The architecture of production ownership & opportunity in industrial process

In Bengal, medieval communities have been plunged headlong into the industrial era and exposed to the vagaries of the world market. From the start to the finish they are victims of alienation. The raw material is foreign to them, totally so in the case of Demra weavers, who depend on thread imported from England and Italy, and partially so in the case of the Langalbund button-makers, who use local shells but also need chemicals, cardboard and sheets of foil. And, throughout the area, production is planned ‘according to foreign standards’, the unfortunate workers themselves being hardly in a position to buy clothes, let alone put buttons on them. Behind the verdant landscapes and peaceful canals lined with cottages can be glimpsed the ugly outlines of an abstract factory, as if history and economics had managed to establish, indeed superimpose, their most tragic phases of development on these wretched victims: the shortages and epidemics of medieval times, frenzied exploitation as in the early years of industrial revolution, and the unemployment and speculation of modern capitalism. The fourteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries come together to make a mockery of the idyll implicit in the setting provided by tropical nature.