Timeline of Art Art in South Asia The Earliest Evidence of Indian Block-Printed Textiles

The Earliest Evidence of Indian Block-Printed Textiles

1300–1350

Fragments of cotton fabric dating c. 1250–1400 and possibly originating in South Asia will be discovered in historic finds at Al Fustat, a town in Egypt, in the 1920s. The red and blue block-printed patterns on these pieces of cloth are similar to Ajrakh, a textile printing tradition practised in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Sindh, and will corroborate other written accounts of finished Indian textile goods being regularly traded across the Indian Ocean.

Bibliography

Bilgrami, Noorjehan. “Ajrakh: Cloth from the Soil of Sindh.” In Approaching Textiles, Varying Viewpoints: Proceedings of the Seventh Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America. 2000, 253-61. 

Rosenfield, Yael. “Indian Block-Printed Textiles: Past and Present.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 15, 2016. Accessed October 6, 2023. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations/2016/indian-block-printed-textiles. 

Roy, Tirthankar, and Giorgio Riello. How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 . Leiden: Brill, 2009.

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