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Convict Carpets: Jails and the Revival of Historic CarpetDesign in Colonial India

Abigail McGowan

The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 72 / Issue 02 / May 2013, pp 391 - 416DOI: 10.1017/S0021911813000028, Published online: 28 May 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911813000028

How to cite this article:Abigail McGowan (2013). Convict Carpets: Jails and the Revival of Historic Carpet Design inColonial India. The Journal of Asian Studies, 72, pp 391-416 doi:10.1017/S0021911813000028

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Convict Carpets: Jails and the Revival of HistoricCarpet Design in Colonial India

ABIGAIL MCGOWAN

One promising traditional industry slated for revival in late colonial India was carpetweaving. Characterized by low technology, high product value, and strong demand,carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons, while simultaneously evoking India’s lux-urious artisanal past. In western India, carpet weaving was centered in jails where con-victs produced high-quality rugs using historic designs in prison factories that served aslaboratories for redefining penal labor and traditional design under the eyes of the colo-nial state. For, even as they were poised at the center of new exchange networks of designideas, jail factories also claimed practical economic goals: to earn money for jails, trainconvicts in new skills and habits, and build India’s productive potential in a time of econ-omic malaise. As such, they provide an ideal site for examining the economic context forthe emerging design industry, and for limitations of colonial visions of the Indianeconomy.

IN THE MIDST OF widespread efforts to develop the Indian economy in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the promising traditional industries

slated for revival was fine carpet weaving. Characterized by low technology, high laborintensiveness, high product value, and growing demand domestically and overseas,carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons. They also, however, captured interestfor their aesthetics; representing India’s famed skills in color and ornamentation,carpets built on global appreciation for Indian traditional design that had beengrowing since the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Carpets appeared, then, topromise economic benefits even as they played on traditional images of richly huedOriental luxury.

In western India, however, those anxious to capitalize on promising opportunities incarpets faced a crucial stumbling block: there was virtually no existing industry on whichto build. Traditional artisans in the region only produced flat, woven daris, often done insuch loose weaves and coarse materials as to more closely resemble crude blanketsinstead of the fine, tufted pile carpets desired by upscale consumers. Despite—orindeed because of—that fact, an industry sprang up anyway, defined through theshared efforts of design professionals, industrial activists, factory managers, and carpetweavers. Together those various agents reshaped production, introducing new popu-lations into carpet weaving and new types of products into markets. At the same time,

Abigail McGowan (amcgowan@uvm.edu) is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in theDepartment of History at the University of Vermont.

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 72, No. 2 (May) 2013: 391–416.© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2013 doi:10.1017/S0021911813000028

they also reshaped design, negotiating between the twin influences of historic Indianexamples on the one hand and foreign styles on the other.

Central to the remaking of carpet production in western India were governmentprison workshops. In the Bombay Presidency, jail factories dominated the carpet indus-try, not only outpacing competitors in volume but also establishing standards of taste fortraditional designs. At first glance, jails would seem an unlikely site for craft revival. Theprison officials in charge of carpet weaving rarely if ever had any art training, let aloneexperience with India’s traditional crafts; instead, as was common to the Indian penalsystem as a whole, they were usually medical men, career officers who had experiencein a wide variety of positions in Indian jails (Sen 2000, chap. 4). Nor were those officialsmuch interested in the status of carpets as crafts. Many of the others trying to encouragetraditional industries in the era were; inspired by the international Arts and Crafts Move-ment, officials in museums and art schools celebrated the social and aesthetic superiorityof Indian handcraftsmanship over machine production (McGowan 2009, 79–84). By con-trast, prison factory superintendents were eminently practical men, promoting carpetweaving not in protest of industrialization, but as a sensible solution to basic problemsof prison management: rising costs on the one hand and the need to discipline convictson the other.

It would be easy to dismiss convict carpets as a colonial oddity, their intricate, tra-ditional designs produced by penal labor just one example among many of the recurringcontradictions of prison work—contradictions which in the U.S. state of New Hampshirehave convicts emblazoning motor vehicle license plates with the state motto “Live free ordie.” But that oddity is revealing on two levels. For one, the incongruity of prison officialssupervising a resurgence of historic carpet production underlines the essential interde-pendence of modernizing reforms and traditionalizing preservation efforts in colonialIndia. British attempts to revive and restore “traditional” design rarely empowered her-editary craftsmen to direct change themselves; as the example of carpets shows, officialefforts instead relied on the emblematically modern institutions of the colonial state.Second and more broadly, convict carpets highlight how both prison management andart instruction contributed to one of the crucial debates of the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries: how to revitalize the Indian economy. Jail factories employedhistoric styles and traditional dyes to capture markets, building on India’s artisanal heri-tage to secure a toehold in the competitive global economy; by putting convicts to workon carpets, jails also sought to train a new generation of disciplined artisanal labor,capable of contributing to economic growth after leaving prison.

It is by their very oddity, then, that convict carpets provide a useful lens on the placeof traditional crafts within attempts to reformulate both individual working bodies andthe Indian economy as a whole—topics that I have explored in broader terms elsewhere(McGowan 2009). There has, however, been little written on jail carpets, aside from por-tions of a coffee-table book by a prominent contemporary dari designer (Ahuja 1999). Inthe spate of work on the major colonial institutions shaping art practices—including artschools, local and international exhibitions, government museums, and public works de-partments (Dutta 2006; Guha-Thakurta 1992; Hoffenberg 2001; Mathur 2007; Metcalf1989)—scholars have ignored the role of jails in aesthetic affairs. Historians workingon Indian prisons, for their part, have used practices within jail walls—messing,medical examination, punishment, protest, gradations in treatment by caste—to

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emphasize how closely prisons were connected to the outside world culturally, socially,and materially, thereby demonstrating that prisons offered crucial sites for the articula-tion of colonial authority and British ideas of reform (Lal 1999; Sen 2004; Tolen 1991;Yang 1987). Aside from a suggestive article by Padmini Swaminathan (1995), however,there has been little attention in the scholarship on colonial prisons to the place of jailindustrial work within visions of India’s economic development.

Bringing together the usually unconnected topics of art and prisons, this paperexplores how convict carpet weaving in particular, and jail industries more broadly, fitinto colonial attempts to rework the Indian economy. Much as colonial carceral insti-tutions offered a laboratory for new attempts to understand and discipline the nativebody (Arnold 1995; Mills 2000; Sen 2004), so too jail workshops provided the opportunityto intervene in industrial development in ways that the state could not (practically) orwould not (politically and financially) do in free society: initiating new industries, introdu-cing new machinery into production, and imposing new discipline on working bodies.The fact that so many jails ignored mechanized industries to instead focus on carpetssuggests the structure of the colonial imagination of the Indian economy. As the emphasison historic designs and cheap labor in jail carpets suggests, colonial officials locatedIndia’s economic future in its past, with traditional crafts as the sign of India’s essentialdifference from the industrializing, modern West.

Western India provides a particularly useful place to see these ideas in action. Theregion not only boasted some of the best jail carpets in India, it was also at the heartof political efforts devoted to India’s industrial modernization—efforts that includedcreating new, nationalist factories and stores, promoting industrial and technical edu-cation, and fighting colonial policies seen as inimical to growth (Mehta 1981). Together,official support for jail carpets and unofficial enthusiasm for industrial developmentshould have produced real results in the creation of a new industry in the region. Thatthey did not, that jail carpets appear to have had no impact on private production inwestern India, suggests the limitations of both colonial visions of the Indian economyand British hopes for effective social engineering through prison policies.

CARPETS AS PRISON LABOR

When H. J. R. Twigg set out to compile a 1907 government monograph on carpetmaking in the Bombay Presidency, he knew he would not find much. As superintendentof one of the largest jail carpet weaving workshops in western India at the HyderabadCentral Prison in Sind, Twigg was well aware of the underdeveloped state of the industry.He thus reported without surprise that in the Khandesh “since the famine of 1876 theindustry has much decreased,” in Hyderabad (Sind) “the industry has almost died out,”and in Nasik where some twenty years earlier fifty families were employed full time incarpet weaving, now only “a single individual, a beggar, spends his leisure momentsafter harvest is over in this work” (Twigg [1907] 1976, 136, 140, 137). Where hereditaryartisans still wove carpets, quality was terrible. Commenting on Sind, Twigg wrote that“much of the carpet [production] is really only blanket work…. The carpets are in twogrades known as ‘superior’ and ‘middling,’ or, as they should be called ‘bad’ and ‘verybad’” (143). Summing up, he argued: “Indeed, it might almost be said that if a strict

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definition of carpet be adhered to, and nothing be called a carpet which is not used forspreading on the floors, then, apart from the prisons, a few art and industrial schools, anda factory or mission here and there, pure carpet-making does not exist in this Presidency”(139).

Despite those dour pronouncements, however, Twigg believed that the economicfuture of carpets was bright. Thus when he requested information from district collectorsfor his monograph, he asked them not only to state if carpets were made locally but also tocomment whether their region “was in a position to supply raw material or labour forcarpet-making with a view to future possibilities” (133). That faith in the future wasbased on recent trade figures. On the one hand, the value of carpets exported fromIndia almost doubled in the last five years of the nineteenth century, increasing from10 to almost 20 lakh rupees (Brendon [1899] 1976, 78); on the other hand, Indiandemand was on the rise, with carpet imports into India more than quadruplingbetween 1895 and 1906 (Twigg [1907] 1976, 149). With that expanding demand,fellow survey official B. A. Brendon concluded that “The industry, which has thus sorapidly developed, seems secure and likely to increase, for neither Europe norAmerica, with their highly organized and expensive labour, can compete with India inan operation which is of necessity manual” (Brendon [1899] 1976, 78).

That optimism was shared by many at the turn of the century, inspiring a series ofattempts to launch carpet production in western India. Some represented private entre-preneurship. In Ahmedabad, American designer Lockwood de Forest and the Jain mer-chant family the Hutheesings collaborated on a carpet factory that opened in the 1880s,eventually featuring some fifteen to twenty looms producing rugs for the Americanmarket (de Forest 1919, 1265–66). Other efforts came via missionary initiative. Duringthe great famine of 1896–97, hundreds of children came under the care of the AmericanMarathi Mission station in Ahmednagar. Anxious to find employment for the mission’s

Figure 1. Carpet loom at the American Marathi Mission factory,Ahmednagar (Hazen 1913, between pages 84 and 85).

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wards, the Reverend James Smith launched a carpet program that trained children toweave for export to London (see figure 1). As of February 1900, less than two yearsafter opening, when the mission’s factory employed 183 boys and girls, Smith boastedin a letter to his superiors that he could employ up to 1,000 children if only there wasmoney to train them to carpet work.1

In terms of the scale, stability, and quality of production, however, the most ambi-tious effort to launch carpet weaving in western India was at government jails (seefigure 2). Jails across the region began carpet production in the early 1850s, with morelaunching weaving in the 1880s; as of January 1883 nineteen out of the twenty-sevenjails in the Bombay Presidency had convicts making carpets, with the most employedat the prisons at Poona, Karachi, Thana, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad.2 From the1880s onwards, an average of 600 convict weavers were at work across the Presidencyproducing everything from simple, flat daris for government offices and private homesto the finest pile carpets meant for princes and provincial governors. Overall, accordingto Twigg, jail carpet factories “exceed[ed] both in output and general high standard ofexcellence those turned out anywhere else in this part of India” (Twigg [1907] 1976, 146).

As with private and missionary factories, carpet weaving in jails emerged in responseto perceived market demand. And yet, as a form of employment for prisoners in jails,carpet weaving also had to fulfill a host of other objectives unrelated to markets, includingpunishing, subsidizing, and reforming prisoners. As Radhika Singha has noted, prison fac-tories emerged as part of a major round of Indian penal reforms in the 1830s—reformsthat prompted an increased emphasis on the punitive nature of convict labor (Singha1998, 255–58). Taking this idea to its extreme, the Prison Discipline Committee of

Figure 2. Weaving cotton daris in a jail workshop, c. 1906 (Twigg[1907] 1976, plate I).

1James Smith to Dr. Barton, February 8, 1900. Unit 4, vol. 31: Reel 425. Papers of the AmericanMarathi Mission, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions records, HoughtonLibrary, Harvard University (hereafter ABCFM).2C. Gonne, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay to Secretary to the Government ofIndia. January 10, 1883. India Office Records (hereafter IOR) L/PJ/6/101 file 1098: 5.

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1838 argued that prisoners should be kept at work at “some dull, monotonous, wearisomeand uninteresting task” like rock-crushing or turning a tread-wheel in order to deny themeven the pleasure of satisfaction in work well-done (quoted in Indian Jails Committee1920, 30). If one goal of early prison reforms was more rigorous punishment, another,however, was that prison labor subsidize the cost of incarceration. According to the gov-ernment, since the prisoner had committed a crime against the state, the state was jus-tified “in making the maximum profit, or at least obtaining the largest possible return,from his labour” (Indian Jails Committee 1920, 117). Thus, despite the recommendationsof the Prison Discipline Committee, as early as the 1840s jails put convicts to workmaking goods for sale to the public or to government departments, with the sometimessubstantial proceeds helping to offset the cost of imprisonment (Mouat 1891, 229–30)—thereby offering a dramatic, and tremendously appealing, savings to government (AnnualReport 1863, 12). To pursue profits, jails diversified their industries over time; as of 1882the 200 long-term prisoners at the Thana Jail made carpets, cane baskets and chairs, goldand silver ornaments, ropes and nets for badminton and lawn tennis, soles for huntingshoes, flower pots, rope, window blinds, and a wide variety of cloth for towels, blankets,tablecloths, napkins, and bedsheets. Increasingly, though, many jails chose to specialize inthe one industry offering the highest earnings per prisoner: carpet weaving. Thus, at theThana Jail in 1882, seventy-five of the two hundred prisoners were employed weavingPersian carpets (Government of Bombay 1882, 400–402).

Compared to other jail industries, carpets were appealing for several reasons. Forone, few expensive inputs were necessary. Aside from dyed wool, cotton twine, and asimple loom, the main element in carpet production was convict labor, to which jailshad ready access. Second, carpet weaving could be learned easily, unlike trades like car-pentry or blacksmithing that required years of training. This was a particular advantagegiven that few prisoners came to jail with any craft skills (Annual Report 1879, 22),and most prisoners served short-term sentences; in carpets anyone could be put towork on high-quality goods, allowing even unskilled, temporary convicts to contributequickly to prison earnings. Third, carpet production required little physical strength.That suited the convicts assigned to labor within prison walls, who were, as one reportput it, generally only “the old, weakly and convalescent, and women and boys” with“all able-bodied prisoners” sent out to labor on public works projects (Annual Report1883, 17).

Jails also favored carpet production because of what it was not: not mechanized andnot a threat to private enterprise. One of the major criticisms of jail industries was thatadvanced machinery—usually for cotton or jute weaving—made prison work too pro-ductive and too easy. As the manager of a Nagpur cotton mill, Mr. S. B. Mehta,argued to the Indian Jails Committee (IJC) of 1919–20:

Power-driven machinery ought not to be introduced in jails as such introductionwould lead to increased production, which in its train would bring competitionwith industrial concerns for disposal of the extra production.… I think attend-ance upon power-driven machines does not involve such arduous and toilsomework and require such close attention as hand labour and in my opinion housesof correction should not introduce devices which would tend to minimise therigours of labour. (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 1065, see also 1143–49)

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Another complaint was that access to free convict labor allowed jails to undercut theprices of private employers, who had to pay wages. In western India, carpets avoidedall these objections. Done on the simplest of implements, with no major investment inmachinery, the work remained slow and tedious, which, in turn, kept it penal. Convictsapparently understood it to be so; in his testimony to the IJC, prison official C. H. Brier-ley noted that he had “often been asked by prisoners employed on carpet-making to sendthem to the [road work] gang” (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 1182). Furthermore, inwestern India convict carpets did not threaten commercial producers because fewcarpets were made outside of jails. As J. Cruickshank, Inspector General of Prisons forthe Bombay Presidency, argued in 1882, “the greater part of the articles made for salein our jails are such as cannot be generally purchased in the bazaar, and are rather a con-venience to the general public, European and Native, than otherwise.”3

Private complaints attached to other types of prison industries—most notably cottonweaving—thus did not target carpet weaving in western India. Nor did the governmentsee much harm in it, specifically exempting carpets from new rules imposed in the 1880sthat curtailed other jail industries.4 That is not to say that jail carpets faced no troubles oftheir own in western India. One was access to raw materials; local wool supplies fromKutch and Rajputana were considered inappropriate for fine carpets, leaving weaversdependent on shipments from the Punjab, Kashmir, or Australia (Brendon [1899]1976, 69–70). Yet another was market competition; local producers faced stiff challengesfrom more established weaving centers in north India, where foreign firms had long-standing connections with large, efficient workshops (Latimer 1916, 19; Roy 1999,205). Others were the result of conditions within jails themselves. Prison work wasoften interrupted during periods of social unrest when swelling convict populationsforced officials to convert workshops to dormitories (Annual Report 1901, 11). Evenwhen work was steady, carpets had to compete with other jail industries for labor; thisposed a particular problem at the Yeraoda Jail, where production never exceededtwenty-five high-class carpets a year because so many prisoners worked at the jail’slarge printing press (Twigg [1907] 1976, 146). Finally, labor supplies were undependable.In normal years, short-term sentences meant constant turnover, with untrained convictsreplacing those who had achieved some degree of skill. Special pardons only exacerbatedthe problem. Looking back on Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887, Bombay’s Inspector General ofPrisons T. M. Filgate complained that carpet profits that year would have been higher

were it not for the removal of the long-term prisoners, skilled weavers, and bestworkmen, by the Jubilee releases. This very seriously affected many of the jail fac-tories, notably those at Yerrowda [sic] and Thana, and it was many months beforethey resumed work on their old footing. The Superintendent, Yerrowda CentralJail estimates his loss in the sale of carpets alone, at Rs. 7,000, caused by therelease of almost all his best workmen on Jubilee day. (Annual Report 1888, 19)

Despite those problems, jails produced high-quality goods for ready markets domes-tically as well as in Europe, the United States (until imports of jail products were banned

3Quoted in C. Gonne to the Government of India. January 10, 1883. IOR/L/PJ/6/101 file 1098.4Ibid., 3–4.

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in 1892), and Arabia (Annual Report 1893, 15; 1898, 17). Even though the overall scale ofproduction remained small (with most jails featuring no more than twelve looms), jailcarpets were high-profile commodities, regularly featured in international and domesticexhibitions and Indian museums. That visibility brought well-placed buyers. WithinIndia, British officials, rajas, industrialists, and visiting dignitaries provided regularorders, including 1928–29 commissions for Jaipur Jail carpets designed for the ViceregalLodge in Simla and the Viceroy’s House in Delhi (Ahuja 1999, 65). Overseas, jail carpetsinfiltrated the highest levels of society, with one prominent specimen gracing the floor ofWaterloo Hall at Windsor Castle in the 1920s (Durai 1929, 245). Indeed, in the earlydecades of the twentieth century the top jails struggled to keep up with demand; in1907, for instance, the Yeraoda Jail had twelve looms in constant use, and yet stillboasted a backlog of orders (Twigg [1907] 1976, 146). Although production eventuallyfell off during the Great Depression, jails continued weaving carpets well after indepen-dence, with some—including the Yeraoda Jail—still producing simple daris to this day(Ahuja 1999, 63).

That success of jail carpets stood in sharp contrast to the eventual failure of private ormissionary carpet work in western India. The de Forest-Hutheesing workshop men-tioned above shifted the bulk of its production from Ahmedabad to Amritsar withinten years due to problems with raw materials and labor (Twigg [1907] 1976, 133). TheAmerican Marathi Mission’s factory fared little better, closing down in less than tenyears after losing its main marketing outlet overseas.5 Jail carpets may not have been over-popular with convicts, but they certainly were with prison officials, adding handsomely toprison earnings while still maintaining an element of punishment in labor.

CARPETS AS ART

Useful employment, profitability, international attention, prominent patronage: allthese marked the economic success of jail carpets in western India. Equally important,though, was the artistic success of those same carpets. For art enthusiasts, it was notthe number of convicts employed or the earnings per prisoner achieved that made jailcarpets important, but the careful use of high-quality materials and historic designs.The impact of jail carpets, in this light, was less on prison revenue than on the carpetindustry as a whole, with prison officials acting as design leaders to establish proper pro-ducts on acceptable aesthetic lines.

In using historic carpets as inspiration, jails in western India were part of a muchlarger effort in the late nineteenth century to revive traditional design. Led by menlike George Birdwood at the India Office in London, Lockwood Kipling at the MayoSchool of Arts in Lahore, and Thomas Holbein Hendley in Jaipur, this revivalism cele-brated the glories of India’s crafts, extolling Indian skilled workmanship, delicate orna-mentation, and subtle harmonies in color (McGowan 2009, chap. 3). Within thatgeneral celebration, carpets received their share of adulation. Indian carpets first cameto European attention at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where a series of magnificentspecimens on loan from English collectors and Indian princes excited enormous public

5James Smith to Dr. Strong, June 14, 1907. Unit 4, vol. 31: Reel 425. ABCFM.

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interest and demand (Twigg [1907] 1976, 3). In art circles in particular, that interest con-tinued through the century, thanks to what British design reformer Richard Redgravetermed in 1872 the “instinctive sense of propriety and attention to good principles” exhib-ited by Indian carpets.6 To men like Redgrave, what was particularly remarkable aboutIndian carpets was how carefully they avoided one of the major flaws of Europeancarpets: depicting large bunches of flowers or other objects in full relief such that, asGeorge Birdwood put it, “one knows not where to walk among them” (Birdwood1880, 385). In Indian carpets, by contrast, Birdwood argued that:

Each object or division of an object is painted in its own proper color, butwithout shades of the color, or light and shade of any kind, so that the ornamen-tation looks perfectly flat, and laid, like a mosaic, in its ground. It is in this waythat the natural surface of any object decorated is maintained in its integrity.This, added to the perfect harmony and distribution of the coloring, is thespecific charm of Indian and Oriental decoration generally. (385)

For late nineteenth-century British designers, interest in Indian design was strategic,with Indian principles in color and ornamentation providing the grounds on which to cri-tique and then reform British design, seen to have gone disastrously astray during therush to industrialization (Dutta 2006). In India, the effort to promote traditionaldesign—in jails and outside—was similarly motivated by a sense that aesthetic standardswere in decline. Inspired by the Romantic-recuperative ideal of colonialism as the meansof preserving primitive/backward cultures from the onslaught of modernity (Metcalf1995), men like Birdwood, Hendley, and Kipling hoped to stop India’s artistic achieve-ments from being swept away by the twin forces of Westernization and commercializa-tion. Just as they used carpets to demonstrate design glory, so too they used carpets toillustrate decline. Birdwood was one of the first to sound the alarm in his famous bookThe Industrial Arts of India, which he initially prepared as a catalog of the Indiansection of the 1878 Paris Exhibition and then published in expanded form in 1880 as acomplete overview of all Indian crafts. Declaring that Indian carpets had, in formeryears, displayed all that was good in “Oriental” design, he argued that by the 1880sthere had been a “great falling-off in the quality and art character of Indian carpets”(Birdwood 1880, 375). Thanks to the “corruption of native designs under European influ-ences,” formerly graceful borders now took on “agonized contortions,” while harmonioushues were replaced by harsh colors “not suited for the floor of a room” (377, 378). Norwas the quality of weaving much better; fine, supple piles had been replaced with coarseones, with some carpets so badly made that they “were shaken to pieces in the attempt toshake the dust out of them when first unpacked” (379).

Birdwood blamed this decline on the exigencies of modern capitalism, which forcedproducers to cut corners in order to meet consumer demand for cheap goods (375–76).Others identified bad design practices as the major problem facing Indian carpets. Atissue were not just the appearance of inappropriate design elements—English daffodils

6Quoted in Harry Rivett-Carnac, “Memorandum: Notices of the Indian Collection Extracted fromthe Official Reports on the Various Sections of the International Exhibition of 1871.” MaharashtraState Archives (hereafter MSA): General Department 1872: v. 24, c. #111: 393.

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mixed with Persian scrollwork—but an inability to adapt traditional patterns to newneeds. Historically, Indian carpets occupied rooms that did not contain much furniture,often helping to create more intimate spaces out of open surroundings (see figure 3)(Walker 1997). In those contexts, patterns and colors could be bold, while carpet dimen-sions tended towards the long and narrow. In the late nineteenth century, by contrast,carpets functioned less as furniture themselves than as an underlay to other furniture—usually Western-style chairs, couches, and tables. This changed the types of carpetsdesired, often dramatically. Long, narrow carpets did not properly fit under diningtables or scattered couches and easy chairs; for that, wider rectangles or squaresworked better. Stylistically, new uses for carpets under furniture dictated changes incolors and motifs. As Birdwood put it, the “great need” for a carpet in a furnishedroom “is to see the furniture distinctly”; as a result, colors could not be glaring and dec-orative elements had to be in a scale harmonious with the décor (Birdwood 1880, 292).

The challenge, then, was to adapt Indian historic carpet designs to suit Westernizingliving spaces. The problem, according to many art officials, was that most adaptationsfailed miserably. Writing in 1907, superintendent of the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (JJ)School of Arts in Bombay Cecil Burns complained that, when weavers switched overto paler colors to better suit Western furnishings, their carpets took on “a washed-outand sickly appearance”; graceful designs prepared with high numbers of knots per inchturned awkward when rendered in coarser weaves; and, in adapting carpet proportionsto more modern dimensions, “one constantly sees fine old patterns completely spoiledby the arbitrary omission of important features and the alteration in the scale of details

Figure 3. A Nautch, painted by Shiva Lal, Patna, c. 1860 (Collection ofthe Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

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and of borders” (quoted in Twigg [1907] 1976, 145). According to Burns, weavers boredirect responsibility for these failings. Thus, in his evidence to the Indian Industrial Com-mission in 1918, Burns argued that “the Indian craftsman, whose intuitive taste can oftenbe relied upon to keep him fairly straight when dealing with traditional designs, has notyet been educated to discriminate between the best and the worst of alien shapes andpatterns, and at present he has the worst only before his eyes.” The result was that,“directly they depart from their traditional designs the Indian craftsmen do not knowwhat is right or wrong” (Indian Industrial Commission 1919, 245, 255).

In his complaints, Burns voiced a common theme of turn-of-the-century art officials:that, while the only future for “traditional” arts was to adapt to contemporary needs,Indian artisans were unable to manage that transition on their own (e.g., Fernandes1932, 6; Hendley 1884, v; Proceedings of the Art Conference 1894, 31). The solution pro-posed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was to subject artisans to outside control by designexperts. To give but one example, Burns’s predecessor as head of the JJ School, John Grif-fiths, noted that if he did not exert the “most vigilant watch” over the master craftsmen inthe JJ studios, “they are sure to go wrong and turn out some most atrocious work. I findthat, if by any possibility a workman can go wrong he will do so in nine cases out of ten.”As explanation for the need of such oversight, Griffiths described what had happenedwhen he asked the JJ carpet teacher for a weaving demonstration. The carpet weaver“produced a number of patterns of ‘Lincrusta Walton’ for me to select a pattern forhim to work into a carpet, and when I directed his attention to an old Bijapur carpetand told him he was to do something like that, he appeared to be very much astonishedat my preferring that to the examples he had shown me.” To Griffiths the implicationswere clear. Thus he warned fellow British art officials in 1894 “how necessary it is thateven skilled labour should be under competent guidance” (Proceedings of the Art Con-ference 1894, app. IV, p. 31).

Virtually all of the design interventions of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies aimed to provide that guidance and maintain that kind of “vigilant watch”over artisans (McGowan 2009, 111–33). Art schools trained students into both the prin-ciples of design and their application to crafts, so that workmen would be better able tocombine old and new. Museums at Jaipur, Lahore, and elsewhere showed off the best ofancient arts alongside successful adaptations to new purposes, so that artisans could learnwhat was most useful about past designs. Publications offered—as warnings—examplesof poor reinterpretations of old designs, to steer artisans away from bad directions.And exhibitions put on display both historic and contemporary examples in approved tra-ditional styles. Viceroy of India Lord Curzon, for instance, stipulated that the DelhiDurbar Exhibition of 1903 “would not have anything European or quasi-European”but would include only “the work that represented India’s trade, traditions, instincts,and beliefs of the people” (quoted in “The Viceroy on the Delhi Arts Exhibition”1903, 50). That work, however, represented new forms as well as traditional styles;thus, the prize-winning Bombay Room from the JJ School (see figure 4) was arranged,as exhibition organizer George Watt put it, “for the purpose of exemplifying the adapta-bility of the various better known styles of Indian Art, to modern household furnishingand architectural decoration” (Watt 1903, 4).

Art officials used all those same venues to spread traditional designs in carpets. Oneoption was a series of publications documenting historic examples. Among the most

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important of these was Asian Carpets, a massive volume illustrating design details fromcarpets in the collection of the Maharaja of Jaipur (see figures 5 and 6). Prepared byThomas Holbein Hendley, Residency Surgeon in Jaipur, the book was issued with beau-tiful color plates, “in hope of their proving useful to students of this most interestingsubject, as well as to Schools of Art and Museums, but more especially to manufacturers,who, with their aid, might be able to produce copies which would truly represent the

Figure 4. The Bombay Room at the Delhi Durbar Exhibition of 1903(Watt 1903, Plate 2).

Figure 5. Plate from Thomas Holbein Hendley’s 1905 book AsianCarpets (Andrews 1906).

402 Abigail McGowan

artistic and magnificent works of the best period” (Hendley 1905, 7). These goals appearto have been reasonably successful; even before the book’s publication in 1905, Hendleyclaimed that its designs were already in use across north India, in the Lahore, Delhi,Agra, and Ajmer Jails and in private firms in Amritsar and Srinagar (Hendley 1905, 8).

Colonial art schools offered another source of advice for how to adapt old designs tonew needs (see figure 7). When the Reay Workshops opened at the JJ School in 1890,carpet weaving was one of the first crafts taught. That choice was based in part on a per-ception that, as Bombay’s Director of Public Instruction K. M. Chatfield put it, currentproducers in jails and elsewhere “require guidance in matters of colour and design, andwithout that guidance are certain to be in trouble before long.”7 In keeping with thatorientation towards design for industry, only a small section of the instruction offeredin the carpet workshop at Reay was devoted to knotting carpets. Instead, studentsspent most of their time learning design, with particular attention paid to the use ofcolor and to “the re-casting of old designs to enable their being employed in carpets ofdifferent proportions to the originals” (Twigg [1907] 1976, 144). As they learned thoseskills, the largely middle-class students of the school applied their newfound knowledgeto the carpet industry at large, both preparing knot-by-knot paper designs to be sent outto workshops elsewhere and advising producers in person. Thus the Sir Dinshaw Man-ockjee Petit Art School in Ahmednagar used designs supplied from the JJ School whilethe American Marathi Mission carpet factory employed a JJ-trained designer (Twigg[1907] 1976, 135).

Figure 6. Plate from Thomas Holbein Hendley’s 1905 book AsianCarpets (Andrews 1906).

7K. M. Chatfield to Secretary to Government, Educational Department, October 16, 1888. MSA:Education Department (hereafter ED) 1889: v. 45, c. #8.

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In addition to the more familiar venues of publications and art schools, jails also con-tributed to this ongoing attempt to reorient traditional designs. Protected from marketdemands and often closely connected to imperial art institutions, jails could focus on his-torical designs in ways private firms could not. Writing in 1888 about a particularly finehistoric reproduction done at the Agra Central Prison, Bengali art official T. N. Mukharjiargued that “it is doubtful whether private parties would have the capital or the courage”to do that kind of work (Mukharji 1888, 390). In western India, when the keepers of theAsar Mahal in Bijapur refused to sell their much-prized 250-year-old carpets to the SouthKensington Museum in London, Yeraoda superintendent Dr. S. M. Salaman managed toborrow the collection. He then had his workmen prepare woven copies (see figure 8) anddetailed paper patterns of the carpets, which became part of regular jail production(Twigg [1907] 1976, 146). Other designs at the Poona Jail were drawn from oldPersian and Central Asian carpets. According to Twigg, the fact that the “supply of pat-terns is particularly large and also very true to old designs, of which some are now veryrare” gave the Yeraoda Jail “a great advantage over the other jails, and indeed over mostcarpet factories” (146). Indeed Yeraoda became a leader in the adaptation of historicIndian designs, freely circulating its work to other jails (see figure 9) and to private man-ufacturers either in full-size samples or in special composite carpets designed to show offcommon patterns (see figure 10). To the Reporter on Economic Products for the Govern-ment of India, Sir George Watt, “the Poona Jail has been the means of distributing someadmirable carpets all over Western India that could not otherwise have been secured….Instead of the Yeraoda Jail having exercised a debasing influence on the carpet manufac-tures of Western India, it has absolutely conservated [sic] what might otherwise havebeen lost” (quoted in Twigg [1907] 1976, 198–99).

The impact of the Yeraoda Jail’s carpets came not just in patterns but also in thecolors used to render those patterns—specifically, in the use of the muted colors pro-duced by natural dyes. From the beginning, convicts there employed only natural

Figure 7. Carpet weavers at the Reay Workshops, JJ School, earlytwentieth century (Solomon 1924, opp. p. 103).

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dyes, bypassing aniline dyes, which were cheaper and easier to use—but also brighterand, some said, more garish (Twigg [1907] 1976, 146). Both the commitment to tra-ditional dyes and the skills in combining colors into designs paid off; as Brendon wrotein 1899, Yeraoda’s carpets were remarkable for “the natural colours being so perfectlyblended as to produce a design of unexpected beauty” (Brendon [1899] 1976, 78).

CARPETS AS NATIONAL INDUSTRY

Among all the sites for preserving traditional designs, some of the most practical andproductive work was done in India’s jails. It was in the jails that actual designs went frompaper into fiber, natural dyes were put into effective use, historic examples were copied

Figure 8. A copy of a Bijapur pile carpet, made at Yeraoda Jail, Poona(Twigg [1907] 1976, Plate XLI).

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and sent out to other producers, and the highest-quality carpets were made. Thus, just asconvict carpets helped prisons rein in costs and keep prisoners busy, they also helped topopularize traditional designs among producers and consumers alike.

For many, though, producing jail revenues or preserving designs were still only sideissues; the true purpose of jail manufactures, they argued, was to stimulate India’s econ-omic development. Such development was a pressing issue in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, thanks to growing concern about the stagnation of theIndian economy. Critics saw economic trouble everywhere: traditional artisanal industrieswere moribund in the face of industrial imports from Europe; agricultural production wasstymied by traditional technologies, widespread indebtedness, and the subdivision ofland; capital was scarce and shy, with few wealthy men willing to invest in new economic

Figure 9. Woolen pile carpet woven at the Thana Jail, copied from adesign developed at the Yeraoda Central Jail, Poona (Twigg [1907]1976, Plate XXXIX).

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Figure 10. Cotton dari designed to demonstrate various popular pat-terns within a single sample (Twigg [1907] 1976, Plate XI).

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opportunities; and modern industrialization was making only a stuttering start in ahandful of cities like Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Calcutta (e.g., Dutt 1906; Naoroji1901; Ranade 1906). In this dismal setting, jails seemed to offer a unique opportunity.By subjecting convicts to disciplined work under strict supervision, jails could teachnew habits of industriousness; by introducing new industries or improved technologies,jails could expand the level of industrial skills in society, modernizing production butalso relieving the pressure on agriculture; and by insisting on high-quality products,jails could raise the standards of Indian manufactures, thereby helping to reduce thecountry’s dependence on imports. Amid complaints that the British were either failingto promote or directly impeding Indian industrialization, jail industries offered criticsthe promise of an active government role in economic development, while reassuringofficials that no direct subsidies were being offered to Indian-owned companies—always a source of unease for the colonial state.

One of the most basic ways that jail industries could change India’s economy was byintroducing new industries. Noting the origin of several major Indian industries behindprison walls, including gunny bags in Calcutta, woolen goods in Agra, and carpets invarious centers, historian David Arnold argues that, “If elsewhere in the industrial agethe factory often resembled the prison, in India the prison largely anticipated thefactory” (Arnold 1994, 178). That pioneering effect was in part based on improving thetools of production. Despite regular opposition to using new technologies in prisons,the larger jails across India routinely introduced modern machinery well before it wasin common use, including massive printing presses, weaving mills, and spinning mills.Thus, the Alipore Jail in Bengal was known for its modern jute production, theYeraoda Jail in the Bombay Presidency for its steam printing, the Coimbatore Jail inMadras for cotton mill weaving, and the Bhagalpur Prison in Bihar for blanketweaving on machines (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 950, 1128).

Just as importantly, jails also pioneered new industries by revealing new markets.By turning out a regular supply of such novelties as tennis nets, tablecloths, and canechairs, jails demonstrated to local producers the stability and depth of demand forsuch goods. Carpets provide a key example here. In the Punjab, the success of jailcarpets in the 1850s inspired private entrepreneurs to increase production in the1870s and 1880s; according to one contemporary report, convict carpets in the Punjab“afford a standard for competition to private enterprises and an incentive to its extension”(quoted in Swaminathan 1995, 84). By 1900 more than 5,000 people were employed inprivate carpet factories in the Punjab, thanks in part to the successful adaptation of skills,patterns, and markets from the jails (Roy 1999, 216). Thus, one of the earliest of the largecarpet firms in Amritsar, Chamba Mal and Company, modeled its production on weavingat the Lahore Central Jail and purchased the jail’s designs for reproduction. To cementthe link, in 1887 the firm hired the man who had helped develop carpet weaving atthe Lahore Jail, Deputy Superintendent Mr. Blake, to take charge of their factory withits fifty looms at work (de Forest 1919, 1290, 1275; Latimer 1916, 24).

Most promising of all, however, was the possibility that jail industries could reformIndian labor. For many British officials, criminality was itself a sign of hostility to work.Thus, in an 1891 speech in London, former Inspector-General of Jails for Bengal F. J.Mouat argued: “Ninety per cent of the prisoners were men who would not work, whosought the means of gratifying their evil passions by theft and fraud, and to whom

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continuous labour in any form was utterly distasteful.” Prison industrial work, he argued,provided the obvious solution to this problem on two levels. First, “the teaching of handi-crafts” gave convicts new skills that they could use after release to gain honest, remunera-tive work. Meanwhile “the formation of habits of industry”would teach those same convictsthe value of honest work—that “labour is one of the greatest blessings conferred uponmanby the Creator, and the one which, in its continual exercise, lifts him high above all othercreated beings” (Mouat 1891, 237, 225). Taken as a whole, Mouat argued that, in teachingboth industry and industriousness, “the main object of discipline in prison is to render theconvict self-reliant, and to furnish him with the means of working out his own redemptionwhen he has regained his freedom, so as to prevent his relapse into crime” (240).

Within a colonial society where criminality was linked directly to resistance to wagelabor, and where a distaste for hard work was supposedly endemic, it is not surprising thatpenal labor regimes aimed to teach both specific skills and new attitudes towards work(Pandian 2009, 144–46; Sen 2000, 86). As Rachel Tolen has argued, jail factoriesaimed to use sustained, rigorous work to transform convicts “into productive and sub-jected bodies” (Tolen 1991, 119). But jails were not the only institutions trying toimprove Indian labor. Working towards similar goals, late nineteenth-century localmunicipal bodies and missionary groups established industrial schools that taught boththe practice of a craft (usually carpentry and smithery) and new working habits of pre-cision, accuracy, and the like (McGowan 2008). Such schools were very popular amongelite Indian industrial activists, who argued that a new kind of lower-class labor wasnecessary to stimulate economic growth. The problem was that there were not nearlyenough industrial schools to meet India’s needs; few provinces offered more than ahandful. This is where jails stepped in. As the Bombay paper Native Opinion noted in1882, jails could extend the reach of industrial schools by tackling some of the most diffi-cult sections of the population: “In one sense our jails, where so many useful industrieshave been carried on, might be regarded as so many technical schools which annually tryto convert so many hopeless criminals into useful members of society by teaching themsome industry…. In the absence of any such public institutions in the country jail indus-tries have been turning out good blacksmiths, carpenters, weavers and artizans [sic]”(“Government Resolution on Jail Manufacture” 1882, 3).

Jails not only supplemented industrial schools, they also appeared to improve uponthem, offering potential solutions to perennial problems. One such problem was that theschools failed to advance industrial skills; generally offering only introductory courses incrafts already common in local areas, the schools did little to introduce students to newtechnologies or advanced techniques. Nor did industrial schools seem to improve indus-triousness; indeed, a common complaint among school principals was that studentsattended irregularly, came for the wrong reasons, and left before completing the fullcourse of study. As one frustrated school official, H. W. Lewis, wrote in his annualreport of the Dharwar School of Industry for 1878, even relatively generous stipendsof 3 to 4 rupees per boy per month were not enough to convince boys to stick withtheir schoolwork.8 The superiority of jails appeared to lie in their ability to enforcestrict discipline on recalcitrant laboring bodies. Whereas boys in industrial schools

8H.W. Lewis to J. Elphinston, Collector ofDharwar, September 20, 1879.MSA: ED1880: v. 19, c. #8.

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could choose whether or not to show up for classes on a given day or perform the assignedwork on time, convicts could be summarily assigned to and kept at industrial work accord-ing to the dictates of prison officials. Whereas boys in industrial schools rushed their edu-cation in order to leave and earn more money in the bazaar, long-term convicts had all thetime in the world to master their arts. Of course not all of these apparent advantages heldtrue in actual prisons. In practice, jail officials found it hard to enforce productivitylet alone skill on convicts who routinely resisted prison discipline by working slowly,making “mistakes,” and otherwise subverting the intentions of their supervisors. Still,many saw jails as crucial to forging a new kind of labor for India. As one British respon-dent relayed to the IJC in 1919, officers in the Ordinance Department “have testified totheir [the convicts] superiority over free labourers, both as regards outturn of work anddiscipline” (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 1037).

Yet another crucial intervention jail industries could make—one repeatedly stressed byIndian activists—was in directly involving the government in economic change. In the 1882Native Opinion article cited above, the unnamed Indian author advocated jail productionnot just as a form of industrial education, but also as a way for the government to spurindustrial expansion. Rejecting the idea that the government should limit jail industriesto protect private enterprise, and claiming for his elite readers the right to shape India’seconomic development, the author argued: “While we approve of the principle that aninfant industry requires freedom from competition, we cannot shut our eyes to thehealthy influence these industries have been exercising upon our artisan world. We there-fore regret the more the closing of these industries because the Government as a mightycapitalist, if it had so wished, could have introduced into the country many valuable indus-tries” (“Government Resolution on Jail Manufacture” 1882, 3). Returning to the sametheme in 1886, the Native Opinion once again reminded its readers that “Interferencein private trade might be avoided, but we think the amount of indirect good these indus-tries do to the country ought not to be sacrificed to the enforcements of a questionableeconomic law.” Continuing on with a list of the benefits of jail industries—including train-ing convicts to give up “their pristine evil propensities” in favor of “honourable modes ofliving”—the paper concluded: “In a country where mechanical industry is in its infantinestate, it is the government which ought to lead the way” (“Convict Labour in Jails” 1886).

By the time the Indian Jails Committee met in 1919, such cries for government inter-vention had become even stronger. It was not just that the government had the capitaland the leadership to make jail industries profitable; it also had control over a captive,untapped labor source—convicts. Rather than allow those men to remain idle as thecountry struggled to modernize industrially, the government had a responsibility to usejail manufactures to transform convict labor for the national good. Thus one witnessbefore the IJC, Shivalal T. Dougli, Esq., argued:

At present there is [a] general cry in India for the [sic] economic salvation. Indiarequires more artisans and more industrialists. Indian prisons contain lakhs ofprisoners and if they are taught various arts and crafts through power-drivenmachinery they will turn out to be efficient workmen and artisans…. Prisonersin the prison should not be treated as criminals or hooligans but they should betreated as students committed to the charge of jail authorities as guides and prin-ciples for the betterment of their lives. (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 1243)

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The IJC as a whole agreed. Thus, after reviewing the testimony of hundreds of witnessesin 1919 and 1920 on the status of India’s prison system, the committee recommended notonly preserving but extending jail production on the most modern lines. For, as the com-mittee declared: “India is on the verge of great industrial development; should not theprisoner in jail be helped and qualified to take his part in this development?” (IndianJails Committee 1920, 120).

JAIL CARPETS: A COLONIAL INDUSTRY

The idea that jails might contribute towards the industrial regeneration of India hadbroad public appeal, eliciting support for jail industries from design traditionalists, jailofficials, industrial activists, and nationalist politicians. By promising to contribute to apressing issue of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—economic regener-ation—prison industries seemed to offer benefits both to individual convicts, whowould be reformed into productive citizens, and to the nation as a whole, which wouldsee both lower recidivism and improved domestic production. And there was evensome proof that jail industries could lead to industrial expansion, thanks to theexample of convict carpets spurring private enterprise in the Punjab.

Interestingly, if perhaps the greatest support for jail industries came in industrialterms, it was precisely in industrial terms that jail carpets in western India failed tomeet their promises most dramatically. Materially, jail carpets from the Yeraoda, Ahme-dabad, and elsewhere were excellent, combining traditional designs, sophisticated naturaldyes, and fine weaving suitable for the most discerning customers. Financially too, jailcarpets were extraordinarily successful, earning much-needed revenue for prisons conti-nually struggling to cover the costs of imprisonment. But industrially, the jail carpets ofwestern India had a much more dismal record; the success of production within jailssparked no private industry to speak of. Prison official N. Hall stated categorically inhis testimony to the IJC in 1920 that “I have never seen any carpet work in this presi-dency” even among men trained to the craft in jail. Instead, as Hall noted, most convictsreturned to the work they had pursued before going to prison, whether agriculture, her-editary crafts, or something else (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 1109). In his own testi-mony to the IJC, fellow jail official Brierley agreed that convicts who had masteredcarpet work “do not appear anxious to carry on such work outside.” Indeed, he notedthat “I have myself offered to give letters to them, and they have told me that theywould prefer to go to their fields or to their carts” (1183).

Why did jail carpets fail to stimulate private production, outside of prison walls?Some blamed traditional artisans, arguing that they kept caste-specific trades closed tooutsiders, no matter what training the latter had received in prison. Thus the 1918Indian Industrial Commission argued that “If the hereditary carpet weaver understoodwhat was going on” when jails trained convicts to weave carpets,

he would protest as emphatically against jail carpet factories as Chambers ofCommerce have done against power cotton weaving in jails. As a matter offact, his protest, though silent, is effective. He renders it impossible for areleased prisoner, no matter how skilled he may be as a carpet weaver[,] to

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practise his trade and one of the presumed objects of jail administration isthereby frustrated. (Indian Industrial Commission 1918, 168)

Yet, if caste-bound traditionalism was the major deterrent to private expansion, westernIndia would seem to be the ideal place for private carpet factories. For, unlike in thePunjab and elsewhere where traditional carpet weaving provided the basis for expansion,in western India there was little existing practice of the craft, and thus no entrenchedbody of artisans to prevent convict laborers from entering the field.

A more likely explanation for the failure of jail carpets to launch private industry isthat convicts probably experienced carpet weaving as punishment, coercion, and humilia-tion, not rehabilitation. In his 1891 speech, F. J. Mouat presented the state as the convict’sguardian while in prison, a role that bound the state to aggressively pursue reform inorder to act “in the manner most beneficial to him [the convict], and to the society towhich he is to be restored on the completion of his sentence” (Mouat 1891, 219). Andyet, the state rarely lived up to those ideals, generally sacrificing reformatory impulsesfor the practical goal of extracting as much value from prison labor as possible. As theIJC report put it in 1920, while Indian prisons “are admitted generally to be deterrent,they are not generally regarded as reformatory”; instead of improving convicts, Indianprisons “tend to harden if not to degrade,” with the result “that most men come out ofprison worse than they went in” (Indian Jails Committee 1920, 31–32, see also 117–18).

This failure to reform was hardly unique to Indian jails; as Michel Foucault hasargued, the rhetoric of failure is inextricable from the project of the modern prison, inwhich recognition of the inability to prevent or cure crime produces an endless cycleof institutional self-correction, rather than the end of prisons (Foucault 1979, 234). InIndia, as elsewhere, the failure to reform represented a practical decision; givenlimited budgets, jails chose not to provide training that would benefit convicts afterrelease. As many people pointed out to the IJC, the most helpful training jails couldoffer convicts was in improved agriculture techniques, since so many were drawn fromfarming communities. And yet since prison farms were expensive and difficult to super-vise effectively, they were rarely tried (Indian Jails Committee 1922, 1183–84). But thefailure to reform was also a political decision, rooted in the nature of colonialism. Pro-ducts of an essentially devious and deceitful society, susceptible not to reason but onlyto violence, Indian convicts were seen as so hopelessly mired in bad habits as to besimply beyond the reach of reform (Lal 1999; Rao and Pierce 2006; Sen 2000,chap. 2). Indeed, as Satatdru Sen has argued, the centrality of racial difference to colonialmodernity “severely complicated the ideological location of the reformed criminal, and,consequently, the meaning of reform” (Sen 2004, 84).

Beyond a failure to commit wholeheartedly to convict reform, another explanationfor the failure of jail carpets to inspire private production in western India lies in thelimited objectives of industrial development by the colonial state. Whatever the claimsmade on their behalf, jail industries ultimately operated for the benefit of the govern-ment, not the economy as a whole; the driving imperatives were to raise money forprison operations, keep convicts busy, and produce needed government stores. Hadthe goal been technical modernization, jail factories might have experimented more reg-ularly with improved technologies; instead, they kept the same equipment operating foryears on end and focused energies on things like carpets that used the most rudimentary

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tools. The example of carpets is particularly useful in revealing the limitations of industrialobjectives. Jails were able to maximize profits and maintain quality because they wereable to train convicts very quickly to weave daris or knot pile carpets. With skills soeasily acquired, success in carpets outside prison walls obviously did not dependmerely on the ability to ply a loom or knot patterns. Instead, as Tirthankar Roy hasargued, in a period of large-scale reorganization within the carpet industry at the turnof the century, commercial success relied on careful control over raw materials, improve-ments in spinning, efficient organization of production, intimate debt relationshipsbinding workers to employers, and close contacts with overseas agents (Roy 1999,197–230). Jails trained convicts only as labor to knot or weave carpets, not as designersreorienting traditional shapes to modern needs, marketers assessing diverse consumerdemand, or supervisors organizing production for maximum efficiency. And yet it wasthose broader skills—in design, marketing, and organization—that spelled success orfailure in the competitive environment of carpet production.

It is no wonder, then, that jail production did little to spur private enterprise incarpets outside prison walls in western India. It was not just that jails were only tepidlycommitted to reforming convicts; they were also hampered by a limited vision of indus-trial progress—one in which Indian laboring bodies could be imagined as useful, evenskilled hands, but not as managers, entrepreneurs, or otherwise active agents in industrialdevelopment. Jail carpet workshops featured close European supervision, (apparently)regimented Indian bodies, archaic working methods, strict adherence to institutionallydefined parameters of good design, and specialization in a product traditionally associatedwith the luxurious East. If jails were to be leading the Indian economy forward, this wasan industrial future rooted in difference, by which India represented the past, the hand-made, and the exotic. As such, jail carpet production offers a perfect embodiment of thecolonial vision of the Indian economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this paper at ColumbiaUniversity, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Annual Conference on South Asia, andthe Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am alsograteful to Vidya Dehejia, Mitra Sharafi, Satadru Sen, and the anonymous reviewersfor the JAS for comments on the paper that have informed its revision.

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416 Abigail McGowan