Growing up, our history books and teachers repeatedly taught us that India was a thriving exporter, its trade routes stretching across continents. We learnt about spices, especially pepper and cardamom, and how they drew the East India Company to our shores. But what those lessons rarely paused to explore in depth was another powerful commodity of that time: textiles. Reflecting on this, ThoughtLoom by Palam Silks hosted ‘Silk and Statecraft’, a cultural talk on Friday by historian and author Pradeep Chakravarthy, who explored how the Arthashastra reveals the hidden history of textiles and how it was a powerful economic commodity central to governance and statecraft.
Curated by Aparna Vidyanath, the event unfolded in the intimate cultural space at Palam Silks’ Mylapore branch, surrounded by displays of vibrant saris. The evening mellowed in with a 30-minute musical rendition by Vasudha Prakash, who made her debut before a live audience, accompanied by a percussionist and a keyboardist. Nalli Kuppuswami Chetti graced the event, supporting his daughter Jeyasree Ravi, founder of Palam Silks. Several textile connoisseurs and history enthusiasts attended.
Dressed in a thoughtfully assembled outfit — a shirt stitched from his mother’s sari and a Chettinad angavastram dating back to at least the 1920s, Pradeep began not with silk routes or royal wardrobes, but with the philosophy of the book central to the evening — the Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya, alias Chanakya or Vishnugupta. Preserved today through the translations of R Shamasastry and RP Kangle, he said, it is a textbook on “how to earn money and how to keep that money and most important, how to distribute the money back so that you control your kingdom and your kingdom doesn’t become anarchic.”
Weaving theory
Divided into 15 chapters (adhikaranas), the text outlines the economic activities a king must monitor: agriculture, mining, trade, textiles, liquor, and armoury. Among them, textiles occupy a strikingly detailed space. “It’s a very accountant’s income tax view of the textiles,” Pradeep noted, describing the manual for the superintendent of weaving.
According to the book, raw materials, mainly from Kshauma (believed to be Varanasi), included cotton wool, silk, linen, and other types of animal hair that can also be spun into yarn. Employers handling costly silk were advised to gift workers perfumes and flowers as a reminder that labour welfare and revenue coexisted. Cloth from Vanga (Bengal) was described as white and soft; Paundra was famed for black cloth “smooth like a gemstone”; and Suvarnakudya, likely in Assam, produced yellow silk “the color of the sun” with two different varieties: “uniformly very silky” and “a little bit rougher”.
Moving to specific fabrics, starting with silk, Pradeep said that its varieties were classified by trees — Nágavriksha, Likucha, Vakula, and Vata (Banyan) — likely indicating the leaves fed to silkworms. Linen or silk from Kshauma and Paundra was so well known, he pointed out, that the text did not explain. Yarn count and embroidery methods varied, and “each thing will be taxed differently,” reinforcing textiles as a regulated revenue stream.
Wool, too, was economically significant as it was observed that the economically weaker class used it a lot, making it an important taxation issue for the king. “For the wealthy people, wool was used for carpets, saddle cloths, and armour padding; it came in white, red or part-red varieties,” he said. The best quality wool was “slippery to touch when it was wet.”
The details extended to regulations for washermen (dhobi) regarding the dyeing disputes, after-wash return, and loss to maintain fairness in supervision. Fines, stated in the text, were payable to the treasury in certain cases. Textiles could even be pledged for loans, hinting at their role as financial equivalents in barter economies.
Perhaps most striking was the inclusion of women’s labour. “Women who cannot stir out of their houses — widows, crippled women and maidens who want to earn — can work in the textile industry,” he read, noting they can visit the yarn house, take their work home, and return the finished product during early hours “because it is safer for them.”
Moving southward to add a couple of details for the city-based textile history, he cited Sangam literature, where embroidery is likened to a surgeon stitching a wound — a metaphor drawn from poems describing storks dipping needle-like beaks into rock pools. Trade routes from Thiruvotriyur, Kayalpattinam, and Nagapattinam connected to Kerala ports, from where cloth travelled to Indonesia, Sumatra, and Arab countries.
The talk concluded with one message: “Textiles were really important for the political economy of the country. They gave a lot of jobs to people.” Spices may have drawn empires, but fabric, as the Arthashastra reveals, helped hold the state together.