Read Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents for Free Online Page A

the width and length of the cloth. Then, sitting on the floor, legs resting down in the pit, he or she threw the threaded shuttle from one hand to the other and back again. This horizontal motion created the weft. Gradually, over perhaps four days, a complete sari would grow from the loom.
    Every few weeks a broker went from house to house to collect the completed saris, which he would sell in the markets at Surat and elsewhere. The broker would bring a few rupees to pay for the work and a batch of soft raw cotton for the next order. This cotton was the training ground for children as young as five, who learned to spin sitting at floor level above their weaving parents. Using a simple wooden wheel, they could stretch and twist the soft clouds into thread.
    Generations of our ancestors had worked in the same way. And until the eighteenth century, textile workers in England competed on an equal basis. The level of artistry varied, but in both places cloth-making was a home-based industry. One weaver could keep up with the output of four spinners; a whole family working together could earn a living wage.
    Then came the machines, the push for speed.
    The flying shuttle, in 1733, quadrupled the pace; now one English weaver needed sixteen spinners to keep up. And for the first time a weaver could make cloth wider than the span of his or her arms. The family was no longer sufficient; the product had outgrown the human.
    The spinning jenny, of 1765, allowed English spinners to make thread more quickly, to keep up with their weavers. Faster and better machines followed. Giant looms were powered by river water flowing through wooden mills; from these origins, all future cloth factories would be known as mills. Spinning and weaving, in England, became mill—or factory—work. In 1785 a steam engine powered a cloth-making factory for the first time, a priest invented the power loom, a Frenchman introduced chlorine bleaching of cotton, and a hot-air balloon crossed the English Channel. The world was growing smaller. The great change that would become known as the Industrial Revolution was well under way.
    In village India these developments were felt as distant murmurs. There were rumors of great machines that did the work of a hundred men, of massive boats that ran on fire and water. But Britain, concerned with competition, did not allow the export of textile machines until 1843. Ten years later, India opened its first cotton mill, in Bombay.
    Still, for a time the damage was limited. Thread from Europe's spinning machines was weaker and looser than that spun by hand. As late as 1866 the textile scholar Forbes Watson called European muslins "practically useless" compared with the Indian product, because they fell apart after several washings.
    Inevitably the technology improved, and price overtook the desire for quality in the marketplace. By 1875, when Motiram's parents were perhaps starting their young family, nearly three-quarters of the cloth consumed in Gujarat was made by machine.

    In rural Gujarat, the shift was evident as farmers turned their fields to cotton to feed the mills. In 1900, three million acres were devoted to cotton; seven years later, cotton took up four million acres. By 1918, the figure was 4.75 million, or 13 percent of the entire region's occupied land. In certain districts, cotton accounted for more than half the cultivated area.
    The cotton boom, along with an aggressive tax policy, made Gujarat—renowned for centuries as one of the most fertile provinces of the world—unable to feed itself. The British-controlled portion of Gujarat was importing half a million tons of grain in a normal year, two million in a famine year.
    The new cotton farmers saw little profit. Instead they struggled to keep up with a tax structure designed to ensure that, whether the crops thrived or failed, London would get its due. Small cotton farmers were taxed now not only on their harvests but on the land itself, so they bore all