Underline the various factors for decline of the Indian cottage industries during the nineteenth century.

Loss of demand. The annexation of Indian states removed the courts that had sustained luxury crafts — fine muslin, brocade, jewellery and armoury work lost their patrons as Awadh, the Maratha courts and the Mughal establishment were dismantled. The new ruling class consumed imported goods.

Discriminatory tariff policy. This is the decisive factor. After the Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company's monopoly, British manufactures entered India at nominal duties while Indian textiles faced prohibitive rates in Britain. Free trade was applied in one direction only, and India was denied protection until the 1920s. Internal transit and town duties further burdened Indian producers in their own market.

Machine competition. Lancashire's mechanised spinning and weaving undercut handloom cloth on price. The handloom weaver competed with a factory while paying higher costs for yarn.

Transport and market penetration. Railways after 1853 were laid to move raw materials to ports and manufactures inland, so British cloth reached interior markets that had earlier been the handloom's protected hinterland.

Raw material competition. Rising raw cotton exports raised input prices for Indian weavers, so they were squeezed at both ends.

The consequence was deindustrialisation in the strict sense — a fall in the share of population in manufacturing and a corresponding overcrowding of agriculture, which R. C. Dutt described as the ruralisation of India.

The caveat. Morris D. Morris and later Tirthankar Roy argue the decline was uneven rather than total — spinning collapsed but weaving partly survived by shifting to coarse cloth and imported yarn, and some crafts adapted. The direction of change, however, is not in dispute.