John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) was born in Pickering, Yorkshire. His interest in art and design was aroused by a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and he later became involved in the decoration of the Victoria and Albert Museum; he is depicted in a relief panel on the pediment of the Museum's Lecture Theatre. At the end of 1864, he was appointed Architectural Sculptor, one of three new posts for artist-craftsmen at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. In 1872 Kipling was in the Deccan making drawings of local craftsmen This picture depicts several men in a gunny bag trampling down cotton, which is being fed into the bag by other men; gunny is a strong, coarse jute fabric. A printed cutting pasted on to the verso of a similar picture by Kipling in the V&A's collection explains the process: ‘A “docra” [the local word for a gunny bag] holds about 140 lbs. of cotton, and it is filled much in the same way as wool-bags are filled on English sheep-farms. The gunny bag is slung in some convenient place - often, as in the sketch, in a corner of the ginning shed - and the cotton is trampled down by a man standing inside'. Ginning is the process of separating cotton from its seeds.