Our Craft

Fifty years ago when the Maharajas of India merged their territories with a newly forming republic, the textile crafts of the country already staggering under the onslaught of industrialization, suffered a further loss. For Indian royalty had been, along with the great temples, patrons of the richest textile traditions of textile crafts in the world. Now Indian's royalty whose apparel would otherwise have continued to evolve in splendor and style as it had for generations, donned modern dress and put their traditional costumes away in trunks or hung them in sterile glass showcase of museums. 

Many of the myths of the exotic lands of the East stem from the opulence seen in the courts of India. India, from a very early time, was known for the use of gold embroidery on all manner of furnishing, trapping, parasols, equestrian ornaments, clothes and especially shoes. In fact, a legend popular with the Zardoz workers of Delhi relates the origin of this craft to a shoe specially embroidered in gold and silver, which was used to hit a king over the head!

Zarkas, a Persian word, means zari or gold embroidery, and since the thirteenth century, the craftsperson who worked with this medium, setting seed pearls, precious stones with use of fine gold and silver wire, was known as the Zardoz. My first encounter with the zardozi craftsmen was in 1972 in Kolkata. I had begun work on revival of patterns of old hand blocks. And, while studying miniature paintings of Akbar's period. I got an insight into the sophistication of colour palette and delicay of embroidery and design motifs used on the costumes of the royalty of that time. I was curious to experiment with the embroidery and the use of thread and gold. Walking around Kolkata's New Market, the Marwari area of Bara Bazaar, or Chandini Chowk near Red Fort in Old Delhi, looking for embroideries, brought home to me the fact that we had lost yet another vocabulary. There was some highly skilled workmanship available, but the base fabrics, the plastic replacements of pure gold and the design motifs were so far removed from the original, that the product did not resemble what had at one time bedazzled visitors to the royal courts of India.

Two young Zardoz craftsmen arrived at my studio one day. They had heard that I was making enquiries about embroideries, I inducted them into the development programme of our attempt to revive an old aesthetic. In the marketplace, tinsel had replaced gold. As a substitute, we used plastic drawn wire wrapped in cotton thread, to dull the tawdriness of lurex, and thus, sought to recreate the burnished look. I could not help being impressed by the high degree of skill they possessed.

As a commercial proposition, they were keen to complete pieces in their own village, Dhamadka, to which I was invited. Curious to visit the area, I made the trip to Ranihati and Uluberia which takes one across the river Hoogly. This is where, in an area of approximately 300 square miles, the zardoz workers live, and practise their crafts in their huts. An image far removed as one conceives it, from Mughal India, and its formal karkhanas (court workshops), in arid Delhi and Agra, where the craft reaches its zenith.

The history of gold thread work goes back to ancient India. Mention is made of it in Vedic literature. In the Mahabharta and Ramayana. The Bharhut sculpture and Ajanta figures are depicted wearing ornamented clothes which could have been embroidered in gold. In the Ajanta figures foreigners of apparent Iranian descent are shown wearing heavily embroidered garments in sharp contrast to the simpler garment worn by the indigenous royalty. There is definite mention of gold weaving and fabrics encrusted with precious stones in the Kushana period and there is some evidence of it in the Mathura sculptures, where a seated image of Surya has embroidery on its tunic topped with a heavily encrusted cap.

More concrete evidence of large scale manufacture of zardozi textile is found after the advent of the sultanate period in India, where there is mention of royal workshops making robes (khillats), animal covering, palanquin covers, shamianas etc, where a work force of 400 was employed. The craft went into decline when Ferozeshah Tuglaq put a restriction on the use of figurative motifs on the robes, and with other stringent measures the craft could not survive under the bigotry and looked outside its boundaries to move into the courts of Pahan kingdoms, to those of Rajasthan, Kohlapur, Avadh, Gujarat and Andhra. With the emergence of the Muslim nobility on Bengal, the craftsmen found rich patronage and settled down in the Ranihati ornamentation, now naturalized to Bengal.

Of all the crafts in India, the zardozi craft seems to have flourished and survives to the present day. It achieved its renaissance and subsequent zenith during the Mughal period and thereafter, lost its aesthetic quality. During the last fifty years, the revival of zardozi has been phenomenal. Not only does yet again for interiors of mega weddings. zardozi is as tenacious as the wires the craftsmen work with.