Punjab notes: Village: where have all the artisans gone!

Byline: Mushtaq Soofi

Our historically evolved village has been defined by two distinct but interconnected groups; farmers and artisans. The farmers directly engage in farming and the artisans provide ancillary services needed for agricultural production.

In the segment of farmers we find the landed and landless, owners and tenants, petty landholders and landlords. Artisans are professional men and women such as weavers, potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers and entertainers/performers etc. The village is a self-reliant and self-sufficient unit in the words of Karl Marx. Interestingly its self-reliance and self-sufficiency worked both ways; they sustained the village for thousands of years but also caused its slow stagnation. In other words village's mainstay was its very bane. Rigid socio-economic structure of the village ensured its survival through the provision of essential economic and social services but its exclusionary nature discouraged innovation, inventiveness and creativity which underpin human evolution. It put premium on producing more of the same, it in fact glorified vegetative existence.

Village has been a paramount example of art of survival and stagnation. Despite innumerable foreign invasions, Punjab's village maintained its insularity. Foreign invaders barring one were less developed than the society they invaded. That's the reason they failed to trigger a process that carried within it the seeds of any meaningfully enduring change. So we witness no significant transformation of rural society from the times of Harappa to mid-19th century. It continued to produce with the same tools in a social frame work that resisted change which it treated as a kind of taboo subject. It was the advent of British colonialism that started an encompassing transformation of village structure with its welcome intrusion. Colonial administration forced by its internal dynamic irrevocably brought about a fundamental change in the mode of production; it replaced traditional mode of production with machine-based one, the most precious gift of Industrial Revolution.

First to disappear from the village life were the weavers [Julaha /Pawali] who used to provide the villagers with all kinds of cloth needed by individuals as well as community for diverse uses. Cloth imported from England and produced by the local textile mills in the colonial era sounded death knell for the weavers as it was cheaper, more refined and well-designed. Its ready...

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