Indian textiles

London

by JASLEEN KANDHARI

INDIA IS ONE of the world’s most influential producers of fabric. The exhibition The Fabric of India at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (to 10th January), explores India’s multifaceted world of handmade textiles from the third century up to the present day.1 More than two hundred exhibits tell a story of invention, artistry and beauty, ranging from raw cotton and undyed cloths to one of the highlights, the magnificent royal tent of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century ruler of Mysore (cat. no.131; Fig.56).

This block-printed and painted cotton chintz tent decorated with floral motifs was taken by the 2nd Lord Clive, a governor of Madras and the eldest son of ‘Clive of India’, to his home, Powis Castle on the Welsh border, after the defeat of Tipu Sultan at the Battle of Seringapatam in 1799. At Powis it served as a grand marquee for garden parties for several years before going on display in the castle. At sixty square metres, it seems like a magical meadow into which one can stroll to admire the designs at close quarters.

The exhibition is divided into five sections beginning with ‘Materials and Making’, which introduces the processes of textile production as well as the fibres of cotton, silk and wool and natural dyes, like indigo blue obtained by processing the plant’s leaves, yellow dye from turmeric or pomegranate shells and crimson dyes from madder root. India’s indigenous sources of textile fibres and dyes have stimulated innovation in the production of regional specialities of textiles by weaving, dyeing, embroidery and printing, such as the finest Shahtoosh fibres which are in diameter a fifth of a strand of a human hair, woven from the underbelly hair of the chiru antelope to produce the finest and most expensive Kashmir shawls. India’s climate is well suited to cultivating several types of cotton, and archaeological evidence of cotton seeds and fibres has been excavated at pre-Harappan sites in Baluchistan dating from 6000 BC with whorls (spiral or circular patterns) unearthed in the Indus Valley of the same period, indicating that woven textiles were produced during ancient periods of India’s history.

The function of Indian fabrics in courtly and spiritual life is examined in the section ‘Local and Global: Patronage and Use’. A fine example is a densely decorated Mughal riding coat in white silk associated with the reign of the Emperor Jahangir (no.111; Fig.57). The coat has a repeating pattern including reclining lions, a lion hunting gazelles, floral motifs and scenes of ducks on a pond and a peacock in flight.

The ‘Trade’ section highlights the importance of textiles for the economy of India, for Indian textiles have been exported internationally for millennia. Designs were adapted for different export markets, both east and west, such as the block-printed ceremonial textile from Gujarat made in the fourteenth century for the Indonesian market (no.161). The selection of wall-hangings, bed-covers, banyan robes (informal robes for Western men) and dresses decorated with chintz patterns, including a set of Indian chintz bed-hangings on a four-poster bed which were originally part of the hunting castle Schloss Hof, in the Marchfield near Vienna, serves to illustrate how Indian designs and techniques were reinterpreted to appeal to the European market (no.174).

The nineteenth century marked the advent of European industrialisation when mass-produced textiles were manufactured ‘in imitation of the Indian’, thereby threatening to destroy India’s handmade textile industry as fabrics produced in England were imported to India. This in turn instigated a resistance movement, the Swadeshi, or homeland movement, in which textiles played an important role in defining Indian identity and nationalism. Indians were encouraged to support the production of traditional Indian fabrics and refrain from importing foreign cloth. Indian textiles served as a symbol of resistance to colonial rule, and Mahatma Gandhi proclaimed that Indians must spin and weave their own handmade thread and fabric to produce khadi (hand-woven cotton). The display of khadi highlights this symbolism.

A particularly beautiful piece is a large and minutely detailed nineteenth-century embroidered Kashmiri map shawl (no.79; Fig.58) measuring about two metres square. It shows a map of the centre of Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. Only five other examples are known. Map shawls are based on a type of town plan fairly widespread in India from the seventeenth century onwards. These detailed maps, which schematically depict streets and public buildings, derive from the painted plans of religious centres of pilgrimage and are made for devotees as souvenirs of their journeys and objects of reverence. The streets and landmarks of Srinagar are embroidered in fine coloured wool on a ground of twillwoven pashmina (the hair of capra hircus, the shawl goat). It is dominated to the north-east by Lake Dal, Srinagar’s most famous landmark, with vignettes of people boating on the River Jhelum, a Hindu temple and the famous Mughal gardens, the Nishat Bagh and Shalimar Bagh, with a watercourse running through a series of pools and dividing the gardens symmetrically. This Mughal tradition of a garden divided into four parts by two intersecting waterways is known as Char-Bagh. The minute scale of the scenes required the finest of stitches, and the use of blue for the lake, green for the trees and the marvellous multicoloured rocks give vitality to the map.

The final section, ‘Textiles in the Modern World’, explores India’s dynamic fashion design industry, showing innovative designs influenced by traditional Indian textiles for a new international market including Bollywood movies, as illustrated by the lehnga, or wedding outfit worn by Madhuri Dixit in the Bollywood blockbuster Devdas (2000; no.213). Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla is renowned for reworking traditional techniques and producing spectacular ensembles. This lehnga, embroidered with gold metallic thread and sequins, was inspired by Gujarati mirror-work.

The exhibition closes with a display from the new generation of India’s fashion designers of the ‘New Sari’, experimenting with new styles, materials and colour combinations, yet influenced by traditional Indian textile techniques of block-printing, ikat weaving, kantha embroidery and gold-thread weaving. The Suicide sari was designed by Kallol Datta (Fig.59), who provides an alternative aesthetic through his bold, controversial prints and titles, using silk-screen printing to transfer the monochrome image of a hanged man onto the fabric.

1 Catalogue: The Fabric of India. Edited by Rosemary Crill, with contributions by the editor, Steven Cohen and Divia Patel. 248 pp. incl. 239 col. ills. (V. & A. Publishing, London, 2015), £35. ISBN 978–1–851–77853–9.