Nineteenth-century European visitors to Panjab in present-day northwest Pakistan bought cheap brush drawings on paper not dissimilar from the drawings still sold in many parts of Asia today. They often naively portray vignettes of everyday life with men and women wearing colourful clothing. This can be seen in a late nineteenth-century drawing (Figure 4.1) that depicts the weaver-saint Kabir (1440–1518) busy at his loom while his wife in the lower part of the drawing spins with a treadle wheel. A musician accompanies their activities, suggesting that Kabir, while weaving, might have been composing one of the poems for which he was famous.

This charming little piece of ephemera has reached us partly because it was collected as a souvenir by John Lockwood Kipling, father of the more famous Rudyard Kipling, while he was director of the Mayo School of Art at Lahore. It is, of course, a late and stylised representation that is not produced to illuminate on textile production or its technologies. Rather, it is a ‘scene’ and as such it contextualises the characters under one roof, the space we imagine to be a house. It is therefore a good starting point for us to move from textile production as a set of technologies to a set of practices, what is called the organisation of production.