Indian Chintz and the Global Routes That Carried It Across Centuries
A new book on Indian cotton textiles is reframing chintz as far more than a decorative fabric. Chintz: Indian Cotton Textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection, published by ACC Art Books, draws on one of the world’s largest textile collections to chart a history of trade, craftsmanship, and cultural exchange that stretched across Asia and Europe for more than a thousand years.
The volume brings together essays by 12 leading scholars of Asian textiles, each helping to recover a field of art history that is notoriously difficult to reconstruct. Textiles made for daily use rarely survive for long, and the anonymous makers behind them were often working within oral traditions that left few written records. What remains is a record of extraordinary variation within highly structured forms.
That complexity is central to the book’s argument. The term “chintz” itself is slippery: in Hindi, it refers to a speckled or splattered effect. In its most familiar form, it describes ivory-colored cottons dyed or painted with red and indigo. By the 17th and 18th centuries, chintz palampores had become fixtures in homes on every continent, a reach that made Indian chintz makers among the most consequential figures in design history, as Avalon Fotheringham of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London notes.
The book also pushes the timeline back. Indian cotton textiles were already being traded as far as Indonesia by the 13th century, long before European colonial power reshaped global commerce. From the 15th century, chintz known in Japan as sarasa circulated there as well, where it sparked a craze and was adapted to local tastes. Yet the most prized versions remained the older Indian imports, known as kowatari sarasa.
Among the most striking objects discussed is The Flower Picker, a rare textile from south India that is thought to reference the ninth-century Tamil poet Manikkavacakar. It is the only surviving example of its kind. John Guy of the Metropolitan Museum in New York describes its “exceptional quality” in the painted line and the subtle way figure and setting are joined through a simple madder-red mordant technique.
The book also traces the later decline of the Indian chintz industry, as European pattern-books, prints, and industrial imitation introduced a new hybrid visual language while undercutting older systems of production. The result is a history that is at once local and global, fragile and enduring — a reminder that textile art helped shape the modern world long before museums began to preserve it.
