Day  3

On this day we watched a short documentary “hidden treasures of India’’ it was all about how people look at textile as art. Spoke about how the art is dying , and even if it is still alive it is in the name of religion . The art is dying because it takes a really long time to make just one cloth and that time is just wasted without getting anything in return. The weavers don’t encourage their children to this because they think that it is better to study and become a doctor or engineer instead of slogging so much and hardly getting anything from it. Due to which they have migrated to cities just to earn a better living.

Later we had a presentation on what carpet motives actually mean. The presentation was basically questioning where carpets originally came from and were was it used and the motives and color of it represent. Carpets in the early times used to be seen on paintings, they have no archeological trace wherein in western renaissance paintings they were seen as table covers, in Islamic culture they are used to pray on and in India they were seen near the throne   of royal kings and queens or a person with power all these carpets had different motives. There was no relation at all within the person in the paintings and the carpet or the motives in it.

Each countries had different motives from another country, they took ideas and motives from other countries by trade, ever carpet had a story to tell altogether for instance the story of the gebergte . There were motives like sea bird forms and dragon forms throughout the Middle East, high breed animal and animals. These motives were mainly motifs from cutlery, Islamic, Chinese and European culture.

I learned a lot from this lecture like how people use the same carpet which is was used just to beautify the place in my dictionary and also learned that these carpets are not only a piece of cloth which is walked on but it is also used as an symbol of identity to show importance of a person with power and also to show an important event happening in paintings apart from the carpet itself it is used as a way of expression to symbolize the mix in culture through motives.

Can use this lecture in future when I need to read any particular cloth or carpet.