Notes of Nagesh

From Caste to Craft: How Hereditary Weaving Communities Shaped India’s Textile Identity By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Long before the factory existed, India clothed the world from the loom. Behind this achievement stood not individual artisans, but entire communities — peoples for whom weaving was not merely a trade, but a birthright, a cosmology, a way of inhabiting the earth.   India has been a producer of cotton cloth from time immemorial and is generally regarded as the birthplace of cotton manufacture. The marvellously woven tissues and sumptuously inwrought apparel of ancient India were not only used within the country but found their way into Egypt, Greece and Rome. In ancient Rome, Indian muslins and chintzes were the rage of fashionable women. Yarn of very high counts was then in use and it is a marvel how such fine yarn was spun by hand in those days. The principal centres of this ancient industry were Dacca, Masulipatam and Paithan — name...

  The Padmasalis, Devangas and Jolahas: The Forgotten Castes Who Clothed India For centuries, hereditary weaving communities spread across the length of the subcontinent, producing fabrics that clothed kings and commoners alike. Their story is one of extraordinary skill, fierce pride — and quiet erasure. Based on the Report of the Fact-Finding Committee (Handloom and Mills), 1942  |   Government of India Press, Calcutta Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan In the markets of Persia and the courts of Europe, before the age of mills and machines, the cloth most coveted bore a very particular origin: the looms of India. Behind every gleaming  kinkhab  from Ahmedabad, every flowered muslin from Dacca, every silk sari from Benares, stood not a factory or a company — but a family. A caste. A community whose hands had learned the loom across uncountable generations, who wore the sacred thread and whose  dharma  — their rightful calling in the cosmic order — was to we...

“An Indian scientist at Harvard discovered ATP. Then invented the first chemotherapy drug. Then invented the first tetracycline antibiotic. Harvard denied him tenure. A bowling alley refused to let him bowl. He died at 53 with no obituary. His drugs save tens of millions of lives every year. Most American doctors prescribing them don't know his name. His name was Yellapragada Subbarow. He was born in 1895 in Bhimavaram, India. A village. His father was a Sanskrit scholar who died of tropical sprue. The disease killed two of his brothers too. Subbarow watched them waste away as a child and decided he was going to fight disease for the rest of his life. He failed his school exams twice. Matriculated on the third try. His future father-in-law paid for his medical school books. Subbarow married the man's daughter and repaid the debt. October 1922. Arrived in Boston with broken English and borrowed money. Age 27. Got into Harvard Medical School. Then into the biochemistr...