Indian handmade textiles, from the earliest known fragments to contemporary styles, have been put on display here at the world-famous Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum as part of the ongoing “India Festival”.
“The Fabric of India” is the first exhibition to explore Indian textiles and forms the centrepiece of the festival.
“This was a tremendous task and we looked at it from a historic perspective and tried to make it relevant today. There is a vague chronology to give it a sense of history but the broad divisions reflect the technical mastery and creativity of Indian textiles,” Divia Patel, co-curator of the exhibition, says.
The exhibition offers an introduction to the raw materials and processes of making cloth by hand.
Displays of the basic fibres of silk, cotton and wool illustrate the importance of India’s natural resources to its textile-making traditions and two-thirds of the exhibits are from the V&A’s own collections. The remaining have been borrowed from museums and private collections in India, the U.S. and France.
The opening section shows fabrics dyed using natural materials such as pomegranate and indigo and the complex techniques of block printing, weaving and embroidery across the ages, together creating a visual compendium of India’s astonishingly diverse array of fabrics.
The highlights spread from muslin embroidered with glittering green beetle wings and a vast wall hanging with appliqué designs of elephants and geometrical patterns to a boy’s jacket densely embroidered with brightly coloured silk thread and mirrors.
Wealth, power and religious devotion are all expressed through textiles, and the exhibition examines how fabrics were used in courtly and spiritual life. Fabrics created for temples and shrines vary widely in imagery and techniques, depending on the religious context, level of patronage and region of production.
