse weaving
was one of these, agricultural labour in the busy seasons was another,

scavenging and associated leather processes were a third.&dquo; The Chamar

was known to thatch roofs and occasionally carry palanquins. The Chamarin
.was a midwife. The tanning castes were also found to be the village

8
A.C. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries of the United Provinces, Allahabad, 1908, p. 99;
Government of United Provinces, Industrial Survey of the United Provinces, Allahabad, 1924,
Almora District report.
9
Government of the Central Provinces and Berar, Report of the Industrial Survey of the
Central Provinces and Berar, Nagpur, 1908-1909.
10
A.C. Chatterton, A Monograph on Tanning and Working on Leather in the Madras
Presidency, Madras, 1904, p. 10.
11 W. Crooke, The Natives of Northern India, Archibald Constable, London, 1907, p. 122.
12
’Village chamars have to depend upon zamindars to have a suitable place for their
tanning ....For a small man in the villages it is not easy
... and the tanner will have to
pay ...
heavy penalty.’ This statement appears in Chowdhary Mukhtar Singh, Cottage and
Small-Scale Industries, Kitabistan, Allahabad, 1947, p. 156. The author, however, did not
substantiate it.
13
Apropos the tanners’ involvement in agriculture, occasional references in the caste
anthologies used in this paper suggest that the various ways the leather castes were paid back
by their patrons included crop share and/or rights to rent-free land. In some areas this seems
to have evolved into tenancy of an undefined sort, though usually the tanners were field
labourers. See, for example, H.V. Nanjundayya and L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer, The Mysore
Tribes and Castes, Mysore, 1931, Vol. IV, ’Madiga’.
 465

musicians, performing at festivals.&dquo;’ Denzil

Ibbetson, author of a book on
Punjab castes, hypothesised that the integration of the vagrant and the
tribal into settled rural life involved an evolution wherein scavenging,
tanning and weaving were adjacently placed occupations. In 1916, he could
observe various stages of this process completed in the Gangetic plains.’S
Coarse weaving and tanning did not require great skills and hence a
specialist artisan caste. They were also ideal as off-season employment for
agricultural labour. The Mahar was additionally the village watchman and
the general purpose labourer, commandeered ’whenever a pair of shoulders
are required to bear some burden, it may be the revenue records from field
to field or a petty official’s kit. 116 As if to justify their function in rural
society, the tanners also invariably carried a degraded image. There is, in
fact, a surprising constancy in this image across distant regions in India.&dquo;
When a cow died in a central Indian village, the owner tied it on a rope,
dragged it as far to the edge of the village as he could, and informed the
Mahar. The latter then dragged it out of the village and flayed it. He could
14
The Madigas were known to play the drum, see Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning,
p. 10; the north Indian Chamar was a drum-player too, see William Crooke, The Tribes and
Castes of the North-Western Provinces, Vol. II, Calcutta, 1896, p. 196. There are many other
sporadic instances of the link between tanning and music, of which perhaps the most
extraordinary is the following. Descriptions of the central Bengal silk industry, c. 1900,
mention the prodigiously talented Dubraj. He was a Chamar in origin, began his life as a
drummer, turned into a composer of verse though he was not literate, became the leader of a
’gang of impromptu singers ),’Kabis
( and later in life, apprenticed himself to a Muslim weaver
of Baluchar. At his death, Dubraj was the most famous master-weaver in figured patterns.
See N.G. Mukherji, A Monograph on the Silk Fabrics of Bengal, Calcutta, p. 42. This link,
indeed, carries an insight into an unwritten side of rural life. Technologically, the association
is obvious: the making of drums and several other instruments involved tanning skins or
working with guts. It is, therefore, possible that tanners tended to make instruments and then
became musicians themselves. It is also possible that tanners by caste were recruited from
musicians, indicating probable tribalist roots of tanners in some areas. There is involved here
a problem in the evolution of products and occupations: which leather article came first, the

water-bag used by the peasants for irrigation or the prehistoric drum?

15
Thus:

The Khatik who is a scavenger in the east turns into a tanner in the west; we see the Koli
Chamar abandon leather-making and take to weaving, and turn into a Chamar-Julaha or
Bunia; we see that in some districts most of the Mochis are weavers rather than leather-
makers.

Denzil Ibbetson, Panjab Castes, Lahore, 1916, p. 267. Consistent with this hypothesis, the
vagrant Paraiyans of Madras were increasingly turning towards leather over the period of the
1911-31 censuses.
16
M.L. Darling, Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village, Bombay, 1934, p. 265.
17
They were ’wily, filthy, and of low morals,’ as numerous north Indian proverbs about the
Chamar expressed. Proverbial too was the landed and other upper castes’ weakness for the
Chamarin or her southern counterpart. Two representative compilations of proverbs and lore
are, Herbert Risley, The People of India, Calcutta, 1908; and Edgar Thurston, Tribes and
Castes of Southern India, Madras, 1909, under ’Chakkiliyan’.
466

’keep the hide free in return for services performed for the village com-
munity.’&dquo; The hide was then cured and either tanned by the scavengers
themselves, or sold to tanners. The latter, in turn, were themselves duty-
bound to supply their ’patrons’ with a fixed number of shoes, ox-goads and
irrigation implements, or sold the leather to the leather workers, who were
thus duty-bound. The intervention of a market, or the extent of division of
labour, seem to have depended on the region and, relatedly, on the
tanning processes followed in the different parts. In the villages of the
northern plains, the three actors quite often collapsed into one caste, the
Chamar.&dquo; The Madigas and the Chakkiliyans of the south too were fre-
quently leather workers as well.&dquo;’ In Gujarat, flayers and tanners merged,
but leather artisans, Mochis, were distinct. In the Deccan, flayers were the
Mahars, tanning was done by the Dhors, and leather was the Chamars’
responsibility.&dquo; This increased division of labour might account for the
great reputation of Dhor.bag tannage in the Satara-Poona area, the origin
of the Kolhapuri sandal. Wherever division of labour was elementary or
absent, the tanner was engaged in making the simplest kind of articles with
an essentially local demand, chiefly the water-bag (mote) for irrigation
and, occasionally, crude footwear. On the other hand, the separation
between tanners and leather workers was decisive whenever the article
involved some sort of skill, decorated footwear, for example, and had an
urban clientele.
It was this last stage in the leather chain, manufacture of finished goods,
that was considerably more commercialised and dispersed. The leather
craftsman, the Mochi, was also socially better off, as he did not have to
touch flesh. The product that seems to have been the most thoroughly
integrated into urban trade was a covered footwear with or without decor-
ation, the indigenous shoe appearing universally as one made of reddish
leather with a curled front, thin sole and covering the feet to a little above
the toes. This ubiquitous article was nowhere a mass consumable or working,
class attire, but was worn by the relatively wealthy, the city-dweller, or
anyone respecting ’the unwritten ordinance which permits [the native] to
doff shoes ... when in the presence of a superior.&dquo;’ In rare instances, this
curled shoe was made in craft towns, came in contact with forms of local

18
Industrial
Survey, Central Provinces, p. 58.
19
For customary exchanges in Punjab, see Darling, Wisdom and Waste, p. 265; in United
Provinces, Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries, p. 99. In the 1870s, the leather artisan, Mochi,
existed as a separate caste only in the towns of northern India, whereas the three occupations,
flayer, tanner and leather artisan, tended to converge in the villages, see M.A. Sherring,
Hindu Tribes and Castes. Vol. II, 1879, ’Chamar’, ’Mochi’.
20
Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, pp. 10-11.
21 A. Guthrie, Report on Leather Industries of the Bombay Presidency, Bombay, 1910.
22
T.N. Mukharji, Arts and Manufactures of India, Calcutta, 1888, p. 302. Mukharji, the
author of this eminent book, was a curator of the Indian Museum at Calcutta.
 467

embroidery, with artisans engaged in gold thread making, and was trans-
formed into a richly designed object. Lucknow had developed this craft of
gilded and embroidered shoes to excellence; other examples of a fusion
between footwear and zari come from Jaipur, Delhi, Raichur and Chanda.2;
Lucknow, in the process, had become ’a hide emporium from which
exports are made.’24 Further, many northern towns housed garrisons which
needed the leather craftsmen for saddlery and harness. The cities also used
leather jars to carry ghee and oil, these bags were, in the 1880s, ’familiar to
every one who has once passed through an Indian bazaar.&dquo;’ In Gujarat, an
ancient sea trade in both unwrought and worked leather survived till the
early colonial period. The best-known description of this trade belongs to
Marco Polo who had noticed, among other objects, ’unicorn’ hides in the
merchandise. Nevertheless, references to leather goods entering long-
distance or urban trade remain rather rare; the final output of the leather
artisan was usually rural. Tanned hides and skins are not commonly en-
countered objects in internal trade prior to the railways; there may well
have been an aversion to carrying such goods over long distances.
The tanning processes were exceedingly simple, even if backbreaking,
partly explaining the ease with which tanning could be combined with
other labour; also they varied relatively little. Flaying was usually done
with a short and sharp knife called rampi. This implement, considered
much too sharp by observers of the practice,&dquo; acquired a certain notoriety
in the nineteenth century as increasing ’butcher’s cuts’ impaired the worth
of the exportable hide. The shape of the knife had somewhat earlier
changed in Europe. Curing was done by either sun drying, or salting the
hide. In the first case, the hide was merely left in the sun, flesh side up, for
several weeks till it was completely drained of moisture and bacteria. The
process yielded a crumpled and hard substance, so hard that the subsequent
soaking and softening became difficult and hazardous.2’ A better method
was air drying where the hide was stretched on a frame and kept under
shade. But the most preferred by tanners was a salt cure where salt
solutions were painted repeatedly on the flesh side of the hide. But as
neither eating salt, nor frames, nor artificial shade was accessible to the
average village curer, the larger part of Indian hides were sukties, or sun

Ibid.,
23 pp. 301-302.
24
William Hoey, A Monograph on Trade and Manufactures in Northern India, American
Methodist Mission, Lucknow, 1880, p. 27.
25
See ibid., p. 138, on the kuppesaz, the maker and seller of leather jars in Lucknow. In
Punjab, the craft involved a group of artisans who once functioned almost like a caste, but
appear to have become extinct through the inter-War censuses, see Ibbetson, Panjab Castes,
pp. 301-302.
26
For a reference, see Government of Bombay, Report of the Bombay Leather Survey,
1960, Bombay, p. 21.
27
Government of India, The Hides Cess Enquiry Committee, 1929, Vol. II (Evidence),
M.B. Hudlikar, Harcourt Butler Technological Institute, Cawnpore (Kanpur), pp. 54-55.
468

dried. It is reported in at least one source that circa 1880-1914, the usual
method of curing in India tended to shift from wet-salted to dry.2&dquo; This
remains rather an isolated statement, but, if true, the tendency can be
explained in terms of a preference in the export market for raw hides with
the minimum of processing, and possibly, a desire to avoid false weights
added via wet-salting, ’a native science’.
Tanning began with preliminary soaking, first in water to desalt the skin,
then in lime solutions to remove hair, a stage avoided with skins of wild
animals, and finally in tannin solutions, under close and extremely long
contact with the bark of the required tree. The skin was placed between
barks, and soaked in bark solutions, ’good, strong liquor’ as they were
called in the European tanneries, with the solution periodically changed
and made stronger. This process could either happen in a pit, or the skin
was sewn up in a bag containing the solution which was repeatedly changed.

Lastly, the leather was finished, that is, oiled, smoothened, sheared and
dyed. The longer the soaking the better for the hide, but in villages the
processes could, in fact, be much simpler: the skin was merely wrapped in
bark and soaked in water and almost never finished. On an average, the
tanning process took about 30-50 days to complete, though the time
depended on the material used, the state of the cured hide, and on whether
the process involved bag or bark tanning, the former being somewhat
quicker. By the end of the nineteenth century, chrome tanning had been
invented in the US, cutting down the time to as little as a day. In India,
Alfred Chatterton, technical adviser to the Madras government, introduced it
in demonstrations.&dquo; But not until the First World War did chrome tanning
become popular, and even then it was practised only in factories in a few
towns. It needed large investments;imported tannin, and the leather cost
more (it was also longer lasting). But even if not popular locally, the global
stride of chrome tanning did affect the demand for Indian hides in the
world market, as we shall see.
A slow transition in the old state of affairs began in the 1830s with the
first exports of Indian hides to Europe. That India had a surplus to sell to
the world was well-known. In a short and informative monograph about
Bengal written in 1804, the civil servant Colebrooke argued the possibility
of England replacing her supplies of hides from Brazil by those available in
Bengal,.30 But it was not until the 1870s that trade surged. In fact, several
circumstances combined in one decade to create this boom that did not

28
Imperial Institute Committee for India, Reports on Hides and Skins, London, 1920,
p. 90.
29
On this initiative, see Padmini Swaminathan, ’State Intervention in Industrialisation: A
Case Study of the Madras Presidency’, IESHR, Vol. 29 (4), October-December 1992,
pp. 479-506.
30
H.T. Colebrooke, Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal, Calcutta,
1804, p. 115.
 469

seem to wane till long afterward. The growth owed much to the repeal of a
3 per cent export duty on hides in 1875. Public auctions in hides began in
London about this time. Trade in hides was ’immensely stimulated’ during
and after the devastating southern famines of 1876-77 and 1896.&dquo; The
decade witnessed substantial progress in the trunk railways connecting
Madras, Bombay and Calcutta with the major hides- and skins-producing
regions. Germany’s advances in mineral dyeing, again a contemporary
development, made her the only country able to manufacture coloured
leather. The conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war and resumption of
normalcy saw Germany re-enter the world market. In the last quarter of
the century Germany and Austria were the main buyers of Indian raw
hides, a trade organised by a group of ’German or quasi-German’ firms
based in Calcutta and forming a strong cartel. 32 In America at the same
time, chrome tanning created a demand for raw or semi-tanned hides for
which India was the ideal source.
India possessed the largest cattle population in the world, and despite
the near absence of meat consumption and hence of slaughtering, India
had one of the world’s largest supplies of hides and skins due to high
natural mortality. From 1890 onwards, leather constituted 5-9 per cent of
total private merchandise exports, though the composition was changing
gradually from cured to tanned and, later, to processed leather (Table 1).
The importance of the trade dropped sharply after the Great Depression.
But by then, the creation of a single market for Indian hides had-forced
traders to intervene in tanning to regulate internal supply and quality.

The Effects on Tanning

Two changes, both locational, are immediately discernible. First, the direc-
tion of internal trade changed. The major source of raw hides was always
the region formed of Punjab, the United Provinces and Central Provinces,
and west Bihar. If earlier tanning was mainly local, now undressed hides
31
See J.R. Martin, Monograph on Tanning and Working in Leather in the Bombay
Presidency, Bombay, 1903, p. 4 on famine mortality forcing exports. Generally on the
significance of the decade, 1870s, see also Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 4.
32
The cartel, which apparently dominated foreign trade in Indian hides, was broken in the
First World War. The subsequent trade history is briefly as follows. During the War, the
British tanners realized the worth of Indian supplies, and got the Imperial Institute to write a
plea for a discriminatory export duty on Indian kips under the Imperial Preference. The
Institute obliged, ’imperial interests demand that the trade ... should be ...
securely in the
hands of British firms’, Imperial Institute, Reports on Hides and Skins, p. 5. In 1919, a duty of
15 per cent was imposed, with a 10 per cent rebate for export within the empire. The duty
does not seem to have destroyed German trade which did revive, but possibly pushed it
towards the better grades of hides, Minutes of Evidence Recorded by the Indian Fiscal
Commission, Calcutta, 1923, p. 351. Also, the trader composition almost certainly diversified
in the inter-War period, with more British and American participation, and the rise of Indian
firms who had started as subcontractors of the Germans. More on this last tendency later.
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 471

(cattle) began to move out of this region towards Calcutta and Bombay and
undressed skins (goats and sheep) from the north as well as the south
towards Madras. Second, as a natural development, tanneries were set up
at the ports and major points of hide trade. The opening of the trunk
railways was a clear inducement for this movement. Railway stations at
source had special godowns for hides. The agents of merchants in the port
cities operated at these points; Bombay’s merchants, for example, had
agents stationed as far as Peshawar, Rawal Pindi, Aligarh and Agra. The
gradual decline in the proportion of cured hides, that is, sun dried in the
village, in total exports (Table 1) is a rough indicator of the urbanisation of
the industry. Indeed, the relative impact of the railways in facilitating trade
was possibly much stronger in tanning than in any other industry. For, the

country tanner was known to have virtually no access to traditional modes

of transportation.;’
But merely a wide transport network was not sufficient in itself. A
steadily expanding trade cannot rely on famine mortality nor on natural
death rates of animals. The market would eventually need to exercise
control on mortality, possible only through slaughterhouses. Centralisation
of slaughtering was also needed to control quality, since the major defects
in Indian hides arose from bad flaying. Municipal slaughterhouses were set
up from about the end of the century, and were in a flourishing state in the
1920s. Slaughtered cattle tended to provide better hides than fallen cattle
not only due to flaying but to the quality of the animal itself. The hide of a
fallen cattle was a mere gift of nature, and came from starved and diseased
animals. The slaughterhouse, on the other hand, was a business, the
prospects of which improved with the possibility of developing a market for
meat. This was the second condition for their success. In the early twentieth
century an export trade to Burma developed in dried oxen and buffalo
meat, and major slaughtering centres in the United Provinces specialised in
this trade.’ Roughly about one-fourth of the estimated 20 million hides
produced annually in the early 1920s came from the slaughterhouse.&dquo; This
was a direct inducement for tanneries to develop in the towns. Centralised

slaughter created a network of merchants to collect dry cattle from the

villages. It allowed the urban tanneries to avoid middlemen and contract
directly with the butchers. It also allowed them to avoid, though partially,
the badly cured hides from the villages and to modernise processes. 36
33
Even as late as the 1950s, the village tanner encountered great resistance to carriage of
his wares by bullock carts, and had to pay higher charges, ’whatever demanded by the vehicle
owner,’ Central Leather Research Institute, Symposium on Tanning as a Small Scale and
Cottage
34
Industry, Madras, 1959, p. 28, in W.N. Pandav’s article on Bombay state.
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of Forrester Walker, Government Harness and
Saddlery Factory, Kanpur, pp. 20-21.
35
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of P.J. Kerr, Veterinary Advisor to the Govern-
ment of Bengal.
36
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of Mehtab Singh, Industrial Surveyor, Delhi,
p. 484; and of bark tanners of Pallavaram, p. 300.
472

For the remaining supplies that still came from ’dead’, a major redefini-
tion of caste roles was under way with the creation of a market. First of all,
flaying was more rarely the right or duty attaching to castes. In some cases
the caste involved refused to accept the duty,&dquo; in others their patrons
refused to part with a product that had now acquired a price. And at the
spiritual level, ’revulsion to consume the carcasses of dead animals is
gaining ground among the scavengers, as a signal to society at large. The
customary exchange was breaking down everywhere. In central India,
’owners of cattle are less disposed to [the] custom [of gifting away
...

carcasses].’ Briggs observed in the north that ’the increased value of

leather has led the landlord to question the chamars’ traditional right to
raw skin.’ Thurston noticed the tendency of the ryots ’to dispense with the
services of family Madigas, and resort to the open market.’ Or, if the hide
was transferred to the Madigas, to demand payment. The Madigas them-

selves began to ’poach on each other’s monopoly of certain houses.’ In

Bombay, the traders tried to enforce a market by insisting that the tanners
enter into a bond promising not to acquire hides except from the traders
The extent of the change can be conveyed by comparing this situation with
Colebrooke’s statement in 1804, when ’the currier often neglects to take
the hides.&dquo;’ By the 1920s, a tannery owner in Bombay could profess
ignorance about ’any custom by which the hide of the dead animals belong
to the chamars or sweepers.’41 And in the south, barring the remoter parts,
the ’qualified kind of serfdom has all but died out’ by the early 1930s.°z
...

There was a curious sidelight to this development. It seems that the

north Indian tanner’s repertoire included the art of poisoning diseased
cattle. By the turn of the century, as hides were nQ longer’plentiful in the
village and customs no longer respected, rumours of its unauthorised usage
were rampant.41 It is not clear how far this allegation was real and how far

37
In parts of Bombay, the Mahars refused to flay animals, ’due to new awakening,’
Bombay Leather Survey, p. 11.
38
So was, interestingly, refusal to play the drum on traditional occasions, Chatterton,
Monograph on Tanning, pp. 10-11.
39
These examples are from Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of A.A. Pillai, Director
of Industries, Madras, p. 332; Thurston, Tribes and Castes of Southern India, ’Madiga’
Industrial Survey, Central Provinces, p. 58; Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, pp. 10-11,
reference to the Madigas; G.W. Briggs, The Chamars, Calcutta, 1920, p. 58; and Indian
Industrial Commission, evidence of R.B. Ewbank, Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Minutes
of Evidence (Bombay Volume), Calcutta, 1918, p. 546.
40
Colebrooke, Remarks on the Husbandry, p. 115.
41
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence, Pratap Pandit, Director of Western India Tannery,
Bombay, p. 388.
42
Nanjundayya and Ananthakrishna Iyer, Mysore Tribes and Castes, Vol. IV, ’Madiga’.
43
Cattle poisoning is a constant element in nearly every portrait of the rural tanner
between the 1880s and the 1920s. The possibility of selling hides at the urban market was
stated, or implied, to be the motivation for clandestine poisoning. One of the earliest
references is, possibly, Hoey, Monograph on Trade and Manufactures, p. 91; see also Indus-
trial Survey, Central Provinces, p. 58; E.A.H. Blunt, The Caste System of Northern India,
 473

fabricated, perhaps to create a hostility that reinforced the collapse of

tradition. In any case, it became an inseparable part of the image of the
Chamar. ’A humorous allusion to this practice may be traced to the
...

proverb which represents the Chamar as enquiring after the health of the
village headman’s buffalo*
It is perhaps this detachment of tanning from the rural economy that
shows up in a long decline in the number and proportion of traditional
leather castes engaged in the craft. In northern India, according to the
census, ’actual workers’ employed in leather did not decline over 1901-31,
though employment may have been stagnant. But participation in tanning
of castes identified with leather definitely came down (Table 2). Further, in
contrast with the percentages of traditional leather castes engaged in
leather in northern India, the proportions were on average low in the south
throughout the census period. This could be due to the entry on a fairly
large scale of servile and agrarian labour castes into leather in the south.
Responding to the creation of a market for his services, the village
servant was evidently specialising. All over the country, some were giving
up leather to become agricultural labourers or to enter other ’cleaner’
occupations, even though the options were severely limited,&dquo; and others
were becoming specialist tanners.1 Three sorts of avenues seemed to be

open to those specialising in leather: to become subcontractors of hide

merchants, to become workers in tanneries and to become traders them-
selves.
The Chamar who lost hereditary access to fallen cattle was often replaced
by the ’contractor’, the itinerant agent of the export merchant or of

Lucknow, 1931, p. 119; Briggs, The Chamars, p. 235; Watt, Dictionary, p. 248. A little
packet of arsenic ’craftily wrapped in a leaf or a petal of the mohua- flower’ was dropped
where the cattle were grazing, Risley, People of India, p. 133. In some of these sources,
Risley and Watt, for example, ’cattle poisoning’ is mentioned as a profession in itself. If
indeed there were specialist poisoners, nothing very much seems to be known about them.
The usual allegations of unlawful use referred to the tanners who as a rule practised it on the
side.
44
Risley, People of India, p. 133.
45
In the towns of Rajasthan, if Chamars or Mochis tried to become entrepreneurs or enter
services like running eateries or hotels, such attempts were known to be resisted by ’Savarna
Hindus’, see, for example, T.S. Katiyar, Social Life in Rajasthan, Allahabad, 1964, pp. 24,
77.
46
On western India, see Indian Industrial Commission, evidence of Ewbank, Bombay
Volume, p. 546; on Mysore, Nanjundayya and Ananthakrishna Iyer, Mysore Tribes and
Castes, ’Madiga’; in Punjab, the same process was observed later by Tom Kessinger, Vilayat-
pur, 1848-1968: Social and Economic Change in a North Indian Village, Berkeley, 1974,
pp. 160-61. In some cases, conversion to Sikhism encouraged exit from leather, Darling,
Wisdom and Waste, p. 265. In Punjab, the Muslim Chamars did not depend on agriculture at
all, whereas large number of the Ramdasi, Hindus and Sikhs worked as farmers and labourers,
Government of Punjab, Report of the Punjab Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, 1929-30,
Lahore, 1930, pp. 302-304. Likewise, the Madigas’ refusal to perform village services followed
conversion to Christianity, Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 10.
474

, Table 2
Employment in Leather (male, ’000)’

Source: Census of India, major provinces, Part II, Tables, for data on caste occupation
correspondence and on employment.
Notes: 1. In the censuses, ’tanning’ is defined as a separate order under the general class
’exploitation of materials’ but leather products are variously classified by usage.
The most important usage is footwear, classified under ’articles of clothing’. We
have considered only this item, which implies exclusion of minor products like
leather containers, etc.
2. 1931 data refer to ’earner with principal occupation as leather’.

tanneries or, in the of live animals, of the slaughterhouse. The

case

Chamar, however, frequently a sub-agent, and privileged to be so,

was

being the only one available to flay and cure the hide locally. For the same
reason, the landlord to whom the cattle belonged could ask for a price but
could not displace the Chamar from the trade, since the agent had an
advance contract with the Chamar.47 A Punjab report of 1930 found that
most rural tanners still in the trade had become permanent clients of
contractors. The few who could contract directlywith the tanneries did
noticeably prosper, but the majority were without the means to ’hold up
their goods for any length of time. ’&dquo;
Many others turned to the city, where newly established large tanneries
needed labour and could still find only Chamars willing to work in the

47
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of P.B. Advani, Director of Industries, Bombay,
p.401.
48
Punjab Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, p. 304.
 475

tanning processes, a situation that has changed very little to the present
day. The movement was something like an exodus: ’In some parts of the
country as many as 25 per cent of [the male rural Chamars] are away from
home half the year.&dquo; They were not all working in the tanneries, though
tanning remained the occupation where they were most naturally acceptable.
Chhattisgarh Chamars were to be found in the Assam tea gardens, in the
railway workshops of Kharagpur and Chakradharpur, as porters in the
railway stations all over the east and, of course, as labourers in Calcutta.&dquo;
Even as early as the 1870s, the central Indian Chamar was known to be
very mobile, leaving the village at ’a very slight caused, but usually they
tended to return.&dquo; The first half of the twentieth century, in contrast,
apparently witnessed many more permanent migrations.
Since food prices were rising somewhat faster than prices of leather
exported during 1890-1925 (Table 1), a preference for wage work was
likely. There might have been implicit earning differentials between the
city and the countryside. The cities offered a cash economy. The village
services carried payments, but usually in kind, and the upper castes often
reneged on these. 52 The tendency of cattle owners selling hides or animals
directly to the slaughterhouse or its contractors gave the rural tanners,
those who could not enter the trade, no option but to emigrate. ~3 Further,
many important usages of leather within the village were in decline, further
loosening the tanners’ ties with the village. The water- bag for irrigation
was going out of use wherever newer and more centralised systems of
water distribution became available. This was mentioned as one of the
chief reasons for the decline of rural tanning in Gujarat, Khandesh and
Marathwada.54 The peasant, moreover, clearly preferred chrome-tanned
leather in irrigation where he had the option, for the country-made mote
was notorious for its short life and frequent repairs, ’leaving the ryot at the

mercy of the chuckler. ’55 Numerous forms of household leather containers

were being replaced by metalware.’ Plausibly, the village drums were

yielding to the music of the cities as their makers themselves migrated,

49
Briggs,The Chamars, p. 58.
50
R.V. Russell and Hira Lal, The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces and Berar,
Nagpur, 1916, ’Chamar’. The great melting pots, the plantations and the public works, thus
performed the humane role of facilitating a disintegration of caste as barrier to entry. This
process and the migrant labourer form the backdrop to Jim Corbett’s unforgettable tribute to
Chamari, an employee at the Mokama station in the first decade of the century, My India,
Delhi, 1991.
51
Sherring, Hindu Tribes and Castes, Vol. II, p. 111.
52 The villagetanners in Berar were paid in kind for the leather goods made, or were not
paid at all, see H.R. Pitke, ’Hides and Skins Industry in Berar’ in Proceedings of the Ninth
Indian Industrial Conference at Karachi, 1913, Amraoti, 1914.
53
Russell and Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, ’Chamar’.
Bombay Leather Survey, p. 28.
54
55
Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 42.
 476

whereas the rural tanners were never known to be adept at the infinitely
more delicate processing of guts or skins demanded by the instruments

played at the courts or the temples. 56

Along with all this, there was present a desire to leave the customary
roles which constrained attempts to specialise. Thus, with the Chhattisgarh
tanners who, by 1915, had dispersed all over eastern India, the most likely
reason for ‘.their taste for emigration [was] the resentment felt at their

despised position in Chhattisgarh. 15 Even as times were changing outside,

in the village, the Chamar remained ’at the beck and call of the others no
matter what their own interests may be.’58 The landlord, the petty officers,
the upper castes all freely laid claim on their time. A revealing example of
this, cited by Briggs, was that of a government servant, a Chamar, who was
forced by the zamindar’s henchmen on to the field when on vacation in his
village. Thus, when asked his caste by the census investigator the Punjab
Chamar answered ’coolie’; he was not only hiding a stigma, but also being
truthful.&dquo; It is easy to see why Ewbank, when asked about the prospects of
collectivising the rural Chamar into cooperatives, honestly rejected the
idea: ’I would rather that the local tanners go to the tanneries at once.’~° In
this one instance, the craftsmen, on joining the proletariat, had nothing to
lose but centuries of petrified, institutionalised degradation.6’
Both the urban and the rural Chamars included examples of own-
account traders. Thus, with Kanpur beginning to emerge as north India’s
entrepot in hides: I

The extension of the leather trade made it a great Chamar centre.

...

Many of them have become wealthy and aim at a standard of social

respectability much higher than their rural brethren, and some have
begun to seclude their women which every native does as soon as he
commences to rise in the world.

Outside, but around the town, ’generally, hides of dead animals are collected
in the villages by chamars and sold in the village weekly bazars.’63 In the
56
A brief indirect reference to this differential in skills involved in making musical instru-
ments and its urbanising effect, appears in Bombay Leather Survey, p. 73.
57
Russell and Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, ’Chamar’.
58
Briggs, The Chamars, p. 56.
59
Ibbetson, Panjab Castes, p. 297.
60 Industrial Commission, evidence of Ewbank, Bombay Volume, p. 557.
Indian
61 The city-ward move, and cash economy formed the bases for movements for social and
political power, see Eleanor Zelliot, ’Mahars and the Non-Brahmin Movement in Maharashtra’,
IESHR, 7 (3), September 1970, pp. 379-416.
62
Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces, Vol. II, p. 191.
63
The various instances of Chamar enterprise in the north are from the Hides Cess
Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of W.C. de Noronha, tanner at Kanpur, pp. 81-82; Briggs, The
Chamars, p. 57; and Government of Punjab, Report of the Industrial Survey of Punjab,
Chandigarh, 1960.
 477

smaller town of Bombay about 1910, ’there is a peculiar sort of &dquo;contract&dquo;

work to be found,’ wherein one Chamar supplw, the physical capital
(hides, bark, lime, vats) to another, and received the tanned hide ’at a
price previously arranged.&dquo; In Raipur town in Chhattisgarh, cattle dealers
were usually Chamars.1 In the 1890s, the Madigas of the Mysore towns
were reported to ’have risen to considerable influence on account of
...

the rise in the value of skins.’&dquo; A survey in the 1950s showed that some
tanneries in the Punjab towns involved Chamar capital. Already in the
1880s, the Chamars owned tanneries in Lucknow and, judging by the size
of the units (multiple pits), were believed to possess substantial capital
The Chamar entrepreneur, thus, was not at all rare. Yet, many instances
from the transition in tanning also reveal the constraints the entrepreneurs,
especially the rural tanner, had to encounter. In the largest tanneries of the
country, Chamar involvement was unknown except as labourers. The
mobility of the Chamar was restricted by exclusion from existing. business
institutions. The Hindu moneylender would scarcely advance credit for
tanning ’In Chhattisgarh, the village tanners are below the status in
which more than the most trifling credit is available. ’I In industrial towns,
the availability of credit was a less serious problem than its price. A tanner
in Hoshangabad town could get Rs 300, no small sum, thanks to ’the
lender’s knowledge of the extent of his transactions.’ In Saugar, a banker
regularly lent to the Chamars. But, ’owing to the ill odour in which such à
trade is held by respectable Hindus, the dealers are not content with the
smaller profits of an anna or two in the rupee.&dquo; It would seem that the
general aversion to financing tanning and the poor creditworthiness of
Chamars placed a few moneylenders in a monopolistic position. Moreover,
unlike textiles, in leather the finished goods would rarely be an acceptable
collateral or a valid form of repayment.
Since more or less the only capital needed in vegetable tanning was large
enough space, urbanisation of tanning went along with large-scale produc-
tion. The export merchant turned a processor. The smaller factories, the
karkhana typical of numerous Indian crafts, could be units worked by a few
labourers, hired and supplied from within the owner’s family.&dquo;’ At the
other end, the Hides Cess Enquiry Committee reported the existence of
export tanneries in the big cities employing 400 to 500 workers each.
64
Guthrie, Report on Leather Industries, p. 19.
65
Russell and Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, ’Chamar’.
66
Mysore census, 1891, cited in Jogendranath Bhattacharya, Hindu Castes and Sects,
Editions Indian, Calcutta 1973 (reprint), p. 214.
67
Hoey, Monograph on Trade and Manufactures, p. 92.
68
P.V. Mehd, ’Tanning Industry, its Development in India’ in Proceedings of the Ninth
Indian Industrial Conference at Karachi, Amraoti, 1914.
Industrial Survey, Central Provinces, p. 71.
69
Ibid., p. 71.
70
71 Survey, United Provinces, Cawnpore District.
Industrial
478

Eventually, and especially in regions with a plentiful supply of hides,

tanning represented an attractive investment for just anyone who had some
capital. During an export boom created by the First World War, factories
mushroomed in Kanpur, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Such ventures
normally suffered from high mortality, but they did transform the industry.
The magnitude of the change is captured in the approximate percentages
worked out by a 1952 report on hides marketing. Village tanners were
estimated to process 43 per cent of the hides, whereas the factories pro-
cessed 50 per cent (30 for exports, 20 for domestic leather producers). The
remaining consisted of ‘raw’, that is, semi-cured hides for exports and hides
entering other uses.’2
These new avenues of mobility did not attract many Hindu trading
castes, and were thus filled by the Muslim merchants, Europeans, Parsis,
Chinese, and Eurasians, with the Muslims having closer access to the
village. The rural hide trader was variously called the Sheikh, Khoja,
Quassai (butchers) or the Kachchi. The tanning/scavenging castes were still
the main collectors of hides, the agents of the rural trader. A report of the
1930s described the Khojas of Punjab as a class of merchants who, in
leather trade, had ’sprung up recently.’ They had a strong cartel. They
processed the raw hides, got them tanned by the Chamars who were under
contract both to procure and to tan.&dquo; There was also an implicit moneylend-
ing in these transactions. In the 1950s, the town merchant having his own
curing yard in the village had probably become more common. 14
Quite apart from conditions in the village, tanning became urbanised
because the towns that developed as points of hide trade had strong
locational advantages: raw material availability in Kanpur and Madras and
the ports in Calcutta and Bombay. Kanpur, since its occupation in 1801,
housed a cantonment. The local Chamars at that time were supplying the
troops with the necessary articles, gradually adapting quality by observing
the British products. When the mutiny demonstrated the need to have
more centralised army supply bases close to areas of potential trouble,

Kanpur was chosen as the site’ for a government harness and saddlery
factory in 1867. The idea came from a young artillery officer Stewart who
set up a tannery with English soldiers with experience in tanyards, the
original hides coming from the ’commissariat cattle’ (cattle serving the
troop’s, rather the English officers’, need for meat). In the same decade, a
north Indian managing agency started by Cooper Allen, shortly to become
the source for the entire Indian army’s boots and shoes and saddlery .71 The

72
Government of India, Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Report on the Marketing of
Hides in India, Delhi, 1952, pp. 56-57.
73
Punjab Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, pp. 302-303.
74
Government of India, Report on Marketing of Hides.
75
’The largest individual concern in the world which deals in leather from the raw state to
the manufactured article,’ Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of the company, p. 6.
 479

town was close to Agra, Aligarh, Delhi and Meerut, each of which had a
meat trade and thus local slaughtering. Aligarh was known for the best
buffaloes in India. The railways integrated Kanpur with Bihar, Punjab and
the Central Provinces, the triangular tract which yielded India’s best cattle
hides, from ’Darbhanga’ to ’Multani’. Forests were within easy reach
Similarly, the suburbs of Madras, which witnessed a spectacular growth
of factories before and during the First World War, enjoyed proximity to
one of the best vegetable tannin in India, the avaram bark. Large army
tanneries existed in the early nineteenth century in Bangalore, Hoonsur
and Madras. But tanning did not attract private enterprise on a large scale
until the legendary efforts of a French Eurasian of Pondicherry, Charles de
Susa, who discovered the best way of utilising the avaram bark. Till then,
avaram bark tanning tended to produce skins which, on exposure to air,
suffered a ’fawn red discolourisation which was. previously one of the
distinguishing features of country-tanned leathers.’&dquo; De Susa could avoid
this effect by treating the leather in myrobalan bath, subsequent to tanning.
From the 1840s, the time his factory at Pondicherry was at work, there
began a tanning industry in Madras. Avaram was generally acknowledged
to be superior to the north Indian tannin, but its best use was in skins and
not in hides. The Madras industry, therefore, specialised in skins. An
added factor in this choice might have been the relative advantages of
regions in livestock; the south’s lay in goats and sheep, animals more
adaptable to drier and drought-prone regions than cattle which thrives on
rich grasslands. As in the north, the railways connected Madras town with
a wide area stretching from the Tamil countryside to southern Andhra and
from the Deccan to Orissa, supplying skins. To these natural advantages
were added the growth of Madras as city, and thus, as destination of

migrant labour. The main body of manual workers, it would seem, was
drawn from the agrarian labour castes, chiefly the Paraiyans. The white
collar jobs, on the other hand, were sometimes performed by people who
owned land. In such cases the interactions between the ’tannery men’ and
the ’factory men’ reproduced, in a much milder way, the hierarchy in the
villages that both had left behind
The advantages enjoyed by Calcutta and Bombay, on the other hand,
did not consist in proximity to sources of raw material, but in the facility of
trade. First of all, they were the premier ports, major points from where
hides were sent out and, hence, with a plentiful supply of hides. The ports,
and especially Calcutta and Bombay, were served by different railways

76
Arough impression of the immense pull of Kanpur, and the centralisation of hide trade,
over the vast northern plains can be had from the information on leather industry available in
the district reports of Industrial Survey, United Provinces.
77
Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 2.
78
Indian Industrial Commission, Evidence of G.A. Chambers of The Chrome Tanning
Co., Pallavaram, Evidence (Madras Volume), p. 323.
480

and, thus, offered manufacturers and traders alike competitive freight

rates and simpler procedures of quotation, advantages that were unavailable
to a town in the interior As ports, and as towns, they attracted foreign
trading firms. Thus, the growth in the hide trade through Calcutta till 1914
is associated with German enterprise in the city. These towns were also
major destinations of migrant labour. The Chamar migration into Calcutta
had probably begun earlier, but factories were slow to expand, and in 1914
the city had only six tanneries in the suburbs. None had any machinery to
speak of, the Chamar foremen providing all the expert knowledge, with a
combined output not exceeding 100 hides a day. In 1929, the city had 300
tanneries, tanning annually 1.9’ million hides and skins and 1.4 million
lizard skins. One major byproduct of this boom was the beginning of
commercial chrome tanning. Although many of the War-time concerns
failed, the method survived. The labour force in tanning was entirely made
up of migrant Chamars from north India and the coastal south. They
adapted very quickly to new processes, and though they visited their
villages at harvest time, they were beginning to settle down in the city in
the 1920s. Already in 1900, Bombay’s ’neighbouring village Dharavi is ...

entirely given up to the tanning industry.’ The tanneries were owned by the
Bohra and Memon merchants, groups controlling Bombay’s hide trade,
though, interestingly, one tannery belonged to a Mochi. Shortly after the
War, the city had 30 tanneries. The workforce consisted of Tamil-speaking
caste tanners, who reportedly furnished better labour than the local tanners.&dquo;
A further advantage of the big cities as location, rarely stated but likely
to have been strong, was water. Tanning on a large scale was especially
intensive in water, but for obvious reasons, would not have had easy access
to sources that were common property village. In other words, it
to the
needed a system of centralised supply such as a modern city could offer.
The number of large tanneries in India rose from 13 in 1901 to 66 in
1939, with a doubling of the labour force. The year 1919 represented a
boom, whence the factory sector shrunk somewhat in 1939, partly due to
bankruptcy in some War-time concerns and partly to enforcement of the
Factories Act in 1934. Using 1921 census employment, factories employed
5 per cent of leather workers in UP, and 4 per cent of tanning workers in
Madras. But this is obviously an underestimate since the ’factories’ here
refer only to concerns registered as such. A provincial survey of unregistered
factories was carried out by the Royal Commission on Labour, 1931,&dquo;’
79
This point is empirically demonstrated by R.D. Tiwari, ’Leather Industry: Its Transport
Problem’, Journal of the University of Bombay, Vol. 6 (4), January 1938.
80
Among the sources on the two cities, see especially, Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II,
evidence of B.M. Das, superintendent of Bengal Tanning Institute, pp. 113-16, and evidence
of Advani, p. 401; Indian Industrial Commission, evidence of B.M. Das, Bengal Volume,
p. 82; Martin, Tanning and Working in Leather, Bombay, pp. 2, 30.
81
His Majesty’s Stationery Office, Royal Commission on Labour in India, London, 1931,
Evidence, Vol. XI (Supplementary). Although the survey was claimed to be a census, for
many provinces it does not appear to be so.
 481

which showed that in Madras 776 tanneries employed close to 10,000

workers each, more than double the 4,000 employed in larger tanneries.
According to the 1931 census, the total represents about 25 per cent of all
leather workers in the province. The survey seems to be less complete for
the other provinces, but the Bombay and Bengal surveys supply interesting
descriptions of the new work organisations. While tanning was usually a
male occupation, 12 in some factories of Bombay women and children were
employed sorting wool. In Calcutta, a typical work organisation was not
really the factory as such, but a collective of three or four Chamars hiring a
shed, a few workers and some children above ten.&dquo;’ It was as if a Chamar
colony in the village moved itself to the city to form one big tanners’ village
located on the suburbs of the city.
The tendency of the craft to concentrate, in larger.units in the cities, was
further strengthened by the need to intervene in technology. Exports
highlighted the fact that the rural Chamar ’at present turns a decent
...

hide into an abominable leathers In fact, the hide was so poor as to make
Indian exports driven by the residual foreign demand and thus highly
unstable, ’If China’s or other markets [Java, for example] are low, Indian
stuffs do not find sale anywhere.’&dquo; The relatively poor quality was partly
due to the size and health of the animal, the Chinese produced a much
heavier hide than the Indian. But there was also bad and careless processing.
Curing under the Indian sun so hardened and contracted the fibres of the
skin that great effort was needed to loosen the pores again for the-skin to
absorb tan. Excessive use of lime damaged the fibres. The absence of any
finishing produced an unattractive leather. Bad flaying left either too much
flesh or too many cuts. The indelible brands on cattle destined for the
consumption of the troops marks left by the yoke and in regions like
Bombay, where the driving stick had a nail fixed at an end, the ’merciless’
application of the goad disfigured the leather.
The universal response was to take as many processes as possible away
from the’ rural Chamar to the tannery, leaving to him the barest curing
essential. Thus, whereas the monographs about 1900 still describe country-
finishing processes, including dyeing, by the time of the Hides Cess Enquiry,
descriptions of technology make no reference to these. The proportion of
82
Employment of females in tanning appears extremely rare. But there does exist one
reference to women currying the tanned hide in the south, Report of the Madras Exhibition,
1855, cited in Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 2.
Royal Commission on Labour, pp. 38, 62.
83
Industrial Survey, Central Provinces, p. 66.
84
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of Mohamad Latif, exporter of Kanpur, p. 37. The
85
witness, however, had an interest in exaggerating instability and thus opposing an export cess.
86
Branding, in fact, was an extensive and notorious practice. Other than on ’commissariat’
cattle, branding was resorted to in certain sicknesses of the cattle, as a mark of ownership,
and with a motive similar to poisoning, to impair the value of the hide and thus preempt
claimants. See on the latter, Indian Industrial Commission, evidence of G.A. Chambers,
Madras Volume, p. 321.
482

cured hides in total exports was falling in the long run in favour of tanned
and dressed hides. Cured hides were merely the sun-dried sukties collected
from the villages and exported, tanned hides came from the urban tanneries.
Direct contracting between the slaughterhouse and the tannery eliminated
not only the rural Chamar, but also one stage in curing. A second response
was to switch from sun-dried to wet-salted curing, less accessible to the

average rural tanner. A third form of adaptation was the Madras ‘half-tan’.
The half-tan was in fact a nearly finished leather but carrying a tan easily
removable so that the leather could be retanned. Retannage possibilities
made the product flexible as an intermediate, suitable for a variety of uses
and increased its export demand. The half-tan industry was in a class of its
own: it had a distinct market, its producers had different interests from the
north Indian tanning lobby,&dquo;’ and its larger extent and more successful
career seem to have induced not only greater advances in sorting and
standardisation of material, but also greater local supply of hides and
skins.&dquo; In 1945, Madras had 12 per cent of India’s cattle, but 25 per cent of
kips production (Table 3). Not only the slaughtering rate, also the propor-
tion of fallen cattle, were higher than average. There being no reason to
believe that animals had higher mortality in Madras, reporting and collection
must have been better.
But if old problems found solutions, new ones arose, the most distressing
being the butcher’s cuts at the public slaughterhouses. Bad flaying meant

Tabk 3
Production of Kip~in India, 1945

Source: Government of India, Report on Marketing of Hides.

Nota: A comparable figure of output for the mid-1920s comes from A.C. Inskip of Messrs
Cooper Allen in his evidence before the Hides Cess Enquiry, 1929. Estimated cattle
population: 180 million; assumed mortality: 10 per cent (a generally accepted figure);
estimated hide output: 18 million. This is for undivided India, whereas the table refers
to the present boundary of India. In 1927, exports at 8.7 million constituted 47 per
cent of production.
*
Lightweight cattle hide.
87
The Madras half-tanners favoured an export duty on hides, debated and introduced in
1929, whereas the Bombay and Karachi lobbies opposed it.
88
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. I, Report, p. 29.
 483

that the flayers cut the inner tissues of hides making the piece useless for
the tanner. These cuts randomly crisscrossed on the inside of the finished
leathers A universal reason for the increase in flaying defects was the
partial withdrawal of hereditary tanning castes from the process. Simultan-
eously, new people entered the craft. In the north, the peak season for
slaughtering was the winter, when meat was dried for export to Burma.
The slaughtering and flaying were done in the night until dawrr, presumably
because the day was spent in sorting and purchases of animals. The
building being small, much of the peak season operations took place in the
open. The master butcher had a ’following of young lads of the caste who
are being initiated into the art of flaying. ’*’ Already distressed by poor light
and the chill, the inexperienced boys worked as fast as they could to turn a
miserable piece-rate of 3-5 annas per animal into a respectable time wage.
Added to these problems, were the minor local variations in manners of
flaying, which made standardisation difficult.&dquo; Bad flaying, moreover,
carried no punishment since the hides were sold on live animals.&dquo;
In the 1920s, a whole range of incentive systems were being tried in
flaying. Although the Director of Industries often issued communiques in
this regard, the effect was generally slight? More noteworthy attempts are
associated with larger individual concerns in Peshawar, Calcutta and Aligarh.
The incentive was offered sometimes by the buyer of the hide, sometimes
by the employer of flayers. In any case, if the problem was created by mass
production, it was recognised that the solution had to be found in the
framework of a factory. Going back to the rural supplier would not work,
’In the villages buyers would not pay bonus for good flaying’ ,&dquo; for monitor-
ing quality over a widely dispersed body of producers was impossible.
Despite improvements, Indian hides retained the image of poor quality.
This combined with the world Depression to cause exports to remain low
and stagnant throughout the 1930s. Surprisingly, however, there was no
report of a crisis in tanning, ’for the local market has not let [the tanners]
down’.9s Even before the First World War, Chamars in the cotton tracts
were known to have been engaged in unconventional products such as
leather for ginning rollers.&dquo; During the war, when many essential industrial
89
Cooper Allen, who presumably had better access to good quality hides than the smaller
producers, stated, ’75 per cent of the hides passing through our hands are damaged by bad
flaying’, Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of Cooper Allen, p. 7.
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of A.E. Corbett, exporter of Kanpur, p. 29.
90
91
Guthrie, Report on Leather Industries, p. 3, refers to the hazardous and ’peculiar method
of cutting’ at the Bandra slaughterhouse.
92 In Calcutta, butcher’s cuts owed to the practice of extracting as much meat as the flayer
could, Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of B.M. Das, p. 96.
93
Indian Industrial Commission, evidence of A. Carnegie, manufacturer, Cawnpore, Evi-
dence (United Provinces Volume), p. 121.
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of Latif, pp. 36-39.
94
Hides Cess Enquiry, Vol. II, evidence of Pandit, p. 387.
95
96
Guthrie, Report on Leather Industries, p. 1.
484

implements like belting and roller skins for the textile mills were in short
supply, tanneries in Calcutta and Bombay were diversifying into leather.*&dquo;
The fact that chrome-tanned leather was especially suited to these uses was
an inducement for the expansion in chrome tanning in Calcutta. If the

initial impetus to diversify was import substitution, the diversification was

also reflected in the rising share of finished leather in exports from the
1930s. But it was still restricted to a few larger tanneries in mill centres.
Perhaps a more important inducement for the strengthening of domestic
demand for hides arose from a change in the craft the Mochi performed.

Effects on Leather Manufactures .

Trade constrained the rural leather worker, on the demand side, by creating a
taste for better-finished shoes and, on supply, by a shortage of hides. To
this was added a long inflation in hide prices. By the first decade of the
present century, the Kanpur tanneries had ’no leather to spare for the
bazar’, causing a ’great contraction in the supply of hides and skins for the
local industry.’* In most places near a big hide market for exports, the
Mochis had to be satisfied with ’triple rejections.’&dquo; In Bombay, likewise,
the leather artisans found themselves eliminated from customary access to
hides once the tannery agents began contracting directly with the Mahars. ux, If
the global trade in leather was growing, most producing countries had stiff
tariff barriers to finished goods, closing the prospect of exports.
About 1900, ’prosperous natives’ of Bombay had more or less given up
the locally made shoes, and adopted those of Western fashion. In 1910, in
Bombay city, ’some considerable time’ spent in observing the footwear of
those who wore any at all revealed that nearly one-third sported European
shoes. &dquo;&dquo; In Bengal at the same time, foreign shoes were sold in all bazaars
and fairs, whereas ’fifty years back they were to be found only in the largest
towns.’ In the Central Provinces, foreign shoes had replaced local footwear
in the towns and among ’the richer classes of villagers.’ Interestingly,
foreign shoes were uniformly more expensive or without any noticeable
price advantage.. The reason for their popularity lay to some extent in the
quality of the leather. It also derived from their better shape and the
greater range of sizes. The country craftsman was notorious for his disregard

97
For a brief description of the early history of a firm manufacturing (substituting imports
in the process) pickers, a leather shock-absorber in the picking motion of a loom, see I.M.
Mansuri, ’Picker Industry in India’, in Symposium on Tanning; another source on the western
Indian picker industry is Bombay Leather Survey, Appendix F, pp. 153-55.
98
Chatterjee, Notes on Industries, pp. 99-101.
99
Indian Fiscal Commission, evidence of L.C. Mousell of Calcutta Hides and Skins
Exporters’ Association, p. 350.
100
Guthrie, Report on Leather Industries, p. 19.
101
Ibid., p. 3.
 485

for anatomy, forcing his clientele to be, as a rule, ’content with anything
that approximately fits them.&dquo;&dquo;’ More subtly but universally, foreign shoes
served as a status symbol: ’the loud creaking ... is a great attraction, as it
advertises to all and sundry on the owner’s possession of up-to-date foot-
wear.’&dquo;&dquo; By the 1920s, the typical country shoe, reddish with a curled front,
was beginning to become obscure, and with it a whole catalogue of products
was on the way to a quiet exit. The shiroli or Poona Brahman shoes, the
marhatti or the two-toed Ahmednagar shoes, the standard slippers or
chapli of the entire north and north-west and hafti of the west, the Parsis’
Surati jora, the Goa sapat, Konkani Muslims’ zenani juta, the Memons’
half-shoes, the bandhai, astaria, alga of central India, the salimshahi,
punjabi, golpanja, zerpai of the north, each serving a specific caste and
regional clientele were no longer products worth remarking in connection
with the cobbler’s arts
What is remarkable is the ease with which the cobbler seemed to reorient
his skills. In 1908, Chatterjee noted in UP a great demand for country-
made ’European’ shoes or the bict, ’the supply [of which] is not equal to the
demand.’ In the towns, the manufacture of ornamental shoes was similarly
replaced by boots and shoes of standard shapes, harnesses, bags and
portmanteaux. &dquo;’S This was surely
’a profitable trade’, as any contemporary
account of the Mochis as a caste suggests.&dquo;* Ewbank observed in 1918 that
’the boot-making classes seem to be doing very well,’ and the 1921 census
attributed a decadal rise in the proportion of Mochis following their tradi-
tional occupation to the prospect of diversification. &dquo;&dquo;
If tanning became urbanised, leather tended to as well, the standardisation
of product reinforcing the tendency. In 1903, Martin saw settlements of
recently migrated Mochis around Bombay town. They settled in Dharavi in
workshops employing four to six workers on piece-rates. Whether due to
collective work or to better quality leather or proximity to a market that
better reflected tastes, they produced ’a larger variety of products and a
better class of workmanship.’ They came from as far as Bengal, the

102
Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 37.
103
On change of tastes in western see Martin, Tanning and Working in Leather,
India,
Bombay, p. 9; on change of tastes in Bengal, see Rowland N.L. Chandra, Tanning and
Working in Leather in the Province of Bengal, Calcutta, 1903. p. 3; the quotation is from
Industrial Survey, Central Provinces, p. 59.
104
For a description of a range of indigenous north Indian footwear, and of the jutafarosh
who made and retailed them, see Hoey, Monograph on Trade and Manufactures, pp. 124-26.
An important instance of survival must be mentioned, the kolhapuri, which proved very well
adaptable to the times, apparently due to the superior bag-tanning process for the sole
practised by the Dhors in Kolhapur, Satara and Poona, and to that balanced mix of utility and
lightness of design which ensured a future for many other artisan goods.
105
Chatterjee, Notes on Industries, p. 105.
106
Blunt, The Caste System, p. 237.
Indian Industrial Commission, evidence of Ewbank, Bombay Volume, p. 546.
107
486

Bengalis in particular supplied the ’cleverest workmen.’ In 1916, Ibbetson

stated that ’in the east of the Punjab the name [Mochi] usually applied only
to the more skilled workmen of the towns.’ A decade earlier, Chatterjee
had found leather footwear to be a prominent industry in Meerut, Agra,
Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad and Benares, owned by Mochis who had
migrated recently. Only in Agra were there footwear factories. But Chat-
terjee also came across ’a growing class of Musalmans as well as Hindus in
the province who would be willing to embark on the enterprise.’ Agra, 20
years later, was probably India’s largest and the most concentrated centre
of leather manufacture. In 1923-24 this industry employed, in Agra town
alone, 25,000 persons, ’small capitalists belonging to the middle classes
take to it more kindly than to leather-making.’ In Allahabad in 1930,
shoemaking took place in Mochi-owned karkhanas, which employed Mochi
workers, and some at. least used power-driven machinery, innovative designs
and styles, to popularise which ’the municipal leather school is doing a
lot.&dquo;&dquo; In 1903 in Bengal, ’wherever there are skilled shoemakers, foreign
[sic] leather from Calcutta or Cawnpore, is exclusively used.&dquo;&dquo; In 1924, a
cottage industry survey found Mochis tending to settle in the suburbs of
Calcutta, Dacca and the smaller towns. Many were migrants from the ’up-
country’, and workers in small factories. As in tanning, the actual artisans
often belonged to the traditional castes, whereas the white collar tasks
offered excellent prospects for the educated unemployed of the cities. In
Madras, likewise, the small and scattered collectives of Mochis usually
consisted of immigrants from Bombay. Significantly, and bearing a parallel
with tanning, the immigrant Mochis enjoyed, or asserted, a higher social
standing than they would command in the lands they came from. 110
The combination of factories, Mochi craftsmen, and middle class capital
is the story of many smaller towns as well in different parts of India, though

108
Shanti Prasad
Shukla, ’A Survey of Small Urban Industries of Allahabad City’, Govern-
ment of United Provinces, United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, Vol. 2,
Evidence, Allahabad, 1930, p. 420.
109
On Bombay, see Martin, Tanning and Working in Leather, Bombay, pp. 2, 9, 26; on
Punjab, Ibbetson, Panjab Castes, p. 300; on United Provinces, Chatterjee, Notes on Industries,
pp. 98, 105; on Agra, United Provinces, Report of the Industries Reorganisation Committee,
Allahabad, 1934, p. 21; and on Bengal, see Chandra, Tanning and Working in Leather,
Bengal, p. 2.
110
The Mochis of Madras wore the thread, ’pretensions’ that would not be ’admitted on the
Bombay side’, Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 13. This reference touches on a fairly
universal tendency in artisan history. It would appear that the local societies tended to be
more ambiguous about the relative status of the highly skilled commodity-producing craftsmen,
than they were about the position of the priestly, propertied or the labouring groups.
Artisans, in other words, could realistically try to alter their station by settling in newer
territories where their skill was highly valued but their background was unknown. Hence we
find an almost universal tendency for skilled craftsmen to migrate or, more precisely, to
consider themselves aliens wherever they lived and worked. Usually, this image was associated
with social practices and claims invariably disputed by some of the local elite.
 487

not rarely the workshop belonged to the Mochi himself. In Punjab, Bade-
noch found Mochi enterprise in Karnal supplying government stores, and
noted with satisfaction that ’the mochi is quick to learn.’&dquo;’ In western
India, as Sholapur and Satara, which had a previous history in bag tanning,
became points of hide trade, leather workshops sprang up. In Poona and
Ahmednagar, both craft and business towns, many leather footwear kark-
hanas were reported in 1936, owned by ’rich Chamhar and Bohara mer-
chants.’ Each employed about five to ten pardeshi (foreign) cobblers, using
machinery and ’possessing a very high skill in their profession.’ Immigrant
cobblers could be seen settled in colonies at the outskirts of several towns.
In general, the organisation of trade and industry seemed to. resemble that
in any craft, ’with its eternal triangle formed by the karkhanadar, the
independent worker and the dependent worker.’ An ’independent’ worker
was one who sold in a market, and not necessarily on contract; he had to

absorb the price fluctuations which could occasionally prove unbearable. A

dependent worker, on the other hand, was on a putting-out contract. 112
But like tanning, caste participation in large-scale production of leather
remained rare. At the same time, entrepreneurship was probably more
diverse here, in tanning as well as leather, than in most other industries.
Presumably, the Hindu trading castes’ avoidance of the craft had also
reduced guild-like barriers to entry for others. In Madras, the early enter-
prise in tanning was entirely in the hands of the Eurasians, though ’their
lack of energy, improvidence and inferior business capacity enabled
Muhammadans and native tanners to cut them out.’&dquo;’ Some of the oldest of
the Madras tanneries surviving in the mid-twentieth century (the Parpia
family concerns, for example) were set up by Muslim merchants who
migrated from Kuchch in the 1860s. In tanning in Kanpur, European and
Eurasian capital was strongly involved. &dquo;4 But cooperation with Muslim
traders was a support the European ventures could not do without, leaving

111
A.C. Badenoch, Punjab Industries, 1911-12, Lahore, 1917, p. 22
; Government of
Bombay, Report of the Bombay Economic and Industrial Survey Committee, Bombay, 1938,
p. 68.
112
Y.S. Pandit, Economic Conditions in Maharashtra and Karnatak, Poona, 1936,
pp. 125-27.
113
Chatterton, Monograph on Tanning, p. 2.
114
We have already referred to the two integrated government factories at Kanpur. One of
the best-known and early private tanneries in the city was set up by A.H. Creet, an Armenian
born in Persia. Creet migrated to India in 1874, and was first a jeweller in Lucknow, then a
dealer in leather c. 1880-81, and finally proprietor of the Cawnpore Tannery in 1896. A
decade later, the factory was sold to a partnership between one William Stork, Hafiz Abdul
Kazi and Hafiz Mohammad Halim, the last probably the leading hide merchant of Delhi and
Kanpur. During the War, the firm did very well simultaneously executing orders for meat to
the troops and hides to the Ordnance Department. These and similar information on firms in
Kanpur are taken from an undated, untitled (missing title page) and partially catalogued
industrial directory preserved at the Centre for Development Studies (Trivandrum) library.
The approximate date of the directory seems to be the early 1920s.
488

open an avenue of mobility to the former. Some of the most successful

Muslim tanners in Kanpur, the firms of H.M. Halim, of Abdul Gafoor or
of M.A. Wasay and H. Nabi Baksh, accumulated capital through agency of
the European tanneries, or as agents of the many German trading firms
prominent in the trade through Calcutta. The partial eclipse of the German
cartel during the First World War was the chance they needed to move
from trade and procurement to manufacture. 115 In Bombay in the late
nineteenth century, the Bohras and Memons, the Muslim trading castes
owned tanneries. In Bengal, the largest and the best-known tannery was a
Bengali ’swadeshi’ venture, but the War boom was led largely by Chinese
tanners. By the end of the 1920s, the shoe manufacture and trade of the
city diversified further from the Chinese-held Bentinck Street market,
towards the northern suburbs. Here, Punjabi Muslims owned workshops,
and north Indian Mochis worked in them. They not only displaced imported
shoes completely, but were known to be so skilful that ’their services are
requisitioned even by the reputed European firms Thus began a network
of subcontracting relationships to which the city’s privileged situation in
leather trade owed a great deal. By the end of our period, however, both
tanning and leather factories involved fairly significant Hindu capital. This
seemed to have flown in via several routes, such as money accumulated in
the export trade, white collar employees of large tanneries and leather
factories or leather goods trade. There was at least one notable instance in
Madras of a Chettiar moving from banking to leather via the export
trade. &dquo;’z

Concluding Remarks

The integration of colonial India into a world market created an export

boom for Indian hides and skins that began in the 1870s and continued for
nearly half a century. Earlier, the craft was performed largely as a service
wherein the rural labourer customarily received hides free and supplied
finished goods to neighbours. The export trade created a large demand for
hides outside the village, and in the process created a market for the
craftsman’s labour, enabling him to leave the customary labour services

115
Abdul Gafoor of Allahabad, who established himself in Kanpur hide trade in the early
1880s, was a procurer for the German firm Schroeder Smidt. The association continued off
and on till 1914 when the war drove out the German firm, and Gafoor with his sons set up a
tannery. Wasay and Nabi Buksh were hide merchants of Kanpur, and agents of Wuttow
Guttman, and later of Cohen and Fuchs. By 1914-16, these collaborations were in trouble. In
1916, they finally broke down and Wasay and Nabi Buksh amalgamated with another trading
firm, Mohammad Ismail, to set up the UP Tanneries on Jajmau Road, the tanning hub in the
city. Creet’s firm, known as Stork, Halim & Co. from 1904 finally came in the possession of
Halim in 1907. For source, see note 114.
116
Government of Bengal, Report on the Survey of Cottage Industries in Bengal, Calcutta,
1929, p. 40.
117
Indian Leather Trades and Industries Year-book, Madras, 1967
 489

imposed by the village. These developments encouraged urbanisation of

the industry and relocation of tanning into urban factories. Yet another
effect of export trade was felt in technologies, as quality control became
imperative, encouraging interventions by traders and mass production.
Leather goods imported, on the other hand, altered tastes and standardised
products sold in the home market. But since competition between the
leather artisans’ output and imported wares was less on cost and more on
quality, imports could be substituted under stricter control on work pro-
cesses, an adaptation than again pulled the country craftsmen closer to the
trading points and turned him into an employer of labour or a labourer
himself.
Going beyond leather, these findings contribute towards a more general-
ised history of the crafts in colonial India, a task that involves comparing
the experiences of different industries. With munch. more work on textiles
available now that even a decade ago, this should be easier. There are
differences in the way the two industries changed due to exposure to trade,
but it would still be instructive to know where their experiences converged.
The differences are obvious. Textiles confronted a wide technological
gap between India and England. The effect of trade was disruptive on the
weavers, partially destroying the craft. Leather faced no such threat. But
the experience of cloths which did not face competition from powerlooms
had elements similar to leather. This consisted in the creation of larger
markets from local and rural ones, attributable in both cases to develop-
ment in transportation, in response to which weaving tended to relocate
itself near points of internal trade and tanning near points of export trade.
Both crafts, moreover, faced similar problems in technology: slow and
uneven pace of work and absence of quality control. Towns once again
offered a better atmosphere for experimentation, being locations where
many producers congregated and many practices coexisted and where
information about markets and technologies were easier to obtain.
In both textiles and leather, factories or putting-out were among the new
and increasingly popular systems of work. This required a labour force on
hire. In both crafts, hired labour was available, but the preconditions
somewhat differed. In cloth, competition from powerlooms reduced many
craftsmen from sellers of commodities to sellers of labour. In leather, the
rural tanners were never in possession of the output of their labour. But
the degraded status that this was due to, itself created a motivation to leave
the village and specialise.
The consequences of new institutions, however, were different in one
respect. The new mercantile and capitalist classes were drawn largely from
within weaver castes in the case of textiles, but in leather they came from
trading and professional classes with a strong non-Hindu presence. Why
was entrepreneurship relatively weak among leather producers? This differ-
ence could be explained by the status of the craftsmen or by reference to
the technology. It is arguable that commodity-producing castes had better
490

prospects of mobility than service castes, for the latter were excluded from
business networks and were generally expected to perform labour. It is also
noteworthy that tanning was a far less skill-intensive craft than weaving.
Tanning needed a native familiarity with plants and roots, but textiles
needed imagination and dexterity and resulted in a diversified output.
Textiles, in other words, was a high-value-added craft and offered returns
to skill.
Finally, both textiles and leather illustrate a point in the historiography
of colonial India. That the extension of market exchange must be at the
core of interpretations of economic change in nineteenth century India is

well-acknowledged in agrarian history, which has described commercialis-

ation, looked for the growth-inducing consequences of markets, explained
their absence where these effects failed to appear and explored the inter-
actions between markets and the social-cultural-ecological contexts_in
which they emerge. Curiously, this line of enquiry has remained largely
undeveloped in artisan history, presumably reflecting a belief that the
world market, via changing tastes or technologies, tended to drive most
artisans into obsolescence. On the contrary, with the exception of certain
kinds of textiles, most of the major pre-existing industries faced integrated,
sometimes larger, markets and little direct competition from machinery.
The consequences were diverse, mediated as they were by differences in
initial conditions and in the nature of the new demand itself. The present
study, as well as the recent advances in textile history, have been in a
general way stimulated by the need to understand how artisans addressed
commercialisation.&dquo;&dquo; The case study we have just concluded demonstrated
an export-induced industrialisation that involved the artisans, creation of
labour markets where none existed, accumulation of skills and capital and,
in t~e process, the deepening of a comparative advantage.

118
See also T. Roy, ’Home Market and the Artisans in Colonial India: A Study of Brass-
ware’, MAS, forthcoming.