The Rug Library

Northern India and present-day eastern Pakistan were an important carpet-weaving region in the late 17th and 18th centuries, where millefleur carpets and later flower-style pieces were made.

The Ain-i-Akbari, the account of Akbar’s administration written in Persian by his court historian Abu’l Fazl between about 1589 and 1596, is a key primary source for the Mughal imperial workshops.

The Mughal emperors ruled large parts of India from 1526 to 1858, a span that frames the 'Mughal period' used to date many Indian court carpets.

The upheaval of 1857 disrupted established carpet-weaving centres such as Agra and Delhi and pushed some weavers to resettle elsewhere, including the Mirzapur–Bhadohi area.

The Colonial and Indian Exhibition opened at South Kensington, London, in May 1886 and drew about 5.5 million visitors; Indian crafts, including carpet weaving, were demonstrated there.

India occupied roughly a third of the exhibition space at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, and its court of working artisans was among the most popular attractions.

Google Arts & Culture holds an image of the Durbar tent in the 'Indian Palace' of the Indian section at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, a record of how Indian furnishings were staged for British audiences.

The Girdlers' Company’s Indian carpet was reproduced as a lithograph in the Victorian period, showing the carpet was already regarded as a notable example of Mughal weaving in the 19th century.

Mordant dyes such as madder, lac and cochineal have little direct affinity for fibre and bond instead to fibre pretreated with a metallic salt such as aluminium, iron, chrome or tin.

A scientific study of a 16th-century carpet with chintamani motifs used chromatographic and spectroscopic methods to identify its natural dyes, uncommon dye components and mordants.

William Henry Perkin, then 18, produced mauve (mauveine) from coal-tar chemicals in 1856 while trying to synthesise quinine; it became the first commercialised synthetic dyestuff.

After patenting mauveine in 1856, Perkin opened a dyeworks at Greenford, near London, the following year to mass-produce it, helping launch the synthetic dye industry.

'Abrash' is the term for visible shifts of shade within one colour area of a handmade rug, often appearing as bands, caused by differences between dye lots or batches of wool.

Indigo is insoluble in water, so for vat dyeing it is chemically reduced in an alkaline bath to a nearly colourless 'leuco' form that fibres can absorb.

When yarn is lifted out of an indigo vat, the absorbed leuco dye re-oxidises in air to insoluble blue indigo, which is why colour develops after dipping; repeated dips build a deeper shade.

The colour a mordant dye gives can vary with the mordant and binder used; purified lac dye, for example, can yield hues from crimson to deep pink.

Not every natural dye needs a mordant: turmeric colours cotton yellow directly, unlike mordant dyes such as madder or lac.

Lac dye was not imported into Europe in commercial quantities until the late 18th century, and synthetic red dyes introduced some decades later made it largely obsolete.

Many artisan dyers use turmeric in a weakly acidified bath without heat or a metal mordant, reflecting how easily the dye takes up on fibre.

Through European trading companies, Indian carpets of the Mughal era travelled west and as far east as China and Japan, and were eagerly collected in England and Portugal.

The Girdlers' Carpet was ordered from the royal workshops in Lahore by Robert Bell, a founding director of the English East India Company, and presented to the Worshipful Company of Girdlers in London in 1634; it remains at Girdlers' Hall.

The Carpet Export Promotion Council and the Jammu and Kashmir Directorate of Handicrafts and Handloom held a seminar in New Delhi to promote QR-code GI labelling of Kashmiri hand-knotted carpets.

Panipat has been recognised as a 'Town of Export Excellence' under India’s Foreign Trade Policy, and most of its recycled yarn is reportedly exported.

Obeetee’s founders set up in Mirzapur in 1920, shortly after the First World War, aiming to benefit from the rising popularity of Indian carpets in Western markets.