The Mughal Empire

Mughal Textiles

In the late seventeenth century, the textile export of the Mughal Empire was one of the largest single commodity flows in the world economy. The English East India Company, the Dutch VOC, and the French Compagnie des Indes orientales all drew substantial portions of their Asian trade from the Mughal provinces, principally Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, and Bengal, and the European demand for Indian muslin, calico, and silk was a major element in the silver flows that sustained the global bullion economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Mughal state was, in John Guy’s phrase, the workshop of the world (Guy, Woven Treasures from the Indian Subcontinent, V&A, 2000). The older work of Jasleen Dhamija on the regional traditions and the Ain-i-Akbari’s detailed list of imperial textile varieties remain the standard starting points.

What the Mughals wore and exported

Three broad families of fabric dominated. Muslin — the hand-spun, hand-woven cotton cloth of Dhaka and the eastern regions — was the most prized. The Ain-i-Akbari distinguishes grades of muslin by translucency and weight: the abrawan (“running water”) and the shabnam (“morning dew”) were the finest, so delicate that, in the celebrated anecdote of the French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a single garment could be drawn through a finger ring (Tavernier, Travels in India, ed. Crooke, 1925, vol. I, p. 113). The jamdani — a muslin with the supplementary weft motif woven in by hand during the weaving — is the form that has survived into the modern Bangladeshi textile tradition and is a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Silk of the western and central regions formed the second family. The paithani of Paithan in the Deccan, with its gold-wrapped weft; the himroo of Aurangabad and Hyderabad, a silk-and-cotton blend; the gaji of Surat; the patola of Patan in Gujarat, a double-ikat silk with a notoriously long and complex loom cycle; and the mashru of Patan and Bharuch, a silk-and-cotton blend developed to comply with the Islamic prohibition on pure silk for men, were all major elements of the imperial wardrobe. The baluchari of Murshidabad, with its Ramayana and Mahabharata figured motifs in supplementary weft, is a later Mughal- and post-Mughal development.

Brocade was the third family. The kinkhwab (literally “what the heart desires”) of Lahore, the farsh-i-chandni of Burhanpur, the badla of the same city (brocade worked with silver thread), and the banarasi brocade of Varanasi were the principal imperial brocades. The Mughal taste favoured a heavier, more architectural brocade than the lighter silk brocades of Gujarat, and the standard kinkhwab of the imperial wardrobe combined silk, gold-wrapped thread, and the zari of the imperial karkhanas (workshops).

The karkhanas

The imperial karkhanas were the workshops of the imperial household, and they were a major economic institution in their own right. The Ain-i-Akbari (trans. Blochmann, vol. I, pp. 65–90) lists the textile karkhanas of Akbar’s court in detail, and it is clear from the list that the imperial workshop produced a substantial portion of the imperial wardrobe in-house: the karkhanas of Lahore, Agra, and Ahmedabad were the principal centres, and the daulat khana-i-khas (the imperial treasury) maintained substantial reserves of the finest abrawan, the kinkhwab, and the zardozi for the use of the emperor and the imperial family. The same karkhanas also produced for the great nobles and for the export market, and the early English and Dutch Companies preferred the imperial karkhana production to the regional product.

Embroidery

The principal embroidery traditions of the period were zardozi (gold and silver embroidery on velvet and brocade, of imperial and Lucknow tradition), kashida (the chain-stitch embroidery of Kashmir, with its characteristic boteh or paisley motif), gota (the gold-and-silver lace work of the Rajput and imperial courts), chikan (the white-on-white embroidery of Lucknow, principally a nineteenth-century development), phulkari (the bold floral embroidery of the Punjab, principally a Sikh and post-Sikh development), and kantha (the running-stitch embroidery of Bengal on layered cotton). The zardozi of the imperial karkhanas was the most expensive and the most labour-intensive; the surviving examples in the museums of South Asia and Europe are mostly of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century date and document the technical sophistication of the tradition.

Dyes

The dyes of the Mughal textile tradition were almost entirely natural. Indigo, drawn from Indigofera tinctoria and principally from Bihar, Bengal, and the Coromandel coast, was the standard blue and the single most valuable Indian dye export; the Ain-i-Akbari gives the Bengal indigo as one of the largest single provincial exports. Madder (the Rubia cordifolia) was the standard red, supplemented by lac (the Kerria lacca insect), the chay-root of the Coromandel coast, and the New World cochineal (introduced by the Portuguese). Safflower and saffron were the principal yellows; turmeric was the kitchen yellow; and pomegranate rind was used for a less common yellow. The mordants were principally alum and iron oxide. The shift to synthetic dyes occurred only in the late nineteenth century, and the modern revival of natural dyeing in the regional textile traditions is a recent development.

Trade with the European companies

The Mughal textile trade with the European companies was the principal economic relationship of the late empire. The English East India Company established its first factory at Surat in 1613 and progressively expanded its procurement network through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the bulk of the textile trade shifting to Bengal in the eighteenth century after the conquest of Plassey. The Dutch VOC drew substantial quantities of Indian textile for the intra-Asian trade (the gulden trade with the East Indies) and for the European market. The French Company, the Danish Company, and the Ostend Company were smaller participants. The principal English and Dutch imports into Europe were the calicoes (printed or painted cotton cloth) of Gujarat and the Coromandel coast, the muslins of Bengal, the silks of Bengal and the Deccan, and the mixed silk-cotton fabrics of the western and central regions. The European demand for Indian textiles was, by the early eighteenth century, the largest single component of the Anglo-Asian trade.

The deindustrialisation

The Mughal textile industry was not destroyed by an external shock so much as it was progressively displaced over the course of the nineteenth century. The British tariff regime, the destruction of the indigenous textile industry of Bengal in the immediate aftermath of Plassey, the systematic deindustrialisation of the Indian textile industry in the nineteenth century, the collapse of the export market in the face of British competition, the loss of the patronage of the Mughal and successor courts, and the broader social and economic changes of the colonial period together produced a near-total collapse of the tradition. The older karkhanas closed; the bawarchi-khana traditions of the imperial household dispersed; the regional sahukar (merchant) networks that had financed the indigenous trade were progressively subordinated to the European Companies; and the surviving traditions of muslin, brocade, and embroidery were reduced to small-scale, regional, often single-village production. The classic treatment is the relevant chapter in Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963; rev. 1999).

The legacy in modern South Asia

The Mughal textile tradition survives in three principal forms in the modern period. The first is the regional sari tradition — the Banarasi brocade of Varanasi, the Chanderi of Madhya Pradesh, the patola of Patan, the paithani of Paithan, the baluchari of Murshidabad — which is recognisably the descendant of the imperial tradition. The second is the modern Mughlai aesthetic of bridal and ceremonial wear (the lehenga and the jama of the bride and groom), which draws on the Mughal zardozi, the kinkhwab, and the peshwaz of the imperial wardrobe. The third is the international luxury market in Indian textiles (the pashmina of Kashmir, the Dhaka muslin, the kantha of Bengal), which has experienced a substantial revival in the last thirty years. The Ain-i-Akbari’s account of the imperial textile industry is, in effect, the catalogue of an industry whose products remain central to the cultural identity of modern South Asia.

For the costume and personal adornment tradition, see the Mughal costumes and personal adornment and the Mughal jewelry pages. The textile tradition in the painting tradition is treated on the Mughal art and miniature painting page. The economic context of the textile industry is treated in the Mughal revenue page and the economic decline of the Mughal Empire page. The European trade in textiles is treated in the European trading companies in Mughal India page.

Sources

  • John Guy, Woven Treasures from the Indian Subcontinent (V&A Publications, 2000).
  • Jasleen Dhamija, ed., Handwoven Fabrics of India (Mapin, 2000).
  • Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. on textiles.
  • Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann, vol. I (1873; reprint Low Price Publications, 1989), on the imperial karkhanas.
  • Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (Asia Publishing House, 1963; rev. ed. Aligarh, 1999), on the textile economy and the colonial deindustrialisation.
  • Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (The New Cambridge History of India V.2, 1998), on the European trade.
  • Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, trans. V. Ball, ed. William Crooke, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1925), for the famous finger-ring muslin anecdote.