Worn – A People’s History of Clothing

Title: Worn – A People’s History of Clothing
Author: Sofi Thanhauser
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780241389539
Pages: 375

Clothes not only differentiates man from other animals, it also demarcates mankind into various categories according to rank, function or utility. The language uses many words, phrases and idioms derived from clothes and how they are worn. Making clothes was an important household activity in every civilized society till a few centuries ago. In the pre-industrial world, people devoted as much labour hours to making cloth as they devoted to producing food. Now, this work disappeared from everyday life and moved into the factory. But this has its own implications. The fabric industry produces a fifth of global waste water and emits one-tenth of global carbon emissions. Plant and animal fibres, namely linen, cotton, silk and wool, formed the basis of human clothing until the advent of rayon and then petro-fabrics in the twentieth century. This book talks about the historical development of each of the five types of fibres and examines the current issues in fabric production such as outsourcing to developing countries, exploitation of labour, rampant pollution in production centres which are not acknowledged nor owned by western companies. The book also touches upon the latest fad in the US and UK to return to hand-weaving using local resources and connoisseurs. This book blends reportage with historical research. The impulse for writing this is claimed to be to answer the craving to know where things – quite ordinary things – come from. Sofi Thanhauser is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in numerous publications. She lives in the US and teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.

Thanhauser presents brief historical sketches of the five fibres and stresses on the tales of exploitation of labour and natural resources in the case of each. Humans began clothing themselves in hides and pelts about 170,000 years ago. Shortly after this, people learned to weave plant fibres into textiles. The advent of clothes made the rapid expansion of habitation zones possible. The first intact cloth in the archaeological record is of linen. Imperialism and slavery built the cotton trade in the modern period. Mono-cropping cotton quickly exhausted the land. Planters then moved on to virgin lands with their slaves. This need to find fertile land helped drive expansion of the newly formed United States. Indigenous occupants were brutally evicted from new territories which the Whites conquered. Cotton was also exchanged for slaves in Africa. Meanwhile it proved to be the instrument of colonial expansion in India. Mechanization raised productivity in the eighteenth century and labour costs in England dropped below India’s. Massive imports – also assisted by tariffs – broke the backbone of India’s cotton industry. Industrial Revolution was a fabric revolution. The new textile machinery allowed huge productivity increase and the capital thus generated was also employed in other sectors to increase the prosperity.

The book includes some interesting historical facts about how the British imposed their cotton fabrics on India and how the crop itself was a symbol of rank exploitation. As noted earlier, when cheap fabrics were imported from England, cotton weavers in India lost their markets and were forced to turn to cotton farming for sending out as raw material for English mills. This additional manpower pulled down wages in agriculture. Colonialism thus devastated the Indian cotton industry. Genetic diversity of cotton in India was also reduced in this period as the American cotton was widely cultivated at the expense of local varieties. Traditional Indian varieties did not require much irrigation but were unsuited to textile machinery imported from Europe which was designed for the American variety. The East India Company replaced all Indian types with American in the 1840s. Cotton is a very thirsty crop – incredibly thirsty, for that matter. To produce one kg of cotton, it needs 8500 litres of water whereas rice requires 3000 litres, maize 1350 litres and wheat just 900. The author appears to harbour all the colonial prejudices against India. Visiting a well-run cotton factory in Tamil Nadu, she hints at child labour and also at many poor women submitting to polygamy. This has no relevance to the topic under discussion. As is usual with white supremacists, she can’t help notice a power failure while she was in the factory, suggesting that long and frequent power outages are common in India. Also, she compares the Noyyal river in Coimbatore to rivers which ran through American and British cities in the 1840s and the food produced from this water is alleged to be laden with toxic chemicals. This is another clear accusation that Indian industry still lags behind their western counterparts by about two centuries.

Some chapters give an overview of how fashion developed and transformed in the face of tectonic political events and pressing societal requirements. The flourishing of fashion in Paris during the Bourbon rule is described along with its collapse after the French Revolution when luxury was shunned in the wake of regicide. At the same time in America, most people wore clothing made at home while those who could afford it dressed in clothes made by a tailor or seamstress. During the course of the nineteenth century, clothing became mass-produced. Before the Civil War, readymade outer garments were made only for sailors and slaves. The chemical pollution generated during the production of artificial fibres such as rayon and nylon are examined in this book which exhibits a distinct leftist outlook. The American Standards Association (ASA) recommended safe exposure to cadmium sulphide (which is a material involved in rayon production) at 20 ppm. The author then proudly remarks in a foot note that this limit in the USSR was 3.2 ppm, less than a fifth of the American limit (p.173). We know that the erstwhile USSR was not very famous for any environmental or safety concerns. The story of rayon and nylon synthetics is saturated with dangerous chemicals eating away at the lives of workers. She accuses the US of fostering the language of anti-communism which boosted the garment and textile industries in Asia on outsourcing contracts without any accountability to American industries.

The dwindling away of textile production in the developed economies, especially in the US, in the aftermath of globalization is a persistent theme in the book as if a very essential aspect of western societies was alienated for making profits for business tycoons. As late as 1997, over 40 per cent of all apparel purchased in the US had been produced domestically. In 2012, that figure was less than 3 per cent. The author remarks about the pollution and exploitation of labour in the countries to which the garments are outsourced for production. This book also talks about a conscious drive to return to the sustainable production of fabric, especially wool. Handcraft societies are returning to the US to serve niche markets. These efforts are claimed to produce less emission and carbon dioxide, but the author incongruously flies in a plane to reach these sites, oblivious to the conservatory effort expected on her behalf since she is so complaining about the carbon emissions engendered by others! A trace of transgender activism is also visible in the text. In a tradition-reviving society of Navajo Indians, the author finds a transgender person in control of things and speculates that the transgenders keep traditions alive. She uses the pronoun ‘they’ to denote this person.

This book is counterintuitive in every sense and is a product of the woke culture predominating among the elite society in the US. It is focussed on American issues, themes, icons and society. It rails against chemical fertilizers, pesticides, industrial scale production of food and clothing fibres, large scale transportation of commodities, outsourcing production to developing countries and instead advises the Gandhian way to spin one’s own thread and get it woven in a local cooperative. This sounds utopian and that’s the one thing which clearly stands out in the entire narrative. This is not a people’s history but a leftist and woke commentary on the unfinished business of organized labour obtaining a controlling stake in the enterprises they work in, according to Marxian economic speculations. It also exhibits feminism in a high dose.

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Nehru’s India

Title: Nehru’s India – A History in Seven Myths
Author: Taylor C. Sherman
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780691245775
Pages: 284

When India became independent in 1947, her economy was in shambles brought on by a world war and two centuries of colonial loot. The new nation needed to show the direction in which to move forward, especially for its economy and international relations. Jawaharlal Nehru, being the first prime minister and a well-read man, sought to guide India during the first seventeen years of post-colonial India till his death in 1964. Even though the paths he trod were reversed later because of the great economic pitfalls along the way, it was critical for the new republic to stay united under a strong man. Although panegyrics of Nehru praising him as the architect of modern India and a visionary emanated from certain quarters – mostly patronized by his own party – the grave flaws in his socio-economic and political perspectives were starting to come into public scrutiny. Nehru’s premiership is associated with a set of ideas, policies and institutions related to non-alignment, secularism, socialism, the strong state, democracy and high modernism. This book argues that these supposed tenets of the Nehruvian period are nothing more than myths. Taylor C. Sherman teaches in the department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has authored other books on India and its secularism.

Sherman claims that Nehru fulfilled the role of an educator, patron, mediator and symbol to the Indian people. He is often lauded as the architect of modern India on the basis of his image as the titan of post-colonial India. The author points out that this image was created by the Congress party to ‘persuade him to stay on in power’, especially after 1958 when he expressed the desire to retire or take a sabbatical. This book is a product of the left-liberal ecosystem pervading every nook and cranny of the Western academia. This book is a paean to Nehru depicting him as a great man who can do no wrong. Every shortfall or anomaly in his character is glossed over or ignored or alleged to be someone else’s fault. Even his political tricks like threatening to resign when confronted with stubborn opponents in the party are naively taken at face value and immense inferences are drawn from these false premises. Sherman criticizes everything in Nehru’s India – even the very idea of India – except the great man himself! She argues that Nehru was no architect of modern India because he had no blueprint in his head or articulated in five-year plans. Then comes the surprising but wrong conclusion that Nehru wasuncomfortable with blind devotion and consistently resisted the iconization that is central to a cult of personality (p.205). She conveniently does not mention that Nehru awarded himself the Bharat Ratna in 1955 – India’s highest civilian honour – or cause his own birthday to be celebrated as the national children’s day. Any way you look at it, these two acts cannot be taken to be an exemplar of humility! When a tunnel was opened in 1956 to connect Jammu with Kashmir Valley, Nehru ‘allowed’ it to be named after him as the Jawahar tunnel! Still, the author claims that this was not an attempt to develop a personality cult around carefully crafted imagery to maintain absolute power (p.16). Nehru personally chose the country’s first ambassadors to prominent nations on the basis of their ‘eminent’ status in the national movement as well as their wit, charm and intellectual abilities (p.23). But the author forgets to explain why he chose Vijayalakshmi Pandit – his own sister – as the ambassador to the US. The book is riddled with so many of these omissions.

Unashamedly reflecting an air of colonial haughtiness, the author hints that India was not doing enough to prop up secularism in the Nehru era and that it should have accommodated more Muslim demands. She claims that Indian secularism is largely figurative and was focussed on the celebration of exceptional individuals and reverence for great monuments. But this iconic approach did not tally with the everyday in practice. India introduced permits for controlling the re-entry of Muslims who had already migrated to Pakistan in 1948. Around 2000 Muslims were doing this each day. Nothing in this gesture was related to patriotism, but a clever ploy to prevent their real estate from being reassigned to Hindu and Sikh refugees who were forcibly evicted from their homes in Pakistan. The Hindus and Sikhs were not allowed to re-enter Pakistan. This just measure is portrayed as injuring secularism! After Hyderabad was annexed by military force, the government sought to reduce the number of Muslims in the state service from 85 per cent to 50 per cent. This is construed as another failure of secularism (p.64). What the author deftly conceals is that Muslims constituted only 13 per cent of Hyderabad’s population but the Nizam had exclusively stuffed them in his services. Moreover, the book employs the old imperialist ploy to drive a wedge between Dalits and other Hindus and to club the former along with Muslims as a minority community separate from Hindus. In her study of secularism in the 1950s, the author implies that Dalits and Muslims had a stake in secularism (p.59). The book further claims that India’s non-alignment was only a political trick to work with superpower competition to its advantage. India was enmeshed in the Anglo-American economic system which provided two-thirds of India’s imports in 1964 while the USSR provided only a tenth. Aid from the US was six times more than Russian aid in 1945.

The book makes a survey of India’s economic policies and concludes that everything smacked of failure. Nationalization was claimed to be only a relatively small feature of Indian economic life in the early period of Nehru’s tenure. The top rate of income tax was 80 per cent, which most people evaded by paying bribes. The author examines the land distribution reforms assisted by Vinoba Bhave’s Bhudan movement. In the end, this philanthropic exercise is portrayed as a hypocritical one in which the land donated is shown as non-productive and inaccessible. This is a recurring theme in the book. Reading these lines, one would feel wonder at the mere fact that India is still existing intact as a nation. Rather than challenging existing hierarchies, Indian socialism attempted to co-opt them and awaken in elites a sense of trusteeship and responsibility towards their fellow countrymen. Instead, the elites simply enlisted the new institutions and worked them for their own benefit (p.113). Sherman rightfully points out that India succumbed to political corruption at this point in time of license-quota-permit raj. A single mill in Mumbai had to fill out some 577 forms each year. A license was only a permit which entitles the holder to apply for numerous other sanctions and permissions. Within this tangled bureaucratic complex, corruption naturally reigned. The primary inconvenience to the industrialists lay in all the efforts to evade government control rather than in submitting to it. The ruling party nonchalantly extracted its pound of flesh from the industry. Tata Steel (TISCO then) obtained permission from court to allow them to donate to Congress party because the ‘stability, security, profits and future expansion of the company were linked up with the continuance of Congress government’ (p.160).

This book is a propaganda piece of the American left academia that thrives in developing countries through NGOs and seeks to displace the national spirit in those countries. The contribution of the Ford Foundation to the development of many social projects in the 1950s is extolled at every opportunity while wholly Indian experiments are deemed to be failures. Contributions of Indian pioneers are narrated only if they are educated overseas at some point in their career. Sherman frequently appears unduly concerned about inequality in society and accuses paternalistic local societies for all the problems they have to endure. After a brief charade of appearing to be objective, the political agenda slips into the open. She alleges that the Indian government ‘assaults on free press, universities and courts from 2015 onwards’ and that some international organisations (meaning the cabal that funds the NGOs) have downgraded India’s democratic rating, as if this act was a huge indictment on India for which every Indian has to hang his or her head in shame. Mind you, the author never mentions the Emergency years (1975-77) but implies that democracy in India is eclipsed only from the year 2015. The book provides an interesting portrayal of modernity which is said to be a group of processes set in train somewhere around the fifteenth century and gaining pace by the nineteenth. These concerned economic connectivity and technical innovation, as well as state-making practices, changing understandings of the self and new experiences of time (p.178).

It has been a long time since I encountered a book on India written by a westerner who still retains the imperial and condescending outlook on our country. Such books invariably talked about peeling plaster in government buildings, pot-holed roads, frequent power outages and omnipresent filth on streets. This colonial memsahib is flustered with Indian archives which are said to be kept in a most careless and inefficient way. She limits the coverage of the Bengal famine of 1943 to just one sentence because it was engendered by Churchill’s apathy to Indians but castigates the Indian government under Nehru for mishandling the ‘perilously close to famine conditions in 1950 and 51’ (p.104). The author has made extensive research for this book, but the experience appears to be marred by lack of insight and the knowledge of how Indian society works.

The book is just a piece of the Left narrative and not recommended for general readers.

Rating: 2 Star

Eminent Distorians

 

Title: Eminent Distorians - Twists and Truths in Bharat's History
Author: Utpal Kumar
Publisher: BluOne Ink, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789365477184
Pages: 290

India’s post-colonial historiography was under the absolute control of Marxist historians who were tolerated at the highest echelons of institutions by Nehru and Indira Gandhi. These people created an ecosystem of their own which stifled dissent of any kind from the established view. Academic positions, research grants, publication of research papers and publicity in the mainstream media were jealously guarded by this coterie of scholars whose sole purpose of existence was to churn out a version of Indian history that stuck to leftist notions defined by them. There were some lone voices which opposed the vested interests but they ended up as a cry in the wilderness. This book vows to expose them. The author is inspired by Sita Ram Goel who was the single individual who moved the left intellectual mountain in India and took the entrenched ‘eminent historians’ by the horns and exposed their distortions, often deliberate and mischievous. This book’s title is indebted to Arun Shourie’s work on a similar theme titled ‘Eminent Historians’ reviewed earlier here. The idea is that these scholars distorted history and hence this group is called ‘distorians’. Utpal Kumar is an editor at News18 and FirstPost who has more than two decades of journalistic experience. This is his second book.

Historians such as Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, R S Sharma and others fit the bill of distorians. The book includes a catalog of the errors and disasters they had heaped on the national intellect. They are accused to have subverted the minds of people, turned them rootless and apologetic about the past. They regarded the essence of Indian culture, the very ‘Indianness’ to be a regressive phenomenon. Anything and everything emerging out in this land was seen to be the result of either an invasion or migration from the outside. They rivalled each other in duplicity or masquerade to play down the violence inflicted by Muslim invaders on India in the form of destruction and conversion of temples into mosques, forced conversion of Hindus, abducting women as sex-slaves and plunder of the national wealth. The author prudently points out that truth and reconciliation, and not duplicity and deception are the first steps towards amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims in today’s India. Forgiveness cannot precede an admission of guilt. Kumar ascribes the distorians to stoop low to any level to confront their rivals. Writing matter-of-factly about a Muslim tyrant spontaneously becomes an act of Islamophobia. So, Mahmud of Ghazni’s obsession to become a ghazi (holy warrior) or but shikan (idol breaker) is projected in economic terms and sanitized.

The author then makes a survey of Indian history in the remaining chapters and classifies the doctored theories of the distorians according to chronological periods. Their falsification starts with the Aryan Invasion theory in which a set of outsiders from central Asia invaded India and destroyed the original Dravidian civilization and dislocated the natives. However, the contradictions and inconsistencies in this flawed theory are so grave that the distorians are now forced to modify the theory as one of Aryan migration, and not invasion. But it still contains the riddle of the illiterate, pastoral Aryans producing one of the most profound texts in human history (the Vedas) while the urbane, sophisticated Harappans ending up without having any literature of their own. The author argues that ancient Indian civilization is indigenous. Desiccation and drying up of the Saraswati river which took place around 1900 BCE led to the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. Excavation of archaeological detritus and genetic analysis of human remains found at Rakhigarhi in Haryana prove that there is no genetic overlap from the outside and the present inhabitants share the genome. Kumar alleges that the distorians could not comprehend any non-Muslim dynasty far away from Delhi could step into greatness which is exemplified by the cavalier treatment they had given to the Cholas of Tamil Nadu who were reduced to being a regional power though the dynasty had a vast maritime realm to rule. This was the only time Indian forces conquered far-off places. This wicked lot of distorians is interested only in eulogizing defeat and ignoring victories.

The author dispels the false assumption of many people that the Islamic invasions which started in 712 CE were continuous and indefensible. In fact, they were held in check by several Indian dynasties. Arab incursion to Indian coast began in 637 CE, at the time of the second caliph himself. It was only in 712 they could gain a foothold in Sindh with the military victory of Muhammad bin Qasim. There is another false notion circulating regarding the different racial lineages among Muslim invaders: Arabs are said to be gentler but India had the misfortune to give in to Turks or Afghans the most number of times. The book compares the atrocities committed by Turkish and Arab invaders and proves that both were equally cruel and bigoted in decimating the Hindus. This deflates the distorians’ assertion that India had the misfortune to be conquered by the ‘uncivilized Turks’ than the ‘cultured Arabs’. The author identifies the root cause of the similarity in violent actions between the two in the religious tenets of Islam itself which call for these acts to be performed on infidels and concludes that ‘cultured’ Arabs were therefore as brutal and barbaric as the ‘uncouth’ Turks (p.116). Kumar also weighs Akbar’s reign for his tolerance of other religions but this study does not go much deep. It is true that during Akbar’s ascendancy, the state officially relinquished its anti-Hindu stand. Jizya and pilgrimage taxes were withdrawn. However, his acceptance of Hindu princesses into his harem should not be considered as an act of charity or broadmindedness. In his reign, 38 Rajput princesses were married to the royal household: 12 to Akbar, 17 to Jahangir, six to Daniyal, two to Murad and one to Shah Jehan. There were five weddings in Jahangir’s reign, five in Shah Jehan’s and nine in Aurangzeb’s time. Even then, not a single Mughal princess was married to a Rajput prince and all of the Hindu princesses were first converted to Islam before the wedding ceremony. To use modern parlance, this was in no way nobler than the ‘love jihad’! A survey of Tipu Sultan’s real character as a hard-line Islamist and the fall of the Sikh kingdom in Punjab are also included. It also explains why the Sikh contingent fought alongside the British in suppressing the 1857 rebellion. However, his contention that the Sikhs were mortally against any descendant of the Mughal dynasty appears to be an oversimplification.

Another aspect in which the distorians excel is in making us believe that the British took over India from the Mughals. This is total falsehood, since before the British could establish themselves, the Marathas were the numero uno power. Peshwa Baji Rao I was undefeated in over forty battles. Other local rulers could outsmart the Mughals but this fact is obfuscated in the distorted history which is thrust down the bills of unsuspecting students. Defeat of the Mughals at the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 at the hands of Lachit Barphukan in Assam which checked their spread in that region is a largely unknown saga. Moreover, India has never holistically examined the predatory nature of British rule nor sought an apology. It was an era of wanton violence which killed 200 million people and institutionalized loot that drained off at least 45 trillion USD from India to Britain between 1765 and 1938.

The book then examines the freedom struggle and the initial decades of post-colonial India in which power was usurped by the Gandhi faction. In the manipulative historiography, one is made to believe that India’s freedom struggle was all about Gandhi after his arrival from South Africa in 1915. The revolutionaries had played an equally important, if not bigger, role in getting freedom. The presence of revolutionaries and their successes helped Gandhi bargain better deals with the colonial masters who in turn handled them with kid gloves at a time when revolutionaries were made to go through the worst of hardships at the Cellular Jail and elsewhere. When it came to power-sharing negotiations with the British, there was no one left in their ranks to do the talking. This moment was seized by the Gandhians to their advantage who obliterated them from history. The author claims that the free nation born in 1947 was unapologetically Hindu and cites in its support the Vedic rituals held in Rajendra Prasad’s residence in his official capacity as the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly which were also attended by Nehru himself. The illustrations in the original Constitution which freely used Hindu symbols reiterate this point. However, as Nehru’s rivals vacated the political arena, the situation changed and mechanical secularism took their place. It was the Nehruvian conspiracy in the 1950s that saw further ascendancy in the 1960s and 1970s which pushed the country towards a socialist, secular order much against the civilizational grain of this land.

It is unfortunate having to note that the book has not justified the thunder in the title. Instead of a roar arising from painful indignation at the disservice these distorians have been inflicting on the social and political fabric of the country, the author coolly diverges to put together his view of Indian history. I had purchased this book having been sufficiently impressed by the grandiloquent title but it has not been value for money. Of course, Kumar’s perspective on India’s history is very interesting, informative and up to date, but that was not the purpose implied by the title. Instead of going deep into the modus operandi of the distorians – how they secure plum positions in government and academia, how a coterie is formed around them, how they manipulate NCERT textbooks, how they distribute patronage among their acolytes and how they zealously attack dissenting sane voices with the ferocity of a pack of wolves – the author digresses to offer a nationalist perspective of history in a highly condensed form. This exhibits a clear subjective bias which a distorian can easily exploit to discredit the entire narrative. To quote just one example: the author’s attempt to place the Mahabharata war coinciding with the drying up of Saraswati river around 1900 BCE is a little laboured and appears to be not much convincing. On the other hand, his take on refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory is superbly presented.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star