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Glass: From sand to glory

Glass: a hard, brittle, non-crystalline, more or less transparent substance produced by fusion, usually consisting of mutually dissolved silica and silicates that also contain soda and lime, as in the ordinary variety used for windows and bottles….

Glass: From sand to glory

Beaker with stripes. Syria; 12th or 13th century. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio



B.N.Goswamy

Glass: a hard, brittle, non-crystalline, more or less transparent substance produced by fusion, usually consisting of mutually dissolved silica and silicates that also contain soda and lime, as in the ordinary variety used for windows and bottles….The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of glass are “silicate glasses” based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand.                                     — Dictionary definitions of glass

‘Glory to our Lord, the Sultan, the King, the Learned, the Doer, the Holy Soldier, the Defender, the Just, the Pious, the Victorious, Trusting in God, the Triumphant Sultan of Islam, and the Muslims, the Tamer of Non-believers, Dispenser of Justice in this World.’          

— Inscription on a mosque lamp of glass; Egypt, 13th century

Quite recently, in the course of a visit to Switzerland, I spent some time with the Nastiks who have been family friends for a long time, and who live close to Aarau, capital of the Kanton of Aargau. Sitting in their relatively small but elegantly appointed living room, I noticed further additions to their collection of contemporary glass, and showed natural interest in them. They have always been interested in glass — not functional glass but in objets d’art made of glass — and keep picking new pieces up with regularity. There they were, their latest acquisitions: a tall carafe-like object in milky white, raising its long and sinuous neck like a swan; a smaller vase in brilliant indigo blue; a luminous beaker-shaped object in purple and gold. All of these, they told me, picked up from a small, unostentatious shop in the little nearby town of Seon. The Nastiks collect virtually nothing else: just this.

Naturally, seeing these objects, and their unexpected but enthusiastic interest in glass as such, my mind lapsed into the mode of recall, and I began to remember other things and sights that had moved me in this respect: the giant glass lamps hanging in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; the first ever Czech documentary that I saw years ago featuring a group of glass-makers working late into the night with a Mozart piece playing in the background; a simple craftsman hot-blowing glass into different shapes at a factory, owned by a relation, in Balawali, close to Hardwar. Above all, however, my mind went to a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, held some 15 years back. It was titled, intriguingly, “Glass of the Sultans’: ‘intriguingly’, because till then relatively little attention had gone to Islamic glass, all concentration having remained on glass — this humblest of materials shaped into splendour in the hands of man —  in the Hellenistic-Roman world, or to centres of great glass-making in medieval Europe like Murano and Venice and Bohemia.

The ‘Glass of the Sultans’ show, something of an eye-opener, owed a great deal to the famous Corning Museum of Glass in the state of New York, and to the efforts of David Whitehouse and Stefan Carboni. As many as 150 superb glass objects had been brought together in it, from perfume-flasks to pitchers, mosque lamps to boxes, inkwells and vases, bottles and beakers. The catalogue that accompanied the show was filled with riches for, apart from describing and analysing the objects on display, it addressed a wide range of themes, whole chapters being devoted to ‘Glass Production in the Islamic World’, ‘Growth of Interest in Islamic Glass’, ‘Archaeological Excavations of Islamic Glass’, and ‘Chemistry and Technology’. There were descriptions, among other things, of undecorated blown glass, mould-blown glass, hot-worked glass, mosaic glass, cut and engraved glass, painted glass. The objects on display had been gathered from Egypt, the Middle East, Iran, and India, and as one turned the pages, one learnt, in breathless succession, about the phases in which the Islamic world engaged itself with glass and glass making. Dynasty after dynasty found mention, from the Abbasids of Baghdad and Samarra, to the Buyids, the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Mamluks, apart of course from the more widely known Ottomans and Safavids and Mughals. Generation after generation of Islamic glassmakers, one learnt, kept innovating while, for obvious reasons, it kept looking back over its shoulders to the techniques used in the ancient Hellenistic and Roman world. Now hanging lamps adorned mausoleums, mosques, Quranic schools, hospices and institutions endowed by Sultans and Emirs, both as pious gestures and as status symbols. Not un-often were these lamps inscribed with their patrons’ names copied in hand on their surfaces ‘so that the names would shine forever once the lamps were hung and lit’.

Each object in the show carried an elaborate caption and description. Consider, for instance, this from an entry about a late 13th century mosque lamp from Cairo in Egypt. The materials are gone into in detail: thus, “brownish colourless glass, red, blue, white, green, yellow and black enamel; gold and orange-yellow stain.” The technique in which it was made was ‘free blown, applied, enamelled, gilded and stained; tooled on the pontils; inscription in the thulth script’. The inscription in praise of the Emir or the Sultan then follows. But, in the course of the long description of the object, one comes upon embedded historical information. Thus:   “This enamelled and gilded object is the earliest dateable lamp known to have been hung in an extant interior — a turba or tomb, built in Cairo for a Mamluk Emir. (Although a secular building, the turba was also a shrine that included a mihrab or prayer-niche.) In addition to this distinction, it also demonstrates the transition of enamelled lamps from a secular function to a strictly religious one inside mosques and madrasas’. This, however, is only a small part of the long entry, which tells us more, much more, about the object and its context. There is richness in all this.

A natural question: how did glass objects, sometimes more than a thousand or more years old, survive time? Did these not break? Was the poet Faiz not right when he said: “sheesha ho kih moti, jaam kih durr/ jo toot gayaa so toot gayaa/ kab ashkon sey jud sakta hai/ jo phoot gayaa so phoot gayaa”? But then, the context in which he wrote these moving words was different. Archaeologists think and do things differently. In this exhibition at the Metropolitan, there were objects which of course were entirely whole, but also some which had been put back together piece by piece, shard by painstaking shard.

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