Published in March 2016 by British Museum Press, “Krishna in the Garden of Assam, The History and Context of a Much-Travelled Textile” by T. Richard Blurton is an illustrated guide to the Vrindavani Vastra – the most important surviving example of an Assamese devotional textile.
From the British Museum website:
This beautiful and rare textile, now in the British Museum, was produced in the late seventeenth century in the wake of the remarkable outflow of Krishna veneration resulting from the ministry of the great eastern Indian saint, Sankaradava (died 1568).
Nine metres in length, it is made up of twelve strips, all now sown together, and woven with captioned scenes from the life of Krishna as recorded in the tenth-century text, the Bhagavata Purana, and elaborated in the dramas of Sankaradeva.
The author looks at the art, technique and iconography of the textile and also place it within its wider religious, cultural and geographical contexts. He traces, too, its fascinating history and its journey from Assam to London.
For those looking for the Tibet connection with this book, Waymarks on Twitter had this to say
'Krishna in the Garden of Assam' by T. Richard Blurton https://t.co/v1Ij8mUNQR On Indian textile found in Tibet by P. Landon in 1904
— Waymarks (@waymarksblog) December 13, 2016
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