Raktim Phookan
(The author can be reached at email: raktimphookan@hotmail.com)
PART-I
(A travelogue across the mountains of Bhutan, Mon Yul, Tibet and over the oceans)
This is a story about a weave. A weave of finesse and mastery, with probably, no parallels in existence.
A story that never ceases to amaze, especially if you have seen portions of the weave at museums around the world or the mystery that surrounds its findings, to intrigue and excite in wonder. It narrates the tales of the Lord’s very own, in a tribute of devotion that qualifies itself to be described as a piece of human excellence.
Shall we then zoom in to the Indian State of Assam, tucked away in its north-east. As the legend goes, it was for the benefit of the great Koch general Chilarai, who was enthralled by the stories of Lord Krisna’s early life in Vrindavan, that Srimanta Sankardev, Assam’s most illustrious Vaishnava saint, agreed to depict the tales on a weave.
A man of many talents, Mahapurush Srimanta Sankardev detailed everything, right from the design to the threads, its patterns and colour combinations. To weave the same, he chose the artisans of Tantikuchi. Originally from Nazira in Upper Assam, these expert weavers of the Ahom Royalty were brought and settled at Tantikuchi by Chilarai, after a victory at Garhgaon. Sankardev personally supervised the complex weaving led by the master craftsman Gopal Tanti, more well known later as Sri Sri Mathuradas Burha Ata of the Barpeta Xatra, to complete it in about a year’s time.
The Saint is said to have presented this weave, christened as the vrindavani vastra, to the Koch Royals, Nara Narayan and Chilarai, sometime before his death in 1568. When it was unveiled at the Koch Court, it is supposed to have left the viewers spellbound, as if it were, a creation of the Heavens. The attention to detail was striking, as was its radiance of colours to portray a flawless depiction of tales on a weave, about 60 metres in length. Imagine, a documentary on a weave. Conceived and created more than 450 years ago!
Very little is known about what happened to this masterpiece thereafter. Particularly, how it disappeared from the Koch Royalty’s archives and thereby from Assam.
Four centuries later, fresh interest on the masterpiece was re-kindled again, due to a few discoveries across the oceans. It was the images of the Jean and Krishna Riboud Collection in the Musee Guimet of Paris that attracted the attention of John Clarke and Rosemary Crill of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Similar exhibits existed in their Museum and in the British Museum collection. Rosemary Crill was the first to publish information about them in 1992, by which time, art circles realised that there were fifteen such tapestries in various museum collections of the world.
Understandably, these pieces of exquisite figured silk lampas weaves were initially attributed to be of Tibetan origin, since they were either collected or sourced from Tibet or Bhutan. It is to the credit of specialists like Rosemary Crill, whose dedicated research helped trace their connection and roots to Assam. The captions and the eleven-line sequence from Sankardev’s Kali damana in that of the piece in the British Museum, being irrefutable evidence of their Assamese origin.
Today, about twenty fragments of such vrindabani vastra pieces exist. All very similar and of the same genre but dated to be of different times. Two pieces, the ones at the Musee Guimet and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, are estimated to be of Sankardev’s times. The piece at the Paris Museum could be a part of the original 16th century weave.
The tradition of weaving vrindabani vastras must have continued in Assam long after Sankardev passed away in 1568, as the dating of the museum pieces would suggest. One such piece, reckoned to have been woven more than 100 years later, was put to an unusual use by the finder or the tailor, who stitched it as the inner linings of a Chinese silk coat! This coat, now well known as the “Chepstow Coat” is preserved at the Museum of Chepstow, in Monmouthshire, Wales. It was acquired from the Cobb family of Caldicot Castle. They trace their ancestry back to Thomas Cobb, a merchant of Banbury in Oxfordshire, who died in 1766. Its earlier origins are not known, except that it could have been from Bhutan.
The vrindabani vastra piece that is preserved in the British Museum is thanks to a donation made by Perceval Landon, a journalist with an eye for art. Stationed in Delhi as a correspondent of the London newspapers, the Daily Mail and later of The Times, Landon accompanied the well-known military expedition to Tibet led by Sir Francis Younghusband, which began in the winter of 1903 and ended in the fall of 1904. It was on this trip that Landon acquired the tapestry from a monastery in Gobshi, between Gyantse and Karo La, on the road to Lhasa. On his return from India, Landon presented the beautiful brocaded weave (length: 937 centimetres; width: 231centimetres) to the British Museum.
It is not known how the tapestry was acquired by Landon, or to what use or value it was to the Tibetan Temple. A bachelor and a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, Landon is known to have bequeathed his papers to Kipling, with whom he had spent most of his last years at the poet and writer’s estate at Batemans, in Sussex. Sadly, like so much of Kipling’s own, Landon’s papers were destroyed by Kipling’s widow!
The discovery that Landon’s find was of Assamese origin brought out another fact to light. Checks revealed that all the other vrindabani vastra type of weaves in museum collections, including the “Chepstow Coat”, were also recorded as being of Tibet or Bhutan origin!
What were these tapestries doing in Tibet and Bhutan?
(To be continued)