The rich purple, pink and blue colour palette is typical of south-east Indian chintzes and palampores. The vibrant colours were achieved through complex dyeing processes employing natural mordants and resist techniques. The outlines of the composition were first block-printed, after which the dyes were applied and the finer details hand-painted. In this example, the use of block printing has not compromised the quality of the design, particularly in the beautiful flowering vine that grows along the cusped arch and into the two spandrels. The vibrant highlights, hand-painted onto the cloth, create a particularly rich and attractive panel. The overall result is a textile that exemplifies the refined production of Indian cottons, which were immensely popular throughout the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Textiles from India were already a luxurious commodity in the ancient world, reaching the Roman Empire through maritime and overland trade routes. Celebrated for their colourful dyes and sophisticated decorative techniques, these textiles later became integral to global systems of trade and cultural exchange in the pre-modern and modern periods. Throughout the centuries, they were valued not only for their beauty but also for their adaptability to the tastes and requirements of diverse overseas markets. Indeed, this beautiful prayer mat (jainamaz) from India was probably made for export to the Islamic world most probably to Iran.
One of the most important centres of textile production and maritime commerce was the port town of Machilipatnam (formerly Masulipatnam), situated at the northern extremity of the Krishna delta on the Coromandel Coast, where this prayer cloth was made. From the sixteenth century onwards, under the control of the Golconda Sultanate, Machilipatnam became a major centre for the manufacture and export of painted and printed cotton, called chintz (or kalamkari) textiles. Golconda encouraged immigration from Iran, and there was a strong Persian presence in Machilipatnam, as well as a market for Coromandel textiles in Iran as early as the turn of the seventeenth century (Subrahmanyam 1988, pp. 505, 510). The town connected inland weaving communities with international trading networks extending across the Indian Ocean. Armenian merchants played a crucial role in the textile trade, particularly after the establishment of New Julfa outside Isfahan in the seventeenth century. Their commercial network facilitated the movement of textiles to markets as distant as the Ottoman Empire, Southeast Asia and Europe, in addition to Safavid and later Qajar Iran.
This cotton jainamaz, was produced for Islamic prayer, as it features a mihrab (prayer niche), here framed by floral ornaments, cypress trees and architectural elements. The type derives from earlier Mughal prototypes (see two late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century prayer cloths in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London IM 23-1936 and IS 56-1950). The “onion” finials are reminiscent of Golconda architecture, reminding us of the historical links between Machilipatnam and the Deccan Sultanate. Other jainamaz cloths of similar design are dated between 1854 and 1895, attesting to a period of production during the second half of the nineteenth century (Anand and Sahiar 1979, p. 109; Wearden 2016, p. 83). An example dated 1881–82 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, shows that these textiles were produced in continuous lengths comprising several arches and later divided into individual prayer niches according to personal or market requirements (Crill 2015, p. 99).
Bibliography
Anand, Mulk Raj, and Dolly Sahiar. Homage to Kalamkari. Marg Publ., 1979.
Crill, Rosemary (ed.). The Fabric of India. V & A Publishing, 2015.
Sebouh David Aslanian. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590-1665” in Modern Asian Studies, 1988, Vol. 22, No. 3, Special Issue: Asian Studies in Honour of Professor Charles Boxer, pp. 503-530.
Wearden, Jennifer Mary. Decorative Textiles from Arab & Islamic Cultures: Selected Works from the Al Lulwa Collection. Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016.
