The CSH is pleased to announce that Soheb Niazi, Associate Researcher at the Centre, has contributed a chapter titled “Practicing Skills, Processing Skins: Urdu manuals on developing tanning as a rural trade (1940-46)”, to the volume Crafting India’s Skill Ecology, edited by S. Maitra and S. Schwecke, and published by Routledge, London.

The chapter is available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003604846-5

Abstract: Based on a close reading of Urdu manuals on fann-e dabāġat (craft of tanning) and insights from the debates on the history of science in colonial India, the article attempts to expand the discourse on technical education on tanning and leather production. It goes beyond the technical institutes and schools founded by the colonial government to include perspectives that emerged from practitioners of the ‘craft’ such as Imdad Ali, the manager of the Gwalior State’s leather factory in Morar. These manuals, published by the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu aimed to address a new readership from the dihāt (rural countryside) interested in practical work associated with the setting up of tanneries based on chrome tanning methods.