64 Kala Demeaned And Discouraged During British Colonial Rule Of India

By Author: Chaitanya Kumari
Total Articles: 164
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The sixty-four traditional arts and crafts, also known as the 64 Kala, form an essential part of India’s impressive and rich cultural heritage. Together, they form the cultural identity of the nation but also its foundational economic backbone. These arts and crafts have formed the livelihoods of millions of people across many generations for thousands of years in India. However, these crafts and arts were systematically discouraged, destroyed (especially Metallurgy), and demeaned during British colonial rule, as they were against the economic interests of the British colonizers. This eventually led to their near annihilation for many of the 64 kalas.

During the British rule of India, the Indian craftsmen who excelled in any of the 64 Kalas that produced the same items as the factories in England were seen as competitors. These greedy British industrialists and merchants driven by profit and market maximization strategies were unwilling to allow the traditional crafts industries to thrive. Instead, they considered the Indian craftsperson as a threat to their profits and market share, as their crafts and handiwork ...
... could challenge the British manufacturing sectors. Many of the British manufacturing units could not match the high level of intricacy, quality, and affordability of Indian handmade products. Instead of encouraging an environment of fair competition, the Britishers imposed hefty tariffs and restrictions on these Indian goods. While they imposed tariffs on exports to other parts of the British Empire, they flooded the Indian markets with British products with zero tariff and the British rule of India was used to create policies that harassed the Indian craftsmen and prevented them from smoothly practising their craft. They also deprived banking facilities to the traditional industries. While, facilitating the same banking facilities for British merchants and businesses. With all these measures, they systematically destabilized the local industries.

The colonial rule in India by the British was orchestrated as a tool for the complete extraction of Indian resources. It was not meant for the development of Indian industries. The British imperialists did not consider the Indians to be citizens of their kingdom, whose rights to livelihood must be protected by the constitution. Instead, they saw India as a colony that could be exploited for the financial and strategic benefit of the British Empire. This is why, they consistently introduced policies that completely disregarded the livelihoods and lives of millions of Indian craftsmen and artisans.
The elite class of the British Empire focused on optimizing their profits from the investments they made in the factories back home. This led to deliberate actions that destroyed India’s indigenous industries. While the British colonizers invested in creating the first railway networks in India, these were not laid for India's development, but to extract the rich deposits of raw materials and to distribute poor-quality British goods into the Indian markets.

The British Crown's rule systematically de-industrialized India and reduced it into a nation that existed only to supply agricultural and mineral goods to them. This forced India to remain dependent on the goods manufactured by the British, which in turn destroyed the self-sustaining industrial economy driven by the efforts of Indian artisans. They advocated an idea of Orientalism wherein British administrators and intellectuals painted a picture of Indians as uncultured, superstitious, and inferior brutes. This process of systematic othering allowed them to justify their colonial expansion and exploitative tendencies.

British colonists suppressed the arts and crafts of 64 kalas as dirty or superstitious vocations that were unsuitable for any civilized society. The arts of weaving, dyeing, metallurgy, sculpture, and other crafts that were once celebrated in Indian society were ridiculed under colonial narratives as regressive and irrelevant. Thus, the artisans had no other way but to give up their ancestral trade and take up agricultural labor or factory jobs to survive.

As India emerges as a major force in the world economy, it has become more important than ever to reclaim its cultural identity and revive these 64 Kala. This is not simply a matter of preserving India’s lost heritage. It also serves as a restorative act of justice for millions of artisans and craftsmen who were once discouraged from following their trade under colonial rule and had to live lives of abject poverty.

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