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The return of paisley and chintz to Indiashows the way ahead for organic fashion
While it is difficult to predict where Indian fashion will go in the next decade, given the propensity for theatrical dressing seen in weddings and religious events, a life-jacket can be extended to our extremely rare textile craft skills to reignite the industry on a large scale.
The fashion industry is a product of the western world and is only a few hundred years old. Its ethos and cyclic nature are not indigenous to India, but from the middle of the 2nd century BC to the British era, India has been a large exporter of fabrics to the world. India produced cotton and silk fabrics and excelled in dyeing and patterning cloth with the skill and sophistication that few others possessed. Created in guilds run by master craftsmen, these textiles had the patronage of affluent temple trusts, Indian royalty, and a vast indigenous population. The export of these textiles contributed greatly to India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The lure of these textiles brought merchant ships from European nations to the shores of the country. This was the trade of what was considered the most precious of goods: Cotton.
In time, Indian-printed cotton caught the fancy of pre-industrial Europe. This depleted the exchequer of many nations, which led to stringent laws that clamped bans on importing Indian fabrics in most of Europe. However, these laws were not very effective because the fabrics had caught the imagination of the elite and royal societies of Europe that grew accustomed to the aesthetics of Indian fabrics. The black market, thereafter, thrived.
However, around the 16th century, European nations began several unsuccessful attempts to replicate Indian textiles in Europe. With the advent of the industrial revolution, the production of textiles became possible in the industrial belts of Lancashire in England and Mulhouse in France, which aimed to substitute Indian textile production mills.
This required a professional strategy to study and document the textiles of India. In 1866, J Forbes Watson was appointed for the purpose. He published a study listing India’s most important textiles. These were accompanied by 700 fabric samples. These documents were distributed for reproduction. Cotton was imported from India, printed with copies of Indian prints, and sent back to India to sell to its vast markets. In the next century, crippling taxes on indigenous production by the British East India Company had a devastating effect on the livelihoods of millions of craftspeople.
This state of affairs continued till the middle of the 20th century. It was not until India’s freedom struggle that Mahatma Gandhi introduced a spectacular concept. He made khadi a fashion tool to reinterpret India’s sartorial ethos — a humble hand-woven cloth, hand-spun on a charkha. This revived production on thousands of silent looms. In defiance of imports from England, voluntary bonfires were made of imported fabrics in India. It began defining organic handwriting as India’s nascent fashion handwriting. A miracle in itself, alien to the modern world.
In the few hundred years of colonisation, Europe had appropriated, among other textiles, India’s finest design directories — a fact not recorded in the history of India’s intellectual property. A full repertoire of painted and printed textiles of the Deccan, created by artists who painted panels of the variations of imagery of the “tree of life”, with veritable gardens of fauna and flora, reflecting stylised versions of a Deccan landscape. These were known as chintz, from the Indian word sheent and were used for fashion clothing and soft furnishings all over Europe, with an exuberance unknown to the western world. In India, these textiles became extinct. The copies of chintz today provide some of the basic art forms for ateliers in Italy and France and are seen on the fashion ramps of the world without any acknowledgement of the country of origin.
To a discerning eye, these copies have lost some of their original characteristics, such as the flowers of the mahua trees and the peacocks on the branches of these trees are not so aesthetically conceived, as the 17th-century originals, which are now found only in the collections of western museums. However, memories still exist in India, and so do the artists. I have seen some fresh directories emerge with idyllic forms from the naf naf tree growing on imaginary islands, which gives me hope for a revival of textile art in India and its handwriting in India’s fashion world.
Another irreparable intellectual loss for India has been the most popular motif in the world — the paisley. From the 16th century onward, Kashmiri shawls, known as jamavaars, woven in the kanni weave, became all the rage in Europe. These were the crown jewels of Indian textiles created by master craftsmen using a mastery of design and sophisticated weaving unmatched by anything the world knew. These gems were initially transported through the silk routes to Europe. This also depleted the exchequer of Europe, and again, these designs were lifted on massive scales to create look-alike versions in factories in Britain and France.
I visited a town called Paisley, named after the famous motif, in Scotland about 10 years ago. Western fashion is fickle and could not support the aesthetics of these shawls for long. The weaving industry, built on appropriating these shawls, died a natural fashion death. A museum in this small town was the only reminder of its existence. I walked around the galleries with some anguish, as I noted that the copies of the shawls looked like ghosts of the original. The curling vine of Kashmir had turned into strange kidney-shaped motifs, and the almond kernel which sprouted life in the original shawls had simply been lost in translation. The kanni weave, painstakingly done with hundreds of colours in vegetable-dyed pashmina wool, had been minimised to eight colours.
In India, unfortunately, the recovery of the kanni shawls of Kashmir has not been successfully revived to anything resembling its original excellence. Copies survive today, though in profusion, as they enrich the design repertoire of western fashions and continue to form a large part of the designs sold in Europe in the ateliers of design houses. It is, perhaps, second to the chintz, the most copied design in the fashion history of the world.
Today I hope that this story is seeing a shifting tide. As Indian fashion becomes organic, there may still be some hope that we may refresh our design directories. A poster of Shah Rukh Khan, from his film Pathaan, has him sporting one of our archival Kashmir-printed shawl designs, on a casual shirt, with due credit to its Indian origin. The chintz in its many avatars is now popular in the repertoire. Could this be the beginning of a resurgence?
Seeing these designs on the big screens can effect a shift in the way India looks at its intellectual property as an integral proponent of the fashion industry. India has historically customised textiles for international and national markets, which led to constant innovation in our designs and processes. Today, an amalgamation of western concepts with indigenous craft is a strong representation of this. As an emerging leader in the global space, the flavour of India is what is needed to make the wheel (rather, chakra) turn. And while it is difficult to predict where Indian fashion is going to go in the next decade, given the propensity for theatrical dressing seen in weddings and religious events, a life-jacket can be extended to our extremely rare textile craft skills to reignite the industry on a large scale.
Ritu Kumar is one of India’s foremost designers
The views expressed are personal
