ignorant of even the spelling of the word cinema. It was... .surprising that the films made by such technicians were appreciated by people who worked in highly equipped studios. What greater tribute could I expect....r7 Skill, Technology — Introducing the Modern The consequences of large-scale import of technology into India through the nineteenth century, which brought in the materials Phaike worked with before and in film, have long been debated. The alignments that had taken place historically between traditional skill and technology — between cultural and economic practices that is — had thrown up, among other things, a history of perceiving skill itself, in the sense in which new production modes had consistently interpreted for themselves the 'usefulness' of available skills. Already in the seventeenth century a disjunction had become apparent. Irfan Habib writes: The development of tools seemed to be in inverse ratio to the skill of the artisans, for in spite of indifferent tools they yet managed to produce works of the highest quality.' He points out that although there was substantial commodity production, and the urban artisan did play to some extent the role of entrepreneur, in fact he was actually converted to an economic wage-labourer. As India in the seventeenth century began visibly falling behind Europe in its level of industrial development, there was evident an extreme skill specialization that cut across caste barriers, but which also reduced artisans to becoming contract workers for karkhanas manufacturing mostly luxury goods for the nobility.8 From the mid-eighteenth century, as cotton manaufactures from India were exported to England, the condition of the Indian artisan and the handicraft industry became central to the Industrial Revolution. As India was reindus-trialized —in Industrial Revolution terms -- mechanization replaced and destroyed what was left of village industries, forcing skilled workers to either find a living in an already overburdened agricultural sector, or to migrate to cities to use their skills in factories and workshops. This was a major landmark in world history', writes Eric Hobsbawm. Tor since the dawn of time Europe had always imported more from the east than she sold there. The cotton shirtings of the Industrial Revolution for the first time reversed this relationship.'9 What they also did was to institutionalize the machine. The machines of the cotton industry that initiated the Industrial Revolution had been designed, among other things, to duplicate the fine weaving of Indian calicoes, i.e., to duplicate, and then abstract, traditional craftsmanship. This acknowledgement of craftsmanship necssarily distinguished its skill from its aesthetic context, and now when efforts were made, in art practice as in scholarship, to articulate the aesthetic and thus contend with the change, mechanized technology became the abstract reality for and against which arguments were formulated. Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy's establishment of art craft workshops in the 1850s, which later grew to form the JJ. School of Art in 1857, is a major instance. Jeejeebhoy and his colleagues, like Jagannath Shankarshet.Framjee Cawas and Mohammed Ibrahim Magba.were at the forefront of nascent Indian capitalism; Jeejeebhoy himself owned a large shipping concern and traded, largely in crafts Journal of Arts & Ideas 49