Cotton - a plant whose fiber shaped and changed the world of our ancestors. The Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus reported on a wool that grew on trees, surpassed sheep's wool in beauty and quality, and from which the Indians made their clothes. (Kluge, 2002)

India actually has one of the longest cotton traditions in the world, as cotton was already being processed into textiles there around 3000 BC. After Alexander the Great brought fabrics back from his trip to India, cotton was considered a sought-after import in Rome. Cotton fabric was also traded as a luxury item elsewhere in Europe and had a similar status to silk.
Until the invention of the spinning machine at the end of the 18th century, pure cotton fabrics were produced exclusively in India and imported to Great Britain by the East India Company during the colonial period. English manufacturers were not yet able to spin cotton threads that were strong enough to make pure cotton fabrics. (Bernstein, 2009)
However, with the Industrial Revolution, which enabled mechanized mass production in Britain, cotton became a financial alternative to sheep's wool. Machine production replaced local craftsmanship and thus, during the Industrial Revolution, India went from being an exporter of manufactured goods to a supplier of raw materials for the English textile industry. The increasing demand led to cotton exports displacing food production and rural poverty worsening. In addition, India became the largest importer of British cotton textiles because manual cotton processing could no longer compete with the English's mechanized production.

Indians had to pay high taxes for the fabrics, and many were angry that the country's own cotton was shipped to England to be processed there and then resold as expensive fabrics in India. Mahatma Gandhi, who wanted to lead the Indian people to independence through non-violent resistance, called on his fellow citizens to spin the wool themselves and weave clothes from it, in accordance with pre-colonial traditions. In this way, Gandhi wanted to boycott the colonial powers and demonstrate to them and to his own countrymen that the Indian people were not dependent on the English. A very famous picture shows Mahatma Gandhi at his spinning wheel, a home-woven cotton cloth wrapped around his waist. Khadi, the simple hand-woven fabric, became the symbol of the non-violent resistance struggle that India finally won when the country gained independence in 1947.

For Gandhi, the revival of traditional crafts was not only a symbolic expression, but also meant strengthening local economic structures. The return to traditional cotton processing, as Gandhi explained to Charlie Chaplin in 1931, was less a rejection of any modern technology, but rather a resistance to an exploitative political system in which textile production was integrated. (Government of India, 1971)
Like Gandhi, we at Jyoti - Fair Works value traditional handcraft over machine production and want to support this with the sale of our clothing. We want to revive India's former reputation as a country of incomparable cotton processing and recognize the special value of local crafts.

You can find out more about the cotton we use and its certifications here .