CORCHORUS 



History 



THE JUTE PLANT 



Gunny. 



Pliny's 

 Pot-herb. 



First Picture. 



Molochine 

 Cloth. 



Sackcloth. 



' Gunned " 



" Sackcloath 

 Londre." 



Kheede's 

 Silence. 



Col. Sir R. Temple has pointed out (Ind. Antiq., 1901) that that name occurs, 

 however, in the log of a voyage made in 1746. It has been suggested that the 

 gardeners employed at the Botanic Gardens, Calcutta, were in Roxburgh's time, as 

 they are to-day, natives of Orissa, and hence that the word " jute " may have been 

 but an Anglicised form of their name for it viz. jhut. But the incident mentioned 

 by Temple carries the word back forty years before the date of the foundation 

 of the Royal Botanic Gardens, though it is quite likely all the same that 

 it came from jhut. The origin of the word gunny is curious. It no doubt comes 

 direct from the Sanskrit goni, " a sack," but in modern usage, in the form of 

 ganja, it denotes the narcotic of <vim6i mttim, and has thus been transferred 

 from a fibre to a resin. Whether or not goni exclusively denoted the sacking of 

 the true hemp (rvrumrbiM nntti<w) need hardly be discussed in this place. It was 

 early applied to sacking made of Crotatnria. fibre and even to that of Cort-honm, 

 hence Rumphius (I.e. 212) gave the jute plant the name of ganja (gania) sativa. 



The early references to the jute plant down to the middle of the 18th century 

 may be said to be very largely concerned with identifying the pot-herb which 

 Pliny (79 A.r>. ) describes as being used by the Egyptians. Considerable uncertainty 

 prevails as to its being the melochia (melokyeh) of the Arabs. Simon Januensis 

 (1473), for example, speaks of the leaves as being hawked in the streets of Baby- 

 lon. Rauwolf (1583) was apparently the first traveller who critically examined 

 the melochia, which he found being cultivated on the banks of the Euphrates, 

 and which he says was largely eaten by the Jews near Aleppo. Camerarius 

 (I.e. 47) was perhaps the first botanist who figured it, and his engraving is an 

 excellent representation of one of the African forms identical with or closely 

 allied to c. oiitortutt. It had been prepared by Gesner but never published, 

 and he lays stress on the fact that it shows the bearded base of the leaf and 

 the cylindrical fruit characters which had not been previously made known. 

 i-orritoniH, as accepted by modern botanists, was thus in the sixteenth 

 century definitely determined to be melochia. But although this pot-herb of 

 the Arab writers and Eastern travellers (from perhaps 1000 A.D. onwards) was 

 unquestionably an edible corciiorim, it is fairly certain that the molochine cloths 

 of Greek and Latin authors (Arrian, Pausanias, Pollux, Nsevius, etc.) were not 

 jute textiles. Yates (Text. Antiq., 303-4 et seq.) is of opinion that the molo- 

 chine cloths brought from India were made of iMittiHeun fibre. In the Periplus 

 the molcchina were said to be procured from localities identified as Ujjain and 

 Junnar. The fibre of the former locality could hardly have been other than 

 iiii>ix<'iifi <'<uin'nnnK, while the lattermost probably was frntainrin jinn-fti, 

 if guessed at purely and simply on modern experience of the distribution of 

 the fibrous plants of India. 



In the Ain-i-Akbari (1590, Jarrett, transl., ii., 123) mention is made of sack- 

 cloth (tat), but whether of jute, son-hemp, or even of the true hemp cannot be 

 ascertained ; but Jarrett, in a footnote, identifies it with jute and the district 

 of Rangpur. That textile was, however, made at Ghoraghat in Eastern Bengal, 

 and thus in the very heart of the jute country, so that it may perhaps be assumed 

 to have been the jute textile in which, about the time in question, it is believed 

 the poorer people were clad. For two centuries after the date of the Ain no 

 mention is made of any fibre or textile that could with certainty be taken as having 

 been jute, though all coarse textiles appear by that time at any rate to have 

 been spoken of as gunnies. W. Foster, for example, has drawn my attention 

 to a passage (in Engl. Factories Ind., 340) of date Surat 1621 in which packages 

 are spoken of as " gunned." This could not have been jute cloth, but more 

 probably was a textile of Ci-ntniar-in or H6f*c, since even to the present 

 time jute is not produced in the Bombay Presidency. Curiously enough the 

 coarse textiles made in England, about the time here indicated, were characterised 

 in Persia as " Sackcloath Londre " (Fryer, New Ace. E. Ind. and Pers., 1672-81. 

 224), and it is thus even questionable how far the simple use of the word " sack- 

 cloath" or its vernacular equivalent "tat" can be accepted as denoting jute 

 fibre. Frequent mention is made by Foster (I.e. 76) of "gunny" among the 

 articles to be sent from Surat to Persia. 



In this connection also it may be regarded as significant that Rheede (India's 

 earliest scientific botanist) is silent regarding the species of Corviiorns, although 

 both ('. fnvMtfiariH and *'. oiitoi in* have been repeatedly collected subsequent 

 to his time on roadsides and as weeds of cultivation, not only in Rheede's special 

 country Malabar but here and there throughout both Southern and Western 

 India. On the other hand, Rumphius, as already pointed out, gives a most 



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