Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Crafts and Craftsmen in Pre-colonial Eastern India

0367557517 pdf This book presents a comprehensive socio-cultural history of crafts and crafts persons in pre-colonial Eastern India. It focuses on the technology of crafts as being integral to the traditional lives of the crafts persons and explores their cultural and social world. It offers an in-depth analysis of the complexities of craft technologies in the three sectors of cotton textile, sericulture and silk textile and mining and metallurgy in the regions of Bihar and Jharkhand in Eastern India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from technology, the book discusses a range of socio-economic themes including craft production systems marketing and financing patterns impact of contact with the world market craft persons identities in terms of caste affiliations and group divisions negotiations for upward caste mobility contestations and dissent of lower castes power and social stratification functioning of caste panchayats gender division of craft labour myths, beliefs and religiosity attributed to craft usages social and ritual traditions and contemporary craft traditions. Read more