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Introduction
The late colonial era was, as many scholars have established, a period of expansion for Indian textile markets. As the overall volume of cloth sold doubled between 1900 and 1939, Indian producers benefited most, dramatically displacing imports which fell from more than 57 per cent of cloth sold down to less than 12 per cent over the same period.1Much of the expansion was concentrated in mills, which had captured over 56 per cent of the market by 1939, representing higher output at existing mills, new mills in existing industrial centres, and the emergence of textile mills in smaller towns and cities across India.2But artisanal producers also captured some of the new demand, maintaining control of almost 32 per cent of the vastly enlarged market by the start of the Second World War. This represented both the continued viability of traditional handlooms, but also the new energy created by Mohandas Gandhi's movement to promote khadi (handspun, hand-woven cloth). Just one sign of that energy is that by 1934 the All India Spinners' Association employed almost 240,000 people.3
As many historians have demonstrated, consumption trends helped determine the segmentation of production within different sectors of the textile industry. Tirthankar Roy, Haruka Yanagisawa, Douglas Haynes, and others have noted that rapidly westernizing styles of men's clothing helped fuel the expansion of mills, which produced plain or patterned medium-count fabrics to be made up into trousers, shirts, coats, and more. Strong and ever-evolving demand for more traditional and higher-end fabrics--bordered, with complex and variegated internal woven patterns, or with fragile silk or art-silk threads--tended to support artisanal producers, as those fabrics were uneconomical for mill production.4In western India, Haynes has argued that the incredible segmentation of taste by gender, region, and community benefited small workshops able to produce as little as two saris of a particular design, at the expense of large mills whose bulk production left them unable to respond to specific local consumption needs.5On a more national level, khadi production expanded in direct response to Gandhi's attempts to shift cloth use into more nationalist directions; as khadi became the required dress at Congress party events in 1924, and, more popularly, the fabric of nationalist sentiment in...