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n December 1976, Joyce Burnard started a textile company, Ascraft, in Sydney from modest premises. In the years to come, Ascraft would spearhead the arrival and distribution of Indian cotton and other woven fabrics in ways that came to reshape Australian design. Long before Burnard’s consignments arrived in jute sacks, like bale no. 49 currently housed Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, in the nineteenth century, gunnies connected the cities of Calcutta, Sydney and Hobart. Bales of jute sacks arrived from Calcutta, then in British India, along with sugar and rice packed in jute. These porous containers linked disparate geographies and resources—wool producing regions of South Australia and sugar mills of Queensland— with South Asia, North and South America and Europe; jute was fundamental to the globalization of Australian wool and wheat (Hassam 2011).

Jute, a plant that was grown in Bengal—then a province in British India and today divided between India and Bangladesh—transformed into a multipurpose cash crop. Cultivated in low lying, humid and water abundant regions, jute requires soaking and retting—a process by which waterborne microbes disband the bark and open the fibers. As Joy Pachuau and Willem van Schendel (2022) remind us, from its widespread local uses, such as in clothing for poor people and its containerization, plants like jute enabled industrialization and global flows. Simultaneously, it brought in merchants, traders, financers, migrant workers and managers to fields, factories, forests, and ports, and left  lasting imprints on local cultures (Pachuau and Van Schendel 2022).

Empire’s Containers

As a container, jute forged connections across the British Empire. It came to join the worlds of mercantile capitalism with the cultural milieu of the working class (Chakraborty 2000), created industrial towns in India and Scotland (Tomlinson 2014), ensured the arrival of migrant workforce into factories (De Haan 1997), and re-ordered gendered roles and identities (Sen 2014). Jute’s porosity and durability escalated its demand; the material resisted months of movement in ships. Moving between form and formlessness, jute sacks secured goods, facilitating their transport and use. The sacks were open to the world; their porosity allowed matter to breathe.  

Unlike its  invisibility in Australia’s public consciousness today—eroding the country’s  historical links with India that were anchored in Empire building and trade (Hassam 2011)— jute continues to be ubiquitous in Calcutta. A vector for mobility in Calcutta, the lifecycle of jute and its logistics did not end with the end of the British Empire. Instead, gunnies still shape the city’s urban forms by unevenly assembling caste and kin, and profit and extraction. From Calcutta’s Strand Road—completed in 1828 and still functioning as a nerve center of commerce and exchange where migrant workers physically load and unload sacks of grains and other items—to traders who recycle and make profits and workers who repair the sacks in warehouses adjoining the Tollygunge Canal, jute sacks have an unceasing lifecycle. Despite the abundance of plastic and other synthetic fibers, jute sacks persist as packaging materials. It significantly features in rebuilding urban settlements, covering damp and damaged floors and absorbing excessive rainwater seepages, such as when the Tollygunge Canal overflows. With every gush of rain and flooding of the settlements that adjoin the canal jute sacks function as flooring materials.

Whether embodied by owners of warehouses and shops or workers, jute’s enduring and exploitative qualities provide glimpses into the social orders that shape cities. In Calcutta, jute recycling underlines the postcolonial logistics of commerce and caste. The Sahus—a family belonging to a trading and money lending caste from the adjoining state of Bihar—control the credit and logistics of jute recycling in Calcutta. The Sahu traders, themselves descendants of an earlier jute mill workforce in British India and of others with access to credit and money lending, started trading in jute recycling. Caste and kinship networks facilitate the arrival of workers from villages in Bihar (Sur 2021). The Food Corporation of India’s patronage of jute as a packaging material for grains until the 1980s led to a flourishing recycling trade. Although the production of jute sacks has declined, repaired and recycled containers gather social properties beyond fields and factories that the Sahus continue to control.

Stitches in Time

In a dark warehouse along the Tollygunge Canal in Calcutta, an elderly worker sat with his back hunched. Straining his eyes, he worked nimbly sewing damaged jute sacks. Young workers alighted from their bicycles and heaped bundles of gunny sacks in the warehouse. As they dropped each consignment, the fibrous sacks set dust into from grains, onions, potatoes, and the road. Particles danced in the thin stream of sunlight, settled on the gunnies and layered the floor. The elderly worker coughed, momentarily covered his mouth and then, very quickly, his fingers set to work again. His fingers moved a needle and thread with precision, gathering ripped and damaged fabric and stitching them together again.

On that day in August 2019, except for the movement of his fingers and the rain outside, everything was still. Sounds from Mr. Sahu’s mobile phone interrupted the silence as he came downstairs from his residence and watched news and videos, reclining against a set of bolsters and cushions while adjusting his paunch.

(Stitches in Time – Jute Sacks in Calcutta Video: Malini Sur)

The labors of repairing sacks enhanced their value and made them mobile. Bicycle bells signaled the arrival of other jute recyclers—all belonging to the same caste—who purchased their consignments from markets in the city and resold them to Sahu at agreed-upon prices. Sahu’s own fleet of workers, young and agile, entered and exited at scheduled market times with their bicycles and wares. Grain traders and others arrived at Sahu’s warehouse, purchasing repaired sacks to transport their wares.

In the nineteenth century, transporting and sewing jute bags that were imported from India comprised essential tasks in South Australia’s granaries. The weight of the bags depended upon the crops. Writing about the early history of transport, John Radcliffe records that bushel bags were filled with wheat, barley and oats. Then the bags were placed in heaps for sewing. Radcliffe (2014:1) notes:

Bags were sewn manually by teams of bag-sewers using hemp twine. Often the bag-sewers worked as teams in the summer twilight after finishing their regular jobs. Two men could load sewn bags from the ground into a trolley or truck using between them a pick-handle on which they tipped the bag, lifting it end over end for a third person to position on the load. Bags were carried on the backs of the “lumpers” at the storage terminals.

Containerization

As the Empire’s container, jute provides glimpses to reckon with the past, a past where grains travelled on the hard labors of “bag-sewers” and “lumpers” (Radcliffe 2014). Jute’s global reputation as an eco-friendly packaging material animates futures. Yet, the uncertain lifecycle of gunnies and their social properties in the present create logistical and social conditions. These conditions extend our understanding of containerization from being synonymous with iron and steel port logistics. Infact, jute’s enduring qualities live alongside its propensity to disintegrate. Even in its gentle degeneration, the fiber itself creates the very conditions for its repair. Gunnies are radically open and ensure containment; they gather volume and are effortlessly compressed. Generating wide networks of capital and commerce, the social and political relations that jute sacks continue to produce are a reminder of the coarse hands that sewed the Empire’s container, and the ones that continue to gather disparate fibers, folding them into relationships of caste patronage and extractions.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Eli Elinoff for encouraging me to think about jute as Empire’s Containers and George Jose for his suggestions. Deborah Lawler-Dormer kindly granted access to the Powerhouse Museum’s collection and John Burt and David Avery made available a wealth of information about Ascraft.

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References

Chakrabarty, D (1989) Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

De Haan, A (1997) Unsettled Settlers: Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta. Modern Asian Studies 31(4): 919–49.

Hassam, A (2011) Indian Jute in Australian Museum Collections: Forgetting and Recollecting Transnational Networks. Public History Review 18: 108–28.

Pachuau, J.L.K, and Schendel H.W (2022) Entangled Lives: Human-Animal-Plant Histories of the Eastern Himalayan Triangle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Radcliffe, J (2014) Transporting the Crop, Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia Incorporated.

Sen, S (2014) Gender and the jute industry: the Calcutta chapter, 1890–1990. International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy 8 (2-3): 126-140.

Sur, M (2020) Cultures of Repair: Cargo-cycles and kinship in Kolkata Economic & Political Weekly 55 (51): 35-39.

Tomlinson, J (2014) Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850-1939. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Malini Sur is Director – Higher Degree Research and Teaching at the Institute for Culture and Society and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Sydney University. She has served as the President of the Australian Anthropological Society (2023). Her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was awarded the President’s Book Prize from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, Bernard S. Cohen Prize (honourable mention) and Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022).