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.
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 weave.
These communities were vast in number and scattered from the Punjab to the southernmost tip of the subcontinent. The 1942 Report of India's Fact-Finding Committee on Handloom and Mills — a document compiled at the twilight of the colonial era — paints an extraordinary portrait of this world, just as it was beginning to fracture. What emerges is a civilisation of cloth, built not by anonymous labour but by named peoples: the Padmasalis, the Devangas, the Koshtis, the Tantis, and the Jolahas, among many others.
Caste as Calling
In the ancient economy of India, every occupation was bound to a caste, and each caste clung fiercely to its caste dharma. Weaving was no different. The social rigidity of this system had, in theory, been breaking down for decades by the time the Committee took its evidence — and yet, in practice, the overwhelming majority of India's hand-weavers in 1942 still belonged to hereditary weaving castes. Caste was not merely a social label; it was a form of industrial knowledge, passed through families as a living inheritance.
The social position of these weavers was not lowly, as colonial observers sometimes assumed. The report is explicit on this point: the weaving castes were classified among the Vaisyas — the third of the four principal divisions in Hindu society — and many wore the sacred thread of the twice-born. Some, like the Sourashtras of Madura, held high social and economic status and were considered among the most accomplished textile communities in southern India. Others, however, found themselves at the opposite end — communities ground down by years of unemployment and the relentless competition of the mills.
"The social status of the weavers has never been low, and they are included among the Vaisyas, the third of the four main caste divisions in India, and many of them still wear the sacred thread which is the mark of the twice-born."
A weaving community and its loom were inseparable from the geography in which they worked. In many places, weavers did not merely live in a town — they constituted a large fraction of the town's entire population. In Guledgud (Bombay Province), nearly all of the 20,000 residents were weavers. In Melapalayam (Madras), 78 per cent of the population worked the loom. In Mau (United Provinces) and Burhanpur (Central Provinces), nearly half the population was engaged in weaving. These were not scattered artisans — they were nations within towns, complete with their own social infrastructure, temples, guilds and councils.
The Great Communities
The weaving castes bore different names in different regions, reflecting the layered diversity of India's social and linguistic geography. Among Hindu communities, the most prominent were the Salis, Devangas, Koshtis, Khatris and Tantis. Among Muslims, the Jolahas — also known as Momins — were the principal weaving community, concentrated especially in Bihar, Bengal, and the United Provinces.
The Padmasalis were, by count, the single largest weaving community in India — numbering over one million, scattered across the provinces of Madras, Bombay, and Central Provinces and Berar, and the States of Hyderabad and Mysore. Their name — from padma (lotus) and sali (weaver) — carries the imprint of ancient devotional identity; they are said to derive their lineage from the sage Markandeyar and regard weaving as a divine calling.
In the Telugu-speaking districts of Hyderabad and Madras, the Padmasalis were the dominant presence. They produced a vast range of fabrics: from coarse cotton for everyday wear to fine silk saris for weddings and festivals. Their communities congregated in the larger weaving towns like Sholapur, Nagpur, Mangalagiri, Chirala, and dozens of smaller centres. In the karkhanas of Bombay Province, migrant Padmasali workers moved seasonally from town to town when rural employment dried up.
The Devangas — whose name means "part of God" — were one of the most organised and culturally cohesive weaving communities of South India, concentrated primarily in the Kannada and Telugu-speaking regions of Bombay Province, the Nizam's Dominions, and parts of Madras. Their strongholds included towns like Ilkal, Guledgud, Dharwar and Gadag — centres renowned for the distinctive Ilkal sari, which combines cotton and silk in a peculiar style unique to the region.
Like the Padmasalis, Devangas traced a proud social history. They maintained their own temples, celebrated distinct festivals, and sustained community associations that by 1942 had begun convening all-India conferences to discuss the challenges of the industry. The report notes that these wider-spread weaving castes had "organised associations and convene now and then all-India conferences for the discussion of common problems."
The Jolahas — known as Momins in Bengal — were the principal Muslim weaving community, with their greatest concentrations in Bihar, the United Provinces, Bengal, and parts of Punjab. In an important sense, their story is one of conversion without departure: many Jolahas were formerly agriculturalists who converted to Islam over centuries, but kept the loom as their primary occupation. Weaving became their profession by choice and then by heritage.
In Bihar and Bengal, large numbers of Muslim weavers called Jolahas or Momins had taken up weaving previously as a part-time pursuit, but by the 20th century it was their primary livelihood. Their community organisations — such as the Jamiat-ul-Ansar in the United Provinces and the Jamiat-ul-Momineen in Bengal — provided a parallel structure to the Hindu guilds, helping to regulate trade, mediate disputes, and maintain craft standards. The famed jamdani and muslin traditions of Dacca were partly their inheritance.
The Koshtis of Central Provinces and Maharashtra were an important cotton and silk weaving community, concentrated particularly in Nagpur, Chandrapur and the Vidarbha region. The Khatris of Punjab and Sind were known especially for fine cotton and silk work — in the Punjab towns of Amritsar and Multan, they were closely associated with mercerised cotton coatings, shirtings and the celebrated pashmina shawls.
The Tantis of Bengal — the name itself means "weaver" — were among the oldest recorded textile castes of Eastern India. In the great weaving centres of Santipur, Tangail, Murshidabad and Bishnupur, the Tantis held hereditary mastery over silk and fine cotton work. Their finest creations — the lace-bordered saris of Santipur with gold and silver work — remained famous among discerning women across India and Bengal well into the 20th century.
"Even to-day, the great majority of the hand-weavers in India are of the traditional weaving castes, and in many places they maintain their social traditions intact."
The Guilds: Corporate Life of the Loom
The weaving communities were never merely collections of individual craftsmen. They were corporate bodies — complete with guilds, councils, patron deities and community temples. The report draws an explicit analogy to the craft guilds of mediaeval Europe, and the parallel is apt: like those guilds, Indian weaving organisations regulated apprenticeship, set hours of work, maintained standards, and celebrated communal festivals.
At Dacca — once the greatest weaving city in the world, home to the legendary muslin whose counts reached 500 — the weavers' guild maintained rules governing hours of work from six or seven in the morning until noon, and from two or three in the afternoon until six or seven in the evening, with forty holidays in the year. To what extent these regulations were enforced is uncertain, but their existence testifies to the seriousness with which the craft was administered.
Each caste maintained its own patron god or goddess, and "at every centre where a large number of them reside they maintain their own temples whose size and splendour still bear witness to the prosperity of the industry in olden days." The weavers also had local punchayats — community councils — to settle disputes and ordain social relations. These were not mere courtesy institutions; they were genuine organs of self-government for a community whose daily life was inseparable from the loom.
One of the most vivid physical expressions of community solidarity was the weaving street itself. Warping and sizing — preparatory processes that required long stretches of open space — were typically done outdoors. In weaving towns across the Madras Province and South India, the streets in weavers' quarters were deliberately made broader than elsewhere, with shady trees planted in the middle of the road. In some centres, an open shaded ground called a pavadi or sizing ground was maintained communally. "The maintenance of such sizing facilities," notes the report, "is among the traditional duties of weaving organisations."
The Geography of Specialisation
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of these communities was not their number but their extraordinary degree of specialisation — a division of labour so fine-grained and so territorially distinct that the report calls it without parallel in any other industry anywhere in the world before the Industrial Revolution.
From ancient times, distinct weaving communities had staked out their particular fabrics and their particular markets. Dacca specialised in artistic cotton muslins and jamdanis. Masulipatam excelled in kalamkaris — printed calico — whose reputation reached Persia and Europe centuries before the East India Company set up its factories. The kinkhabs of Ahmedabad commanded markets from Cairo to Peking. The silk shalu of Chanderi in Gwalior State and the gold-thread saris of Maheswar in Indore State were coveted throughout Central India.
This specialisation operated at multiple scales simultaneously. At the provincial level, entire communities had their signature fabric: the Khatris of Punjab their pashminas, the Padmasalis their Ilkal saris, the Tantis of Bengal their gold-bordered Santipur silk. But the division went deeper still — within a single district of Salem, for instance, the town itself concentrated on high-class silk and lace-bordered saris, while smaller centres nearby made cotton saris and dhotis for ordinary wear. "Such specialisation has been going on in Southern India," remarks the report, "among the different weaving communities there."
A World Under Pressure
By 1942, this ancient order was under severe strain. The mills — first British, then Indian — had been pouring cheap machine-made cloth into the market since the 1870s. The effect on the weaving castes was not uniform. In some areas, such as Madras and Bengal, new entrants to weaving from outside the hereditary castes actually grew, as mill competition drove down wages to a point where the traditional weavers left and those with no better alternative took their place. In other areas — Orissa, Central Provinces, Sind and Mysore — the industry had been in a stationary or declining condition for years.
The economic distress was compounded by structural changes within the industry itself. The traditional model — in which a weaver owned his own loom, purchased his own yarn, and sold his own cloth at the local market — had been replaced, in most of the more important weaving centres, by a system of middlemen and merchant-financiers. The sowtar, the mahajan, and the karkhanadars had inserted themselves between the weaver and the market, providing advances against future production and thereby tying the weaver to a kind of perpetual, low-level debt peonage.
"The hand-weaving industry can be expressed as a pageant of industrial systems — the independent weaver, the contract worker, the out-worker, and the wage-worker — all existing side by side, often within the same town."
Wages, already low, were paid on a piece basis and adjusted downward whenever the market weakened. The report's data on earnings are stark: a skilled worker weaving speciality fabrics in a well-run karkhana might earn as much as one rupee eight annas per day — but such work was not obtained every day, and monthly earnings fell far below that rate. In the seasonal karkhanas of Bombay, Padmasali workers found themselves migrating from town to town in search of work, and when even the mofussil centres had nothing to offer, they drifted to Bombay and took up work in the mills — the very institutions that had displaced them.
Legacy: The Thread That Remains
The communities documented in this 1942 report did not disappear. The Padmasalis, Devangas and Jolahas — along with dozens of other weaving castes — continue to exist and, in many places, to weave. The Geographical Indications system of modern India has in recent decades attempted to formalise and protect some of the regional traditions: the Kanjeevaram silk of the Tamil Sourashtras, the Pochampally ikat of the Telugu weavers, the Benaresi brocade of the Uttar Pradesh loom communities. These protections are partly an acknowledgement of what the 1942 report already knew — that behind every great fabric was a specific community, with specific knowledge, accumulated over centuries.
Yet the structural problems that the Fact-Finding Committee identified — the debt cycle, the middleman's grip, the relentless competition from machine-made cloth, the loss of hereditary identity among younger generations — have not been solved. If anything, they have deepened. The weaving castes that once formed half the population of great towns like Mau and Burhanpur and Santipur have thinned; the temples their prosperity once built still stand, but the looms that funded them grow fewer each decade.
The 1942 report was written in the language of economic investigation: numbers of looms, counts of workers, tables of wages. But threaded through its columns of figures is a story of extraordinary human richness — of communities who took their place in the cosmic order not as labourers but as craftsmen, who built guilds and councils and held all-India conferences, who planted shade trees in their streets and maintained temples to their patron deities, and who, generation after generation, dressed the rest of India in cloth it could not have made without them.
This article draws on the Report of the Fact-Finding Committee (Handloom and Mills), published by the Manager of Publications, Delhi, and printed by the Manager, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1942. Chairman: Dr P. J. Thomas; Member: Rai Bahadur H. Mookerje; Secretary: Mr B. P. Adarkar.
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