JUTE AND ITS SUBSTITUTES. 



By R. S. FINLOW. 

 Fibre Expert to the Government of Bengal. 



THE cultivation of jute and the manufacture by hand 

 of jute cloth called gunnies (from goni, a sack), of ropes, 

 and probably also of jute paper, are very ancient practices, 

 the dates of commencement of which are lost in antiquity. 

 The first exports of raw jute which were the origin of 

 the great jute industry of to-day apparently took place as 

 recently as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 

 when a few hundreds of maunds were forwarded to 

 Europe. Long before this, however, jute was cultivated 

 on a large scale, at least in Northern Bengal in the 

 districts of Rangpur, Dinajpur, and Purnea; but all the 

 raw product was worked up in India, partly into clothing 

 (megili) for the inhabitants of Bengal, partly into sacking 

 and wrappers (gunni), and partly into ropes and cordage. 

 In 1746 an entry in the log of the ship Wake runs : " Sent 

 on shore 60 bales of gunny belonging to the Company, 

 with all the jute ropes." In 1804 Buchanan Hamilton, in 

 his manuscript accounts of Rangpur, says: "In this 

 district one of the most extensive crops is the ' jat pata/ 

 or Corchorus capsularis, used in the same manner as in 

 Dinajpur. For the manufacture of the better kinds of 

 paper ' tangsa,' or ' tosha pata ' (Corchorus olitorius), is 

 more usually cultivated. In every part as much is culti- 

 vated as is required for the use of the farms; but in the 

 north-western parts of the country great quantities are 

 exported (to the neighbouring districts), both raw and 

 manufactured, and a great part of the people are clothed 

 with cloth made of this material." The extent of the 

 cultivation of jute in Northern Bengal can be gauged 

 from Buchanan Hamilton's estimate that at the time of 

 writing about 1804 the area under jute in Rangpur 

 approximated to 20,000 acres. Incidentally, he relates 



