Vrindavani Vastra

Assam Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma deserves praise for working out an arrangement with the British Museum authorities in London to bring to the state the Vrindavani Vastra, a very sacred piece of fabric which originally belongs to this land, in a little over one year from now. The Vrindavani Vastra occupies a very special place in the heart of the Assamese people. It is said that Srimanta Sankaradeva, the great saint-reformer and renaissance man of Assam who lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, had created the Vrindavani Vastra at the request of Naranarayan, the great Koch king. While Naranarayan prayed for depicting the life of Krishna on a piece of fabric, Sankaradeva chose only the childhood part of Krishna’s life for the purpose and engaged a number of weavers of Tantikuchi near present-day Barpeta to carry out the task. Headed by Gopal, a renowned maral, or master weaver, a team of artisans took about six months to complete the amazing fabric, with Sankaradeva making a daily visit to supervise the task. On several occasions, he even sat down on the loom to make corrections in the motifs so that the work came out flawless. The wonderful tapestry, which was ninety feet long and four and a half feet wide, depicted various childhood images of Krishna when he was in Vrindavan – from his birth in a prison to the killing of Kamsa – and hence the fabric came to be known as Vrindavani Vastra. When news of the artisans at work on a special project spread, hundreds of people made a beeline to Tantikuchi to have a look at it. On completion, Sankaradeva first put it on public display for a few days and then transported it to Cooch Behar, the capital of the great western Assamese kingdom, in the beginning of 1555 AD. More than 300 years later, portions of the Vrindavani Vastra were discovered in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet by Perceval Landon, a British journalist who was part of a British expedition to Tibet. How it reached Tibet is still a mystery. Acquired by the British Museum in 1904, it was only in 1992 that its true Assamese origin was ascertained. It is today a treasure of the human race.