Galicha Kala: India's Carpet & Rug Heritage

Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri

Akbar stands at the edge of the newly laid courtyard at Fatehpur Sikri. It is 1585. Two attendants walk the carpet out before him, holding its ends, and let it drop. The knots catch the afternoon light. The pile is deep wool, the field a burning crimson, the border a chain of lotus medallions in gold and indigo. Thirty Persian master weavers, brought from Herat and Kashan at the emperor's own expense, have spent two years at their looms in the new karkhana he built for them just outside the city.

Akbar is forty-two. He bends down, runs a fingertip across the warp, and feels the count of knots under his thumb. He is a man who can neither read nor write, but he can feel two hundred knots per square inch the way a banker feels the weight of gold. He nods once.

His scribe, Abu'l Fazl, writes a line in his notebook. It will eventually grow into the chapter on Galicha-bafi in the Ain-i-Akbari, the enormous administrative gazetteer that catalogues every workshop in the empire. Four hundred years later, the same knots, copied and recopied through twenty generations of Indian weavers, will cover the floors of Buckingham Palace, the Oval Office, and the Rashtrapati Bhavan banquet hall. None of it would have happened without this afternoon.

Before Akbar: A Kashmir Sultan's Invitation

The story does not actually begin with Akbar. It begins a hundred and fifty years earlier, with Zain-ul-Abidin, the eighth sultan of Kashmir, who ruled the valley from 1420 to 1470. Kashmiri folk memory still calls him Budshah, the Great King. He ended his predecessor's persecution of Hindus, rebuilt destroyed temples, commissioned Sanskrit translations of the Mahabharata and Kalhana's Rajatarangini, and, most consequentially for this lesson, sent envoys to Samarkand and Herat asking for master artisans.