Intimate Materials in a Globalizing Era: Textiles in the Making of the Modern Indian Home, 1900–60

In this paper I explore domestic textiles in western India as a site for negotiating competing local, national, and global demands. By the beginning of the twentieth century, home and family alike had become charged sites for the articulation of new identities: masculine and feminine, modern and anti-modern, national and cosmopolitan. At the same time, domestic practices were in flux as urbanization and changing ideas of comfort pushed families into new types of living spaces like apartments and housing colonies even as more furniture, kitchen utensils, and larger supplies of clothing helped fill those spaces in novel ways. Much scholarly attention has focused on the role of nationalism in those changes, specifically on Gandhi´s politicization of wearing handspun, hand-woven khadi cloth as a material expression of patriotism. By shifting our focus to a wider range of textiles-home furnishings as well as clothing, mill cloth as well as khadi, foreign materials as well as Indian-I argue that the material practices of everyday life provided not just a means of mass participation in nationalist politics but also a key strategy for negotiating new ideals of family, gender, and self-a strategy to which a flexible utilization of foreign and local goods was vital.