The Art of Cloth in Mughal India

(Hardback)

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A richly illustrated history of textiles in the Mughal Empire.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast array of textiles circulated throughout the Mughal Empire. Made from rare fibers and crafted using virtuosic techniques, these exquisite objects animated early modern experience, from the intimate, sensory pleasure of garments to the monumentality of imperial tents. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India tells the story of textiles crafted and collected across South Asia and beyond, illuminating how cloth participated in political negotiations, social conversations, and the shared seasonal rhythms of the year.

Drawing on small-scale paintings, popular poetry, chronicle histories, and royal inventory records, Sylvia Houghteling charts the travels of textiles from the Mughal imperial court to the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles. She shows how the art of cloth encompassed both the making of textiles as well as their creative uses. Houghteling asks what cloth made its wearers feel, how it acted in space, and what images and memories it conjured in the mind. She reveals how woven objects began to evoke the natural environment, convey political and personal meaning, and span the distance between faraway people and places.

Beautifully illustrated, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India offers an incomparable account of the aesthetics and techniques of cloth and cloth making and the ways that textiles shaped the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia.

Reviews

"Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association"
"[The Art of Cloth in Mughal India] maps a history of a specific art form while offering a multilayered methodological corrective to the field of art history. . . . [This book] is a crucial, multidisciplinary addition to the field that combines art and architectural history with explorations into comparative literature, botany, and the history of trade."---Murad Khan Mumtaz, caa.reviews
"Drawing on a superb range of material . . . Houghteling weaves a lively and comprehensive tale of the production, circulation and sensory experience of textiles during the age of the Great Mughals (155-1700). . . . A remarkable aesthetic sensitivity permeates her erudite research in this superb account of the lives and meanings of Mughal textiles."---Emily Hannam, World of Interiors

Author Bio

Sylvia Houghteling is assistant professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College.