India and Southeast Asia were recently at the center of the world’s attention as a result of the tragic tsunami disaster. While the millions affected try to rebuild their lives and humanitarian efforts are made to replace infrastructure, the dignity of the survivors reminds us that the real riches of these countries are their extraordinary people and their ancient, yet vibrant, cultural traditions.
In Paris, the Musee Guimet, France’s national museum of Asian art, is presenting an exhibition entitled “Silken Lights: Woven Gold Silks from the Riboud Collection.” It is a tribute to the memory of Madame Krishna Riboud, a major collector and scholar of Asian textiles and a benefactor of the museum.
A descendent of the Nobel Prize-winning Indian author Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Krishna Roy Riboud (1926-2000) was born and brought up in Calcutta. A scholarship allowed her to study philosophy in the United States where she met her husband, Jean Riboud, a French banker and industrialist. Living in New York and later in Paris, the couple befriended and encouraged many young artists, writers, and filmmakers.
Madame Riboud devoted much time to introducing Indian art to the West and Western art to India. She began a collection of Asian textiles that became the world’s largest in private hands. For more than thirty years, she was a consultant to the Musee Guimet and made invaluable contributions to the study and presentation of Asian textile art. In 2001 in accordance with her wishes, her grandchildren donated her entire collection of 4000 pieces along with a library of specialized documents to the Musee Guimet.
“Silken Lights” is the first of a series of exhibitions intended to share the wealth of the Riboud Collection with the public. The show highlights the production of silk, the techniques of gold-thread weaving and the brilliant fabrics against a background of wide geographic diversity. “In Asia, textiles are essential to what we know about ancient civilizations” wrote Krishna Riboud in 1997. “Textiles defined culture in China and in India. As trade goods, they conveyed the impression of one people to another. The transfer of technology and patterns is tied to other transfers — religion, literature, art, economics, politics.” The far-reaching cultural impact of these Asian fabrics and garments is evident even in their once exotic, but now familiar, vocabulary, including the Indian words “pyjama” and “sari” and the Indonesian word “sarong.” “Damask” refers to a fabric of only one color where patterns are obtained by the effects of light on differently-woven textures, a technique developed in Mughal India in the 18th century and later used extensively in Damascus, Syria.
Silk production began in China as early as 3000 B.C. Techniques and styles became increasingly elaborate, making silk one of the ancient world’s most sought-after commodities. Under the Tang Dynasty in the 6th to 9th centuries, gold thread began to be woven into silk, a method possibly influenced by cultural and commercial exchanges with Central Asia, India and Iran. The rich artistic traditions of these countries were linked to China by the Silk Road which was a network of trade routes that facilitated the spread of luxury items and innovative technical skills as well as philosophy and other kinds of learning. China exported silks and ceramics, and imported glass and metalwork, often decorated with Persian or Central Asian motifs that were later incorporated into the Chinese design repertoire.
India, long famous for its cotton fabrics, was producing silk by the 4th century B.C., if not earlier. Roman merchants looked at India, particularly the Gujarat region at the crossroads of India and Persia, as the source of fine silks. With the establishment of the Sultanate of Delhi in the 12th century, India began supplying fine fabrics to royal courts throughout the Islamic world and even in Europe. The refined beauty and rich variety of Indian textiles reached their peak in the 16th century under the Mughals. In 1572 Emperor Akbar established royal workshops called “karkhana” for the production of silk in Lahore, Agra, Ahmedabad, Benares, and other centers. The demand for gold-woven silk, used for royal costumes, gifts, and upholstery, was so great that the fabric came to be made throughout India, even as far south as Kanchipuram in the Tamil region.
Indian, Arab and Chinese merchants established trading posts in Southeast Asia, where they exchanged fabrics for spices, dyes, and other local products. Indonesia was at the heart of this flourishing maritime trade, absorbing cultural influences from its neighbors and combining foreign elements with its native textile traditions. In the 7th century the Indonesian kingdom of Srivijaya appeared on the island of Sumatra; its capital was on the site of present-day Palembang. Capitalizing on the strategic value of the Straits of Malacca, the kingdom prospered and soon became noted for the quality of its textiles. Despite their quality and variety, however, Indonesia was overshadowed by India’s immense and highly refined textile production. All this changed in the 16th century because of European technical innovations. More advanced looms and weaving techniques produced a wealth of fabrics that rivaled Indian production. Though inferior in quality to India’s fine silks and cottons, the increased availability and much lower cost of European fabrics earned them an increasingly larger share of the world market. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and its textile factories marked the end of an era. India’s textile industry collapsed, opening the way for Southeast Asia to expand its customers.
Though practical and affordable, Europe’s mass-produced textiles were considered mediocre in quality. Buyers of luxury goods still looked to Asia, where Indonesian and Malaysian production were flourishing. The gold-woven silk of Indonesia, developed many centuries earlier during the Srivijaya dynasty and known as the art of “songket,” became widely known and earned a reputation for excellence that it retains to this day.
The “Silken Lights” exhibition illustrates the variety and grandeur of Asia’s gold-woven silk. It features more than a hundred pieces from China, Japan, India and Indonesia, tracing the development of the luxury fabric. The textiles are accompanied by art objects in metal, ceramic, and leather that share the fabrics’ motifs and may have influenced their design. The exhibit is completed by a display of old photographs from the Guimet’s archive, showing traditional weaving methods as well as costumes and draperies in their original settings. For more information, visit www.museeguimet.fr.
