Gandhi and Elwin: Two Competing Perspectives on the Artisans of Mandla District

The indigenous or adivasi artisan has been a relatively neglected figure in historiographic debates concerning the momentous interface between colonial industrialization and artisanal labor. What might attention to this other figure, the adivasi artisan, open up for historians? How were discourses about artisanal labor as relics from a pre-industrial age complicated by discourses about the pre-modernity of adivasi communities? In this paper, I trace the way two notions of adivasi artisanal labor collided. Parallel to the imperial discourses around the Lancashire mills and nationalist discourse about swadeshi was a debate about the adivasi craftsman and his or her place in the Indian nation.

Nationalists and British liberals in the post 1857 period shared the belief that the arts and crafts of India had to be preserved because they were threatened with extinction by industrialization. Swadeshi products had been displayed in exhibitions like the 1893 Industrial Association that revived the Hindu Mela tradition and at annual meetings of the Indian National Congress from 1901 onwards. Gandhian nationalism boldly refashioned swadeshi into a “cult of the handicraft.” But where would the adivasi craftsman fit in this symbolic system?

The missionary-anthropologist Verrier Elwin wrote to M.K. Gandhi about fostering the tradition of arts and crafts among the Gond adivasis of Mandla District in the Central Provinces. While Gandhi wrote about a future India where village industries would be fostered, Elwin described the disappearance of a craft—specifically how the iron smelting of the Agaria, a tribe related to the Gonds, dwindled due to colonial policies.  The significance of the Elwin-Gandhi debate about the symbolism of charkha versus the aesthetics of Gond production of beautiful crafts lies in the tension between two competing ways of looking at the adivasi artisan that would have serious implications for discourses regarding adivasi capacity for citizenship in post-colonial India.