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Riches beyond belief

A close family friend of ours — Dorothy Foernzler, ‘Doro’ in short: former colleague of my daughter’s, and godmother to her son — is here, and in the course of a casual conversation, she mentioned how greatly drawn she was to a very festive-looking dress she saw recently not back home in Switzerland, but in New York.

Riches beyond belief

Detail from a Map Shawl showing Srinagar. Kashmir, ca. 1875. Collection: V&A Museum, London



B.N. Goswamy

A close family friend of ours — Dorothy Foernzler, ‘Doro’ in short: former colleague of my daughter’s, and godmother to her son — is here, and in the course of a casual conversation, she mentioned how greatly drawn she was to a very festive-looking dress she saw recently not back home in Switzerland, but in New York. It was made of very fine white material: ‘Japanese khadi’, she was told, when she inquired: hand-spun, hand-woven. Khadi ‘made in Japan’, we said to ourselves? She described it with an eager sparkle in her eyes: you placed your hand under a layer of the fabric and could see it clearly, so fine was it. Surely, we instinctively thought, it must have been made in India, the material imported from here by some enterprising business-man, and turned into a ‘Japanese’ dress.

Intrigued in any case, I decided to look for comparable material here. I reached some friends in Gujarat, knowing how active the business of producing khadi in that region still was. And, in a matter of days, I received three sample-lengths of khadi, secured from a reputed Khadi Bhandar in Ahmedabad: among these was one so fine that it nearly took one’s breath away, sending the mind hurtling in the direction of the famed Dhaka muslins of the past. Here now, you could place your hand under the gossamer layer of this fabric and see it clearly. Almost perfectly: exactly as Doro had described. “Chadariya, jheeni rey jheeni”, as Kabir, the weaver-saint, said, although he was speaking of the fabric of life itself: ‘finely woven is it; how exquisitely fine’. 

This is what it is about our textiles: hardly a skill has been lost over the passage of time. The range, the quality, the sheer brilliance of it all, scattered over the length and breadth of our land, is astonishing. Not surprisingly, therefore, this incomparable heritage of ours continues to be celebrated. One can see and soak oneself in it in a great museum of textiles, like the Calico Museum at Ahmedabad. One can now see it, a friend told me, in a great show currently on at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London which holds, in its own words, “the greatest collection of Indian textiles in the world”. I have not seen the show yet — The Fabric of India, it is titled — but have had access to some stunning photographs and a book, put together by Rosemary Crill together with her colleagues, that goes with the show. It must have taken some doing to put that show together, judging from the photographs: a giant textile from Tipu Sultan’s tent suspended from the ceiling and billowing downwards; a Chamba rumal, teeming with figures, embroidered with scenes from the Mahabharata, stretching several metres in length along a wall; exquisite shawls lighting up one gallery, lavishly designed riding coats another. And so on. There are more than 200 objects on view. Like the mounting of the show, it must have taken some doing to put together the splendid ‘companion’ book. For it is packed with finely sifted information not always easy to get, and with insights that come from years, decades in fact, of exploring and seeing and understanding. 

Not uncharacteristically, in her introduction to this rich volume, Rosemary approaches the subject initially at a slant, for she opens with describing a 16th century Mughal painting showing the prophet Idris “introducing mankind to the concept of wearing tailored garments in place of animal skins”. At the top in this work, one sees the prophet gifting bales of cloth to men dressed in furs; but of real interest from the point of view of this show is the lower half of the painting where processes are shown: ‘washing cotton, cleaning it with a bow, preparing the warp, and weaving the cloth on a pit loom’. From this point onwards, one plunges into the economics of the handloom industry, into symbolism of colours and patterns, life-cycle rituals in which inevitably textiles figure, issues of status and local pride; and from these back to the formation of the V&A’s vast collection in which figure the ‘spoils of war’ taken after the defeat of Tipu Sultan, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London; equally, the significant role played by former directors of the Museum. A framework for looking at the show is put into place.

And then comes the section on Materials and Making in which one keeps picking up, at each step, some valuable snippet or the other. The world’s earliest surviving woven cotton fragment, one learns for instance, has been found not in India but at Dhuweila in Jordan, dating from around 4450-3000 BC, but also that this “cotton cloth was almost certainly imported from Indus Valley settlements”. Fibres are spoken of, from cotton and bast and silk and metal-wrapped silk thread to wool, pashmina and toosh; from this one gets into typically Indian dyes such as indigo, going back to ‘at least four thousand years’, lac that figures in a text as ancient as the Mahabharata, and red and yellow dyes derived from an incredibly wide range of substances: manjishtha and chay and suranji; turmeric and saffron and, just possibly, kusumbha flowers. 

There are descriptions of the astonishing range of techniques and processes used by the Indian craftsmen. Armed with these facts, one can move into the world of textiles themselves: brocades from Varanasi, lampas from Assam, figurative silk velvets from Mughal India, shawls from Kashmir, kalamkaris from Andhra, pichhwais from Rajasthan, sacral panels from the Coromandal coast, jajams from Burhanpur, rumals from Chamba, patolus from Gujarat, bed-hangings from the Company period…. It is a long, almost endless journey that one can take through these fabrics: along the way one runs into the swadeshi movement reflecting Gandhi’s undimmed vision, and then moves on to the modern world with our designers adapting and innovating all the time. Nothing comes to a stop. As they say, in popular parlance, “Hari ananta, hari katha anantaa”: roughly, ‘without end is the Lord, and without end are the ways to speak of Him”.

No book, no exhibition, on Indian textiles can ever be complete, one can be certain. There will always be gaps and holes, always things to be added or subtracted, formulations to take up issue with. But each time it is an invitation to look and take delight in. As the great poet, Ghalib, said in Urdu:

bakhshay hai jalwa-e gul zauq-e tamaasha, ‘Ghalib’.

chashm ko chahiye har rang me waa ho jaana

(It is our eagerness to see that urges the blossom to reveal its beauty;

What is needed then? Keeping your eyes open all the time, each moment.)

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