Spinning a fine tale

Woven in each carpet are yarns about people's lives. You walk all over them, you take them for granted and sometimes you don't even reali...

Woven in each carpet are yarns about people’s lives.

You walk all over them, you take them for granted and sometimes you don’t even realise that you are treading on the past. But, if you look with a keen eye, you will notice that each carpet has history woven into it. Read between the weaving and a rather interesting story emerges. Most carpets have had an eventful journey through the passage of time. If carpets could speak, they would spin yarns about the lives of people who have stepped on them.

For instance, the craft of carpet weaving was imported from Persia into India during the great Moghul period in the 16th century. The main centres of weaving came up in Kashmir, Agra, Jaipur, Mirzapur (Badoi) and Shahjahanpur. And obviously, the designs had a distinctly Persian flavour about them. However, over the centuries, Indian designers have come into their own — resulting in a beautiful blend of the two schools of design.

The story goes on, may be with a little embellishment, that Indian carpets came to the market as "jail" carpets. In the last century, prisoners, particularly in Agra and Jaipur, were given the task of making extremely tough carpets. It is said that good weavers were resentenced at the end of their term on any pretext so that they could finish the carpet they were weaving.

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Today, jail terms are no longer given to good weavers. Instead the process has taken on all the shades of a well-developed industry and carpet making begins with the selection of the requisite design and colour. All this is now done by expert design masters and not jail wardens. The various skeins of wool are then reeled by women mostly. Once the wool is ready and the designs drawn up, workers sit in front of looms with a miniature copy of the design before them. The weaving masters call out the colour and specifications of the knot and hands fly across the machine, in response to his voice. Work proceeds slowly — day after day, week after week — until what seems a lifetime, the carpet is taken off the loom. It is now ready for trimming and fringing, and then for a final scrub and a long bath in the tank. Once dry, it is ready to be displayed. These hand-knotted carpets are, of course, among the most expensive to be found. And, if the carpet is made of silk and has a high number of knots per square inch, it can cost upwards of Rs 20,000 per square inch.

Kashmir also produces some of the finest Indian carpets that are mainly copies of Persian designs. You may have a Kashan rug to sweep all your secrets under or you may have the "tree of life" that has a variety of birds and animals on its spreading branches. Your carpet may have a display of the most heavenly flowers and an impressive central medallion or it may depict a royal hunt. It may be wool-based or a mix of wool and silk or a pure silk affair that is too precious to trample under foot and has to be reverently placed as a wall hanging. The Bukhara carpets or the Afghani kilims that come from Turkistan have geometrical designs and are more formal and stately. Jaipur and Agra tend to follow these designs with a mix of the Persian ones.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of rug lore to the collector is the "prayer rug" or the "namazlyk". Of all the knotted pile rugs, it was the prayer rug which was made for practical use. The other types of rugs were, of course made for floor coverings but many were also made for other uses such as for covering diwans or as wall hangings. The prayer rug, however, is used by devout Muslim owners five times a day. It is laid on any surface available at the appointed hour, knelt on and after prayer, rolled up and carried around until the next time. Consequently, prayer rugs receive more wear, particularly in one area of the rug, than any other type of rug.

Identification of prayer rugs, is not difficult as most are deep red or brown, curvilinear, with many flowers, often with borders filled with verses from the Koran.

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India has been a carpet producing country for many years. In UP, Mirzapur (Badoi) and Shahjahanpur have come up as main carpet weaving centres. Carpets here do not have the fine craftsmanship of the Kashmiri ones but they are more affordable. They also do not weave in silk. Kashmir is the only place in India that does carpets in silk. But whatever the lineage of the carpet, the more interesting aspect is the stories they tell about their owners. A beautiful carpet in one Indian Army Officers’ mess had a rather worn out, weary patch on one side of it but an interesting explanation for it. The story goes that it was the side diagonally opposite the big armchair where the officer-in-command normally sat, with his handlebar moustache and whisky in one hand, waiting for dinner to the announced. And for years the chief maitre de would announce dinner every evening by saying "Shrimaan, bhojan tayyar hai," saluting and clicking his heels on that very part of the carpet. Over the years, that action created a large, bald patch on that beautiful floor rug.

A few tips on how to care for your carpet, particularly with the onset of the monsoons:

Keep your carpet well brushed and vacuumed.

Do not spread over a damp floor. In fact, line it with hessian cloth for protection against damp.

For additional spring, spread foam under finely-woven carpets.

Dry clean and shampoo your carpet ever so often.

Finally, beat the obstinate dust settled into the pile every year or so.

Keep away from direct sunlight to keep your carpet from fading.