When my daughter came back from uni for Christmas
holidays, I couldn’t wait to dash with her to the V&A with my new
membership card plus guest.
The “Fabric of India” exhibition was the main aim of
the day, but we ended up seeing the “Al Thani” collection first. It was all
about priceless jewels, diamonds as big as peanuts, rubies as big as walnuts
and emeralds like hazelnuts. Just the day before I’d toured the centre of my
village and popped into the jewellery shop for the first time, the luscious
rings and earrings had tiny precious stones and were already very expensive, but
the gems from Al Thani collection were from another planet. The first piece, a
turban jewel, had seventeen diamonds of the weight of 152.64 carats.
Most of the gems of the exhibition were from in
India or in Sri Lanka. Their names quite revealing, sometimes disturbing:
Idol’s eye, Mirror of Paradise, the Star of Golconda. There were also precious
jade bowls, enamelling works and some spinel necklaces, their stones so big
that made me think of pebbles collected on a shore, which they clearly were
not.
Interestingly, with the British rule in the middle
of the 19th century, the production of jewellery moved out of the
palaces and entered the commercial world reaching Europe. Consequently they
adapted their style to Western tastes. The Indian manner, to cut and polish the
stone aimed to adapt and interpret the gem’s natural shape without changing it drastically,
moved to the Western aesthetic of cutting gems into geometrically perfect forms.
These angular, regular shapes, captured and refracted light, giving that
astonishing, mesmerizing effect that makes gems so attractive, and, I daresay,
hypnotizing.
Some photos of Indian aristocrats on display drew my
attention: a baby in his father’s arms covered in pearl strings, women with
heavy bangles, earrings and nose rings all reminded me of portraits of European
queens and kings, with their clothes embroidered with pearls and precious
stones. The essence of jewels is evidently linked to power.
The last section was dedicated to large stones
carved with deities and inscriptions invoking God. It sounded weird as most, if
not all religions preach frugality and charity.
Some of the videos were very interesting, showing
how Indian craftsmen made an enamel brooch using traditional tools or how they
cut an astounding gem from a rough stone that looked similar to an ordinary
piece of rock.
The Fabric of India exhibition was pretty different.
It made me realize how much fabrics have always been important in Indian
production since ancient times. In Ancient Greece the name ‘India’ meant cotton
and the word ‘indigo’ derives from the word India. And still today, India is
undoubtedly part of the fabric global trade. Each region of the Indian
subcontinent specialized in a particular fabric, e.g. golden silk of Assan,
fine cotton of Bengal, red dyes of south-east India. The dyes were originally
extracted from plants and roots, like pomegranates rinds, madder root, tinbura
root, chay plant, and insects like the lac beetle. To fix the dye they used
alum, a mordant, which reminded me of the war between Florence and Volterra
under Lorenzo de’ Medici rule caused by Florence greedy aims on alum mines,
precious for their fabric production.
India exported fabrics all over the known world,
Mediterranean countries, Middle-East, Africa and Europe, then also Japan and the
Americas. Interesting videos showed how they hand make wooden blocks to print
patterns, how they weave using handlooms and the Ari embroidery technique made
by men using hooked tools. Beautiful works that required great skills in
craftsmanship.
At the end of the exhibition they explained how the
British Empire tried to break this ancient tradition taking the monopoly of the
fabric production, producing fabrics in Lancashire mills that were then sold in
India. Unemployment spread and only very fine or very rough fabric production
survived. From this it’s obvious why Gandhi wanted to inspire people to spin by
showing them himself and insisted that everybody had to weave their own clothes.
Significantly the spinning wheel is in the Indian flag to highlight the great
importance of their fabric production. Today’s Indian fashion design takes into
account traditional techniques like mirror work, hand weaving, natural dyes and
chikan embroidery, elevating them to a new level using new materials and
silhouettes.
A revealing day.