Introduction
In 1900, an article appeared in the August edition of the Salvation Army's monthly magazine, India's Cry, entitled ‘The Hindu Village Artisan. How to Revive His Crafts’, reprinted from the Bombay Guardian, a Christian missionary periodical.Footnote 1 The author of the article related the proposal of Mr S. J. Tellery, the owner of an Indian curio firm. Tellery believed that the Government of India ought to intervene in the preservation and improvement of craft manufactures, the most threatened of which was silk weaving. In the years that followed, the Salvation Army energetically took up Tellery's proposals where the government would not (or could not), paying particular attention to establishing or extending silk production (sericulture) as well as silk weaving. By 1916, the Army was at the command of 28 sericulture and silk settlements across British India and Ceylon, which were to serve as nuclei for the spread of these industries further afield. Almost one-fifth were in Punjab, including the largest single site at Changa Manga and the flagship institution at Simla, all the more significant as the province had previously been home to silk weaving but not silk yarn production.Footnote 2 By 1920, most of the enterprises were abandoned, having failed either to profitably produce silk or to encourage peasants to enter the silk industry, let alone have an impact upon silk weaving. But the Army's reputation was not tarnished as a result of these failures for, in fact, its activities had garnered significant positive publicity and public attention, as decried by those who recognized all the faults in the Army's interventions. This article examines the Salvation Army's involvement in the silk industry in British India, circa 1900–1920, in the course adding to our knowledge of this increasingly influential organization, to the material dimensions of the work of missionary organizations in early twentieth-century colonial India, and to debates about India's traditional industries that raged through to the post-colonial period.
Because of constant cash shortages, on the one hand, and laissez-faire economic ideology, on the other, British India was a ‘private enterprise economy’ where the private sector made most decisions about the allocation of resources, sometimes receiving state support through subsidies and small grants or other forms of preferential treatment.Footnote 3 The imperial arena, therefore, offered opportunities to organizations and individuals to build private fortunes, social and political capital, respectability, and public influence by pioneering developments that the government was unable or unwilling to undertake. The story of the rise of the Salvation Army in Britain and British India, scholars have recently sought to show, was rooted in the ability of its leadership to take advantage of these opportunities. In the first few decades after its establishment, first as the East London Christian Mission in 1865, renamed the Salvation Army in 1878, the Army and its founder, William Booth, were regarded as radical and troublesome. In the face of resistance to proselytization and conversion from the working classes in London, Booth turned to the advocacy of social reform as the key to the spiritual reform of the most hardened ‘heathens’. Although theology remained important to the identity and ideology of the Army, the significance of the balance of focus on material rather than spiritual concerns is indicated by the accusation that Booth was more a businessman than a clergyman, motivated above all by profit.Footnote 4
Harald Fischer-Tiné argues that the diffusion of this social reformism from the metropole to colonial India was central to the changing circumstances and rising reputation of the Army.Footnote 5 Of crucial importance to this story is Frederick Booth-Tucker, son-in-law of the Army's founder.Footnote 6 Unlike most missionaries, Frederick Booth-Tucker was born into the privileged world of the Indian Civil Service in 1853 and educated in England until the age of 20, thereafter joining the Indian Civil Service and working as an assistant magistrate in Punjab from 1874. Booth-Tucker joined the Salvation Army during leave spent in London in 1881, resigning his Indian Civil Service post to work in the Army's legal department, before returning to India to pioneer the Army's efforts there in 1882, making use of his high-profile connections to the colonial state, especially in North India. Under Booth-Tucker, Meena Radhakrishna argues, the Army played a central role in reconceptualizing criminality and reformulating policy in British India.Footnote 7 For Booth, criminality was curable through the provision of profitable employment, and the ‘criminocurological’ approach was central to his social reformism. For Booth-Tucker, ‘criminocurology’ had particular purchase in India where nomadic groups had lost their livelihoods as a consequence of colonial policies towards unsettled ways of life, making it imperative that they be given employment to counteract their turning to a life of crime as a means of survival.Footnote 8 Booth-Tucker was, of course, building on the work of other missionary societies who, in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, had offered work and protection to converts who otherwise would be cast out of their communities.Footnote 9 But Booth-Tucker's advocacy of the ideology of criminocurology went further in that it contributed to the shift in focus from the genetic to the social causes of hereditary criminality, and, consequently, eased the growing administrative problem of the so-called criminal tribes by positing that their behaviour was remediable and reversible.Footnote 10 With the backing of the government of the United Provinces, the Army opened their first ‘settlement’ for the Dom tribe in Gorakpur in 1908, to whom they offered gainful employment in craft industries such as weaving, carpet making, and garment stitching.Footnote 11 The Government of India's Criminal Tribes Act of 1911 enshrined this approach to the causes and cure of criminality—a considerable change from earlier and more unfavourable attitudes towards the usefulness of agricultural and industrial settlements.Footnote 12 With the Army's ability and aptitude for the task demonstrated in Gorakpur, provincial governments gave preference to the Salvation Army over other missionary organizations in running settlements for the groups they classified as criminal tribes.Footnote 13
As Rachel Tolen highlighted in a seminal article in 1991, the Salvation Army sought to ‘discipline’ the body of the individual colonial subject through its work with the criminal tribes on the settlements and the use of their labour.Footnote 14 Yet, by broadening the focus from work with the criminal tribes to interventions in crafts, it is evident that the Army was involved in transforming the individual as well as the collective—that is, Indian society—as part of the same project writ large; there was, in other words, a larger dimension to the work that the Army undertook on the settlements. As scholarly work on the Army in British India has hitherto focussed on its ideology and its work with the criminal tribes, the aims and outcomes of its initiatives to transform the Indian economy have hardly received any mention at all. Although this article focusses foremost on the history of the Army's interventions in sericulture and the silk industry as an important instance of its wider programme of action, it highlights the connection and complementarity of these two transformations: the work with the criminal tribes and with traditional crafts, disciplining the labour of the individual and reorienting the economy to health, the ‘private’ reality of profit-oriented work on the settlements and in the schools, and the public presentation of Salvationist success for the greater good.
The significance of these interventions is readily apparent in light of the increasingly fervent discussions in the 1900s and 1910s about the state of India's economy. These decades formed a crucial moment in the development of the Indian economy, marked by the departure from the state's so-called laissez-fairism (or, rather, its limited interventionism), towards a new stance that morphed out of the attempts of individuals, organizations, provincial governments, and bureaucrats to encourage industrial growth. An important factor was the political pressure brought to bear on the state on the point of its lack of encouragement to industry by the mounting force of Indian nationalist and wider public opinion, especially after the 1905 Partition of Bengal, which gave further momentum to the Swadeshi movement and attempts to improve the status of India's traditional industries. At the official level, these developments culminated in the formation and report of the Indian Industrial Commission in the later 1910s, and what Clive Dewey has called the Government of India's ‘New Industrial Policy’.Footnote 15 It was within this context of ideological change, and the pursuit of economic change, that the Army's interventions and the assistance it wrought from the government ought to be situated. It is, furthermore, as a contribution to the currents of these debates and discussions that the Army's interventions should be appreciated, although it is impossible in this article to draw a direct link between the work of the Salvationists and any particular programmatic details proposed by government.
In turn, the focus on the Army's work in the raw silk and silk textile industries is useful for at least two reasons. In the first place, it was the most publicized, promoted, and discussed of the Army's economic interventions in the 1910s, both in the Army's own publications and also in official literature at the provincial and national levels of the colonial state, much more so than the Army's interventions in cotton weaving or tobacco cultivation and processing, for example. In rhetorical terms, if not in reality, the silk enterprises provided some coherence to the range of its activities, insofar, for example, as they connected the social enterprise of the rehabilitation of criminal tribes (in spite of the silk centres employing a relatively small proportion of the available criminal tribe labour) with the economic endeavour of rescuing and regenerating craft industries, especially in the eyes of the rank-and-file of the mission membership. At the same time, it made the Army's work with the criminal tribes more palatable than did the true fact of the settlements providing labour for increasingly over-stretched provincial governments, especially during the war years. Whereas instruction in sericulture or silk weaving was easily portrayed as beneficial to the criminal tribes while at the same time creating a spillover to the rest of society and the economy, the bulk of the criminal tribes’ labour came to be employed in felling timber for fuel sold at a profit accruing to the Army in addition to the payment received for operating the settlements, thereby only adding to the charge that the Army was more a business than a mission. In short, studying the silk enterprises is central to a fuller understanding of the Army than can be gleaned from the published works on matters of ideology authored by Booth-Tucker that form the basis of much scholarship on the Salvation Army. At the same time, it is a lens through which to examine the way in which the Army sought to present itself to the public in the early twentieth century.
Second, the Army's ideology clearly connected spiritual and material concerns, arguably advantaging the latter, to the extent that the material dimensions of its work on the subcontinent assume some importance in understanding the profile of its activities as a whole. As seen from the synopsis of Tellery's proposals (reprinted by the Salvationists from another, rival, missionary periodical) and from the Army's competition with other missions (who were already rehabilitating criminals in settlements towards the end of the nineteenth century and who also sought to operate settlements on behalf of the government after 1911), the Salvation Army was operating in what is commonly called the ‘competitive mission field’. The Salvation Army is under-researched relative to other missionary organizations such as the Baptist Mission Society, Church Mission Society, and London Missionary Society, which dominate the study of missionary organizations in British India.Footnote 16 Furthermore, many of the material dimensions of this inter-denominational competition have been little studied: alongside the establishment of settlements, schools, and hospitals, mission organizations also intervened in Indian artisan or craft industries such as weaving. The Army, for its part, also sought to compete with other organizations in this field of activity, and projected itself as a national champion of craft regeneration. Indeed, the Army became an important actor in debates about the future of India's traditional industries, a subject long of interest to historians of Indian nationalists and the nationalist movement. More recently, Abigail McGowan has studied what came to be constituted as India's traditional or craft industries, and the range of attitudes towards the development of craft production.Footnote 17 In studying the Army's interventions in sericulture and the silk industry, this article highlights how mission organizations occupied a place within the trajectory of craft regeneration in the early twentieth century, widening the range of actors beyond those Indian thinkers or nationalists and British or British Indian officials that dominate the discussion in McGowan's groundbreaking work. At the same time, however, an appreciation of context and competition—of the concern about the state of crafts around the turn of the century, and the activities of other missions in the field of craft regeneration—helps counter the tendency of viewing Booth-Tucker as the intellectual source and sole driving force of the Army's operations in India before circa 1920, as if other actors and agencies were absent from his thinking.
Within scholarship on the Army, Tolen, Fischer-Tiné, and Radhakrishna's are in fact among the few academic works devoted to the study of the organization outside Britain, Europe, and America, in spite of the fact that the Army's missions were—and still are—truly transnational. Yet, none of these scholars have focussed on the Army's interest in traditional industry and crafts.Footnote 18 To understand the Army's intervention in the silk industry, it is necessary to return to Tellery's proposal of 1900, and the anxieties about Indian society and economy and India's significance in the world, of which it was a manifestation. At the heart of these anxieties was an increasing suspicion of industrialization influenced by Ruskin, Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century, on the one hand, and a belief in fundamental civilizational difference separating Britain and India, as famously articulated by the legal scholar Henry Maine in 1875, on the other. Following their common civilizational origins, Maine argued, Britain had progressed, whereas India had stayed true to her past. Increasingly, agriculturalists and craftsmen came to represent an ‘authentic’ India—an India, it was believed, that ought to be conserved but which could benefit from better techniques and technologies from Britain. Of India's traditional industries, both sericulture and silk weaving were widely recognized in the 1870s and 1880s as being in relative and absolute decline—a decline that provincial and national governments largely failed to thwart.
The Army's primary focus on the production of raw silk and silk textiles was by no means an exclusive focus, for the Army was also involved in the development of ‘improved’ looms and delivering instruction in ‘improved’ weaving techniques to Indians, for example. India's cotton textile industry was, after all, at the epicentre of concerns about deindustrialization and attendant efforts to preserve, improve, revivify, and extend India's traditional industries. Yet, the Army's decision to focus on—or, at least, most heavily publicize its programme of action in—silk can be best understood as the confluence of a range of factors that incentivized intervention in silk over cotton textiles. With the nationwide interest in cotton textiles and efforts to shore up the handloom industry, it is unsurprising that the Army was ‘pushed’ elsewhere in its search for a scheme that could bring it publicity and profit. The fact that a range of missionary organizations were involved in efforts to improve cotton textile technology and cotton cloth weaving prior to the Army's interest in crafts, and had already achieved some success in their efforts, only underscored the difficulty facing the Army were it to focus on cotton. Given the competitiveness of the missionary field, and the need to stand out from other organizations, it is unsurprising that the Army chose to focus instead on silk.
However, there were also positive factors that ‘pulled’ the Army towards silk. In the first place, raw silk was potentially more profitable than cotton, especially once woven into cloth. For the Army, who won contracts for the administration of criminal tribes’ labour on large settlements, silk manufacture offered a much more profitable way of making these allocations of labour and land remunerative than cotton cultivation. Second, there was a double crisis in the silk industry, and a double opportunity for the Army, were it to take an ‘integrated’ approach to solving the problems of the input and output side of the silk textile industry. India was famed for its raw silk and its silk cloth production, but both were in decline by the twentieth century, the former due to disease and international competition, and the latter due to the loss of skills and the influx of cheap foreign silks. Whereas the production of raw cotton was not a hindrance to the handloom industry, the dramatic decline of raw silk production was seen as an impediment to the production of import-competing cloth. Although the Army was motivated at first by the task of regenerating the craft of Indian silk weaving, it thus came to combine this with the prior task of improving and extending Indian sericulture, thereby tackling two of India's beleaguered traditional industries at once. For the Salvation Army, therefore, the tasks of agricultural improvement logically went hand-in-hand with craft regeneration and offered the opportunity to make much more of an impact—if successful—than intervention in cotton weaving. If the task of regenerating Indian silk weaving actually came to occupy proportionally less of the Army's time and efforts in the 1910s, however, it is because it was predicated on the prior task of improving and extending sericulture, which was nowhere achieved with adequate success.
The first and second sections of this article highlight how contemporary anxieties offered opportunities to the Army to position itself as an actor committed to putting Indian traditional industries—specifically sericulture and silk weaving—on a steadier footing. Of importance to the credibility of the Army in this regard was their takeover of the successful Tata Silk Farm in Bangalore, and the mobilization of the Army's networks outside the British Empire that allowed Booth-Tucker to tour the silk industries of the then global leaders, China and Japan. Following the promulgation of the 1911 Act and the Army's operation of settlements for the criminal tribes across India, a small proportion of the settlements’ populations were set to the task of sericulture and silk weaving as part of their ‘reformation’. The attention this receives in the surviving sources far outweighs the actual quantitative significance of these enterprises relative to other activities with which the criminal tribes were employed. This, in turn, is indicative of the importance of the silk project to the Army's publicity and public image. The third and fourth sections examine the Army's most ambitious interventions in Changa Manga and Simla, highlighting how the Army's involvement in the silk industry was predicated and presented as connecting the concerns of preserving ‘authentic’ peasant production, reversing the decline of the formerly lucrative silk industry, and providing profitable employment to the criminal tribes and vocational education to their progeny. In so doing, the Army presented itself as shouldering the concerns of the imperial rulers, and as the saviour of Indian society and economy, at least in its own publicity, but nevertheless becoming an important, if overlooked, actor in the discussion and action surrounding industry and the economy in British India. Although the Army's enterprises ended in failure within a few years, forcing provincial governments to withdraw their funding of the Army's sericultural operations, this was not before it had inveigled the government and the public as to its authority and gained greater publicity for its activities.
The crisis of sericulture in late colonial India
A series of monographs on Indian sericulture were commissioned in response to the mounting crisis in the late nineteenth century, as a once-lucrative industry languished as a result of competition from China and Japan.Footnote 19 The Government of India was acutely aware of the deterioration of silk production and the decline of exports, and, in 1885, appointed Thomas Wardle to the task of reinstating Bengal as the epicentre of global silk production. Wardle's knowledge of Indian silk yarns stemmed from his textile business in the north of England.Footnote 20 In the course of his investigations, Wardle recommended that an Indian sericulturalist be sent to study in Europe, returning to India with knowledge that could then be taught to silk manufacturers. This was in keeping with the state's attitudes towards industrial intervention: after the East India Company's silk monopoly was opened to private entrepreneurs in 1835, the Government of India ‘saw its own role as restricted to demonstration, encouragement and experimentation’.Footnote 21 A Bengali named Nitya Gopal Mukherji was thus duly despatched to Europe, studying in Padua, in Montpelier, and in Paris under Pasteur, the doyen of microbiology and bacteriology, whose study of silkworm disease saved sericulture in France and Italy.Footnote 22 Until 1915, Mukherji remained—as the ‘silk expert’ —at the head of small-scale efforts to investigate and save Indian sericulture, their lack of success the result of the shortage of funds, personnel, and planning.Footnote 23
Although the Imperial Department of Agriculture appointed Harold Maxwell-Lefroy as the second entomologist to the Government of India in 1903, his duties did not initially extend to sericulture, which remained Mukherji's domain, indicative of the state's half-hearted intervention in saving the silk industry.Footnote 24 Maxwell-Lefroy's work was conducted at Pusa in Bihar, a site intimately connected with the history of science in British India. It was first established in 1796 as a stud farm for the breeding of cavalry horses, thereafter repurposed as an experimental farm in 1874, and latterly redeveloped as the Agricultural Research Institute in 1905, renamed the Imperial Institute of Agricultural Research in 1911.Footnote 25 At the Institute, Maxwell-Lefroy's main duties included the investigation of insect pests and their eradication, which fitted him well for his future as the founder of Rentokil, the extermination company, for which he is most famous and remembered today. Only in 1915 was Lefroy specially seconded for one year to the position of imperial silk specialist, in which capacity he toured the subcontinent, the result of which was the three-volume Report written with E. C. Ansorge in 1917, the most comprehensive compilation of information and policy prescriptions on the subject to date.Footnote 26 In the meantime, a number of individuals, institutions, and initiatives were working to revive sericulture in Bengal and Bihar under the auspices of the provincial governments and private bodies. Aside from the growth of global competition, the decline of the silk industry was thought to be the result of the ‘deterioration’ of silk worms due to disease, as well as technological backwardness in yarn-production relative to Europe and East Asia, where state support had succeeded in helping sericulturalists claw back some of the market share from Bengal.Footnote 27
Both pébrine and flacherie resulted from the silkworms’ ingestion of infected leaves, with mother moths passing on pébrine to the eggs, afflicting even those offspring fed with healthy leaves. To save sericulture from crisis, it was necessary, first, to microscopically examine eggs using the Pasteur method and supply silkworm rearers with disease-free seed and, second, to improve the quality and quantity of silk produced through the cross-breeding of silkworm species.Footnote 28 Until 1923, when the experiments were finally abandoned, entomologists in Pusa and the Sericultural Research Station in Berhampur, Bengal, attempted to hybridize Indian multivoltine silkworms, which hatched several times a year but produced an inferior sort of silk, with Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese univoltine silkworms, which hatched only once a year but produced the most valuable sort of silk.Footnote 29 Although these efforts ended in defeat, the distribution of disease-free seed, disinfectants, and microscopes, the employment of foreign experts, the establishment of model rearing sheds, and the education of sericulturalists through the provision of scholarships, for example, were together marginally more successful initiatives instituted at the expense of the Bengal Silk Committee (established in 1898) and the Bengal and Assam governments.Footnote 30
Because the threat of foreign competition was only one of the problems facing the Indian silk industry, proposed solutions ranged wider than the emulation of Chinese and Japanese silk production. Although large filatures were established in East Asia, the rearing of silkworms was ideal as a small-scale industry, which protected to some extent against the rapid spread of disease. In India, Kashmir served as a model. In 1869, Maharaja Ranbir Singh (r.1857–1885) inaugurated the first experiment in the expansion and modernization of Kashmir's silk industry. The growth of the industry from one oriented towards silk supply for the domestic manufacture of shawls and embroidery to one oriented towards export is evident from the increase in the trade of raw silk to neighbouring Punjab.Footnote 31 From Punjab, some silk was shipped abroad, all the more significant at a time when the global market share and scale of Indian silk exports as a whole was shrinking.Footnote 32 Because the silkworms were reared in warehouses, they were much more susceptible to disease epidemics, which eventually devastated the enterprise in 1878, causing its abandonment in 1881.Footnote 33
In the 1890s, Maharajah Pratab Singh (r.1885–1925) and Thomas Wardle—with the support of the Government of India—resumed the modernization of Kashmir's silk industry, this time with a greater degree of decentralization in silkworm rearing (for example, as a cottage industry), as well as government-centralized control and supervision of all stages of production, from mulberry cultivation, seed distribution, cocoon purchase and processing, to silk sales.Footnote 34 The results were impressive: manufacturers in England considered Kashmir raw silks far superior to those of Bengal, notwithstanding some defects, and the scale of exports increased considerably.Footnote 35 In 1905, for example, Kashmir's silk industry employed almost 70,000 people and produced profits of £28,139, or 58.5 per cent on capital investment.Footnote 36 Ultimately, the running costs were so great that the enterprise continued to make a net loss through the early decades of the twentieth century, making it impossible to sell the silk industry to private entrepreneurs.Footnote 37 But the transformation of Kashmir's silk industry was seen as a blueprint for sericulture in British India.
If sericulture was suitable as a cottage industry, cottage industry was ideal as a form of productive organization that mediated between new and old, accommodating technological and technical developments while also preserving pre-industrial or ‘traditional’ lifestyles and landscapes. In the metropole, men such as John Ruskin and William Morris lamented the loss of the countryside and historic monuments and buildings, and the loss of creativity that came with the division of labour and industrial capitalism. The aesthetic critique of industrialization famously flowered in the Arts and Crafts Movement. In India, its influence was profound, although the public interest in traditional industry, cottage industry, and crafts was not merely derivative of metropolitan agendas.Footnote 38 Rather, ‘crafts came to stand not just as a set of products or a type of production but as a larger snapshot of Indian society itself, representing its visual culture, social organization, intellectual traditions, and engagement with the larger world’.Footnote 39 Specifically, India and Indian traditional agrarian and craft industries were considered ‘different’ from those of Britain and the West, a difference of development in time more than place.Footnote 40 In spite of their common ‘civilizational’ origins, Britain had marched into progress and prosperity, whereas India remained backward and barbaric, as argued by Henry Maine.Footnote 41
The imperial rulers thought it their duty, therefore, to act ‘at once [as] agents of “progress”, charged with setting India on the road to modernity, and at the same time as custodians of an enduring India formed forever in antiquity.’Footnote 42 If India's fabled, self-supporting ‘village republics’ were worth preserving, it was because agriculture, craft manufacture, and the supposedly stable and unchanging unit that was the village came to be seen as ‘authentic’.Footnote 43 In fulfilment of Britain's duty to her poor relation, however, the benefits of progress could be brought to the ‘village republics’ in the form of improved tools, techniques, and technologies. But the paternalist-preservationist path to progress was only one approach. Although they accepted the existence of difference, some Indian nationalists denied its inevitability. In the crisis of Indian traditional industries, they saw a critique of colonial rule. In place of preservation, they saw an opportunity for modernization, focussing on labour and technology, on industrial discipline and efficiency.Footnote 44
Occupying a space between these two positions, however, were a number of individuals, including, most famously, Tagore and M. K. Gandhi, as well as a number of organizations, such as the Salvation Army, who viewed the Indian handloom sector as too important to be replaced wholescale with large-scale modern mills, and instead saw modernization as taking place through small-scale craft industry.Footnote 45 In India, Booth-Tucker and his fellow Salvationists adopted Indian dress—turbans, lungis (waistcloths), kurtas (tunics), and saris—and Indian names in order ‘to be Indians to the Indians’ and teach the life of Christ in a vernacular rather than an English style, an act as much to do with the maintenance of civilizational difference as reaching out to the Indian populace.Footnote 46 Booth-Tucker himself was known as Fakir Singh—and his third wife, Mary Reid, as Dutini—and wore Indian dress whenever photographed for the Army's periodical, the Indian Cry.Footnote 47 That Booth-Tucker's assessment of the Army's work on the subcontinent was concerned not with ‘introducing a “back to the land” movement’ so much as ‘a “stick to the land” policy’ is indicative of the vision of ‘village communities’ as authentic, and of the proximity to the traditionalists and those nationalists who also sought to rescue and revive the Indian artisanal sector in place of promoting factory production.Footnote 48 The championing of traditional industry by the Army became the embodiment of efforts to address the economic crisis in colonial India, a crisis that extended beyond craft manufacture. In particular, the Army turned their attention not merely to the craft of cloth weaving, but to the whole business of silk, from mulberry cultivation to the subcontinent's shrinking sericulture industry to silk weaving, an effort that occupied the energies of the Salvationists throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Silk, sericulture, and the Salvation Army
In 1900, eight years before the start of the work with criminal tribes, and around a decade before the start of their engagement with sericulture and the silk industry, Tellery's ‘The Hindu Village Artisan. How to Revive His Crafts’ was reprinted in the Army's Indian periodical. Whatever his humanitarian interest, Tellery is likely to have had a vested interest in the condition of craft producers, his occupation having once been profitable as a result of the expansion of the curio trade thanks to the Arts and Crafts Movement and the popularization of the Orient in fashionable London stores such as Liberty, but fast becoming redundant as consumer tastes turned towards continental modernism.Footnote 49
Tellery had ‘carefully studied’ Indian village crafts and had ‘come forward with a proposal full of promise for speedy and large results’. In essence, Tellery asserted that Indian handicrafts were in decline as a consequence of Indian artisans’ technological backwardness, their exposure to foreign competition, and an absence of the sort of public and private intervention that supported handicraft production in continental Europe. He produced a list of 16 crafts that could be ‘revived’, at the top of which was silk weaving, followed by cotton weaving, carpet making, and various stone, wood, ivory, metal, and lapidary crafts.Footnote 50 He also outlined a proposal whereby the ‘Government should open factories in various centres, supply raw material to village craftsmen, purchase the produce, and act as traders, and to some extent as instructors and producers, at least of samples’.Footnote 51 Typical of the traditionalist critic of industrialization, Tellery's insights were utterly unrepresentative of the sort of content that usually appeared in the periodical, namely notices of official tours and personal rites of passage, digests of progress in conversions and missionary work, and submissions of songs for performance by the Army's bands.
In fact, Tellery's proposal served as a sort of programme for the Salvation Army, who sought to take the place allocated to ‘government’ in the revival of Indian crafts. A poem printed in India's Cry in 1906, ‘The Two Weavers’, took the form of a dialogue between two Indian carpet-makers, colloquially named John and Dick, the latter weary of his work, which is insufficiently remunerative to provide for his family and sick children.Footnote 52 The literal message of the poem concerned perseverance, that reward would follow from such honourable employment. The moral message of the poem was also clear: the artisan's work was virtuous, for it was a microcosmic reminder and a manifestation of the mysteries of the macrocosm, the threads coming together on the loom to form a beauteous pattern analogous to God's workings in the universe.Footnote 53 The Army was not unusual among Protestant mission organizations in emphasizing the moral importance of work and discipline, as opposed to idleness. Following the mid nineteenth-century rebellions against colonial rule, including the Indian Rebellion of 1857, many missionary organizations ‘started to doubt the efficacy of evangelising’ non-Christian, non-white subjects, turning instead to ‘“good works” directed towards specific communities or problems’.Footnote 54 Thus, the Army was also not unique among missions in colonial India in seeking to intervene in the craft sector, with the American Presbyterian Mission offering technical training in weaving in Punjab, for example. Rather, they differed on the point of the comprehensiveness of the Army's interventions (knitting together the two traditional industries of sericulture and silk weaving, thus encompassing everything from silkworm rearing to cloth manufacture, from improving mulberry cultivation to improving machinery for weaving), the rapid pace of the developments and the spread of these activities to the Army's centres of missionary work across the subcontinent, and the amount of state support and public attention that these enterprises garnered.Footnote 55 Indeed, the Army's materialist ideology and its interest in the economy meant that the poem's literal and allegorical messages were equally important.Footnote 56 Writing in The War Cry about the nature and necessity of the Army's work in India, Booth-Tucker went further, nesting spiritual concerns within the wider social and economic intervention that emerged as the task of the Salvationists, namely the preservation of traditional industries that Indians—epitomized by Dick—seemed to be giving up.Footnote 57
The loom as an apparatus was crucial to the Army's revival of mixed silk-cotton and cotton weaving.Footnote 58 In 1904, the S. A. Loom Factory was established at Ludhiana in Punjab, where existing handlooms and warping machines were adapted to allow the manufacture of the sorts and sizes of cloth thought to be in demand but impossible to manufacture on traditional apparatus.Footnote 59 The back cover of the February 1910 issue of India's Cry featured an early advertisement for the ‘Salvation Army Swadeshi Automatic Patent Direct Action Hand Loom’, listing the awards and prizes in place of the improvements it offered on existing machines.Footnote 60 Of course, the name of the apparatus was a nod to the Swadeshi movement that had emerged in Bengal in 1905, which saw the boycott of British or Western goods. Throughout the 1900s and 1910s, a series of models were introduced—such as the ‘Coronation Loom’, the ‘model de luxe’ of 1911.Footnote 61 With the increase in demand for weaving apparatus, production and distribution was established at Byculla, Bombay, in addition to the loom factory in Ludhiana, to fulfil orders that came from ‘China, Africa, Australia, Singapore, Aden, India, Burma, Ceylon’ by 1921.Footnote 62 This aspect of the Army's work was, much like its intervention in crafts at large, neither unique nor original: D. C. Churchill, of the American Marathi Mission, innovated an improved loom that outcompeted the Army's loom to win first prize in the 1908 Madras competition. Churchill was an MIT graduate, and his scientific background probably explains his success over the Salvationists, whose deficit in expertise was a chronic feature running throughout their interventions, as this article highlights.Footnote 63
Alongside the ‘improvement’ of traditional technologies, the Salvation Army opened the Sir Louis Dane Weaving School in the Ludhiana Fort, named after the then Lieutenant Governor of Punjab. The Army received rent-free use of the fort, and an annual subsidy of over Rs. 40,000 for the first three years, among other advantages not mentioned in its periodicals.Footnote 64 At the school, the Salvation Army continued their work with orphaned children and criminal tribes, offering education and employment in textile manufacture.Footnote 65 Additionally, the school offered missionaries ‘realising the advantage of understanding looms and weaving themselves . . . a month's course of practical instruction . . . [so they] can get a good practical knowledge of how to run a “Weavery”’.Footnote 66 The establishment of the model weavery in 1911, however, was also sanctioned by the Punjab government at an additional annual expense of Rs. 20,000 for the first two years for the employment of a weaving assistant, a mechanic, five weavers, and, from 1912, a supervisor, a weaving master, a dyeing assistant, and an embroidery mistress.Footnote 67 Aside from experimenting with techniques and technologies, and diffusing these through instruction to weavers and missionaries, the weavery and the school also served as a showroom and salesroom, and fulfilled orders received from across North India—although what proportion of these purchases was made by Salvationists rather than the public at large is impossible to say.Footnote 68
In turning to sericulture, the Salvation Army at once addressed the issue of the artisan's supply of raw material and the troubles of a traditional cottage industry itself in need of revival. Sericulture was believed to be better suited to India than Europe or East Asia—the global leaders in silk production—and was thought to offer ‘congenial and profitable employment’ to the ryot (peasant).Footnote 69 Public interest in the silk industry in the early decades of the twentieth century was considerable, the Imperial Department of Agriculture noting the increasing number of ‘correspondents’ who took an interest in sericulture and asked for advice, disease-free eggs, spinning machines, and so forth.Footnote 70 But Booth-Tucker retained a close personal connection to the colonial state and was more than a mere correspondent with the entomologists and experts at Bihar and Bengal. For the Salvation Army's work with the criminal tribes in the United Provinces, Booth-Tucker was invested with the Kaiser-i-Hind by Governor General Hardinge in 1913.Footnote 71 Following their work in the United Provinces, the weaving school in Ludhiana was opened—according to The War Cry—at the behest of the lieutenant governor himself. And the Salvation Army were invited—alongside ‘leaders of industry and government’—to the Industrial Commission's first conference ‘regarding the future of Punjab industry’ in 1911.Footnote 72 Whatever the reality of their relationship with the upper echelons of the Punjab government and the Government of India, Booth-Tucker and his Salvationists certainly took pains to present a relationship of closeness as means of further cultivating connections.
Certainly, the Army's periodicals and pamphlets painted the organization and its enterprises as shouldering the concerns of the colonial state, and nowhere was this more apparent than in its intervention in sericulture and the silk industry. In 1916, a pamphlet was published containing the insights gathered by Booth-Tucker and Mary Reid during their trip to Canton, Shanghai, Peking (Beijing), Mukden (Shenyang), Tokyo, Kyoto, Chosen (Japanese Korea), and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh).Footnote 73 On the one hand, the material on univoltine and multivoltine worms was of relevance to the sort of laboratory-based experiments that engaged the scientists in Pusa and Berhampur, rather than the staff at the Army's sericulture centres.Footnote 74 Additionally, the conclusion contained suggestions—including the organization of a conference with speakers from silk-utilizing firms in Europe and silk-producing institutions in Asia, and the establishment of a Department of Silk with a director of sericulture in India —that were outside the scope of the Army's work, and were directed towards the Government of India.Footnote 75 On the other hand, much of the material related to the hands-on task of (re)establishing sericulture across India, a task with which the Salvation Army—not the Imperial Department of Agriculture—was more actively engaged.
In fact, the publication of the pamphlet inadvertently made a mockery of the state's intervention in sericulture, for while these two Salvationists travelled to the epicentres of silk production—outside the British Empire, into a truly transnational or global sphere—Mukherji and Maxwell-Lefroy's investigations were restricted to the ailing silk centres of India.Footnote 76 Booth-Tucker's advice was imprinted with the bias towards cottage industry rather than the large filatures and the large weaveries recently established in China and Japan, and towards the use of traditional looms, while at the same time attempting to ascertain means of improving the technologies, techniques, and methods of education employed at the Salvation Army's silk centres.Footnote 77 In this respect, the information in the pamphlet crystallized the spirit of the Salvationist interest in sericulture, which was always conceived as a crucial part of an ‘integrated’ response to the crisis in silk weaving and, in turn, part of a response to the wider crisis in the subcontinent's traditional industries. Indeed, the energy with which the Salvationists set about the sericulture experiments of the 1900s and 1910s is testament to the centrality of these experiments to their work as a whole—to the work with the criminal tribes, to the revival of cottage industry, and to the revival of India's premier position as a silk producer.
The Army first engaged in sericultural activities in Bangalore.Footnote 78 Around the turn of the century, Jamsetji Tata—the Indian Parsi industrialist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist—founded the Tata Silk Farm for the purpose of reviving the silk industry, with the support of an annual subsidy from the Mysore government. A Japanese silk expert was employed to instruct the staff in the latest techniques in silkworm rearing and silk reeling and to manage the farm, with his success even encouraging the Government of India's sanctioning of the establishment of silk experiments at Pusa.Footnote 79 In 1910, management of the farm was officially transferred to the Salvation Army, who continued to receive subsidy payments from the provincial government. In fact, Tata and Booth-Tucker were old friends, and the industrial dynast's support stretched far further than involving the Army in its sericulture centre.Footnote 80 Under its management, nevertheless, work at the farm was extended to include mulberry cultivation, thread production, cloth weaving, cocoon supply to outlying villages, and sales. These activities were undertaken with some success; the specimens of the Farm's manufactures—from worms to woven goods— were awarded gold medals at exhibition in 1911, for example, all of which was open to visitors to the farm.Footnote 81
Unable to meet the demand for postcards, the manager of the Tata Silk Farm in Bangalore published a pamphlet in 1918 containing 21 photographs of men and women at work, analysis of which highlights how labour was organized by the Salvationists.Footnote 82 Tolen has highlighted the general ways in which the Army sought to ‘inculcate [sic] a disciplined habitus in criminal tribespeople’, including the strict observance of routine, of scheduled time, and time-keeping, which encompassed inducting the criminal tribespeople ‘into the processes of commodity production and the conventions of selling one's bodily activity as labor for a wage . . . in factories, workshops, and industrial schools’.Footnote 83 Tolen also noted that the ‘missionary activities of the Salvation Army were linked to the spatiotemporal extension of the British Empire’. Yet, there were specific ways in which this disciplining took place which were linked more closely to the needs and ideals of British India than Britain—of the colony rather than the metropole. Indeed, the photographs and accompanying captions of work at the Tata Silk Farm in Bangalore are valuable precisely because they offer some indication of the ways in which the work of the men and women at the Salvation Army's schools, settlements, and farms was gendered and classed. The photographs show women involved in ‘throwing and preparing silk for the men’, ‘Hemstitching silk handkerchiefs, &c.’, and ‘Packing parcels for England and other places’.Footnote 84 A woman's work was in the home and was domestic in character—at least for the ‘would-be good’, would-be bourgeois women from the criminal tribes at the farm.Footnote 85 In contrast, the boys and men undertook all the manual and outdoor work.Footnote 86 The Army's attitudes towards gender and race, therefore, were complex and contradictory, at once opening opportunities for those who achieved salvation, while simultaneously sharpening differences and distinctions among men and women, whites and non-whites. In this respect, the Army is an under-researched architect of the ‘tensions of empire’.Footnote 87 In turn, these attitudes ossified the gendering of labour and technology manifest in the development programmes in post-independence India, indicative of the wider impact of the missionary–colonial state relationship.Footnote 88
The Tata Silk Farm served as a model for the organization of sericultural labour, and as a model of vertically integrated cottage industry, encompassing everything from mulberry cultivation to cloth weaving—models which were rapidly replicated across India and Ceylon.Footnote 89 These efforts came to be especially concentrated in Punjab—partly because of the greater competitiveness of the missionary field and ‘rival’ attempts to revive sericulture in Bengal, but also because of the greater potential for success with sericulture in an area free from both disease and pre-existing industry, and because of Booth-Tucker's denser network of official contacts in Punjab.
Silk and salvation in the forests of Punjab
Of several legends concerning the name of the Changa Manga Forest, one remains particularly popular. The forest, 40 miles south of Lahore, was at some time the refuge of Changa and Manga—brothers by birth, and outlaws by occupation—who plundered passing traders and secreted their treasure in the forest.Footnote 90 Around half a century after the colonial conquest of Punjab, the forest was again home to ‘criminals’ who harvested its treasure, the abundance of timber. Spanning almost 10,000 acres in the 1910s, much of the Changa Manga Forest was mulberry that naturally filled the empty expanses that stood several decades earlier, when the Punjab Forest Department first outlined their working plan for the forest.Footnote 91 Mulberry was thought to out-compete sisu, or Indian rosewood. As sisu was believed to be a superior source of timber and firewood, and more remunerative as a cash crop, the early plans for the forest outlined the felling of mulberry in areas suitable for sisu.Footnote 92 In fact, sisu was prone to a root parasite that did not affect mulberry, and grew more slowly, so the mulberry yields were greater than those of sisu.Footnote 93
Establishing a settlement for criminal tribes at Changa Manga was the idea of Louis Dane, lieutenant governor of Punjab, who believed that the expenditure on clearing the forest of virulent tree species such as mulberry could be better utilized if it provided employment to criminals, thereby simultaneously clearing one of the physical and ‘moral jungles’ of the province.Footnote 94 In fact, the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911 sanctioned the use of ‘criminal’ labour to plug private entrepreneurs’ labour shortages, a strategy widely adopted across the subcontinent, with the demand for timber during the war years prompting a considerable increase in the number of people registered as criminal tribes in Punjab as a whole as well as an increase in the importance of the Changa Manga settlement in particular.Footnote 95 As the village of Changa Manga was constituted of only 30 houses, the scarcity of local labour meant that an entirely seasonal and casual arrangement was not workable, while tree felling alone was not worthwhile for the 300–400 men that the scheme envisaged.Footnote 96 The abundance of mulberry also suggested the fruitfulness of sericulture, again not only for the single purpose of ‘finding further employment for these tribes’, but also as means of ‘popularising the cult of the silkworm throughout the province’.Footnote 97 Such beliefs were typical of those frequently espoused by the colonial state: the utility of criminal labour—whether on the settlements or in jails—was seen to lie in its idleness, for this idle labour could be mobilized to manufacture traditional craft items in need of preservation and improvement, revivification and (re)introduction into the local economy through a demonstration and diffusion effect.Footnote 98
The settlement, or silk camp, at Changa Manga was first mentioned in The War Cry in 1911, following the inauguration of the revised Criminal Tribes Act, and at the same time as the establishment of a settlement for criminals at Danipur, itself later a site for silkworm rearing and silk weaving, albeit briefly.Footnote 99 With its fabled connection to the thieves Changa and Manga, the literature produced by the Salvationists presented this as a site for the transformation of history, to turn former vice into future virtue through the salvation of the criminals and the forest.Footnote 100 But the forest at Changa Manga offered much more as a site for the salvation of sericulture and the silk industry in South Asia. The Army's publications position the Changa Manga initiative as following from their work with the criminal tribes in Gorakpur from 1908, their interest in sericulture as manifested in their takeover of the Tata Silk Farm in Bangalore in 1910, and the colonial state's spirit of promoting private enterprise.
In fact, the sericulturally oriented settlement for criminal tribes followed from interest within the Punjab Agriculture Department for the establishment of a silk industry prior to the Army's involvement anywhere on the subcontinent with either silk or criminals.Footnote 101 Although the Agriculture Department recognized the deleterious influence of the hot winds on the worms, they singled out Changa Manga as one of three sites across Punjab where mulberry flourished on a significant scale.Footnote 102 In 1909, preliminary experiments produced promising results, the quality, quantity, and yield of the silk produced at Changa Manga exceeding that produced in the submontane and canal colony tracts; this success was attributed to the abundance of food and the care of the sericulturalists.Footnote 103 These results presumably provided the momentum for the Army's involvement from 1911.
Management of the forest work and the silk camp at Changa Manga was the occupation of an English couple, renamed Akbar and Fazal Bibi, who organized the seasonal supply of criminal labour on contract.Footnote 104 In the cool months, from October to March, the criminals were employed in the task of timber felling, with 200 men cutting 750,000 cubic feet of timber in 1912–1913. The number of men involved in tree felling and timber transport increased to 500 by 1916.Footnote 105 Although some firewood was purchased by the people of Changa Manga, most firewood and timber was transported by bullock cart for sale at the depot alongside the Changa Manga railway station, from whence the bulk was taken to Lahore and Amritsar.Footnote 106 Additionally, the tasks of road improvement, road clearing, silt clearing, and irrigation provided employment for around 100 men.Footnote 107
At the heart of the Changa Manga settlement was the serai, or rest-house, the spiritual and sericultural centre of the operation, where the Army's otherwise separate concerns for moral and material uplift were brought together. The Salvationists proselytized at the serai and in the village, screening films on the life of Christ, arranging afternoon meetings and sermons on Sundays, and distributing tracts from the Gospel translated into Urdu and Gurmukhi (Punjabi), for example, while also operating a dispensary, zenana visits, and a small school for boys.Footnote 108 And there, in the warm and dry months from February to April, Akbar, Fazal Bibi, and the criminals constructed bamboo and dried-grass sheds where 100 ounces of French silkworm eggs were hatched. The labours of the sericulturalists were then occupied ‘till midnight feeding the Silkworms, every room available . . . filled to overflowing with the worms’.Footnote 109
For their efforts with the ‘crims’ to succeed, however, the Salvationists realized the necessity of extending employment opportunities beyond the winter and spring seasons. The Salvationists thought of Changa Manga as an ‘artificial forest’ of mulberry—artificial insofar as the tree was treated as a crop, its cultivation carefully managed for the provision of fuel and fruit, as well as fodder for the silkworms.Footnote 110 Jam making also occupied the labours of the Salvationists and the workers in the forest, to utilize the otherwise wasted fruits of the mulberry.Footnote 111 But this activity is absent from progress reports published in The War Cry. In fact, in Army writing about Changa Manga, if not in reality, sericulture came to define the entire enterprise, rather than being portrayed as a convenient complement to tree felling. A poem printed in The War Cry in June 1916, entitled ‘Changa Manga’, is exemplary of the way in which the periodical's contributors and editors presented the enterprise. Charlie Green, the poet—presumably a Salvationist visiting the Silk Camp while on leave (‘furlough’)—wrote of silkworm rearing in the forest (‘For nestling in among the trees/An unexpected sight one sees’), and the efforts of the sericulturalists, ending with the reward of a cocoon harvest for the Army (‘But we are very glad to tell/Cocoons we soon shall have to sell/Silk, yes, Army manufacture/Soon will be a source of rapture’). The forestry work, however, was not mentioned at all.Footnote 112 Of course, this omission was in keeping with the momentum behind their efforts on the subcontinent at this time, to the extent that sericulture and silk weaving institutions were the most numerous of the many memorials proposed following the death of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, in 1912.Footnote 113
But the forest at Changa Manga was not only the largest of these experiments in sericulture; it was also intended as the nucleus of the Army's efforts to spread sericulture as a cottage industry in Punjab. Booth-Tucker, after all, was a proponent of a ‘stick to the land’ policy for the peasantry and saw India's villages and the British Indian state's settlements for the criminal tribes along the same lines, to the extent of blurring the two together: as places where silkworms would be reared, silk yarn manufactured, and silk textiles woven, with surpluses of yarn and cloth presumably to be sold in export markets.Footnote 114 Official interest in sericulture in Punjab is traceable to the 1840s, prior to the conclusion of the wars of conquest, from which time the earliest evidence relating to the extent of sericulture is to be found. On the whole, Punjabi weavers imported almost all of their yarns from Afghanistan and Central Asia, substituting these supplies with Chinese and Japanese yarns over the course of the century. In Kashmir and the submontane tracts of Punjab, however, peasants produced small amounts of silk for local consumption, which formed the basis for the aforementioned massive state interventions in Kashmir, as well as sporadic but ongoing optimism about (and attempts to initiate) productive expansion in Punjab, of which the Army's interest was the final and costliest flourish.Footnote 115 The Salvationists’ task, therefore, was to expand and improve silk production in the submontane districts, while also introducing sericulture further afield in the province.
Yet, rather than the Army's work with the peasantry depending on the diffusion of expertise from Changa Manga, the work with villagers came to constitute an increasingly autonomous counterpart to the work with the criminal tribes, in part because of the limited successes achieved at Changa Manga (discussed below), and in part because of the distinctive problems to be surmounted in the districts. Because sericulture was labour- rather than land-intensive, it generally tended to attract those who were poorer, landless, and seasonally employed. This was especially true of peasants in the submontane tracts in Punjab, who welcomed sericulture as a well-remunerated, year-round cottage industry.Footnote 116 However, this sort of sericulturalist relied on communal local sources of leaves for the worms. Thus, the expansion of sericulture as a cottage industry among peasants necessitated the expansion of mulberry plantations proximate to the silkworm rearers.
In 1910, therefore, the Salvationists organized ‘Arbour Day’ to coincide with the annual Empire Day celebrations on 24 May, the birthday of Queen Victoria.Footnote 117 ‘The utilisation of such an event for a practical purpose,’ wrote Booth-Tucker in The War Cry in March 1910, ‘is in accordance with the principles and spirit of the Salvation Army.’Footnote 118 Trees stopped soil erosion; trees provided shade, timber, fuel, and fruit; trees provided for prosperity. Of all trees, the mulberry was singled out as especially valuable in each regard, with an entire section outlining the profits made from silkworm rearing.Footnote 119 The April and May issues of The War Cry provided further information, most importantly planting advice and guidance on where to procure free seed, seedlings, and cuttings, most of which was oriented towards mulberry, with only a short section on ‘Other Trees’ in the latter issue, for example.Footnote 120 Although the ‘Arbour Day’ was advertised with the most fanfare in its inaugural year, the subsequent silence is not evidence of a subsidence in these efforts, for Arbour Day and tree planting persisted through the 1910s.Footnote 121
In spite of these energetic campaigns, tree planting probably altered the silkworm rearers’ access to fresh leaf only minimally. In fact, up until the 1920s, Punjabi sericulturalists remained reliant on what were still small supplies of free mulberry leaf. If sericulture was to expand, more mulberry cultivation was needed, which was dependent on sufficient profit margins to the private planter, for neither the local landowners or district boards were likely to enter the market. If the rearers were forced to pay the market price for leaf, their profit margins might be reduced so far as to disincentivize sericulture altogether. The Punjab Department of Agriculture deemed it doubtful, therefore, that sericulture could continue as a cottage industry.Footnote 122 But they persevered, rather slowly and sluggishly, to try to increase access to sufficient supplies of leaf, following the lead of the Salvation Army. In the closing years of the 1910s, the Agricultural Department tried to establish mulberry plantations in the principal silk-producing districts, extending the efforts of the Irrigation Department at the start of the decade in planting mulberry along canal banks in Ambala, Gurdaspur, and Ludhiana.Footnote 123 And, in 1921–1922, 3,000 mulberry saplings were planted on the waste banks of the Upper Bari Doab Canal.Footnote 124
Alongside the supply of fresh food for worms, the success of sericulture as a cottage industry depended on the supply of disease-free eggs. The Punjab government decided that French (rather than Bengali) seed would be supplied to rearers gratis, as long as they returned the cocoons to the government, who would sell the silk and pay the rearers out of the profits realized.Footnote 125 The volume of free seed disbursed through the Department of Agriculture increased from 575 ounces in 1916, to 700 ounces in 1917, 872 ounces in 1919, 1,000 ounces in 1920, 2,162 ounces in 1921, and 2,825 ounces in 1922, and serves as a sort of index for the expansion of silk yarn production.Footnote 126 Unsurprisingly, given their involvement in the spread of sericulture as a cottage industry, some seed was also annually supplied by the Salvation Army, although they, too, initially made use of the free seed supplied through the Department of Agriculture. In 1916–1917, for example, the only year for which any statistics relating to their distribution of seed are available, the Army supplied 463 ounces of seed, equivalent to two-thirds of what was supplied by the Punjab government.Footnote 127 The seed was supplied to schools in the submontane districts with mulberry trees in their vicinity, alongside leaflets and lesson cards.Footnote 128
Accompanying the increase in the amount of seed distributed to rearers, was the increase in the number of districts and the number of people involved in sericulture, indicative of the spread of silkworm rearing as a cottage industry.Footnote 129 The lack of expertise and education in sericulture, however, was responsible for reducing the average yield of yarn from the seed supplied to the peasants, not to mention anything of its quality.Footnote 130 The Department of Agriculture was aware of the inadequate methods of silkworm rearing prior to the commencement of its preliminary experiments in 1909, proposing that Kashmiri sericulturalists be employed for the instruction of Punjabi rearers.Footnote 131 For their part, the Department of Agriculture instituted demonstrations across the province and issued a bulletin on silkworm rearing in 1910–1911, and, around the middle of the decade, they introduced education in sericulture in a few village schools, increasing to 46 schools by 1920–1921, and 124 by 1921–1922.Footnote 132
If these efforts were few and far between, it is because of the shortage of expert staff in the province. Punjab's Department of Agriculture and its agricultural college in Lyallpur, in the Chenab-Ravi doab, developed from the experimental farm established in the city in 1901, and were primarily preoccupied with the more effective use of canal colony lands.Footnote 133 Unpopular with the agriculturalists of the canal colonies, these institutions were neither concerned with, nor capable of instructing, those interested in sericulture.Footnote 134 In the absence of a full-time entomologist and a sufficient staff for the task of extending experiments in sericulture, the Pusa-trained assistant entomologist appointed in 1912—Lala Madan Mohan Lal—worked instead with an economic botanist, and paid little attention to ‘the preliminary work of investigation on which all advance depends’.Footnote 135 Only at the end of the decade did a full-time expert entomologist, Afzal Hussain, join the staff of the Department of Agriculture.Footnote 136
In contrast, the Salvationists threw themselves into the task of spreading sericulture, even though they were equally short on expertise. At the Army's subcontinental headquarters in Simla in 1913, the Educational Department inaugurated a ‘reading circle’ for the circulation of materials on ‘Agriculture, Sericulture, Mercantile or Weaving &c. &c., so that in addition to being supplied with good spiritual magazine reading, will there be a supply of reading which will help keep our comrades up to date with the Industrial side of their work’.Footnote 137 Among the pamphlets on sericulture were those mentioned above, authored by Booth-Tucker, as well as pamphlets reporting on the operations of the Tata Silk Farm in Bangalore.Footnote 138 Yet, as far as the education of silkworm rearers was concerned—through lectures and demonstrations, and teaching and hands-on opportunities at the silk camp—Changa Manga scarcely played a role at all, with the students starting at the silk camp in 1915 forming the first and final intake.Footnote 139
The Army retreats
If the Salvation Army's work at Changa Manga was remembered and remarked upon in publications in the decades that followed, it was as the Army's most ambitious experiment in sericulture on the subcontinent, rather than as a failure.Footnote 140 To incentivize the improvement of its sericultural and silk enterprises, the Army introduced a competition for the best silk-producing and silk-weaving centre in 1915, typical of the exhibitions and prize competitions instituted by the colonial state for the same purposes.Footnote 141 The champion was the first institution to receive the Salvation Army flag for excellence three times in a six-month period, receiving Rs. 500 in prize money in addition to the Rs. 100 on receipt of the flag. The criteria for the award of the ‘Champion Silkery’ were output (in weight), efficiency (in terms of maximum profit and average yield per basin, and minimum waste), and quality. On the basis of performance the previous year, the Tata Silk Farm was named the first Champion Silkery, Ludhiana in second place (for its silk reeling only), and Changa Manga in fourth (for its silkworm rearing and silk reeling)—this was in spite of the judges announcing that ‘those will do best who push both branches’, that is, silkworm rearing and silk reeling.Footnote 142 The result, therefore, was an indictment of the investment in sericulture at Changa Manga.Footnote 143
In fact, the experiment ended as shortly as six years after its commencement.Footnote 144 The promising results of the preliminary experiments in 1909 were probably a fluke, for a forest in central Punjab was an altogether unsuitable location for the rearing of silkworms. But Fazal Bibi and Akbar were also at fault. In 1911, none of their 25 ounces of free seed were hatched, the eggs being either drowned or diseased.Footnote 145 In spite of successfully hatching all 25 ounces of seed in 1912, the yield was a meagre 600 seers of undried cocoons, although from the 12 ounces hatched in 1913, the sericulturalists produced a slightly improved three maunds of dry cocoons.Footnote 146 Booth-Tucker attributed the ‘failure to obtain better results’ to ‘irregular and prolonged hatching’ and ‘over-crowding in the last stage’—the latter due to centralization, highlighting how little the managers knew of silk manufacture.Footnote 147 In 1914, the final year for which silk statistics for Changa Manga are available, the sericulturalists produced two maunds of dry cocoons from eight ounces of silk, attributing this to the sudden onset of the hot weather—the curse on any operation in this part of the province.Footnote 148
With the main concern of the Forest Department being to render remunerative the expenditure on maintaining the forest as a source of fuel and timber, it was decided that the felling or clearing of mulberry was unnecessary under the new plans of 1917, and the cultivation and cutting of mulberry as a crop continued with the use of criminal labour until the 1911 Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1949.Footnote 149 The only other mention, therefore, of the work at Changa Manga in The War Cry—in 1919 and 1921— concerned the construction of dwellings in the forest for the settlement of the criminals, and their apparent contentment with their work.Footnote 150 Other sources reveal that the Army ‘abandoned the system of wholesale rearing at their Changa Manga settlement and now get the neighbouring villages to hatch some seed’.Footnote 151 The silk camp—as the nucleus for the spread of sericulture in Punjab—was no more.
The abandonment of sericulture at Changa Manga was not the result of the Salvation Army's dwindling interest in the silk industry. In September 1915, scarcely a few months before the end of the experiment in the forest, the Salvation Army inaugurated the Michael O’Dwyer Silk Farm and Institute in Simla, named after Louis Dane's successor to the lieutenant governorship of Punjab.Footnote 152 Just as the site of the silk camp in Changa Manga was imbued with significance, so, too, were the premises in Simla, which was formerly a brewery, a site of considerable significance to the Army with its origins in the temperance movement. Jackson arrived from Bangalore and—along with the Army's ‘silk expert’, Choudhury—set about furnishing the buildings with all the requisite apparatus, from microscopes to looms.Footnote 153 Within a year, 25 students were in attendance at the silk school, a library and sericulture museum were opened, weekly lectures were offered, and, outside, mulberry bushes were being raised for the silkworms.Footnote 154 In short, the Army's initiative in Simla became everything that had a few years earlier been envisaged for the forest at Changa Manga.
But the expense of the experiment at Changa Manga was, at the very least, only a fraction of that of the Ludhiana and Simla enterprises; Akbar and Fazal Bibi made the most of the forest mulberry, constructed sheds for the silkworms cheaply, and had no expenditure on staff. Whatever the purported success of the school and weavery at Ludhiana, the Punjab government was forced to pull their funding of the scheme in 1915. The Salvationists ‘failed to get into touch with the Punjabi weaver’, ignoring the types of thread count with which he worked, and, in doing so, sidelining his knowledge of the market for their own imperfect information, while also advancing the use of their own looms at the expense of other, more suitable apparatus, not to mention mechanized, steam-powered looms.Footnote 155 While early reports on the Salvationists’ work at Simla were favourable, this, too, was blighted by the aloofness of the staff from the condition of the peasants in the province, the enterprise failing to establish sericulture in Punjab. The report of the Punjab Department of Agriculture for 1918–1919 noted an ambiguous silence surrounding the Army's sericultural enterprises, stating that the poorly performing ‘Simla Silk School has seemingly closed down’, easing the decision to cut its Rs. 2,000 subsidy.Footnote 156
As only the biggest and best success stories made it from the Indian to the English War Cry or into publications such as All the World, it is telling that a silence surrounds the institutions in Simla and Ludhiana in the 1920s, in marked contrast to the continued coverage of the Tata Silk Farm in Bangalore.Footnote 157 But the tone of the periodical was markedly more ‘serious’ in the 1920s, with much more space devoted to techniques of achieving success in conversion and proselytization, shifting the balance of focus from material to moral uplift. This change of direction is attributable to the termination of Frederick Booth-Tucker's commandership following a bout of ill health and the ‘retreat’ from India in 1919, ahead of his retirement in 1924. With its funding cut and the departure of sericulture's great supporter in the organization, the Army's involvement in the silk industry came to an abrupt end in Punjab, and elsewhere, in 1919.Footnote 158
Conclusions
The Army's work—which was intimately interconnected with the nationwide debates and discussions about the economy after the turn of the century that culminated in the programme outlined by the Indian Industrial Commission—did not flounder for the same reason as the state's New Industrial Policy. Insofar as the New Industrial Policy was a failure, it was because it did not envisage the extent of the coordination and resources requisite for success, and because the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 shifted political powers—including powers regarding intervention in industrial matters—from the centre to the provinces, weakening the ability of the government to make the sort of interventions imagined by the Industrial Commission.Footnote 159 Nor was the Army's work a casualty of the particular pressures of the war years. Although the Army's silk enterprises floundered during the war years, it was not in consequence of the state withdrawing funds which were now required for the war effort or for more serious sorts of enterprise (rather than failed start-ups). In Punjab, at least, the state continued to fund the Army until 1917 and continued sericulture work long after the withdrawal of the Army from that field of activity, including mulberry planting, silkworm rearing, and practical demonstrations to schoolchildren. Under the auspices of the Punjab Department of Agriculture and a few private individuals, furthermore, silk seed distribution continued through the 1920s, always showing ‘signs of promise’, but never becoming more than a ‘cottage industry’ as opposed to an ‘art or manufacture’, even in suitable districts such as Sialkot.Footnote 160 And if the Army redeployed more and more of the criminal tribes’ labour at Changa Manga to the felling of timber for fuel urgently needed during the war years, it was not because it was forced to do so by the state, but because it was more profitable as an activity in light of the absolute failure of the sericulture enterprise.
Indeed, the termination of the Salvation Army's efforts was welcome news to Maxwell-Lefroy. Having failed to personally press the point to the Punjab Department of Agriculture in 1916—whose belief in the profit and practicability of establishing a silk industry was too strong to change course—the imperial entomologist used the report of 1917 to launch a unambiguous attack on the Salvation Army, damning their recklessness in encouraging the establishment of sericulture at any cost.Footnote 161 Maxwell-Lefroy foretold the failure of the Changa Manga silk settlement and the Simla silk school, although he could not have anticipated that both would be wound up so soon. The faults of the former scheme ought to have been evident from the outset—the distance from a pool of entrepreneurial peasants interested in sericulture and the unsuitable climate on the plains.Footnote 162 In the latter, however, were crystallized the errors that flawed entirely the Army's intervention in the silk industry.Footnote 163 Indian sericulture succeeded where it was profitable, often as a result of some agency purchasing cocoons or yarn at above-market prices, as in Kashmir.Footnote 164 Indian peasants, far from lacking entrepreneurial spirit, were acting rationally in exiting the silk industry. Instructing the criminal tribes in silk production and silk weaving was pointless, because the business of silk was unprofitable outside the confines of the settlements.Footnote 165 Instructing pupils in primary schools, moreover, was tantamount to ‘treating what should be a serious livelihood as a joke’, akin to trying ‘to foster agriculture by giving children toy ploughs and little toy fields of plasticine’.Footnote 166 The fact that the curriculum at the Simla silk school, and the quality of instruction there and at other institutions, was so poor was merely an unhappy fact for all those involved. Unless the state stepped in as a purchaser of silk, which was impossible in terms of cost (and ideology), the prospect of employment in the silk industry would be next to none. But the extent of unprofitability on the one hand, and the strength of foreign competition on the other, signalled to the imperial entomologist that the government was unwise to fund such an ‘unsound industry’.Footnote 167
In concluding his critique, Maxwell-Lefroy stressed that the Army's ‘public influence’ and ‘demanding public money’ were what prompted the analysis of their policies. ‘If they neither attempt to influence the public nor ask for grants it is immaterial . . . what they do,’ he wrote, ‘but genuine efforts to develop sericulture are very seriously prejudiced by the ill-advised advocacy of the Salvation Army.’Footnote 168 Of course, the Army was not the only organization and Booth-Tucker was not the only individual pressing the state for financial support with agricultural and industrial schemes. D. C. Churchill, as noted above, received support from the Bombay government for his (ultimately unsuccessful) work with improved cotton looms, and the Punjab government had been pushed into supporting sericulture initiatives by the Agri-Horticultural Society as early as the 1850s, and—despite the Society's failure to profitably produce silk—continued to support similar projects, including the Salvation Army's work in the 1910s.Footnote 169 Across the subcontinent, provincial governments became increasingly willing by the turn of the century to make what were rather small outlays to the proponents of such schemes, desperate as they were to thwart, and even reverse, the decline of India's traditional industries or, at the very least, to be seen to be doing something in response to political pressure within India.
Yet, the Salvation Army's initiatives were unusual in terms of their extensiveness across the subcontinent (rather than being restricted to one region), as well as in their coordination and comprehensiveness (in addressing all aspects of silk, from silkworm rearing to silk weaving). Within this context, it is unsurprising that Maxwell-Lefroy's fervent critique singled out the Army's work, since it came together in a way that made it much more visible than the myriad interventions undertaken by dispersed individuals and organizations across India. In turn, this was the product of the Army’s—and Booth-Tucker’s—close relationship to the colonial state. Maxwell-Lefroy was thus striking at Booth-Tucker's somewhat singular ability, over 30 years, to cajole colonial officials into new policy positions, both with respect to the redefinition of criminality and the ‘criminal tribes’ (as Radhakrishna has argued), and to solving the problems of criminality and traditional industry (through their demands for public money and rent-free premises, as at Ludhiana and Simla, as well as their invitation to take charge of the criminal tribes in various regions and their invitation to industrial conferences in Punjab, for example). To do so, Booth-Tucker found it expedient to tap into existing anxieties at the national level about Indian society and economy, personal connections at the provincial level of government, existing interest in sericulture among the public and the provincial and national governments, and the well-entrenched ideology of promoting private enterprise (bolstered by the pressures and turning tide of agitation for industrial development in the 1900s and 1910s), using print, public performance, and personal intervention. In spite of the fair but fierce attack on Booth-Tucker and the Salvation Army's intervention in sericulture, and Booth-Tucker's subsequent departure from India, his legacy lived on, at least in Punjab, where sericulture in primary schools, seed distribution, and mulberry planting in the plains and other regions continued after 1917.
The Salvation Army in British India is studied for its ‘criminocurological’ approach, for its relationship to the state—at the provincial and national levels—in discussing and defining criminality and subsequently delivering ‘rehabilitation’ to the criminal tribes on its settlements, and for the way in which it disciplined these criminal tribespeople into ‘ideal’ colonial subjects. In contrast, its interventions in crafts and craft regeneration are scarcely studied at all, in part, perhaps, because these aspects of the Army's work were more marginal in terms of their outcome or impact on Indian society and economy. Yet, as this article has highlighted, these two interventions were complementary. The origins of the Army's involvement in the settlements and in the silk industry are both to be found around the turn of the century, in the competitive missionary field and in a set of debates about the problems facing Indian society and economy. Just as missionary organizations were already involved in the running of the settlements, so, too, did some missions involve themselves in providing technical education in craft manufacture or in the improvement of craft apparatus. Just as the Army sought to participate in the process of defining criminality that culminated in the 1911 Act, so, too, did it seek to tap into and shape anxieties and debates about the future of India's traditional industries. While historians of the Army have focussed on the innovativeness of its ideology and the importance of Booth-Tucker's leadership in British India, attention to the wider context of the Army's work shows that their agenda was shaped by the activities of other organizations. Aside from their similar origins, these two interventions were also linked in terms of the outcomes that the Army had hoped to achieve, albeit on different scales and with different degrees of success. If life on the settlements was structured to discipline the criminal tribespeople into the sorts of subjects that could ensure the stability of the colonial state and society, the regeneration and revivification of the agricultural and craft sectors was arguably intended to ensure the health and stability of the colonial economy. While historians of the colonial state (and its allies)—influenced by the work of Bourdieu and Foucault, and by the ideas of habitus, governmentality, and disciplinarity, for example—have focussed on the transformation of individuals and the production of ‘ideal’ colonial subjects, these could be better linked to studies of the transformation of Indian society and economy as a whole. The Army is fascinating, therefore, precisely because its work in the 1910s shows the link between transformation at the micro level of the individual (for example, through its work with the criminal tribes on the settlements), on the one hand, and the discussions and debates about transformations at the macro level of Indian society and the economy (for example, through its agricultural improvement and craft rejuvenation schemes), on the other, bridging these separate sets of scholarship on cultural, social, and economic change under colonialism.
The Army's intervention in traditional industries, of course, unfolded somewhat more slowly than its work with the criminal tribes, was perhaps only possible after the Army had gained greater esteem in the eyes of provincial and national governments (for their settlement work) from whom they sought funds for their silk experiments, and was, of course, ultimately unsuccessful. Yet, the intervention in the silk industry is a useful lens through which to develop a more detailed understanding of the Salvation Army's work on the subcontinent. In the first place, studying the Army's publications—in conjunction with the official reports and papers produced by various government departments—reveals a great deal about the attention and influence that the short-lived silk enterprises garnered, as lamented by Maxwell-Lefroy. These sources show, furthermore, how the Army foregrounded the relatively inconsequential and seasonal sericultural work above the other forms of labour that the tribespeople provided (such as woodcutting for fuel at Changa Manga, which became increasingly crucial to the settlement's activities during the war years). They also reveal the Army sought to present the silk enterprises as an integrated or collective solution to the crisis of crafts, the crisis of Indian sericulture, and the crisis embodied by the criminal tribes problem, and how the Army sought, therefore, to present itself as a leader working in those fields of activity where the state could not intervene (as was made amply clear by the publication of the pamphlet of 1916 following the tour in the Far East). Second, this article has highlighted that Booth-Tucker was the driving force behind the Army's involvement in debates and action around the issue of the future of India's traditional industry, but that his thinking was shaped to a considerable degree by circumstances external to the mission. From the inspiration for the Army's involvement in craft regeneration, its industrial schools and technical training, and its settlements in the work of other missionary organizations, to taking the lead for Arbour Day from an existing precedent or following in the footsteps of other agencies who first attempted silkworm rearing in Punjab and procured silk seed to that end, the Salvation Army's silk enterprises were hastily cobbled together from such disparate influences into a seemingly coherent programme. The Army became, for better or worse, one of many influential voices in the early twentieth century on the future of India's traditional industries, but this was often because it was able to seize inspiration and opportunities and shout louder than its closest competitors.
