Indian Tents: Matters of Silk & Velvet

A talk by Dr Peter Andrews

December 5, 2018
Wednesday at 7pm. Doors open at 6pm.
Tickets £7. Free to ORTS members

St James Piccadilly Conference Room , 197 Piccadilly London W1J 9LL

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The Oriental Rug & Textile Society present a talk by Dr Peter Andrews

From the time of the Delhi Sultanate, if not earlier, the tents used by Indian rulers were a matter of great prestige, as representing their presence before the public. They were used at court to shelter not only the sovereign, but those attending him in huge numbers, and palace buildings were planned ab initio for extension with tentage over the courtyards. The increasing size of royal domains, too, made it essential, in an age of poor communications, for the ruler to tour them extensively, and the camp acquired an additional purpose, besides the obvious military one, of a temporary palace from which justice could be administered.

Peter Andrews, M.A. (Cantab), Ph.D. (Lond) wrote his Ph.D. thesis for SOAS (London) on the history of tents in the Middle East, Hindustan and Central Asia. He first studied architecture in India in 1960. From 1966 he conducted extensive fieldwork on nomad tents in Morocco, Turkey, Iran, Qatar, Mongolia and Qırgızstan, and on urban tents in museums throughout Europe and India, besides surveying a village in Northern Areas, Pakistan. In 2006 he was made an honorary research fellow at the University of Bristol (Anthropology).