How a centuries-old textile comes to life

B.N.Goswamy

In 1848 John Ruskin wrote about the buildings of past times in his publication, ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture’ and his sentiment has relevance here: ‘They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us’. The properties of the Trust have been referred to as ‘theatres of memory’ and, at a time of rapid change, these theatres of memory are particularly vital.  Historic textiles are as much a part of that memory as is the architecture, the paintings and other decorative arts.  

— Textile Conservation Studio of the National Trust

This is how, keeping simply aspects of technique in mind, one of the greatest textiles now in the famed Calico Museum of Textiles at Ahmedabad, is described in the Museum’s catalogue of Printed and Painted Textiles: “Ground: fine white cotton; Three reds, two violets, blue, two greens, yellow and flesh tint; outlines black and red. The outlines are stencilled and painted by hand with the mordant for black, except for the red areas, which are outlined with the mordant for red …Delicate patterns are reserved in white on the mordant-dyed grounds by painting with molten wax before the mordants were applied …The blue is resist-dyed in indigo. The darker green is achieved by over-painting green on the indigo ….The flesh tints are painted.”

For all the accurate information that this detail communicates, it does not prepare one for the experience of seeing this great textile in the flesh. The textile, a ‘Hanging’, dateable to 1640-1650, was made for an Indian court in the St.Thome-Pulicat region of what used to be the ‘Madras State’, and it was acquired by the Museum long years ago from the Amber Palace, Jaipur. But, as I said, these facts and details give one no idea of the magnificence, the sheer dazzle of this extraordinary piece. In it, in a fanciful palace setting of halls and terraces and pavilions, figures — some distinctly European, most of them Indian — jostle against one another; elegantly dressed, remarkably lissom, women stand in attendance upon a seated prince; couples hold quiet conversations; lovers eagerly bend forward holding each other in tight embraces; armed courtiers train alert eyes upon their superiors under Deccani style Islamic domes, their figures etched against rich embroideries. There is sumptuousness, a flood of colours and patterns and figures, on view in this large, very large, piece which measures close to 15 feet in length and 7 feet in height And one can imagine the impact that this, as a hanging or a qanat, would have made in a palace, when whole, for in its present state it is only a fragment.

Sadly, however — sharing the fate of countless other textiles all over the world — time has not been too kind to this piece, referred to in the records of the Museum as “Kalamkari, No. 647”. For years, it had stood there, beautifully mounted, almost greeting the visitors as they entered the unbearably rich Calico galleries, but one knew that it was time to pay to it close attention, have a textile conservator look at it. But it was not any textile conservator that Gira Sarabhai — the founder of the Museum and its sustaining spirit — was going to turn to: she had in mind an old and trusted friend who has been the doyenne of the rarefied world of textile conservation: Nobuko Kajitani. With her exquisite, typically Japanese passion for refinement and detail, Nobuko had headed the Department of Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for close to 30 years. In between, during her visits to India, she would come to see Giraben and the Calico Museum the fame of which spreads far beyond the borders of our land. Now, when requested to take care of this precious textile, she readily agreed. I had seen her at work on a different textile earlier, and could not take my eyes off her and a young colleague/student of hers, Miki Komatsu, attached to the Heritage Conservation Centre in Singapore, for so sharp was their observation, so nimble their fingers. This time, when I was in Ahmedabad recently, I saw Nobuko at work together with her young colleagues again: not in real life but in a long, very evocative video recording of the conservation that the Museum had made.

I had read somewhere of Nobuko’s concerns and methods and processes as a conservator: all those thoughts of “aesthetic, technological, physical, mechanical, and chemical aspects” that would pass through the mind before work even began. She would study the provenance of the textile, the in-house history since its acquisition and the environmental conditions in which it had been kept. There were old restorations to be taken into account if any been done; re-weavings needed to be removed if they were “chromatically, structurally, or functionally obtrusive”, and so on. All these concerns one naturally did not see in the short film that I watched, for most of them related to the area of decision-making. What I did see, however, was the utter sense of dedication to the work in hand. As many as seven conservators were involved in the delicate work at hand. When the textile had to be rolled for turning it on its back, hands would move with the gentlest of touches, and the textile brought to rest on a stand, as if it were a newborn being laid on a layette. There were no noises, no fuss: with just the briefest movement of the eyes instructions were issued and followed. Nobuko herself would bend over virtually every inch of the kalamkari, her face close to and almost parallel with the laid textile, studying every tiny detail; needles would be passed through the textile with the deftest of movements; protective sheets would be lifted as if they were gold leaf. Hands moved forming dancers’ mudras; noiselessly, feet shifted position; eyes kept darting from edge to edge.

The work is not finished yet. Nobuko and her team is visiting the Calico Museum again this month and then in December. I do not exactly know why, but a famous saying of the German Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, comes to mind. “Work on good prose has three steps,” he said: “a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”