In his book, Papermaking by Hand In India, he described Indian papermakers as little short of beggars, living from day to day on the few annas that may be earned through the sale of paper to local merchants for use in their account books...Unless government encouragement is forthcoming, which is most unlikely, the handmade paper industry will be a thing of the past within ten years.1 Dard Hunter visited papermakers (called khagazis, a Persian-derived word) who were still working in the Islamic tradition, introduced into India sometime around the 10th century. They used waste fibers--like rags and old flax fishing nets--and new plant fibers--such as sunn hemp, jute, rice straw, and banana fiber. They boiled the fiber, then soaked and beat it in a simple stamper called a denki. Sheet-forming took place at a deep vat filled with beaten fiber and water using a chapri, a flexible horsehair and grass screen supported on a wooden frame with two deckle sticks. The papermakers couched newly-formed paper on posts with no felts between, pressed it under weights, and dried it in the sun on plaster walls. After sizing it with a thin coating of rice or wheat paste, they hand-burnished it with a smooth stone. The best of the old Islamic paper seems almost to be lit from within. It is warm in color, lustrous, and smooth but with some surface modulation. One can hold it to the light and see the laid lines left by the grass screen. Its smooth burnished surface made it ideal as a substrate for finely detailed miniature paintings, scribal work, and account books. Kashmiri paper was considered the finest and was among the prestigious gifts exchanged by sultans. Though their numbers have shrunk, hand papermakers in most countries in Asia are the direct descendants of practitioners of an older papermaking tradition. Despite some shifts and adaptations, generally they use raw materials and tools similar to those employed by their ancestors, to make paper for uses similar to traditional ones. Ironically, almost nothing about contemporary handmade paper in India can be called traditional. Some of the people making paper today descend from the same khagazis who introduced paper technology into India and whom Dard Hunter met more than fifty years ago, but that is the only stable element. Everything else--raw materials, tools, types of paper, intended uses and market--has changed.2 A look at recent history explains how this came about. By the early 19th century, Great Britain effectively controlled India. In the early years of their occupation, the British heavily patronized the khagazi papermakers. After mid-century, however, Britain flooded the Indian market with cheap, imported machine-made paper. By 1880, the British built machine papermills in several Indian cities. So, first foreign and then domestic manufactured paper took large percentages of the traditional khagazi's market. In the 1870s the British made prisoners in Indian jails manufacture handmade paper and required public offices, which had formerly bought the khagazis' paper, to use it. Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling, curator at the Lahore Museum, complained that this paper cost more than the khagazis' and was of inferior quality. In 1939, Dard Hunter wrote, The Indian handmade papermakers have the erroneous idea that their only hope lies in the endeavor to undersell the machine manufactured product through the use of cheap and easily macerated waste materials. In this way they create paper that is actually inferior in strength and endurance to that manufactured on the machine.3 His suggestion that handmade paper would find a market if it were better than machine-made fell on deaf ears. In India I was recently given examples of traditional Islamic paper and British machine-made paper, both probably made in the 19th century. They are superficially similar enough to have been reasonably interchangeable. Both are buff colored, though the machine paper has none of the flecking of the handmade paper. The machine-made paper is smoother and evener. In fact, its "perfection" must have appealed strongly to an Indian population that saw anything machine-made as superior to anything handcrafted. Unfortunately, the machine paper is also more brittle, less flexible. It lacks the depth and vitality that mark the khagazi paper. The glorification of machine-made goods was a particular tragedy in India where the handcraft tradition continues to rank among the most exciting in the world in both design and level of skill. In contrast to India, hand papermakers in countries like Japan and Korea had an advantage in that machine paper could not replicate traditional bast fiber paper. Although modernization meant that handmade paper was no longer used for such things as furniture or linings for clothing, market demand continued for handmade paper for calligraphy, block printing, and other traditional uses, such as shoji screens. In addition, the brush was the basic writing tool in the Far East and it was ideal for writing on bast fiber paper. Indians, however, used the kalam, a quill-like pen, as their traditional writing tool, and it worked fine on machine-made paper. India before independence from British rule was a conglomeration of princely states. Many of the wealthy ruling families had long been patrons and connoisseurs of the traditional arts, including painting and calligraphy on fine handmade paper. In the 19th century it became fashionable to send rich young Indian men to England for their education. After fifteen years abroad, the scions of wealthy families returned to India alienated from their own culture and wanting to live a more westernized lifestyle. The maharajahs' collections in various palace museums are full of horrific hybrids of Indian and European Victoriana which attest to this loss. In some cultures, paper acts as a metaphor for connection with the spirit world. In Japan, white paper folded into zigzag forms hangs over doorways and around ancient trees at Shinto shrines. In Korea, shamans place white paper triangles in their mouths and wrap their drums in white paper to summon the gods. Much of this symbolism grew out of an animist sense of bast fiber as a metaphor for life. Machine-made paper was not a possible substitute.4 The written word has always been of central importance in Indian Islamic culture. Great effort was expended on beautifully embellished manuscripts of religious writings and poetry. Nevertheless, the paper was substrate only. In itself it did not carry spiritual symbolism. In Islamic culture the value of enabling as many people to read the Koran as possible justified producing cheap copies on machine paper. The oral tradition in Hindu culture was considered superior to the written word. It was not until the 17th or 18th century that this culture developed an interest in recording its teachings. As in the West, neither cultural approach in India made the use of handmade paper essential. In the 1920s and 1930s Mohandas Gandhi became very concerned that importing British goods had thrown Indians out of work and impoverished them. "We have to reach a method whereby everyone can manufacture paper in his own house. Just as everyone can do spinning in his own house," he wrote. Gandhi used Indian handmade paper for his personal correspondence and had at least one issue of his weekly newsletter, Harijan, printed on it. In India, cloth and thread are the equivalent metaphor to paper in Japan and Korea. When Gandhi told his followers to spin, many had an innate feeling for a length of thread, the drape of cloth. It was a sensual practice, a form of meditation. That was probably not true for the many inexperienced Indians who set out to make paper. Making paper by hand was more a political statement, a way to assert independence from the British and create employment at the village level. It seems quite likely that Gandhi himself lacked an aesthetic feeling for paper, seeing instead its political value. Dard Hunter was prescient in 1939 when he suggested that government support would be needed to save Indian handmade paper. After Indian independence in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru set up the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) and the Handmade Paper Institute at Pune. This support ensured the continuation of Indian handmade paper. The workers at the Institute at Pune devised a semi-automated deckle box system. The papermaker pours dilute fiber into the deckle box (a mould covered with a fixed wire or nylon mesh and a deep removable deckle, which floats in a vat of water). They beat the main materials, generally cotton cuttings, sometimes with vegetable fibers added for textural interest, in a Hollander. The papermaker uses a foot pedal to raise the box and lift the deckle. Then he couches the paper between felts. The wet paper is hydraulically pressed, then hung to dry. It is externally sized and put through a calender press, which compresses and smooths the surface. Generally different fibers, different formation action, different drying, and calendering result in paper quite unlike traditional Islamic paper.5 Though younger generations of traditional khagazi families work at KVIC units, many papermakers in India today come from the Hindu community. They have little sense of a paper tradition to draw on. Some facilities struggle to teach inexperienced workers sensitivity to paper and attention to detail. I watched recently as an Indian papermaker let a newly formed sheet of paper drip water onto the post below. He may have been unaware of any reason to avoid this. Contemporary Indian handmade paper has a wide range of uses, from strictly utilitarian--for loudspeaker cones and leatherboard for shoes--to up-scale items, such as diploma paper and flower petal stationery. Some mills make white rag paper for artists, others make blotter paper. Though I tried hard, I could not find anyone making the traditional hemp paper of the khagazis, when I visited India in the winter of 1994-1995. At various Indian mills I sensed incomprehension when I said I missed the quality and vitality of the traditional paper. The KVIC managers and independent factory owners concentrate on running viable businesses, creating employment, and making paper that does not strain India's already-stressed forest resources. These are laudable achievements, central to India's prosperity and well-being. Unfortunately, many factory managers have had little exposure to India's traditional paper. Growing up in a nation bent on modernization, they have little chance to consider the old paper's "character and integrity."6 Instead, the Khadi Commission has pushed craftsmen in the direction of small scale mass production, what could be called the industrialization of handcraft. For many years the Khadi Commission used much of the handmade paper produced in papermaking units around India in its own offices. They gave little serious emphasis to designing paper for a competitive market. These days the KVIC, in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program, funds research geared to rethinking and upgrading Indian handmade paper. They are looking into new product development with an eye to increasing domestic and export sales. Filling the niche left vacant by the end of traditional papermaking seems to be a market that has been overlooked. A trade in contemporary miniature painting thrives in Udaipur and Jaipur. Lacking new Islamic paper, the painters prefer to use the backs of old paper, but that supply has its limits. Indian conservators doing restoration must be content with Nepalese or Bhutanese paper when they can get it, although Himalayan paper is quite different from Islamic paper. New Islamic paper would undoubtedly find an export market as well, among conservators, artists, and the general public. The anomaly of Indian handmade paper--the survival of a craft with few roots to its traditions--led me to think about tradition's value, beyond nostalgia. Traditional craft results from work done year after year with the same, usually local, material. It is, in effect, a marriage between that material and the craftsmen's sensitivity and skill. Tradition does not rule out experimentation and innovation. Living tradition is more like a river than a wall. What we see as established and apparently static is often the outgrowth of previous culture shifts. There must have been cultural dislocation when paper began to replace cloth, wood, and clay, just as computer technology and new communication systems today shift our relation to time, paper, and print. What conditions allow tradition to thrive in some places and die in others? Traditional hand papermaking seems to thrive where: 1. traditional materials and tools continue to be available; 2. available machine-made paper cannot adequately substitute for traditional handmade paper for particular uses; 3. indigenous handmade paper has metaphorical or cultural significance, missing in the machine-made equivalent; 4. a population values the qualities of handmade paper and willingly pays for it; 5. skilled craftsmen continue to make traditional paper, either out of personal commitment or because they have no alternative, in regions isolated from urban, industrialized centers where the world moves more slowly; 6. an older generation passes on not only the skills but also the ethic of the craft to young people, who continue to want to learn. It is something of a miracle that Indian handmade paper has survived at all. Historically, passing on highly developed craft skills relied on the mentor-student relationship, with transmission usually from parent to child. We cannot rely on that anymore. Skilled teachers may be inaccessible, they may all be gone, or they may have no one to teach.7 Fortunately, careful observation of fine paper may itself be the mentor.8 Indian museums and archives have inspiring examples of old books, manuscripts, and paintings. One could also examine the caches of old paper being used by artists today. The opportunity exists to analyze old paper samples for how they were made and what gives them their radiant quality. The time is right. India's increased prosperity allows for a cultural self-consciousness, often the pre-requisite for a deepening arts awareness. With luck Indian handmade paper will go beyond survival into a fuller vitality and integrity that ties today's economic needs to the cultural richness of the old Islamic paper. Notes 1. Dard Hunter, Papermaking by Hand In India (New York: Pynson Printers, 1939), pp. 6-7. 2. Simon Green, Alexandra Soteriou, and Nigel Macfarlane have all touched on this in their writings on Indian paper. 3. Hunter, pp. 6-7. 4. This is changing. All over Japan white plastic is being substituted for washi, an indication that many Japanese no longer understand the roots of their own symbolism. 5. Cotton was used in some traditional Kashmiri paper, but was rare in other parts of India. Hand Papermaking included a sample of this contemporary handmade Indian paper, in Volume 8 Number 2, Winter 1993, accompanying an excerpted chapter from Nigel Macfarlane's book, Papermaking in India. 6. Words used by Timothy Barrett in his article on Katsu Tadahiko, in Hand Papermaking, vol 9 no 2, Winter 1994, pp. 8-12. 7. Several years ago I visited the last papermaker in a Bengali village. He came from a long line of Muslim traditional papermakers but he was no longer working. He had taught his sons but they and the rest of the younger people had given up the trade. They could make more money rolling cigarettes. The old man still had the skills and sensitivity but no one to teach. 8. Timothy Barrett has spoken and written about this idea in various talks and articles. </div>

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