Indian Rugs

India weaves more hand-knotted rugs than anywhere else, and it weaves almost every design anyone else invented. That makes the name harder to read than most: an Indian rug can be a heavy commercial piece or a silk-on-silk carpet at a fineness few Persian workshops attempt. The country is not the grade. The rug is.

Where the looms are

The weaving belt runs through Bhadohi and Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, with a second centre at Jaipur in Rajasthan. Both work on the asymmetric knot, the same one used across most of Iran, which is part of why Indian workshops reproduce Persian designs so convincingly. A Tabriz pattern woven in Bhadohi is an Indian rug, honestly described and honestly priced as one.

What India does that nowhere else does

Scale and range. The same town will produce a coarse wool rug for a family floor and a 400 knot silk piece for a collector, and the infrastructure exists to weave a design in any size a room needs. India is also where most of the modern revival of vegetable dyeing happened, which is why the Ziegler and the Chobi look the way they do.

The designs you will actually see

Classical medallion fields, the Herati repeat, the Oushak palette, and the whole of the transitional vocabulary: a medallion with air around it, a single border, three or four colours. Indian workshops also weave the largest share of genuinely modern hand-knotted designs, where the field is a surface rather than a pattern.

Judging one

Ignore the country and read the rug. Turn it over: a clear, tight knot pattern on the back with the design legible through it is the mark of good work, whatever the origin. Then feel the pile. Good Indian wool is springy and slightly greasy; thin, dry, over-washed wool is the thing to avoid, and a heavy chemical wash to fake age is the most common shortcut in the trade.

Wool, silk and what is neither

Most Indian rugs here are wool, some are wool outlined with silk, and a large share of the shiny ones are bamboo silk, which is a cellulose fibre and not silk at all. That is worth knowing before you put one in a hallway, because it is weaker than wool when wet. The materials page is blunt about which pile suits which room.

Where an Indian rug belongs

Everywhere, which is rather the point of the tradition. If the room is busy, take wool and a busy field; if the room is quiet, the fine end of India is as good as anything woven today. For a comparison in the opposite direction, the geometric Caucasian and Kazak weaves are the clearest contrast to the curved Indian workshop style.