“The Unstitched Story of India: How Fabric Wove a Global Empire”, Brhat, September 25, 2025:
“In the age before the factory, before the clatter of the Lancashire mill, the world was clothed by hand. And for over three centuries, it was India that clothed the world. The warp and weft of global commerce, identity, and aesthetics were spun on looms in Bengal, Gujarat, Sindh, and the Coromandel coast. Indian cottons, silks, and embroideries were not mere adornments or markers of taste. They were the material infrastructures of early globalization. They travelled vast geographies, carried in the holds of Arab dhows and Dutch East Indiamen, stitched into local rituals and imperial economies. They were currency, couture, and cosmology.
How India Clothed the World (2009), edited by Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, begins from this material premise, offering a synoptic intervention into global economic history by shifting the locus of industrial dynamism and commercial modernity eastward. The essays in this volume refuse to treat Indian textiles as passive commodities caught in the wake of European expansion. Instead, they position India as a manufacturing powerhouse whose fabrics shaped taste, enabled trade, and stitched together the early modern world. This essay extends and dialogues with Riello and Roy’s provocation by drawing on key works that deepen our understanding of India’s textile ecologies and cultural economy, from Rahul Jain’s Handcrafted Indian Textiles to Ṛta Kapur Chishti’s Saris of India, from the encyclopedic Handmade in India to the colonial textile archive of John Forbes Watson.
Together, these sources unravel a fabric-centric epistemology of Indian history. They compel us to see cloth not only as an object but as an archive of movement, of labor, of desire.”
Read the full article at brhat.in
