A 500-year-old “wearable book” kept in storage at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) for 80 years has made its public debut this month, thanks to the institution’s textile conservators, who have painstakingly prepared it for display in a new exhibition, The Fabric of India.
The talismanic shirt, beautifully inscribed with all 6,000 verses from the Koran, would have been worn by those seeking protection in battle and from other dangers such as disease, famine, travel and childbirth. Many such garments were made in Iran and Turkey, but the Bihari script written on its starched cotton suggests that this one was made in India between 1480 and 1520.
Rosemary Crill, the show’s co-curator and a senior curator in the museum’s South and Southeast Asian department, says that there are no records to show how long it took to create the piece, but notes that an example in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul took three years to complete.
The object’s “hybrid” status required the textile conservator Elizabeth-Anne Haldane to work with colleagues specialising in paintings and works on paper. Pigment analysis revealed that the artist used black ink, red lead, vermilion, lead white and lapis lazuli; gold was reserved to record the 99 names of God. Haldane found the pigments to be highly fugitive, or impermanent, making it too risky to attempt to remove stains, especially the noticeable sweat marks under the arms. “I couldn’t use any wet adhesives because of the pigment,” she says.
Although the rest of the shirt remains fingerprint-free, the undecorated bottom strip features several black, smudged fingerprints, suggesting that the artist might have thought that this area would be trimmed.
A very special delivery Haldane removed old, stitched repairs and patched the areas of loss with toned fabric. Creases caused by the shirt having been folded into a neat square and sent by post to the museum in 1935 can still be seen. “I wanted to reduce the hard creases because that is where the shirt had split,” she says, adding that the top was almost entirely split. She thinks the garment might originally have been a pullover and that someone had cut it down the middle at some point to make it easier to put on.
One of the biggest works in the exhibition is a 17m-long wall hanging from Gujarat in north-west India, decorated with flowers, animals and smartly dressed figures. It was found discarded on a pavement in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1990s, in what Crill says “must have been a huge pile”. Fortunately for the V&A, an art adviser retrieved the 20th-century textile and donated it to the museum. “We don’t have many of these complete room hangings because they were normally used until they were worn out,” Crill says.
Before being treated, the textile was laid out on the floor of the V&A’s Raphael Court—one of the few spaces large enough to accommodate the piece—where it was measured and documented. Haldane says the appliqué figures required treatment but that the structure itself was mostly sound.
One of her biggest concerns was how to hang such a large piece without causing any strain to the object. A lot of thought has gone into how it would be hoisted up and secured with Velcro, Haldane says, adding that the scale of some pieces has been a challenge.
For example, a stunning Bollywood costume, decorated with hundreds of tiny mirrors, was “so heavy, I think the actress wore it once to a photo shoot and that was it”, Haldane says. In the end, conservators decided to put the garment on a seated mannequin, which has been mounted on a board.
• The Fabric of India, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 3 October-10 January 2016