Worker preparing thread for sari weaving ---Photographer: Shivashanker Narayen Medium: Photographic print Date: 1870

In the early 1860s the Governor General of India Lord Canning commissioned ethnographical photographs for the whole of India. This image showing a worker crouching beside a spinning wheel [charkha] and paying off thread to a reel at the right, is probably one of the series of views of cotton manufacture shown by Narayan at the Vienna Exhibition of 1873.