The word kārkhāna , common to many Indian languages, is of Persian origin. In its original Indianised meaning, kārkhāna is "a place where business is done" (Yule and Burnell, 125). More often, it is a workshop or a warehouse. Not all workshops would qualify to be called kārkhāna s. The word ordinarily meant a large-scale craft-production workshop employing wage labour. In that respect, it was the pre-modern factory, part of a large-scale urban industrial organisation distinct from the more usual household production systems. This connotation of the