Cowboys & India-(ns) (1 Viewer)

[PolarBear]

I spent the day in Salem, Massachusetts at the Peabody Essex Museum. Salem was a major American port in the 18th and 19th Centuries and was a center of our trade with Asia. In 1799 the merchants of Salem established the East India Marine Society to collect and preserve artifacts from our Asian trading partners. Many of these artifacts makeup the current collection. I had been aware of the American China Trade and the opening up of Japan by Commodore Perry but was not aware of the extent of American commercial and cultural contact with India this early in our history. To find out more about these connections I purchased a book published by the museum and illustrated with artifacts from their collection shown below:

 

[PolarBear]

Among the goods sought by Americans from India were textiles. Among those textiles was the pattern that has come to be called "Paisley" from the town in Scotland:

"By the early 18th century, PAISLEY had developed into a manufacturing centre for the hand-loom weaving of linen. At the end of the 18th century the new town was laid out over much of the ground that once belonged to the abbey. During the early 19th century, PAISLEY became famous for its PAISLEY Shawls, copies in silk and cotton of the ASIAN shawls sent back by Scottish soldiers serving in INDIA.

PAISLEY, textile pattern owing its name to the manufacture at the town of PAISLEY, Renfrewshire, of PAISLEY shawls. 1800, patterned shawls made from the soft fleece of the Kashmir GOAT began to be imported to Britain from INDIA, machine-woven wool equivalents were made at PAISLEY to supply the insatiable demand that had been created for "cashmere" shawls.

The rich, abstract, curvilinear patterns, modified from their Kashmir counterparts and deriving ultimately from MUGHAL ART, have continued to be widely adopted in modern textiles, especially for clothing. A motif resembling an ENLARGED COMMA (well-known in MUGHAL decorative art) is the one by which most people recognize a PAISLEY pattern."

Here is an example of the typical Paisley pattern:

 

[PolarBear]

These colorful Indian textiles and their patterns became very popular in Europe and America and were often used for kerchiefs known as bandanas. Bandana is an Indian word from the Hindi language which means "to tie". These bandanas were useful in the Indian climate where dust might blow in one's face. For the same reason these Indian designs and bandanas became a staple for American cowboys driving cattle along the dusty trails of the American West as illustrated below including the paisley motif:

So here you have a slightly different story of the Cowboy and the Indian