The Handloom Industry of Begampur in Transition: Technology, Disjuncture, and Development

The Handloom Industry of Begampur in Transition: Technology, Disjuncture and Development provides an ethnographic description of the handloom industry of the Begampur region, Hooghly district, West Bengal, India. While explaining the process of transformation within the industry, Abhradip Banerjee explores the uneasy relationship between technology, disjuncture, and development that has impacted the lives of this particular group of artisans for more than two decades. The novelty of this book lies in Banerjee’s approach, which allowed him to perceive and analyze the process of transition within the handloom weaving tradition of Begampur region from a more inclusive perspective, miles away from the pitfall of gross ＂technological determinism.＂ The ＂sociotechnical approach allowed him to gauge, analyze, and incorporate several important but neglected dimensions of this transformation, which were otherwise missing in many historiographic or empirical accounts regarding the process of industrialization, deindustrialization, and class formation in India.

Abhradip Banerjee is assistant professor of anthropology in the Higher Education Department, government of West Bengal.