Woven chants
What is it about Indian textiles, one sometimes wonders? Their dazzling range? The incredible skills involved? The simplicity? The complexity? The ceaseless renewal? The ability to adapt? The way they are interwoven into our lives, and thoughts? Whatever it is, one finds oneself constantly, irresistibly, drawn to them. Again and again, when one thinks that one has seen it all, something different, something utterly alluring, surfaces. And one starts wondering again.
What occasions these thoughts? An exhibition of select textiles that opened at the National Museum in New Delhi less than a month back, under the title: "Masters of the Cloth: Indian Textiles Traded to Distant Shores." Those who were present at the opening of the show came from all parts of India and of the world, but the objects, many of them retrieved from distant shores, belong to just one, and by now famed, source: the TAPI collection in Surat.
Inspired as they undoubtedly must have been by the celebrated Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, the two collectors who built up TAPI – Praful and Shilpa Shah – went about the task of gathering and garnering in their own clear-eyed fashion. In their wide-ranging collection, there are some exquisite pieces, and I have had occasion to write on them earlier. But this show centres almost exclusively upon textiles that left the shores of India centuries ago, became almost integrated with other cultures, led lives of their own, and are back now in their homeland.
On view are objects that were found in areas as far flung as eastern Indonesia, the southern Moluccas, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Egypt, Iran, Western Africa, Portugal, Holland and France. And what is common to them is the fact that they are all products of the vision and the unmatched skills of long-forgotten Indian craftsmen.
There are different tracks along which the show and its slim but information-packed catalogue can nudge or hurtle the viewer. There is, if one follows one track, an opportunity to learn. About the manner, for example, in which some of the textiles imported from India, or inspired by Indian imports, acquired a distinct, sometimes sacred, status in some lands, became part of rituals and ceremonies, were even seen as possessed of medicinal or magical powers: the daun bolu cloths in Sulawesi turning into precious heirlooms, patola fragments being used to cure diseases, maa’ textiles employed as talismans for averting the evil eye, and the like.
All because they had this wonderful, precious quality and were believed to have "come from across the sea in legendary times". There is something quite moving again about how some Indian textiles were regarded in West Africa: there, as a colonial officer posted in Nigeria reported, even a relatively simple ‘Madras cloth’, elicited a deeply emotional response from the successor of a recently deceased local chief. As the property was being divided, and a length of Indian cloth was displayed, we read, the young man stood up and said: "I should like to have that piece for my share of the house property, because it is the one with which I covered the faces of my ancestors at the Nduein Alali (ancestor screen)."
But then there is the other, more enticing, track of gazing at the incredible array and quality of the objects themselves: all those hangings and floor-spreads, jackets and skirts and head-cloths, shawls and prayer rugs. A world of enchantment reveals itself in them. Trees and shrubs sway as if in a gentle breeze in these pieces, rows of hamsa-s move with lithe grace, intricate squares and lozenges and circles chase one another across large expanses, and birds of imagination display dazzling plumage as they prepare to wing their way through the air.
The detail, and the refinement, that one sees in some of these pieces, leaves one wide-eyed with wonder. One of the great pieces in the show, for instance—of which, it needs to be mentioned, a fine replica was made recently by the Salvis, gifted patola weavers of Patan—a ceremonial cloth in the double-ikat technique, nearly five meters in length, is dominated by four massive elephants, but the field around them is alive with an incredible range of little figures: mahouts and chariot-drivers, flag-bearers and riders, tigers and leopards and deer.
It is as if the viewer were being taken on a ride through dense foliage, part of a great hunting party that will never come to an end. From the borders of a large ‘Palampore’ spread, influenced as it is by some Japanese motifs and intended as it was for the European market, springs out fantastic fauna and flora, printed and painted in jewel-like colours, plants raising spiky heads in the air, long-beaked birds poised on cliff tops, and mountains afire with intensity.
My own great favourite in the show, however, is a 16th century hand-painted cotton textile from Gujarat, astir with large, sinuous figures of young women in a forest landscape, dancers and musicians, flanking a male figure holding a lotus stalk. The colouring is simple, almost austere—red ground against which the black of the designs stands out and glistens—but it is the cadence in the figures, and the inexhaustible range of patterns that augment and enhance every curve, every stance, that seduces one.
Strongly, and surprisingly, related as the figures are to those seen in Jain paintings, with their sharp profiles and whispering eyes, the piece is of obvious historical significance. But one needs to go beyond history to enjoy it. For it is, simply put, permeated with that chhanda, cosmic rhythm, which early texts speak of as being the very essence of great works of art.
(This article was published on December 4, 2005)
