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There is no doubt that parts of the cotton industry were highly commercialized even before British rule. These segments supplied mainly foreign trade. From the first quarter of the nineteenth century the amount of foreign trade began to decline and British cloth began to complete with Indian cloths even in Indian markets also. Some commercialized cloth thus disappeared. There were other clothes that were not heavily traded before. The gradually became commercialized during the colonial reign. The most important craft threatened by steam-powered technology is the cotton textile. The threat was posed by Lancashire from the 1820s until the pre-war decade. Thereafter, the competition came mainly from the cotton spinning-weaving mills in Bombay and Ahmadabad. It is true that a power driven loom is much faster than a hand-loom. Naturally the output was also bigger. Now the question is if the hand-looms survive at all? The answer is that it survived because it was more efficient in certain types of traditional clothing. Through Lancashire posed a great threat it was overcome because of the quality and excellence of the product being produced by a hand-loom. The indigenous technique was far better and was handy in producing indigenous cloth. The most important example of hand-loom specially one that is still made on a hand-loom is a sari with designed border. In 1930, there were many more such cloths, turbans, bordered dhotis, checked and stripped lungies, were also common hand-loom items. By contrast, the mi8lls dominated shirting, suiting, dhotis and simple saris, basically any cloths that could be woven in long sheets and with very simple design.

Even as handlooms faced competition in a number of categories, in those classes where it had comparative advantage consumption grew in the early 20^th century. It was thus proved that the British textile factories with their steam-powered looms failed to exercise any remarkable influence on Indian textile market. The increased consumption derived partly from increasing purchasing power of those rural regions that produced lucrative crash crops. It also derived from changes in clothing habits. For example, the depressed castes of south India began to wear a greater quality and finer types of clothing from the turn of the century. In hand-loom cloth, especially silk, long distance trade was not a new phenomenon. It was continuing from earlier times. But there are a number of evidences which can substantiate the fact that trade almost certainly increased in extent in the second half of the 19^th century. Capital and labour involved in the hand-loom industry became increasingly mobile. But there were negative impacts also. Imported and mill made cloth had destroyed many local weaving traditions. Thus it had reduced local transactions of cloth in rural markets or seasonal fairs where weavers and consumers often made the dealings between them on a direct basis. At the same time wholesale trade had increased considerably. Long distance trade in yarn, dyes, silk and gold-thread—AL major raw materials for the hand-loom industry became more extensive and more organized from the 1870s when these materials began to be imported or made in the mills. Hand loom cloth also used these systems. It was often seen that the wholesale traders in textile raw materials were of weaver’s background. In India textile production survived because the European imports could not displace the very coarse and very fine varieties of Indian textiles, thus domestic hand-loom industry survived.