Ties that bind: fashion, textiles, and gendered labour in South Asia today

ABSTRACT

As in many parts of the world, throughout South Asia, the various steps in textile production have historically been gendered, with men and women performing their respective specialized jobs. The late twentieth century saw the erosion of these long entrenched gendered roles in the region’s textile/garment industries. As they assume new roles in the workforce, women face challenges, including discrimination and physical danger. How are women negotiating these challenges? How is women’s textile-based labour valued in South Asia today? As artisans of regional heritage textiles, do men and women exercise their creative agency and market their work differently? What support systems are in place to train new generations of heritage textile makers, advocate for garment factory workers, and educate young women from textile making communities? This introduction to the special edition on confluences of gender, labour, and textiles/fashion in contemporary South Asia lays out the questions posed above. It provides a brief overview of textile production in the subcontinent, focusing on makers, markets, the role of gendered labour, and the interventions the following articles make to the field. The authors of the articles in this edition – scholars of art history, sociology, anthropology, political science, media and gender studies, and a textile curator and founder of a textile-based Non-Governmental Organization – offer unique insight into the South Asian textile/garment industry from the vantage point of garment factory workers, activists, socially engaged artists, factory owners, heritage textile makers, and recyclers of discarded fabric.

KEYWORDS:

• Cotton
• pashmina
• swadeshi
• heritage textiles
• fast fashion

Matched only by China, textiles from the Indian sub-continent enjoy an illustrious history spanning millennia. Celebrated textiles and garments from South Asia, including luxury, tribal and handloom examples, have been the subject of countless international exhibitions and scholarly studies.¹ Building on recent scholarship on the subject, this special edition offers fresh perspectives on cloth and garment production and their use in parts of contemporary South Asia including India (Gujarat, Kashmir, and Mumbai), Nepal, and Bangladesh. Written by art historians, a social anthropologist, a sociologist, a political scientist, a scholar of comparative literature, and a textile curator who founded an Indian textile-based Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and school, each of these articles explores imbrications of gender and textile/garment labour, particularly women’s changing roles in the industry over the last few decades. The authors offer insight into the South Asian textile/garment industry from the perspective of garment factory workers and socially engaged artists whose work critiques worker exploitation, factory managers, heritage textile makers, and recyclers of discarded fabric. Textile and garment production is often a multi step process, and the various stages were historically strictly gendered. Prior to Gandhi’s early 20^th c. swadeshi movement, in which citizens of both sexes spun cloth as an act of resistance to the colonial government, throughout South Asia, spinning, along with preparing the raw material for the loom, and embroidery were almost always women’s work. Weaving and dying were largely performed by men. The late twentieth century saw these long entrenched gendered roles for both men and women in South Asia’s textile/garment industry begin to erode. Articles in this special edition detail how, as they joined the public workforce, particularly on garment factory floors and management, women faced new challenges, including discrimination and physical danger. However, despite these drawbacks, such work affords women, especially those who are uneducated and from impoverished, rural communities, unprecedented opportunities to financially contribute to their families and better their own lives. Other articles in this edition explore women’s (and in some cases, men’s) new roles as cultural stewards, who assist in reviving heritage textiles and exercise their creative agency in new ways. Here too, gender dynamics intersect with capitalism, literacy, and urban/rural divides, which members of both sexes must negotiate. Below, I offer a brief outline of South Asian textile history, focusing on makers, shifting consumer bases, the role of gender within these, and the interventions the articles in this special edition make to the field.

Synonymous with superb quality and exquisite taste, in the premodern period, South Asian textiles were exported to imperial China, Greece, and Rome, as well as West Africa, sites throughout the Islamic World, and Southeast Asia, where they served as commerce, tribute, and markers of status. Although South Asia has historically produced wool, pashmina, velvet, silk, and carpets, since ancient times, the region has been especially renowned for its cotton textiles. Cotton thread was first produced some six thousand years ago, in the Indian subcontinent. Residents of Harappan settlements are believed to be the first to spin and weave the fibre into cloth and the oldest known surviving cotton textile, dated to 3250–2750 BCE, was discovered at Mohenjo Daro.² By ca. 4,450 BCE, Harappan port towns, such as Lothal in Gujarat, were exporting the fabric to West and Southeast Asia, and as far as Jordan.³

South Asia continued to dominate the global cotton industry for millennia. These textiles were in high demand not only for their superior spinning and weaving, but also for their rich colour and decoration, achieved through printing, painting, and embroidery. Among the most celebrated South Asian cotton textiles are gossamer muslin, so fine it was known as baft hāna (‘woven air’),⁴ and intricately woven jamdani from Dhaka; printed cotton from Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Coromandel and Malabar coasts – such as ajrak from Gujarat and Sindh, Pakistan, which was exported to West and Southeast Asia, Africa, and as far as Scandinavia – calico from Calcutta; and chintz from Golconda (present day Hyderabad). These fabrics travelled along vast trade networks to distant lands where they were exchanged for commodities ranging from spices and foodstuffs to various luxury materials and goods.⁵ Central to South Asia’s roaring success in textile production, both within the subcontinent and beyond, is its rich and varied natural resources, including wool producing sheep in Rajasthan and pashmina goats in Kashmir; wild silk moths in northeast India and Bangladesh; numerous species of cotton that are cultivated throughout the region; and a vast array of plants and minerals yielding natural dyes, chief among them, indigo.⁶

By the 10th c., Arab merchants who settled in coastal Gujarat introduced new currents of foreign influence, including production techniques, media, motifs, and designs (such as woven brocades), which left a lasting impress on South Asian textiles and garments. These Arab merchants also established a brisk trade of South Asian textiles based on foreign commissions.⁷ The South Asian textile and fashion industry thus holds a long and well-established history of foreign commissions. In this special edition, Mallika Shakya, Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, and Melia Belli Bose explore women’s new roles as producers and facilitators for international markets in contemporary Nepal and Bangladesh respectively. South Asian textiles have also historically enjoyed a robust local and intra-regional market. In this edition, Judy Frater offers the example of production and consumption of textiles from Kutch, Gujarat, while Souzeina Mushtaq discusses pashmina production in Kashmir, both of which remain widely consumed in India today. The authors consider how members of both sexes are increasingly taking up unconventionally gendered work in heritage textile/garment production and consider the associated social implications.

Beginning in the 17^th c., more sustained contact with Europe, particularly Britain, brought sweeping changes to the textile industries and markets in both regions. The founding of the trade-based British East India Company in 1600 and its subsequent import of different cotton textiles to Britain profoundly impacted British fashion, furnishings, and design. Lively patterned and colourful, yet affordable and readily available, Indian muslin and chintz are credited with establishing the first notions of fashion and the beginning of consumer culture in England.⁸ The tide had turned by the late 18^th c., with the Company exploiting hereditary weavers in Bengal, Gujarat, and South India by compelling them to work exclusively for the Company, for considerably lower wages than offered by other patrons.⁹ Finally, with the colonisation of much of the subcontinent under the Raj in the mid 19^th c., British domination of the South Asian textile industry was complete and India went from being the biggest player in the global cotton trade for millennia, to being forced to purchase British produced textiles made from Indian cotton. Colonial directives compelled India to sell raw cotton to Britain at wholesale prices. The cotton was then woven into cloth on power looms in British mills, and finally exported back to the subcontinent. The secret to Britain’s success in securing its South Asian consumer base was their implementation an adverse system of taxation, taxing British mill-made textiles at a lower rate (5%) than the South Asian products (up to 85%).¹⁰ Indian cloth was thus prohibitively expensive for most consumers in the land in which the cotton was grown. This economically exploitative system galvanised the Industrial Revolution – of which cotton was the single most important fabric – and fuelled the globally mushrooming British Empire. This system had devastating financial impacts, particularly on individual hereditary textile communities, such as weavers, who by the end of the eighteenth century were impoverished.¹¹

Significant to this special edition on gendered textile labour in contemporary South Asia, the Industrial Revolution also profoundly transformed gendered textile labour in Britain. Prior to the 18^th c., as in the rest of the world, British women worked predominantly in home-based family industries, with one of their most common tasks being hand spinning (as in South Asia). Men dominated work in industries that required leaving the home.¹² The power looms of the Industrial Revolution produced cloth far faster and for less money, thereby displacing women’s domestic textile labour. In the early 18^th c., the concomitant mass redundancy of female domestic textile workers and need for human labour in power mills to produce cloth (largely from Indian cotton) ushered in a sea change in women’s work. For the first time, British women (and children) worked outside the home, in the new factories. Poor, uneducated women dominated the labour force in this sector due to the cheapness of their labour, skill (honed through domestic textile labour) and widespread perceptions that women were more disciplined and docile, and thus more easily exploitable and less apt to rebel than men. They were also popularly believed to be better suited to endure bodily fatigue and repetitive stress.¹³

Nearly three centuries later, on the other side of the world, this is the same demographic that dominates the labour force in the readymade garment industry in Asia. Young, impoverished, lower class, and uneducated women from rural Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and India (as well as China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Honduras, and other countries in the Global South) once again clothe the Global North. However, rather than fine cotton and pashmina, the factories in which they work produce disposable, ‘fast fashion.’¹⁴

As Belli Bose addresses in her article in this edition, in the early twentieth century, garment factory managers in the United States capitalised on their female workers’ vulnerabilities and subjected them to deplorable working conditions – at times with lethal consequences. Today garment factory workers throughout much of the Global South are subjected to similar conditions, occasionally with similar consequences. Belli Bose explores how one American and three Bangladeshi artists memorialised workers in two recent garment factory disasters in Dhaka (a fire in the Tazreen Fashion factory in 2012, which killed 117 and the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building, in which 1,135 died), through the deeply symbolic medium of, or references to, traditional Bengali quilts (nakshi kanthas).

Building on her recent scholarship, in her article in this edition, Banerjee Saxena explores Bangladesh’s readymade garment industry from a different perspective, considering how safety measures and workers’ rights changed post 2013, and how these earlier disasters guided government and industry responses to the COVID-19 pandemic for the workers.¹⁵ In 2020, as much of the world was in lockdown, consumer demand for ‘fast fashion’ plunged. Retailers of major fashion brands cancelled and/or refused to pay for their orders of garments that workers in Bangladeshi factories had already completed. The Bangladeshi government, factories, and especially the workers, who are among the lowest paid labourers in the nation, had no recourse. This is not a unique situation. Elsewhere throughout South Asia (and beyond) garment factory workers are routinely the hardest hit during local or global crises. For example, during Sri Lanka’s recent political and economic crises, an estimated 350,000 garment workers were laid off. They lost their income against the backdrop of a sudden currency devaluation and massive price hike on fuel and food.¹⁶

The plight of Indian cottons outlined above is paralleled by that of Kashmiri shawls, albeit on a smaller scale. However, unlike cotton textiles, Kashmiri shawls were originally an exclusive luxury item, worn as markers of taste and status in South Asian and Persian courts, and traded with and gifted to elites in neighbouring regions for centuries.¹⁷ As with cotton weaving in the subcontinent, shawl weaving was and is men’s hereditary work. The labour is highly skilled, and time consuming, and held in high regard. The British East India Company exported Kashmiri shawls to Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century, followed by Europe, and finally, the United States, where they quickly became an upper-class women’s wardrobe staple. Their newfound popularity among women marked a gendered reversal, as in South Asia, men were the garment’s main consumers.¹⁸ Prized for its intricate and novel embroidery, the softness and warmth, yet remarkable lightness of the pashim wool from wild Asian mountain goats, of which it is woven, the garment was also a coveted synecdoche for the land of its manufacture, perceived in Orientalist Western imaginings as exotic and luxurious.¹⁹

By the turn of the nineteenth century, shortly after the invention of the Jacquard loom, which facilitated rapid production of complex patterns, and thus mass production of textiles, replica Kashmiri shawl factories opened in cities such as Paisley, Scotland.²⁰ That both the originally teardrop-shaped motif (Persian: boteh, ‘shrub/bush’) and buta (Kashmiri: ‘flower’) which are the dominant motif on the shawls, as well as the shawls themselves are widely known as paisley in English, is a testament to the success of the mills in this city.²¹ As with South Asian cottons, hereditary shawl makers were unable to compete with the more affordable, mass-produced British and European replica Kashmiri shawl industry, and were ultimately, priced out of business. Shawl makers who initially maintained an export-based livelihood in Kashmir, saw further downturn in their fortunes during the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, which greatly impeded trade between Asia and Europe. The final death knell to the industry was the late 19^th c. famine in Kashmir, during which many of the region’s craftsperson, including shawl weavers, perished.²²

The Kashmiri shawl industry survived the onslaught of mass-produced foreign competition, albeit much reduced from its original glory. In this special edition, Souzeina Mushtaq provides insight into the contemporary industry, which is based in the region’s capital, Srinagar. Mushtaq focuses on the lives and labour of female members of an extended, hereditary shawl weaving family. She breaks down the gendered steps and privileges, which are typical of members of such home industries in the valley, as well as others throughout the subcontinent. As the weavers, men are at the forefront and receive money and social recognition for their labour. Boys work directly with the men as they apprentice to become weavers themselves. The family’s women and girls perform the anonymous, ‘behind the scenes’ work of preparing the materials for the men’s looms (separating the fine from coarse hairs, combing the wool, and spinning it into yarn) for which they receive no money. Mushtaq explores how higher education can be a path to (a degree of) financial freedom and independence for these women, even as they continue their socially-sanctioned unpaid labour in the family business.

Considering how detrimental colonialism was to the South Asian textile industry and its workers, it is unsurprising that the swadeshi Indian independence movement was so entwined with cloth, especially cotton. Gender, fashion, and labour all intersected in the swadeshi movement. Established 1905, the movement focused on boycotting British goods and nurturing domestic production. Gandhi encouraged swadeshi adherents of both sexes to spin their own cotton at home, in contravention to imperial law.²³ Thus, for men, engagement in the heteronormatively feminine practice of spinning became a performance of their commitment to nationalism. What Susan Bean aptly terms ‘the fabric of Indian independence,’ this particular cotton is rough, handspun and hand woven khādī.²⁴ The swadeshi movement established a nationalist ‘uniform’ in North India, which created sartorial solidarity announcing the wearer’s commitment to non-cooperation with the colonial state. Khādī. and particular garments form which it is made retain their signification today. For men, these garments include kurtas, dhotis, sadri/ bandi (popularly known as the “Nehru vest’) and most distinctive of all, white ‘Ghandi caps,’ all of khādī.²⁵ The Indian independence movement also informed the wardrobes of nationalist women. Beginning in the late 19^th c., Hindu upper-caste nationalists in colonial India cast women as embodiments of the nation, concomitantly modern and gatekeepers of religion and culture.²⁶ These women were thus socially pressured to embody the independence movement not only by spinning and wearing exclusively khādī, but also by embracing frugality, and eschewing ornamentation, ostentatious display, and the brightly printed powerloom-woven British cottons, in favour simple attire.²⁷ The typical contemporary Indian politician’s wardrobe (both men’s and women’s and from most parties) are rooted in the swadeshi uniform, as demonstrated by how politicians such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, and General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee in charge of Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra dress in public.

Today, South Asia retains its global reputation for excellence in textile and garment production, which includes the discordant poles of readymade garments and heritage handlooms. As outlined above, the apparel industry is both a blessing and a curse to the workers, bringing unprecedented economic opportunity and personal risk. Throughout the subcontinent, millions of garment workers, 80–90% of whom are women, produce clothing for consumers in the Global North.²⁸ The industry has also been a massive boon for the economies of their nations.

The garment industry also poses significant environmental hazards. The affordability of ‘fast fashion’ encourages a culture of wastefulness among consumers in the Global North. According to a 2016 study, the average American throws away 81 lbs. of clothing each year. Few consider the fate of those garments; an alarming amount make their way to landfills – often located in the Global South, in countries that are leaders of fast fashion manufacture – leading to 9.5 million tons of landfill waste annually.²⁹ Despite the environmental hazards of this practice, in India, Pakistan, and several African nations, members of hereditary textile recycling communities profit immensely from the Global North’s voracious and mercurial appetite for the latest must-have garment. In this special edition, Dipti Bapat offers an ethnographic study of members of the Mumbai-based, nomadic, tribal Waghri Chindiwalli community. Comprised almost exclusively of women and girls, Chindiwallis harvest garments and rags destined for landfills, and resell or trade them for utensils and other necessary items, along a complex network linking dumps, residential neighbourhoods, and bazaars between rural Maharashtra and urban Mumbai. Bapat explores the challenges and precarity of the Chindiwallis’ informal work, including the unsanitary conditions, absence of trade formalisation, and lack of access to education or other means to improve their situation.

Shakya’s contribution to this edition lies at the intersection between artisanal and mass manufactured export garments. Her article also resonates with Mushtaq’s, as both offer ethnographic case-studies of unequal gender dynamics in family-owned and operated garment industries. Drawing on her extensive research on Nepal’s readymade apparel industry, here Shakya charts the rise and expansion of a family’s garment factory in Kathmandu, from small-scale artisanal production to their manufacture of globally-oriented ethnic wear, which it exports to retailers in Europe and North America.³⁰ Shakya focuses on Nepali women entrepreneurs and designers in the industry, and how, as their companies succeed, the women are sidelined, and their work marginalised to that of their male counterparts (who are often relatives or spouses). She also explores the dynamics between the female factory workers and female factory owners/managers.

As handloom textiles hold such a rich and storied history, and were so central to the Independence Movement, post-Independence, governments of the new sovereign nations of India and Pakistan focused on preserving, yet revitalising, innovating, and industrialising the textile craft (in India, this was in response to the Nehruvian directive to modernise and industrialise the nation). To meet these needs, during the 1950s the Indian government sponsored institutions such as the All India Handloom Board and the All India Handicrafts Board, the Khadi Village Industries Commission, and The Weavers Service Centres. Numerous new institutions were established, dedicated to the preservation, cataloguing, and creation of heritage textiles across India. Examples include the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, and National Institutes of Design (NID), founded in 1949 and the 1960s respectively.³¹

Textiles have also played a central role in women’s economic rehabilitation in South Asia post-Independence. Following Partition, the nationalist, politician, social reformer, and advocate for Indian handcrafts, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–88), developed schemes to train women fleeing into India from Pakistan in handcraft production, which generated revenue for the refugees.³²

Similarly, following the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the new nation was tasked with creating work for refugees returning from East Bengal and tens of thousands of war widows and Birongonas (‘Brave Women,’ survivors of rape by Pakistani soldiers and their local collaborators), as their homes had been demolished, they had no surviving family members, or were ostracised by them following their rape. Training in craft production, including weaving, embroidery, and jute work, enabled the displaced to reintegrate into society and attain self-sufficiency.³³ Numerous artisanal handcraft stores grew from these endeavours. The most successful is Aarong, the fair-trade retail chain of the world’s largest NGO, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). Founded in 1978, now with stores throughout Bangladesh, and in 12 countries, Aarong offers local handcrafts, including heritage textiles, many made by women in rural villages. The need to create income-generating work for the displaced following the war dovetailed with the need to create lieux de memoire, around which citizens of the new Bangladesh could rally in shared nationalism. This was particularly pressing as one of the central points of contention, ultimately leading to the war, was the perceived Pakistani suppression of Bengali culture in the East Pakistan. Handcrafts, especially distinctive Bengali textiles, such as nakshi kanthas and jamdani saris, fit this requirement. As with FabIndia, shopping at Aarong, is thus promoted as a patriotic, philanthropic act of cultural stewardship.³⁴

Today in India, millions of artisans continue to produce heritage textiles by hand. In particular, handloomed textiles remain a thriving, albeit annually decreasing, industry.³⁵ Their work is available in Central Cottage Industries emporia and trendy chain stores like Fabindia that promote ethical values, including employing rural craftsmen, who are shareholders in the company.³⁶

In this special edition, Annapurna Garimella and Santhosh Sakhinala, and Frater explore confluences of regional heritage textiles, pedagogy, consumerism, and possibilities of artisanal creativity and innovation. In India, women, both Indian and foreign-born, have long been at the forefront of textile preservation and revitalisation efforts, which at times subvert gender norms. Chattopadhyay is undoubtedly the most significant figure in the establishment of handicraft and handloom development. At the behest of Nehru she was a leading figure in the establishment of the handcraft-focused post-Independence initiates listed above.³⁷

More recently, women have established NGOs and commercial enterprises to support and train textile and garment producers throughout India. Examples include American-born Sally Holkar, co-founder of the charitable trusts Rehwa Society and WomenWeave, based in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh. Young women from the local weaver community are trained at the WomenWeave Handloom School in the historically male-dominated craft of weaving. In their article, Garimella and Sakhinala describe a similar situation to what Mushtaq outlines with the division of labour, recognition, and money in the Kashmiri shawl industry. WomenWeave Handloom School aims to tap the women’s skill in the craft and bring them to the fore by training them as actual weavers of famed local Maheshwari handloom saris, thereby ensuring the preservation of the industry and economic independence for the women. Judy Frater is author of Threads of Identity: Embroidery and 365 Adornment among the Nomadic Rabaris, the definitive book on textiles of the nomadic Rabari community in Kutch, Gujarat.³⁸ Frater, also an American, has lived and worked among Rabaris for several decades. She is Founding Director of Somaiya Kala Vidya (SKV), an education institute for textile artists, and the Kala Raksha Trust and Textile Museum, which promotes and preserves their work. In her article, Frater offers personal insight into her years with Rabari textile artisans. She discusses aspects of SKV’s design education programme, including training in business and marketing, aimed at imparting agency and independence to the textile artisans. SKV encourages students to both draw from their cultural heritage and innovate. Kutch is a conservative society, with deeply embedded gender norms. Frater explores the role of gender in the extent to which students engage their creativity, before and after graduation, their ability to interact with customers, and continued success as textile artisans.

Celebrated regional textiles and garments such as Rabari mirror-work embroidery, Punjabi phulkaris, and nakshi kanthas (of West Bengal and Bangladesh) continue to be made by women for both family and commercial use. Other heritage textile traditions, whose creation was once the exclusive purview of men – Lucknowi chikankari and Maheshwari handloomed saris – are now made almost exclusively by women.³⁹ As Tereza Kuldova describes, many high-end Indian designers work with middlemen to employ female artisans. The artisans create exquisite heritage luxury textiles, which the designers then style according to the latest trends. Such pieces are a potent status symbol for wealthy urban consumers, who seek to announce their cultural stewardship of Indian craft, and support of its hereditary makers.⁴⁰ Designers such as the globally renowned Manish Malhotra, whose 2013 autumn/winter collection, ‘Threads of Emotion,’ which features phulkari embroidery, capitalises on consumers’ discerning connoisseurship and quest for authenticity. Textiles from regions bifurcated by Partition – Punjab, Bengal, Sindh – can tap into urban consumers’ nostalgic longings for an undivided homeland, represented by bucolic villages and comforting domestic interiors, in which women embroider regional heritage textiles.⁴¹

This special edition sheds light on various traditions of textile/fashion production in parts of South Asia, focusing on the communities who make (or re-use) the material and garments. Gender is at the heart of each article. Read together, the following articles demonstrate that throughout contemporary South Asia, with few exceptions, women’s labour is still held in lower regard than men’s. Accordingly, as in most sectors, female textile artisans and garment makers are routinely paid less, subjected to worse working conditions, and are often pressured by family or society to abandon work so that they do not have to leave the home, and can focus exclusively on domestic matters. Yet, even if they operate as what Sally Holkar refers to as ‘Shadow Weavers’ in Garimella and Sakhinala’s article, performing ‘behind the scenes’ work, their contributions are critical. Without it, South Asia’s celebrated textile traditions would not be. Women’s textile and garment work, whether ‘behind the scenes,’ or at the forefront, in new roles as managers, artists, activists, and cultural stewards, contributes to their regional history, and family, as well as national welfare. Building on earlier work on gender and textile traditions in South Asia, such as Clare Wilkinson-Weber’s ground breaking study on gender in Lucknow’s chikan industry, the authors of articles in this special edition contend that gender is a vital piece of a larger mosaic that makes the rich history of textiles in South Asia. Here, we twine gender with heritage, agency, creativity, and the efforts of multiple parties (curators, artists, non-governmental agencies, and activists) working towards equitable pay and labour conditions, as well as to preserve acclaimed South Asian heritage textile traditions. This edition could, of course, not include all of the region’s textile traditions. We hope that our contributions inspire investigations into similar questions of intersections between gender and labour in textile traditions in other parts of South Asia and beyond.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Notable major exhibitions over the past few decades include: “Colours of the Indus: Costumes and Textiles of Pakistan’ and ‘The Fabric of India” (both at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1997 and 2014 respectively); “Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era,” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997); “The Cloth that Changed the World: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz” (Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2020); “Phulkari: The Embroidered Textiles of Punjab from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection’ and ‘A Century of Kanthas: Women’s Quilts in Bengal, 1870s–1970s’ (both at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017, 2023 respectively); ‘Indian Textiles: 1,000 Years of Art and Design” (The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., 2022); and “Woven Wonders: Indian Textiles from the Parpia Collection” (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2023).

Publications on South Asian textiles and fashion over the past few decades include the catalogues for the exhibitions listed above and, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Woven Air: the Muslin and Kantha Tradition of Bangladesh, London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1988; Hamida Hossain,The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988;

Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996; Clare Wilkinson-Weber, Embroidering Lives: Women’s Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1999; Judy Frater, Threads of Identity: Embroidery and Adornment among the Nomadic Rabaris, Ahmedabad, Mapin Publishing, 2006; Rosemary Crill, Textiles from India: The Global Trade, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2006; Niaz Zaman, The Art of Kantha Embroidery, Dhaka University Press, Bangladesh, 2014; Arti Sandhu, Indian Fashion Tradition, Innovation, Style, London, Bloomsbury, 2015; Tereza Kuldova, Luxury Indian Fashion: a Social Critique, London, Bloomsbury, 2016; Pika Ghosh, Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in Colonial Bengal, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2020; Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2022.

2. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 5–7.

3. Cohen, “Materials and Making,” 17.

4. For more on the art and history of muslin and jamdani textiles, see: Whitechapel Art Gallery, ed. Woven Air; Veronica Murphy, ‘Textiles,’ in Whitechapel Art Gallery, ed., The Arts of Bengal: the Heritage of Bangladesh and East India, London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1979, 63–70.

5. Riello, “Selling to the World: India and the Old Cotton System,” in Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World, 17–36; Riello and Tirthankar Roy, “Introduction,”; and Riello, “The World of Textiles in Three Spheres.”

6. For more on South Asian indigo, including its metaphysical, cultural, and aesthetic appeal, see Dhamija, ibid, 30.

7. Dhamija, Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, 30.

8. Throughout the 18^th c. chintzes were widely consumed by women and men of different classes in Britain, France, Holland. Among others, see Riello, ‘New Consuming Habits: How Cottons Entered European Houses and Wardrobes’ in Cotton: the fabric that made the modern world, 110–134.

9. Crill, ibid, 179.

10. Dhamija, https://www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com/encyclopedia-chapter?docid=b-9781847888532&tocid=b-9781847888532-EDch4004a&pdfid=9781847888532.0009.pdf.

11. Crill, ibid., 179.

12. Honeyman, Women, Gender, and Industrialization in England 1700–1870, 19.

13. Honeyman, ibid., 42–43.

14. ‘Fast fashion’ refers to garments that are designed, produced, and marketed as rapidly as possible, enabling brands to make trends quickly and cheaply available.

15. See Banerjee Saxena, Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries, and Saxena, Ed., Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia: Bangladesh after Rana Plaza.

16. Clean Clothes Campaign, Accessed December 15, 2023. https://cleanclothes.org/blog/copy_of_open-letter-to-brands-producing-in-bangladesh.

17. Maskiell, “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000,”, 27–28. Kashmiri shawls are especially associated with the courts of Mughal emperors Akbar (r. 1526–1606) and Jahangir (r. 1605–27). Akbar’s Ain-i-Akbari, which contains administrative reports, offers some of the first historical information on Kashmiri shawls, noting their manufacture, luxury qualities, and status as tribute, and elite gifts (Margaret Hall, “Historical Development and Trade,” in Jennifer Harris ed. 5000 Years of Textiles, Washington DC, Smithsonian Books, 2010, 106–107)

18. Maskiell, ibid., 37–40.

19. Maskiell, ibid.,28.

20. The imitation-Kashmiri shawls are not of the same composition, due to the lack of pashim, European and British shawl makers used fibres such as silk mixed with merino wool; Ben Skarratt, Scarlett Mansfield, and Christopher McKenna, “From India to Europe: The Production of the Kashmir Shawl and the Spread of the Paisley Motif,” Global History of Capitalism Project, University of Oxford, August 2018. https://globalcapitalism.histobotry.ox.ac.uk/4-india-europe-production-kashmir-shawl-and-spread-paisley-motif.

21. See: Maskiell, ibid, and Skarratt, et al. ibid.

22. Skarratt, et al., ibid.

23. For more on the swadeshi movement and homespinning cotton, see Rebecca M. Brown, Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India, London, Routledge, 2010; Susan S. Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence,” In Cloth and the Human Experience, edited by Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, 355-65. Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989; Bean, “Freedom Homespun.” Asian Art and Culture 9, no. 2 (1996): 53–67.

24. Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence”

25. Patel, “Textiles in the Modern World,” in Crill, ed. The Fabric of India, 102.

26. Deo, “Religion, nationalism, and gender: Perspective from South Asia,” 874.

27. Gupta, ‘Fashioning’ Swadeshi: Clothing Women in Colonial North India”, 77.

28. Bangladesh employs over 4 million workers in the garment sector, of which 90% are women; Saxena, ‘Introduction: How do We Understand the Rana Plaza Disaster and What Needs to be Done’ in Saxena ed., Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia, 1. Of the nearly 900,000 garment workers in Sri Lanka, nearly 78% are women see: Development Asia August 31, 2020. https://development.asia/insight/securing-womens-place-sri-lankas-apparel-industry.

Women comprise 60 to 80% of the 45 million workers in India’s garment sector, Archana Shukla Mukherjee & PV Narayanan, “From hardship to hope: women migrant workers in the Indian ready-made garment industry,” Open Global Rights, (December 23, 2020). https://www.openglobalrights.org/hardship-to-hope-women-migrant-workers-in-the-indian-ready-made-garment-industry/.

29. Goldberg, “You’re Probably Going To Throw Away 81 Pounds Of Clothing This Year”.

30. Shakya’s earlier work on this topic includes Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal.

31. Patel, ibid, 193–4; “Fabindia Weaves in Artisan Shareholders.” Business Week. Bloomberg. Accessed December 12, 2023.

32. Chatterjee, “Can Our Future be Handmade?”

33. Saha, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal.

34. Saha, Ibid., 215.

35. Crill, ibid., 9.

36. Patel, ibid., 197.

37. Chatterjee, ibid.

38. Frater, ibid.

39. For a discussion on the shift in gendered labour in Lucknow’s chikan industry, see Wilkinson-Weber, ibid; Wilkinson-Weber, “Skill, Dependency, and Differentiation: Artisans and Agents in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry, 53.

40. Kuldova, ibid.

41. Tibert, “Collective Repositories: The Social Lives of Phulkari and Nakshi Kantha Embroideries.”