Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 of 7Thurston, Edgar
History
Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 of 7
Thurston, Edgar
Caste -- India, South; Ethnology -- India, South; India, South -- Social life and customs; Tribes -- India, South
would give employment to this number of looms. In Madura, Coimbatore,
Madras and Salem, attempts are being made to establish organised
hand-loom weaving factories, and these represent the direction in which
future development must take place. At present all these factories
are running with fly-shuttle looms, and various modifications of
the old types of hand-warping machinery. The only experiments in
warping and sizing are now being conducted, at Government expense,
in the Government weaving factory at Salem, and in a small factory
established privately at Tondiarpet (Madras). A warping machinery,
suited to Indian requirements, has been specially designed for us in
England, and there is no doubt but that it will provide a solution
to the warping question, but whether it will be satisfactory or not
depends upon the efficiency of hank sizing. The superiority of native
cloths is commonly attributed to the fact that they are made in hand
looms, but in reality it is largely due to the methods of sizing
employed by native weavers, and it is still doubtful whether we can
attain the same results by any process which involves the production
of continuous warps of indefinite length. The ordinary native warp
is short, and it is stretched out to its full length in the street,
and the size carefully and thoroughly brushed into it. The warps
which our machines will produce may be thousands of yards in length,
and, if they are successful, will almost entirely do away with the
enormous waste of time involved in putting new warps into a loom at
frequent intervals. That they will be successful in a sense there is no
reasonable doubt, but whether the goods produced in our hand-weaving
factories will be what are now known as hand-woven goods, or whether
they will partake more of the nature of the power-loom productions,
remains to be seen. With the cheap labour available in Southern India,
there is probably a future for hand-weaving factories, but it will
depend almost entirely upon the successful training of the weavers, and
experience shows that they are not easily amenable to discipline, and
have very rigid objections to anything approaching a factory system."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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