Book Extract | Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India by Amanda Lanzillo

“Whenever printing is required, the aforementioned [grease] pencil is taken up and used to write upon the recommended starched paper [kāghaẕ-i āhārdār]. After that, the [lithographic] stone is heated to a moderate level over the burning charcoal, and the copy paper is slightly dampened, and then the side upon which words are written is placed onto the printing stone [sang-i muntabiʻ], until all the letters have reached the stone in reversed form. . . . The letters on the stone are then covered with an ointment of water and gum Arabic [ṣamgh-i ʻarabī] and left for one night.”

Karimullah Khan then described the process of applying ink and oil to the stones in the morning, to transfer the text from the stones to printing paper, as well as the importance of “mirror-writing”—writing in reverse—directly on lithographic stones. This, he explained, could be used to “correct” texts after they had been transferred to the stones and before printing. The text thus suggested that knowledge of lithography was not so different from the ability to fashion a reed pen or to form smooth lines. Karimullah portrayed lithography as part of the region’s scribal tradition, a technology that allowed scribal continuity, important for scribes who hoped to demonstrate their respectability and skill.

Half a century later, in late April 1935, lithographic press workers at several of the most prominent Muslim-owned presses in the city of Lahore walked out on strike. The workers were employed by the city’s largest Urdu-language newspaper, Zamīndār (The Landlord), as well as at two local presses that printed Urdu, Arabic, and Persian books and periodicals: the Mansur Steam Press and the Muslim Printing Press. Many of the striking scribes were employed as independent pieceworkers for the presses, and they demanded more consistent access to work and pay. They were joined by machine-men and other nonscribal lithographic press workers—a broad community of press kārīgars who complained of stagnant wages and delays in payment in the context of the global economic depression.

The press workers’ strike attracted attention from all-India and regional unions and leftist parties. As left-leaning organizations across Punjab distributed pamphlets to the strikers and passed resolutions of support, colonial administrators assigned to monitor “dangerous associations” fretted that regional trade unions and communist groups might expand their reach to the so-called Muslim presses of urban Punjab. While the striking workers apparently expressed limited interest in these groups, the strike did spark efforts to organize a union for kātibs or copyists or scribes, coordinated by the larger Punjab Press Workers’ Association. Attempts to organize a union specifically for kātibs are suggestive of scribes’ continued relevance to book production, a widespread sentiment that they were taken advantage of by press managers, and social and economic distinctions that separated them from other press workers.

Karimullah Khan’s Daftar-i khattāt and the strike of lithographic press workers in Lahore seem unrelated at first. After all, they were separated by fifty years and over three hundred miles. The Daftar-i khattāt was written in a small provincial city, where manuscript scribes often relied on elite princely patronage. It reflected the fact that print had not fully replaced manuscript production but had developed alongside it, with scribes engaged in both forms of production. The strike took place in a context of urban industrial print capitalism. The strikers walked out from industrialized lithographic presses—factories—that employed scores of workers, not only scribes but also machine-men, ink makers, stone wipers, book-binders, and others.

But these seemingly distinct moments were, in fact, part of a larger, shared history of lithographic labor. Muslim scribes asserted narratives about technological change in the field of book production that informed their economic and social relationships within the expanding North Indian lithographic print economy. Claiming a distinct Muslim tradition for scribal work, scribes sought to distinguish themselves from growing cadres of nonscribal lithographic workers, even as they sometimes aligned with these nonscribal press laborers during conflicts with press management. The Daftar-i khattāt and the Lahore lithographic strike reflect a connected history through which scribes and other lithographic press workers negotiated radical technological and social change within their spaces of labor.

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This book is a history of Muslim artisan communities and their engagement with technological change in colonial India. But in many ways, it is also a history of print. The rapid development of the Urdu print economy in mid-nineteenth-century India meant that religious framings of trades and technologies moved quickly across the Indian subcontinent and sometimes beyond it. Through print, Muslim religious traditions for work were contested and reinterpreted by artisans and laborers. Although many Muslim artisans could not read or were semi-literate, new publications circulated within artisan communities through a combination of literacy and orality by the 1860s. Texts were printed with the assumption that they would be read aloud and circulated within artisans’ neighborhoods and workshops, and they ultimately shaped how workers understood both their trades and their religious practices.

Book production itself also underwent radical change in its organization and technologies from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The kārīgars who worked at lithographic presses and produced publications about technological change negotiated shifting relationships between social status, religion, and technological knowledge.

SCRIBES, BOOK WORKERS, AND THE RISE OF LITHOGRAPHY

Prior to the popularization of lithography in India after 1824, scribes and calligraphers were typically employed in three types of overlapping positions. First, scribes were employed in courtly settings, as state and personal secretaries. Second, scribes and calligraphers were employed producing manuscripts in workshops sponsored by wealthy or royal families. In the most elite of these workshops, there were high levels of scribal differentiation, with those from the most prestigious educational lineages working as khūshnavīses, calligraphers producing calligraphic art and highly prized manuscripts, and larger numbers working as kātibs (scribes), producing most texts. In the manuscript workshops of smaller courts or noble families, however, these categories were sometimes collapsed. Finally, scribes could find employment by offering their services to copy books, letters, and other texts for the public, usually paid by the piece. Organized into small independent workshops, these scribes were often trained by their fathers or apprenticed to another member of the trade community.

In both courtly workshops and independent operations, scribes were joined in book production by other workers, such as bookbinders, ink makers, and illustrators. Just as independent bookbinding workshops often cluster around printing houses in India today, these aligned artisan communities historically clustered together in Indian bazaars. Scribes’ traditions about scribal labor and book production—those referenced in Karimullah Khan’s work—were recorded frequently in manuscript form.

In many regions of the world and in linguistic traditions in which the transition to print relied on movable type, print threatened the structures of scribal employment. But in South Asian lithographic traditions the demand for scribes expanded, and scribes learned new forms of book production. From the 1780s, European employees of the British East India Company at Fort William in Calcutta promoted typographic printing for Persian, Urdu, and other languages that used the Perso-Arabic script, as did missionaries, who hoped to use print to spread the Bible and Christianity. Representatives of the colonial state promoted typographic printing because they believed that it would lessen the Company’s dependence on Indian munshis, or secretarial scribes, who acted as writers and often also as translators, communicating between the Company and Indian elites. Indeed, much of the previous scholarship on colonial-era scribal transitions has focused on secretarial scribes and their navigation of changing modes of employment in what Bhavani Raman frames as the “colonial bureaucratic order.” But even as secretarial scribes asserted a new clerical middle-class-ness centered on the bureaucratic office, other communities of scribes retained artisanal modes of production. While some secured the patronage of local elites within large manuscript workshops, most maintained small family workshops from which they were commissioned. It was primarily these “artisanal” scribes and calligraphers—rather than secretarial scribes, who occupied a distinct social and class status by the mid-nineteenth century—for whom lithographic labor offered a pathway to sustain their trade and skills.

The movable-type print used at Fort William never attracted large-scale readership. Instead, it was primarily used for printing language textbooks and readers to educate new Company employees. Nineteenth-century experiments in Perso-Arabic movable type overcame many of the technical challenges experienced by earlier attempts to render the script legible in type, including problems rendering letter compounds and dots. Despite increased legibility, typography was not embraced by many Indian readers or producers of Perso-Arabic script books. On the production side, this was partially due to the high cost of obtaining and running a movable-type press in comparison to a lithographic press. It also stemmed from aesthetics, because nastʿalīq features sloping lines and curves that early movable type was unable to reproduce.

The spread of Perso-Arabic script print in India began in earnest after the introduction of lithography in 1824, when the British East India Company acquired lithographic presses for each of its presidencies. The trade was rapidly popularized over the subsequent two decades by cadres of private Indian publishers, who required the labor of an expanding number of scribes. Over the following decades, Indian-owned lithographic printing houses flourished across the subcontinent. Lithography dominated Perso-Arabic script printing to the near exclusion of typography. It was also frequently used for other Indian languages and scripts that were more easily rendered in movable type, in part because the economic barriers to entry were lower for lithographic than typographic publishers.

By the late 1860s, Indian-run lithographic printing houses not only dominated local markets but also exported books abroad to Indian diasporas and other communities who read Perso-Arabic script languages. From its inception, lithographic printing in India was a significant site of employment for scribes, and Indian printed books mirrored their manuscript predecessors. They often included extensive colophons that identified the scribe, as well as versified chronograms to indicate the date of publication. Though this practice diminished slowly through the 1880s and 1890s, even early twentieth-century printed texts sometimes identified the scribe or scribes responsible for their composition.

SCRIBAL KNOWLEDGE AS MUSLIM KNOWLEDGE

Despite significant differences in the assumed class and social positionalities of their audiences, both Daftar-i khattāt and Raīl khushnavīsī are notable because they tied scribal work to a Muslim religious identity and practice. It is important to note here that scribes working in Persian, Urdu, and other languages that used Perso-Arabic script had historically been drawn from multiple religious communities. The Mughal court, its successor states, and regional elites regularly patronized Hindu caste and community groups that were seen as “scribal” in nature, most notably kayasthas, including for Persian and Urdu manuscripts. Members of these communities continued to secure employment as producers of nastaʿlīq and other Perso-Arabic scripts through the mid-nineteenth century. Until the early nineteenth century, non-Muslim scribes were often featured in Persian scribal treatises as potential models of scribal work.

Among the most prominent North Indian, Persian-language scribal treatises authored in the period immediately preceding the rise of lithographic print was the Taẓkirah-yi khūshnavīsān (Compendium of Calligraphers). It was composed in 1824 by Ghulam Muhammad Dehlvi, a scribe based in Lucknow, and it provided advice on how to undertake scribal work and detailed biographies of prominent scribes. Dehlvi’s 1824 treatise profiled several kayastha scribes and calligraphers, portraying them as rooted in the same educational milieu as prominent Muslim scribes. It portrayed a world of scribal production and training that, while having a Muslim-majority, was religiously plural. At the same time, Dehlvi’s work—like many scribal treatises that preceded it—asserted that the history of Perso-Arabic scribal work was essentially an Islamic one and that the precepts of writing had been first revealed by God to the first prophet, Adam.

In the late nineteenth century, there was an increased erasure of non-Muslim scribes from scribal treatises, accompanied by a renewed and expanded assertion of Islam as a source of a shared scribal past. This shift suggests that the importance of Muslim religious identity among scribes increased in the age of print. As earlier forms of training and patronage ruptured, scribes emphasized Islam as a factor that distinguished their trade, drawing on new articulations of artisan Islam that made space for multiple spaces of training. This shift was especially pronounced in texts such as the Raīl khushnavīsī, which did not assume that scribes had access to prestigious educational lineages and prominent ustāds but instead assumed that they learned scribal work from texts and in the presses.

By articulating a shared Muslim past for scribal work, authors like ʿAbdul Rahman sought to tie together lithographic scribes from multiple social and economic backgrounds. Invoking the Quran to claim a Muslim nature for scribal work, ‘Abdul Rahman’s introduction explained that the work of men is in the hands of God. He cited, for instance, God’s protection of the ark of the Prophet Nuh (Noah), quoting the thirty-sixth surah (ya-sin), “We carried their seed in the loaded Ark, and we have made similar things for them to ride in.” Further emphasizing God’s influence over the “hands of men,” he suggested that the ways in which scribes piously carried out their work reflected the will of God. And he reminded his readers of sayings associated with prominent figures in Islamic history. Citing a saying attributed to ʿAli—the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law—he noted that “what cannot be completely attained, should not be completely let go,” suggesting that while scribes might not be able to perfect their knowledge, they must nonetheless pursue it. In centering figures like ʿAli as sources of inspiration for potential scribes, he suggested that the correct practice of scribal work was dependent on one’s knowledge of Islam and a shared Muslim past.

Perhaps most importantly, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scribal manuals like the Raīl khushnavīsī—those aimed at expanded scribal communities—reoriented the extant scribal tradition of the revelation of script and writing to the Prophet Adam. Earlier scribal treatises like the Taẓkirah-yi khūshnavīsān claimed that God’s revelation of writing to Adam had been passed down from ustād to murīd through long, unbroken chains of scribal education. But this narrative was less resonant among scribes trained in, or for, lithographic presses who lacked access to prestigious scribal lineages.

In the Raīl khushnavīsī, ʿAbdul Rahman celebrated God’s revelation of printing to Adam but claimed that boys could learn to write in a pious way that reflected the divine and prophetic nature of writing without access to a scribal lineage. Scribal skills learned through textbooks, and improved through presswork, he suggested, were just as likely to be pious and reflective of God’s intentions for the written word.

LITHOGRAPHIC LABOR BEYOND SCRIBAL WORK

Within the presses, however, scribes were also joined by nonscribal laborers. By the turn of the twentieth century, the largest lithographic presses on the subcontinent employed several hundred workers. Ulrike Stark estimates that by 1890 the Naval Kishore Press employed over nine hundred people at its Lucknow press alone, in addition to several hundred others at its branch operations in Lahore, Kanpur, and the princely state of Kapurthala. This number decreased significantly after 1895 because the press became one of the earliest in North India to adopt steam-powered printing, decreasing its manual labor demands. Nonetheless, this number shows that presses in urban North India were among the cities’ most significant private industrial employers and had the largest factories.

The Naval Kishore Press maintained both typographic and lithographic units for various scripts, although most of their book and periodical production—and almost all print production in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic—was lithographic. In the lithographic department, print workers included generalized machine-men, as well as stone wipers, ink rollers, and even lithographic ink makers. The lithographic department of the Naval Kishore Press also employed some in-house scribes and calligraphers, but many other independent scribes did piecework for the press. Piecework was often more well remunerated than directly employed wage labor, and it allowed the most prominent scribes to maintain independent workshops, continuing their role in the manuscript economy. But it was also often inconsistent and financially unstable, particularly for the new cadres of scribes who worked and trained primarily in the presses and lacked rootedness in prestigious workshops.

Most lithographic presses in North India, however, never reached anywhere near the scale of the Naval Kishore Press or its large-scale, urban competitors. Many presses were small, family- or individual-run enterprises, based in towns, small cities, and qaṣbahs. In Rampur, for instance, the most prominent private press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Ḥusanī Press, which released the state’s only weekly periodical. The Ḥusanī Press was founded in 1866 and was likely Karimullah Khan’s point of reference for lithographic technologies and practices along with the state lithographic press. By 1911 the Ḥusanī Press was owned and managed by four brothers—the sons of its founder— and employed four permanent laborers. These laborers were described in a colonial report as “illiterate and employed for mechanical work only.” The press’s scribal labor demands were met entirely by pieceworkers, suggesting that the precarity of scribal employment that sometimes characterized large presses in major cities extended to their smaller, more provincial counterparts.

In both cases, scribes usually earned higher pay than other lithographic workers. Although wage reports lack detail, reports on the administration of factory regulations in the United Provinces—which included notes on presses that employed more than fifty people—suggest that between 1900 and 1910, skilled machine-men—often blacksmiths by training—usually earned eight to twelve rupees per month in the presses, and “unskilled” press laborers, including stone wipers and paper carriers, likely earned about two to four rupees per month. Scribes employed directly by the presses earned about fourteen to sixteen rupees per month, though the fact that most were employed as pieceworkers means that these wages tell us little. The most prestigious scribes—those with access to the lineages praised by Karimullah Khan—could earn up to a rupee per day, though most earned about half that, and many struggled to secure consistent work throughout the month.
As in the case of scribes, nonscribal lithographic laborers were not uniformly Muslim. At North Indian private presses, whether managed by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Christians, the labor force was always religiously heterogeneous. Nonetheless, by the late nineteenth century, press labor was often popularly associated with Muslims. At both lithographic and typographic presses in major North Indian cities including Lahore, Lucknow, Allahabad, and Kanpur, press laborers were majority Muslim. At the United Provinces Government Press, which undertook primarily typographic but also some lithographic work, Muslims made up nearly 70 percent of the over one thousand press laborers. Detailed records about the employees of privately run presses, even the large-scale presses, are rare, but references to “Muhammadan” press workers at both state and private presses abound in the colonial archive and English press. They paint a picture of a growing industrial field that was never exclusively the domain of Muslims but was widely viewed as an appropriate and appealing trade for Muslim boys. Print work, both scribal and otherwise, was framed as an attractive and relatively well-paid form of labor for the sons of Muslim artisans, especially blacksmiths and others perceived to have mechanical skill, who pursued work as press-based machine-men. THE BOOKBINDERS’ STORY
The records of colonial-era lithographic presses suggest that the primary distinction in book production was between scribes—with their long-standing claims on a tradition for their trade—and new cadres of “mechanical” workers who lacked such traditions and accompanying status. However, several other communities of book workers also sustained traditions for their trades that referenced manuscript production while adapting to the economic and industrial realities of the emerging print economy. Prior to the rise of print, writing on other types of book labor was more limited, though textual evidence suggests the religious, cultural, and technical traditions that circulated among workers such as bookbinders and ink makers. For instance, the Risālah-yi jild sāzī (Treatise on Bookbinding), a Persian-language manuscript composed in India around the early nineteenth century by Sayyid Yusuf Hussain, was a versified treatise advising bookbinders on the moral and practical dictates of their trade. In an opening section titled “The Reason for the Existence of Binding,” the manual tied the trade to the production and protection of the Quran. It narrated the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s companion and the third caliph, Usman bin Affan, and his compilation of a written Quran after he noted differences in its oral circulation, and then explained that to leave the Quran unbound would show a lack of reverence and a failure to protect its words.

As with scribes, bookbinders’ knowledge was rooted in the transregional exchange of technical practices. Manuscript copies of the Risālah-yi jild sāzī were produced and circulated not only across North and South India but also in Iran. Indeed, most of the recent academic attention to the text has come from Iran and scholars of the wider Persianate world. Unlike scribes, bookbinders do not seem to have maintained extensive written records of their educational lineages and claims on transregional educational descent. The Risālah-yi jild sāzī noted the role of Sufi pīrs, guides/saints, in protecting and passing on the know-ledge of the trade and praised ustāds who taught the trade to apprentices. But unlike contemporary scribal treatises, it did not blend a telling of lineages with its descriptions of work, focusing instead on explaining techniques in a versified manual format. This likely reflected the nature of bookbinding, in which apprentices learned the trade through practice under the guidance of master binders, but one’s status in the trade was less dependent on the ability to claim illustrious lineages of training.

At the same time, aside from the fact that they possessed a preprint written tradition for their trade, bookbinders shared at least one other important characteristic with scribes: they often performed piecework for the presses, rather than securing wage-based employment within them. William Hoey, the tax commissioner in Lucknow who compiled an 1880 compendium on trades and manufactures in that city, characterized bookbinders primarily as independent artisans, many of whom maintained their own workshops from which they were commissioned by presses or individuals. According to Hoey, given the cost of materials—pasteboard, sheepskin, marble paper, thread, and paste—and the amount of time required for work, an independent Lucknavi bookbinder could usually earn a profit of nine annas over two days. Indeed, while government agencies and presses usually employed bookbinders directly, they too occasionally had books bound through independent workshops, and they often recruited bookbinders as pieceworkers rather than wage employees. Moreover, in the case of the largest presses, which doubled as stationers, bookbinders were sometimes required to purchase the materials and tools of their trade from the presses. The Naval Kishore Press, for instance, sold the cloth for bookbinding. Bookbinders’ dependence on presses for piecework, combined with their need to purchase materials up front, suggests that it is possible they went into debt to their employers, highlighting the economic precarity of their trade in the print economy. PRESSES AS SITES OF LABOR

The industrialization of presses, the dangers inherent in the work, and the sense that the wages offered by press managers were insufficient for the cost of urban living meant that by the early twentieth century, printing was a trade known for management-labor conflicts and strikes. The earliest efforts by press workers to agitate for improved wages and working conditions took place in government presses. Government presses relied on typography for most of their production in English, but they primarily used lithography for Urdu from the 1850s through the 1940s. The government press strikes of the early twentieth century were characterized by demands—especially among pieceworkers, a group that often included both lithographic scribes and bookbinders—for improved pay, forms of leave, and limitations on the fluctuations in the amount of work offered or assigned. These strikes also pushed the administrators of government presses to investigate alternative sources of press labor.

For instance, following a large-scale strike at the government presses in Calcutta in 1905, colonial administrators sought to curtail the influence of press workers while also mitigating the effects of potential strikes on their government printing. To do so, they developed lithographic and typographic training schemes and programs in regional jails, not only in Bengal, but across the subcontinent. Indeed, jail administrators had sought to secure income by developing printing as a jail industry as early as the 1840s, and jail printing had previously been heralded as a more affordable source of printing by the state. In Lahore, the city’s courts moved all their vernacular lithographic printing to the Lahore Central Jail in 1895. Reflecting the fact that both lithography and typography were physically demanding processes for workers, within Indian prisons they were categorized as “hard labor,” alongside assignments such as “pounding bricks,” “stone quarrying,” and “road making,” for able-bodied convicts.

Likewise, for many nonscribal “mechanical” laborers outside of prisons, press work was dangerous, sometimes even deadly. For instance, at the Public Printing Press of Lahore in 1924, a “boy, while helping a machine-man repair a belt, was wrapped around the main shaft, with the result that his left arm and both legs were fractured.” Transported to the hospital, he died later the same day. The colonial notice of the boy’s death in the annual factory report from Punjab was reflective of the widespread use of child labor in industrialized presses. The physical dangers presented by press work were cited as a complaint against management by some striking press laborers throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, though they were usually portrayed as secondary to disputes over wages.

PRESS PROPRIETORS AND NARRATIVES OF MUSLIM LITHOGRAPHIC LABOR

In response to rising agitation among press workers for improved wages and conditions from the early twentieth century, press proprietors increasingly sought to intervene in workers’ narratives about the relationship between Islam and press work. Muslim press owners especially sought to engender forms of religious solidarity between their workers and management, sometimes even by co-opting and reorienting the language used by scribal communities and asserting a connection between Muslim piety and press labor for their workers.

Some proprietors—including Munshi Mahbub ʿAlam, who was the owner of one of the most prominent presses of turn-of-the-century Lahore—turned toward transregional models of Muslim piety in press labor, which they attempted to inculcate into their workers. Mahbub ʿAlam owned and managed the Khādim al-Ṭaʿlīm (Servant of Education) Press, which published several artisan and industrial manuals. The Khādim al-Ṭaʿlīm Press and Mahbub ʿAlam were also well known throughout Punjab for the publication of a popular weekly and daily newspaper titled Paisah Akhbār (Penny Paper). Born into a landholding family in Gujranwala District, Mahbub ʿAlam began publishing from there around 1886, before moving himself and his press to Lahore in 1889. As its name suggested, the Paisah Akhbār was known for its low price. At its peak, just before the First World War, it had a daily circulation of approximately three thousand copies, with its weekly edition printing more than nine thousand copies. These numbers made it among the most widely circulated vernacular weekly papers in Punjab in the period before the First World War.

Mahbub ʿAlam, like many other prominent publishers of North India, sought to develop a workforce that was well educated in lithographic work. He imagined this workforce as formed of pious, diligent, modern Muslims, and his publications reflect his efforts to find models for this ideal Muslim workforce beyond those in India. In 1908, he published a 970-page Urdu-language travelogue— portions of which had previously been serialized in his newspaper—chronicling his journey to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, and his subsequent travels across Europe, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the travelogue, Mahbub ʿAlam expressed interest in the state of the press in the cities that he visited—from Vienna to Damascus—but he devoted the most energy to this topic during his stays in Istanbul and Cairo. This showed that those cities, and especially Cairo, were centers of consolidating transregional print industries, from which books and knowledge circulated through Muslim scholarly worlds, as well as broader political networks of Arabic readers. Mahbub ʿAlam found a flourishing print culture, reliant upon engaged editors and what he saw as a well-trained, Muslim print labor force.

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Amanda Lanzillo Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India Three Essays Collective/ Originally published by University of California Press, 2025. Pb. Pp.246

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions “from below.” Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.

Amanda Lanzillo is Lecturer in South Asian History at Brunel University London.