Indian Trade Cloth & Fragments
offered as a complete collection to curators and collectors
I collected most of the 49 pieces in this group more than 25 years ago in Indonesia. They are divided by the ‘taste’ of the region where they were found, with Sulawesi and Sumatra being of primary importance. The collection also includes textiles found in, or to the taste of, Thailand, Japan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Persia, and Europe, plus an exceptional block-printed cloth from Kashgar, Western China. Added to this is an extremely rare group of historic archeological fragments from Fustat, Egypt, that came out of the ground more than a century ago. It was my goal to survey of the range of Indian Trade Cloths (ITC), inclusive of early Gujarati block prints and hand-painted mordant- and resist-dyed cloths from the Coromandel Coast. Created in India for export often more than 250 years ago, these textiles served as currency in exchange for spices and other trade goods and are now recognized as important aesthetic and art historical documents of world exploration and trade.
Cotton and silk textiles created in India have held the world in thrall for more than two millennia. Blessed with advantageous soil and weather conditions, the cultivation of cotton (Gossypium arboreum, Gossypium herbaceum), silkworms and dyestuffs came naturally to the environment of the subcontinent. Human ingenuity took care of the rest.
Learning how to spin and dye thread and weave cloth on simple looms came first. Over time, dyeing methods and loom architecture became more complex, permitting a greater variety of sophisticated textiles. We encounter ikat, double-ikat, block-stamping and/or hand-painted and resist-dye patterning techniques.
Recipes evolved to achieve a broad range of colorfast hues and shades. The proteinaceous nature of silk accepts dye far more readily than the cellulosic fibers of cotton that require using naturally occurring chemical mordants to ‘tan’ the cotton in such a manner that a red dye would bond with the cotton fiber only where the mordant is painted and nowhere else. A fermented and oxidized tincture of indigo, the source of blue, was the exception and could be applied directly to the cotton surface. The use of different mordants or their concentrations produced a range of colors from purple red to rose. Alum salts and cow’s urine could be used for fixing the dye or bleaching the dyed cloth back to white. Wood blocks with design patterning could be used to apply mordants or dyes directly. A wax resist might be applied with a pen (kalam), a craft technique from which kalamkari, the Indo-Persian name for these printed textiles, comes. Chintz is an alternative name used in the West that derives from the Hindu word chint, meaning spotted or variegated.
Both cotton and silk trade cloths woven in India were being made by Jains in Gujarat, traded by Arabs and kept as heirlooms by head-hunting tribes in Indonesia. They were exchanged for spices by traders long before the Portuguese and Dutch arrived. Some cotton cloths of sari length that feature patterns of birds, leaves, hunters and dancers, were found with ink stamps written in archaic Islamic scripts that gave a radiocarbon date of 14th–15th century and are now found in museum around the world.
The Portuguese, led by Afonso de Albuquerque, arrived in Indonesia in 1511 after conquering Malacca to dominate the lucrative spice trade. As the first Europeans to reach the archipelago, they sought cloves, nutmeg, and mace, establishing forts and trading posts in Maluku, Solor, and Flores before being largely displaced by the Dutch in the early 1600s. The Dutch, led by Cornelis de Houtman, first arrived in Indonesia in 1596, seeking spice trade routes, which led to the establishment of the VOC in 1602. Initially focused on trade, the Dutch gradually colonized the archipelago over 350 years, establishing a major colony known as the Dutch East Indies before Indonesia declared independence in 1945.
As John Guy observed in Woven Cargoes, his seminal 1998 volume on Indian Trade Cloth, the dyed cotton cloths were stronger and survived from an earlier age in greater numbers than the more fragile silk double ikat. They also served all levels of the market from low-cost productions to high value luxuries. The great variety of surviving patterns, including pieces of great age, serves as a comprehensive visual and historical record of the ancient trade in Indian textiles to Southeast Asia and Japan. These textiles played a multifaceted role in the regions they reached, serving as royal attire, prestigious diplomatic gifts, and sacred ceremonial objects and served as a currency in trade exchange.
Only a few echoes of early textile patterns survive to this day in India itself. The Thomas Murray Collection, now the finest in private hands in the Americas, serves as a compendium through time of Indian Trade Cloths, myth, magic and motifs.
