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Crafting the Nation in Colonial India By Abigail McGowan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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...