PROBABLY JAIPUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA, MID-17TH CENTURY

This magnificent textile would have been one of a series that in their totality created a glorious crimson tent interior, emblematic of the Emperor’s wealth and prestige. This is best illustrated by a remarkable complete surviving tent in the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Fort, Jodhpur (L21/1981), see Stuart Cary Welch, India: Art and Culture, 1300-1900, New York, 1985, pp.252-256. no.165. Cary Welch notes that tents, such as the present panel, were woven in the farrashkana, a particular imperial workshop where artists, including textile designers, were overseen by the Emperor himself (Cary Welch, op.cit., p.252).

Extravagantly decorated textiles such as this were used in the sumptuous interiors of Mughal royal encampments. The lavish decoration of these tents would reflect the royal wealth and the majesty of the Emperor’s presence. They were favoured by Mughal rulers who saw these as part of their Central Asian heritage. In Abu’l-Fazl’s chronicle of Akbar’s reign, he notes that they are ‘an excellent dwelling place, a shelter from heat and cold […] as the ornament of royalty’. Much later, François Bernier noted that in 1664 the royal enclosure of Aurangzeb’s camp was surrounded by tent walls seven or eight feet high. He wrote, ‘these kanates are of strong cloth which was lined with chittes [chintz] or cloths painted with portals with a great vase of flowers’. He records that the Emperor’s private quarters were enclosed with smaller flowered kanats and that ‘beautiful chittes of painted flowers’ lined the interiors (quote in Joseph M. Dye III, The Arts of India, Virginia, 2001, p.467). The spectacular display of a tent that once belonged to Tipu Sultan, probably made in Burhanpur, Deccan, circa 1725-50 and recently reconstructed for The Fabric of India exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, gave an impressive illustration of what these tents would have looked like (Rosemary Crill (ed.), The Fabric of India, exhibition catalogue, London, 2015, cat. 131, pp. 124-126).

The design of this panel is typical of floral tent panels in which gold leaf was applied via an adhesive substance of the surface to the textile. The ground was most often a crimson silk-velvet such as the complete tent mentioned above. A large panel of five compartments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc.no. 1981.321) and another single compartment in the Victoria and Albert Museum (IM.30-1936). The present panel differs from these examples however, as it is a rare example on a mashru ground.

Mashru gained importance in India after the Ain-i-Akbari, the 16th century administrative document of the Mughal Empire, was issued. It outlined that orthodox Muslims were to wear clothes of simple material like linen and to avoid silk, velvet, brocade, or fur. Mashru, which is mix of silk and cotton, was worn instead and it soon became the main fabric that was used for the costumes and household fabrics of courtiers, nobles, and royalty. In its weaving, the loom brings the cotton yarn down and the silk fibres to the surface and as a result the cloth exhibits a silk face and cotton backing. The dazzling contrast of the crimson ground and gold ornamentation is remarkably preserved today on this panel. The preservation of the panel reveals the theatre of the golden flowers coupled with the luxurious lustre of the mashru that would have welcomed the Emperor’s visitors.