The massive carpet that adorns the famous Morning Drawing Room of Holyrood House (the Queen’s residence in Edinburgh) was made in a weaving village near Mirzapur in northern India. It took seventeen months to make and was put together by 12 workers, all males, each paid about 600 rupees a month (equal to roughly £25 in 1987 when the carpet was commissioned). OCM (Oriental Carpet Manufacturers), which received the commission (and well over a million pounds for it??), had for decades had no presence in the Mirzapur carpet industry and only established one when it took over E.F. Hill’s business in 1944. By the late 1980s OCM had become a division of Ralli Brothers, having been acquired through a City investment firm whose partners were directors of Rallis; this happened between 1969 and 1972. The gap between the royal sum received for the Holyrood carpet and the wages that went into its Indian manufacture seems staggering, but of course it was and is typical of the carpet industry worldwide.
Tag: Capitalism
On the 2G case, the CBI Trial Court’s acquittal of the 2G accused has not been fully understood – not even the implications, let alone the judgment itself.
The first question I was asked when I reached Moshi, Tanzania, the homeland of the Chagga community who reside in the banana and coffee filled foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro, was:
“How do you all peel your bananas?”
Capitalism doesn’t assist us in destroying itself. Should we actually become effective in building an anti-capitalist mass movement, they won’t issue us a paycheck. Instead, they will do everything possible to discredit, neutralize, imprison and kill us.
Everybody believed in the glory of the King and his gospel of sending poverty to museum with the help of microcredit.
Understanding the current crisis of agriculture, requires a study of the history of global development since the second world war.
As the events at JNU have unfolded over the past week, there has been a stunned silence from the upper echelons of corporate India.
“I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy. The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it’s not a danger to any industry at all”
Ngin ym lah ban iada bad pynneh ia ka Merisawkun, lymda ngi iakhun pyrshah ia ka “Capitalism”, ka Sain Pyrkhat kaba pynshlur ban pynjot bad kaba ngeit ba ka spah ka dei ban lang lynnong lynnong tang ha ki katto katne ki lynghoh kti.
Betel Cultivators in Odisha Up Against the State-Capital Nexus
Rural India faces many calamities be it natural disasters, corporate acquisition of forests, lands and village commons, or migrant workers walking back hundreds of kilometres from hostile cities due to pandemic lockdowns. In Odisha on the eastern coast, the macabre theatre of capital’s insidious appropriation of agricultural land and village commons is being resisted bravely once again by villagers of Dhinkia of Jagatsinghpur district in collective barricading from the clutches of state-supported Jindal Steel Works Utkal Limited.
Share this: