Cotton stacks and 'churka' or cotton gin in operation, Berar--Photographer: Unknown Medium: Photographic print Date: 1866
Cotton stacks and 'churka' or cotton gin in operation, Berar - 1866
Photograph of cotton stacks and a 'charka' or cotton gin in operation at
Berar in India, taken by an unknown photographer in 1866, from the
Archaeological Survey of Indian Collections. After photography was
introduced into India in the 1840s it rapidly grew in popularity,
particularly as a means to record the vast diversity of people and their
dress, manners, trades, customs and religions. The first official
attempt to create a comprehensive record of Indian types was the 'The
People of India'; an ethnographical survey edited by John Forbes Watson
and John William Kaye, and published in eight volumes from 1868 to1875.
This photograph shows a group of workers posed among piles of cotton. In
the middleground two women operate a small charka or gin, while in the
foreground a man is posed with a spinning wheel. In the exhibition
catalogue of the Vienna exhibition of 1873 Watson describes of one of
these machines, "[the charka] consists of two rollers, either one of
iron and one of wood, or both of wood, revolving in opposite directions.
The fibre is drawn through between the rollers, the seed, which is too
bulky to pass through, falling on the other side. The machine is very
simple, and seldom gets out of order, and the principle on which it
works is the foundation of most of the cotton gins made from time to
time in Europe...The native gins do their work fairly enough, but much
seed is sometimes found in the cotton thus cleaned".
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