Discover the deep cultural and ritualistic significance of textiles across traditions. From sacred temple drapes to ceremonial attire, textiles serve as vessels of heritage, devotion, and identity. This blog explores how fabrics transcend mere utility, weaving stories of faith, craftsmanship, and communal memory, ensuring that ancestral traditions continue to thrive in the modern world.
The tale of civilization is the tale of discovery. In the folds of time, every tool, every material, every invention that now shapes human existence was once an accident—an epiphany wrested from the struggles of survival. The nomad, an untamed wanderer of primeval landscapes, did not set out to build homes or weave garments. His was a world of necessity, where each day’s sun saw him pitted against the raw forces of nature, and each night’s darkness swallowed him in its formless void. Yet, within this ceaseless battle, he observed, adapted, and created.
It was not with grand vision but with small, instinctive experiments that he stumbled upon the devices that would transform his existence. A swinging vine bore his hunt, easing his burden. A strip of animal hide stilled his shivering child, revealing the first garment. And in the golden tufts of a plant, a child’s idle play spun the first thread, unraveling a new future.
From these scattered moments of insight, civilization took shape. The rock shelter gave way to the structured abode, the hunter became the herdsman, and the skin-clad nomad draped himself in woven cloth. It was in the Indus Valley, on the banks of a life-giving river, that the story of textiles truly began. The loom, the dye, the weave—each bore testimony to a culture that saw fabric not merely as covering, but as a canvas of identity, status, and artistry.
This is the story of textiles, of the hands that spun them, and of a civilization that draped itself in the ingenuity of its people.
The nomad had his hunt lying before him. He had to carry it to his rock shelter where the woman who had borne him a child awaited him. He dragged it by its legs but the exercise was quite tiresome and somewhat unproductive – a large part of the day had gone and only a small distance covered. Shrubs, stone boulders, stumps of the trees, felled or fallen, …., everything came in between.
Tired he looked around. A playful bird, a larger one, perhaps a bustard, swinging on a vine suspending upon a tree, caught his attention and delighted him. The vine swung to and for and with it the bird. He looked at the bird and then at the vine and questioned himself, ‘Would the vine bear his hunt?’
He thought he should try. With a quivering mind, he pulled the vine, laid it around his hunt, locked its ends, drew them to fasten into a knot, and lifted it above the ground. He was delighted to see that it bore its weight. It was now easier to hang it on his back and carry it. In the vine, he discovered thus his first rope, string, and the later days’ flax, linen, and all kinds of plant fibers.
The nomad was already in his rock shelter when the night’s darkness began enshrouding his hill. Freezing cold winds joined it soon. In almost no time, his rock shelter, hill, and all around stood covered under a thick sheet of darkness, which nothing but cold sweeping winds shook. Hunt’s skin had been removed and the nomad and the woman who had borne him his child were now separating prominent bones from flesh.
A portion of flesh, so sorted, was already put to roast. The hearth blazed low and high and in one of its gusts, the nomad woman noticed her child shivering with cold. Dried tree leaves and grass, covering the child to protect him from cold, were shaken and dispersed. She re-arranged these leaves and grass but the child still shivered.
She feared his shivering would again throw them off. An idea struck her mind. She picked the hunt’s skin and laid it over the dry leaves and grass and, of course, the child. The device worked. The leaves and grass did not fall, the shivering stopped and the child was comfortably sleeping. In skin, the so far useless part of the hunt, the nomad discovered his ever-first body cover – a costume or quilt.
Hundreds of years passed. Nothing – a social tie or personal bond, bound the nomad to the woman who bore him his child but he was now used to her. The rock was only his shelter, not his abode, but he was used to it, too. The whole day he ran after his hunt but wished he were back to his shelter, to his child and the woman he had become used to.
Animals’ flesh was yet his food and their skin his body-cover but he hardly liked killing them. Despite all that, things went on as before except some questions emerging in his mind. ‘Why’, he thought, ‘he killed animals for his food while many of the animals that as much loved their lives and kids and needed food as he did, fed just on plants, plant products – fruits, leaves…, and even grass and not on lives of others’.
He realized his littleness. He wished he could live, as did many of the animals, on what nature gave. He noticed that many animals contained in their thuds food for their kids and fed them. He wondered if they would share with him some of this food for his kids.
Many a time, an animal, he sought to kill for food, looked at him with friendliness in his eyes, or walked to his rock shelter and looked into his child’s or the child’s mother’s eyes searching in them a grain of love for it. It sometimes pained him why he could not reciprocate and befriend this animal.
These and similar other questions agitated his mind and he felt he was changing. Personal bonds and social ties bound him now to the woman who bore him his child. He was no more a nomad seeking refuge in rock shelters. He structured instead a shelter by piling the pieces of rock or baked layers of clay, broken into cubes, one over the other, or by erecting a mud wall and thatching it with bamboo and tree leaves.
He had learnt to reciprocate the gestures of animals and the two were now friends. The animals shared with him the food they had in their thuds. The nomad was now the herdsman settled around the Indus, the river which gave him water to drink and was the source of good crops and abundant food.
Animals’ generosity led him to love all animals, even the most wild. He could not bring them all to his hutment but made their clay models and gave them to his kids to play so that the ties in between were stronger and love and respect prevailed. The food he now grew, but for protecting himself, his child, and the child’s mother against shivering cold the animal hide was yet his main source.
Tree barks and leaves did not survive beyond a day or two, nor withstood the weather’s cruel fangs. Now he was not an individual wandering isolated. He lived in a group and here, his appearance, conduct, and the way he lived mattered. In him had burst a creative impulse. By using the readily available clay he created, besides the models of animals, toys, tools, utensils, articles of day-to-day use, as well as beads and other ornament components.
A wear was yet his problem. Skins did not reflect his taste, lifestyle, and attitude nor had scope for his talent to work. He looked for something different, and it was discovered by chance. His child, looking around for something to fashion his doll’s coiffure, was enthralled to see a fruit, seed, or whatever, shaped like a ball, crowning a rough-looking shrub grown in the backyard of his hutment around the dung heap.
It had exploded giving vent to a white hairy substance bursting from it. Its coiffure-like round shape was a perfect model for his tiny damsel’s hairdresser. The hairy substance breathed a kind of softness and plasticity adaptable to any desired form, which further answered the child’s need. It was a boll born on a cotton plant.
He plucked it and began giving it a shape. While removing pieces of boll-shell, stuck to a shell piece some of its fibers spun out and thus thread began its maiden journey beyond the plant it was born on. This boll was the golden egg – hiranya- garbha in the Vedic terminology.
Thus, Cotton had emerged as the primary source of clothing in India by around 3000 B. C., during the early days of Indus civilization, though in the absence of any tangible evidence as to its exact origin, a fiction, such as above, alone might define the incidence of its emergence. A child’s chance discovery or an elder’s effortful find, this plant yield was soon the most favored source of clothing for the animal-friendly Indus dweller.
It helped him replace animal skin obtainable largely by killing an animal, which he shunned. More significantly, it had scope for ingenious designing, coloring, and fashioning various styles of costuming that revealed a person’s rank, distinction, and taste. Harappan finds include a number of cores of sand revealing prominent traces of woven cloth and threads.
Some vases and a temple ornament with impressions of cloth on them suggest that textiles were used also for beautifying various decorating articles. More significant among the finds is the statuette of the priest draped in ‘uttariya’ (upper garment). The Mother goddess figurines with elaborate headdresses adorned with variedly designed ribbons and short skirts secured with stylistic belts; and, the metal statue of the nude dancing girl.
These three sets of imagery seem to reveal three conventionalized modes of clothing – one, for the divine female representing fertility, abundance, and beauty; two, for an ecclesiastical being; and three, for an entertainer. Thus, in Harappan culture, a person’s apparel was also the instrument that defined his distinction, rank, and role in society.
No actual textile or textile component, except a piece of woven material, just 0.1"x 0.3”, pasted inside the lid of a silver vase, and a bundle of mordant dyed cotton thread, has been recovered from any of the Harappan sites. In the growth of textiles, the significance of the Indus is, however, far greater. Indus pioneered techniques of spinning, weaving, printing, embroidering, and fashioning costumes.
As suggested boat motifs on Indus seals, and inscriptions from Middle Eastern countries, one of King Sharrukin of Akkad (Agade) of 2350 B.C., Indus had overseas trade, and cotton textile was one of its most traded commodities. Greeks and Babylonians called Indian cotton ‘Sind’ and ‘Sindon’.
Three material sources reveal the presence of textiles in the Indus Valley: actual textile and textile material; sculptures, terracotta figurines…. representing human figures wearing various costumes; and, tools and instruments used in manufacturing textiles. Pottery and potsherds, which shared with textiles their design patterns and motifs, helped know the type of designs and motifs that Harappan textiles used.
The trefoil motif, used in the shawl of the priest figure, appears also in the clay objects and long after in the costumes of the female figures at Ajanta. The four-petalled floral motif, painted on the Indus pot, in the National Museum, New Delhi, has been a textile design across centuries, in Ajanta, in textiles exported to different countries during the Middle Ages and in the 19th-20th textiles.
As per laboratory reports, the textile piece found at Indus Valley was manufactured using a coarser variety of Indian cotton. It used the warp and weft technique and was dyed in purple probably of madder class. Warp threads comprised the base, and weft, creating thickness and design, still the basic principle of weaving. The bundle of yarn has sustained due to mordant coated over it.
Thus, the Indus dweller had knowledge of spinning, weaving, dying, and mordanting. In relation to textiles, three categories of Harappan finds are more significant: stone sculptures, the priest statuette draped in a shawl being of exceptional significance; terracottas, figurines of the mother goddess, various male and female icons, and seals carved with human figures; and metal-casts, mainly the statue of the undraped dancing girl.
The trefoil motifs on the priest’s unstitched shawl might be a relief, weaved-in, embroidered, or block-printed design. Headgear and sashes of the mother goddess figurines could be, stitched and unstitched, and embroidered, weaved-in, or inlaid. Male figurines are draped in elaborate headdresses, muffler-type wraps, and sometimes in a loincloth, breeches, or close clinging ‘dhotis’.
The human figures on seals are draped in knee-long stitched skirts. Copper needles, printing blocks, dying vats, and textile tools – spindle whorls, spools, bobbins, loom weights, and holed discs …., recovered from various Harappan sites, suggest that textile manufacturing, as also dying, block printing, stitching, embroidering, and fashioning costumes … were quite in vogue those days.
Except for a few terms – vasa, adhivasa, nivi, drapi, pesas, suvasas, suvasana … occurring in the Vedic texts, contemplated to denote some kinds of wears, not a piece of tangible evidence – some material finds or whatever, suggestive of weaving, woven textile …., has been reported so far from the Vedic period. Even the alluded terms are not specific in regard to their material and manufacturing technique.
Such allusions are sometimes only indirect or metaphoric. Most of these terms have occurred in later Vedic literature; Vedic Samhitas referring to urna sutra, yarn made of sheep’s or goat’s wool; the Satpatha Brahmana, to tarpya, an undergarment made of tree bark or flax and an upper one made of undyed wool, as also to kausheya denoting silk.
In Vedic literature, cotton is mentioned at its earliest in the Manusmriti, and that too only once. Manu prescribes Brahmins’ yajnopavita, sacred thread, to be made from cotton yarn. Skins, mostly of goats, antelopes, and spotted deer, formed a significant class of Vedic clothing. The post-Vedic era seems to take two different lines in regard to clothing.
Those pursuing the Vedic line of animal sacrifice sought skins as the major source of clothing, while others, Buddhists and Jains in particular, in cotton. In his Ashtadhyayi, Panini talks of tula, perhaps cotton yarn, as one of the prevalent fabrics, and Kautilya, of cotton as a source of the king’s revenue, but the emphasis of both is largely on skins and wools, or at the most on silks, grasses, and plant fibers.
In his Arthashashtra, Kautilya enumerates many wild animals that could be killed for their skins and furs. The Arthashashtra recommended that the number of tanneries be increased and wool obtained also from rats and dogs, not sheep and goats alone. It enjoined that sheep and goats be sheared every six months, not annually.
Measures, that developed furs into a marketable commodity, were also suggested. Manu had also identified a number of animals that could be killed for skins. The majority of wear that he prescribed for ascetics and others were made of skins and wool and a few from grasses. Yajnopavita alone was its exception.
Contrarily, the main emphasis of the Jain and Buddhist texts is on textiles, cotton in particular, and related activities – tailoring, printing, and dying, as also spinning and weaving, though fur garments also figure in some of the Jain and Buddhist texts and monks were allowed to have a strip of deer-skins.
As suggested in these texts, spinning and weaving were widespread industries in those days. The trading class comprised independent dealers of cloth, yarn, and cotton – dosiya, sottiya and kapasiya respectively. Lunnaga or sivaga – tailors, tantuvaya – weavers or manufacturers of silken cloth, and champaya – printers and dyers, comprised an important group of craftsmen.
These texts are quite elaborate in their details of various textiles – vastra or vasana made from kauseya, a silk produced from cocoon, not silk-worms; linen made from flax; dhanga, another class of linen made from hemp plant; karpasa, cotton; and, wool obtained mainly from sheep and goats.
Furs obtained mainly from deer and tiger and garments made from palm leaves and bank fibers are also alluded to, though only to enlist the types of wears in use. In contrast, they deal at length with techniques of carding, spinning, weaving, dying, and sewing.
The Jatakas and Vinayapitaka advise monks as to what they should wear, and the Brahat Kalpa-Sutra, what people were required to wear on different occasions, at least four – nitya-niwasan, daily; nimajjamik, after bath; kshanotsavika, festivals; and, rajadvarika, courts.
Amongst the articles on textiles and costumes, which these texts allude to, the significant ones are: kilimika – carpets; tulika – mattresses; bhisi – bolsters; kharim – bed coverings; patched sheets; patika – woolen coverlets; carpets inwrought with gold or silk; maksa kutika – mosquito curtains; robes; mantles; curtains; blankets; parasols; bags; plaids; scarves and ribbons; water strainers or filters; and, umbrellas – all woven and manufactured.
Kashika, a textile woven at Kashi or Varanasi, a woolen blanket, cotton sheet, or whatever, has been mentioned as the finest in its kind anywhere. Chittor and Mathura have been mentioned as other great centers of textile manufacturing.
Beyond their utilitarian purpose, textiles in the Indus Valley may have held symbolic and ritualistic significance. While direct evidence remains scarce, figurines adorned with elaborate clothes suggest that clothing played a role in social and religious ceremonies. The tradition of using specific garments for different life events, a practice seen in later Indian civilizations, might have roots in this ancient culture.
In the grand tapestry of civilization, textiles have never been mere fabric; they are woven with the threads of identity, belief, and tradition. From the earliest looms to the intricate weaves of today, cloth has served as more than a covering—it has been a storyteller, a sacred relic, and a bearer of culture. In the vast expanse of human history, few creations have been as entwined with the spiritual and social order as textiles.
The sanctity of cloth is perhaps best illustrated in rituals that mark the cycle of life and death. At birth, an infant is swathed in white, the color of purity, symbolizing the unblemished soul entering the world. In marriage, the bride don’s fabric steeped in symbolism—whether it is the crimson Banarasi silk of India, echoing fertility and prosperity, or the pristine white of a Japanese shiromuku kimono, signifying a new beginning.
In death, the body is wrapped once more in cloth, a final shroud that marks the transition from the tangible to the ethereal. Across faiths and cultures, fabric serves as a conduit between the mortal and the divine. Religious rites, too, find deep resonance in textiles. In Hinduism, sacred threads—be it the Upanayana thread worn by the twice-born or the yellow fabric draped over deities—are imbued with spiritual power.
The prayer shawls of Judaism, the vestments of the Christian clergy, and the ihram of Islam all transform simple cloth into sanctified garments, drawing a bridge between the temporal and the sacred. The act of weaving itself, in many traditions, is considered divine—a craft attributed to goddesses and cosmic forces that bind the universe together.
Beyond ritual, textiles embody cultural memory. They are the banners of identity, the visual lexicon of a people’s history. The intricate motifs of a Patola sari, the bold geometries of Navajo weaves, and the silk brocades of China—all carry within them the echoes of their makers’ hands, their stories whispered in warp and weft. Each pattern, each dye, and each stitch is a relic of a past preserved in the thread, passed down from loom to loom, generation after generation.
Textiles are far more than woven threads; they are the embodiment of a community’s spirit, a silent witness to its rituals, and a medium through which generations converse across time. From the sacred drapes of deities to the ceremonial garments that mark life’s milestones, textiles carry the weight of cultural memory and the grace of ancestral craftsmanship. They are storytellers, custodians of identity, and symbols of devotion, binding individuals to their heritage in ways both intimate and profound. As modernity reshapes the world, preserving and honoring these textile traditions becomes an act of reverence—a way of ensuring that the sacred weaves of our past continue to enrich the fabric of our future.
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