12. Textile

Block Printed Textiles: Till the 18^th C Mughal India was the world’s largest manufacturer and  textiles from Bengal its most important product.

This large well preserved piece is a long cream cotton textile of plain weave, block-printed, resist-dyed and painted with a design of twelve identical female figures.

Each wears a blouse and skirt as well as disc earrings,  necklaces, bangles and anklets: the red top and blue skirt alternates with the blue top and the red skirt. Each figure, with the fingers of the left hand, plucks the strings of a vina, (a long necked lute). A parrot is perched on the splayed, upward-pointing fingers of the right hand. A tall, thin tree motif, with an entwining creeper, appears to the left of each figure.

Pieces such as this would have been widely exported all along the Silk Roads. In fact The Greek philosopher, historian  and geographer Strabo writing  in the first decades of CE wrote “the River Oxus separated Bactria from Sogdiana, and was remarkable for its navigability, being the means by which Indian goods were transported over the mountains and downstream to the Hyrcanian Sea (the Caspian Sea), and then further into the nearby region via the local rivers, until they reached the Euxeinos Pontos (the Black Sea)”.

This piece is dated to the 1500s, probably made in Gujarat and is about 5m x 1m.