This book celebrates India's spectacular textile art. It takes the reader on a visual odyssey spanning 500 years, tracing the images created on cloth for India's magnificent courts and temples, as well as for more distant but not less discerning patrons in Europe and Asia. It showcases the motifs and colours of some of the most remarkable Indian textiles to have survived from the past. Several of these have never been published before, and some appeared in textile books and journals so many decades ago that they are now nearly unknown. At a time when specialist studies have confined the appreciation and study of India's historical textiles to academic circles and connoisseurs, this book offers a unique survey of the subject to a new generation of textile enthusiasts, practitioners, and researchers.
