In the last fifty years efforts have been made in several places to aid remaining village papermakers and to introduce papermaking projects to create new employment. These papermaking projects fall into categories according to several criteria: areas where there was an existing papermaking tradition vs. areas where papermaking is being newly introduced; projects initiated from within the country vs. projects initiated by foreign aid organizations; and projects using fiber that is a by-product of another industry or recycled material vs. projects using newly harvested plant material. INDIA The manufacture of paper in India dates as far back as the tenth century, entering the country probably through either Kashmir or the Himalayas. By the sixteenth century, fine, durable paper which could be burnished and highly decorated was being produced in quantity in a number of centers, often under the patronage of Muslim rulers. In the nineteenth century, cheap, industrial paper imported from Europe, especially England, as well as paper made in Indian jails undercut the village papermakers. In 1939 Dard Hunter found the remaining Indian papermakers completely dispirited. Their skills were poor. They were trying to undersell industrial paper, but their paper was weak and poorly made. Hunter suggested that they try instead to make fine quality paper. He wondered, though, whether handmade paper would die out completely in ten years' time. Traditional Indian paper is made by dipping a mold into a vat of fiber. The flexible screen, called a "chapri", is made of twined grass and horsehair with wooden sticks at top and bottom. It is supported on a wooden frame with pointed ribs running about 13 cm. apart. The papermaker holds the screen against the mold with deckle sticks at the right and left sides. Traditionally the fiber would have been flax, jute, old fishing nets, or other recycled materials, boiled and then soaked in lime and water for several weeks. Two men then tied the corners of a sheet around their waists, creating a cloth "cradle" between them, filled the cradle with water, and sloshed the fiber in it to remove the lime. The fiber was then beaten in a simple stamper. Some of the old papermakers formed sheets using a technique called "do panika kagaz," in which they dipped once, gave the mold a shake, allowed the water to drain, then dipped a second time. The paper was couched directly on top of the previously formed sheet without a cloth or string between. The post was pressed under heavy stones, then brushed onto plaster walls to dry. The paper was sized with starch and burnished by hand, using a smooth stone. Today even those using the traditional methods have modified them in various ways. The raw materials are recycled paper and cotton cuttings, screens are made from monofilament rather than grass and horsehair, a screw press is used instead of rocks, the Hollander beater has replaced the stamper, and the calender press makes hand burnishing unnecessary. In the 1920s Mahatma Gandhi began experimenting with paper at his ashram at Wardha. Under his influence, Jawaharlal Nehru set up the Khadi and Village Industries Commission and the Handmade Paper Institute at Pune in the 1940s. Almost wherever there is handmade paper in India today, the Khadi Commission is in evidence or was involved in the mill's founding. At the Handmade Paper Institute the "Pune box" was developed. This system uses a mold which floats on the surface of the vat. It is covered with a metal screen and has a deckle about five inches deep. A measured amount of dilute pulp is poured into this deckle box and quickly distributed for evenness. A foot pedal raises the box, allowing the water to drain. The deckle is removed and the paper is couched on felts. These boxes are easy to build and the training in their use is simple. In traditional Muslim papermaking villages the Khadi Commission has helped form cooperatives to share the cost of modern beaters and calender presses, although some papermakers continue to form sheets traditionally. Other, primarily Hindu cooperatives have their roots in the freedom movement. They use only Pune boxes since they had no pre-existing tradition. I visited one young Hindu man in his twenties. He runs the mill which his grandfather, a freedom fighter, started in the outskirts of Calcutta thirty years ago. The Khadi Commission helps him with marketing his product, specialty paper with long unbeaten fiber. In aiding these papermills the Khadi Commission's main objective is to create employment. Many of the problems of earlier papermakers continue. There is a scarcity of good materials, and skills vary substantially from mill to mill. Often paper of inferior quality is recycled to become even more inferior. Much of the paper is bought by the Khadi Commission for its own use. Little effort has been made to produce fine quality paper for artists or conservation purposes, although there is a real need for both in India. In more recent years with less government support, the market continues to shrink. Starvation wages drive numerous papermakers to abandon their trade. I had a chance to see this abandonment in a Bengali village where the Khadi Commission invited me to visit the last traditional papermaker. I had expected an active papermaking village. As it turned out the papermaker, Mobin Ali Sha, a lean Muslim man with greying hair, was no longer working nor was the small project funded by the Khadi Commission. The cooperative had two large Hollanders, a calender press, a screw press, and a smaller beater to train new papermakers. Mobin Ali had been head of the cooperative. He had hoped that through the cooperative his five sons would continue as papermakers. Problems arose: materials were poor; there was too much iron in the water; and they had trouble with their diesel-powered engine and difficulties finding a market. Eventually the workers gave up. They were making fifteen rupees a day as papermakers but they could earn twenty rupees rolling bidis, the local cigarette. Mobin Ali showed me the ruins of his traditional equipment, his mold, vat, and stamping pit. The cooperative shed with its equipment stood empty except for stacks of soiled paper. Some centers are more successful. A cooperative dating back to 1946 (reorganized with the help of the Khadi Commission) is working in Khagzipura, an Urdu speaking Muslim village west of Bombay whose reputation for fine paper for the court goes back to the fifteenth century. Before the cooperative was formed, each family worked separately. Now they recycle a variety of papers and form sheets in a communal shed. At this cooperative they make thin paper by dipping in the traditional way out of an inverted pyramidal vat, and heavier paper using the Pune box. Unlike other mills, where only the older men know the tradition, here both young and old make traditional-style paper. Maybe it is an awareness of history here on the Deccan plateau, a sense of life scratched out of this dry rocky scrub, but there is pride. The paper is superior in quality to papers made in similar cooperatives. The best known papermill in India stands in a leafy compound at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, south of Madras. Here the work of making paper is considered a service to the Divine. The words of Sri Aurobindo, who started as a freedom fighter but turned to yoga in his search for truth, are posted on the walls. When I visited, the doors, shelves, and work tables were painted all over with Shiva's mark, three horizontal stripes, the residue of a festival during which the tools of work are blessed. The papermill was begun in 1959 with the help of the Khadi Commission. From the beginning they aimed to make fine quality paper using new white cotton hosiery cuttings for almost all their materials. The mill has made its reputation on the high quality of its watercolor paper, stationery, and marbled stock for cards, wedding invitations, and the like. These products are sold within India and internationally. The mill is managed by devotees of the ashram and hires local people as workers. There was no paper tradition in Pondicherry. Because many of these workers come from a rural background, the mill functions as a protective entree into urban life. Kartikeya Anurakta, the manager since 1961, spoke of the initial difficulty of instilling a commitment to quality in workers new to papermaking. At Sri Aurobindo they now have many long-term employees who have developed a feeling for the beauty of paper. In a relatively new operation this is a real achievement. The mill creates employment for 140 people. All their equipment is made in India and all the raw material is local. This is part of a conscious effort to fulfill Gandhi's goals. India's approach to hand papermaking rises as a direct, internal response to the country's recent and past history. Although the problems are similar in other developing countries, most of the other projects I visited rely heavily on input from outside the country.   BANGLADESH Bangladesh shared India's history until 1947, when it was carved out of India and became East Pakistan. In 1971, after a war for independence from West Pakistan, Bangladesh was established. At the time of its birth, Bangladesh was physically and psychically decimated by war. In the years since, it has been plagued by famine and floods. Poverty is endemic. Foreign aid organizations work valiantly to turn things around for Bangladesh. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) started a papermaking project in Feni, a rural village, about five hours southeast of Dhaka, in 1984. Not far from here Gandhi made a walking pilgrimage to bring peace to an area torn apart by riots between Hindus and Muslims in 1947. The MCC's aid program is consistent with Gandhi's ideas about creating self-sufficiency through appropriate small industry at a local level. Although paper was made in this area about one hundred years ago, all memory had been lost when MCC started their project. During the first three years most effort went into research and development. In 1987 they began making paper. MCC's primary goal is job creation; once the papermill is self-sufficient MCC will withdraw. I spent some time in Feni near the end of 1988. Evidence of recent disastrous flooding was everywhere. Rice slumped black in the fields or rotted in still submerged paddies. Still there was a heart-rending beauty in the huge red sun, sinking towards the huge horizon, bleeding into the standing water. Although MCC's intentions are excellent, a decision to use Japanese technology has caused a number of problems. Japanese technique is best passed from master to apprentice by example and long practice. None of the Bangladeshis making paper in Feni had had the benefit of any direct training. The foreign staff was doing its best to apply its training in appropriate technology, but everything they knew came from books. When I was there they were using a Japanese-style sugeta in a Western manner to make jute paper, which they pressed between cotton cloth. Since they had only fifty cloths, they could make only one hundred sheets a day in two pressings. There were problems with waste and poor equipment. Production was too slow to fill their orders. Concern for quality was a low priority. They could sell whatever they made, they said, so quality was not important. They were too committed to Japanese technology to consider switching to a simpler method. There were ambitious plans to increase the number of vats, and to build a large Hollander beater, drying walls, and a pressure digester. I was discouraged for them. They seemed to be reinventing paper in a vacuum. Two years later things had changed. I heard they were producing about sixteen hundred sheets a day, although quality control was still an issue. They had found markets in Dhaka and through alternative trading organizations. They still made mostly stationery but they hoped to branch out into artists' paper. Visiting the papermill at Feni brought home the difficulties of starting to make paper where there is no remembered tradition. MCC several times considered abandoning the project. They deserve credit for their enduring support. NEPAL Papermaking has been a continuous activity in the Himalayas over the past thousand years. The market for handmade paper is still strong today. The Buddhist monasteries of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan have an ongoing need for handmade paper for prayer books. In Nepal all official government documents must be on handmade daphne paper. Handmade paper is also sold to the tourist market. Traditional Himalayan paper is made by pouring handbeaten fiber, usually daphne species, onto a mold formed by stretching cotton cloth over a wooden frame. The mold floats on the surface of a vat. If a papermaker makes seventy-five sheets at a time, he will need seventy-five molds, since the paper dries on the mold. This paper is characterized by a cloudy formation with no grain. It can be made in various thicknesses, but the better paper tends to have a certain heft to it. In Nepal, papermaking is mostly done in small "factories" scattered through papermaking regions. Often one man contracts the papermakers seasonally. He supplies the fiber and the equipment and pays them for their labor. Other papermakers still work alone. His Majesty's Government Department of Cottage and Village Industries in Nepal is similar to the Khadi Commission in India. The Ready-made Garment and Hand-made Paper section of the department tries to keep track of papermaking enterprises in the countryside. They also run a center which brings papermakers from rural areas into Kathmandu for training in Japanese papermaking techniques. This program has received funding from JICA, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. JICA supplies Japanese staff who serve as advisors and teachers, and who research alternate fibers. Trainees come from all over Nepal. The training set up is extremely sophisticated. Two large stainless steel beaters and one smaller beater stand in a spotless room. Banks of Japanese vats stand along the walls, with trainees using locally made sugetas at each one. Daphne is used almost exclusively, although experimentation with alternate fibers is ongoing. The paper is thin and translucent, with the subtle watermark of the su. It bears no resemblance to traditional Nepalese paper. There is no question that Japanese paper is outstanding. There are problems though in exporting Japanese technology.^1 The start-up costs for rural papermakers wanting to make Japanese-style paper are high. The necessary loans are hard to repay. It is difficult to translate the Kathmandu training, with its laboratory-like setting into the countryside, where there is rarely electricity, much less stainless steel beaters. The Japanese process is so much faster than the traditional technology that much more raw fiber is needed to keep the vats stocked. The Nepali staff at the Small Industries center speak of the possibilities for Japanese-style paper with great optimism. The demand is rising and more and more people are being trained, they say. I sensed a scorn for traditional techniques, which they view as a holdover from a primitive past.^2 In an area in the mountains east of Kathmandu on the trek towards Everest, I witnessed traditional Nepali paper at its worst. The screens were in appalling condition. The metal mesh was rusty and full of holes. The fiber was undercooked, barely picked, and badly beaten. In a country where daphne stocks are endangered it seems criminal to use this resource for such bad paper. Only I was concerned. The paper can be laminated onto cheap, recycled, machine-made stock for envelopes for the tourist trade. One of the workers here was trained in the Japanese-style in Kathmandu. After his training, this mill tried the Japanese technique but it used too much fiber, it was too expensive, and there was no market. There are many conflicting stories about whether there is a market for Japanese-style paper from Nepal. The JICA people said the government used Japanese-style daphne paper for official documents. A woman with knowledge in the field, however, said that was not true. A friend who had worked for the Handmade Paper Project said there was a market but that the trainees returned to their villages after their Japanese training with swelled heads. They were no longer satisfied with village wages. What is consistent in these views is that handmade paper in general is getting scarce and expensive in Nepal. There are problems with lack of fiber. The government now requires daphne to be cut on a six rather than four year cycle. They are sincerely trying to regulate the cutting, but in some areas it is possible to bribe local police into turning a blind eye. Wages are low and living conditions for contract workers are abysmal. The average papermaker makes thirty rupees per day (less than two dollars). Many leave to work as porters for one hundred rupees per day. There is concern that there will not be enough paper for the government or the monasteries in years to come. From her office in the new brick UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) building in Kathmandu, a project officer administers a program which has revived papermaking in the area of Khaniyaghat, a village which lies west of Kathmandu on the Annapurna trek. This is a traditional papermaking area but, after the border with Tibet was closed in 1959, papermakers were cut off from their traditional market. Many families stopped making paper. Others lost all their profits to middlemen who bought paper for resale in Kathmandu. In 1981 UNICEF started a program of loans to small farmers to buy daphne and be retrained as papermakers. The paper they make cannot be sold privately. The Small Farmers Development program buys the paper and applies a percentage of each farmer's income to repay his loan. The start up cost is small, approximately one tenth of the cost for Japanese-style papermaking, and loans are easily repaid. UNICEF has retrained a number of papermakers who had been trained by JICA instructors but found Japanese technique frustrating. The paper is transported to another UNICEF project, the Bhaktapur Craft Printers, in the Kathmandu Valley. There, women who are the sole support of their families and disabled men print greeting cards with designs reflecting Tibetan life, for sale by UNICEF. The workers at the Bhaktapur Craft Printers are in the process of taking over the printshop and will run it as a cooperative. This program is a model in many ways. Strict quality control provides incentive to make good paper. UNICEF devised a simple measuring system which makes standardization of three weights of paper possible. Papermaking is a supplement to the farming of rice and barley, which continues unchanged. Each papermaker receives the same amount of raw fiber unless he shows a particular need or particular ability to produce more paper. The project has evolved out of a way of life that has worked in this valley for centuries. The project director explained that paper was really a side issue for UNICEF. Their concern was improving living standards for the children in an area which had been very depressed. Assessing the impact of the project's success is complex. I spent several days photographing one papermaker at work. "There's no profit," he said; if there were any other work he would stop making paper. Everyone else says that incomes are up. Each year new farmers apply to take part in the program. Still the project director said that she could not be sure yet whether increasing income really filtered down to the children. Market remains a problem. Under their mandate UNICEF cannot export raw paper. It must be made into stationery products. Most of their output is now used by UNICEF for greeting cards but they hope to branch out into other markets. BHUTAN I had a chance to consider these same issues in a visit to Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan kingdom which fiercely guards its independence despite India's hungry glance. Paper there is made using both traditional Nepalese and traditional Indian techniques. In Thimpu, the capital, I purchased paper from various parts of the country. It was rough paper with a rustic beauty. I visited several papermakers' workshops but all the papermakers were away. Several had been sent to Japan to study Japanese-style paper. I have not been able to find out whether they continued making Japanese-style paper on their return, but I question the whole premise of Japanese training. Bhutanese screens are quite coarse and the drying surfaces rough. Attention to removing debris from the fiber is hit or miss. The paper is poorly adapted to modern printing methods. It seems that a minimal investment to refine papermaking equipment and to train papermakers in more careful fiber preparation would raise the paper's quality without sacrificing its intrinsic Bhutanese character. CONCLUSION A number of elements must be looked at in evaluating these various projects. The most obvious but not necessarily the most important test may be the quality and quantity of paper produced. Beyond that, and possibly more important in the long run, are criteria that affect the health of the community as a whole. Is the project creating secure employment for people who were previously unemployed or underemployed? Has the paper been designed to fill a particular market niche either within the country or for export, one which is unlikely to be saturated in a short time, or does it compete with machine-made paper? Does the work create pride and a positive sense of identity among papermakers? Does it encourage self-sufficiency: is the technology self-sustaining, can the tools be locally made, are the papermakers less dependent on middlemen who would slice away their profit? What are the environmental effects? Is the project sensitive to issues of deforestation^3 and pollution? Has it ameliorated living conditions for the workers and their dependent children? Conditions change for better or worse. It is three or four years since I visited the projects described here, so my evaluations may not reflect the current situation. UNICEF's project in Nepal impressed me with its simplicity and directness. After the initial training, UNICEF administers the loans, channels the supply of raw material, and buys the finished paper. The papermaker-farmers form together into small networks but they work on their own. There is no sacrifice of pride or independence. They use the raw material efficiently to make high quality paper. The Sri Aurobindo Mill at Pondicherry is a model for centralized projects introducing papermaking where there was none before. Concern for the workers and a sense of community permeate the project, creating a positive environment where both paper and workers seem to flourish. The MCC project in Bangladesh is based on well-founded principles of appropriate technology and community independence. Unfortunately, while I was visiting, an entrenched hierarchical pride made Bangladeshis trained as engineers unwilling to get their hands dirty, while their co-workers with less formal education floundered, trying to make paper using unfamiliar tools and poorly understood techniques. Faced with general confusion and disorganization, the workers' main concern seemed to be in drawing their pay rather than with the co-op and good paper. Many of the problems of paper cooperatives in India lie in the poor raw materials available and a lack of marketing strategy at the level of the Khadi Commission. The dispiritedness that Dard Hunter observed fifty years ago is still there. UNICEF hired fine designers to update their Nepalese stationery products. Lines of innovative, well-designed products would go a long way to improve markets for Indian handmade paper. Finally, I question the imposition of complex outsider technology into village papermaking. I believe there is a more stable market, both internal and export, for high quality traditional Bhutanese or Nepalese paper than for Japanese-style daphne paper. The traditional papers are sought by artists and conservators in Asia and abroad. More businesses, hotels, restaurants, and government offices could be encouraged to do their printing on distinctive local paper. This would make paper quality a primary concern and the necessity for good forest conservation practices would become apparent. Papermaking projects in developing countries have great potential as one specific approach to improving the lives of villagers. With thoughtfulness and sensitivity they can result in the production of finely crafted paper which enhances the lives of those who make it as well as those who use it.   Notes 1. Japanese imposition of their paper technology and an attempt to supplant indigenous paper is not new. In Korea during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), papermakers were retrained in Japanese-style papermaking. Little respect was shown for the venerable and highly refined Korean paper. To this day Koreans make more Japanese- than Korean-style paper. 2. This attitude is common among those who want to prove a newly acquired sophistication. A conservator in Calcutta, desperate for a consistent supply of Nepali paper, said that some of his co-workers referred to it scornfully as "jungly" paper. 3. Deforestation of Himalayan hillsides not only caries off tons of valuable topsoil, it is also a major cause of disastrous flooding in such countries as Bangladesh and Thailand.

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