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Show 9 Wardha the instructor of the Gandhi papermaking school was carryin experiments with this fibre, but at the time of my sojourn little hedd\va had been made, owing to the difficulty in preparing the material (8) Bhoosa (H.mdx Mm), the broken wheat and rice straw, husks an chaff that remain on the threshing floor or ground after the grain has bee hamplcd or beaten out, at one time formed a papermaking fibre. This material is not employed at the present time in any of the papermaking cu'mc that I visited, but writing about the Punjab Exposition of 1864, Mr Bade Powell in his work Punjab Manufactures has this to say rclauvc to the use o bhoosa in the papermaking department of the Rawalpindi jail: . . . . iti not a good paper, although it might be used for packmg purposes; itis als interesting as showing how even a brittle, stiff siliceous substance can b made into paper . . . . if the bhoosa is mixed with a proportion of old ta or other soft paper material, the quality of the paper is much improved. (9) An examination of Indian paper froma half century ago will revea i in rare instances the use of the wild date palm (Phoenix syluesiris) (Hindi Khajur) as a raw material. The leaves of the tree arc used and the result s five by eighteen inches, and for the most part the sheets have been kyanized that i, rendered somewhat proof against decay by immersion in a solutio of corrosive sublimate (10 At one time the bast fibre of the mudar (Calotropis procera) (Hindi Madar), was used as a raw material for Indian handmade paper, but a Present this fibre receives no attention by the papermakers. The fibre of thi Plant resembles flax, but it is much shorter and is difficult to separate. During the Punjab Exposition of 1864 specimens of Indian handmade pape ‘manufactured from the madar in the Sirsa jail were shown and some of thes examples are now in my collection. The process used in making this pape ‘was described by the Assistant Commissioner of the Sirsa prison in the fol Digital Imag © 2005 Marrioft Library Universityof Utah. All rights reserved |
