Handloom Weaving: 1900-50

 

 

The long-term survival of handloom can be explained by relative advantages of power-loom and handloom. In the  mid-nineteenth century, two types of cloth faced keen competition from foreign or Indian mill-made cloth: ‘coarse-medium’ cotton cloth, and printed and bleached cotton cloth. By contrast, cloths that used very coarse or very fine cotton yarn, or complex designs woven on the loom, or non-cotton yarn, tended to use the handloom. These were either so labour-intensive that the mills did not enter them by choice, or used non-cotton fibres that the mills did not want to handle.

Statistically speaking, we are vastly better off in the twentieth century. For the first time, we can handle quantitative issues – scale, productivity, income, degree of inequality, etc – with some measure of confidence. Handlooms accounted for about 25 per cent of the cotton cloth produced annually in the first half of the 20th century. Market-share of handloom cotton cloth was roughly stable between the 1890s and the 1930s. The total production of cotton cloth expanded by about 30 per cent between 1900 and 1939. Throughout this period, total cloth consumption was growing, and Indian cloth was steadily substituting imported cloth. In cloths made of silk and other fibres, handlooms dominated. These other fibres were generally more expensive than the average quality of cotton. Taking all fibres together except wool, in the 1930s handlooms’ market-share in total cloth consumption in value may have been about 50. Rising production and constant loomage suggest that the productivity and the capacity of the looms increased. This can be independently confirmed from the information we have on technology