CARPETS 



AND RUGS 

 Pile Stitch 



INDIAN CAKPETS AND EUGS 



Persian 

 Influence. 



Indian 

 Influence. 



Jail Influence. 



Native Demand. 



Machine-made. 



Pile 

 Carpets. 



Pan jab. 



Lahore. 



pany's hall. It bears the Company's arms and is Persian in design. It is quite 

 probable, however, that India possessed a carpet industry of its own, though 

 very possibly not in pile carpets, long anterior to the advent of Persian influence 

 (see under Multan, also Ellore). But it would be difficult if not impossible to 

 prove either that India possessed an indigenous art of pile-carpet weaving before 

 the date named, or that the introduced industry made much progress for many 

 years subsequently. It, however, survived and in time absorbed so many 

 local conceptions as to justify the description " Indian Carpets." It has been 

 said that the modern jail-made pile carpets have debased and degraded a system 

 of manufacture that had been " literally and figuratively interwoven with the 

 life of the people." But if the pile-carpet industry was only introduced and 

 fostered by Akbar and practised by his co-religionists, and if it be the fact that 

 it has not to the present day been taken up by any recognised Indian caste, 

 it is difficult to see how it could be described as having become " interwoven 

 with the life of the people." It is much more likely that the modern jail-manu- 

 facture preserved from extinction the foreign art, than that it debased and 

 degraded it. Milburn (Or. Comm., 1813, i., 136) says that carpets were formerly 

 an article of trade, but through " the improved state of our own manufactures 

 and the heavy duty on Persian carpets, they are now seldom imported." It 

 would thus seem fairly certain that by the beginning of the 19th century the 

 Indian carpet trade (such as it had been previously), like that of Persia, had 

 suffered greatly through the rise of British manufacturing enterprise. The 

 craftsmen in all countries produce the standard of goods demanded of them ; 

 it would therefore be most interesting to obtain any sort of indication of the 

 class of goods in demand immediately prior to the modern jail-made article. 

 So far as Indian records are concerned there is nothing to show that the Natives 

 of India to any material extent ever used, and certainly to-day they do not use, 

 Indian pile carpets. Pyrard (Voy. E. Ind., 1601-10 (Engl. transl.), ii., 248) 

 observes that " They make carpets of the fashion of those of Persia and Ormus, 

 but not so fine or so dear, for they use the rougher and longer wool ; the patterns 

 are however the same ; they also make cotton carpets with bands of many 

 colours." So long ago as 1655, Terry in his Voyage to East India (ed. 1777, 129) 

 pointed out that the Eastern artists were essentially imitative. He speaks of 

 their cotton and silk carpets, but makes no reference to woollen carpets. Thus, 

 then, for the degradation of Indian art not the Government nor the Natives 

 are responsible, but the people of Europe and America, who ask for and there- 

 fore get cheap inartistic productions, And this has possibly been confirmed 

 definitely by an invention recently announced that will enable Oriental carpets 

 to be produced by new and special machinery at a price far below that of the 

 hand-loom weaver. 



For the purpose of easy reference the classification employed in Indian Art 

 at Delhi may be pursued in this review : 



I. Pile Carpets : 



1. Pan jab. The chief centres of the carpet industry in this province 

 are Amritsar, Kashmir, Lahore, Multan, Hoshiarpur, Batala, Bahawalpur, 

 Kohat and Bannu, and they have been named in their order of importance. 

 But Peshawar has also to be added, since it is the great emporium of the Trans- 

 frontier traffic in carpets brought from Afghanistan, Turkestan and Persia. 



Lahore. It has already been suggested that the manufacture of carpets 

 at Lahore, established very possibly by the Emperor Akbar, soon decayed, and 

 in support of that view it may be pointed out that in Honigberger's Thirty-five 

 Years in the East (a work that deals specially with Lahore prior to 1852) there 

 is no mention of an indigenous carpet industry. In this connection also it may 

 be observed that the Ain-i-Akbari makes frequent reference to the Persian 

 carpets as regularly imported into India (Blochmann, transl., 55). And it would 

 seem probable that most of the Lahore carpets mentioned in the Records of the 

 East India Co., and elsewhere, refer to that Trans-frontier trade and not to 

 Indian woven carpets. A letter to the East India Co., for example, of the year 

 1617 (Foster, E.I.C. Letters, vi., 250) mentions that " carpets to be well 

 chosen would require a long time : those which are true Lahore carpets are 

 not suddenly to be gotten." It is possible that this may point to the survival 

 of the Muhammadan carpet-weaving industry (introduced by the Emperor some 

 30 or 40 years previously), or it may simply denote the uncertain Trans-frontier 

 supply, the carpets being picked up in the bazars, not ordered from the weavers. 

 At the present day, at any rate, the most prized carpets in Lahore Museum are 



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