The fine-weave carpets of India - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1997 by Daniel Walker

Credit has rarely been given to Indian carpet designers and weavers for their magnificent contributions to the Eastern tradition of carpet weaving. Yet during what might be called the classical age of Indian carpets, from the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) until about 1800, designers and weavers at the Mughal court developed a very special type of carpet that has rarely been equaled: the carpet made with a knotted pile of pashmina (from the Persian word for wool, pasbm), the wool from Himalayan mountain goats known popularly as cashmere. Pashmina is a material so fine and luxurious to the touch that it has been mistaken for silk or even velvet, and only recently has microscopic examination confirmed that it is indeed wool.(1) Obtained primarily from western Tibet, via Ladakh, pashmina was an extremely valuable commodity, the trade in which was monopolized by the maharajas of Kashmir in the seventeenth century and later. It was the wool used in the finest cashmere shawls from at least the time of Akbar.

The fineness of pashmina can vary considerably, and so does the fineness of the weave of the carpets made from it, ranging from about four hundred Persian, or asymmetrical, knots per square inch to almost twenty-one hundred. The pile of the incredibly finely-woven rug in Plate II is so severely damaged (probably by vermin) that one can barely make out the pattern, but it reveals that the silk warp threads were organized in colored stripes. Not all fine-weave carpets are constructed in this manner, nor is it known exactly why Indian fine-weave weavers preferred it, but the result was a multicolored fringe (now gone on most pashmina carpets) that was so distinctive a feature of the rugs that it was carefully depicted in works by court painters (see pl. I).

The development of fine-weave carpets in India can be traced to the time of the emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1627). All surviving carpets attributable to the reign of his father, Akbar, are made with a sheep's wool pile on a cotton foundations; several are about as fine in weave (up to 460 knots per square inch) as these materials will permit. Their designs are closely tied to Persian sources, for Persian culture was considered the highest culture of the day, and Persian artists and craftsmen, their traditional sources of patronage drying up at home, were welcomed at Indian courts. Typical Persian patterns involved symmetrical design of sinuously scrolling vines with palmettes and blossoms, sometimes with an overlay of animals. Such designs were evident in Persian manuscripts collected at the imperial Mughal library and in Herat and Sanguszko Persian carpets probably used at the Mughal court, and of course they were familiar to the Persian artists and weavers who worked at the Indian court.

Under Jahangir, drawing and technical virtuosity became increasingly refined in many mediums; in terms of carpet weaving this was possible only with a finer weave, and that could be achieved only with finer materials. The first step in this process was the substitution of silk for cotton in the foundation. Plates III and IV illustrate five of eight surviving fragments from a magnificent carpet of this type, with almost five hundred knots per square inch. The main field is covered with two vine systems, one green and one light brown, set against a dark blue ground, with flowers and lotus palmettes, bright-eyed lion masks, and the heads of antlered deer and other animals. The elegance of the pattern has led certain authorities to suggest that the carpet was woven in fifteenth-century Timurid Iran,(2) but the identification of the weft dye as cochineal,(3) a New World dyestuff brought to the Middle East only in the early sixteenth century, rules out a Timurid origin. Moreover, the fragments possess numerous features of Mughal production: dyed warps and wefts,(4) the use of ton-sur-ton coloring (green on dark blue, pink on red) and of blended colors (the horses' eyes in Pl. III are a mixture of red and white knots); the playful spirit of the animals; and the heightened sense of naturalism, evident in the elephant (surely drown from close observation) and the rooster (with its streaked neck feathers).

The carpet can be dated to the second decade of the seventeenth century, when the appeal of Persian ornamental patterns seems to have peaked and when similarly fanciful animal ornamentation was employed in the margins of an album of paintings and calligraphic drawings made for Jahangir.(5) Evidence of experimentation is offered in the fragments by the somewhat jumbled knotting and the presence of jufti knots, which are tied over four warps instead of two, a feature rarely seen in Indian rugs. The next step in the technical evolution of fine-weave rugs was the introduction of a finer pile fiber to take advantage of the potential offered by the silk foundation. Weavers in northern India, who were familiar with pashmina from the shawls made in Kashmir and possibly in Lahore, soon found it to be the ideal fiber.(6)