Woven portrait of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute. Bombay, Maharashtra. 1934 Image and Narrative contributed by Jayati Gupta, India Indian textiles were a major part of the East India Company’s trade since the 17th century. Hundreds of thousands of people in India were involved in the textile trade, as spinners, weavers and dyers. 
By the early years of the 20th century too, textile and textile technology was controlled and promoted by the British and colonial masters. Indian textiles was a rapidly growing industry, especially since the demand for British cotton had slumped during the interwar period. During the booming era of the East India Company, raw materials were sent back to Britain and the finished goods were re-exported and sold in the colonies at exorbitant prices. The production and consumptions of textiles was controlled with imbalanced equations between the producer and the consumer, the coloniser and the colonised.

 When Mahatma Gandhi's activism to promote khadi (homespun thread and home-woven cloth) became a big part of resistance to imperial authority, cotton became an important symbol in Indian independence and the Swadeshi movement began to overrule all. The resistance took the form of boycotting foreign goods and textiles. My father, Nirmal Chandra Ghosh (1911-1989), after his initial education in the Zilla School (district scool) in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, (formerly part of Bihar), won a scholarship and decided to train as a textile technologist. In 1930, he became a student of Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute (now Veermata Jeejabai Technical Institute/VJTI) in Matunga, Bombay (now Mumbai). He graduated in 1934 becoming that year’s recipient of the Dadabhai Nowrojee Gold Medal. His name appears on the Roll of Honour, a board that is maintained in the Institute.

 Those…