Cultures of Hand-knitting in North India: Provenance, Domesticity and Gendered Learning, c.1850-1980

作为印度的日常家庭实践，来自次大陆的手工编织在现有的以欧洲为中心的学术研究中仍然很少（Black, 2012; Compton, 2010; Gillow & Sentance, 1999; Nargi, 2011），除了Rutt(1987)，他认为编织对印度人来说从来都不是一项重要的工艺。该项目通过追溯工艺在殖民和后殖民印度的引入和演变，将其置于更广泛的社会文化纠缠中，挑战了Rutt的断言。当今印度针织的定位与大英帝国和随后建立的使命教育密切相关（Allender, 2016）。尽管所有性别都学习和练习手工编织（MacMillan, 2018），但这种代际技能通常是通过家庭空间内的非正式学习渠道获得的。对于一种被定义为理想家庭主妇标志的社会建构实践（Walsh, 2004），以及最近编织作为一种爱好或独立企业的复兴（Kedkar, 2022），由于该技能在公共场所的代表性微不足道，因此没有来自印度的历史风格或图案的记录，不像西方的样本被保存下来。采用跨学科的方法，结合档案研究和口述历史方法，以物质文化、家庭生活和殖民历史为主题，研究了1850年至1980年编织在北印度的地位和意义。这是一个关键时期，西方实践的影响和适应越来越大，同时后殖民时代的印度将其定位为一个工艺国家，强调传统/民间工艺（McGowan, 2009），排除了国内工艺。1980年以后，随着印度经济的开放和1991年的自由化浪潮，针织行业受到全球吸引力的影响，并一直延续到今天。

As an everyday domestic practice in India, hand-knitting from the subcontinent has remained little studied within the existing scholarship which is predominantly Euro-centric (Black, 2012; Compton, 2010; Gillow & Sentance, 1999; Nargi, 2011) with the exception of Rutt (1987) who argues that knitting was never an important craft to Indians. This project challenges Rutt's assertion by tracing the introduction and evolution of the craft in colonial and post-colonial India, situating it within the wider socio-cultural entanglements.The present-day positioning of knitting in India is closely intertwined with the British Empire and the subsequent establishment of mission education (Allender, 2016). Although hand-knitting was learned and practised by all genders (MacMillan, 2018), the intergenerational skill was (and is) generally acquired through informal channels of learning, within the domestic spaces. For a socially constructed practice defined as a hallmark of an ideal housewife (Walsh, 2004) and with the recent resurgence of knitting as a hobby or as independent businesses (Kedkar, 2022), there is no record of historic styles or patterns from India due to the skill's negligible representation in public spaces, unlike the West where samplers have been preserved. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival study and oral history methods, underpinned by the themes of material culture, domesticity and colonial history, the research interrogates the place and significance of knitting in North India from 1850 to 1980. This was a critical period which saw an increasing influence and adaptation of Western practices with the simultaneous positioning of post-colonial India as a crafts nation that drew emphasis on the traditional/folk crafts (McGowan, 2009) with the exclusion of the domestic crafts. After 1980, with the opening of India's economy and the liberalization wave of 1991, the knitting landscape was influenced by global appeal and continues to the present day.