History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c26.s3.t5.3

v1.c26.s3.t5.3

Much of what has been said about the evolution of the oilpress also applies therefore to the sugarcane press. The Buddhist literature mentions sugarcane juice being extracted with a machine (Prakash, Om, 1961, pp. 7-53), and in the Kuṣāṇa-Śaka period (75-300 AD), machine-extracted juice is declared to be inferior, presumably to the hand-extracted product. A Jain manuscript copied at Palam near Delhi in 1540 AD features a drawing of two oxen crushing sugarcane in a typical barrel-shaped ghāni (Daniels and Daniels, 1988, Drawing on p. 502).