The Supremacy of Indian Decorative and Pattern Work

Illustration: Owen Jones. Indian Decoration from The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.

The Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all nations in 1851 was barely opened to the public ere attention was directed to the gorgeous contributions of India.

This was the opening sentence of the Indian Ornament chapter of Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament. Although the Jones title was published five years after the Great Exhibition of 1851, the obvious significance of India's role in that exhibition was still being felt by Jones and other critics and practical designers, well into the 1850s. To be more exact, the influences of Indian design work, technique and technology was to be felt for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. It could be said that in some respects the way we approach surface pattern today could be directly linked to the impact of Indian design and decorative work on Britain in the mid-nineteenth century.

Britain had a long history with Indian design and decoration, particularly through textiles. Textile work was both imported and copied from the beginnings of British trade with India in the eighteenth century and its influence can clearly be seen in the number of fabrics that tried to reproduce authentic Indian pattern work through such pattern genres as chintz. 

Illustration: Owen Jones. Indian Decoration from The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.

Although Indian decorative and pattern work was recognised and to some extent familiar with the British, it was the bringing together of the full and diverse genre of Indian decoration and ornamentation at the Great Exhibition of 1851 that really brought Indian design to the forefront of the imagination and examination of the British. It was here that critics were able to examine not just a few examples, but a whole range of styles from textiles, to armour, wood and ivory inlay to detailed silverwork and rich and embellished embroidery. It was the obvious technical supremacy of much of the craftwork from India that clearly highlighted some of the acute problems and lack of sophistication in much of the British industrially produced manufacturing work. The public noticed, as did critics and those intimately involved in the processes of mass manufacturing. It was this stark contrast between the work produced in India and that of Britain in which Jones concentrated in both his book and the earlier critical reports he made during the great Exhibition for both the general art and design press, but more importantly for that of the official government report as to the lessons to be learnt from the Exhibition.

 Illustration: Owen Jones. Indian Decoration from The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.

One of the stark and probably insurmountable problems faced by anyone who wished to compare and contrast the work of India and that of Britain, was the obvious one of hand versus machine production. Most, if not all of the work displayed at the Indian pavilion of the Great Exhibition had been produced after long hours of labour, techniques often only reproducible by hand. In the case of the British, although some hand production was present, much was machine produced. This was purposeful as Britain had been keen to use the Great Exhibition as a vehicle for its pre-eminence in the industrial revolution. That much of the work on display looked cheap, confused and woefully inadequate compared to the hand production from India, was an acute embarrassment and an indictment that although the machine was obviously faster than the hand, it still had a long way to go in order to better the results of hand production, many would say that that day is still as far off as it was in 1851. 

Illustration: Owen Jones. Indian Decoration from The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.

Although Jones was keen to stress both the technical and practical supremacy of Indian hand design work as well as the high skills base in most design forms, he was keener to place a direct understanding of Indian pattern and decoration and to stress where lessons could be learnt by the British manufacturing industry as to how improvements could be made quickly and efficiently. One of the main ideas that came from examination of Indian surface pattern in particular, was the obvious lack of any form of three-dimensional trickery. The Indian pattern work illustrating Jones 1856 The Grammar of Ornament for example, of which the five illustrations for this article are drawn, make it clear that there is a definite graphic quality to all the pattern work on display. Jones stressed that Indian surface pattern did not use the trick of introducing shadow to give an impression of depth, and that often interpretations of floral work were not copied exactly as they often were in Britain, but gave a free impression of the flower. This, in Jones interpretation, was because Indian pattern designers had always been aware that the illusion of reality did little service to a flat format such as textiles. A flat surface deserves to be complemented by a flat medium, in other words surface pattern should be sensitive and reflective of the surface medium it has to work with.

Illustration: Owen Jones. Indian Decoration from The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.

Jones was aware and drew attention to the fact that many cultures stressed the same fundamental facts concerning surface pattern as in India. In The Grammar of Ornament he paid great heed to Islamic decoration and also that of medieval Europe. He argued that it was the renaissance and their obsession with systematically portraying reality through carefully constructed illusion, which took Europe away from the medieval path of graphic and symbolic representations of the world at large. That this in turn began to fundamentally affect textiles through surface pattern tragically severed designer's natural affinity with flat rather than illusional pattern. However, despite all these examples, both past and present, it was still India itself that had the most obvious impact on British surface pattern work during the latter half of the nineteenth century and beyond.

India as a cultural entity has seen many invasions come and go and absorbed them all. Although external occupations are very often also a form of cultural exchange, many of the external cultures that were involved with India, such as the British, absorbed much more than they ever gave out. The relatively short relationship between India and Britain, lasting only two and a half centuries, is full of complex and often conflicting cultural facts and fantasies. The relationship between the textile industries of both countries is just as complex with both sides deliberately manipulating pattern work to cater for each other's commercial markets. Future articles will try to explore a little of the relationship between Indian and British textile industries as well as more concerning the relationship that Britain had with Indian surface pattern and decoration which is a fascinating and diverse subject. Indian pattern work is also covered in some detail in two of my ebooks: Islamic Decoration and Ornament as seen by Owen Jones, which covers all aspects of Jones coverage of Islamic and Indian decoration in his 1856 title, as well as Nature and Surface Pattern which covers some of the issues dealing with British surface pattern and the inevitable influence of India. Both titles are available through The Textile Blog on the ebook page, or by clicking on the links to the titles just given.

Further reading links: