Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West.

Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West, by Rosemary Crill. V&A Publishing, London in association with Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2008. 144 pages, 160 colour illustrations, 1 map. Price not mentioned.

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We no longer need to make a trip to the V&A in London to view the wonderful "palampores" once made by the ingenious painter-dyers of India's southeastern Coromandel coast. Rosemary Crill's new book has unlocked the museum's storehouse for us and 88 of their glorious 17th- and 18th-century chintz specimens have come tumbling out, to be seen and enjoyed in armchair comfort.

Few remains of India's proverbially rich and ancient textile heritage kindle the recall and nostalgia as do the iconic flower-patterned cotton cloths famously called "chintz". Rosemary Crill, a distinguished specialist in the field of Indian textiles, has authored several books on Indian textiles, each of which serves as a standard reference on its subject. That she has, after 28 years spent in the Indian department at the Victoria and Albert Museum--where she presently holds the position of Senior Curator for South Asia--chosen to revisit an old favourite theme of Indian chintzes has its reasons.

A full 38 years have elapsed since the seminal book on the subject of chintz was published. Authored by the eminent textile historians John Irwin and Katherine B. Brett, Origins of Chintz introduced, for the first time in 1970, the important collections of chintzes jointly drawn from the V&A, London and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Ironically, that pioneering book, despite being a singularly indispensable resource for serious textile scholars, carries illustrations of the now-famous early chintzes imported into Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries almost only in black-and-white plates (barring eight plates in colour). For a subject dealing with the mastery of dyes, the absence of colour was indeed an unfortunate limitation. In any case, the good book has long since been out of print. Readers familiar with this invaluable work may recall the additional frustration faced in figuring out which textile belonged to which museum, as the illustrations were not arranged in separate or distinct sections.

The author of the present attractively designed and produced book explains at the outset that while she has drawn primarily on the information provided in Irwin and Brett's estimable book, the new work includes acquisitions made by the V&A in the years after 1970. What first meets your eye as you pick up the book is the inviting, chaste-white cover strewn with a variety of flowers and leaves that magically sprout from the same tree, all in different colours. The tree itself emanates from a clump designed with an intricate, exquisitely drawn filigree in dye-resist. Clearly these patterns were figments of the imaginative minds of very skilful craftsmen of the Coromandel (Cholamandalam) coast, guided by musters or sample patterns received from Europe through the East India Company's agents stationed in India. As Crill shows, the results were not without surprise, whence stemmed their exotic appeal.

Open the book, and you have 31 pages of lucid, illustrated text followed by 113 pages of lavish colour plates. Each of the chintz pieces is shown in full with enlarged details in many cases. The latter are where the thrill lies for the reader, as, for the very first time, the stunning close-up details of the V&A hangings, bed-covers, and garments reveal what it is that made this particular textile art-form so distinctive and desirable in its time to be absorbed and adapted into the decorative arts of the West, transforming the way people there would dress or furnish their homes. The popularly understood meaning of the word "chintz" in the past century or so has mistakenly come to mean any glazed cotton furnishing fabric with a floral printed pattern. This definition blurs its original meaning as a painstakingly handdrawn, mordant-dyed, and resist-dyed textile called "chint" (chhint), a unique contribution to the textile arts by Indian textile craftsmen of the pre-industrialized world.

This book focuses on the mordant-dyed and resist-dyed textiles made on the Coromandel Coast (in today's states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh) for the Western markets. As Crill observes, this art was also practised in other centres in Gujarat, and Burhanpur and Sironj (in Madhya Pradesh), but the art of the Coromandel Coast was unsurpassed in fineness of drawing, precision of dyeing, and depth of colours. The secret of chintz-making lay in the dyer knowing which mordants or metallic salts to use and in what strength to produce specific colours by predicting their reactions to particular dyestuffs. The mordant was the key to fix the dye to the cotton base. The resultant bright patterns were amazingly colour-fast, unlike the fugitive colours known till that time to cloth-makers in Europe. This was Europe before the arrival of that object of bodily comfort we take so much for granted today--soft, washable, absorbable cotton clothing. To wearers used to the ubiquitous drab colours of wool and linen, or the expensiveness and high-maintenance of silk and lace, the gaily coloured, affordable cotton chintz imports from India offered a revolutionary new option. One only has to imagine the effect of an unseasonally hot summer on ladies with tight bodices, long sleeves, and skirts with yards and yards of flounce! Remember, we are speaking of two centuries before air-conditioning and dry-cleaning were to arrive to keep or take the sweat off those charming Victorian clothes.

Peppering her brief text with interesting facts, Crill traces the historical background, the process and trade in chintz, describing its rise to fame, the ban imposed on it in 1701, and its eventual decline by the end of the 18th century in the face of inexpensive industrial imitations. It is a surprising and ironic reality that the famous chintzes represented in the catalogue are from a period when the embargo was officially in force. Indian readers will be amused at an anecdote Crill relates here, reminiscent of Bollywood stars flexing the law, using their celebrity status: London society icons and popular theatre couple David and Eva Garrick had their bed-hangings of imported Indian chintz confiscated amidst much media publicity, only to be cleared after a "friendly compromise". The said bed with hangings is now in the V&A.

Among the many important examples of the V&A's chintzes illustrated and described here are hangings that feature the iconic flowering trees growing from rocky mounds inhabited by pheasants, squirrels, bears, deer, monkeys, rabbits, butterflies, and birds. We are told that a white ground with dainty flowers was favoured more by the English, and a red ground with large flowers by the Dutch. Designs illustrated also include cornucopias, heraldic devices and coat-of-arms, Armenian altar cloths bearing Christian iconography, or Chinoiserie patterns like the one with concubines at their toilette. "Pelican in her Piety" shows a mother pelican pecking blood from her breast to feed her chicks, symbolic of Christ feeding his flock with his blood. Those familiar with the figurative kalamkaris of Kalahasti (Andhra Pradesh) will find a quirky counterpart in the mordant-dyed and resist-dyed mid-18th-century hanging (plate 17) showing Don Quixote bidding farewell to his trusty Sancho Panza. Crill suggests that the pattern may be based on a print by the French artist J.B.H. Bonnart (d. 1726). We are told that this, like many of the hangings in the catalogue, are part of the bequest made by G.P. Baker, the textile merchant and author of the pioneering study, Calico Painting and Printing in the East Indies in the 17th and 18th Centuries published in his lifetime in 1921.

Votaries of India's textile tradition will appreciate the heights reached by the chintz-makers of those times, predecessors of today's kalamkari artists. The latter, even when using natural dyes, no more execute patterns in dye-resist.

A wealth of information finds itself compressed into a sparse but breezy text, bearing Crill's hallmark of clarity and simplicity. Not aiming to replicate John Irwin's book on Western chintzes, the scope she sets for this book keeps technical information to a minimum, forgoing glossary and lengthy bibliography. Nor does her survey emphasize regional variations like "les Indiennes" in France or "Sits" in Holland. Yet, she succeeds in explaining a complex and wide-ranging field from the ground up, serving as it does as an excellent and informative catalogue of the V&A's chintz collection. The concise and simple text will doubtless appeal to a much wider audience, beyond the confines of research scholars. At a time when museums around the world are redefining their outreach programmes to increase footfall, this book offers a good model of inclusive scholarship to tap equally the connoisseur and the nonspecialist, particularly students and practitioners of interior and fashion design. Textile enthusiasts can now hope that the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, will take a cue from Rosemary Crill to present an account of their museum's wonderful chintz holdings, the notable collection of their benefactor, the late Harry Wearne.

And, perhaps, looking at the treasures Crill has revealed in this book will make us want to take that ride to South Kensington after all, to see those marvellous V&A chintzes in their original splendour.