Adang

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Adang a Persian word for a big mart where significant commercial activities took place among buyers and sellers on market as well as on n-market days. The east india company provided an added significance to the word. The company set up numerous buying centres in the commercially important places of Bengal. In the company vocabulary such a centre was called a 'factory'. A white or native agent in charge of the factory was called 'factor'. A native factor was usually called gomosta. The job of the factor/gomosta was to invite local karigars (artisans), particularly weaving karigars, to settle in the factory area and produce articles according to specifications and patterns supplied by the factor. Karigars settled around the factory neighbourhood and produced goods either on a contract basis or as free manufacturers. The factory area thus developed into a reputed manufacturing centre and was eventually called adang, by the factors a term, which gave their factory some status.

The most important company adangs in the eighteenth century were Laksmipur (Noakhali), Jugdia (Noakhali, w in seabed), Kumarkhali (Jessore) and Rampur-Boalia (Rajshahi). In addition to the company adangs, there were other independent adangs, which flourished on important communication lines like bhagwangola, kasimbazar, Dhaka and sylhet. In Mughal Bengal an adang was, in fact, a large-scale cloth market in the strict sense of the term. While keeping the cloth market as a core, every adang also flourished as a centre of marketing of numerous other items.

Of course, an adang was t merely an ordinary market place for sale and purchase. It traditionally implied manufacturing and selling of manufactured goods on the spot. With the growth of urbanisation and consequent concentration of production and distribution in cities and also with the change of mode of production, the traditional adang languished and almost disappeared in the twentieth century. Though adang as a manufacturing and marketing institution is long extinct, the name 'adang' is still upheld in the names of departmental stores, shops, shopping centres, etc. [Sirajul Islam]