Following the Part 1’s discussion on the “origin” of Khadi’s meaning under the Khaddar Act, in Part II of his two part post Subhadeep builds an argument for an interdisciplinary approach to study IP with the concept of origin as the subject matter. Subhadeep is a Doctoral Research Fellow for the European Research Council (ERC) funded “Creative IPR” project at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo. His research interest includes histories of institutional connections of the Global South with European imperialism with a particular focus on intellectual property.
Part II- Shifting Origins of Khadi
By Subhadeep Chowdhury
Coming back to the present, the KVIC stated the history of khadi as a symbol of the Indian freedom struggle in its legal battle in Europe. It made it clear how at the time of filing its objections the relevant Indian laws required a prior certification from the KVIC for any firm to label its products with the word “khadi.” Soon after the KVIC’s defeats in Europe, in 2021, Indians were told by a legal authority that “khadi” was not a generic word free for use and commercial government (see here).
The present-day legal actions of the KVIC can be understood to be largely aligned to its overarching mandate of safeguarding India’s village industries. For the uninitiated European consumer of the German firm’s products, “khadi” was thus deemed to originate from somewhere within Europe. Or that was, essentially, what the European courts believed to be the case when they ruled against the KVIC’s objections.
Yet it remains a question whether the Indian spinners and weavers share this legal understanding of origin. We, as predominantly urban consumers, have been accustomed to consuming certain Indian products with their broad geographical associations. Consumers of khadi have certainly been wearing khadi since the era of the Indian freedom struggle. Outcomes of histories are seldom foreseen and the same can be said for the “Indian” producer and customer of khadi of the 1930s, who in the present-day, can be mapped across the postcolonial nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (at least).
The origin of khadi was “fixed” in 1934 according to the available legal tools for the very first time. However, as a non-textile trademark, it came into tension in Europe far from the boundaries of the three postcolonial nation-states that emerged from colonial India. A Global South approach to understanding the entanglement of our present and past should bring us closer to an awareness of the historical consequences of colonialism in how we imagine our borders. If “khadi” belonged to those hands that resisted against British cloth in colonial India, then, historically, the first instance of mapping the origins of khadi defined undivided India as its boundaries.
Some Thoughts on the Futures of “Origin”
Thinking about “origin” in present-day legal terms inherently brings into questions of territorial boundaries within which a particular word might be associated to something pre-existing. Critical histories can help us unpack such “pre-existing” associations that in khadi’s case predate present-day borders of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The trajectory of khadi’s legal existence takes us beyond borders of nation-states inherited from legacies of colonial violence. Moreover, this trajectory tells us that law itself is something historically contingent. Power and authority often compete for influence with different interests to shape law.
In the KNPA’s case, it came down to Indian nationalists representing khadi’s producers—the hands that weave and spin khadi—as khadi’s source. The conceptual differences between a trademark and a trade description fizzled away in a colonial context where the former as a law was missing till 1940. Difference in cultural terms came into play strongly, where European/ Eurocentric concepts of the law were subverted.
In 1934, dominant nationalist politics had started incorporating assertions of a separate Indian nation-state in the future, but not yet as two nation-states (which was yet to happen in the future because of the Partition of 1947). The “origin” of khadi was aspiring for being something not only Indian in a national (and a place-based, albeit not yet in a nation-state) sense but also as something made with hand (as opposed to a mill in a commercial origin sense). In our postcolonial reality, it will be a presentist bias to see these two as essentially separate domains if we wanted to understand where khadi and its legal avatar come from.
Critical interdisciplinary approaches can help us further understand how “origin” as a legally arbitrated concept became a more socio-politically accepted one. For most parts of the world, the modern forms of law pertaining to geographical and commercial origin made their introduction through imperial and colonial contact (see here) I have argued through this case study that nationalist responses to these introductions of otherwise foreign/ alien concepts, albeit being elitist themselves, accepted such concepts in a manner that simultaneously disturbed their very conceptual cores.
This disturbance indeed can have a long shelf life and constitute a “messy” terrain for legal concepts such as trade marks, or, what in the present-day Geographical Indications (GI) have been understood to represent (See Prof. Dev Gangjee’s “Introduction: Locating Geographical Indications” in this book). However, a critical historical investigation reveals that when powerful interests introduce otherwise foreign concepts into a society, the responses are made in a way that necessitates reading such introductions as impositions. As a result, the responses can then be read as acts of resistance, where resistance is not only driven towards particular subjects of law, like khadi, that had hitherto remained outside of law, but also towards the very concepts of law—what a trade mark is as opposed to a trade description.
These legal forms made contact with Indian society through British colonialism and carried with them a history of having already solved their conceptual confusions. However, the Indian nationalists within structures of colonial governance asserted their agency in challenging both the subjects and the concepts of the law (that themselves originated from the colonial masters). The trajectory of treating geographical and commercial origins as legal subjects have thus been intimately entwined with questions of sovereignty and as well as with the extent to which the legal field interacts with larger socio-political fields. This interaction itself develops over time in several different trajectories, albeit some directions grow more dominant than others. Thus, whenever the right (or wrong) mix of issues related to sovereignty and a social understanding of a somewhat foreign legal concept meet their dominant counterparts, more messy conflicts on origins of certain goods, like khadi, that embody some form of group identity can be anticipated.