Balaram’s face was suddenly flushed. He jumped to his feet: Be quiet, Gopal. Don’t say any more. You don’t know what you’re saying. Science doesn’t belong to countries. Reason doesn’t belong to any nation. They belong to history — to the world.
Balaram turned, flung a stone into the lake and stalked off. Wait, Balaram, Gopal called after him, listen …
Balaram’s voice came back to him from a distance — You’re wrong, I’ll show you — and Gopal was left alone with his sense of foreboding.
For eight months after that Gopal neither saw nor heard from Balaram. He sent three letters to Lalpukur in that time. None was answered. He sent a telegram: Cable welfare speediliest. There was no answer, and Gopal was seriously worried. He began to think of dropping his cases for a few days to make a quick trip to Lalpukur.
Then one day in mid-July, while Gopal was at home, drinking his evening tea, his wife heard the doorbell ring. She saw Balaram at the door and exclaimed with pleasure. Before he could step in she unleashed a volley of questions about Toru-debi and Alu. But he brushed past her, straight to the veranda.
He stood in the doorway, looking at Gopal, his hands on his hips. I have an answer for you, he announced. I’ve made Alu a weaver.
Gopal instantly forgot all his relief at seeing Balaram again. His mouth fell open with disbelief at the thought of an educated, literate man pushing his own nephew to manual labour.
Balaram, delighted at Gopal’s surprise, said: Yes, it was the answer. The right thing to do. It took me a long time to reach it, but I did at last.
Gopal, in stupefaction, took off his spectacles and began to wipe them on his vest. But why? he said. Why?
It was the lump on his forehead beneath the hair-line. It had taken him all these years to discover its meaning. Spurzheim was wrong. The Mechanical sense was not on the pterion; it was not a mere propensity, to be lumped with Alimentiveness and Acquisitiveness. The Mechanical was the highest of all organs — the organ that made a mere two-legged creature Man, the seat of Reason. Where else could that organ be but on the crown of the forehead?
Once the organ was identified everything else became blindingly clear — Alu’s huge hands, his squat stocky frame. Even the mysterious attraction that drew him to Shombhu Debnath’s home. How could he cheat his destiny?
As soon as he knew the truth he had smuggled his instruments out of his house, under his clothes, and gone to Shombhu Debnath’s house. For months he had spent his evenings measuring Shombhu Debnath’s looms, the distance between the shuttle strings and the weaver’s hands, between the pedals and the seat. He had worked until there was no room left for error. The calculations had taken even longer. When at last it was all done, trembling with apprehension, he had matched Alu’s measurements with his calculations.
His intuition was proved right in every detaiclass="underline" Alu’s body, his hands, his legs, his arms, not to speak of the Organ, corresponded exactly to his calculations of the proportions ideal for a weaver.
Only then, when Balaram knew he was right, did he take the boy to Shombhu Debnath and say: Take him to be your apprentice.
And the boy?
The boy was overjoyed. He wanted nothing better.
But why? Why weaving?
What could it be but weaving? Man at the loom is the finest example of Mechanical man; a creature who makes his own world as no other can, with his mind. The machine is man’s curse and his salvation, and no machine has created man as much as the loom. It has created not separate worlds but one, for it has never permitted the division of the world. The loom recognizes no continents and no countries. It has tied the world together with its bloody ironies from the beginning of human time.
It has never permitted the division of reason.
Human beings have woven and traded in cloth from the time they built their first houses and cities. Indian cloth was found in the graves of the Pharaohs. Indian soil is strewn with cloth from China. The whole of the ancient world hummed with the cloth trade. The Silk Route from China, running through central Asia and Persia to the ports of the Mediterranean and from there to the markets of Africa and Europe, bound continents together for more centuries than we can count. It spawned empires and epics, cities and romances. Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo were just journeymen following paths that had been made safe and tame over centuries by unknown, unsung traders, armed with nothing more than bundles of cloth. It was the hunger for Indian chintzes and calicos, brocades and muslins that led to the foundation of the first European settlements in India. All through those centuries cloth, in its richness and variety, bound the Mediterranean to Asia, India to Africa, the Arab world to Europe, in equal, bountiful trade.
Think of cotton. It’s easy now, but it wasn’t once.
India first gave cotton, Gossypium indicus, to the world. The cities of the Indus valley grew cotton as early as 1500 BC. But soon cotton was busy spinning its web around the world. It had King Sennacherib of Mesopotamia in its toils by 700 BC, and before long it had found its way to Herodotus in Greece. It travelled eastwards more slowly, but its conquests were no smaller in magnitude.
Everywhere it went people had trouble thinking of it. Only the oldest of the Indo-European languages could think of it as a thing in itself and even then the thought was so difficult that across continents people hardly dared differ. In Sanskrit it was called karpasia, in Persian kirpas. In Greek it was carbasos, and in Latin carbasus. They gave Hebrew its kirpas.
But it couldn’t last. Cotton changed the world too fast, made too many demands, called for too much subtlety. English is lucky. It has a word which can even begin to suggest cotton as a substance different from others. So many languages, like German with its baumwolle, are condemned for ever to the blinkers that bound Sennacherib and Herodotus to think of cotton as a misbegotten wool. But even the English were handed down their word, like so much else that raised them to civilization, by the Arabs, from their kutn (how fine an irony when several centuries later hundreds of thousands of Egyptian fellahin were tied in bondage to the demands of the cotton mills of Lancashire). But the Arabs took their own word from the Akkadian kitinu. And there they had lost the battle already, for that word came from kitu, in the same language, which meant nothing but dreary flax.
What does it say for human beings that they let themselves be ruled so completely by so simple a thing as cloth?
When the history of the world broke, cotton and cloth were behind it; mechanical man in pursuit of his own destruction.
Perhaps it began in the sixteenth century with William Lee in England, and his invention of a stretching frame for yarn. Then it was Arkwright with his spinning-jenny, and Kay and his flying shuttle.
The machine had driven men mad.
Lancashire poured out its waterfalls of cloth, and the once cloth-hungry and peaceful Englishmen and Dutchmen and Danes of Calcutta and Chandannagar, Madras and Bombay turned their trade into a garotte to make every continent safe for the cloth of Lancashire, strangling the very weavers and techniques they had crossed oceans to discover. Millions of Africans and half of America were enslaved by cotton.
And then weaving changed mechanical man again with the computer. In the mid-nineteenth century when Charles Babbage built his first calculating machine, using the principle of storing information on punched cards, he took his idea not from systems of writing nor from mathematics, but from the draw-loom. The Chinese have used punched cards to discriminate between warp threads in the weaving of silk since 1000 BC. They gave it (unwillingly) to the Italians, and the Italians gave it to the rest of Europe, in the form of the draw-loom. Basile Bouchon of Lyons, in 1725, added a roll of perforated paper to store the pattern in its punched memory. And in 1801 Joseph Jacquard invented his automatic selective device based on the same principle. Babbage took his ideas for his calculating engines from Jacquard’s loom, and Holleville who patented the first punched-card machines took his ideas from Babbage. Once again the loom reaches through the centuries and across continents to decide the fate of mechanical man.