Here in Ahmedabad, at the Gandhi ashram, one of the first of the contemporary handmade paper mills was set up to recycle cotton rag into paper. At the beginning of the century India's traditional papermakers, the Khagzi, were in dire straits. During the first half of the nineteenth century the British colonial administration had patronized the Khagzi and had bought up all the paper they could produce. But by the end of the century steamships were bringing in machine-made papers from British and French mills, mechanized production was getting established in Calcutta, the commercial capital of British India, and the British Indian government was no longer interested in handmade paper. All over India papermaking villages were abandoned; the Khagzi were finding themselves without work. India's village-based cotton industry suffered in the same way, and on an even larger scale. With the arrival of mill cloth from the cotton mills of Manchester and later from Indian mills like the ones here in Ahmedabad, the village industry collapsed. By 1915, when Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, the village-based cotton industry had ceased to exist. The result was widespread destitution in the villages. This was the social and economic background of Gandhi's Swadeshi movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Swadeshi--the word means indigenous--was an attempt to revive India's traditional village industries, to create work in the villages. Gandhi's involvement was practical as well as ideological. On his ashram on the banks of the Sabarmarti River in Ahmedabad he took up the charkha, the Indian spinning wheel, and learned to make his own yarn. (The charkha and a hank of yarn can still be seen there among Gandhi's few possessions.) Gandhi dressed in Khadi, the handloom cloth woven from this yarn, and encouraged millions of Indians to do the same. The Swadeshi movement developed a mass following and came to express a new sense of solidarity felt by educated urban Indians for the villages. Khadi symbolized this new awareness. It was one of Gandhi's followers involved in the Swadeshi movement, Krishna Joshi, who suggested to Gandhi the potential of village papermaking based on the use of cotton as a raw material. Joshi was a technician working at an oil seed mill in Gujarat and he had no connection with the Khagzi tradition. He had experimented with paper made from cotton linters, a by-product of the oil seed industry, and, encouraged by Gandhi, started up a small scale production of handmade paper at Gandhi's ashram. Gandhi himself used the paper made there for his correspondence and promoted its development throughout India. The Kalam Kush paper mill at Gandhi's ashram is still there, still producing paper. I travelled to the ashram by taxi from the railway station. Ahmedabad, big, bustling, and industrial, seemed an unlikely place to find a model for a village industry. On Relief Road we found ourselves locked in a traffic jam of taxis, autorickshaws, trucks, buses, and bicycles, every vehicle blowing its horn or ringing its bell, tension and the temperature rising. When the police arrived to direct the traffic they were dressed in riot gear, with steel helmets and bamboo shields. It all seemed a long way from Gandhi's ideal of the Indian Village...and yet there is still something of the village about Ahmedabad. There are animals in the streets: cows, buffalos, even a few working elephants. You do not see this in Bombay or New Delhi anymore. And on the wide sand banks of the Sabarmarti River where the washer people spread out shirts and saris to dry in the sun there is a sense of the timelessness of village life. The Kalam Kush mill was some distance from the commercial center, close to the river. It felt like a village here; there were just a few low buildings, small fields, a lot of trees. It was a secluded place. The compound of the paper mill had been planted with ashoka trees which cast black shadows on the white dust. The heat here was fierce and the papermaking shed was cool and dark and inviting. There was an appealing sound of splashing water from the lifting vats. I was shown around by one of the mill's workers, a man who had once known Gandhi. He was dressed in khadi kurta and pyjama. He spoke very little and seemed in no particular hurry. He took me through the whole papermaking process, from the arrival of bales of cotton rags to the final packing of the finished sheets. We watched as the rags, white and off-white tailor's cuttings, were being sorted and fed into a machine called a rag chopper. Pins and bits of metal which would cause rust spots to appear on the finished sheet were being removed at this stage. In the main paper shed two Hollander beaters were in operation. The beaters, based on the European model, consist of a concrete trough in which the rags circulate in water passing under the beater roll which mechanically disintegrates the fibers. I had seen beaters of the same kind in Sanganer. The sheet forming here, however, was quite different from the chapri system I had seen in the north. Here the sheet was being formed not by dipping the mould into the pulp but by pouring the pulp onto the mould. The papermakers were working from a standing position which to western eyes looked more uncomfortable than the squatting position used by the Khagzi at Sanganer. The sheet is formed in water on the surface of the vat. With a rapid splashing movement the papermaker spreads the pulp, with both hands, over the mould. The mould, a wooden frame covered with a wire mesh--like a European wove mould--is fitted with a high-sided deckle frame which stops the pulp spilling over the side and into the vat. The mould with its heavy deckle is lifted by a foot-operated mechanism connected to a pair of overhead pulleys and counter-weights. This complicated system, developed, I was told, by Krishna Joshi, lifts the mould from the vat and the deckle from the mould in a single action, considerably reducing the labor of the papermaker. The fresh sheets of paper at Kalam Kush are couched either onto woollen blankets or onto lengths of cotton fabric. The cotton fabric, interleaved in a pile of newly formed sheets, imparts a canvas-like grid to the surface of the paper. This surface texture is a characteristic of most of the rag papers made in India. Woollen blankets, which are expensive, are only used for the finest quality of drawing paper here. While I was being shown around the Kalam Kush mill a special order of Double Elephant paper, the largest production size here, was being made for the Survey of India. This paper, which was going to be used for drawing large scale maps of Indian villages, was being given a smooth surface by passing each sheet under a roller sandwiched between two sheets of tinned steel. This, the calendering machine, had also been introduced by Joshi and was powered by an electric motor. The machine had a forward and reserve gear so that each sheet could be passed under the roller twice while only having to be fed into the machine once. This made it easy to produce a consistent, smooth surface and eliminate the slow and tedious operation of hand smoothing with a polished agate. Gandhi had regarded this, and many of Joshi's other innovations, with some skepticism. He believed that the introduction of machines of any sort would compromise the objective of creating the greatest number of jobs in the villages and he was opposed to electrically powered machinery for the justifiable reason that very few villages in the 1930s and 1940s had electric power. Joshi, coming from a technical background, took a different view, and continued to pursue, before the term had been invented, an intermediate technology for papermaking, a technology designed not to replace workers but to make them more productive. Only in this way, Joshi felt, could village papermaking be made viable. Because of this divergence of views Joshi continued his work at a research and training institute for handmade paper which had been set up in Pune, in the state of Maharashtra, three hundred miles south of Ahmedabad. This was my next destination. Village Papermaking and the Pune Institute To reach Pune you have to cross the Western Ghats, the range of hills behind India's west coast, and then descend to the plateau of the Deccan. I travelled by train, a spectacular journey, emerging from a series of tunnels onto a landscape of massive rocks and boulders, cascading streams and hillsides covered with saal forest. Pune, a rapidly growing industrial town, the place where India's autorickshaws are made, still has something of the atmosphere of a hill station. There are still a few buildings with gables and wooden balconies, and in the early morning there is a discernible coolness in the air. The Handmade Paper Institute, like the Kalam Kush mill, seemed in many ways a throwback to the days of Gandhi and Swadeshi. The institute buildings, shaded by enormous banyan trees, were concrete, utilitarian and ascetic. Exterior walls were mottled with monsoon damp. Over the main entrance were framed photographs of Joshi, Gandhi, and Nehru, garlanded with marigolds. The institute is funded by the Maharashtra State Village Industries Commission, a kind of successor to Gandhi's Swadeshi movement, which is responsible for promoting and developing village industries in the state. Although the feeling here is of a period forty or fifty years in the past, the work has a pressing contemporary relevance. There is now, more than ever, an urgent need to create work in the rural areas. India's population is still overwhelmingly village-based and yet there has been for decades a massive migration of villages to the cities in search of work. This migration is apparently unstoppable and its effect on the cities is devastating. Passing through Bombay on my way from Ahmedabad to Pune I saw squatters, migrants from the countryside, camping on the pavements, in the parks, alongside the railway lines, on swamp land by creeks and drainage canals. The cities are choking and the migration from the villages continues. Papermaking, and perhaps more especially the manufacture of board, are particularly well suited to small scale village-based production and there may be a potential here which has hardly begun to be tapped. Small scale paper mills using intermediate technology can make use of scattered and variable raw materials such as residual crop fiber, which would otherwise be waste. Tropical crops like pineapple, banana, and sugar cane produce large quantities of waste fiber. This fiber can be mixed with recycled paper or rags and converted into paper and board without the complications associated with fully mechanized production which requires rigorous control of inputs. The small cylinder mould machines of the kind I had seen at Sanganer, which produce file board and file covers, would seem to have an enormous application here. India, with its government offices and state industries, has an almost inexhaustible captive market for these products. The institute at Pune has its own paper mill where practical training is given to students who come from all over India, sponsored by their own State Village Industries Commissions. The manager of this mill, Vasudevan, a South Indian from Kerala, showed me around. Here were many of the things I had seen at the Kalam Kush mill at Ahmedabad: the sorting and chopping of cotton rags, the beating in Hollander beaters, the sheet forming in vats with foot-operated lifting mechanisms and overhead pulleys, the calendering machines. There were however some refinements here, which I had not seen before. One of the problems Vasudevan had faced, something particularly noticeable in the production of white paper, was the presence of rust spots on the surface of the sheets. I had seen at Ahmedabad how pins and other small objects had been removed at the sorting stage. This was also done here but, he explained, it was impossible to ensure that every bit of metal had been sifted out. Microscopic iron filings in the dry rags could produce very visible rust spots in the finished paper. Vasudevan's solution was to fit strong magnets to the bottom of the beater to draw away all traces of metal. The result is that rust spots have almost entirely been eliminated from the papers produced here now. Another refinement here was the method of sizing. The rag papers made at Ahmedabad and those I had seen at Sanganer were sized internally by adding rosin, a tree gum, to the pulp while it was in the beater. This sort of sizing prevents water, and water-based inks and paints, from being absorbed by the cotton fibers within the sheet, but the surface of the sheet remains soft and is easily abraded. At Pune the rag papers are given a further sizing, on the surface, by dipping the sheets in a tub containing a warm solution of gelatin. The gelatin size gives the sheet a harder more resistant surface and the papers made here for painting, drawing, and printmaking are exceptionally strong and can stand up to a lot of rough treatment.
