 I'd like now to welcome John Gillow, who is an author, lecturer, traveller and collector and has spent more than 40 years collecting the folk textiles of Asia and Africa. Every year he collects and researches for several months of the year in many parts of the globe. John is also author of Indian textiles, traditional Indonesian textiles, arts and crafts of India, world textiles, African textiles and printed and painted textiles of Africa. All these volumes have been published by Thames and Hudson and the British Museum. Textiles of the Islamic world is his latest book. There are copies of these books on the desk outside for those who would like to see them and order them after the lecture. May I call on you John now to please come and share all your knowledge with us as much as you can in the time given and then call and then raise questions. Thank you very much indeed. Well, thank you to Marian and everybody at the Brunei Gallery and at SOAS who have helped to organise this lecture and the exhibition downstairs rather, which I do encourage you to go and look particularly to look at the Cindy and the catchy textiles which are just stunning. Anywhere, I'm glad not all of you have gone to demonstrate against Donald Trump. It's getting to be like 1968 again. I followed Tariq Ali into Groveness Square in October 1968. He denied he ever led the march but I was there. The police horses kicked and the helmets flew and it was all chaos and I remember this bearded chap in a kind of Jeremy Corbyn type. You charged the police horses and I thought, well, I'm the 16-year-old schoolboy and you're the professional revolutionary, so why don't you charge the police horses? So this was my introduction to left-wing politics. It was probably Jeremy Corbyn himself. He was about the right age. Anyway, I digress as usual. I've spent since 1974 going to the subcontinent and first came across the wonderful embroidered textiles of Cuch and Seraistra and Gujarat on Connor Place. Went down there, collected stuff, came back after my first long trip to India and my sister noticed an advert in the Sunday Times magazine which was for Joss Crayham's first exhibition. So I went up there and there we are. Joss and I were both very skinny in those days. It's difficult to believe, but we were. And there was Joss with his glasses held together with, not sellotape, with a laster plaster and on the wall were all these stunning things from sinned. So I thought, hmm, well if Joss can do it, I can do it too. So I went off and collected more and started selling them to make my living. And Joss, I must thank for encouraging me later actually to go to sinned because sinned was the very cornucopia of the wonderful textiles. So Salam Joss, and many thanks after all these years. So what I'm going to talk about today is the peoples of the lower Indus. Which way this works. Left one. Okay keyboards. Yeah, now I know what I'm doing. Right, what I'm going to do today is talk about the peoples of the lower Indus. So basically about sinned, the extreme south of Pakistani Punjab and the adjoining, not so much, adjoining province, let's say, of Kach. And these are the areas which have absolutely and utterly fabulous textiles. Pakistan is totally dependent on the waters of the Indus. Sindhu, it is called. And from that we derive the word India and the word for the province of Sindh. Sindh itself is desert towards India, the region of Tharpakar and irrigated land, land irrigated from the Indus. The whole of Pakistan's economy is mainly agricultural and it is very much dependent on irrigation coming from the waters of the Indus. The Indus of course is temperamental, it flooded terribly in 2010 and many people were dispossessed both right up in the north and down in Sindh. The Indus is fed by the five rivers which rise in the Himalaya, the Indus itself rises in the Himalaya and that with other four rivers it constitutes the five rivers of the Punjab and also the Kaiba river from Afghanistan feeds into it. My favourite part of Sindh is Tharpakar, which is a desert region, was up to 70-80% Hindu at the time of partition in 1947. It's less now but it's still got very much a Hindu flavour. The villages there are divided up between a Muslim Mahala, a Muslim quarter, a caste Hindu quarter, a Megwa who are a low caste leather working people and the tribals, the Beals. They get along fine but the way that they get along is still very much dictated by caste prejudice. Here's a little bullock which has been decorated in the Hindu manner with hands dipped into herra. And here is everybody going off to the festival of Chandapir. This is in Tharpakar near the village of Kantio where my friends live and we went there and not in this truck I do assure you. We zig-zagged across the desert in a four-wheel drive. Everybody comes, although it's a Hindu temple, not only Hindus but Muslims, everybody comes. There's a big kitchen which is manned by the caste Hindus and they stir great vats of rice and vegetable curry and suji sweets and they give out to everybody and everybody gets fed. And because they are caste Hindus the high caste can eat as well as the low caste and the Muslims. These are jarts of the desert. These are found both in Pakistan, in Sind and also in Kutch in India. The people there have a dowry tradition whereby the girls will learn to sow at an early age. Their mothers, their grandmothers, their aunts will all help them to sow a true sow. And the true sow is presented at the wedding on the basis, look, I'm good at embroidery, marry me. So it's a test so she can create all the clothes for the family. This is a wonderful blouse front, which is from Sind, but I bought in Delhi in Conop place of a Waiguri woman, a Pettler caste woman from Gujarat. It's the blouse front of a Lahana people. The Lahanas are merchants and it's distinguished by you can see peacocks and baby peacocks on top of the mother. This is a backless brals worn by the Hindus, by the Megwell, low caste leather workers. Again, it's floral inset with Shisha mirrors. The Shishas are still being made in Shekopor in the north of Sind. I've got a commission from a Canadian friend of mine to go out and buy Shisha mirrors for embroidery work to export to a friend of mine in Canada. They no longer make Shisha mirror in the traditional manner in India. All you get in India is sort of bits of glass, which is just broken up your bathroom mirror. So the joy of Sindy embroidery is both the flowers, the flowers that appear out of the desert when the monsoon rains come. The birds, the peacocks, peacocks are symbols of perfection and they also have the practical protective role of killing snakes and mirrors. The mirrors are perhaps to reflect away the evil eye, but I think it's more to imitate light on water when the monsoon rains come. And all the flowers burst up out of the desert. Great pools of water appear and birds arrive, great big pelicans and all kinds of things. And it's the joy of rain and you're living in a very dry, desicated area. And the colour is to kind of counterbalance all that brown sand and things that the landscape is basically quite dull. This is a wedding shawl that my ex used to wear the first time I ever saw her. I saw her at Kent University in 1971. She was coming down the stairs wearing this as a cape. All long raven hair and beast-dung lips and I kind of fell for her. And when she left, she left this behind. So I've still got it. This is also Lohana from Sindh, from a place called Diplor. And there's a row at the bottom as you can see of peacocks. The Lohana are a Hindu merchant caste. They have a counterpart, the Memon, who are also merchants. And they're basically the same people the Memon converted to Islam around about 200 years ago. And their embroidery is very similar. You can tell, distinguished between the two, is that the Lohana will put things like peacocks or animals and the all-human figures. And the Memon will restrict themselves to geometric or floral patterns. This is the sheeshire I've got to go off and buy in a couple of months. It's in the Mina Bazaar and the Women's Bazaar in Hyderabad Sindh. Always remember when you're reading about the subcontinent, there are two Hyderabads. There's Hyderabad in Sindh and there's Hyderabad in Dhaka in southern India. So this sheeshire is sold by weight by the kilo. And the women who are going to embroider with sheeshire mirrors will take it home. They'll cut it up to the requisite size with a pair of scissors. Then they'll tack it down and usually with buttonhole stitch, tie the mirror into the embroidery. This is a chap in the same bazaar selling a typical Sindhi cap. Those are all the caps that have a sale. Sindh has got the reputation and still maintains it for having some of the best textiles in the subcontinent. It always had the best embroidery. It had fantastic weaving. It had tie-dye, all kinds of techniques. But of course, as the years progress and the world changes and technology spreads, it's the quality is going down. This is a wedding scarf of the Magwal. These are Hindus living in a predominantly Muslim environment. So they disguise their patterns. You've got to look carefully at the bottom of this slide. You can see there's a peacock with its beak, its crest and its tail coming out. It's tail to the side of it. But if you just glanced at it, you think it's a flower. There is some very, very fine embroidery done by both the poorest of people and the richest of the people. This is called a gudge. It's a wedding garment of the Lohana who come from Thana Bulla Khan. Thana Bulla Khan I've driven past but I haven't been up. It's set on a sort of mini mountain by the side of the road between Karachi and Hyderabad. An old friend of mine said when he was very young, he used to go with his father-in-law buying these garments and they'd sell them to the Afghans who'd take them up to Kabul. These were before all the dreadful wars that have afflicted Afghanistan. He said he used to sling one over his shoulder and walk round the town and gradually the women would come out and sell him these things. If he didn't put one on his shoulder, they wouldn't know what was going on and he wouldn't get anything. The first time I saw this work, I saw it in Kabul and the Afghan merchants, I said where's that from? The Afghan merchants, of course, stroke their beards and held their hands up like that and said it's from Afghanistan. The world is full of misinformation. This is the quality of the embroidery. I should think this must take up to a year to embroider. The girl will start it, but quite probably it's mother, grandmother, aunts who actually finish it. The story the lahana tell is that it's worn, let's go back a bit if we can. The lahana say that it's worn that way on the day of the wedding and the morning after it's reversed and there's a slit down here. With two sachets of lavender, either side of it. If they wear it with the slit open like that it says the wedding has gone okay and everything has gone okay. So there you are. So shawl from the lahana. This is rather interesting. This is professional work. Most likely done by female professional embroiderers. It's gone on, probably silk imported from China and was done in Hyderabad. And this is a little dress for a little boy and I suspect I'm not certain that these were garments for circumcision ceremonies. You get very vivid tie-dye bandhani done in Sen. This is a part of a Hindu woman's vase skirt. It would be very long and would be very bulky round the waist. The tie-dye is not nearly as fine as the stuff you find in Kutch, but it's vivid. I was complaining once when I was in Kutch at a place called Mantwe on the coast about the quality of the tie-dye that you find in Pakistan. I said the stuff they sell in Karachi is rubbishy. And the chap that I bought very good tie-dye from, he said yes, he's made by my brother. This is a rather wonderful shawl that I actually left on a train going from London to Cambridge. And it's one of my great regrets. And of course today being today I never got the bag back in which it was in. There are two stories of where these are made. One is that they were made in Tarpaka by Hindus. I think almost certainly they're Hindu practitioners. And the other one is that they came from Punjab from a place called Bahol Naga, which is on the border of Pakistan adjoining Bikanya. But what I love again is the peacocks in the corner. And at the bottom that's probably a scorpion. Scorpions were protective. They were to ward off the smallpox goddess and also to protect the children. This is a technique called rogan. These Rajputs of the desert in Sindh where this kind of work. I've seen them at that festival that I started off with. People are coming right out of the deep desert and they've never seen a white man before. And their eyes are like that, just open wide. It was utterly wonderful. I was talking to a relative of my friends who was quite a senior civil servant in Karachi. And he said when he was young, well not so long ago before they introduced electricity. The whole thing was just oil lamps and camels. They must have been wonderful. These cloths are decorated with a technique called rogan. Rogan means oil. When you go to your local Bangladeshi or Pakistani takeaway and you order rogan ghost, what you're ordering is oily meat, which is what you get. So rogan is castor oil which is brewed up till it forms a consistency of potty. And you add pigment to it and then you paint it onto the textile. What you mustn't do, which I once did foolishly, is try to iron these things because it creates a complete mess. These are still done in Kutch in a place called Nirona, which is west of the capital of Kutch, Buj. And I think these were exported from Kutch to Cent till very recently. The border up till 10 years ago was very porous and things used to get smuggled across. There used to be a system whereby, as there are families on either side and they're all invited for weddings and other family gatherings, there used to be a system whereby they'd take if you were coming from India, they'd take you to near the border, and then you'd take if you were a Hindu, they'd take off all your Hindu clothes, take away your money, your identity card, the whole thing. They'd give you Pakistani clothes, Salwakames, they'd give you a bus ticket from whatever the village they're going to Karachi. They'd give you some Pakistani rupees and then they'd set you across the border. Because people speak the same language either side of the border, so it's not that difficult to disappear into the mass of the crowds and then they'd meet their relatives, attend the wedding and then they'd come back. There was all kinds of interaction. I remember an old army officer telling me that from the mess in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, the officers of the regiments used to go and drink at a place called Ferozpur, which is in India. But because of partition, Ferozpur was left out on a limb, it's much easier to reach it from Pakistan than it is from the rest of India. So these Pakistani officers used to get invited every other month to get drunk in the mess of their regiments in Ferozpur and then they used to respond and return the hospitality and the Indians used to go to Lahore. Maybe these things still happen now, but maybe not. This is a Baluch woman in the Bazaar, in the women's Bazaar in Hyderabad. The Baluch are found all over southern Pakistan. They are found of course in Baluchistan, they are found in eastern Iran, they are found up into Afghanistan. But they are found in Sind and southern Pakistani Punjab. The Baluch were actually colonised in the 1500s, colonised a lot of Sind and southern Pakistani Punjab and their social moors actually dictate a lot of what goes on, a lot of the social structure in Pakistan. You can tell a Baluch, I mean I tell them because they've always got really sharp noses as you can note with this woman here and her daughter behind her. But a better test is she'll always be wearing a pashk which is the loose smock that the Baluch you wear and it'll have an embroidered blouse, embroidered cuffs and a pentagonal kangaroo pocket just at crutch level. This is part of an animal trapping, also Baluch, but done on, done with small carry shells, mirrors and it's done on old English broadcloth, the British or the English rather exported broadcloth which was made in Gloucestershire in Painswick to, or Nailsworth, Nailsworth. All over the world and people bought it for curiosity often but they liked it because you could cut it and you didn't have to hem it. This is an animal trapping probably for a camel but I've had one of these from the 19th century which is carry shells and the redcloth is actually old redcoat uniform. So it's all British army uniform or British Indian army uniform and you don't often find everybody assumes that the redcloth is always old army uniform but you rarely actually find it. This rather wonderful shawl is from the mare of who are a pastoral, very rich pastoral people from the extreme north of Sind around Sukker and then up into Pakistani Punjab so that both sides of the prodigial border. So they are probably to my mind the best embroiderers in the whole of the subcontinent if you look at the exhibition that is the display of their cushion covers or mats with incredibly fine work. They're so fine and so regular again I wonder whether there's a professional aspect to their creation. Sind is the land of quilts. This is at the festival of Chandapyr and this chap who really didn't want his photograph taken like most people don't want their photograph taken is sheltering from the midday sun underneath a patchwork quilt. This is across the border in Kach and this is a Matvar woman, one of the Muslim herding cast and she's exhibiting a wonderful quilt with applique details that she's made. This is a typical patchwork quilt from Tharpakar. This is made by the Chahan people who are labourers. If you ask these people how long they've been doing these quilts, they will say from the very dawn of time we've been doing it or at least since the Emperor Akbar in fact these are most likely the influence of Protestant American missionaries in the late 19th century. There's a magazine called the Female Missionary Intelligencea which a Singaporean scholar has recommended to me but I've never actually to my shame read but she said that one of the things this magazine, this is a 19th century magazine did was lay out what you could teach to the people you were trying to convert. And the people who make these quilts are usually low caste so they would have been the target for Christian missionaries. This is a rather beautiful Cindy quilt with patchwork and reverse applique. A group of women will work together to make a quilt and they'll be made for weddings. They're not only to cover people to keep out the desert cold but they will use as floor spreads. I remember once going to a performance in the interior of Sindh and you of course had to take your shoes off to go into the house but all the mud floor was covered in quilts. This is a Rajput woman, so Hindu woman in the village of Kanthir making a quilt for the market. My suppliers and my Hindu supplier in Karachi says we can't get any more quilts and however much we were paying they were paying them about the equivalent of about 20 pounds to make these quilts which is an appreciable amount of money for the local economy. But what has happened was when the security situation between India and Pakistan calmed down and the Pakistanis were reassured that the Indians were never going to invade again. General Musharraf who was president of Pakistan at the time built power lines out to the desert so I stayed in a place which had air conditioning for heaven's sake and with electricity comes of course television and what are the women doing now? They are not embroidering, they are not making quilts, they are sitting there with their mouths open watching Mexican soap operas translated into Urdu or Cindy. So the enemy of traditional textiles is TV, what the smartphone will do to the creation of traditional textiles I don't know. This is a very interesting itinerant group called the Sami and the Sami beg us by profession. They do seasonal agricultural work, the men wander as far as Iran to beg. They have Muslim names but whether they are in fact Paka Muslims is open to doubt. They live, this was outside the old Mogul town of Tata by the Indus and they live on raised wooden platforms made out of bent sticks and they have an awning over this platform. The platforms are quite high, quite wide and at night the women all sleep on one and the men all sleep on another. They make wonderful quilts like this. One of their part-time jobs is rag pickers so they all unpick Sulwakamees so it's not necessarily pure cotton, it'll have an admixture of synthetic but the colours are pretty wonderful. And then these women who have got absolutely no concept of produce these things that are rival abstract art. When I sell these things I say it's like a $50,000 painting, just buy it, occasionally they do. This is what I bought in the 80s. They're quilted, they've usually got a backing quite often, a block print and they'll take, they're quilted going round the edges and working in concentric rectangles onto the inside so sometimes it goes a bit wonky on the inside. And they'll embroider with at least three needles and they'll push the fabric back onto those needles so they'll do lines of say three of white with white thread and then they'll change the colour of the threads, three with pink thread, three with green thread, three with blue thread. So they'll vary the stitches and because they're varying the colour of the stitches that gives a variation to the colour of the quilt. This is a quilt made by the Megwell who are low cast for the Dars or Pali Muslim landowning cast for the German Dars. Because sinned is very, you can call it feudal but some people are very rich and some people are very poor and the people who are very rich call the shots. Families like the Bhutos, they're old landowners from the north of the sinned, they have an immense amount of local and provincial power and sometimes Pakistan wide power. The Megwell will quilt these using a stitch called Cumbiri stitch which is made up of steps to form a diamond shape and this one is then decorated with little flecks of felt, give it like a sort of sweeties or smarty effect. There are lots of bags made like this, there are lots of squares made like this but very few quilts, I've just got another one, I always like to have a good one. My Rosie hid this particular quilt under her bed for three years denying that she knew where it was just so I wouldn't sell it and then of course I sold it. This is another quilt that they've used at an embroidered shawl as the face of the quilt. This is a pretty typical Sami quilt from sinned made on an Azraq block print. The Sami are quite savvy when Rosie and I went to see them, I shouted a very loud salam aleykum so they called the dogs off because they had very fierce dogs and Rosie talked to the women, I talked to the men. The men were friendly and showed me their dogs, showed me what they had which was, they had tethered terrapins and tethered porcupines. This didn't happen to me but this is the story that's always told about the Sami, when you come to visit them they'll lay out a quilt, a very classy quilt and you'll sit on it and when they get bored with you and when they feel it's time for you to go they'll just turn the corner of the quilt over and it's time to disappear. This is a chowdry, so he's a village leader, this is in the town of Matiari in sinned near Hyderabad and here they're block printing Azraq. It used to be when I first went to sinned and you went into the interior every man wore one of these cloths. There are certain designs for the Muslims and there's a certain design called a malir which is reserved for the Hindus. But now if they wear it at all it's usually screen printed or mill made or heaven help us imported from China and the handmade stuff is only really given to us as gifts. It's the kind of thing if you've got a political meeting and you want to honour somebody, you commission an Azraq and then you give it to them. Here they're making Azraq, this is in Matiari and unlike in India where they block print standing with high tables, they're still doing it in the traditional manner which is sitting cross legged on the floor and block printing at a low table. There's the mud floor and the cockerel which is sort of wandering around. Whenever you're making, whenever you're printing you need lots of water to wash out the dyes and they always say that the mineral quality of the water affects the colours that you make. My friends in Carch is mild by catry and his brothers. The two brothers have stayed in Damatka which is their original home where the river has dried up and the water has dried up so they've got terrible problems with that. And this mild by is the most enterprising of the brothers. He moved to near Buj the capital of Carch putting some boreholes and there's plenty of water there. But the water isn't quite right so there's still sort of problems with how it affects the dyes. So this chap is in Matiari and his job is to wash out, to rinse all the Azraq cloth. 100 years ago, even 80 years ago, even 60 years ago they were still weaving incredibly fine silk brocades. This is known as a lungi. It's woven at a place called Nassapur and some of them were woven at Tata. And they're turbans, very fine turbans. And they were sold to the Maldaris who were the cattle traders who could be either Muslim or Hindu. And you'll find these also on the Indian side. This is the cares from scent. This is a double weave. I feel they're an imitation of British double weaves that were used by the British Colonials. And this is again woven at Nassapur. All the camels have wonderful camel girths that are made out of goat hair. And they're made by a technique called split ply. If you're interested in the technique by the late great Peter Collingwood's book on split ply camel girths. Here's the late Ishwar Singh of Jad Samir making a camel girth. Briefly you put about 40 strands of goat hair on a little wooden stick. You take the first cord and then feed it diagonally with a wooden needle. Feed it through to the opposite selvage and then down again. And because the cords are four ply, too black and too white, you can change it by twisting it so the white appears on one surface and the black on the reverse. So you can get a pattern, I'd say, a white camel on a black background and on the other side it'll be a black camel on a white background. I was with my friend Nick Barnard when we were researching our book, Traditional Indian Textiles. Ishwar Singh was showing us everything and we were asking loads of questions and he was getting bored. And I could see him thinking, what are these ridiculous white guys going to actually buy something? And then I saw a detail on the camel girth he was making, which was of acrobat sort of one on top of two men, on top of three men, on top of four men. And I knew this didn't occur in Weston Rajasthan, where Johnson was at Curz in Easton Rajasthan. So I said, where's that from? And he said, Easton Rajasthan. Then there was another pattern, which was just a black diamond with two black triangles at either end on a white ground. And I said, what's that pattern there? And he looked to me and he went, chocolates, Cadbury's chocolate eclairs. And we both burst out laughing and then we were friends and I bought a couple of his split ply belts, presents for my sons and yeah, we got them fine. This is the split ply pattern, so you've got hunters with guns. And these are ladies in a chairbank, like an old fashioned lorry on its way to a wedding. Those are the hunters. Now we move across the border from Sindh, from Nagaparka into Kach. Kach is centred around the Rhine of Kach, which you've probably heard of, which is a salt flats basically. And it's the old dried up bed of the Indus River. There was a great earthquake in the very early years of the 19th century, somewhere about 1810. I can't recall precisely the date. That changed the course of the Indus, so the Indus flows out to the sea further west in Pakistan, I think from Tata going south. And that dried up bed of the Indus is salt flats for most of the year. But when the rains come, it floods and you get this incredible pasturage and semi-nomadic pasturists from all over come and graze their flux. You can see the men travelling, the men always travel with their herding sticks over their shoulders like that, with their arms draped like that. And it's not the oldest man who guides the migration. It's the most active, mature male. The old guys are there for advice about what to do. But there's a captain and he determines everything. The women bring up the rear with the camels, the beds, the small children and they move. They'll have a home village in Cutch and then they'll migrate to the pasturage with their flocks of sheep and goats and camels. We're now in predominantly Hindu area, so here we have a roadside guard. The building blocks of Hinduism is the roadside shrines are one of the important things. These are the juxtrines. This is part of Rajput mythology, so this is a shrine in Cutch. This is what a Cutch home looks like. These people are the, spelled A-H-I-R and these are herders and they're cattle people. And you can see an embroidered taurang to decorate over the doorway to the main room of the house. And then all the pots and pans and chest also decorated with mirrors behind. That's the interior of another house and here you have the rabari, the shepardesses with their tie dyed woolen shawls. This is a rabari young man walking through the streets of Anjar. It's market day. These are rabari waiting for a bus. It's a young rabari girl with her father and uncle. Father wearing this wonderful little jacket. These jackets are imported here and sold to women. But actually they're for men. They have long sleeves and they have a skirt, flares from the waistline. And it's basically to keep them cool during the day. The sleeves are very long and those are pulled down at night to keep their hands warm. This is a coverlet for a baby basket when the rabari are on their migration. They carry their babies in a kind of log basket with a cover like this over it. When I was in Anjar once I got a sailor offered to translate for me and I went up to a rabari grandmother and mother in a little haberdashery shop where they were buying mirrors for embroidery. They had one of these baskets with the most beautiful embroidered covers. So I pointed into what's underneath there and they looked rather dubiously at me. But the sailor said he's all right. So they pulled the cover up and there was the babe, a pound of sugar, a pound of rice, just like wandering around Sainsbury's. They make covers for their domestic animals. This is for the bullocks. These can be people farming, settled farming people. And these are the rabari who are all dressed up to celebrate Gokul astame, which is Krishna's birthday. They got off this truck. They shouted at me and my taxi driver translated for me. They're the kind of people who live outside so they shout automatically. So I thought they were being very hostile but actually what they were saying is make sure you get a picture of the truck as well as us because my friend owns the truck. So there they are wearing these wonderful turbans, these wonderful embroidered long jackets. They're wearing leather, cul-tip shoes short with metal. And what was great about it is that each of these rabari, and there were about 20 of them, had matching tartan nylon socks with some enterprising Hindu shopkeeper and said, right, that would go great with your outfit. And I'll finish up as I'm sure I've gone over time. This is a rabari shepherd boy in the market, Anjar, with his little sister. He's looking suspicious and she's looking a little frightened. But it's a wonderful area. So you can go to cutch, no problem at all. Pakistan has its moments but is one of my very favourite countries. It's full of very hospitable and very kind people. It's a bit difficult to get a visa for various reasons but do persevere. It's a fantastic area. Still is despite all the advantages of the 21st century. Thank you very much indeed. If you've got any questions far away, I've got a very few copies of my books outside which are for sale. And if you want to order them online, you can just take the title and the ISBN and order it. Thank you very much indeed. Any questions, I'm sure John will be delighted to answer them. So I'm going to leave you in his very capable hands to ask anything you'd like to know more. They're non-plus. They want to rush off and demonstrate against Donald Trump. I know. No, no. They're Steve and Corffin. They're all of the right generation. You can wave some bad at them. The old reform, I'm sure. And after the questions, if you'd like to know more about anything that is particularly important for you, there's Steve and Corffin. You can continue the conversation with him. But let me thank you, John, for absolutely delightful. It's my pleasure. I like blathering. The recollections of synth were marvellous. Far away. Can you... Thank you. That lady is... You've got to be a gentleman. Thank you. That was fantastic. I just wondered if you could say a little bit more about the actual stitches that are used. I could see that there was a running stitch and you talked about buttonhole stitch, but are there any other stitches that are typically... There's a lot of chain stitch, and although I've built myself as an expert on embroidery and have been collecting it and dealing with it for nine or 50 years, I'm a complete ignoramus as to the stitches. What I should recommend is get hold of any of the many books by Amorell, and she will tell you what stitches they use. The Calico Museum in Amdabad in Gujarat produces a lot of them, but if you just google Amorell, you'll get all her publications. The one...her first one, which I think was called something like Indian embroidery, she did that under a maiden name, Anne Buffler. So I apologise, I ought to know, but I don't. Thank you. Chos? My question, John, is to do with the item that is called the budge key, which is the envelope bag that you find. Can you say something about how these are used by all the... Budge key as far as I can make out. Again, this is like your information. It comes from dealers and you've got to kind of sift it out and whatever, but it seems to be that they're vanity bags, and the story that I've heard many times repeated is these are beautiful envelope shaped bags, often with exquisite embroidery on the basis that it's small and they can do very fine stitchery on it. They're vanity bags which are made by the sister or the female cousin of the bride and given to the bride for the wedding. And then she'll keep basically the vanity bags, she'll keep needles and thread, anything. Make-up, muck-up. They're always telling me, bring some muck-up. Have you got time to add? Thank you very much. It was really delightful to hear you. I just want you to do things. One is I'm very curious as to how in Sindh this developed to this type of art form. And the second that I also noticed that similarity between Sindh, Cach as well as in Andhra, they make similar things. So can you just elaborate on the connection there? Well, let's say that it's a guess. But I feel the embroidery, and Joss might disagree or he might confirm what I got with my guess. But I guess the embroidery tradition has come from the west with the nomadic peoples who came into that part of the Indian subcontinent. Not necessarily Muslim, I think it predates the Muslims. And the other thing is the suspicion is that embroidery originated in China. So how the craft of embroidery arrived on the subcontinent, I don't know. But if you look at the embroidery tradition done for weddings, it stretches from Morocco right away across North Africa. It stretches from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, down to Istanbul, Constantinople, across Turkey, up into Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And then it more or less comes to a halt in Sindh, Cach, Surashtra and Western Rajasthan. And you say that these stitches are found in Andhra, but that's the banjara, and the banjara are wandering peoples. And again, I suspect they brought those traditions from the west. And the mirrors were, which we think as intrinsic to Hindu-Pakistani embroidery, were to my mind influenced by the Persian tradition of mirror work paralysis. But the actual mirrors themselves were European. They were exported as ballast in the European trade ship. So the French, the English, the Dutch, I don't know about the Portuguese, exported the waste mirror glass from European manufacturers. And that was sold in India. And presumably then they started embellishing their clothes with those mirrors. And then you got local manufacturer near Ahmedabad in Gujarat and in the north of Sindh. Thank you. I was just going to add to that, John, to say that I understand that there are sort of two main passages for this immigration from the west. One is down through Central Asia, through the north of Pakistan and the Qaibar Pass. And that is the one that leads into Cungra and the northern territories of India. And then there is another migration which comes along the Makran Corridor, which is above the Arabian nation. And there are certain stitches such as Shireen Froesnan I wrote about and her little pamphlet on Sindhi embroidery about interlacing stitch, how that it was in Sindh, it's called Baluchi Stitch. But it's actually, you can trace it back to the south of Iran and then eventually to Switzerland, to 14th century Switzerland. And it's a stitch that travelled from west to east rather than east to west. But there are other traditions that travel in the other directions such as with the Roma Gypsies and so on. With the Roma Gypsies who split off from India owing to the Muslim persecution in the 1000 AD. So it's a complex picture, but easy to put together relatively. I think also if we're talking about transmission of pattern and technique, always remember that women up to very recently, up to a generation ago, were creating these wonderful tech-starts, partly for their beauty, partly for social reasons, but partly for entertainment. They get up very early, they get the men off to the fields or off to the flocks, they'll have fed them, they've got to send out lunch to them. And then the very hot hours of the day, they've got nothing else to do. So they'll have swept the house and their houses are quite bare, there's not much furniture. They'll get all the housework done and then they like to sit around with their female mates and embroider. So it was a lot of it was entertainment like... Relaxation. Sorry? Relaxation. Yeah. And this has now been replaced by gawping at Mexican soap operas, but what can you do? Fantastic. What can you do? Fantastic talk and it's good to know here positive things about Pakistan. Just clarifications. What's the division of labour between males and females with regards to, let's say, rally embroidery? You know, the quilt, the rally, and the... I don't know, because I left the room for a few minutes, perhaps you touched upon that, because there is this whole concept of putting another but two right in the middle of the quilt, you know, formation quilted embroidery, and the colours, for example, that are chosen from what I've heard that they are chosen by the males and then the male population who are actually into embroidery and embroidered by females. So is there some kind of a gender, you know, division of labour over there? That's just one. The other aspect is when you talked about the cryptic aspect of, let's say, the Hindus, basically, to disguise that. Absolutely. So is this something to do with persecution or is there some kind of political more sort of system? Minorities in Muslim countries have always got to be careful about display of their religious symbols and Hindus like to incorporate ffumin and animal figures and the gods in their art. And this is disapproved of by Sunni Islam. But as you've got to remember is that the world of Islam is full of different, people of different persuasions. The sheer in whom there are many in Pakistan are much more tolerant of the image of people, animals. The division of labour between the sexes is the women do nearly all the embroidery. The men do the tie-dye and the block printing. So I'm just trying to think whether there's a tradition in places like Lahore of metal thread embroidery. That would be men because it's high value, it's sold for a high price and there's enough money to pay the man's wages. Remember, the man is, even today, almost always the breadwinner and the women are at home and they are homemakers. And the embroidery, if it's amateur, done for love, done for social occasions, will be done by women. But anything, any craft whereby there's a commercial sale at the end of it is almost always men. I hope that answers your question. Again, sorry. The Sami quilts you're talking about. The abstract ones. The applique ones. The term, at least in Gujarat for the applique is the ancient Sanskrit phrase cut up, which is of course from the English cut up. And so, you assume a lot of these techniques are ancient. Actually, it's colonial, often missionary influence. And so the applique and the reverse applique would be an introduction from the west. Not at all. Anybody else? Thank you. Thank you very much for a fascinating talk first of all. My question is about the base materials themselves. Embroidery presupposes a medium on which you embroider. And much of what you showed looked like cotton. There was some added that the little polka dot decoration came from felt. And one considers the range diurnal and also climatic over seasonal change in temperatures and climatic conditions just within a single year. That suggests that very different materials might be used, particularly among nomadic peoples who would use much heavier materials than those living in a warm area. So my question was about the base material and about the metallic threads. But would threads be silk, be cotton, just what they had? Would the base materials be bought? You mentioned some rag gatherers. But for those who were not rag gatherers, where do the base materials come from? The quilts will be made out of store bought cloth, which is dyed to order with very inferior chemical dyes. So don't drink your glass of white wine on top of your quilt because it will run. That's one thing. Most of all the materials are cotton because it's generally very hot. You can see in the last slides I showed the Rabari women were wearing a tie dyed woolen shawl. So as you correctly say, even within a very hot, you can get a cool night and in winter it gets incredibly cold. So they wrap themselves up, the Rabari women in woolen shawls. The men will have woolen blankets which are woven on local piplooms. So they dress for the climate. The cloth is either hand woven cotton, mill woven cotton. They'll use silk or they'll use hand woven wool. I hope that answers your question. The embroidery threads are bought? With the silk or cotton? Both. The Pakistan always had a more open economy than India. So you can tell. One of the blouse fronts I showed you by the Megwile with all the pom-poms and birds and flowers and mirrors. That's from scent but you get exactly the same embroidery done across the border in catch. You can tell the difference because the ones in Pakistan they use silk thread and the ones in India they'll use cotton thread because they can't get imported silk. Okay, shall we call it a day and move? Thank you very much for being a wonderful audience and not going to Trafalgar Square. Thank you so much for coming to hear John. As you can see it was well worth it. Those of you who might still want to pick on all his information there's tea and coffee being served with biscuits to send you and we can all go ahead and have something to drink before leaving and being able to actually meet John in person. So John, I'll take this opportunity of thanking you and School of Oriental and African Studies for giving me this opportunity of having you all here. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you very much.