Threads across empires: Why a 17th century Mughal carpet hangs in a London Guild Hall

Girdlers’ carpet, manufactured in the 17th century by artisans of the Mughal Empire, is no ordinary piece of furnishing. It was commissioned by Robert Bell, an influential merchant and one of the founding directors of the English East India Company, as a gift for the Worshipful Company of Girdlers during his final tenure as its Master in 1634.

Active since the medieval period, the Company of Girdlers specialised in the manufacture of girdles, belts, and associated metal works and received its patent from Edward III in 1327.

The thread of Girdler’s carpet bears the imprint of a chequered past: arduously procured from Lahore, it travelled many miles from Surat to reach London in 1634, where it served as a table covering in the courtroom hall of the Company of Girdlers.

Even though the hall was consumed by the Great Fire of 1666, the carpet was saved by the presence of mind of its caretaker. It would later endure the Blitz of 1940-’41, the sustained campaign of aerial bombing of London and other British cities during the Second World War.

Between these two brushes with destruction, the carpet was given a new lease of life in 1899.

On the advice of the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mayor of London, Alfred J Newton – a prominent businessman known for his role in the public listing of the luxury retailer Harrods and Master of the Worshipful Company of Girdlers from 1898 to 1900 – together with the Father and Wardens of the Company, set in motion a careful programme to have it restored.

The process involved cleaning, repair and framing: ink stains were removed, tears were mended by the Decorative Needlework Society, and the carpet was returned to the Hall in 1900, set within a large oak frame bearing the inscription, “The Gift of Robert Bell, Master, A.D. 1634, in remembrance of his love”.

The carpet is on permanent display at the current premises of the Worshipful Company of Girdlers in East London.

On May 16, 1900, a luncheon banquet was held at Girdlers’ Hall in London to celebrate the restored splendour of this remarkable carpet. Attended by the Secretary of State and members of the Council of India, the occasion was presided over by Newton, and toasts were raised to the reigning monarch, Victoria, to Robert Bell, and to the Worshipful Company of Girdlers.

The speech accompanying the toast was delivered by George Birdwood, an idiosyncratic advocate of Indian handicrafts over industrial machinery. Born in 1832 in Belgaum, Bombay Presidency, into a family long associated with the East India Company, Birdwood later returned to England as an expert on Indian languages and material culture.

At the banquet for the Girdlers’ carpet, he reflected on practices of commemorating the dead across cultures, recalling the “eastern” sweets served at the Parsi festival of Muktad or Farvardin, which he had attended in Bombay, before inviting the audience to raise their glasses to the memory of Robert Bell in accordance with an old ritual:

“Ter bibe, vel totiens ternos, sic mystica lex est; vel tria potanti, vel ter tria multiplicanti.”
(Drink three times, or three times three; such is the mystic law: either three cups, or thrice three).

This couplet is drawn from the fourth-century playful arithmetic poem Griphus ternarii numeri (“Riddle of the Number Three”) by Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Written within the classical Greek and Roman tradition of symposium drinking games, the poem celebrates the symbolic power of the number three through a series of mythological, natural, and philosophical triads.

During his speech, Birdwood described rituals observed by artisan communities in cities such as Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat and Bombay upon completing a work, where craftsmen publicly displayed the object and celebrated its beauty with fellow artisans by sharing sugared sesame seeds as tokens of goodwill and remembrance.

Shortly before concluding, he reflected on the symbolism of carpets in West and South Asia, describing them as representations of the universe or of divine paradise, and observing that many of the names given to these rugs imported into Europe translated as “place of worship”.

Here, Birdwood appears to conflate prayer rugs, which often depict a mihrab, a niche or alcove indicating the direction of prayer, similar to those found in mosques, with the carpets used to cover floors, windows, furniture, and even walls.

Paintings from the period show that carpets, accompanied by sumptuous mats, mattresses, cushions, awnings, and curtains, animated both public and private spaces, indoors and outdoors alike, ranging from mosques and dargahs to the imperial court’s audience hall, harem chambers, dining halls, terraces, and gardens, and even the wilderness during picnics or on hunting excursions.

Such Mughal carpets prominently featured nature-inspired floral and animal motifs, drawing on the lush gardens cultivated within the empire.

Art historians, such as Walter B Denny and D Fairchild Ruggles, argue that notions of earthly and heavenly paradise, and the heavenly garden and earthly palace, commingled in the architectural and design language of the period. Creating gardens of perpetual bloom, filled with diverse birds and animals, required immense wealth and thus signalled cultural and economic status.

Yet such gardens also expressed a deeper aspiration: by resisting seasonal decay and withstanding drought or frost, these permanent gardens embodied human mastery over nature and the spectre of death. Through the transportation and transplantation of flora and fauna from distant regions, patrons reshaped their immediate surroundings, asserting control over natural cycles.

In this sense, like paradise, they may ultimately have promised the triumph of life eternal over death. As a corollary, the textiles and furnishings adorned with real and imagined floral and faunal motifs extended curated nature and associated meanings into built spaces.

Mughal-era craft

Floral motifs appear both on the dark blue border and across the main red field of the Girdlers’ carpet. Measuring 24 feet by 7 feet 6 inches, this carpet with a woollen-piled surface was woven with cotton warps and wefts.

It is made of at least seven colours: red, blue, green, brown, black, white, and yellow. Like other Mughal carpets, these shades were extracted from plants and insects. Blue dyes were derived from indigo, whereas reds came from lac insects (Kerria lacca) and madder roots such as chay (Oldenlandia umbellata) and manjishtha (Rubia cordifolia). Greens and yellows were produced from turmeric, safflower, yellow larkspur, Himalayan rhubarb, hemp, and indigo; blacks and browns from catechu, myrobalan, teak leaves, pomegranate peels, and walnut shells.

With a density of 224 hand-tied knots per square inch – sixteen knots per warp inch and fourteen per weft inch – this exquisitely crafted carpet bears witness to the skill of Mughal-period craft communities.

Art historian Sylvia Houghteling observes that although carpets in the Mughal period were woven on fixed upright looms, their defining quality lay less in the loom itself than in the painstaking process of knotting. Unlike flat-woven textiles, where pattern emerges through the interlacing of warp and weft, knotted-pile carpets were made by tying innumerable small wool knots, creating the dense, raised surface characteristic of their texture.

This method demanded sustained manual skill: the weaver worked knot by knot, guided by a predetermined design – often set out in a taʿlim or symbols and code – and translated it into form through careful execution and memory.

Yet, as the 17th-century account of Francis Pelsaert, an agent of the Dutch East India Company in Agra, suggests, this extraordinary labour yielded only modest returns. A carpet maker earned only five to six tankas (a copper coin valued at one-twentieth of a rupee) a day, even when working from dawn to dusk.

The Girdlers’ carpet reveals additional dimensions of the exacting craft of carpet making in early modern South Asia: the adaptability and creative range of the weavers, evident in the incorporation of custom design elements, some of which were not intrinsic to conventional Mughal carpets.

Exemplifying early modern bespoke luxury, the Girdlers’ carpet is personalised with two eagle-crested emblems representing Eagle House in Wimbledon, the country residence Robert Bell built in 1613. Bell’s initials appear on either side. At the centre, the coat of arms of the Worshipful Company of Girdlers, rendered in reverse.

This inversion likely resulted from an error during the design transfer process, when a traced or stencilled drawing was accidentally reversed before being pounced – an oversight the weavers, unfamiliar with the design, did not detect during execution. The coat of arms consists of a shield with three gridirons, or girdle-irons, symbolising the Company’s historic craft of making girdles and associated metalwork.

Above the shield appears the Company’s patron saint, St Lawrence, who, according to legend, was burned to death on a gridiron; he is depicted holding the Book of the Gospels in his right hand and a gridiron in his left.

Below this image is a scroll bearing the Company’s motto, “Give thanks to God,” which appears correctly oriented, suggesting that it was not traced at the same time as the coat of arms and was likely added later.

How did these customised details reach the weavers? Although Robert Bell never set foot in South Asia, his position as a director of the East India Company gave him privileged access to objects crafted by Mughal artisans and transported to England aboard Company ships operating in the Indian Ocean.

In 1614, William Edwards, stationed in India, wrote to Thomas Smythe that he was sending to London a consignment of quilts and carpets commissioned by Bell for personal use, with his initials woven along their margins in a specified pattern.

Unfortunately, the fate of these furnishings is unknown, but 16 years later, during the reign of Shah Jahan (1628-1658), Bell instructed Thomas Rastell, who had been appointed president of the English East India Company’s council at Surat in 1630, to procure a wool-pile Mughal carpet intended as a gift for the Girdlers’ Company.

As in the earlier instance, Bell likely supplied drawings of the custom designs he wished to incorporate into the carpet. The East India Company initially covered the cost, which Bell promised to reimburse.

Within a year of reaching Surat, Rastell died of illness, though not before ensuring that weaving had begun in Lahore. Nearly two and a half years elapsed before news finally reached London that the carpet was ready for shipment. Writing on January 25, 1633, Rastell’s successor, Joseph Hopkinson, reported that he was dispatching a carpet for Bell from Surat.

Akbar’s patronage

Although references to knotted-pile carpets in South Asia predate the 16th century, it was under Akbar that sustained imperial patronage enabled the industry to expand and flourish.

Notably, Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s court historian, uses the term kilim as a catch-all for carpets, even though in Iran and Central Asia it more specifically denoted flat-woven textiles. Other terms for carpets in South Asian sources include bisat and qalin.

While the needs of the earlier Mughal emperors were met through Persian imports, Abul Fazl observes that under Akbar, the carpets of Iran and Central Asia lost some of their preeminence as weavers from diverse regions settled in the Mughal realm and fostered a flourishing trade. He also highlighted the remarkable scale of carpets produced in imperial workshops, some reaching up to 55 feet in length.

Akbar’s carpets, especially those woven with brocade, along with awnings, tents, and screens made of cloth of gold, European velvet, wool, and damask silk and satin, were destroyed in 1579 when the farrashkhana, or storeroom for such portable encampment structures and furnishings, caught fire. Nevertheless, carpet production, both under direct courtly patronage and through mercantile private enterprise, continued to thrive across the Mughal Empire, particularly in cities that served as imperial capitals and commercial centres.

Key sites of production included Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Surat, Ahmedabad, Amber, Jaunpur, Kashmir, and Multan; however, Lahore consistently emerges as the principal centre of production and the primary marketplace for carpets in the Mughal Empire.

Mughal wool-piled carpet production primarily relied on sheep’s wool, but artisans also used pashmina – from the Persian pashm, meaning wool – to produce knotted-pile carpets of exceptional refinement. This delicate fibre, twice as fine as sheep’s wool, came from the soft undercoat of mountain goats grazing across the high-altitude plateaus of southeastern Ladakh and western Tibet. From there, it entered established trade circuits: sent to Kashmir for shawl weaving or carried onward to Lahore for textile and carpet manufacture.

Pashmina’s fineness enabled extraordinarily dense knotting, resulting in some of the most finely wrought carpets of the Mughal world. Writing in 1634, Abd al-Hamid Lahori, court historian to Shah Jahan, praised the output of Lahore’s workshops, observing that their carpets were so soft and refined that those produced in the royal ateliers of Safavid Persia paled in comparison.

A sizeable collection of 17th and 18th-century Mughal carpets acquired by the rulers of Amber from dealers in Lahore is now part of the City Palace Museum in Jaipur. The Dutch East India Company obtained a Lahore carpet for the Emperor of Japan in 1650, which is now housed in Kyoto.

In fact, the first shipment of carpets to England in 1615, sent via Surat, consisted entirely of pieces from Lahore and included Bell’s initial consignment of quilts and carpets embellished with his initials. Probably inspired by this, Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to Jahangir’s court, set out in search of such wares, scouring the lanes of Ajmer, only to realise that the kind he desired could be found only in Lahore.

In 1618, he commissioned one bearing his coat of arms. There is no record of its survival beyond the fact that it was bequeathed in his will to his cousin, Sir Henry Roe. Robert Bell’s customised carpets, especially the Girdlers’ carpet, continued to inspire the East India Company officers’ collection of Mughal art.

William Fremlin, President of the Company’s Council at Surat from 1637 to 1644, commissioned South Asian weavers to produce a carpet bearing his coat of arms in the central field. Both its field and borders depict scenes of animal hunts. Known as the Fremlin carpet, it is now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

These carpets, carried across oceans, bear witness to the circuits of connoisseurship that ran through the Mughal and British empires.

Knot by knot, these carpets retain the imprint of the hands and labour of largely anonymous artisans working in South Asia. Fragile and in constant need of care, they continue to speak across centuries, revealing not only remarkable craftsmanship but also the entangled histories of exchange, connoisseurship and survival woven into their threads.

Neha Vermani is an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Durham University. She is a historian of early modern South Asia, and her research focuses on the intersections of food practices, material culture, and scientific and ethical discourses on the body, the senses, and the natural world.