Uthra Rajgopal unravels the complex history of cotton

Cotton: fluffy, white and soft. It’s hard to imagine how different our wardrobes and homes would be without it. Of all the natural fibres, cotton has captured global attention like no other. To date, it is still the most profitable non-food crop in the world, with an estimated global value of £1.4 trillion. How did we get to the point of such staggering profits and consumption?

For many centuries, cotton was extensively grown, harvested and produced throughout the Indian subcontinent. These industries relied on local knowledge and crafts, skills passed from generation to generation, supported by a thriving network of national and international trade routes. Indian cottons were highly sought after by many cultures: bespoke orders were tailor-made to suit the tastes and habits of various societies, their colours and patterns altered accordingly. These wares ranged from the finest quality cloth destined for the elites, so light that – famously – it could fit through a ring, to cheaper cotton bought in bulk, which was bound up with the slave trade in West Africa.

After the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498, there followed an influx of European traders keen to cash in on both spices and cotton. The booming demand led to a spate of industrial inventions, cotton plantations and the control of labour, land and people, which ultimately shaped empires. Another result: the enormous disparities in relative wealth and poverty that we still see today.

The political push and pull of cotton manufacturing and production is the subject of the Crafts Council’s exhibition, Cotton: Labour, Land and Body, which tells the rarely heard stories behind the ubiquitous textile. First commissioned for the British Textile Biennial, the show draws together four contemporary artists whose work unpicks the historic threads connecting the Indian subcontinent with British textile mills in Lancashire and beyond.

Khadi cotton – a hand-spun and woven cloth – tells one such story. Championed by Mahatma Gandhi in the early 20th century, it was a core part of the swadeshi movement, which encouraged Indians to become self-sufficient, aiming to end reliance on foreign goods such as British-made cloth. These imports had flooded the Indian market at the expense of the nation’s own natural resources and livelihoods.

In a number of works such as Lexicon and Cotton Plant Morphology by Bharti Parmar, a British artist of Indian heritage, we see punched and pierced khadi cotton paper – made from recycled T-shirts – in a work exploring themes of globalisation, fast fashion and colonialism. In Parmar’s film Khadi, produced by Sima Gonsai, we see the artist’s hands labouring with tools to make shapes and voids, the punching gesture recalling the rhythms of a jacquard loom with its punch cards. Interspersed with archival footage of Gandhi’s 1931 visit to a mill in Darwen, Lancashire – he was invited by mill owners to see first-hand the impact of the Indian boycott on their businesses – Parmar’s persistent chiselling acts as a physical metaphor for the dismantling of colonial rule.

The loom also lies at the heart of British-Bangladeshi artist Raisa Kabir’s work Resistances. A jacquard-woven panel features a repetitive, poem-like list of the personnel involved in the textile industry (‘Warper / Warper / Weaver / Cleaner / Managing director’, and so on). Its zig-zagging form captures the rhythmic hum and buzz of a weaving shed. This work was made during Kabir’s residency at John Spencer Textiles’ weaving mill and Queen Street Mill Museum in Lancashire, in collaboration with the National Festival of Making. She also researched The Textile Manufactures of India (1866) by John Forbes Watson, who was employed by Britain’s India Office. Containing 700 samples of cut cloth, this 18-volume publication was compiled to instruct Victorian industrialists how to infiltrate the highly profitable colonial markets.

Ironically, these samples today provide invaluable evidence of South Asian weaving and patterning techniques, many now lost. Two volumes are in the exhibition, on loan from the Harris Museum in Preston. A film shows the artist turning the pages of samples sourced from areas connected to the South Asian diaspora; these include muslin from undivided Bengal, made through a labour-intensive process in which supplementary wefts are inserted during the process of weaving. Kabir created an intricate handwoven panel using a pattern made from coded Bangla script. Titled The Art and Language of Weaving Resistance/বুনন-শিল্প প্রতিরোধ ভাষা, this work conveys the resilience of communities despite their displacement.

In Shabnam, a film by Reetu Sattar, we encounter the realities of labour-intensive cotton production today. Born out of the artist’s residency in Burnley, Lancashire, and an acute awareness of the class divisions in her home city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, the film illustrates the delicate balance between human life and consumption, capturing the exhausting existence of many South Asian textile workers. Skin cells and cotton fibres hang in the air, heavy with the burden of the colonial legacy, as Sattar illustrates the historic – and continuing – relationship between East Lancashire and Bangladesh.

Similarly, Ireland-born, London-based Brigid McLeer sheds light on the complex position we occupy as consumers in relation to factory workers. Based on archival research at Gawthorpe Textiles in Burnley, her multimedia piece Collateral brings together woven textiles and films made collaboratively with stitchers and performers. The works memorialise factory tragedies in the West and in Asia, asking us to reflect on how we are connected to those events as individuals. It explores the cost of human life and the meaning of value in the globalised fashion system.

Cotton has been interwoven with empirebuilding and profit throughout its history. As millions of men, women and children worldwide have dedicated their lives to feeding the continuous cycle of consumption, cotton has shaped – and continues to shape – our world.

Cotton: Labour, Land and Body is at the Crafts Council Gallery, London, until 4 March 2023