Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (review)

Abigail McGowan's excellent book connects craft production in colonial India with imperial politics, economics and culture, arguing that "crafts stood in for India as a whole" (3) for British colonizers for whom crafts demonstrated India's economic backwardness, and for Indian nationalists who vied for control of India's highly skilled, globally valued crafts. Crafts became a battleground for colonial politics and economics from the eighteenth century on and complex issues often appeared as dichotomies: were artisans subjects subordinate to British mandates or agents determining their own production? Did discourses on crafts sustain traditions disappearing under British policies and global taste for cheap, kitschy imitations or inhibit industrialization which were considered craft's antithesis? Did nationalists suggest new ways of reinvigorating crafts or adopt colonial views of naïve craftsmen needing an educated elite to direct them?

McGowan recognizes three definitions of crafts: as objects, as "a means of production," and as "a sector of the economy." (13) She embraces a wide definition of craft media and methods, which share a common identification under colonialism as handmade in opposition to industrialization. McGowan acknowledges two dominant approaches: one, finding common features among all crafts or two, disaggregating crafts by recognizing diverse practices, media, regional influences, markets, and uneven success (e.g., weavers in western India succeeded; Bengali weavers suffered setbacks). Akin to the second approach, McGowan's dialectical history examines interventions by national, regional and local governments, missionaries, artisans, industrialists, nationalists, and colonizers, in a "creative process," (18) while at the same time focusing on all parties' "converging agenda" of putting crafts "at the heart of the state's duty to promote the welfare of its people." (7)

In Chapter One McGowan explores how the British standardized notions of crafts, as they did other areas of Indian life (e.g., caste system, Hindu practices). The Victorian episteme of classification created scientized and naturalized craft categories that served Britain's economic ambitions, while ignoring wide differences across regions, histories, economics and modes of craft production. Heroized by the Arts and Crafts movement, Indian artisans were also "orientalized" and differenced from "progressive" Europeans. McGowan traces emerging discourses across international exhibitions, including those held in India; collections of Indian crafts by the Victoria & Albert Museum (then the South Kensington Museum) and by Indian museums after 1880; and George Birdwood's shaping of craft discourse in his writings and by organizing Indian displays for international exhibitions. As craft discourse embraced artisans as well as objects, ethnography "operated side by side with economics," (43) marshaled to sustain "traditional industries." (45) These trends radically enhanced knowledge of craft histories and production through comprehensive collections in museums and in texts such as John Forbes Watson's The Costumes and Textiles of the People of India (1867), anticipating a deluge of articles, gazetteers, books, design publications, and even real artisans performing craft-making at world's fairs. In the end, such systematizing and classification became ossified, reductively erasing differences within imposed categories and sharpening distinctions between categories to control craft production.

In Chapter Two McGowan turns to craft production narratives and differences between the presentation of artisans as resisting change and artisans' own adoption of new technologies and working relationships. Despite the discourse that separated crafts and industrial productions, McGowan argues that they were much closer than admitted. Industrialism signified progress, modernity, prosperity, and India's future, while handmade, "traditional" crafts became symbolic of India as backwards and medieval, though the beauty of its crafts was widely recognized in Europe. McGowan examines relationships and similarities between crafts and industrial production, relationships that deployed concepts of beauty and an idealized, autonomous artisan (e.g., in Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings influenced by Arts and Crafts leader William Morris). Many artisans flexibly adjusted to changing global markets and new modes of production (technologies, occupations, workshops, collectives) despite the image of passive, unchanging, "traditional" artisans, orientalized by Birdwood and idealized by Coomaraswamy. McGowan might have included views of some radical nationalists (e.g., Aurobindo Ghosh) hostile to Coomaraswamy's idealism to reflect wider Indian views.

Crafts' difference from...