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Show 1 tory of early Indian papermaking. In Rangpura and Nekapura, suburbs o Sailkot, excavations have revealed the ruins of old paper mills that woul give this ancient city the distinction of having been centuries ago a gred scat of papermaking. Indeed, during the prosperous years of this nativ handicraft, Sailkot was probably the most extensive papermaking centre i all India Since the introduction of papermaking into Kashmir from Samarkan the modus operandi has undergone few changes, and at the present time th maceration of the pulp, the actual forming of the sheets, and their ultimat drying and polishing present the same scenes in many of the same places as men looke upon hundreds of years ago In decades past papermaking was established in one or two India jails, and in 1870 the authorities entered into the manufacture of paper i the prisons in a manner that soon made it one of the chief industries. Th quality of the paper was improved and experiments were made with variou fibres. It was required that the paper used in all public offices for vernacula writing must be fabricated in the jails and prizes were given for the fines product. This competition was hardly fair to the free workers whose familie of the streams. While the prices sct for jail-made paper were usually somewhat above those at which country paper could be sold, the free worker were ot thereby compensated, as the best market-the public offices had been taken from them. In the year 1882, Mr. John Lockwood Kipling Mr. Rudyard Kipling's father, curator of the Lahore Museum from 187 10 1893, expressed himself strongly on the subject of jail-made paper: "Th competition of jails, none of which with all their resources have greatl improved on the best Sailkot stuff has had an injurious effect on th manufacture. . . . District officers have frequently had occasion to complai of the quality of the paper they were compelled to buy alleging that the could better and more cheaply be served in the open market "Digital image© 2005 Marriot Lib of Utah, Al rights ressrved |