Shikargarh

Resonant with the traditional theme of the royal hunt, Shikargah, these lengths of patterned silks resurrect Indian textile imagery of inhabited natural landscapes. Repeated seamlessly in the warp and weft directions, these designs are at once historic and of our time. Their subject, India's vanishing wildlife, have a compelling urgency today. Rare, endangered animals and birds replace the symbolic elephants, tigers, horses, parrots, and peacocks that have been celebrated in Indian myth, literature, music and art. The quality of the materials and weaving matches the finest found in historic examples of this kind, representing a culmination of a new wave of revivalist experiments in the late Nineties, which aimed to restore skills, techniques, and pattern-making within Indian hand-weaving.